Harry Potter and the Girl with the Diary

It wasn’t the first time there’d been a row over breakfast at number four, Privet Drive, and it wouldn’t be the last. Mr Vernon Dursley had been dragged out of sleep at some ungodly hour by a long, mournful hooting from his nephew Harry’s bedroom, and he’d been building up to this since the kettle went on.

‘Three times this week!’ he bellowed down the table. ‘Three! If you can’t keep that bird quiet, I’ll chuck it out myself!’

Harry tried, for what felt like the hundredth time, to explain.

‘She’s bored,’ he said. ‘She’s used to being out. If I could let her fly at night, just for an hour...’

‘Do I look like I came down in the last shower?’ snarled Uncle Vernon. A piece of fried egg trembled in his moustache. ‘I know exactly what happens if that owl gets out.’

He and Aunt Petunia exchanged one of their dark looks, the kind they’d been exchanging over Harry’s head since he was old enough to notice. Harry opened his mouth to argue, and whatever he’d been going to say was lost under a belch from the Dursleys’ son Dudley that went on long enough to rattle the cutlery.

‘More bacon.’

‘There’s more in the pan, sweetums,’ said Aunt Petunia, gazing at her enormous son with wet eyes. ‘We’ve got to build you up while we’ve got you. I don’t trust that school food...’

‘Rubbish, Petunia. I never went short at Smeltings,’ said Uncle Vernon heartily. ‘Dudley gets plenty. Don’t you, son?’

Dudley, who was so large that his bottom spilled over both sides of the kitchen chair, grinned, and swung round to Harry.

‘Pass the pan.’

‘You’ve forgotten the magic word,’ said Harry irritably.

He hadn’t meant anything by it. He’d have said the same thing to anyone. But the effect on the rest of the family was extraordinary. Dudley gasped and went over backwards off his chair with a crash that shook the floor. Aunt Petunia gave a little shriek and clapped both hands over her mouth. Uncle Vernon was on his feet, with the veins standing out at his temples like cords.

‘WHAT HAVE I TOLD YOU,’ Uncle Vernon thundered, spraying the tablecloth, ‘ABOUT SAYING THE M WORD IN THIS HOUSE?’

‘What, malignant?’ Harry said dryly, as that was exactly what he thought about the Dursleys.

He regretted it the moment it was out.

‘HOW DARE YOU THREATEN DUDLEY!’ roared Uncle Vernon, and he brought his fist down so hard the toast rack jumped.

‘I wasn’t threatening him, Uncle Vernon,’ Harry said patiently and calmly, despite how highly strung the Dursleys were being.

‘I WARNED YOU! I WILL NOT HAVE YOUR ABNORMALITY SO MUCH AS MENTIONED UNDER THIS ROOF!’

Harry looked from his uncle, who’d gone the colour of a plum, to his aunt, who was trying to haul Dudley up off the lino and not managing it.

‘All right,’ said Harry. ‘All right...’

He kept his voice low and level, the way you’d talk to a dog that had its hackles up. The truth was that he’d done it on purpose. Not the magic word; that had been an accident. But the malignant, yes. He’d done that.

Something had come back from Hogwarts with him that hadn’t gone up there in September. The same stubborn streak that had kept him on a bucking broomstick and taken him down through the trapdoor and up against Voldemort had come home to Privet Drive in his trunk, and it had opinions about the Dursleys. Sometimes, for no better reason than that he loathed them more than he’d ever loathed anything, Harry would try it on with them. He’d say the one thing that would set Uncle Vernon off and then stand very still while the bull came at him, and step out of the way at the last second, like a man with a red cloth. There was a thrill in it. But he could admit, as his uncle sat back down breathing like a winded rhinoceros, that the Dursleys were already strung as tight as piano wire, and that what he was doing wasn’t helping.

Uncle Vernon watched him out of the corners of his small, sharp eyes for the rest of the meal. He’d been watching Harry like that ever since Harry had come home for the holidays, the way you’d watch a parcel that had started ticking. Because Harry wasn’t a normal boy. He was about as far from a normal boy as it’s possible to get.

Harry Potter was a wizard. A wizard with one year of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry behind him, and if the Dursleys were miserable to have him home, they couldn’t have been half as miserable as Harry was to be there.

He missed Hogwarts like a toothache. He missed the castle, with its shifting staircases and its ghosts and its passages behind the tapestries. He missed his lessons, or most of them; he could have managed without Snape, the Potions master. He missed the post arriving by owl, and the feasts in the Great Hall, and his four-poster in the tower, and going down to Hagrid’s hut at the edge of the Forbidden Forest for excellent tea and equally as dreadful rock cakes  And he missed Quidditch, with its six tall hoops and its four flying balls and its fourteen players on broomsticks, more than he’d have thought it possible to miss a game.

And there was something else he missed, which he wouldn’t have admitted to Ron, or Hermione, or to himself if he could help it. He missed Dracina Malfoy. Not Malfoy, exactly. He missed the twinkle that had come into her silver eyes when he’d knelt down beside her on the common-room floor, with Hermione’s Body-Bind holding her stiff as a plank, and told her he accepted her apology. He’d thought about that twinkle more often than was sensible. It had been aimed at him. Nobody had ever aimed anything like it at him before.

He shook the thought off. He had enough to be getting on with.

Every one of Harry’s spellbooks, along with his wand, his robes, his cauldron and his top-of-the-range Nimbus Two Thousand, had gone into the cupboard under the stairs the moment he’d walked through the front door, and Uncle Vernon had put a padlock on it. What did the Dursleys care if Harry lost his place on the house team because he hadn’t been near a broom all summer? What was it to them if he went back without a line of his homework done?

And it had come to Harry, over the long weeks of this summer, exactly why so many witches and wizards wanted nothing whatever to do with Muggles, and why they’d gone to such lengths to wall themselves off. He’d never understood it at Hogwarts. Hermione’s parents were Muggles, and they sounded perfectly nice. But he’d spent six weeks in a house where having a wizard in the family was a matter of the deepest shame, where the word itself couldn’t be said, and he understood it now. He wished he could wall himself off too. Uncle Vernon had gone so far as to padlock Hedwig into her cage, in case she carried a message to anybody in the wizarding world, and Harry had come to think that, if it had been the other way round, he’d have been tempted to do the same to Uncle Vernon.

Harry looked nothing like the rest of the family, and it was one of the few things about him that he was grateful for. Uncle Vernon was a fat old boy with about as much neck as he had respect for Harry. His moustache was enormous, and whatever he ate or drank seemed to end up in it, so that Aunt Petunia had him groom it at the hall mirror every morning like a prize shrub. Aunt Petunia herself was bony and horse-faced, with a long neck she used for looking over the garden hedge at the neighbours, which she kept clipped to exactly the right height for the purpose. Dudley was blond and pink and porky, and had managed to combine the worst of both his parents into one dismal lump, and they’d spoilt him to the bone.

It had struck Harry more than once that Dudley and Dracina Malfoy would have got on like a house on fire. Both of them were arrogant, both of them were cruel, and both of them were convinced, to the marrow, that they were better than everybody else in the room. It was that likeness, in the end, that had made him refuse her hand in Madam Malkin’s and again on the train. He’d looked at her and seen Dudley in a long blonde wig. And nothing she’d done all year had given him a reason to change his mind. He was sure of that. Nearly sure.

A year ago, almost to the day, Harry had found out what he really was. He’d been carried off to Hogwarts, to a place where nobody shouted at him, where nobody called him a freak, where nobody came at his head with a frying pan or a rolling pin or the flat of a hand, where he had Ron and Hermione, where the whole world was the kind of thing you only found in fairy tales, and he’d never wanted to leave it. But he had to leave it. Every summer, for as long as he was at school, he’d have to come back here, and he hated that with a hatred that surprised him. Before Hogwarts he hadn’t known any different. He’d never had a thing to compare Privet Drive with. Now it was like the Mirror of Erised all over again. The whole wizarding world had shown him something better, close enough to touch, and then the train had pulled into King’s Cross and he’d had to walk away from it. So there was nothing to do but seethe quietly and count the days until September.

The Dursleys hadn’t even remembered that today was Harry’s twelfth birthday. He hadn’t expected much. They’d never once given him a proper present, let alone a cake. But to let it go by without a single word...

At that moment Uncle Vernon cleared his throat with great importance.

‘Now. As we all know, today is a very important day.’

Harry looked up. He hardly dared believe it.

‘This could well be the day I close the biggest deal of my career,’ said Uncle Vernon.

Harry went back to his toast.

Of course, he thought. The dinner party. His uncle had talked of nothing else for a fortnight. Some rich builder and his wife were coming to dinner, a builder and his wife who both had very big noses, and Uncle Vernon had set his heart on a huge order out of them. Uncle Vernon’s firm made drills.

‘Vernon, dear. Aren’t they...’

‘Yes, my darling. And that’s why we need to put our personal feelings aside for the sake of the business. This is very important. Especially you, Harry! I know how you can be about... those people.’

Harry shrugged. He hadn’t the faintest idea what Uncle Vernon meant. It was Vernon and Petunia who’d warned him about "those people" in the first place, 

‘I think we’d better run through the schedule one more time,’ said Uncle Vernon. ‘Everyone in position by eight. Petunia, you’ll be...?’

‘In the lounge,’ said Aunt Petunia at once, ‘ready to welcome them graciously into our home.’

‘Good, good. Dudley?’

‘I’ll be at the door.’ Dudley put on a horrible, simpering little smile. ‘May I take your coats, Mr and Mrs Mason?’

‘Oh, they’ll adore him!’ cried Aunt Petunia.

‘Very good, Dudley,’ said Uncle Vernon. He swung round on Harry. ‘And you?’

‘I’ll be in my bedroom, making no noise and pretending I’m not there,’ said Harry tonelessly.

‘Exactly,’ said Uncle Vernon, with relish. ‘I’ll bring them through to the lounge, introduce you, Petunia, and see to the drinks. At quarter past eight...’

‘I’ll announce dinner,’ said Aunt Petunia.

‘And Dudley, you’ll say...’

‘May I take you through to the dining room, Mrs Mason?’ said Dudley, holding out a fat arm to a woman who wasn’t there.

‘My perfect little gentleman!’ sniffed Aunt Petunia.

‘And you?’ said Uncle Vernon viciously, to Harry.

‘I’ll be in my room, making no noise and pretending I’m not there,’ said Harry dully.

‘Precisely. Now. We’ll want a few compliments at the table. Petunia, any thoughts?’

‘Vernon tells me you’re a marvellous golfer, Mr Mason... Do say where you found that dress, Mrs Mason...’

‘Perfect. Dudley?’

‘How about, "We had to write an essay on our hero at school, Mr Mason, and I wrote about you."’

It was too much for Aunt Petunia, who burst into tears and flung her arms round her son, and it was too much for Harry, who had to dive under the table so that none of them would see him laughing.

‘And you, boy?’

Harry came up with his face as straight as he could get it.

‘I’ll be in my room, making no noise and pretending I’m not there,’ he said. whilst they bloody grovelled to people Harry suspected were closely related to Goblins, People that THEY told him to be wary of in the first place. Harry thought. Bloody thick Dursleys.

‘Too right you will,’ said Uncle Vernon forcefully. ‘The Masons know nothing about you, and that’s how it’s going to stay. When we’ve eaten, Petunia, you take Mrs Mason through for coffee, and I’ll steer the conversation round to drills. With any luck I’ll have it signed before the News at Ten. This time tomorrow we’ll be looking at villas in Majorca.’

Harry couldn’t get very excited about that. He didn’t suppose the Dursleys would like him any more in Majorca than they did in Little Whinging.

‘Right. I’m off into town for the dinner jackets, mine and Dudley’s. And you,’ he snarled at Harry, ‘keep out of your aunt’s way while she’s cleaning.’

Harry went out through the back door. It was a brilliant, hot day, and the lawn was so bright it hurt. He crossed it and dropped on to the garden bench. At least, he thought, with the dinner party to fuss over, the Dursleys would leave him alone today. That was something. He sang under his breath, which was as sad a thing as he’d done all summer.

‘Happy birthday to me... happy birthday to me...’

No cards. No presents. And he’d spend the evening pretending he didn’t exist. He stared into the hedge and felt lonelier than he’d ever felt in his life, and he’d had some practice.

More than anything at Hogwarts, more even than Quidditch, Harry missed his two best friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. And here his thoughts went sour, because the whole summer long he hadn’t had one letter from either of them. Not one. It made no sense. Ron had said, more than once, on the train and on the platform, that Harry must come and stay. Harry had the green Weasley jumper on now, in July, because he liked wearing it, and it was still the best-made thing he owned, and he’d have liked the chance to tell Mrs Weasley so again. But neither of them, it seemed, had cared enough to send so much as a line.

And the voice was there. The old one, the one that sounded like all three Dursleys at once and had spent eleven years telling him exactly what he was. It had been quiet at Hogwarts, for the most part. Now it was ringing like a bell. You always knew. Nobody ever liked you. They only pretended, because you were there. Now you’re not there, they can stop. It was getting harder and harder not to believe it. There was nothing in Privet Drive to set against it. No owls. No letters. Nothing at all to prove that the last year hadn’t been a dream he’d had in the cupboard under the stairs.

A dozen times at least he’d been on the point of taking the padlock off Hedwig’s cage by magic and sending her off to Ron and Hermione with a letter. It wasn’t worth it. Underage wizards weren’t allowed to use magic outside school. Harry hadn’t mentioned this to the Dursleys. He knew perfectly well that the only reason he wasn’t locked in the cupboard with his wand and his broomstick was their terror of waking up as dung beetles, and for the first fortnight back he’d rather enjoyed muttering nonsense under his breath and watching Dudley tear out of the room as fast as his fat legs would go. But the silence from Ron and Hermione had cut him so far off from everything that even that had stopped being fun. And now they’d forgotten his birthday.

He’d have given anything for a letter. From anyone. Even Dracina Malfoy. Even a sneering one, three lines long, that called him Pottyhead. He’d have read it twice. Harry reminded himself, quite sharply, that Malfoy was his arch-enemy, and not somebody to be sitting on a bench thinking wistfully about, twinkle or no twinkle, and he was not going to think about the twinkle. That was the thought of a stupid, attention-starved boy. He sat and didn’t think about it for some time.

Not that the year had all been fun. At the very end of it Harry had stood face to face with Lord Voldemort himself. Voldemort might be a wreck of what he’d been, but he was as terrifying as ever, and as cunning, and as set on getting his power back. Harry had slipped through his fingers a second time, and only just, and even now, weeks later, he’d wake in the night soaked in sweat, wondering where Voldemort was, and seeing that chalk-white face, and those wide, mad, red eyes...

Harry sat up very straight.

He’d been staring into the hedge without seeing it. And the hedge was staring back. Two enormous green eyes had appeared among the leaves.

He was on his feet before he knew it, and at that moment a jeering voice came floating over the lawn.

‘I know what day it is,’ sang Dudley, waddling towards him.

The huge eyes blinked once and were gone.

‘What?’ said Harry. He didn’t take his eyes off the spot.

‘I know what day it is,’ Dudley said again, coming right up to him.

‘Wow, Dudley. You can finally count to seven. Maybe even look at a calendar. That remedial work at Smeltings is paying off. Uncle Vernon’s money is finally being put to good use. Good on you.’

‘It’s your birthday,’ sneered Dudley, who hadn’t understood a word of it. ‘So how come you haven’t got any cards? Haven’t you even got friends at that freak place?’

Dudley and Dracina really were very alike, Harry thought. She’d have said it with better grammar, and the nose in the air, but it would have been the same jab in the same place.

‘Oh dear, Dudley. Better not let your mum hear you talking about my school,’ said Harry coolly.

Dudley hitched up his trousers, which were working their way down his backside.

‘What’re you staring at the hedge for?’ he said suspiciously.

‘You read those Lord of the Rings books, yeah?’

Dudley gave him a blank look, and Harry remembered that Dudley never read anything at all, and hadn’t done since the Dursleys had the Sky satellite dish put up and he’d discovered WWF.

‘Never mind, Dudley. I’m trying to turn this bush into an Ent. It’ll help Aunt Petunia with the gardening.’

Dudley went backwards so fast he nearly sat down. His fat face had gone grey.

‘You c-can’t. Dad said you’re not to do m-magic. He said he’d throw you out of the house, and you’ve got nowhere else to go, you haven’t got any friends to take you...’

‘I’m being nice about it, Dudley. Just trying to help your dear Mum out. Might as well start now. Jiggery pokery!’ said Harry in a fierce voice. ‘Hocus pocus... squiggly wiggly...’

‘MUUUUUUM!’ Dudley howled, and he fell over his own feet twice on the way back to the house. ‘MUUUUM! He’s doing you know what!’

Harry paid for that. He paid for it at once, and dearly. Neither Dudley nor the hedge had come to any harm, so Aunt Petunia knew well enough that he hadn’t really done anything, but she still came out of the back door swinging the frying pan, suds and all, and Harry had to duck.

He ducked very well. That was one thing you could say for Quidditch. A term of Fred and George belting Bludgers at his head had done wonders for his reflexes, and next to a Bludger a soapy frying pan was nothing at all. The pan went over him with a foot to spare, and he came up out of the crouch and had a second, just one, of being pleased with himself. Then he remembered that there was nobody to see it. Nobody at all. And the bitterness came back worse than before.

Aunt Petunia found him work. She found him a great deal of work, and told him he wouldn’t eat again until it was done. Dudley lay about on a sun lounger with a stack of ice-creams and watched, and Harry cleaned the windows, washed the car, mowed the lawn, edged the flowerbeds, pruned and watered the roses, and repainted the garden bench he’d been sitting on. The sun beat down on the back of his neck until it burned.

He knew he shouldn’t have let Dudley get to him. But Dudley had only said out loud what Harry had been thinking all morning. Maybe he hadn’t got any friends at Hogwarts after all.

Wish they could see famous Harry Potter now, he thought savagely, forking manure on to the flowerbeds with his back on fire and the sweat running into his eyes.

It was half past seven before Aunt Petunia called him in, and by then he could barely lift the fork.

‘Get in here! And walk on the newspaper!’

He went gladly into the shade of the kitchen, which had been scrubbed until it gleamed. Tonight’s pudding stood on top of the fridge: a great mountain of whipped cream heaped with sugared violets. A joint of pork was spitting in the oven.

‘Eat quickly! The Masons will be here any minute!’ snapped Aunt Petunia, and she pointed at the kitchen table, where two slices of bread and a lump of cheese were waiting for him.

That was his lot, then. And perhaps, Harry thought, he’d better get used to it again, for his own sanity’s sake. It was easier if you didn’t expect any better.

Aunt Petunia was already in her salmon-pink cocktail dress. Harry washed the manure off his hands and bolted his supper, and she whisked the plate out from under the last mouthful.

‘Upstairs! Hurry!’

As he passed the living-room door he caught a glimpse of Uncle Vernon and Dudley in bow-ties and dinner jackets, like two sacks of flour somebody had dressed for a wedding, and something hot went through him. He’d dug their garden all day on two slices of bread. He’d been shouted at and swung at and told to pretend he didn’t exist in the house he’d grown up in. If only he could show them. Really use it on them, just once. Make them sorry for every single thing they’d ever done to him. He stood in the hall with his fists clenched and felt the thought go through him like a current.

Then the doorbell rang, and Harry went up the stairs three at a time.

‘Remember, boy,’ Uncle Vernon hissed after him from the foot of them. ‘One sound...’

Harry crossed the landing on tiptoe, slipped into his bedroom, shut the door behind him, and turned to throw himself down on the bed.

The trouble was, there was already somebody sitting on it.

Harry stared at the creature on his bed, and the creature stared back, and for a long moment neither of them had anything to say.

It was small and skinny, no taller than the bedside table, with a pair of enormous green eyes that bulged out of its head like tennis balls, and long, floppy, bat-like ears that twitched as it looked at him. Harry knew, in the instant he saw those eyes, exactly what had been watching him out of Aunt Petunia’s hedge that morning.

Dudley’s voice came floating up from the hall.

‘May I take your coats, Mr and Mrs Mason?’

The creature slid off the bed and bowed so low that the end of its long, thin nose brushed the carpet. Harry saw that it was wearing an old pillowcase, with holes torn in it for the arms and legs.

‘Er... you alright?’ said Harry nervously.

The effect was as though he’d pressed a button. The creature sprang up, quivering from ears to toes with excitement, and the voice that came out of it was high and carrying and, Harry was quite sure, audible from the dining room.

‘Harry Potter!’ it cried. ‘So long has Dobby wanted to meet you, sir... Such an honour it is... Dobby is fine, Dobby is excited that Harry Potter is concerned for Dobby!’

‘I didn’t... okay. Whatever. Uh, thanks, I guess.’

Harry looked over at his desk. Hedwig was asleep in her cage with her head under her wing, which seemed to him a remarkable thing to manage with this going on. He sat down in the desk chair, mostly so that he’d be between the creature and the door. He had a great many questions. He wanted to know what the thing was, and where it had come from, and what the bloody hell it thought it had been playing at, stalking him out of the privet all morning. But it had bowed to him, and it was looking at him as if he’d hung the moon, and Harry had been brought up, whatever else you could say about the Dursleys, not to be rude to visitors. So he settled for the simplest thing.

‘Who are you?’

‘Dobby, sir. Just Dobby. Dobby the house-elf,’ said the creature.

‘Oh, right,’ Harry said dryly.

He hadn’t the faintest idea what a house-elf was. Nobody had covered them in first year, and if Hermione had mentioned them he hadn’t been listening. He had the vaguest idea he’d heard of them before. But from who?

‘Well, uh... Dobby. I have to be brutally honest with you here...’

He trailed off and turned his head towards the door. Dobby was being very loud, and the stairs at number four carried sound like a drainpipe, but for the moment there was still a murmur of Mr Mason’s voice from below and no sound of Uncle Vernon’s chair going back. Harry turned back to the elf.

‘Look, I really don’t want to be rude here. But I don’t need a house-elf. I’m pleased to meet you, but...’

Dobby didn’t let him finish. He flung both arms in the air and cried out at the top of his voice, which really, really wasn’t helping.

‘Harry Potter? Pleased to meet Dobby? Oh, what an honour this is! Oh, how magnanimous Harry Potter is! Truly, you are a champion of the Light!’

Harry winced. Downstairs, Aunt Petunia’s high, false laugh rang out, the one she kept for people she wanted something from, and he knew it wouldn’t take much to turn it into something else. This blubbering little creature was going to get him skinned.

‘Is there any particular reason you’re here?’ he asked, as curtly as he could.

‘Oh, yes, sir,’ said Dobby earnestly. ‘Dobby has come to tell you, sir... it is difficult, sir... Dobby wonders where to begin...’

‘Sit down,’ said Harry politely, and nodded at the bed.

To his horror, the elf burst into tears. They weren’t quiet tears. They were the loudest tears Harry had ever heard come out of anything that size.

‘S-sit down!’ Dobby wailed. ‘Never... never ever...’

Harry was sure he heard the voices downstairs falter.

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered, both hands up. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you or anything.’

‘Offend Dobby!’ the elf choked. ‘Dobby has never been asked to sit down by a wizard. Like an equal...’

Harry got up and did his best to steer Dobby back on to the bed, with Dobby sobbing into the pillowcase the whole way, and sobbing loudly, loudly enough that Harry could picture Uncle Vernon’s head coming up from his soup like a bull’s. He couldn’t be angry, though. He’d meant to be, and found he couldn’t. There was something about the way the elf had said it, like an equal, that had gone straight to Harry’s heart, despite himself.

At last Dobby got himself under control and sat on the edge of the bed with his enormous eyes fixed on Harry, swimming with a sort of watery worship.

‘You can’t have met many decent wizards,’ said Harry, to cheer him up.

Dobby shook his head.

Then, without any warning at all, he leapt off the bed and began slamming his head against the window frame, shouting, ‘Bad Dobby! Bad Dobby!’ at every blow.

‘Oi, oi, pack it in, pack that in, you’re going to get me in trouble. What are you doing?’ Harry hissed, trying to shout and whisper at once, which can’t be done. He sprang across the room, got the elf under the arms and hauled him back on to the bed. Hedwig had woken up with a screech that could have taken the paint off the ceiling and was beating her wings against the bars of her cage.

‘Dobby had to punish himself, sir,’ said the elf, who’d gone a little cross-eyed. ‘Dobby almost spoke ill of his family, sir...’

Harry looked at Dobby, who’d gone cross-eyed from the blunt force trauma.. He wondered whether all house-elves were like this, or whether there was something particularly wrong with this one. Harry was reminded of the kids in his old muggle primary school who had to have a special classroom and wore helmets to stop themselves banging their heads on walls or each other. Harry hoped other house elves weren't like this. Maybe Dobby was equally as 'special' as those other kids.

‘Your family?’

‘The wizard family Dobby serves, sir... Dobby is a house-elf. Bound to serve one house and one family, forever...’

‘Do they know you’re here?’ Harry asked curiously.

Dobby shuddered from top to bottom.

‘Oh no, sir, no... Dobby will have to punish himself most grievously for coming to see you, sir. Dobby will have to shut his ears in the oven door for this. If they ever knew, sir...’

‘Right... and they won’t notice that?’

‘Dobby doubts it, sir. Dobby is always having to punish himself for something, sir. They lets Dobby get on with it, sir. Sometimes they remind me to do extra punishments...’

Harry thought of the cupboard under the stairs, and of Aunt Petunia’s frying pan, and found, to his surprise, that he was angry on somebody else’s behalf for once.

‘If that’s what they want, that’s not right, Dobby. But why don’t you leave? Escape?’

‘A house-elf must be set free, sir. And the family will never set Dobby free... Dobby will serve the family until he dies, sir...’

Harry stared at him.

‘There I was thinking I had it rough here with the Dursleys. Bloody hell... Can’t anyone help you, mate?’

Dobby’s eyes lit up like a pair of lamps, and the whole of him seemed to go off at once, every bit as loud as before.

‘MATE? DOBBY IS HARRY POTTER’S MATE? NEVER HAS A -’

‘Shut up, Dobby! You’ll get me in trouble. Calm down!’ Harry hissed, but it was no good. Dobby had dissolved into a chorus of sobbing wails, very loud sobbing wails, and all Harry could do was sit on the bed next to him and wait for them to pass and listen to the dining room with every nerve he had.

‘Dobby has heard of your greatness, sir,’ the elf gasped at last, ‘but of your goodness, Dobby never knew...’

Harry, whose face had gone very hot, said, ‘Whatever you’ve heard about my greatness is a load of rubbish. I’m not even top of my year at Hogwarts. That’s Hermione, she...’

He stopped. Thinking about Hermione hurt.

‘Harry Potter is humble and modest,’ said Dobby reverently, and his great eyes glowed. ‘Harry Potter speaks not of his triumph over He Who Must Not Be Named.’

‘Voldemort?’ said Harry.

Dobby clapped his hands over his ears and moaned, ‘Ah, speak not the name, sir! Speak not the name!’

‘I’ll say the bloody name if I want. Dumbledore says fear of a name makes it powerful.’ Then Harry softened. ‘I do understand it, though. My mate Ron...’

He trailed off again. Thinking about Ron was no better.

Dobby leaned in close, with his eyes as wide as headlamps.

‘Dobby heard tell,’ he said hoarsely, ‘that Harry Potter met the Dark Lord a second time, only weeks ago... that Harry Potter escaped him yet again.’

Harry nodded, and Dobby’s eyes filled with tears all over again.

‘Ah, sir,’ he gasped, dabbing at his face with the corner of the pillowcase. ‘Harry Potter is valiant and bold! He has braved so many dangers already! But Dobby has come to protect Harry Potter, to warn him, even if he does have to shut his ears in the oven door later for defying the Master. Mistress was very clear on Dobby telling Harry Potter this... Harry Potter must not go back to Hogwarts.’

Silence. Downstairs, knives and forks chinked, and Uncle Vernon’s voice rumbled on about something.

‘Mistress?’ said Harry.

Dobby’s head jerked towards the wall. Harry grabbed the elf’s shoulder before it could get there.

‘All right. All right, forget I asked.’

Then what Dobby had actually said caught up with him, and when he spoke again his voice had gone very dark.

‘No one will ever stop me from going to Hogwarts.’

He meant every word of it. He’d have walked there, if it came to that. Anything to be out of this Muggle hell.

‘Term starts on September the first. It’s all that’s keeping me going. You don’t know what it’s like here. I don’t belong here. I belong in your world. At Hogwarts.’ The longing in his own voice embarrassed him, and he didn’t care.

‘No, no, no,’ squeaked Dobby, shaking his head so hard that his ears slapped his cheeks. ‘Harry Potter must stay where he is safe. He is too great, too good, to lose. If Harry Potter goes back to Hogwarts, he will be in mortal danger.’

‘Why?’ said Harry, startled.

‘There is a plot, Harry Potter. A plot to make most terrible things happen at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry this year,’ whispered Dobby, and he’d begun to shake all over. ‘Dobby has known it for months, sir. Harry Potter must not put himself in peril. He is too important, sir!’

‘What terrible things?’ said Harry at once. ‘Who’s plotting them?’

Dobby made a strangled noise, like a drain, and then threw himself at the wall and began banging his head against it.

‘I told you to pack it in, bloody hell.’ Harry dragged him off it. ‘Fine, you can’t say. I understand. But why are you warning me?’

A nasty thought had just occurred to him.

‘Hang on. This hasn’t got anything to do with Vol... sorry... with You Know Who, has it? You could just shake or nod,’ he added hastily, as Dobby’s head started to tilt towards the wall again.

Slowly, Dobby shook his head.

‘Not... not He Who Must Not Be Named, sir.’

But his eyes had gone huge, and he was looking at Harry as though he were trying very hard to tell him something without any words at all. Harry, for his part, was completely at sea.

‘Oh, he’s got a brother, hasn’t he?’

Dobby shook his head again, with his eyes wider than ever.

‘Well, then, I can’t think who else would have a chance of making horrible things happen at Hogwarts,’ said Harry. ‘I mean, there’s Dumbledore, for one thing. You know who Dumbledore is, don’t you?’

Dobby bowed his head.

‘Albus Dumbledore is the greatest Headmaster Hogwarts has ever had. Dobby knows it, sir. Dobby has heard Dumbledore’s powers rival those of He Who Must Not Be Named at the height of his strength. But, sir,’ and the elf’s voice dropped to a frantic whisper, ‘there are powers Dumbledore doesn’t... powers no decent wizard...’

And before Harry could get to him, Dobby had bounded off the bed, seized the desk lamp, and begun beating himself round the head with it, with yelps that could have split a log.

‘Dobby, for the love of -’

Harry didn’t finish. The dining room had gone deafeningly silent.

Two seconds later, with his heart hammering, he heard Uncle Vernon’s chair go back and his feet come into the hall.

‘Dudley must have left his television on again, the little tyke!’

‘Quick! In the wardrobe!’ Harry hissed. He got Dobby round the middle, rammed him in among the school shirts, shut the door on him, and threw himself on to the bed just as the handle turned, cursing Dobby silently the whole way in words that would have made Ron sit up and take notes.

‘What... the... devil... are... you... doing?’ said Uncle Vernon, through his teeth, with his face an inch from Harry’s. ‘You’ve just killed the punchline of my Japanese-golfer joke.’ Harry had heard that one. He had to admit It was actually pretty funny, but not the sort of thing to repeat to people like Hermione. Who’d probably be scandalized by such a joke. ‘one more sound and you’ll wish you’d never been born, boy!’

He stamped flat-footed out of the room.

Shaking, Harry let Dobby out of the wardrobe.

‘See what it’s like here?’ he said. ‘See why I’ve got to go back to Hogwarts? It’s the only place I’ve got... well, I think I’ve got friends.’

He was trying not to be angry. He’d begun to understand that there was something not right about Dobby, that the elf perhaps couldn’t help half of what he did. But understanding it wasn’t going to save Harry if the next yelp brought Uncle Vernon up the stairs.

‘Friends who don’t even write to Harry Potter?’ said Dobby slyly.

‘I expect they’ve just been... hang on,’ said Harry. He frowned.

Then his face went darker than it had gone all evening.

‘What does THAT mean, Dobby?’ he hissed, and the elf shrank back from him as though, for one moment, Harry Potter were a more frightening thing to have in front of you than Voldemort.

Dobby shuffled his feet.

‘Harry Potter mustn’t be angry with Dobby... Dobby did it for the best...’

‘Have you been STOPPING my letters?’

‘Dobby has them here, sir,’ said the elf.

He stepped nimbly out of Harry’s reach, and pulled a thick wad of envelopes out of the front of the pillowcase. Harry could see Hermione’s neat, upright hand, and Ron’s scrawl, and a great splodgy scribble that could only have come from Hagrid.

For one second his heart went up like a bird. Then it came down again, like a stone,  the stone landed on Dobby.

Dobby blinked anxiously up at him.

‘Harry Potter mustn’t be angry... Dobby hoped... if Harry Potter thought his friends had forgotten him... Harry Potter might not want to go back to school, sir...’

Harry wasn’t listening. He lunged for the letters, and Dobby skipped out of reach.

‘Harry Potter will have them, sir, if he gives Dobby his word that he will not return to Hogwarts. Ah, sir, this is a danger you must not face! Say you won’t go back, sir!’

‘No,’ said Harry. He said it with more anger than a twelve-year-old ought to have had in him. ‘Give me my friends’ letters, or I’ll make your master look kind compared to what I’m going to do to you!’

‘Then Harry Potter leaves Dobby no choice,’ said the elf sadly.

Before Harry could move, Dobby had darted to the bedroom door, wrenched it open, and gone down the stairs like a rat down a drainpipe.

Harry went after him with his mouth dry and his stomach turning over, trying not to make a sound, and finding it very hard with his blood up the way it was. He took the last six stairs in one jump and landed on the hall carpet like a cat, looking left and right.

From the dining room he heard Uncle Vernon.

‘... do tell Petunia that very funny story about the American plumbers, Mr Mason, she’s been dying to hear it...’

Harry ran up the hall and into the kitchen, and felt his stomach drop out of him altogether.

Aunt Petunia’s masterpiece, the great white mountain of cream and sugared violets, was floating up near the ceiling. On top of the cupboard in the corner, Dobby crouched.

‘No,’ croaked Harry. ‘Please... they’ll kill me...’

‘Harry Potter must say he’s not going back to school...’

‘Dobby... please...’

‘Say it, sir...’

‘I’ve got plenty to say to you, Dobby, and even more to do to you, but not that!’

Dobby had the cheek to look at him as if his heart were breaking. As if he weren’t about to ruin Harry’s life for good.

‘Then Dobby must do it, sir, for Harry Potter’s own good.’

It happened slowly. That was the worst of it. The pudding tipped, and hung, and fell, and seemed to take an age about it, and then it hit the kitchen floor with a crash that stopped Harry’s heart. The dish burst. Cream went up the walls and across the windows and over Harry, and with a crack like a whip, Dobby was gone, a full half-second before Harry’s hands would have closed round his throat.

There were screams from the dining room. Uncle Vernon came through the door and found Harry standing in the middle of the wreckage, stiff with shock and white from head to foot with Aunt Petunia’s pudding.

For a minute or two it looked as if Uncle Vernon might carry it off. ‘Only our nephew... very disturbed... meeting strangers upsets him, so we keep him upstairs...’ He herded the Masons back into the dining room, and on the way past promised Harry, quietly, that he’d flay him to within an inch of his life once they’d gone, and put a mop in his hand.

Aunt Petunia dug a tub of ice-cream out of the freezer, and Harry, still shaking, began to scrub the kitchen. In his head he was swearing up a storm that would have had Fred and George taking their hats off to him, if they’d been able to hear it. Then even the swearing wore out, and what was left was a single word, going round and round like something on a loop. Kill. Kill. Kill. He’d kill Dobby the next time he saw him. He meant it as sincerely as a boy of twelve can mean a thing like that, which is to say completely, and without the first idea of what it would involve.

Uncle Vernon might still have had his deal. It was the owl that finished it.

Aunt Petunia was passing round the after-dinner mints when an enormous barn owl came in through the open dining-room window, dropped a letter squarely on top of Mrs Mason’s head, and sailed out again. Mrs Mason screamed like a banshee and ran out of the house shouting about lunatics. Mr Mason stayed only long enough to tell the Dursleys that his wife had been terrified of birds of every size and description since she was a girl, and to ask whether this was their idea of a joke.

Uncle Vernon, trying to be diplomatic, asked whether ‘their people’ were always nervous of birds. Mr Mason went purple.

‘Why, I never...!’ he shouted, and the front door slammed behind him.

Harry stood in the kitchen with both hands on the mop handle to keep himself upright as Uncle Vernon came through the door with a look in his tiny eyes that was very nearly demonic. It had been Vernon who’d said it. Not Harry. It didn’t seem to matter.

‘Read it!’ Uncle Vernon hissed, and he thrust the owl’s letter into Harry’s face. ‘Go on. Read it!’

Harry took it. It wasn’t a birthday card.

Dear Mr Potter,

We have received intelligence that a Hover Charm was used at your place of residence this evening at twelve minutes past nine.

As you know, underage wizards are not permitted to perform spells outside school, and further spellwork on your part may lead to expulsion from said school (Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery, 1875, Paragraph C).

We would also ask you to remember that any magical activity which risks notice by members of the non-magical community (Muggles) is a serious offence under Section 13 of the International Confederation of Warlocks’ Statute of Secrecy.

Enjoy your holidays!

Yours sincerely,

Mafalda Hopkirk

Improper Use of Magic Office

Ministry of Magic

Harry looked up from the letter and swallowed. The rage had gone out of him, quite soberly, and what was left was cold.

‘You didn’t tell us you weren’t allowed to do magic outside school,’ said Uncle Vernon, and a mad light was dancing in his eyes. ‘Slipped your mind, I expect... forgot to mention it...’

He came at Harry like a bulldog, with every one of his teeth showing.

‘Well, I’ve got news for you, boy... I’m locking you up... you’re never going back to that school... never... and if you try and magic your way out, they’ll throw you out of it!’

And laughing like a lunatic, he took Harry by the back of the neck and dragged him up the stairs.

‘You can’t do that, Uncle Vernon!’

He could. Harry heard the key turn, and the bolt go across, and Uncle Vernon’s feet go away down the stairs.

Harry banged on the door. He begged through it. He shouted. And it wasn’t the wizard Harry Potter who’d faced Voldemort in his first year doing the shouting. It was a small boy who’d been locked in a cupboard for being a freak, who’d never once been let out by asking. He swore at the Dursleys until he ran out of words. He hammered on the door until his knuckles split, and he screamed, and he sobbed, louder than Dobby had, and nobody came, and nobody answered, and when at last there was nothing left in him he curled up on the floor by the door and slept there.

Uncle Vernon was as good as his word.

The next morning he paid a man to put bars on Harry’s window. He fitted the cat-flap in the bedroom door himself, so that food could be pushed through three times a day. It was very little food. A slice of bread, mostly, and a cup of water. Sometimes they forgot the bread. They let him out to the bathroom morning and night, and shouted him down if he so much as opened his mouth to them, and the rest of the time he was locked in, round the clock.

Three days went by. The Dursleys showed no sign of giving in, and Harry couldn’t see any way out. He lay on his bed and watched the sun go down behind the bars and wondered, miserably, what was going to happen to him. What was the use of magicking himself out, if Hogwarts expelled him for it? He couldn’t save himself. He was entirely at the Dursleys’ mercy, and life at Privet Drive had hit a low he hadn’t known it had in it. Now that they knew they weren’t going to wake up as fruit bats, he’d lost the only weapon he’d ever had against them. Dobby might have saved him from whatever was waiting at Hogwarts. At this rate, he’d starve to death in Little Whinging instead.

The cat-flap rattled and Aunt Petunia’s hand came through it, pushing a bowl of tinned soup across the carpet. Harry was off the bed and on it before the hand had gone. They’d forgotten him altogether the day before. No food, no bathroom, nothing. The soup was stone cold and he drank half of it in a single swallow. Then he carried the bowl over to Hedwig’s cage and tipped the soggy vegetables from the bottom into her empty tray.

She ruffled every feather she had and looked at him with the deepest disgust.

‘It’s no good turning your beak up at it,’ said Harry grimly. ‘That’s all we’ve got.’

He put the empty bowl back by the cat-flap and lay down again, hungrier, somehow, than he’d been before the soup.

Suppose he was still alive in four weeks. What would happen when he didn’t turn up at Hogwarts? Would they send somebody to find out why? Could whoever they sent make the Dursleys let him go?

The room went dark round him. Worn out and empty, with the same questions going round his head and no answers to any of them, Harry slid into a thin, uneasy sleep.

He dreamed he was in a zoo. He was lying on straw in a cage with a card on the bars that said Underage Wizard, and people were filing past and goggling at him through the bars, and he was so weak with hunger he couldn’t lift his head. He saw Dobby’s face in the crowd and shouted for help, and Dobby called, ‘Harry Potter is safe there, sir!’ and was gone. Then the Dursleys were there, and Dudley was rattling the bars, and beside Dudley, with her white-blonde hair and her silver eyes and her nose in the air, stood Dracina Malfoy, laughing at him.

‘Stop it,’ Harry mumbled. The rattling was going straight through his sore head. ‘Leave me alone... cut it out... I’m trying to sleep...’

He opened his eyes.

Moonlight was coming in through the bars. And somebody was goggling through them at him. A freckled, red-haired, long-nosed somebody.

Ron Weasley was outside Harry’s window.

‘Ron!’ breathed Harry.

He crept to the window and pushed it up, so that they could talk through the bars. His head swam when he stood. It was hard to make his eyes stay on anything.

‘Ron, you came?’

His friends hadn’t forgotten him. The bitter canker in his chest that had been clenched for three days let go all at once, and then his mouth fell open, because the rest of what he was looking at had caught up with him.

Ron was leaning out of the back window of an old turquoise car, the car was parked in mid-air, level with the gutter, as calmly as if it had been standing at a kerb. In the front seats, grinning at him, sat Fred and George, Ron’s elder twin brothers.

‘All right...’ Fred began.

Whatever else he’d meant to say died in his mouth. The grin went with it. He was looking at the bars on Harry’s window, and then past them, at Harry, who hadn’t seen a mirror in three days and didn’t need one to know what he looked like.

‘What’s been going on?’ said Ron. His voice had gone careful. His eyes went from Harry’s face to the room behind him, to the bowl by the cat-flap and the bars and back again. ‘Why haven’t you been answering my letters? I’ve asked you to stay about twelve times, and then Dad came home and said you’d got an official warning for using magic in front of Muggles...’

‘It was that bloody house-elf. And wait, how did your dad know about that?’

‘He works for the Ministry,’ said Ron. ‘You know we’re not supposed to do spells outside school...’

Harry waved the rest of that away and pointed at the car.

‘Oh, and that’s not magical at all, Ron,’ he said sarcastically.

Ron looked at him, and then he laughed, properly, and Harry hadn’t heard anybody laugh like that in six weeks.

‘Oh, Harry. I missed you, mate.’ He slapped the door of the car. ‘This doesn’t count. We’re borrowing it off my Dad. He’s mental for Muggle things. He enchanted the car. But doing magic in front of those Muggles you live with… I saw what they were like at the station, mate...’

‘I didn’t do a bloody thing!’ Harry hissed. He was too tired to be angry and too indignant not to be. ‘It was that bloody damned house-elf, and when I get my hands on him he’ll wish he was still just shoving his ears into ovens.’

Ron gave him a look. It was a puzzled look, and a worried one, and Harry realised that Ron had never heard him talk like that about anything, not even Snape. He made himself calm down.

‘Look, Ron. It’s a long bloody story. Never mind for now. Can you explain to them at Hogwarts that the Dursleys have locked me up and won’t let me come back, and obviously I can’t magic myself out, because the Ministry’ll think that’s the second spell I’ve done in three days, so -’

‘Stop gibbering,’ said Ron. ‘We’ve come to take you home with us.’

‘Ron, these are solid metal bars. And if I can’t use magic, you can’t either, mate. Unless you can get Superman on the phone, or that green bloke I saw on the news, I reckon I’m stuck.’

‘Who’s Superman?’ said Fred, interested.

‘Never mind.’

‘We don’t need to,’ said Ron, and he jerked his head at the front seats and grinned. ‘You forget who I’ve got with me.’

And Harry remembered. Fred and George Weasley were famous at Hogwarts, or infamous, depending on who you asked,. There wasn’t a locked door in the castle they hadn’t been through, or a caretaker they hadn’t outrun, or a corridor they hadn’t rigged. The thing in Harry’s chest let go a little more. If there was anybody in the world who could get him out of this room, it was the two people in the front of that car.

‘Tie that round the bars,’ said Fred, and he threw the end of a rope through the window.

Harry caught it, and stood holding it, and a very cold thought went through him.

‘The Dursleys. If they find out... I can’t...’

He trailed off. Three days of the locked door had got into him deeper than he’d known. He could hear Uncle Vernon on the stairs already, and he wasn’t even on them.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Fred. ‘And stand back.’

Harry knotted the rope round the middle bar with fingers that weren’t working properly, and backed away into the shadow beside Hedwig’s cage. Hedwig, who seemed to understand that this was no time for noise, sat as still as a stuffed bird and didn’t make a sound. The engine revved, and revved again, louder, until Harry was sure the whole street would wake, and then with a crunch of splintering sill the bars came clean out of the wall, and the car went straight up with them swinging underneath it.

Harry ran to the window. The bars dangled a few feet above the lawn. Ron, panting, hauled them up hand over hand and dragged them into the back seat.

Harry listened. Nothing. No creak from the Dursleys’ room, no light under the door. He said a silent thank-you to God, and to Merlin, and to anybody else who might have been on duty.

‘Get in,’ said Ron.

‘But all my Hogwarts stuff... my wand... my broomstick...’

‘Where is it?’

‘Locked in the cupboard under the stairs, and I can’t get out of this room...’

‘No problem,’ said George, from the passenger seat. ‘Out of the way, Harry.’

The twins climbed in through the gap where the bars had been, carefully, one after the other, and stood up in Harry’s bedroom. And then they stopped.

It was the smell, first. Harry had stopped noticing it, but it had been three days of a boy and an owl in a shut room in July, with a cat-flap for air. Fred looked down at the cat-flap. George looked at the lock on the door, which was the size of a man’s fist and had been screwed through the frame.

‘Oh, Merlin, what were they doing to you, Harry?’ said Ron, through the window, and there was something in his voice that Harry hadn’t heard there before, and didn’t want to hear.

Harry would have laughed, if he’d had the strength.

‘Nothing. That was rather the point,’ he said sadly. ‘They left me in here to rot as punishment for that damned house-elf ruining their business meeting.’

Fred and George looked at each other, and neither of them said anything, which from Fred and George was saying a great deal.

‘Well, we’re here to get you out,’ said Ron. ‘Mum was right about those people, Harry.’

He said it firmly, the way he’d have said that Gryffindor were the best house or the Cannons were due a good season, as something that wasn’t up for argument, and it went through Harry like warmth through cold hands. He’d never had anybody stand on his side like that. He’d never had anybody who’d fly a car to his window.

There was a click behind him.

Fred and George had done the lock. No wand, no spell, nothing but a bent bit of wire out of George’s pocket, and the lock Uncle Vernon had told Harry was fitted in prisons up and down the country and couldn’t be picked by anyone had opened for them in under a minute.

‘A lot of wizards think it’s a waste of time, knowing this sort of Muggle trick,’ said Fred, pocketing the wire, ‘but we feel they’re skills worth learning, even if they are a bit slow.’

The door swung open on to the landing.

Harry started towards it, to get the trunk, and his legs went out from under him. He caught the end of the bed. The room tipped.

‘I need to... get the trunk.’

‘No,’ said Fred.

‘We’ll get the trunk. You get what you need from your room,’ said George.

‘Can you stand?’ said Fred, and he had Harry under the arm before Harry could answer.

‘Were... were they starving you?’ asked Ron, from the window. The horror was climbing up his face as he said it.

‘N-no. No.’ It came out weak and stammering, and Harry heard, with a sort of distant surprise, that he sounded like Professor Quirrell. He didn’t want Ron to worry. He waved a hand at the empty soup bowl by the cat-flap. ‘They gave me bread and things like that.’

Ron looked at the bowl, and at Harry, and plainly didn’t believe a word of it. If anything, he looked worse.

‘Watch out for the bottom stair, it creaks,’ Harry whispered, as the twins went out on to the dark landing.

He went round his room as fast as he could manage, which wasn’t very fast, gathering things up and passing them out through the window to Ron. Schoolbooks. The photograph album Hagrid had made him, which he’d kept under the pillow. The Weasley jumper. Then he went to the top of the stairs to help with the trunk.

Somewhere below him, Uncle Vernon coughed.

Everything stopped. Then the cough turned into a snore, and the trunk came on up, a step at a time, with Fred and George straining under it and Harry doing what he could from behind. They got it across the landing and through the bedroom and up to the window. Fred climbed back out into the car to pull with Ron, and Harry and George pushed from the room, and inch by inch the trunk slid out over the sill.

Uncle Vernon coughed again.

‘A bit more,’ panted Fred, from inside the car. ‘One good push...’

Harry and George put their shoulders to it, and the trunk went out through the window and down into the back seat with a thump that Harry felt in his teeth.

‘OK, let’s go,’ George whispered.

Harry got a knee on the windowsill, and from behind him came a sudden, piercing screech, and on its heels the roar of Uncle Vernon’s voice through two walls.

‘THAT BLOOMING OWL!’

‘I’ve forgotten Hedwig!’

Harry tore back across the room as the landing light clicked on under the door. He snatched up the cage and ran it to the window and shoved it out into Ron’s arms, and he was scrambling back up on to the chest of drawers when Uncle Vernon’s fist hit the door, found it unlocked, and sent it crashing open against the wall.

For one long, swollen second Uncle Vernon stood in the doorway. Then he bellowed like a bull and came across the room and got Harry by the ankle.

And something in Harry gave way.

He’d had enough. He’d had enough of all of it, of the cupboard and the frying pan and the door and the three days, and he twisted round on the sill and went for the hand on his ankle with both of his own, clawing at it, tearing at it, with every ounce of rage and strength he had left.

‘Get away! I’m not coming back! I’m never coming back! Get off of me! I hate you!’

He was spitting as he said it. Ron, Fred and George had him by the arms, all three of them, pulling for all they were worth.

‘Petunia!’ roared Uncle Vernon. ‘He’s getting away! HE’S GETTING AWAY!’

The Weasleys gave one enormous heave, and Harry’s leg came out of his uncle’s grip like a cork out of a bottle, and he went backwards into the car in a heap of arms and elbows. He got the door shut. He got one hand up to the window and made a gesture at the Dursleys that Dudley’s friends would have recognised, and Ron yelled, ‘Put your foot down, Fred!’ and the car shot up towards the moon like a rocket.

Harry couldn’t take it in. He was free.

He wound the window down, and the night air hit him in the face and tore at his hair, and he looked back at the roofs of Privet Drive shrinking under them, and at the three of them, Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia and Dudley, hanging out of his bedroom window with their mouths open.

‘I hope you die of diabetes, you fat-’

The rest went into the wind, because the car gave a lurch and a jerk, and Harry’s head hit the roof.

‘Sorry. Dad taught me how to make this thing go, but I’m still figuring on how this bleedin’ Muggle contraption works,’ said Fred, waving a hand at the steering wheel.

The Dursleys were far too far behind to hear any more of Harry’s language, however colourful, so he gave it up and sat back in the seat.

And that was when the tears came.

He couldn’t help them. He didn’t try very hard. They were tears of relief, and they came in a rush, and he put his face in his hands so that the others wouldn’t see.

‘I’m free,’ he said. ‘I’m finally free.’

‘It’s okay, Harry,’ said Ron. He put a hand on Harry’s shoulder and left it there, which was more than Harry could have asked of him.

‘I thought I’d never be let out again. They... they wouldn’t let me go to Hogwarts. I was trapped. It was like being in the cupboard again.’

And then everything in him pulled tight.

‘All because of that evil little house-elf!’ Harry hissed.

‘What do you mean by being in the cupboard, Harry?’ said Ron. His face had gone very serious.

Harry looked at him and remembered, with a lurch, that he’d never told Ron. Not about the cupboard, not about the ten years in it, not really anything at all about what the Dursleys were. He’d stopped telling people a long time ago, because nobody ever believed him, and after a while the not being believed was worse than the thing itself. He didn’t want to start now, in the back of a flying car at three in the morning with his face still wet.

‘Let Hedwig out,’ he said. ‘She can fly behind us. She hasn’t had a chance to stretch her wings for ages.’

George passed the hairpin back, and Ron worked it in the padlock, and a moment later Hedwig went out through the window in one long, joyful sweep and settled in beside the car, gliding on the night air like a ghost. All four of them watched her. It was beautiful enough, Harry was glad to see, to take Ron’s mind off cupboards.

‘So. What’s the story, Harry?’ said Ron, when Hedwig had settled into their slipstream. ‘What’s been happening?’

Harry told them. All of it. Dobby, and the warning, and the letters down the front of the pillowcase, and the pudding, and the owl on Mrs Mason’s head. When he’d finished there was a long silence in the car.

‘Very fishy,’ said Fred at last.

‘Definitely dodgy,’ George agreed.

‘So he wouldn’t even tell you who’s supposed to be plotting all this stuff?’

‘I don’t think he could,’ said Harry. ‘I told you. Every time he got near letting something out he started banging his head on the wall.’

He saw Fred and George exchange a look in the front.

‘What, you think he was lying to me?’

‘Well,’ said Fred. ‘Put it this way. House-elves have got powerful magic of their own, but they can’t usually use it without their masters’ say-so. I reckon old Dobby was sent to stop you coming back to Hogwarts. Somebody’s idea of a joke. Can you think of anyone at school with a grudge against you?’

‘Yes,’ said Harry and Ron, together, without a pause.

‘Dracina Malfoy,’ Harry explained. ‘She hates me.’

‘Ah, yeah,’ said Fred. ‘She was going round the whole school whilst you were in the hospital wing last year. Telling us all she was going to get you all back for the Body-Bind spell you did on her.’

‘I didn’t do it,’ said Harry automatically. ‘Hermione did it.’

‘Not what she was telling people.’

‘That’s Lucius Malfoy’s girl, right?’ asked George.

‘Must be. It’s not a very common name, is it?’ said Harry. ‘Why?’

‘I’ve heard Dad talking about him,’ said George. ‘He was a big supporter of You Know Who.’

‘And when You Know Who went,’ said Fred, twisting round in the driver’s seat to look at Harry, which did nothing for the steering, ‘Lucius Malfoy came back saying he’d never meant a word of it. Load of dung. Dad reckons he was right in You Know Who’s inner circle. The Malfoys have always been Dark wizards, even all the way back to the Norman conquest. When they first came over here.’

Harry had heard that part before, from Hermione, in a corridor, with Dracina’s cheeks going pink. And then another memory came up out of nowhere, and he sat forward.

‘Oh, God, I remember now. Dracina... Malfoy, I mean... she talked about having a house-elf when we had detention with Quirrell in the Forbidden Forest.’

‘Well, whoever owns that elf will be an old wizarding family, and they’ll be rich,’ said Fred.

‘Yeah, Mum’s always wishing we had a house-elf to do the ironing,’ said George. ‘But all we’ve got is a lousy old ghoul in the attic.’

‘Woah, wait. You have a ghoul in the attic?’ asked Harry, horrified.

‘Yeah,’ said Ron, matter-of-factly. And that was all he said.

‘And you’re not all that bothered by the flesh-eating monster in your attic?’ Harry asked dryly.

‘We tried to get him out, but we need a proper professional, and for a ghoul it’s too bloody expensive. We’re saving up, though. Mum feeds it the gnomes sometimes. And he doesn’t ever come out of the attic,’ said Ron, who seemed to think this settled it.

Harry decided to put the ghoul out of his mind, and his thoughts went back to Dracina Malfoy, which wasn’t where he wanted them.

She’d always had the best of everything, so her family had to be rolling in it. He could picture her perfectly, strutting the halls of some great manor house with her nose in the air and that smug, silver-eyed look on her face, snapping her fingers at some poor creature in a pillowcase. And sending the family servant to keep Harry away from Hogwarts was exactly the sort of thing Malfoy would do. It had her fingerprints all over it. Whoever Dobby’s master was, though, Harry had already made up his mind that if he and the elf met again, Dobby would be sorry for every one of those three days.

And he’d made up his mind about something else. He was never going back to the Dursleys. Never. The voice in his head laughed at that, the way it laughed at most things, and told him exactly how long that resolution would last. Harry set his jaw and ignored it.

‘I’m glad we came to get you, anyway,’ said Ron. ‘I was getting really worried when you didn’t answer any of my letters. I thought it was Errol’s fault at first...’

‘Who’s Errol?’

‘Our owl. He’s ancient. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d collapsed on a delivery. So then I tried to borrow Hermes...’

‘Who?’

‘The owl Mum and Dad bought Percy when he was made a prefect,’ said Fred, from the front.

‘But Percy wouldn’t lend him to me,’ said Ron. ‘Said he needed him.’

‘Percy’s been acting very oddly this summer,’ said George, frowning. ‘Ever since Mum took away that statue Charlie gave him, he has been sending a lot of letters and spending a load of time shut up in his room... I mean, there’s only so many times you can polish a prefect badge... You’re driving too far west, Fred,’ he added, pointing at a compass on the dashboard.

Fred twiddled the wheel.

Something had just occurred to Harry.

‘So, Ron...’

‘Yes?’ said Ron innocently.

‘I’m just wondering, for my own benefit, but when you "borrowed" your Dad’s flying car, you did ask him first, right?’

Ron’s face dropped.

‘Well... um.’

‘No, then,’ Harry answered his own question. ‘No, you didn’t.’

‘He was busy at work, mate. I couldn’t get to him in time. Hopefully we’ll be able to get it back in the garage without Mum noticing we flew it.’

‘What does your dad do at the Ministry of Magic, anyway?’ Harry asked.

‘He works in the most boring department there is,’ said Ron. ‘The Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office.’

‘The what?’

‘It’s all to do with bewitching things that are Muggle-made, you know, in case they end up back in a Muggle shop or house. Like, last year, some old witch died, and she had this tea set given to her by a formerly cursed Muggle French nobleman and his peasant wife, and her tea set was sold to an antiques shop. This little old Muggle lady bought it, took it home, and tried to serve her friends tea in it. It was a nightmare. Dad was working overtime for weeks.’

‘What happened?’ asked Harry.

‘Well, they came alive and started dancing and speaking to one another. The little old lady died of shock. The other people went mad. Dad was going spare about it all. It’s only him and an old warlock called Perkins in the office, and they had to do Memory Charms and all sorts to cover it up...’

‘Dancing,’ said Harry.

‘The teapot sang, apparently.’

‘But your dad... this car...’

Fred laughed.

‘Yeah, Dad’s mad about everything to do with Muggles. Our shed’s full of Muggle stuff. He takes it apart, puts spells on it and puts it back together again. If he raided our house he’d have to put himself straight under arrest. It drives Mum mad.’

‘That’s the main road,’ said George, peering down through the windscreen. ‘We’ll be there in ten minutes... just as well, it’s getting light...’

A thin pink line had come up along the eastern edge of the sky. Fred took the car down, and Harry saw a dark quilt of fields, and hedges, and clumps of trees.

‘We’re a little way outside the village,’ said George. ‘Ottery St Catchpole...’

Lower and lower. The rim of a red sun showed through the trees.

‘Touchdown!’ said Fred, and with a small bump they were on the ground.

They’d come down beside a tumbledown garage in a small yard, and Harry looked out of the window and saw Ron’s house for the first time.

It looked as though it had started out as a big stone pigsty, and then somebody had kept adding rooms on to it, here and there and on top, until it was four or five storeys high and so crooked that it could only have been standing up by magic, which, Harry reminded himself, it probably was. Half a dozen chimneys sat on the red roof at odd angles. A lopsided sign by the gate said The Burrow. Round the front door was a heap of wellington boots and a cauldron gone rusty, and several fat brown hens were picking their way across the yard as though they owned it.

‘It’s not much,’ said Ron.

‘It’s brilliant,’ said Harry, and he meant it with his whole heart.

He thought of Privet Drive, with its clipped lawn and its hedge at exactly the right height for spying, and he didn’t let himself have the stab of envy he’d had at Christmas, over the jumper. It still puzzled him, though, how Ron could look at this and shrug. The house was odd, and crooked, and the garden was a jungle, and every inch of it looked warm, and lived in, and glad to see you. Beyond it the fields went rolling away into a morning mist that was turning gold. And best of all, there wasn’t a Dursley in it. Not a soapy frying pan, not a fat hand round an ankle, not for miles. Harry couldn’t think of anywhere on earth he’d rather be, except for one.

They got out of the car.

‘Now, we’ll go up really quietly,’ said Fred, ‘and wait for Mum to call us for breakfast. Then Ron, you come bounding down going, "Mum, look who turned up in the night!" and she’ll be all pleased to see Harry, and no one need ever know we flew the car.’

‘Right,’ said Ron.

Harry was so tired he could hardly stand. The yard was swaying gently, like the deck of a boat. All he wanted in the world was a bed.

‘Come on, Harry, I sleep at the...’

Ron had gone a horrible greenish colour, and his eyes were fixed on the house.

The other three turned round.

Mrs Weasley was coming across the yard, scattering hens, and the kind woman who’d knitted Harry a jumper and made him fudge for Christmas was nowhere to be seen. What was coming across the yard was a mother bear. Harry hoped, from the bottom of his heart, that he hadn’t upset her too badly.

‘Ah,’ said Fred.

‘Oh dear,’ said George.

Mrs Weasley stopped in front of them with her hands on her hips and looked from one guilty face to the next. She was wearing a flowered apron with a wand sticking out of the pocket.

‘So,’ she said.

‘Morning, Mum,’ said George, in what he obviously believed was a winning sort of voice.

‘Have you any idea how worried I’ve been?’ said Mrs Weasley, in a whisper that was far worse than shouting.

‘Sorry, Mum, but see, we had to...’

All three of her sons were taller than she was, and all three of them shrank as she went off like a firework.

‘Beds empty! No note! Car gone... could have crashed... out of my mind with worry... did you care?... never, as long as I’ve lived... you wait until your father gets home, we never had trouble like this from Bill or Charlie or Percy...’

She was upset, Harry thought. He’d done that. All he ever did was upset people, by showing them what he was. The voice had got very loud, and the yard was swaying worse, and he was so tired and so dizzy that he couldn’t tell any more where the voice stopped and his own thoughts began. Ungrateful. Look what you’ve done. You’ve got Ron in trouble, and the twins, and she’s angry at you too, she’s only not saying it, and any minute now she’ll tell you to go. Why would anybody let you stay anywhere?

‘Perfect Percy,’ muttered Fred.

‘YOU COULD DO WITH TAKING A LEAF OUT OF PERCY’S BOOK!’ Mrs Weasley shouted, and jabbed a finger into Fred’s chest. ‘You could have died, you could have been seen, you could have lost your father his job...’

Harry felt sick. The anxiety and the exhaustion had hold of him together, and he had to say something, he had to, before Mrs Weasley got really angry and turned round and did something to him.

‘Mrs Weasley,’ said Harry weakly. ‘I’m really sorry. Really, really sorry. This is my fault. I’m sorry for getting Ron in trouble. I...’

The yard went grey at the edges, and then black, and the ground came up very gently to meet him, and he couldn’t hold on to any of it any more. He heard voices, from a long way off.

‘Harry!’ screamed Ron.

‘Oh, Merlin, what did those foul Muggles do to that poor boy?’ said another voice.

Harry barely heard it. Everything went black.

Harry saw a ceiling with a crack in it shaped like a river, and then he saw Mrs Weasley’s face, upside down, looking at him.

He was lying on a sofa. Somebody had put a cushion under his head and a crocheted blanket over him, and the room smelled of woodsmoke and toast and something frying. Ron was hovering behind his mother with his hands jammed in his pockets and a look on his face that Harry had last seen when the white queen’s arm came down.

‘There you are,’ said Mrs Weasley softly. ‘Are you all right, dear? Don’t sit up. Just tell me.’

Harry nodded. Then he remembered the yard, and the hens, and what he’d been in the middle of saying when the ground came up, and it all came out of him in a rush.

‘I’m sorry. Mrs Weasley, I’m really sorry. It’s my fault, all of it. Ron only came because of me. Please don’t be angry with him, it was me, I’d have done anything to get out, I...’ He swallowed. ‘I’ll understand. If you don’t want me here. I’ll understand, honestly.’

‘Hush,’ said Mrs Weasley. ‘Hush, now.’

She put a hand on his forehead, the way you’d check for a fever, and left it there a moment, and Harry, who’d never had anybody do that, didn’t know what to do.

‘I’m not best pleased with Ron,’ she said. ‘Or with Fred, or with George, and the three of them know it. But I’m not angry with you, Harry. Not in the least. Do you hear me?’

‘I had to get him out, Mum,’ said Ron, before Harry could answer. He’d come round the end of the sofa. ‘You should’ve seen him. You should’ve seen the room. They’d put bars on his window. Actual bars, Mum, bolted on. And a lock on the door like a prison, and a cat-flap at the bottom to push food through, and there wasn’t any food, there was an empty soup bowl and that was it. They were starving him. It’s not right. It’s not right.’

‘Ronald.’

Mrs Weasley didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t need to.

‘I am going to handle this. Go and set the table for breakfast. We’ve a guest.’

Ron opened his mouth, shut it, and went. At the door he looked back at Harry, and it was the look he’d given him from the window of the car, the one that said I’ve got you, and then he was gone, and Harry heard cutlery start to rattle in the next room.

Mrs Weasley pulled a chair up to the sofa and sat down on it.

‘Now,’ she said. ‘Is that true? What Ron’s just told me?’

Harry’s first thought was to lie.

It came as easily as breathing. It was what he’d always done. Say it was fine. Say he’d fallen over. Say it was nothing. Because he knew exactly how this went: she’d go to Privet Drive, and Aunt Petunia would open the door in her good apron, and Uncle Vernon would stand behind her in his tie and say very disturbed, I’m afraid, tells stories, we do our best, and by the time Mrs Weasley came back she’d be looking at Harry the way all the others had. The teachers. The dinner lady. The lady from the council who’d come once and had a cup of tea and gone away. Every one of them had believed the Dursleys, in the end, because the Dursleys had a nice house and a clean car and Harry was a scrawny boy with broken glasses who said things that couldn’t be true.

He looked up at Mrs Weasley to say it was fine.

And she was looking at him with such plain, ordinary kindness, with no suspicion in it at all, that the lie wouldn’t come. He tried. He opened his mouth for it, and what came out instead was the truth.

‘They locked me in,’ he said. ‘In my room. They wouldn’t let me out. It was because of that house-elf, he came to the house and dropped a pudding on the kitchen floor in front of the people Uncle Vernon was trying to sell drills to, and then the Ministry sent an owl saying I’d done magic, and I hadn’t, I never touched anything, it was him, that stupid, snivelling little...’

He’d sat up. His hands had closed into fists on the blanket.

‘All right,’ said Mrs Weasley gently. ‘All right, love. Never mind the elf for now.’

She waited until his hands had opened again. Then she looked him over, slowly, from the top of his head to the blanket, the way she’d have looked over a chicken she was thinking of buying, and Harry saw her mouth go tight.

‘You’re all skin and bone,’ she said. ‘Were they feeding you properly, Harry? Before the lock, I mean. Were they feeding you at all?’

‘They gave me bread and stuff,’ said Harry, as he’d said to Ron. ‘Don’t worry about me. I’m all right.’

‘Bread isn’t a meal.’ She said it quite quietly. ‘And I saw you in that yard before you went down, so don’t tell me you’re all right. You were white as that wall.’

Harry noticed her hands. They were folded in her lap, and they’d gone very still, and her knuckles had come up pale under the skin. Her eyes had changed, too. They were still kind. They’d just got sharper, somehow, like a knife that’s been on the steel. He didn’t know what to make of it. He had no way of knowing that what he was looking at was a woman getting angrier, by the sentence, than she’d been in her life, and keeping every ounce of it off her face for his sake.

‘Harry,’ she said, and it was the sweetest, gentlest voice he’d ever heard a grown-up use. ‘Did they ever hit you? The Dursleys?’

He didn’t know that Mrs Weasley had already seen the ankle. Uncle Vernon’s fingers had left a ring of bruises round it like a cuff. She'd seen them when she took his trainers off and said nothing.

‘No,’ said Harry.

It came out wrong. It came out small, and it didn’t finish properly, and they both heard it.

‘I mean... it’s not like... I get hurt at Quidditch all the time, you know, that’s nothing, Fred and George hit Bludgers at me every practice. And Quirrell, I fought Quirrell, he had his hands round my neck and I didn’t let go of him, I beat him, so I’m not... I can take it. I’m good at ducking now. That’s the Bludgers. I got really quick, Oliver says I’ve got the best reflexes on the team, and that’s why I could finally dodge Aunt Petunia’s frying pan, I never used to be able to and now I...’

He stopped.

He hadn’t meant to say that. It had got out while he was looking the other way.

And once it was out, the rest came up behind it, whether he wanted it or not. The frying pan. The rolling pin. The flat of Uncle Vernon’s hand across the back of his head for burning the bacon. Dudley’s gang in the playground, and the school roof, and the cupboard, with the spiders, and the bolt going across on the outside. Ten years of it, every blow he could remember and a good many he’d thought he’d forgotten, all stacked up and waiting, and the wall that had held them back for ten years went, all at once, like a dam going.

Harry cried.

He didn’t cry the way he’d cried in the car. He cried the way he hadn’t cried since he was very small, with his whole body, bent over on the sofa with his face in his hands, great ugly sobs that hurt his chest, and he couldn’t have stopped it if Voldemort had walked into the room.

‘It never used to bother me,’ he got out, between them. ‘It didn’t. I didn’t know any different, I thought that was just, that was just what it was like, for everyone, and then Hagrid came and he was kind to me, he was just kind, he gave me a cake, and then I met Ron on the train and he...’

He had to stop and breathe.

‘Ron’s the best person I know. He’s the bravest. He’s the kindest. He sat down in my compartment and he didn’t even know me and he shared his sandwiches, well, I shared mine, but he would have, and he stood up for me to Malfoy, and he came to get me, he flew a car to get me, Mrs Weasley, nobody’s ever... I’m so lucky. I’m so lucky to have him as my mate and I don’t know why he bothers.’

‘Harry...’

‘And your jumper.’ It came out in a sob, and he didn’t care. ‘And the fudge. At Christmas. I’d never had a present before. Not a proper one. And it was the best thing I’d ever been given, and Ron was moaning about his being maroon, and I was so angry with him, I wanted to hit him, because he gets that every year, he gets it all the time and he doesn’t even know, and I’ve never told him that and I’m ashamed of it, I still think about it, because he’s such a good son and you should be proud of him. You should. He came and got me. You shouldn’t be angry with him, you should be proud.’

And then he couldn’t say any more, because Mrs Weasley had got off the chair and on to the sofa and put both her arms round him and pulled him in against her apron, and she was rubbing his back in slow circles the way you’d rub a baby’s, and saying, over and over, ‘It’s all right. It’s all right, now. It’s going to be all right. I’m going to make it better, Harry. I promise you. I’m going to make it all better.’

Harry held on to her.

He’d never been held like this. He’d been grabbed, and dragged, and shoved into a cupboard, and once, when he was six and had the flu, Aunt Petunia had put a cold flannel on his head and told him not to be sick on the sheets, and that had been the most anyone had done. He pressed his face into Mrs Weasley’s shoulder and wondered, with his eyes shut, whether this was what it felt like. Having a mum. Whether this was what Ron had every day of his life and didn’t know he had.

She isn’t yours, said the voice. She isn’t your mum. Your mum’s dead. And when this one goes round to the Dursleys, and she will, she’ll find out what you are, and she’ll come back and look at you the way they all look at you.

Harry was so far inside his own head that he didn’t see the look on Molly Weasley’s face over the top of his, which was turned towards the window, and the south, and Surrey, and would have frightened Uncle Vernon very badly indeed.

‘Mum,’ said Ron, from the doorway. ‘Table’s done.’

He stopped. He took in his mother and Harry and the state of them both, and had the sense to say nothing whatever.

Mrs Weasley let Harry go, slowly, and wiped her own eyes with the back of her wrist, and stood up and smoothed her apron.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘I’ll get on with breakfast.’ She put a hand on Harry’s head. ‘You’re to stay here, Harry. For as long as you want. Do you understand me? As long as you want.’

She said the last part as though she’d like it written down somewhere.

Then she took him gently by the shoulder and steered him through to the kitchen.

It was small, and rather cramped, with a scrubbed wooden table and chairs in the middle, and Harry sat down on the very edge of his and looked round. He’d never been inside a wizard’s house before.

The clock on the wall opposite had one hand and no numbers at all. Round the edge, where the numbers should have been, it said things like Time to make tea and Time to feed the chickens and You’re late. Books stood three deep along the mantelpiece, with titles like Charm Your Own Cheese and Enchantment in Baking and One Minute Feasts: It’s Magic! And unless Harry’s ears were playing tricks on him, the old wireless by the sink had just announced that coming up next was Witching Hour, with the popular singing sorceress, Celestina Warbeck.

It was so cosy it made his throat ache. Every inch of the place had been lived in and loved, and mended, and lived in again, until it had a character of its own, like a house in a storybook. So this was how a real family lived, he thought. In the wizarding world, anyway.

Mrs Weasley was clattering about at the stove, cooking a little haphazardly and shooting black looks at her sons as she flung sausages into the pan. Every so often she muttered something like ‘don’t know what you were thinking of’ and ‘never would have believed it’.

‘I don’t blame you, dear,’ she assured Harry, looking him over once more as she tipped eight or nine sausages on to his plate, and he saw her mouth go tight again at what she saw. ‘Arthur and I have been worried about you too. Only last night we were saying we’d go and fetch you ourselves if you hadn’t written back to Ron by Friday. But really,’ and three fried eggs went on top of the sausages, ‘flying an illegal car halfway across the country, anyone could have seen you...’

She flicked her wand at the sink, and the washing-up began to do itself with a gentle clinking.

‘It was cloudy, Mum!’ said Fred.

‘You keep your mouth closed while you’re eating!’ snapped Mrs Weasley.

‘They were starving him, Mum!’ said George.

‘I know. I’m going to deal with that dreadful lot,’ Mrs Weasley said, with a grimness that Harry would think about later, as she took the bread out of the bin.

‘And you!’ she said, rounding on George, but her face had softened a good deal by the time she’d turned back to Harry and started cutting and buttering bread for him as though he were five years old. He let her. He found he didn’t mind in the least.

There was a diversion then, in the shape of a small, red-headed figure in a long nightdress, who came into the kitchen, saw Harry, gave a squeak like a trodden mouse, and ran straight out again.

‘Ginny,’ Ron muttered to Harry. ‘My sister. She’s been talking about you all summer.’

‘Yeah, she’ll be wanting your autograph, Harry,’ grinned Fred, and then he caught his mother’s eye and bent over his plate without another word.

Nothing more was said until all four plates were clean, which took a remarkably short time. Harry ate everything. He ate the sausages and the eggs and the bread and butter, and the second round of bread and butter that appeared without his asking, and a tomato, and when he’d finished he sat back and found that the kitchen had stopped swaying.

‘Blimey, I’m tired,’ Fred yawned, putting his knife and fork down. ‘I think I’ll go up to bed and-’

‘You will not,’ snapped Mrs Weasley. ‘It’s your own fault you’ve been up all night. You’re going to de-gnome the garden for me. They’re getting completely out of hand again.’

‘Oh, Mum...’

‘And you two,’ she said, glaring at Ron and George. ‘You can go up to bed, dear,’ she added, to Harry. ‘You didn’t ask them to fly that wretched car.’

But Harry, who felt wide awake now, and who wanted very badly to be useful, so that Mrs Weasley wouldn’t have any reason to wonder why she’d kept him, said quickly, ‘I’ll help Ron. I’ve never seen a de-gnoming...’

‘That’s very sweet of you, dear, but it’s dull work,’ said Mrs Weasley. ‘Now. Let’s see what Lockhart’s got to say on the subject.’

She pulled a heavy book from the stack on the mantelpiece. George groaned.

‘Mum, we know how to de-gnome a garden.’

Harry looked at the cover. In swirling gold letters it said Gilderoy Lockhart’s Guide to Household Pests, and under the title was a large photograph of a very good-looking wizard with wavy blond hair and bright blue eyes, who, this being a wizarding photograph, kept winking up at them all in a way Harry found hard to warm to.

Mrs Weasley beamed down at him.

‘Oh, he is marvellous,’ she said. ‘So dishy, and he knows his household pests, all right, it’s a wonderful book...’

‘Mum fancies him,’ said Fred, in a whisper that could have been heard in the yard.

‘Don’t be so ridiculous, Fred,’ said Mrs Weasley, and her cheeks had gone rather pink. ‘All right. If you think you know better than Lockhart, you can go and get on with it, and woe betide you if there’s a single gnome in that garden when I come out to inspect it.’

Yawning and grumbling, the Weasleys trooped outside, and Harry went with them.

The garden was big, and in Harry’s opinion it was everything a garden ought to be. The Dursleys would have hated it. There were weeds in every bed, and the lawn wanted cutting, and nothing had been clipped to any particular height. But gnarled old trees leaned in over the walls all the way round, and plants Harry didn’t know the names of spilled out of every border, and down at the bottom there was a big green pond, loud with frogs.

‘Muggles have garden gnomes too, you know,’ Harry told Ron cheekily, as they crossed the lawn, with a half-formed idea of setting Ron up for something. But Ron was nobody’s fool.

‘Yeah, nice try, you smart arse. I’ve seen those things they think are gnomes,’ said Ron, from inside a peony bush. ‘Like fat little Father Christmases with fishing rods. They don’t even walk around.’

There was a violent scuffling, the peony shook from top to bottom, and Ron came up out of it holding something at arm’s length.

‘This is a gnome, annoying little bugger,’ he said grimly.

‘Gerroff me! Gerroff me!’ the gnome squealed.

It was nothing like Father Christmas. It was small and brown and leathery, with a bald, knobbly head exactly like a potato, and it kicked at Ron with hard little horny feet as he got it by the ankles and turned it upside down.

‘This is what you do,’ he said. He lifted it over his head (‘Gerroff me!’) and began to swing it round in big circles, like a lasso. He saw Harry’s face. ‘It doesn’t hurt them. You’ve just got to get them really dizzy so they can’t find their way back to the gnome-holes.’

He let go. The gnome went twenty feet up, sailed over the hedge, and came down in the field beyond with a thud.

‘Pitiful,’ said Fred. ‘Bet I can get mine past that stump.’

Harry learned very quickly not to feel sorry for the gnomes. He’d meant to drop his first one over the hedge, gently, out of consideration, and the gnome, sensing a soft touch, sank a row of teeth like needles into his finger. Harry swore, loudly and with feeling, and flung the wretched thing away from him with all the strength in his arm.

‘Wow, Harry. That must’ve been fifty feet...’

The air was soon full of gnomes.

‘See, they’re not too bright,’ said George, with five or six of them in his fists at once. ‘The minute they know there’s a de-gnoming on, they all come storming up to have a look. You’d think they’d have learned by now to stay put.’

Before long a crowd of gnomes was trudging off across the field in a straggling line, with their little shoulders hunched.

‘They’ll be back,’ said Ron, as they watched the last of them vanish into the far hedge. ‘They love it here. Dad’s too bloomin’ soft with them, he thinks they’re funny...’

Just then the front door slammed.

‘Speak of the Jabberwocky, he’s back!’ said George. ‘Dad’s home!’

They hurried back through the garden and into the house.

Mr Weasley was slumped in a kitchen chair with his glasses off and his eyes shut. He was a thin man, going bald, but what hair he had left was as red as any of his children’s, and he was wearing long green robes that were dusty and creased from a night’s work.

‘What a night,’ he mumbled, groping for the teapot as they all sat down round him. ‘Nine raids. Nine! And old Mundungus Fletcher tried to put a hex on me when I had my back turned. I suppose they can’t help themselves. Those lot with the caravans. Bloody Pikey Ba-’

He opened one eye, saw that the kitchen was full of children, took a long gulp of tea, and sighed instead.

‘Find anything, Dad?’ said Fred eagerly.

‘A few shrinking door-keys and a biting kettle,’ yawned Mr Weasley. ‘There was some pretty nasty stuff that wasn’t my department, mind. Mortlake was taken in for questioning about some extremely odd ferrets, but that’s the Committee on Experimental Charms, thank goodness...’

‘Why would anyone bother making door-keys shrink?’ said George.

‘Muggle-baiting,’ sighed Mr Weasley. ‘Sell a Muggle a key that keeps shrinking down to nothing, so he can never find it when he wants it... Of course, it’s very hard to get a conviction, because no Muggle will admit his key keeps shrinking. He’ll swear blind he just keeps losing it. Bless them, they’ll go to any lengths to ignore magic, even with it staring them in the face... but the things our lot have taken to enchanting, you wouldn’t believe...’

‘LIKE CARS, FOR INSTANCE?’

Mrs Weasley had appeared in the doorway with a long poker in her hand, held like a sword.

Mr Weasley’s eyes jerked open. He looked at his wife with the guilt of a man who has been caught halfway through a biscuit.

‘C-cars, Molly, dear?’

‘Yes, Arthur, cars,’ said Mrs Weasley, and her eyes flashed. ‘Imagine a wizard buying a rusty old car and telling his wife all he wanted was to take it to bits to see how it worked, when all along he was enchanting it to fly.’

Mr Weasley blinked.

‘Well, dear, I think you’ll find that he’d be quite within the law to do that. Even if, er, he might have done better to, um, tell his wife the truth... There’s a loophole in the law, you see... as long as he never intended to fly the car, the fact that the car could fly wouldn’t...’

‘Arthur Weasley, you made sure there was a loophole when you wrote that law!’ shouted Mrs Weasley. ‘Just so you could carry on tinkering with all that Muggle rubbish in your shed! And for your information, Harry arrived this morning in the car you weren’t intending to fly!’

‘Harry?’ said Mr Weasley blankly. ‘Harry who?’

He looked round, saw Harry, and jumped.

‘Good Lord, is it Harry Potter? Very pleased to meet you, Ron’s told us so much about-’

‘Your sons flew that car to Harry’s house and back last night!’ shouted Mrs Weasley. ‘What have you got to say about that, eh?’

‘Did you really?’ said Mr Weasley, and his whole face lit up. ‘Did it go all right? I-I mean,’ he faltered, as the sparks flew out of Mrs Weasley’s eyes, ‘uh, that... that was bang out of order, boys...’

‘Let’s leave them to it,’ Ron muttered to Harry, with a hand on his shoulder, as Mrs Weasley swelled up like a bullfrog. ‘Come on. I’ll show you my bedroom.’

Harry had been wanting to see it since the train.

They slipped out of the kitchen and down a narrow passage to a staircase that zigzagged up through the house with no two steps the same height. On the third landing a door stood ajar, and Harry caught a glimpse of a pair of bright brown eyes looking out at him before it shut with a snap.

‘Ginny,’ said Ron. ‘You don’t know how weird it is for her to be this shy. She never shuts up, normally. She’s um... well, you’ll see.’

Two more flights, and they came to a door with the paint peeling off it and a small plaque that said Ronald’s Room.

Harry stepped inside, with his head nearly brushing the sloping ceiling, and blinked. It was like walking into a furnace. Nearly everything in the room was a violent orange: the bedspread, the walls, the ceiling. Then he saw that Ron had covered almost every inch of the shabby wallpaper with posters of the same seven witches and wizards, all in bright orange robes, all holding broomsticks, all waving at him like mad.

‘Your Quidditch team?’ said Harry.

‘The Chudley Cannons,’ said Ron, and pointed at the bedspread, which had two enormous black Cs on it and a speeding cannonball. ‘Ninth in the league, but look at them. They’d batter those ball blokes Dean goes on about,’ Ron said proudly. ‘Also, all the Chudleys are from England. What are those Muggles playing at, letting blokes from bloody Timbuktu play for English teams?’

‘Dunno. Never understood it myself, Ron.’

‘Muggles are mental,’ Ron said, shaking his head, and after the summer Harry had just had, he found he couldn’t argue.

Ron’s schoolbooks were heaped in a corner next to a pile of comics, all of which seemed to be about The Adventures of Martin Miggs, the Mad Muggle. His wand lay on top of a fish tank full of frogspawn on the windowsill, beside Scabbers, who was asleep in a patch of sun and looked, if anything, fatter than he had in June.

Harry stepped over a pack of Self-Shuffling playing cards on the floor and looked out of the little window. Far below, in the field, a straggle of gnomes was creeping back through the hedge one by one. He turned round, and found Ron watching him, almost nervously, as though he were waiting to hear a verdict.

‘It’s a bit small,’ said Ron quickly. ‘Not like that room you had with the Muggles. And I’m right under the ghoul in the attic, he’s always banging on the pipes and groaning...’

But Harry was grinning so widely that his face hurt.

‘This is the best house I’ve ever been in,’ he said.

Ron’s ears went pink.

 

Harry still couldn’t quite believe he was free.

Every morning he woke under the sloping orange ceiling and had to work it out all over again, No bars. No cat-flap. No bolt on the outside of the door. And every morning, once he’d got it, he lay there for a minute with his eyes shut and let it sink in.

The Dursleys had been orderly people. Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon had built their whole lives, and Dudley’s, round a neat, tidy, upper-middle-class sort of order, with the lawn edged and the car washed and the net curtains just so, and they’d measured everybody they met against it. Nobody ever quite came up to the mark. Those who were above it, the people with the bigger car or the golf club membership, the Dursleys were deferential to in public and resentful of in private, over the washing-up. Those below it, and there were a great many of those, the Dursleys treated with contempt, and used them, as Harry had worked out at about the age of eight, to prove to themselves how hard-working and decent they were by comparison.

The Burrow in comparison burst at the seams with life and character and unexpected chaos, at least by anything Harry was used to. The Weasleys had lived in the middle of it all their lives and thought nothing of the mirror over the kitchen mantelpiece telling Harry, ‘Tuck your shirt in, young man, honestly, the state of you,’ every time he passed it, or of the ghoul in the attic howling for sacrifices down the pipes, which was all very well at breakfast and somewhat less so at three in the morning with Harry’s pillow over his head.

‘Does he ever stop?’ Harry asked Ron, the first night.

‘Only when Mum goes up with the poker,’ said Ron sleepily. ‘You get used to it.’

Harry didn’t, quite. But what he couldn’t get used to at all, what he still didn’t know what to do with, was the strange and unlikely fact that everybody in the house seemed to like him.

Mrs Weasley fussed over the state of his socks and tried to force fourth helpings on him at every meal. She was motherly about it, but she was also very firm and very insistent, and Harry, who’d never been made to eat more of anything in his life, ate it. Mr Weasley liked Harry to sit beside him at dinner so that he could pepper him with questions about living with Muggles, and have things like plugs and the postal service explained to him.

‘Fascinating!’ he said, as Harry took him through how a telephone worked. ‘And the voice goes down the wire? Ingenious, really, how many ways Muggles have found of getting along without magic.’

‘Arthur,’ said Mrs Weasley, with the look of long suffering that Harry had started to recognise, ‘has been on at Professor McGonagall about her telephone every time he’s run into her for the last fifteen years. She’s got one, you see, Harry, and a great many friends in the Muggle world.’

Something in the way she said it made Harry look up.

‘Professor McGonagall is a sweetheart, Harry. But I know where she’s been and who she knows. Pay it no mind, dear.’

She said it to reassure him, and Harry didn’t find it reassuring in the least. He thought of Kosovo, and Kandahar, and a place called Zanzibar Land, and of the way Professor McGonagall had come up behind him and Ron outside the third-floor corridor without a sound, and put it all in the drawer in his head marked later, with the rest.

He was quite sure of one thing. If it were up to him, he’d never leave the Burrow again except for Hogwarts. He loved it. And over the next few days he felt his strength come back, meal by meal, until he could run up all five flights to Ron’s room without stopping, and with it came something else he’d lost when Uncle Vernon turned the key in his door. The thing he’d found at Hogwarts. The thing that didn’t let go of broomsticks.

The letters from school came one bright morning about a week after he’d arrived.

He and Ron went down to breakfast and found Mr and Mrs Weasley and Ginny already at the table, and the moment Ginny saw Harry she knocked her porridge bowl off the table with a clatter that made everybody jump. She was very prone to knocking things over whenever Harry came into a room. She dived under the table for the bowl and came up with her face the colour of a sunset, and Harry, who had no idea what to do about it, did what he always did, which was to pretend he hadn’t noticed and take the toast Mrs Weasley was holding out.

‘Letters from school,’ said Mr Weasley, and passed Harry and Ron two identical envelopes of yellowish parchment, addressed in green ink. ‘Dumbledore already knows you’re here, Harry. Molly, uh, well... he knows. He really knows, now.’

He gave an awkward laugh that said as much as Mrs Weasley’s long-suffering look did, and Harry wondered what, exactly, Mrs Weasley had said to Albus Dumbledore. Then he opened his letter and forgot about it.

For a few minutes there was no sound but parchment. Harry’s letter told him to catch the Hogwarts Express from King’s Cross as usual on September the first, and listed the books he’d need for the year.

Second-year students will require:

The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 2 by Miranda Goshawk

Break with a Banshee by Gilderoy Lockhart

Gadding with Ghouls by Gilderoy Lockhart

Holidays with Hags by Gilderoy Lockhart

Travels with Trolls by Gilderoy Lockhart

Voyages with Vampires by Gilderoy Lockhart

Wanderings with Werewolves by Gilderoy Lockhart

Year with the Yeti by Gilderoy Lockhart

Fred, who’d finished his own list, leaned over to look at Harry’s.

‘You’ve been told to get all Lockhart’s books too!’ he said. ‘The new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher must be a fan. Bet it’s a witch. One of those barmy middle-aged ones with a load of cats and...’

Fred caught his mother’s eye, stopped talking, and became very interested in the marmalade.

‘That lot won’t come cheap,’ said George, with a quick glance at his parents. ‘Lockhart’s books are really expensive...’

‘Well, we’ll manage,’ said Mrs Weasley, but she looked worried. ‘I expect we’ll be able to pick up a lot of Ginny’s things second-hand.’

‘Oh, you’re starting Hogwarts this year? That’s brilliant. It’s so wonderful there. You’ll love it,’ Harry said enthusiastically.

Ginny went scarlet, nodded so hard her hair bounced, and put both elbows in the butter dish, and apologised to it.

‘I can help with the books,’ Harry said. He’d been wanting to say it for a week. ‘I’ll buy them all for you myself.’

Down in a vault under London there was a small fortune his parents had left him, and it had done nothing for a year but sit there. It was wizard money, of course. You couldn’t spend a Galleon in a Muggle shop, and he’d never breathed a word about Gringotts to the Dursleys, because he had a feeling their horror of magic might not stretch quite as far as a large heap of gold.

‘No, that’s quite all right, Harry dear,’ said Mrs Weasley, kindly, and quite firmly.

‘But Mrs Weasley, I’ve got the money, and I want to help after all you’ve done.’

Ron’s hand landed on his shoulder and stayed there.

‘We’ll manage, Harry. We always have. It wouldn’t be right to take advantage of you like that,’ said Mrs Weasley, in the voice that ended arguments.

Harry didn’t understand it. He had more money than he knew what to do with, the Weasleys never had enough, and he wanted to help the people who’d taken him in more than he’d ever wanted anything, and every time he tried, Mrs Weasley turned him down, kindly, firmly, and without the smallest crack to get a finger into. He was still chewing on it when Percy came in.

Percy was already dressed, with his prefect badge pinned to a knitted tank top.

‘Morning, all,’ he said briskly. ‘Lovely day.’

He sat down in the only empty chair and shot up out of it again, holding what Harry took for a moulting grey feather duster, until he saw that it was breathing.

‘Errol!’ said Ron. He took the limp owl off Percy and pulled a letter from under its wing. ‘Finally. He’s got Hermione’s answer. I wrote to her saying we were going to try and rescue you from the Dursleys.’

He carried Errol to the perch by the back door and tried to stand him on it, and Errol fell straight off, so Ron laid him on the draining board instead, muttering, ‘Pathetic,’ and tore open the letter and read it out.

Dear Ron, and Harry if you’re there,

I hope everything went all right and that Harry is OK and that you didn’t do anything illegal to get him out, Ronald, because that would get Harry into trouble too. I’ve been really worried, and if Harry is all right will you please let me know AT ONCE, but perhaps it would be better if you used a different owl, because I think another delivery might finish your one off.

I’m very busy with schoolwork, of course...

‘How can she be?’ said Ron, in horror. ‘We’re on holiday!’

... and we’re going to London next Wednesday to buy my new books. Why don’t we meet in Diagon Alley? Let me know what’s happening as soon as you can. Love from Hermione.

‘Well, that fits in nicely, we can get all your things then too,’ said Mrs Weasley, starting to clear the table. ‘What are you all up to today?’

Harry, Ron, Fred and George were going up the hill to the little paddock the Weasleys owned. It was ringed with trees that hid it from the village, so that they could practise Quidditch there as long as they didn’t fly too high, and Harry, who hadn’t been near his broom since June, was one small, twelve-year-old ball of excitement about it. They couldn’t use real Quidditch balls, which would have taken some explaining if one had got away over the village, so they threw apples for each other to catch. They took turns on the Nimbus Two Thousand, which was easily the best broom among them. Ron’s old Shooting Star was regularly overtaken by passing butterflies.

‘Dean would have a fit,’ said Harry, on the third morning, as Ron came puffing in on it three lengths behind an admiral. ‘He’d want a transfer.’

‘Dean can have it,’ said Ron.

They’d asked Percy if he wanted to come, and he’d muttered something about being busy. Harry had only seen him at mealtimes. The rest of the time he was shut in his room.

‘Wish I knew what he was up to,’ said Fred, frowning, as they marched up the hill with their brooms over their shoulders. ‘He’s not himself. His exam results came the day before you did. Twelve O.W.L.s, and he hardly gloated at all.’

‘Ordinary Wizarding Levels,’ George explained, at Harry’s look. ‘Bill got twelve too. If we’re not careful we’ll have another Head Boy in the family. I don’t think I could stand the shame.’

Bill was the eldest Weasley. He and Charlie, the next one down, had both left Hogwarts, and Harry had never met either of them, but he knew that Charlie was in Romania with the dragons and Bill in Egypt, working for Gringotts.

‘Dunno how Mum and Dad are going to afford all our school stuff this year,’ said George, after a while. ‘Five sets of Lockhart books! And Ginny needs robes and a wand and everything...’

Harry said nothing. He felt awkward about it, and he wanted to say, all over again, that he’d happily pay for the lot and more besides. But Mrs Weasley had made herself clear, and he’d no wish to annoy her, so he kept his mouth shut and threw an apple at Fred instead.

Mrs Weasley had them all up early on the Wednesday.

Breakfast was half a dozen bacon sandwiches each, and they were divine. Harry had come to the conclusion over the past week that Mrs Weasley was the best cook he’d ever met, and he’d have said so if he hadn’t had his mouth full. Then they pulled on their coats, and Mrs Weasley took a flowerpot down off the kitchen mantelpiece and looked into it.

‘We’re running low, Arthur,’ she sighed. ‘We’ll have to buy some more today... ah, well. Guests first! After you, Harry dear!’

She held out the flowerpot.

Harry looked at it. Then he looked at the ring of faces, all watching him.

‘Uh, is that for gardening?’ he asked.

‘Mum, he’s never travelled by Floo powder,’ said Ron suddenly. ‘Sorry, Harry, I forgot.’

‘Never?’ said Mr Weasley. ‘But how did you get to Diagon Alley for your school things last year?’

‘I went on the Underground with Hagrid. He barely fit through the barriers.’

‘Really?’ Mr Weasley lit up. ‘Were there escapators? How exactly...’

‘That’s QUITE all right, Arthur dear. Stop harassing the poor boy.’ Mrs Weasley turned back to Harry. ‘Floo powder’s a lot quicker, dear, but goodness me, if you’ve never used it before...’

‘He’ll be all right, Mum,’ said Fred. ‘Harry, watch us first.’

He took a pinch of glittering powder out of the pot, stepped up to the fire, and threw it into the flames. With a roar, the fire went emerald green and shot up taller than Fred, who stepped straight into it, shouted, ‘Diagon Alley!’ and was gone.

He’d made it look as easy as feeding a ticket into the barrier on the Tube. Harry stared at the place where Fred had been. Fred had just been swallowed by green fire and sent, in the space of a word, to a street in London, and everybody in the kitchen was behaving as though he’d stepped on to a bus. Harry seemed to be the only person in the room who thought it was a miracle. He was also, he suspected, the only one who thought it might kill him.

Mrs Weasley saw his face.

‘Don’t worry. You must speak clearly, dear,’ she told him, as George dipped into the flowerpot. ‘And mind you get out at the right grate...’

‘You what?’ said Harry. ‘How do I even tell what the right grate is?’

He was going for his usual dryness, and George went up in green flames in the middle of it, Mrs Weasley heard what was underneath the dryness as plainly as if he’d said it.

‘Well, there are an awful lot of wizard fires to choose from, you know, but as long as you’ve spoken clearly...’

‘He’ll be fine, Molly, don’t fuss,’ said Mr Weasley, helping himself to powder.

‘But Mum, if he got lost, how would we ever explain things to his aunt and unc-’

‘He’s not going back there, Ronald!’

It came out louder than she’d meant it to. There was a short silence in the kitchen. Then Mr Weasley reached over and took his wife’s hand, and held it, and gave her a look, and she gave him one back, and Harry, watching them, thought that it was so wonderful to see two people who’d been married for as long as that still look at each other like that. It was one more thing he’d never seen at Privet Drive.

‘It’s not going to be a problem,’ Mrs Weasley said, much more quietly.

‘They wouldn’t mind,’ Harry reassured her, with an awkward laugh. ‘Dudley would think it was a brilliant joke if I got lost up a chimney. Don’t worry about that.’

‘I’ve got nothing to laugh about in regard to those nasty Muggles yet. But I will soon enough.’

Mrs Weasley smiled at him, very sweetly, and Harry smiled back, and didn’t see how far down the darkness in her eyes went, because none of it was pointed at him.

‘Well... all right... you go after Arthur,’ she said. ‘Now, when you get into the fire, say where you’re going...’

‘And keep your elbows tucked in,’ Ron advised.

‘And your eyes shut,’ said Mrs Weasley. ‘The soot...’

‘Don’t fidget,’ said Ron. ‘Or you might well fall out of the wrong fireplace...’

It was a great deal to remember.

‘Sounds easy enough,’ Harry said drily.

‘But don’t panic and get out too early. Wait until you see Fred and George.’

‘Right, yeah,’ Harry replied.

He took a pinch of Floo powder, with all of it going round his head at once, and walked up to the edge of the fire. He took a deep breath, threw the powder into the flames, and stepped forward.

The fire was like a warm breeze. He opened his mouth, and swallowed a great lungful of hot ash.

‘D-Dia-gon Alley,’ he coughed.

It was as though he’d been sucked down a giant plughole. He was spinning, very fast, and the roaring in his ears was deafening. He tried to keep his eyes open and the whirl of green made him want to be sick. Something hard cracked him on the elbow and he clamped it to his side, still spinning. Now cold hands seemed to be slapping at his face. Squinting through his glasses he saw a blurred stream of fireplaces going past, and glimpses of the rooms beyond them, and the bacon sandwiches turned over in his stomach. He shut his eyes and wished it would stop, and then...

He fell. Face first, on to cold stone, and heard his glasses go.

Dizzy, bruised, and black with soot, he got up carefully and held the broken glasses to his eyes. He was alone. Where he was, he had no idea. He was standing in the stone fireplace of what looked like a large, dim wizard’s shop, a place that frankly looked like what Mr Weasley would call a Pikey’s Picnic.

A glass case near him held a withered hand on a cushion, a bloodstained pack of cards, and a glass eye that seemed to be looking at him. Masks leered down from the walls. An assortment of human bones lay across the counter, and rusty, spiked things hung from the ceiling on chains. Worse, the narrow, dark street he could see through the grimy window was definitely not Diagon Alley.

The sooner he was out of here, the better.

With his nose still stinging from the hearth, he started quickly and quietly for the door, and he hadn’t got halfway to it when two people appeared on the other side of the glass. One of them was the very last person on earth Harry wanted to meet while lost, covered in soot, and holding his glasses together with his thumb. The person who, in all likelihood, had sent Dobby to Privet Drive, and so sent Harry to three days behind a locked door.

Dracina Malfoy.

Harry looked wildly round, saw a big black cabinet on his left, shot into it and pulled the doors to, leaving a crack to see through. A second later a bell clanged and Malfoy came into the shop.

This was so bloody typical of her. Stupid Malfoy, and her stupid twinkle. Harry swore to himself, inside the cabinet, that he’d pay her back for every one of those three days, and then had to give the whole of his attention to not sneezing, because the cabinet was a hundred years deep in dust.

The man who came in behind her could only have been her father. He had the same pale, pointed face, and the same silver eyes, except that hers sparkled and his were cold as a coin. He crossed the shop, looking idly at the things on display, rang a bell on the counter, and turned to his daughter.

‘These are dangerous objects, Dracina. Not toys or make-up. Leave them alone!’ he said softly.

Malfoy, who’d been reaching for the glass eye, said, ‘I thought you were going to buy me a present.’

‘I said I’d buy you a racing broom,’ said her father, drumming his fingers on the counter.

‘What’s the good of that if I’m not on the house team?’ said Malfoy, with her lower lip out, as spoilt as Harry had ever seen her. There was no twinkle in her eyes at all. Not that Harry noticed. Stupid, spoilt Malfoy. ‘Harry Potter got a Nimbus Two Thousand last year. Special permission from Dumbledore, so he could play for Gryffindor. He’s not even that good, it’s only because he’s famous... famous for having a stupid scar on his forehead...’

‘Yes, sweetie,’ said Lucius Malfoy, and the look on his face was precisely the one Mrs Weasley gave her husband when he got going on microwaves and video recorders.

She’s still cross with me, Harry thought, in the cabinet, and felt a small, unworthy triumph at having annoyed her so thoroughly.

Malfoy bent to look along a shelf of skulls, and said, ‘Yuck,’ loudly.

‘Ugh, everyone thinks he’s so smart, wonderful Potter, with his scar and his broomstick -.’

‘You have told me this at least a dozen times already,’ said Mr Malfoy, with a quelling look at his daughter. ‘More, even. And I would remind you that it is not prudent for a young witch to seem so obsessed about a young wizard. People will start to whisper, and...’

‘I am not obsessed with that stupid Potter!’ Malfoy shouted, so loudly that several of the cursed and no doubt evil objects on the shelves rattled.

‘Of course, Dracina. As you say... so many times,’ Lucius sighed.

He turned away from her, and Harry heard him mutter something under his breath, irritably, that he could only just catch. Something about Cissy putting fanciful ideas about the cursed Potter boy in her...

Whoever Cissy was, and whatever Lucius Malfoy had been about to let slip, Harry never found out, because a man had appeared behind the counter.

‘Ah, Mr Borgin.’

The man was stooped, and he was smoothing greasy hair back from his forehead.

‘Mr Malfoy, what a pleasure to see you again,’ said Mr Borgin, in a voice as oily as his hair. ‘Delighted. And young Mistress Malfoy too, delightful. How may I be of assistance? I must show you, just in today, and very reasonably priced...’

Lucius Malfoy raised one black-gloved hand, and Mr Borgin stopped as if he’d been switched off. The smile stayed where it was. The man underneath it was plainly afraid.

‘I’m not buying today, Mr Borgin, but selling,’ said Mr Malfoy.

‘Selling?’ The smile slipped a little.

‘You will have heard, of course, that the Ministry is conducting more raids,’ said Mr Malfoy. He drew a roll of parchment from inside his robes and unrolled it on the counter for Mr Borgin to read. ‘I have a few... ah... items at home that need to be discreetly moved along, if the Ministry were to call...’

Mr Borgin nodded wisely, fixed a pince-nez on his nose, and ran his eye down the list.

‘The Ministry wouldn’t presume to trouble you, sir, surely?’

Mr Malfoy’s lip curled. It was, Harry thought, exactly the way Dracina’s lip had curled when Hermione told her where the Malfoys had come from.

‘I have not been visited yet. The name Malfoy still commands a certain respect. Yet the Ministry grows ever more meddlesome. There are rumours of a new Muggle Protection Act, and no doubt that flea-bitten, Muggle-loving fool Arthur Weasley is behind it...’

Something hot went up through Harry’s chest. Mr Weasley was a lovely man. He was a good man, worth more than every piece of Norman plunder the Malfoys had ever got their hands on.

‘... and as you see, certain of these poisons might make it appear...’

‘I understand, sir, of course,’ said Mr Borgin. ‘Let me see...’

‘Ewwww, what is that disgusting thing, Father?’ Dracina interrupted, pointing at the withered hand on its cushion.

‘Ah, the Hand of Glory!’ Mr Borgin abandoned the list at once and scurried over to her, managing to sound deferential and defensive both at once. ‘Insert a candle and it gives light only to the holder! Best friend of thieves and plunderers! A wondrous...’

He tailed off. Dracina was looking at the hand with an expression of such disgust that it had stopped him dead.

‘I hope my daughter will amount to more than a thief or a plunderer, Borgin,’ said Mr Malfoy, and laid a hand on Dracina’s shoulder, quite gently.

‘No offence, sir, no offence meant...’

‘Though if her school marks don’t pick up,’ said Mr Malfoy, ‘that may indeed be all she is fit for.’

‘It’s not my fault,’ Dracina retorted, pouting. ‘The teachers all have favourites. That Hermione Granger...’ She stopped, and then said, in a lower voice and with a good deal more feeling, ‘One day I’ll make stupid Potter realise how dreadful that Mudblood is.’

‘I would have thought you’d be ashamed that a girl of no wizard family beat you in every exam,’ snapped Mr Malfoy.

‘Ha!’ Harry breathed, in the cabinet. It did him good to see Dracina Malfoy told off.

‘I’m sorry, Father,’ Dracina said. She said it sadly, with her eyes on the floor.

And Harry, watching her through the crack, found that he’d stopped being pleased, and was sorry he’d ever started. Why did he have such annoying thoughts? She was his enemy. His arch-enemy. He’d no business feeling anything at all about her eyes being on the floor.

‘It’s the same all over,’ said Mr Borgin, oilier than ever. ‘Wizard blood is counting for less everywhere...’

‘Not with me,’ said Mr Malfoy, and his long nostrils flared.

‘No, sir, nor with me, sir,’ said Mr Borgin, with a bow so deep that Uncle Vernon, who had bowed to a good many bank managers in his time, would have been forced to admire it.

‘In that case, perhaps we can return to my list,’ said Mr Malfoy shortly. ‘I am in something of a hurry, Borgin. I have important business elsewhere today.’

They began to haggle.

Harry watched, with his heart going, as Dracina wandered nearer and nearer to the cabinet, looking over the things for sale. She gasped suddenly and darted to a glass case where a necklace of opals lay on black velvet, and stood over it with her hands pressed together, and Harry had never seen her look so plainly delighted by anything. She’d drawn breath to call her father over when she read the card beside it. Caution: Do Not Touch. Cursed. Has Claimed the Lives of Nineteen Muggle Owners to Date.

She pouted. Another prize denied her.

She turned away from the case, and found herself looking straight at the cabinet. She walked up to it. She put out her hand for the handle.

Harry would have sworn, if his heart hadn’t been in his mouth.

‘Done,’ said Mr Malfoy, at the counter. ‘Come, Dracina!’

She turned away. Harry wiped his forehead on his sleeve.

‘Good day to you, Mr Borgin. I’ll expect you at the manor tomorrow to collect the goods.’

The moment the door had shut behind them, Mr Borgin dropped the oil.

‘Good day yourself, Mister Malfoy, and if the stories are true, you haven’t sold me half of what’s hidden in your manor...’

Muttering darkly, he went through into a back room. Rubbing his hands.

Harry gave it a minute, in case he came back. Then, as quietly as he could, he got out of the cabinet, slipped past the glass cases, and out of the door.

Holding his broken glasses to his face, he looked about him.

He was in a dingy alley that seemed to consist of nothing but shops devoted to the Dark Arts. The one he’d just come out of, Borgin and Burkes, was the biggest, but the window opposite was full of shrunken heads, and two doors down a large cage seethed with enormous black spiders. Two shabby wizards were watching him from the shadow of a doorway and muttering to each other.

Feeling very jumpy, Harry set off, holding his glasses straight and hoping against hope for a way out. An old wooden sign over a shop selling poisonous candles told him he was in Knockturn Alley, which was no help at all, since he’d never heard of it. He supposed he hadn’t spoken clearly enough through the ash. Bloody esoteric wizarding transport. How did they ever get anything done, when one sneeze or one slurred syllable landed you in some dark junk shop full of people who’d happily chop you up and pickle you for potions?

He tried to think calmly about what to do.

An old witch had stepped into his path. She was holding a tray of what looked horribly like whole human fingernails, and she leered at him with a mouthful of mossy teeth.

Harry backed away.

‘No, you’re alright,’ he said. ‘I’m just -’

‘HARRY! What d’yeh think yer doin’ down there?’

Harry’s heart leapt. So did the witch; a cascade of fingernails went over her feet, and she swore as the enormous shape of Hagrid, the Hogwarts gamekeeper, came striding up the alley with his beetle-black eyes flashing over his beard.

‘Hagrid!’ Harry croaked. ‘I was lost... Bloody Floo powder...’

Hagrid got him by the scruff of the neck and hauled him away from the witch, knocking the tray clean out of her hands, and her shrieks followed them all the way along the twisting alley and out into the sunshine. Harry saw a familiar snow-white building in the distance. Gringotts. Hagrid had steered him straight into Diagon Alley.

‘Yer a mess!’ said Hagrid gruffly, and he began brushing the soot off Harry so hard that he nearly knocked him into a barrel of dragon dung outside the apothecary’s. ‘Skulkin’ round Knockturn Alley, I dunno. Dodgy place, Harry. Don’ want no one ter see yeh down there...’

‘Oh no, I’m sure the dodgy shop full of cursed knick-knacks and the woman selling toenails is just giving a bad impression to an otherwise reputable area,’ said Harry sarcastically, with a venomous look back at the mouth of the alley, and then ducked as Hagrid came at him again with the brushing. ‘I told you, I was lost. What were you doing down there, anyway?’

‘I was lookin’ fer a Flesh-Eatin’ Slug Repellent,’ growled Hagrid. ‘They’re ruinin’ the school cabbages. Yer not on yer own?’

‘I’m staying with the Weasleys, but we got separated,’ Harry explained. ‘I’ve got to go and find them...’

They set off together down the street.

‘How come yeh never wrote back ter me?’ said Hagrid, as Harry jogged beside him, three steps to every one of Hagrid’s boots.

Harry told him. Dobby, and the letters, and the pudding, and the Dursleys, and the lock, and what, precisely, he intended to do to Dobby the next time their paths crossed, which took some time and made Hagrid whistle.

‘Harry! Harry! Over here!’

Harry looked up and saw Hermione Granger at the top of the white steps of Gringotts. She came down them at a run, very fast and very straight, with her bushy hair streaming behind her and her eyes never once leaving him.

‘What happened to your glasses? Who did this to you? Are they nearby so I can... talk to them. Oh, hello, Hagrid. Are you coming into Gringotts, Harry?’

She fired it all at him like a machine gun, with the same fierce concentration she’d turned on him ever since the troll, and had one hand on his arm before she’d finished. Hermione was lovely, Harry thought. She was also very strange, and he’d never got to the bottom of it.

‘As soon as I’ve found the Weasleys,’ said Harry.

‘Yeh won’t have long ter wait,’ grinned Hagrid.

Harry and Hermione looked round. Ron, Fred, George, Percy and Mr Weasley were sprinting up the crowded street towards them.

‘Harry,’ panted Mr Weasley, mopping his bald patch. ‘We hoped you’d only gone one grate too far...’

‘More than one grate, Mr Weasley,’ Harry said, trying extremely hard not to sound as dry about it as he felt.

‘Molly’s frantic. She’s coming now.’

‘Where did you come out?’ Ron asked.

‘Knockturn Alley,’ said Hagrid grimly.

‘Brilliant!‘ said Fred and George together.

‘We’ve never been allowed in,’ said Ron enviously.

‘I should ruddy well think not,’ growled Hagrid.

Mrs Weasley came galloping into view with her handbag swinging from one hand and Ginny clinging to the other.

‘Oh, Harry... oh, my dear... you could have been anywhere...’

Still gasping for breath, she pulled a big clothes brush out of her bag and set about the soot Hagrid had missed, and Harry stood and let her, and found himself unexpectedly moved by it. She’d run the length of Diagon Alley for him. She was fussy, he supposed, and a little overwhelming, and he wouldn’t have heard a bad word said against her. Mr Weasley took Harry’s glasses, tapped them with his wand, and handed them back as good as new.

‘Well, gotta be off,’ said Hagrid, while Mrs Weasley wrung his hand (‘Knockturn Alley! If you hadn’t found him, Hagrid!’). ‘See yer at Hogwarts!’

And off he went up the street, a head and shoulders above everyone in it, and left Harry to the mercy of Mrs Weasley’s brush and Hermione, who had taken hold of his sleeve again and was telling him, at great length, and more than once, how much she’d missed him.

Ron caught Harry’s eye over her head. It was a look of pure sympathy. Then he said, ‘Hermione, what did you reckon to the booklist? Seven Lockharts. Seven. Is that normal?’ and Hermione turned on him like a lamp, and Harry got his sleeve back. Ron was a good friend. He was also, Harry was beginning to notice, surprisingly good at steering Hermione.

‘Guess who I saw in Borgin and Burkes?’ Harry said to the pair of them, as they climbed the steps to Gringotts. ‘Malfoy and her father. She’s bloody steaming with me. Talks about me all the time with her dad,’ Harry said, with some pride.

He said it proudly enough not to notice Ron’s knowing look, or the way Ron rubbed his ear where Malfoy had bitten it. He didn’t notice, either, the cold, furious glance that Hermione gave, not quite at him, but at the idea of it. Of that girl. Talking about Harry. All the time.

‘She’s VERY dangerous, Harry,’ Hermione said, in a voice so strange that Harry decided not to say any more about it. Malfoy was stupid anyway. And if he wasn’t careful he’d end up as obsessed with her as she apparently was with him, and he wasn’t, and he never would be, and that was that.

‘Did Lucius Malfoy buy anything?’ said Mr Weasley sharply, behind them, with a hand at his chin.

‘No. He was selling.’

‘So he’s worried,’ said Mr Weasley, with grim satisfaction. ‘Oh, I’d love to nick Lucius Malfoy for something...’

He said it with a relish that spoke of history.

‘You be careful, Arthur,’ said Mrs Weasley sharply, as a bowing goblin showed them in. ‘That family’s trouble. Don’t go biting off more than you can chew.’

‘So you don’t think I’m a match for Lucius Malfoy?’ said Mr Weasley indignantly, but he was distracted at once by the sight of Hermione’s parents, who were standing nervously at the long marble counter waiting for their daughter to introduce them.

They looked exactly as Hermione had described them. Respectable, mild, and so thoroughly middle class that Harry could have told you the make of their car.

‘But you’re Muggles!’ said Mr Weasley, as if they’d done it on purpose to please him. ‘We must have a drink! What’s that you’ve got there? Oh, you’re changing Muggle money. Molly, look!’ He pointed with delight at the ten-pound notes in Mr Granger’s hand.

‘Meet you back here,’ Ron said to Hermione, as a goblin led the Weasleys and Harry away to the vaults.

The vaults were reached by small goblin-driven carts that hurtled along miniature railway tracks through the tunnels under the bank, and Harry enjoyed every second of the ride, and felt dreadful, worse than he’d felt in Knockturn Alley, when the Weasleys’ vault swung open. There was a very small pile of Sickles in it, and one gold Galleon, and that was all. Mrs Weasley felt right into the corners before she swept the lot into her bag.

He felt worse still at his own vault. Mrs Weasley had been perfectly clear. But he still felt greedy, and selfish, and useless, standing in front of a heap of gold he’d done nothing to earn while the kindest family he’d ever met counted Sickles. He put himself between the door and the pile and shovelled coins into a leather bag as fast as he could, and tried once more, quietly, to press a handful on Mrs Weasley, and was once more very kindly and very firmly refused.

She did let him buy her a box of Chocolate Frogs, from the trolley by the doors, as a thank-you for everything. For some reason Harry couldn’t work out, it very nearly made her cry. She pulled herself together and told him not to be so silly, and put the box in her bag very carefully, as if it might break.

Out on the steps they all split up. Percy mumbled about needing a new quill, still looking drained and miserable. Fred and George had spotted their friend Lee Jordan across the street and went off towards him chanting his name to a tune Dean Thomas had taught the whole of Gryffindor, with their arms in the air. Mrs Weasley and Ginny were going to a second-hand robe shop. Mr Weasley was insisting on taking the Grangers to the Leaky Cauldron for a drink, and from where the Grangers stood it looked a good deal more like a kidnapping, with Mr Weasley towing them up the street and talking about television sets and asking whether it was true that the dishes on the roofs were for catching flying saucers.

‘We’ll all meet at Flourish and Blotts in an hour to buy your school books,’ said Mrs Weasley, setting off with Ginny. ‘And not one step down Knockturn Alley!’ she shouted after the twins’ backs.

Harry, Ron and Hermione wandered off along the winding cobbles. The bag of gold and silver and bronze was jangling in Harry’s pocket and asking to be spent, so he bought three enormous strawberry-and-peanut-butter ice-creams, and they ate them as they walked, looking in the windows. Ron stood for a long time in front of a full set of Chudley Cannons robes in the window of Quality Quidditch Supplies, until Hermione dragged them next door for ink and parchment. In Gambol and Japes they found Fred, George and Lee Jordan stocking up on Dr Filibuster’s Fabulous Wet-Start, No-Heat Fireworks, and in a tiny junk shop full of broken wands, wonky brass scales and old cloaks stiff with potion stains they found Percy, deep in a small and deeply boring book called Prefects Who Gained Power.

‘"A study of Hogwarts prefects and their later careers",’ Ron read off the back. ‘That sounds fascinating...’

‘Go away,’ Percy snapped.

‘Course, he’s very ambitious, Percy. He’s got it all planned out... he wants to be Minister of Magic... He’s got ideas that’d make Grindelwald tell him to steady on,’ Ron told Harry and Hermione in an undertone, as they left Percy to it.

An hour later they made for Flourish and Blotts, and they were far from the only ones. There was a crowd outside the doors, jostling to get in, and the reason for it hung across the upper windows on a banner:

GILDEROY LOCKHART

will be signing copies of his autobiography

MAGICAL ME

today 12.30 to 4.30 p.m.

‘We can actually meet him!’ Hermione squealed. ‘I mean, he’s written almost the whole booklist!’

Ron sighed. It was the sigh of a man who’s just found an unexploded bomb and been told it’s his job to see to it.

‘Mum’s going to go as mental as Hermione,’ he mumbled.

‘I heard that, Ronald!’ Hermione said, and gave him a look that would have curdled milk.

The crowd was made up mostly of witches about Mrs Weasley’s age. It was, in nearly every particular, exactly as Fred had prophesied. A harassed wizard at the door was saying, ‘Calmly, please, ladies... don’t push, there... mind the books, now...’ and Harry, Ron and Hermione squeezed in past him.

A long queue wound to the back of the shop, where Gilderoy Lockhart sat signing. They grabbed a copy of Break with a Banshee each and crept up the line to where the rest of the Weasleys stood with Mr and Mrs Granger.

‘Oh, there you are, good,’ said Mrs Weasley. She was breathless, and kept patting her hair. ‘We’ll be able to see him in a minute...’

Gilderoy Lockhart came slowly into view. He was sitting at a table surrounded by large portraits of his own face, every one of which was winking and flashing its teeth at the crowd. The real Lockhart wore robes of forget-me-not blue that matched his eyes exactly, and his pointed hat sat at a jaunty angle on his wavy hair, and if Harry was honest, there was metaphorically a faint whiff of lavender coming off him that reached halfway down the queue.

A short, bad-tempered man was dancing round the table taking photographs with a big black camera that let off a puff of purple smoke with every blinding flash.

‘Out of the way, there,’ he snarled at Ron, backing up for a better shot. ‘This is for the Daily Prophet.’

‘My fist’ll be for the Daily Prophet if you don’t give me some bloomin SPACE!’ shouted Ron, rubbing the foot the photographer had trodden on.

Gilderoy Lockhart heard him. He looked up. He saw Ron. And then he saw Harry.

He stared.

Harry didn’t like that stare at all. There was vanity in it, and something hungrier than vanity. It was the stare of a man who, on meeting anybody, asked himself one question only, which was what they could do for him, and had never in his life got as far as a second. Harry had met a few people like that. He wasn’t impressed.

Lockhart leapt to his feet and positively shouted, ‘It can’t be Harry Potter?’

Harry really didn’t like where this was going.

‘Oh, no, uh... I just look a bit like him. I’m Barry Trotter. No relation at all,’ Harry said nervously, hoping to nip it in the bud.

The crowd parted, whispering. Lockhart dived forward, seized Harry by the arm and hauled him to the front, laughing a big, booming laugh.

‘Oh, you have a lovely sense of humour, Mr Potter.’

The crowd burst into applause. Harry’s face burned as Lockhart pumped his hand for the photographer, who was clicking away like mad and wafting thick purple smoke over the Weasleys.

‘Nice big smile, Harry,’ said Lockhart through his own gleaming teeth. ‘Together, you and I are worth the front page.’

When he finally let go, Harry couldn’t feel his fingers. He tried to edge back towards the Weasleys, but Lockhart flung an arm round his shoulders and clamped him to his side with a grip that would have given Hermione a run for her money.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said loudly, waving for quiet. ‘What an extraordinary moment this is! The perfect moment for me to make a little announcement I’ve been sitting on for some time! When young Harry here stepped into Flourish and Blotts today, he only wanted to buy my autobiography -’

‘No, I didn’t,’ Harry said curtly.

Lockhart laughed again.

‘Ha! What a wicked joker you are, Mr Potter. Anyway, I shall be happy to gift this book to Mr Potter free of charge. In the hopes this helps his Hero’s Journey. That’s Joseph Campbell, by the way. A Muggle, but a very smart man. A true warrior-scholar such as myself never turns my nose up at knowledge.’

He gave a chortle so smug that it would have made Malfoy look humble. Hermione, for once, wasn’t looking at Harry at all. She was hanging off Lockhart’s every word, and at the chortle she giggled like a schoolgirl, which to be fair was what she was. The three dozen middle-aged witches giggling in the same key behind her were a good deal more unsettling.

‘He had no idea,’ Lockhart went on, giving Harry a little shake that sent his glasses to the end of his nose, ‘that he would shortly be getting much, much more than my book, Magical Me. He and his schoolfellows will, in fact, be getting the real, magical me. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I have great pleasure and pride in announcing that this September, I will be taking up the post of Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry!’

‘God help us all,’ Harry said.

He hadn’t meant to say it out loud. Luckily the whooping and cheering drowned him out, and Harry found himself being presented with the entire works of Gilderoy Lockhart. The very large, very heavy, very numerous entire works. Staggering slightly under them, he got himself out of the limelight to the edge of the shop, where Ginny was standing beside her new cauldron.

‘You have these,’ Harry mumbled, and tipped the whole lot into it. ‘I’ll buy my own...’

‘Bet you loved that, didn’t you, Potter?’ said a voice he had no trouble placing.

He straightened up and found himself nose to nose with Dracina Malfoy, wearing her usual sneer, and he had no time whatever for whichever game she was playing this afternoon.

‘How’s Dobby, Malfoy? I’d SO like to meet him again,’ he said slyly.

The sneer went off her face as if it had been wiped. She went very serious, all at once, and the twinkle came up in her eyes, the one that was aimed at him and nobody else, and she leaned in close, oddly conspiratorial, as though she were about to tell him something that mattered.

‘Good. Did you get my -.’

‘Leave him alone, he didn’t want all that!’ said Ginny.

Malfoy noticed her for the first time.

It was the first thing Ginny had ever said in front of Harry. She was glaring up at Malfoy with her chin out and her face on fire, and standing, Harry realised, very slightly in front of him.

Malfoy blinked. She leaned back from Harry. And then, in the space of a breath, she looked angrier than Harry had ever seen her, angrier than when he’d caught the Remembrall, angrier than the night in the common room. Her hands had curled into fists at her sides.

‘Stupid Potter, did you get yourself a girlfriend?’ she hissed.

Ginny went scarlet to the roots of her hair. Ron and Hermione were fighting their way over through the crowd, both with armfuls of Lockhart.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ said Ron, looking at Malfoy as if she were something he’d trodden in. ‘Bet you’re surprised to see Harry here, eh? After what nonsense you tried to pull.’

Malfoy drew back, and had the cheek to look confused. It was obviously an act, Harry thought. Though he did wonder, for a second, what she’d been about to say to him before Ginny spoke. Something insulting, no doubt. It always was.

Malfoy looked at Harry. She looked at Ron. She looked at Ginny, for a good deal longer than she’d looked at either of the boys, and with something in her face that Harry had no name for. Then she folded her arms and huffed.

‘Not as surprised as I am to see you in a shop, Weasley,’ she retorted. ‘I suppose your parents will go hungry for a month to pay for that lot.’

Ron went as red as Ginny. He dumped his books in the cauldron and started for Malfoy, and Harry and Hermione got him by the back of the jacket.

‘Ron!’ Mr Weasley was struggling towards them with Fred and George. ‘What are you doing? It’s mad in here, let’s go outside.’

‘Well, well, well. Arthur Weasley.’

It was Mr Malfoy. He stood with a hand on Dracina’s shoulder, sneering in precisely the way his daughter sneered.

‘Lucius,’ said Mr Weasley, with a cold nod.

‘Busy time at the Ministry, I hear,’ said Mr Malfoy. ‘All those raids... I do hope they’re paying you overtime?’

He reached into Ginny’s cauldron and drew out, from among the glossy new Lockharts, a very old and very battered copy of A Beginner’s Guide to Transfiguration.

‘Evidently not,’ he said. ‘Dear me. What’s the use of being a disgrace to the name of wizards, if they don’t even pay you well for it?’

Mr Weasley went a darker red than either of his children.

‘We have a very different idea of what disgraces the name of wizards, Malfoy,’ he said.

‘Clearly,’ said Mr Malfoy, and his pale eyes slid to Mr and Mrs Granger, who were watching with some alarm. ‘The company you keep, Weasley... and I thought your family could sink no lower...’

There was a clang as Ginny’s cauldron went over. Mr Weasley had thrown himself at Mr Malfoy and sent him backwards into a bookcase. A dozen heavy spellbooks came thundering down on everybody’s heads. Somebody, Fred or George, yelled, ‘Get him, Dad!’ Mrs Weasley was shrieking, ‘No, Arthur, no!’ The crowd went backwards in a stampede and brought down more shelves. ‘Gentlemen, please... please!’ cried the assistant, and over all of it a voice bellowed, ‘Break it up, there, gents, break it up...’

While the two fathers went at it on the floor, Harry saw that Dracina had moved. She’d edged round the fight and up to Ginny, and she was going through Ginny’s spilled books with the toe of her shoe.

‘Look at all this low-class, second-hand rubbish. Potter will never take a little girl like YOU seriously.’

She picked one up, looked at the cover, and dropped it on the floor in front of Ginny. Then another. She stood over her and laughed, and said things about the books and about Ginny and about her clothes that Harry only half heard over the din, and she didn’t stop.

Ginny had had enough. She snatched the stack of brand-new books out of the bag on Malfoy’s shoulder and threw them at her, one after another, aiming for the head, and screaming names at her that Harry hadn’t thought an eleven-year-old would know. Harry tried to get to them. He was worried, more worried than he could account for, both at the way Malfoy was bullying a girl a year younger and a head shorter, and at how fast it was turning into something worse. But every time he moved, Mr Weasley and Mr Malfoy rolled across his path in a tangle of robes and Lockharts, and the crowd shoved him back.

Then Hagrid was wading through the sea of books like a man through surf, and in one movement he’d got Mr Weasley by one collar and Mr Malfoy by the other and pulled them apart.

Mr Weasley had a cut lip. Mr Malfoy had been caught in the eye by an Encyclopaedia of Toadstools, and he was still holding Ginny’s old Transfiguration book. He thrust it at her, with his eyes glittering.

‘Here, girl. Take your book. It’s the best your father can give you.’

Ginny took it. And Dracina, beside her, knocked it straight out of her hands on to the floor.

Ginny slapped Malfoy’s own book out of her grip and on to the floor beside it.

‘Pick it up, Little Weasel.’

Ginny’s face crumpled. She started to cry, and it looked, for one second, as though the whole thing was going to start again from the beginning. But Lucius Malfoy had evidently decided to be dignified.

‘Dracina, pick up the book for her. We’re dignified purebloods. Unlike some wizards. So we’ll leave peacefully.’

Dracina crouched. There were three or four books in a heap at her feet now, Ginny’s and hers, old and new, and a small black one Harry hadn’t noticed before, lying half under the others. She gathered them up in a sweep, pressed one into Ginny’s hands without looking at it, and stuffed the rest into her own bag.

Mr Malfoy turned, and swept out, with a hand on his daughter’s shoulder.

Dracina went with him. But on the way to the door she looked back, once, and the look was for Harry. Then she lifted her nose at Hermione, who met it with a stare that could have stripped varnish. And then, to Ginny, with her lip drawn back, she made a sound Harry had never heard a human being make, a long, low hiss, like a snake that has found something in its nest.

Harry had no idea what any of that meant. Hermione, it seemed, did, because she took hold of his arm again and didn’t let go until they were in the street.

The door banged behind the Malfoys, and only then did Harry realise that he’d never got to ask her about Dobby. Then he thought about it, and decided it didn’t matter, because he’d never have got anything out of her but spite and lies anyway. He only had to look at Ginny, with her face in her hands and her books all over the floor. Why did Malfoy have to be so cruel to other girls? And to him?

‘Yeh should’ve ignored him, Arthur,’ said Hagrid, very nearly lifting Mr Weasley off the ground as he straightened his robes for him. ‘Rotten ter the core, the whole family, everyone knows that. No Malfoy’s worth listenin’ ter. Bad blood, that’s what it is. Come on, now. Let’s get outta here.’

The assistant looked as though he’d have liked to stop them leaving, but he barely came up to Hagrid’s waist and thought better of it.

They hurried up the street, with the Grangers shaking and Mrs Weasley beside herself.

‘A fine example to set your children... brawling in public... what Gilderoy Lockhart must have thought...’

‘Yeah, and I would’ve chinned him if Hagrid didn’t stop us,’ said Arthur.

Harry looked at him, and understood just how much of Ron had come from his dad. That was a Ron thing to say, down to the last word.

‘He was pleased,’ said Fred. ‘Didn’t you hear him as we were leaving? He was asking that bloke from the Daily Prophet if he could work the fight into his report. Said it was all publicity.’

But it was a quiet, subdued party that made its way back to the fireside in the Leaky Cauldron, where Harry, the Weasleys and all their shopping would go home to the Burrow by Floo powder. They said goodbye to the Grangers, who were going out through the pub into the Muggle street on the other side. Mr Weasley started to ask them how bus stops worked, and stopped very quickly at the look on his wife’s face.

Harry took off his glasses and put them safely in his pocket before he helped himself to Floo powder.

It definitely wasn’t his favourite way to travel.

Harry had never had a summer like it, and he knew, even while it was happening, that he’d be measuring every summer afterwards against it.

He’d been taken into the Weasley family as completely as if he’d been born into it. But all things end, and term was coming, and the odd thing was that however much he loved the Burrow, and however grateful he was for its warmth after the long cold of Privet Drive, he found that he was looking forward to Hogwarts even more than ever before. The castle was the one place that had ever been his.

It was hard not to envy Ron, when Harry thought about the Dursleys and the welcome he could expect the next time he turned up on their doorstep. If he ever did. Mrs Weasley seemed to have made up her mind that he never would. Not a day passed without her finding a way, sometimes subtle and sometimes not subtle at all, to let him know that he needn’t ever leave if he didn’t want to. She said it over the washing-up and across the dinner table and once, out of nowhere, while she was mending his robes.

Harry didn’t know what to do with it. For as long as he could remember, going back to the Dursleys had been as certain as the tide. He’d never dared imagine a life without a frying pan, rolling pin, or waterbomb in it somewhere. And now, in the evenings, with the Burrow creaking round him and the ghoul grumbling in the roof, he found himself wishing, quite seriously, that he could come back here at the end of term. Sometimes he even let himself believe that he’d never see number four again. He never let himself believe it for long.

On their last evening Mrs Weasley produced a dinner that included every one of Harry’s favourite things, and finished with a treacle tart that he thought about for a week afterwards. Fred and George rounded the night off with a display of Filibuster fireworks that filled the kitchen with red and blue stars, bouncing from the ceiling to the walls and back for half an hour, while Mrs Weasley pretended to be cross and wasn’t. Then there was a last mug of hot chocolate, and bed.

Ron made Harry’s. He made it exactly right, with the skin taken off the top, and watched Harry drink it.

‘What?’ said Harry.

‘Nothing.’

Ron had been like this the whole summer. He was always there, somehow, at Harry’s elbow, with a second helping or a spare jumper or a suggestion that they go up to the paddock.

‘Just looking out for you, mate,’ Ron would say.

Harry had a strong suspicion that Mrs Weasley had told Ron everything Harry had told her, on the sofa, that first morning, and that Ron had quietly made Harry his job. Harry sighed over it. Ron was a good friend. He was the best friend anybody could have asked for. But the fussing wasn’t necessary, from him or from his mother, and Harry had told them both so, separately, more than once.

‘I’m fine, Ron. Honestly. You don’t have to keep doing this.’

‘Doing what?’

‘This. The hot chocolate. Asking if I’m all right every five minutes.’

Ron would nod, sagely, as though he’d taken it fully on board, and an hour later he’d ask Harry how he wanted his eggs done. Mrs Weasley, for her part, would nod sweetly, and say, ‘Of course, dear,’ and Harry would go off to the paddock, and never saw the look she turned on the window afterwards, in the general direction of Surrey. He wouldn’t have understood it if he had. Molly Weasley was a mother, and he was twelve, and there was no way on earth that a boy of twelve could have understood what it did to a mother to be told what had been done to him. She’d put some of it in a letter to Albus Dumbledore, informing him, in terms that left no room for discussion, where Harry Potter would be living from now on, and informing him of several other things besides, chief among them her opinion of a Headmaster who’d let it go on for eleven years. The rest she kept, and fed, and waited.

They were up at cockcrow on the first of September, and the house went off like one of Fred’s fireworks.

Mrs Weasley was in a thoroughly bad temper. She fussed and shouted and chased every Weasley in the building, and things were banged and shoved and crammed into trunks, several of which, Harry discovered, had been charmed to hold a good deal more than they looked as if they could. He thought this was wonderful. The Weasleys thought it was a trunk. They treated magic like Harry treated a pen or a kettle. It still made him blink, now and then, to watch somebody stuff a cauldron, a broomstick and four years’ worth of robes into a box the size of a tea chest without looking up.

By the end of it there was a heap in the yard that looked like the baggage of a small army, and Harry looked from the heap to the Ford Anglia and back, and couldn’t see how it was going to be done.

This was where Mr Weasley came in.

He explained it to Harry. He explained, with enormous pride, every charm, enchantment and ward he’d ever put on the car. All of them. Every. Last. One. Harry learned about the Cushioning Charm on the seats, and the charm that kept the tyres from going flat, and the one that made the engine run on straight vegetable oil instead of petrol, and the one that stopped Muggles noticing that it never needed petrol, and by the time Mr Weasley got round to the boot Harry had been standing in the yard for twenty minutes with a trunk in each hand.

‘Not a word to Molly,’ Mr Weasley whispered cheekily, as he opened the boot and showed Harry how it had been stretched, inside, until the trunks dropped in with room to spare.

When they were all finally in, Mrs Weasley turned and looked at the back seat, where Harry, Ron, Fred, George and Percy were sitting side by side with as much elbow room as the back row of a cinema.

‘See, Molly, my darling,’ said Mr Weasley. ‘Muggles do know what they’re doing, and so do I.’

Mrs Weasley sighed, and allowed that the car was a decent idea, though it still wasn’t as fast as the Floo.

‘I mean, you’d never know it was this roomy from the outside, would you?’

He started the engine and they trundled out of the yard, Harry twisted round for a last look at the crooked house, with the sun on its chimneys, and had barely had time to wonder when he’d see it again before they were back in the yard. George had forgotten his Filibuster fireworks. Five minutes later they skidded to a halt a second time so that Fred could run in for his broom. They’d nearly reached the motorway when Ginny shrieked that she’d left her diary on her bed, and by the time she’d scrambled back into the car they were running very late, and tempers had gone up accordingly.

Mr Weasley looked at his watch.

‘I know what you’re thinking, Arthur,’ said Mrs Weasley.

‘Well, you see, my love. The Muggle roads are very bumpy and full of all the other Muggle cars. They like to crash into each other, Molly. If I could just -’

‘No, Arthur,’ said Mrs Weasley, lovingly and firmly.

‘Not to worry, my love. No one would see. I had an invisibility charm put into this button right here.’

He pointed, with great pride, at a large red button on the dashboard with a plated, embossed label in silver letters that read Invisibility Booster.

‘We’ll be there in ten minutes. It’s a lovely day for it, love. No Muggles will see us.’

He looked, for all the world, like a small boy asking his mother whether he could keep the stray dog.

‘Arthur, I love you, and you’ve done a very good job on this Muggle contraption. But I’m NOT repeating myself. We aren’t flying a Muggle car through broad daylight. Think of the Statute of Secrecy, for Merlin’s sake.’

‘It’d be invisible,’ Arthur murmured.

‘Arthur!‘ Mrs Weasley barked.

Mr Weasley sighed.

‘Yes, my dear.’

And the car trundled on along the road, looking from the outside like every other Ford Anglia in England, part of the scenery of everybody else’s journey, with Mr Weasley sullen at the wheel and muttering, mile after mile, about traffic lights, and slow tractors, and every pothole between Devon and London. At quarter past eleven, and cutting it very fine, as Mrs Weasley reminded them all, loudly, more than once, they pulled up outside King’s Cross.

‘I’ll get the trolleys, kids. Go with your mum into the station, quickly now! She’s going spare,’ said Mr Weasley, and ran for the trolley rank with the air of a man escaping, and the rest of them hurried into the station after Mrs Weasley.

There was the wall.

The barrier between platforms nine and ten looked like any old wall,. Solid brick. The trick, Harry reminded himself, was to ignore the part of your head that told you walls were solid and that running a loaded trolley at one was a mistake, and to go at it anyway, and because it was magic you’d pass through it as if it were smoke, the Hogwarts Express would be waiting on the other side. He told himself this several times. The rational part of his brain, the part that wizards didn’t appear to possess, went on telling him, loudly, reasonably, but with that dry tone of voice Harry seemed to be using more and more, not to run full tilt into a brick wall, and it didn’t seem to care in the least that he’d done it before and it had worked.

‘Percy first,’ said Mrs Weasley, looking up anxiously at the station clock, which gave them five minutes to disappear through the barrier without anybody noticing.

Percy strode at it and vanished. Mr Weasley went next. Fred and George followed.

‘I’ll take Ginny, and you two come right after us,’ Mrs Weasley told Harry and Ron, and she took Ginny’s hand and set off, and in a blink they were gone.

‘Let’s go together, we’ve only got a minute,’ Ron said.

Harry checked that Hedwig’s cage was wedged firmly on top of his trunk, and turned his trolley to face the barrier. He felt perfectly confident now. This was nothing. This wasn’t a tenth as bad as Floo powder. He could do this.

They both bent low over the handles and walked at the barrier, gathering speed, and a few feet from it they broke into a run, and...

CRASH.

Both trolleys hit the wall and bounced off it. Ron’s trunk came off with a bang. Harry went over backwards on to the floor, and Hedwig’s cage bounced off the trolley, hit the tiles and rolled away across the concourse with Hedwig inside it, shrieking with outrage.

People stopped. People stared. A guard yelled, ‘What in blazes d’you think you’re doing?’

‘Lost control of the trolley,’ Harry gasped, holding his ribs as he got up.

Ron ran after Hedwig, who was making enough noise that the crowd round them had started muttering about cruelty to animals.

‘Why can’t we get through?’ Harry hissed, when Ron got back.

‘I dunno...’

And then the light went on in Harry’s head, and it wasn’t a kind light.

‘Dobby!’ Harry said as if the name was a curse word, and his voice had started to climb.

‘You what? Oh, the house-elf.’

‘The Malfoy house-elf, Ron!’ The anger in Harry curdled every other bit of him. ‘It’s Malfoy. She’s doing this to get back at us for the Body-Bind. I bloody well apologised to her. But she’s such a spiteful girl. You saw how she was with Ginny. And that elf! I’m going to crush his skull. Heal it, and crush it again. And that’s just the start.’

Ron was looking at him. He’d taken half a step back without seeming to know he’d done it.

‘Harry, mate, I get it.’ He got Harry by both shoulders. Harry had gone somewhere behind his own eyes, somewhere with Dobby in it, lots of chains, a radiator, and a length of pipe. 

‘Harry…’

‘He made it so the Dursleys kept me in that bloody room,’ Harry hissed.

‘Yeah, but that was the Dursleys who kept you in the room, not the house-elf,’ Ron said. ‘Anyway, Mum said she’s going to sort them out.’

‘Did she?’ Harry asked. The anger came down a notch.

‘Bugger, I shouldn’t’ve said anything.’ Ron let go of him. ‘Look, never mind that. We can’t get through the barrier.’

That sobered Harry up as nothing else could have.

Ron looked wildly round. A dozen curious people were still watching.

‘We’re going to miss the train,’ Ron whispered. ‘I don’t understand why the gateway’s sealed itself...’

Harry looked up at the great clock with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. Ten seconds. Nine. He wheeled his trolley forward, slowly this time, until the front of it was against the barrier, and leaned on it with all his weight. The brick stayed brick. Three seconds. Two. One.

‘It’s gone,’ said Ron, stunned. ‘The train’s left. What if Mum and Dad can’t get back through to us? Have you got any Muggle money?’

Harry gave a hollow laugh. Mentally cursing and wishing all the malice a twelve year old boy could muster on Dobby.

‘The Dursleys haven’t given me pocket money for about six years. Apart from that 50p I gave you at Christmas.’

Ron put his ear against the cold brick.

‘Can’t hear a thing,’ he said tensely. ‘What are we going to do? I don’t know how long it’ll take Mum and Dad to get back to us.’

They looked round. People were still staring, mostly because of Hedwig.

‘I think we’d better go and wait by the car,’ said Harry. ‘We’re attracting too much atten-.’

‘Harry!’ Ron’s eyes had lit up. ‘The car!’

‘What about it?’

‘We can fly the car to Hogwarts!’

‘But I thought...’

‘We’re stuck, right? And we’ve got to get to school, haven’t we? And even underage wizards are allowed to use magic if it’s a real emergency, section nineteen or something of the Restriction of Thingy...’

‘Your dad won’t mind?’ Harry asked.

‘He didn’t mind last time, even before we explained everything to him. Mum didn’t mind either, after she knew what went on.’

Harry nodded. There it was again, that family, and the way they simply took him in and made room. He’d have to find a way to repay them. He didn’t know how yet, but he’d find it. It wasn’t right for people to be that good to you and get nothing back.

And then the panic turned over inside him and became something a great deal more like excitement.

‘Can you fly it?’

‘Yeah, it’s easy. I figured it out a while back, mate. No problem at all.’ said Ron, swinging his trolley round towards the exit. ‘C’mon, let’s go, if we hurry we’ll be able to follow the Hogwarts Express.’

They marched out through the crowd of staring Muggles, out of the station and round into the side road where the old Ford Anglia stood at the kerb. Ron unlocked the enormous boot with a series of taps of his wand, and they heaved the trunks in, put Hedwig on the back seat, and climbed into the front.

‘Check no one’s watching,’ said Ron, and tapped the ignition.

Harry put his head out of the window. Traffic was grinding along the main road at the end, but the side street was empty.

‘Alright, we’re clear,’ he said.

Ron pressed a small silver button on the dashboard.

The car vanished. So did they. Harry could feel the seat under him and hear the engine and feel his own hands on his knees and his glasses on his nose, but as far as his eyes could tell he’d turned into a pair of eyeballs hanging four feet above a dirty street full of parked cars.

‘Let’s go,’ said Ron’s voice, from his right.

The road and the grimy buildings on either side dropped away. In seconds the whole of London lay beneath them, smoky and glittering in the sun.

Then there was a pop, and the car was back, and so were they.

‘Uh oh,’ said Ron, jabbing at the Invisibility Booster. ‘It’s faulty...’

They both pummelled it. The car vanished. Then it flickered back.

‘Hold on!’ Ron yelled, and he stamped on the accelerator, and they shot straight up into the low woolly cloud and everything went grey and wet.

‘Now what?’ said Harry, blinking at the solid fog pressing in on every window.

‘We need to see the train to know what direction to go in,’ said Ron. ‘Dip back down again. Quickly...’

They dropped out of the cloud and twisted round in their seats, squinting at the ground.

‘I can see it!’ Harry yelled. ‘Right ahead! There!’

The Hogwarts Express was streaking along below them like a scarlet snake.

‘Due north,’ said Ron, checking the compass on the dashboard. ‘OK. We’ll just have to check on it every half an hour or so. Hold on...’

And they went up through the clouds again, and a minute later burst out into blazing sunlight.

It was another world. The wheels of the car skimmed a sea of white fleece, under a blue sky that went on for ever and a sun too bright to look at.

‘All we’ve got to worry about now are those muggle aeroplanes,’ said Ron.

They looked at each other, and started to laugh, and for a long time they couldn’t stop. It was as though they’d been dropped into somebody’s dream. This, Harry thought, was the only way to travel. Past towers and swirls of snowy cloud, in a car full of hot bright sunlight, with a fat bag of toffees in the glove compartment and the thought of Fred’s and George’s faces when the two of them came down, smooth and spectacular, on the lawn in front of the castle.

They checked on the train as they went further and further north, and each dip under the cloud showed them a different country. London went behind them. Neat green fields gave way to wide purple moors, and villages with churches like toys, and a great grey city crawling with cars like coloured ants.

Several hours later, though, Harry had to admit that some of the fun had gone out of it. The toffees had made them thirsty and there was nothing to drink. They’d both taken their jumpers off, and Harry’s T-shirt was stuck to the back of the seat, and his glasses kept sliding down his sweaty nose. He’d stopped noticing the clouds. He was thinking, longingly, of the train somewhere miles beneath them, where you could buy ice-cold pumpkin juice off a trolley from a plump, smiling witch. Why hadn’t they been able to get on to the platform?

‘Can’t be much further, can it?’ croaked Ron, hours later still, as the sun began to sink into the floor of cloud and stain it pink. ‘Ready for another check on the train?’

It was still directly beneath them, winding past a snow-capped mountain. It was a good deal darker under the clouds now. Ron put his foot down to climb, and as he did, the engine began to whine.

Harry and Ron looked at each other.

‘It’s probably just tired,’ said Ron. ‘It’s never been this far before...’

And they both pretended not to hear the whine getting louder as the sky went steadily darker. Stars came out in the black. Harry pulled his jumper back on, and tried not to look at the windscreen wipers, which had begun to wave feebly, as though in protest.

‘Not far,’ said Ron, more to the car than to Harry. ‘Not far now.’ He patted the dashboard nervously.

When they came down through the cloud a little later they had to squint into the darkness for a landmark they knew.

‘There!’ Harry shouted, and Ron and Hedwig both jumped. ‘Straight ahead!’

High on its cliff over the lake, black against the dark horizon, stood the turrets and towers of Hogwarts.

But the car had begun to shudder, and it was losing speed.

‘Come on,’ Ron said, coaxing, and gave the wheel a little shake. ‘Nearly there, come on...’

The engine groaned. Thin jets of steam came hissing out from under the bonnet. Harry found that he was gripping the edges of his seat as they flew out over the lake. The car gave a nasty wobble. Harry looked out of his window and saw the water a mile below, smooth and black as glass. Ron’s knuckles were white on the wheel. The car wobbled again.

‘Come on,’ Ron muttered.

They were over the lake. The castle was right ahead. Ron put his foot to the floor.

There was a loud clunk, a splutter, and the engine died.

‘Uh oh,’ said Ron, into the silence.

The nose of the car dropped. They were falling, and gathering speed, straight at the castle wall.

‘Oh, bugger!’ Ron yelled, and he hauled the wheel round, and they missed the dark stone by inches as the car swung in a great arc, over the greenhouses, over the vegetable patch, out across the black lawns, and losing height every yard of the way.

Ron let go of the wheel entirely and dragged his wand out of his back pocket.

‘STOP! STOP!’ he bellowed, whacking the dashboard and the windscreen with it, but the ground was still coming up at them...

‘MIND THAT TREE!’ Harry roared, and lunged for the wheel, and it was too late.

CRUNCH.

With a bang of metal on wood that went through Harry’s teeth, they hit the trunk of the tree and dropped to the ground with a jolt that threw them both forward into the dashboard.

Steam poured up from the crumpled bonnet. Hedwig was screaming in her cage. There was a lump the size of a golf ball coming up on Harry’s forehead where he’d hit the windscreen, and to his right Ron let out a low, despairing groan.

‘Are you OK?’ Harry said urgently.

‘My wand,’ said Ron, in a shaking voice. ‘Look at my wand.’

It had snapped nearly in two. The tip hung off it by a few splinters.

Harry had opened his mouth to say that Madam Pomfrey might be able to do something, or Flitwick, when the car moved.

It wasn’t the engine. The engine was dead. The whole car lifted, a foot off the ground, on Ron’s side, and dropped again with a crash that threw Harry against his door. Something had hit the roof. Something very big. The roof over Ron’s head bowed in like a tin can under a boot.

‘What was...’

The tree hit them again.

Harry saw it this time. A branch as thick as a man’s body came down out of the dark and struck the bonnet, and the bonnet folded up like paper, and the windscreen went white and fell in over their knees in a thousand pieces. Then the branch drew back. It drew back, up and away into the black, slowly, like an arm. And Harry saw the rest of the tree.

It was moving. All of it. Every branch on it was writhing, lashing, flexing like the legs of something turned over on its back, and the trunk they’d hit was twisting on its roots, and the whole enormous thing was bending down over them, and Harry understood, with a cold that went right through him, that it was looking for them.

‘Out!’ he screamed. ‘Ron, out, get OUT!’

A branch came through Ron’s window. It didn’t break the glass; there wasn’t time for the glass to break; it came through the door, through the metal, and the whole side of the car crumpled in on Ron like a fist closing. Ron shouted. Harry grabbed him by the arm and the collar and hauled him across the seats, over the gear stick, and Ron came, scrabbling, with his legs still in the wreckage, and the door on Ron’s side tore clean off its hinges and went spinning away across the grass.

Harry got his own door open. It opened a foot and jammed. Something hit the roof again and the foot became six inches.

‘Window!’

He went out through it head first. The frame caught his hip and he fell on to the grass, and rolled, and came up on his knees reaching back for Ron. Ron’s head and shoulders were out. The car lifted again, and came down, and Ron screamed as the sill came down on his leg.

‘I’ve got you. I’ve got you. Pull!’

Ron pulled. Harry pulled. Ron came out of the car like a cork, and the two of them went over backwards in a heap, and a branch came down where Ron had been lying and stove the roof of the car flat to the seats.

The windows all burst at once.

Then the car came to life.

It started. Not the engine. The lights came on, both headlamps, blazing full beam across the lawn, and the horn went, one long, furious note, and the whole crumpled wreck of it reared up on its back wheels like a horse. The boot flew open and both their trunks shot out of it and skidded across the grass. The back door banged open and Hedwig’s cage came flying out after them and bounced twice and lay still. And then the Ford Anglia tore itself out from under the tree, with its wheels spinning on nothing, with branches coming down all round it and missing, and swung round once, and roared off into the dark of the Forest with its one remaining door flapping, and was gone.

Harry lay on the grass and watched it go.

‘Ron,’ he said. ‘Ron, did you see-’

The tree came down between them.

It wasn’t a branch this time. It was the crown of the tree, half of it, the whole weight of the thing bending over and smashing into the ground like a felled building, and the earth jumped under Harry and threw him a yard, and when he’d got his breath back and his glasses back on there was a wall of thrashing wood in front of him where Ron had been.

‘RON!’

Nothing. The branches heaved and settled and heaved.

‘RON! RON, ANSWER ME!’

He went at the wood with his hands. He didn’t think about it. He got hold of a branch as thick as his leg and tried to drag it aside, and it whipped out of his grip and took the skin off his palms, and he went at it again. He couldn’t see anything. He could see the car’s lights, far off in the Forest now, swinging about between the trees, and nothing else. No red hair. No Ron. Only the tree, flexing and creaking and settling its weight down on the place where his best friend had been lying three seconds before, and the thought came up through him, clear and cold and quite certain: he’s under that. He’s under that and he’s dead, and it’s your fault, you made him come, you made him fly the car, everything you touch...

The voice had never been so loud.

‘Ron,’ Harry said, and it came out as nothing, a breath. ‘Ron, please.’

He was on his knees in front of the branches. He had no wand out. He’d forgotten he owned one. He heard the tree creak above him, a long, slow groan of wood under strain, and he didn’t look up, because there was nothing above him that mattered, and...

Something hit him in the side like a bull.

He went over sideways, and a branch the width of a door came down where he’d been kneeling and buried itself a foot in the turf, and the ground kicked, and Harry was on his back in the grass with Ron Weasley on top of him, filthy, bleeding from a cut over one eye, and very much alive.

‘MOVE, you stupid...’

Ron was up. Ron had him by the back of his jumper and was hauling. Harry got his feet under him.

‘I thought you were-’

‘Not yet! Go! GO!’

They ran. The tree came after them. It couldn’t move its roots, but it didn’t need to; its reach was enormous, and it swung at them with branch after branch, and every one of them came down like a hammer. Harry heard one go past his ear with a sound like a whip. Ron shoved him sideways and a second buried itself where they’d been. They zigzagged. They fell over the trunks and got up. A branch swept low across the grass like a scythe and both of them jumped it, and Ron landed badly and went down, and Harry went back for him and got him up by the arm, and another branch cracked down between them, and they went round it in opposite directions and met on the far side, running.

And then they were out of range.

They knew it because the next blow fell short, and hit the grass ten feet behind them with a thud they felt in their feet, and the one after that fell shorter still. They staggered on another twenty yards for good measure before they stopped, and bent over with their hands on their knees, and sucked at the air.

Behind them, the tree went on lashing at nothing, slower and slower, like a dog that has lost the scent.

‘That thing could’ve killed us! What was Dumbledore thinking, putting that there?’ Ron said irritably, between gulps.

‘It’s probably guarding something. Dumbledore always has his reasons. He’s the most brilliant wizard of our age, and very wise,’ Harry said, with heat, and with a reverence that would have surprised anyone who hadn’t heard him on the subject before.

Ron opened his mouth. He shut it again. He knew, because his mother had said so at the kitchen table in a voice that made the crockery hum, exactly what Molly Weasley thought of Albus Dumbledore for leaving Harry where he’d been left for eleven years, and Ron had risked his neck on a chessboard for a Stone that Dumbledore had apparently known perfectly well they were going after. He didn’t share Harry’s opinion of the Headmaster. He hadn’t for some time. But Harry’s face, when he talked about Dumbledore, was the face of someone holding on to something, and Ron had got a good deal better over the summer at knowing when not to kick a thing out from under his friend. So he said nothing at all.

‘Can you believe our luck?’ Ron said miserably instead, crouching to pick up Scabbers, who’d come out of his pocket in the last dash and was sitting dazed in the grass. ‘All the trees on these grounds, and we found the one that fights back.’

He looked over his shoulder at the ancient thing, which was still swaying and flexing its branches in a way that was somehow worse now that it was slow.

‘Come on,’ said Harry wearily. ‘We’d better get up to the school...’

It was not at all the arrival they’d pictured. Stiff, cold, bruised and bleeding, with their trunks scattered across half an acre of lawn and the lump on Harry’s head throbbing in time with his heart, they collected what they could, found Hedwig’s cage, which was dented but whole, and Hedwig inside it, who had a great deal to say to both of them, and began the long drag up the slope to the great oak doors.

‘I think the feast’s already started,’ said Ron, dropping his end of the trunk at the foot of the steps and crossing quietly to a bright window. ‘Hey, Harry, come and look. It’s the Sorting!’

Harry hurried over, and the two of them pressed their faces to the glass and looked into the Great Hall.

Thousands of candles hung in the air above the four long tables, and the golden plates and goblets glittered under them, and overhead the enchanted ceiling, which always showed the sky outside, was thick with stars. Through the forest of pointed black hats Harry could see a line of frightened first-years filing up the Hall, and Ginny among them, easy to spot by her hair. Professor McGonagall, with her hair in its tight bun and her spectacles catching the light, was setting the Sorting Hat on its stool.

Harry remembered that hat. He remembered sitting under it, a year ago, with the whole Hall watching and the Hat muttering in his ear, and the long, horrible seconds when he’d thought it was going to say Slytherin. It hadn’t. Gryffindor had got him, and Ron, and Hermione, and every Weasley there’d ever been, and last term the two of them had helped win Gryffindor the Cup off Slytherin for the first time in seven years.

A very small boy with mousy hair had gone forward to put the Hat on. Harry’s eyes slid past him to the staff table, and to Dumbledore in the middle of it, with his silver beard and his half-moon spectacles shining in the candlelight. A few seats along sat Gilderoy Lockhart in robes of aquamarine. And down at the end, huge and hairy, drinking deeply from his goblet, was Hagrid.

‘Hang on...’ Harry muttered. ‘There’s an empty chair at the staff table... where’s Snape?’

Professor Severus Snape was Harry’s least favourite teacher, and Harry had the honour of being Snape’s least favourite pupil. He taught Potions, and he was cruel, and sarcastic, and disliked by everybody who wasn’t in his own house, which was Slytherin.

‘Maybe he’s ill!’ said Ron hopefully.

‘Maybe he’s left,’ said Harry, ‘because he missed out on the Defence Against the Dark Arts job again!’

‘Or he might have been sacked!’ said Ron, warming to it. ‘I mean, everyone hates him’

‘Or maybe,’ said a very cold voice directly behind them, ‘he’s waiting to hear why you two didn’t arrive on the school train.’

Harry spun round.

Severus Snape stood on the step behind them with his black robes stirring in the cold wind off the lake. He was thin and sallow, with a hooked nose and greasy black hair to his shoulders, and he was smiling, and the smile told Harry everything he needed to know about how much trouble they were in.

‘Follow me,’ said Snape.

They didn’t dare look at each other. They followed him up the steps and into the vast, echoing Entrance Hall, where the torches burned in their brackets and the smell of the feast came drifting out of the Great Hall, and Snape led them away from the light and the smell and the warmth, down a narrow stone stair into the dungeons.

‘In!’ he said, opening a door halfway along the cold passage.

They went into Snape’s office, shivering. The walls were lined with shelves of large glass jars, and in the jars floated things that Harry didn’t, just now, want to know the names of. The fireplace was black and empty. Snape shut the door and turned round.

‘So,’ he said softly. ‘The train isn’t good enough for the famous Harry Potter and his faithful sidekick Weasley. Wanted to arrive with a bang, did we, boys?’

Harry drew breath. He had the whole thing ready, Dobby and all.

‘Okay, sir, it was the barrier at King’s Cross. There’s this house-elf, right. And...’

‘Silence!’ said Snape coldly. ‘What have you done with the car?’

Ron gulped. It wasn’t the first time Snape had given Harry the impression of being able to see straight into his head. A moment later he understood, as Snape unrolled that evening’s Prophet and held it up.

‘You were seen,’ he hissed.

FLYING FORD ANGLIA MYSTIFIES MUGGLES, said the headline.

‘Bugger,’ said Harry.

Snape gave him a fierce look, and then began to read aloud.

‘"Two Muggles in London, convinced they saw an old car flying over the Post Office tower... at noon in Norfolk, Mrs Hetty Bayliss, while hanging out her washing... Mr Angus Fleet, of Peebles, reported to police..." Six or seven Muggles in all. I believe your father works in the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office?’ He looked up at Ron, and the smile got nastier. ‘Dear, dear... his own son...’

Harry felt as though one of the tree’s bigger branches had got him in the stomach. If anyone found out Mr Weasley had enchanted the car... he hadn’t thought of that. He hadn’t thought of it once.

‘I noticed, in my search of the grounds, that considerable damage appears to have been done to a very valuable Whomping Willow,’ Snape went on.

‘Professor, that tree nearly killed us both. We -.’

‘Again, Silence!’ snapped Snape again. ‘Most unfortunately, you are not in my house, and the decision to expel you does not rest with me. I shall go and fetch the people who do have that happy power. You will wait here.’

Harry and Ron stared at each other, white-faced.

Harry wasn’t hungry any more. He felt sick. He tried not to look at the large, slimy something hanging in green liquid on the shelf behind Snape’s desk. If Snape had gone for Professor McGonagall, head of Gryffindor, they were barely any better off. She might be fairer than Snape, but she was every bit as strict.

Ten minutes later Snape came back, and sure enough it was Professor McGonagall with him.

Harry had seen her angry before. Either he’d forgotten how thin her mouth could go, or he’d never seen it go this thin. She raised her wand the moment she came through the door, and both of them flinched, but she only pointed it at the empty grate, and fire sprang up in it.

‘Sit,’ she said, and they backed into the two chairs by the fire.

‘Explain,’ she said, with her glasses glinting.

Ron told it. He started with the barrier that wouldn’t let them through, and went on from there.

‘... so we had no choice, Professor. We couldn’t get on the train.’

‘Why didn’t you send us a letter by owl? I believe you have an owl?’ Professor McGonagall said coldly, to Harry.

Harry gaped at her. Now she’d said it, it was so obviously the thing to have done that he couldn’t think why it hadn’t crossed his mind.

‘I... I didn’t think...’

‘That,’ said Professor McGonagall, ‘is obvious.’

There was a knock at the office door, and Snape, looking happier than Harry had ever seen him, opened it.

The Headmaster stood there.

Harry’s whole body went numb. Dumbledore was looking unusually grave. He looked down his long crooked nose at the pair of them, and Harry found himself wishing, quite sincerely, that he and Ron were back under the Whomping Willow.

The silence went on for a long time.

‘Please explain why you did this,’ said Dumbledore.

Shouting would have been better. Harry hated the disappointment in that voice more than he’d have hated anything. He found he couldn’t look Dumbledore in the eye, and told the whole story to his own knees instead.

He left out one thing only, which was that the car was Mr Weasley’s; he told it as though he and Ron had happened to find a flying car parked outside the station. He made very sure Dumbledore heard about Dobby, and the letters, and the barrier, and whose fault every bit of it was. He didn’t mention Malfoy, because he had no proof. He knew Dumbledore would see through the business with the car in a second, but Dumbledore asked nothing about it. When Harry finished, the Headmaster only went on looking at them over his spectacles.

‘We’ll go and get our stuff,’ said Ron, in a hopeless sort of voice.

‘What are you talking about, Weasley?’ barked Professor McGonagall.

‘Well, you’re expelling us, aren’t you?’ said Ron.

Harry looked quickly at Dumbledore.

‘Not today, Mr Weasley,’ said Dumbledore. ‘But I must impress upon both of you the seriousness of what you have done. I will be writing to both your families tonight. And I must warn you that if you do anything of this kind again, I will have no choice but to expel you.’

Snape looked as though somebody had cancelled Christmas. He cleared his throat.

‘Professor Dumbledore, these boys have flouted the Decree for the Restriction of Underage Wizardry, caused serious damage to an old and valuable tree... surely acts of this nature...’

‘It will be for Professor McGonagall to decide on these boys’ punishments, Severus,’ said Dumbledore calmly. ‘They are in her house, and therefore her responsibility.’ He turned to Professor McGonagall. ‘I must get back to the feast, Minerva. I have a few notices to give out. Come, Severus. There’s a delicious-looking custard tart I want to sample.’

Snape shot Harry and Ron a look of pure venom as he let himself be swept out of his own office, and they were left alone with Professor McGonagall, who was still regarding them like an eagle that hasn’t yet decided which one to eat first.

‘You had better get along to the hospital wing, Weasley. You’re bleeding.’

‘Not much,’ said Ron, wiping hastily at the cut over his eye with his sleeve. ‘Professor, I wanted to watch my sister being Sorted...’

‘The Sorting Ceremony is over,’ said Professor McGonagall. ‘Your sister is also in Gryffindor.’

‘Oh, good,’ said Ron.

‘And speaking of Gryffindor...’ Professor McGonagall said sharply, but Harry got in first.

‘Professor, when we took the car, term hadn’t started, so... so Gryffindor shouldn’t really have points taken from it, should it?’ he finished, watching her face.

Professor McGonagall gave him a piercing look. But he was sure, nearly sure, that she’d almost smiled. Her mouth looked a shade less thin, at any rate.

‘You’re learning, Potter. Very good. I will not take any points from Gryffindor,’ she said, and Harry’s heart lifted a great deal. ‘But you will both get a detention.’

It was better than Harry had expected. As for Dumbledore writing to the Dursleys, that was nothing at all. They’d only be disappointed that the tree hadn’t finished the job. He hoped, though, that Dumbledore would back him up about never going back there, after everything. He’d told Dumbledore all of it. So Dumbledore had to understand. Of course he would. Dumbledore was wise, and kind.

Professor McGonagall raised her wand again and pointed it at Snape’s desk, and a large plate of sandwiches, two silver goblets and a jug of iced pumpkin juice appeared on it with a pop.

‘You will eat in here, and then go straight up to your dormitory,’ she said. ‘I must also return to the feast.’

The door shut behind her. Ron let out a long, low whistle.

‘I thought we’d had it,’ he said, and took a sandwich.

‘So did I,’ said Harry, and took one too.

‘Can you believe our luck, though?’ said Ron thickly, through chicken and ham. ‘Fred and George must’ve flown that car five or six times and no Muggle ever saw them.’ He swallowed and bit again. ‘Why couldn’t we get through the barrier?’

‘It was Dobby, I told you.’ Harry said.

‘We’ll have to watch our step from now on, though,’ he said, and took a grateful swig of pumpkin juice, which was the best thing he’d ever tasted. ‘Wish we could’ve gone up to the feast...’

‘She didn’t want us showing off,’ said Ron sagely. ‘Doesn’t want people thinking it’s clever, arriving by flying car.’

When they’d eaten as many sandwiches as they could hold, which took some time, since the plate kept refilling itself, they got up and left the office and took the old familiar road to Gryffindor Tower. The castle was quiet. The feast was over. They passed muttering portraits and creaking suits of armour and climbed the narrow stairs, until at last they came to the passage where the Fat Lady hung in her pink silk dress.

‘Password?’ she said.

‘Er...’ said Harry.

They didn’t know it. They hadn’t met a prefect yet. But help was already on the way; there were feet running behind them, and they turned to see Hermione dashing up the corridor.

‘There you are! Where have you been? Harry, are you okay? The most ridiculous rumours. Someone said you’d been expelled for crashing a flying car. Malfoy was glaring about it, that nasty harpy. She’s probably very happy about the whole affair.’

‘Well, we haven’t been expelled,’ Harry assured her.

‘You’re not telling me you did fly here?’ said Hermione, sounding very nearly as severe as Professor McGonagall.

‘No, we took the bus,’ said Harry, drily, and a good deal more irritably than he’d meant to. How else did anybody imagine they’d got here?

‘Skip the lecture,’ said Ron impatiently, ‘and tell us the new password.’

‘It’s "wattlebird",’ said Hermione impatiently, ‘but that’s not the point...’

The rest of it was lost, because the portrait had swung open on a sudden storm of clapping.

The whole of Gryffindor was still up. They were packed into the circular common room, standing on the lopsided tables and the squashy armchairs, and they’d been waiting. Arms came through the portrait hole and hauled Harry and Ron inside, and Hermione had to scramble in after them.

‘Brilliant!’ yelled Lee Jordan. ‘Inspired! What an entrance! Flying a car right into the Whomping Willow, people’ll be talking about that one for years!’

‘Good on you,’ said a fifth-year Harry had never spoken to in his life, and somebody was thumping him on the back as though he’d just won a marathon.

Fred and George shoved their way to the front and said, together, ‘Why couldn’t you’ve called us back, eh?’

Ron was scarlet, and grinning, and trying not to. But Harry could see one person who didn’t look happy at all. Percy’s head was visible above a crowd of excited first-years, and he was plainly trying to get close enough to begin telling them off.

Harry dug Ron in the ribs and nodded at Percy. Ron saw it at once.

‘Got to get upstairs. Bit tired,’ he said, and the two of them started working their way towards the door on the far side of the room, and the spiral stair beyond it.

‘Night,’ Harry called back to Hermione, who was wearing a scowl very like Percy’s.

They got across the room, still having their backs slapped, and gained the peace of the staircase, and climbed it to the very top, where the door of their old dormitory now had a sign on it that said Second-years. Inside was the same circular room, with the same five four-posters in their red velvet and the same high narrow windows. Their trunks had been brought up and set at the ends of their beds.

Ron grinned guiltily at Harry.

‘I know I shouldn’t’ve enjoyed that or anything, but...’

The door flew open, and in came the other three second-year Gryffindor boys, Seamus Finnigan, Dean Thomas, and Neville Longbottom.

‘Unbelievable!’ beamed Seamus.

‘Cool,’ said Dean.

‘Amazing,’ said Neville, in awe.

Harry couldn’t help it. He grinned too.

Everyone was impressed with him. Everyone. And he lay awake for a while, afterwards, with the lump on his head throbbing gently and the tree going round and round behind his eyes, and wondered whether this was what it felt like to be cool.

Harry barely grinned once the next day, and the day started going wrong at breakfast.

The four long tables were loaded with tureens of porridge and plates of kippers and mountains of toast under an enchanted ceiling that had chosen, for the first morning of term, a dull and cloudy grey. Harry and Ron sat down at the Gryffindor table beside Hermione, who had Voyages with Vampires propped open against the milk jug. There was a stiffness in the way she said ‘Morning’ to Ron that told Harry she hadn’t quite finished disapproving of how they’d arrived. Harry, on the other hand, she was delighted to see, and she’d got something to tell him.

‘Harry, did you know there are clans? Of vampires. Thirteen of them. It’s all in here. There’s the Ventrue, they’re the ones who think they’re royalty, and there was one of them called Angelus, from the Aurelian bloodline, who went right across Europe in the seventeen hundreds, and the things he did, Harry, in Romania, and then in London, there was a whole convent in-’

‘Hermione, I’m eating,’ said Ron.

‘And there’s one called William the Bloody, who was made in London, and they called him that because of the poetry, apparently, not the... well. And Dracula’s real. He’s actually real, he’s in chapter nine, and there’s a family who’ve been hunting him for about four hundred years, the Belmonts, they’ve got a whip, a whip, Harry, and every hundred years or so he comes back and one of them has to go up the mountain and...’

She went on. Each fact was worse than the last, and she told all of them with the shining, bright-eyed enthusiasm of someone describing a particularly good day out. She wouldn’t let Ron get a word in. Harry found it very slightly disturbing, and had nowhere to put his eyes, and was never so glad to see Neville Longbottom as when Neville sat down opposite with a cheerful, ‘Morning, all.’

‘Post’ll be here in a minute,’ Neville added. ‘I think Gran’s sending on a few things I forgot.’

Harry had only just started his porridge when there was a rush of wings overhead and a hundred or so owls came pouring in through the high windows, circling the Hall and dropping letters and packages into the crowd. A big lumpy parcel bounced off Neville’s head, and a second later something large and grey came down in Hermione’s milk jug and showered all four of them with milk and feathers.

‘Errol!’ said Ron, and pulled the bedraggled owl out by the feet.

Errol flopped on to the table, unconscious, with his legs in the air and a damp red envelope in his beak.

‘Oh, no...’ Ron gasped.

‘It’s all right, he’s still alive,’ said Hermione, prodding Errol gently with a fingertip.

‘It’s not that. It’s that.’

Ron was pointing at the red envelope. It looked ordinary enough to Harry, but Ron and Neville were both staring at it as though it might go off.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Harry.

‘She’s... she’s sent me a Howler,’ said Ron faintly.

‘You’d better open it, Ron,’ Neville whispered. ‘It’ll be worse if you don’t. My Gran sent me one once and I ignored it, and...’ He swallowed. ‘It was horrible.’

Harry looked from their stricken faces to the envelope.

‘What’s a Howler?’

But Ron’s whole attention was on the letter, which had started to smoke at the corners.

‘Open it,’ Neville urged. ‘It’ll all be over in a few minutes...’

Ron put out a shaking hand, eased the envelope out of Errol’s beak, and slit it open. Neville stuffed his fingers in his ears, and a split second later Harry knew why. For a moment he thought the thing had exploded. A roar of sound filled the enormous Hall and shook dust out of the rafters.

‘... STEALING THE CAR, I WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN SURPRISED IF THEY’D EXPELLED YOU, YOU WAIT TILL I GET HOLD OF YOU, I DON’T SUPPOSE YOU STOPPED TO THINK WHAT YOUR FATHER AND I WENT THROUGH WHEN WE SAW IT HAD GONE...’

Mrs Weasley’s voice, a hundred times louder than it had ever been in the kitchen at the Burrow, rattled the plates and spoons on the table and came booming back off the stone walls. Heads were turning all over the Hall to see who’d got the Howler, and Ron slid so far down in his chair that only his crimson forehead showed above the table.

‘... LETTER FROM DUMBLEDORE LAST NIGHT, I THOUGHT YOUR FATHER WOULD DIE OF SHAME, WE DIDN’T BRING YOU UP TO BEHAVE LIKE THIS, YOU AND HARRY COULD BOTH HAVE DIED...’

Harry had been wondering when his name was going to come up. He tried very hard to look like somebody who couldn’t hear a voice that was making his eardrums throb.

‘... ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTED, YOUR FATHER’S FACING AN INQUIRY AT WORK, IT’S ENTIRELY YOUR FAULT AND IF YOU PUT ANOTHER TOE OUT OF LINE WE’LL BRING YOU STRAIGHT BACK HOME.’

A ringing silence fell. The red envelope, which had slipped out of Ron’s fingers, burst into flame and curled up into ash. Harry and Ron sat as though a wave had just gone over them. A few people laughed, and gradually the talk came back.

Hermione shut Voyages with Vampires and looked down at the top of Ron’s head.

‘Well, I don’t know what you expected, Ron, but you...’

‘Don’t tell me I deserved it,’ snapped Ron.

Harry pushed his porridge away. His insides were burning with guilt. Mr Weasley was facing an inquiry. After everything the pair of them had done for him over the summer...

He had no time to dwell on it, because Professor McGonagall was moving down the Gryffindor table handing out timetables, and Harry took his and saw that they had double Herbology with the Hufflepuffs first. He was reading down the rest of the day when a head of silver-blonde hair rose into view over the top of the parchment.

It was Dracina Malfoy. Harry set his teeth to keep the anger where it was.

Crabbe and Goyle weren’t with her, which was unusual. Harry had noticed that the two of them tended to make themselves scarce whenever Neville was about, and had done ever since the Hufflepuff match, when Neville had got the better of both of them with Malfoy screaming for help in the background. Malfoy was looking at Harry. She was looking at him very hard indeed, the way she had in Flourish and Blotts, as though there were something on the tip of her tongue.

‘What?’ asked Harry.

‘Nothing!’ Dracina said.

‘Brilliant. If you have nothing to say, jog on, Malfoy.’

She plainly did have something to say. Her mouth had opened And then Ginny arrived.

Ginny had come down the table to speak to Ron. That was what she said, at any rate, in a very small voice,  standing much closer to Harry’s end of the bench than she needed to, with her eyes going to Harry and away again, and she hadn’t seen Malfoy at all. Malfoy saw her, though. Harry watched the colour come up into Malfoy’s face like a tide.

‘Maybe I don’t, Potter! You idiot! Enjoy your girlfriend!’

And she stamped off down the Hall.

Harry stared after her. Then, because the whole of the Gryffindor table seemed to have heard, he shouted, ‘She’s not my bloody girlfriend! She’s Ron’s sister, and that’d be weird!’

Malfoy stopped, and turned, and shouted straight back up the length of the Hall.

‘Well, no witch of a proper noble family would want to be with someone as foul and idiotic as Harry Potter anyway!’

Then she stamped on to where Crabbe and Goyle had been loitering by the doors, and started shouting at them instead, and poking them, and hitting them on the arms, and both of them took it, both of them kept casting wary looks down the Hall at Neville, who was finishing his porridge and had no idea he was being looked at. Malfoy followed their eyes, and laughed at them, cruelly, and snapped her fingers for them to go. Then she looked back at Harry. Once more. He glared at her. And for a second, before she caught herself, she went pink, and her face did something that wasn’t a sneer, wasn't a glare, and Harry didn’t know what it was. Then she seemed to remember where she was, and huffed, and went.

‘Bloody Malfoy,’ Harry growled, and put the last spoonful of his cereal in his mouth. It looked like Coco Pops

, but at Hogwarts the pieces leaked actual melted chocolate when you bit them.

He noticed, as he swallowed, that Hermione had moved along the bench until she was pressed against his side. He didn’t notice that Ginny, who was talking to Ron with her back to him, had gone quiet and sad about the shoulders at being told she wasn’t his girlfriend, as though she’d hoped, for a second, to be allowed to be.

Harry, Ron and Hermione left the castle together, crossed the vegetable patch and made for the greenhouses. The Howler had done one good thing: Hermione seemed to feel they’d been punished enough now, and had gone back to being perfectly friendly. The rest of the class were waiting outside Greenhouse Three when they got there, and Professor Sprout came striding across the lawn to meet them a moment later, with Gilderoy Lockhart beside her.

Her arms were full of bandages, and Harry, with another twinge, saw the Whomping Willow in the distance with several of its branches in slings.

Professor Sprout was a squat little witch with a patched hat on her flyaway hair, a good deal of earth on her robes, and fingernails that would have made Aunt Petunia faint. Gilderoy Lockhart was immaculate in sweeping turquoise, with a turquoise hat trimmed in gold set just so on his shining hair.

‘Oh, hello there!’ Lockhart called, beaming round at them all. ‘Just been showing Professor Sprout the right way to doctor a Whomping Willow! But I don’t want you running away with the idea that I’m better at Herbology than she is! I just happen to have met several of these exotic plants on my travels...’

‘Of course you were,’ said Harry.

Lockhart didn’t appear to hear him. Lockhart, Harry was coming to understand, didn’t appear to hear anything that wasn’t about Lockhart.

‘Greenhouse Three today, chaps!’ said Professor Sprout, who looked thoroughly disgruntled and not at all her usual cheerful self.

A murmur went through the class. They’d only ever worked in Greenhouse One. Greenhouse Three had the interesting plants in it, and the dangerous ones.

Professor Sprout took a large key from her belt and unlocked the door, and Harry caught a breath of damp earth and fertiliser, and under it the heavy scent of some enormous umbrella-sized flowers hanging from the roof. He was about to follow Ron and Hermione inside when Lockhart’s hand shot out and caught him.

‘Harry! I’ve been wanting a word. You don’t mind if he’s a couple of minutes late, do you, Professor Sprout?’

Professor Sprout’s scowl said that she minded a good deal, but Lockhart said, ‘That’s the ticket,’ and shut the greenhouse door in her face.

‘Harry,’ said Lockhart, shaking his head, with every one of his big white teeth catching the sun. ‘Harry, Harry, Harry.’

‘That’s my name, all right,’ Harry said dryly. He wanted very much to be somewhere else.

‘When I heard... well, of course, it was all my fault. Could have kicked myself.’

Harry hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about, and was about to say so when Lockhart swept on.

‘Don’t know when I’ve been more shocked. Flying a car to Hogwarts! Well, of course, I knew at once why you’d done it.’

‘Of course you do,’ Harry said, knowing he didn’t.

‘Stood out a mile. Harry, Harry, Harry.’

It was remarkable, Harry thought, how he could show all those teeth even with his mouth shut.

‘Gave you a taste for publicity, didn’t I?’ said Lockhart. ‘Gave you the bug. You got on to the front page of the paper with me, and you couldn’t wait to do it again.’

‘Oh, no, Professor, see...’

‘Harry, Harry, Harry,’ said Lockhart, and gripped his shoulder. ‘I understand. Natural to want a bit more once you’ve had that first taste. And I blame myself for giving you that, because it was bound to go to your head.’

‘No, it hasn’t, sir,’ Harry refuted.

‘Haha. But see here, young man, you can’t start flying cars to try and get yourself noticed. Just calm down, all right? Plenty of time for all that when you’re older. Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking! "It’s all right for him, he’s an internationally famous wizard already!" But when I was twelve, I was just as much of a nobody as you are now. In fact, I’d say I was even more of a nobody! I mean, a few people have heard of you, haven’t they? All that business with He Who Must Not Be Named!’

‘I’m sure you’re an expert, sir.’

Lockhart’s eyes went to the scar on Harry’s forehead.

‘I know, I know, it’s not quite as good as winning Witch Weekly’s Most Charming Smile Award five times in a row, as I have.’

‘I’m sure you have, sir,’ Harry nodded. It explained a good deal, he thought, about the lavender.

‘You’ve got a bright future in front of you, my boy. And I’ll always be available for advice. Read my work and you’ll see the adventures I’ve had.’

‘Sure,’ Harry said, in a tone that meant he wouldn’t, ever.

‘Haha. You’ve a keen sense of humour, my boy. I love it. But I must be off.’

And Lockhart sauntered away across the lawn, in the way that people who smell of lavender tend to saunter, and Harry went into the greenhouse and shut the door on him.

Professor Sprout was standing behind a trestle bench in the middle of the greenhouse, and on the bench lay twenty or so pairs of earmuffs in different colours. When Harry had taken his place between Ron and Hermione, she said, ‘We’ll be repotting Mandrakes today. Now. Who can tell me the properties of the Mandrake?’

Nobody was surprised when Hermione’s hand went up first.

‘Mandrake, or Mandragora, is a powerful restorative,’ said Hermione, sounding, as usual, as though she’d eaten the textbook. ‘It’s used to return people who’ve been transfigured or cursed to their original state.’

‘Excellent. Ten points to Gryffindor,’ said Professor Sprout. ‘The Mandrake forms an essential part of most antidotes. It’s also, however, dangerous. Who can tell me why?’

Hermione’s hand went up so fast it nearly took Harry’s glasses with it.

‘The cry of the Mandrake is fatal to anyone who hears it,’ she said promptly.

‘Lovely,’ murmured Harry dryly. He was still thinking about what a dandy Lockhart was.

‘Precisely. Take another ten points,’ said Professor Sprout. ‘Now, the Mandrakes we have here are still very young.’

She pointed at a row of deep trays, and everybody shuffled forward for a look. A hundred or so small tufty plants, purplish green, were growing in rows. They looked perfectly ordinary to Harry, who had no idea what Hermione meant by the cry of a plant.

‘Everyone take a pair of earmuffs,’ said Professor Sprout.

There was a scramble for any pair that wasn’t pink and fluffy.

‘When I tell you to put them on, make sure your ears are completely covered,’ said Professor Sprout. ‘When it’s safe to take them off, I’ll give you the thumbs up. Right. Earmuffs on.’

Harry snapped his over his ears. The world went silent. Professor Sprout put a pink fluffy pair over her own ears, rolled up her sleeves, took a firm hold of one of the tufty plants, and pulled.

Harry gasped, and nobody heard him.

Instead of roots, a small, muddy, extremely ugly baby came up out of the earth. The leaves were growing straight out of its head. Its skin was pale green and mottled, and it was quite plainly screaming its lungs out. Professor Sprout took a big pot from under the bench and plunged the Mandrake into it, and buried it in dark compost until only the leaves showed. Then she dusted her hands, gave them all the thumbs up, and took her earmuffs off.

‘As our Mandrakes are only seedlings, their cries won’t kill yet,’ she said, as calmly as if she’d just watered a begonia. ‘However, they’ll knock you out for several hours, and as I’m sure none of you want to miss your first day back, make sure your earmuffs are securely in place while you work. I’ll attract your attention when it’s time to pack up. Four to a tray. There’s a large supply of pots here. Compost in the sacks over there. And be careful of the Venomous Tentacula, it’s teething.’

She gave a sharp slap to a spiky dark-red plant as she said it, and it drew in a set of long feelers that had been inching over her shoulder.

Harry, Ron and Hermione were joined at their tray by a curly-haired Hufflepuff that Harry knew by sight and had never spoken to.

‘Justin Finch-Fletchley,’ he said brightly, shaking Harry’s hand. ‘Know who you are, of course, the famous Harry Potter, and you’re Hermione Granger, always top in everything...’ Hermione beamed and had her hand shaken too. ‘... and Ron Weasley. Wasn’t that your flying car?’

Ron didn’t smile. The Howler was still sitting on him.

‘That Lockhart’s something, isn’t he?’ said Justin happily, as they started filling their pots with dragon-dung compost. ‘Awfully brave chap. Have you read his books? I’d have died of fright if I’d been cornered in a telephone box by a werewolf, but he stayed cool and, zap, just fantastic. My name was down for Eton, you know.’

He said it as though it were the most impressive thing anybody had ever said.

‘I can tell,’ Harry added.

Ron looked at Harry with his eyebrows up, waiting to be told what an Eton was.

‘Oh, I can’t tell you how glad I am I came here instead. Of course, Mother was slightly disappointed, but since I made her read Lockhart’s books I think she’s begun to see how useful it’ll be to have a fully trained wizard in the family.’

‘It’d be more useful if we could use our ruddy spells outside of Hogwarts,’ Harry replied ruefully, and thought of Dobby, and the Dursleys, and a frying pan.

Justin laughed, in a way that reminded Harry far too much of Lockhart, and then they all put their earmuffs back on and went back to potting a tray of potentially lethal screaming vegetables that somebody had thought it sensible to hand to a roomful of twelve-year-olds. Wizards, Harry thought, were still mental. Beside him Ron winced, with the earmuffs on, at a noise he shouldn’t have been able to hear.

There wasn’t much chance to talk after that. Professor Sprout had made it look easy, and it wasn’t. The Mandrakes didn’t want to come out of the earth, and didn’t want to go back into it either, and they squirmed and kicked and flailed their sharp little fists and gnashed their teeth, and Harry spent ten whole minutes trying to force one particularly fat one into a pot. By the end of the lesson he was sweating, aching, and covered in earth, like everybody else, and they trudged back up to the castle for a wash before the Gryffindors hurried off to Transfiguration.

Professor McGonagall’s lessons were always hard work, and today was worse than most. Everything Harry had learned last year seemed to have run out of his head over the summer. He was supposed to be turning a beetle into a button.

‘It’s the same principle as the match,’ said Professor McGonagall, pacing between the desks. ‘Intent, Potter. The beetle must understand that you mean it. I once turned a vault’s worth of gold into beetles, a very long time ago, in a place I shan’t name, and the gold understood me perfectly, which is more than can be said for your beetle.’

‘A vault of gold, Professor?’ said Seamus. ‘Why?’

‘Because a gentleman I was working alongside at the time needed a great deal of gold to go missing in a hurry, and he had a way of asking that one found hard to refuse.’ Something that might have been fondness went across her face and was gone. ‘A Muggle. Scottish. He had a desk at a very dull-sounding office near the river, though he was seldom at it. I haven’t heard from him in a good many years. I expect he’s retired somewhere warm, and I expect he’s lying about it. Never mind him. Wrist, Potter.’

Harry’s wrist did its best. All he managed was to give his beetle a great deal of exercise, scuttling about the desk ahead of his wand.

Ron was having a far worse time of it. He’d patched his wand with borrowed Spellotape, but it seemed to be damaged beyond repair; it crackled and sparked at odd moments, and every time he tried to transfigure his beetle it swallowed him in a cloud of thick grey smoke that smelled of rotten eggs. Unable to see what he was doing, Ron put his elbow on his beetle and had to ask for a new one, and Professor McGonagall wasn’t pleased.

Harry was relieved to hear the bell. His brain felt like a sponge that had been wrung out. Everyone filed out except him and Ron, who was whacking his wand on the desk.

‘Stupid... useless... thing...’

‘Write home for another one,’ Harry suggested, as the wand let off a volley of bangs like a jumping jack.

‘Oh yeah, and get another Howler back,’ said Ron, and stuffed the wand, now hissing, into his bag.

Harry did his best to cheer him up on the way down.

‘Look, it still sparks. That’s something. Most of a spell’s the sparks.’

‘Is it?’

‘I don’t know. Probably.’

‘It’s your own fault your wand got snapped,’ said Hermione, catching them up, which didn’t help.

Nor did lunch, where Hermione showed them the handful of perfect coat buttons she’d made in Transfiguration.

‘What’ve we got this afternoon?’ said Harry, changing the subject as fast as he could.

‘Defence Against the Dark Arts,’ said Hermione at once. ‘And we’re sharing it with the Slytherins.’

‘Oh, God. That means I have to be around Malfoy,’ Harry said, in horror.

‘I’m sure you drew little love hearts around Lockhart’s lessons,’ Ron teased Hermione, and ducked the bread roll.

They finished lunch and went out into the overcast courtyard. Hermione sat down on a step and put her nose back into Voyages with Vampires, somewhere round the bit about the Nosferatu, Harry supposed, which she’d described to him at breakfast in rather more detail than he’d wanted with a kipper in front of him. He and Ron stood talking Quidditch for a few minutes before Harry became aware that he was being watched.

He looked up, and found the very small mousy-haired boy from the Sorting staring at him as though he’d been turned to stone. He had what looked like an ordinary Muggle camera clutched in both hands, and the moment Harry looked at him he went bright red.

‘All right, Harry? I’m... I’m Colin Creevey,’ he said breathlessly, taking a careful step forward. ‘I’m in Gryffindor too. D’you think... would it be all right if... can I have a picture?’ He lifted the camera, hopefully.

‘A picture?’ Harry repeated blankly.

‘So I can prove I’ve met you,’ said Colin eagerly, edging nearer. ‘I know all about you. Everyone’s told me. About how you survived when You Know Who tried to kill you, and how he disappeared and everything, and how you’ve still got a lightning scar on your forehead...’ His eyes went over Harry’s hairline like a searchlight. ‘... and a boy in my dormitory said if I develop the film in the right potion, the pictures’ll move.’ He took a great shuddering breath. ‘It’s brilliant here, isn’t it? I never knew all the odd stuff I could do was magic till I got the letter. My dad’s a milkman, he couldn’t believe it either. So I’m taking loads of pictures to send home to him. And it’d be really good if I had one of you...’ He looked up at Harry imploringly. ‘... maybe your friend could take it, and I could stand next to you? And then, could you sign it?’

Harry would have gone to his grave before admitting that he was flattered, and he was.

‘Signed photos? You’re giving out signed photos, Potter?’

Loud, scathing, and carrying to every corner, Dracina Malfoy’s voice rang round the courtyard. She’d stopped right behind Colin, with Crabbe and Goyle planted on either side of her like a pair of gateposts.

‘Everyone queue up!’ Malfoy roared to the crowd. ‘Harry Potter’s giving out signed photos!’

‘You want one?’ said Harry dryly.

Dracina snorted in disgust, and something in the snort got under Harry’s skin.

‘No, I’m not, actually. Shut up, Malfoy.’

‘You’re just jealous,’ piped up Colin, the whole of whom was about as thick as one of Crabbe’s necks.

‘Jealous?’ said Malfoy. She didn’t need to shout any more; half the courtyard was listening. ‘Of what? I don’t want a foul scar right across my head, thanks. I don’t think getting your head cut open makes you that special, myself.’

‘Eat slugs, Malfoy,’ said Ron angrily.

Crabbe stopped laughing and began to rub his conker-sized knuckles together.

‘Be careful, Weasley,’ sneered Malfoy. ‘You remember what happened the last time you crossed me!’

Ron’s hand went to his ear.

‘You don’t want to start any trouble, or your mummy’ll have to come and take you away from school.’ She put on a high, mocking voice. ‘If you put another toe out of line...‘

A knot of Slytherin fifth-years nearby laughed loudly.

‘Seeing as Weasley is your friend, and I’m NOT, not that I WANT to be friends with you, Weasley would like a signed photo, Potter,’ smirked Malfoy. ‘It’d be worth more than his family’s whole house.’

Ron whipped out his Spellotaped wand, but Hermione shut Voyages with Vampires with a snap and whispered, ‘Look out!’

‘What’s all this, what’s all this?’

Gilderoy Lockhart was striding towards them with his turquoise robes billowing. ‘Who’s giving out signed photos?’

Harry started to speak, and was cut short, because Lockhart had flung an arm round his shoulders and boomed, ‘Shouldn’t have asked! We meet again, Harry!’

‘Unfortunately,’ said Harry.

Why could the man never take a hint? Harry had never in his life tried so hard not to be liked by somebody, and it was having no effect whatever Harry didn’t like Men like Lockheart did. Pinned to Lockhart’s side and burning with humiliation, he watched Malfoy melt back into the crowd with that smug grin on her face, that bloody, infuriating grin, and swore to himself that he’d wipe it off her one day if it was the last thing he did.

‘Come on then, Mr Creevey,’ said Lockhart, beaming at Colin. ‘A double portrait, can’t say fairer than that, and we’ll both sign it for you.’

Colin fumbled with his camera and took the picture as the bell rang behind them for afternoon lessons.

‘Off you go, move along there,’ Lockhart called to the crowd, and he set off for the castle with Harry, who was wishing he knew a good Vanishing Spell, still clamped under his arm.

‘A word to the wise, Harry,’ said Lockhart, fatherly, as they went in by a side door. ‘I covered up for you back there with young Creevey. If he was photographing me too, your schoolfellows won’t think you’re setting yourself up so much...’

‘I... I didn’t even want my bloomin’ photo taken,’ Harry said irritably.

Lockhart, deaf to it, swept him down a corridor full of staring students and up a staircase.

‘Let me just say that handing out signed pictures at this stage of your career isn’t sensible. Looks a tad big-headed, Harry.’

‘Not that you’d know anything of that, sir,’ Harry said. He’d found that, with Lockhart, he was incapable of being anything less dry than a desert.

They’d reached Lockhart’s classroom, and Lockhart let him go at last. Harry yanked his robes straight and went for a seat at the very back, where he set about stacking all seven of Lockhart’s books in a wall in front of him, so that he wouldn’t have to look at the real thing over the top.

The rest of the class came clattering in, and Ron and Hermione sat down on either side of him.

‘You could’ve fried an egg on your face,’ said Ron. ‘You’d better hope Creevey doesn’t meet Ginny, they’ll be starting a Harry Potter fan club.’

Dracina had just come through the door. Ron’s words reached her, and she made a noise that Harry could only describe as a hiss and a spit put together.

‘Idiot Potter,’ she said, and sat down as far from them as the room allowed, with a huff that could be heard from the back.

‘You shut your bloody mouth up,’ Harry snapped at Ron. The last thing on earth he needed was for Lockhart to hear the words Harry Potter fan club.

When everyone was seated, Lockhart cleared his throat loudly, and the room went quiet. He leaned forward, picked up Neville’s copy of Travels with Trolls, and held it up so that the class could see his own portrait winking on the cover.

‘Me,’ he said, pointing at it and winking too. ‘Gilderoy Lockhart, Order of Merlin, Third Class, Honorary Member of the Dark Force Defence League, and five times winner of Witch Weekly’s Most Charming Smile Award. But I don’t talk about that. I didn’t get rid of the Bandon Banshee by smiling at her!’

He waited for the laugh. A few people smiled, weakly.

‘I see you’ve all bought a complete set of my books. Well done. I thought we’d start today with a little quiz. Nothing to worry about. Just to check how well you’ve read them, how much you’ve taken in...’

He handed out the papers, went back to the front, and said, ‘You have thirty minutes. Start... now!’

Harry looked down at his paper.

1. What is Gilderoy Lockhart’s favourite colour?
2. What is Gilderoy Lockhart’s secret ambition?
3. What, in your opinion, is Gilderoy Lockhart’s greatest achievement to date?

It went on like that for three sides, all the way down to:

1. When is Gilderoy Lockhart’s birthday, and what would his ideal gift be?

Half an hour later Lockhart collected the papers and rifled through them in front of the class.

‘Tut, tut. Hardly any of you remembered that my favourite colour is lilac. I say so in Year with the Yeti. And a few of you need to read Wanderings with Werewolves more carefully. I clearly state in chapter twelve that my ideal birthday gift would be harmony between all magic and non-magic peoples. Though I wouldn’t say no to a large bottle of Ogden’s Old Firewhisky!’

He gave them another roguish wink. Ron was staring at him with open disbelief. In the front row, Seamus and Dean were shaking with laughter they didn’t dare let out. At least, Harry thought, everybody in the room apart from Lockhart could see he was a berk.

Everybody apart from Lockhart and Hermione. Hermione was listening with her hands clasped and her whole face lit up, and she jumped when he said her name.

‘... but Miss Hermione Granger knew my secret ambition is to rid the world of evil and market my own range of hair-care potions. Good girl! In fact...’ He turned her paper over. ‘Full marks! Where is Miss Hermione Granger?’

Hermione raised a trembling hand.

‘Excellent!’ beamed Lockhart. ‘Quite excellent! Take ten points for Gryffindor! And so, to business...’

He bent down behind his desk and lifted a large covered cage on to it.

‘Now. Be warned! It is my job to arm you against the foulest creatures known to wizardkind! You may find yourselves facing your worst fears in this room. Know only that no harm can befall you whilst I am here. All I ask is that you remain calm.’

In spite of himself, Harry leaned round his wall of books for a look. Lockhart laid a hand on the cover. Dean and Seamus had stopped laughing. Neville was cowering in his front-row seat.

‘I must ask you not to scream,’ said Lockhart, in a low voice. ‘It might provoke them.’

The whole class held its breath. Lockhart whipped off the cover.

‘Yes,’ he said dramatically. ‘Freshly caught Cornish pixies.’

Seamus Finnigan couldn’t hold it. He let out a snort of laughter that even Lockhart couldn’t have mistaken for a scream of terror.

‘Yes?’ Lockhart smiled at him.

‘Well, they’re not... they’re not very... dangerous, are they?’ Seamus choked.

‘Don’t be so sure!’ said Lockhart, wagging a finger at him in a way that made Harry want to bite it. ‘Devilish tricky little blighters they can be!’

The pixies were electric blue and about eight inches tall, with pointed faces and voices so shrill that it was like listening to a cage full of budgies having a row. The moment the cover came off they’d started jabbering and rocketing about, rattling the bars and pulling faces at whoever was nearest.

‘Right then,’ Lockhart said loudly. ‘Let’s see what you make of them!’

And he opened the cage.

It was pandemonium. The pixies went off in every direction like fireworks. Two of them seized Neville by the ears and lifted him clean into the air. Several shot straight through the window and showered the back row with glass. The rest set about wrecking the classroom more thoroughly than a rhinoceros could have. They snatched up ink bottles and sprayed the class with them. They shredded books and parchment, tore pictures off the walls, tipped over the bin, grabbed bags and threw them out through the broken window, and inside two minutes half the class was under the desks and Neville was swinging from the candelabra in the ceiling.

‘Come on now, round them up, round them up, they’re only pixies...’

Across the room, Malfoy had four of them on her. They were in her hair, and pulling it, and one had her by the ear, and she’d lost her wand under a desk somewhere, and for all her shrieking and flailing she couldn’t shake them.

‘Potter, do something!’ she screamed at him.

Harry had no idea why she’d picked him. Of all the people in the room. But against every bit of his better judgement, he found he was already on his feet with a copy of Gadding with Ghouls in his hand, and he waded in and swung it, and swung it again, and the pixies went off her in a cloud of blue sparks and bad language, and he beat the last one out of her hair with the spine of the book while she sat perfectly still with her hands over her face.

He didn’t see what her face did when she took her hands away. He didn’t see that she looked at him, in that moment, as though he were the most heroic thing she’d ever laid eyes on, or that she turned straight round in her seat afterwards and pulled a face at Hermione that Hermione returned with interest. He didn’t see that her eyes stayed on him for the whole of the rest of the lesson. He’d already turned away.

‘You’re welcome,’ Harry said irritably, when he’d got his breath back and gone over to address her.

Dracina put her nose in the air and snorted. She was still, evidently, cross with him about breakfast, and he could see she’d rather have swallowed a pixie than thank him, or give him the satisfaction of being thanked.

Lockhart, meanwhile, had rolled up his sleeves, brandished his wand, and bellowed, ‘Peskipiksi Pesternomi!’

It did nothing whatever. One of the pixies took the wand off him and threw it out of the window after the bags. Lockhart gulped and dived under his own desk, and was missed by inches as Neville came down a second later with the candelabra on top of him.

The bell rang. There was a stampede for the door. In the relative quiet that followed, Lockhart straightened up, saw Harry, Ron and Hermione almost at the exit, and said, ‘Well, I’ll ask you three to just nip the rest of them back into their cage.’

And he swept past them and shut the door smartly behind him.

‘Thanks, Professor,’ Harry said to the door, with feeling.

‘Can you believe him?’ roared Ron, as one of the remaining pixies bit him painfully on the ear.

‘He just wants to give us some hands-on experience,’ said Hermione, stopping two pixies dead with a neat Freezing Charm and stuffing them back in the cage.

‘Hands on?’ said Harry, who was trying to grab one that kept dancing just out of reach with its tongue out. He got it, and waved it at Hermione. ‘Mission accomplished, Hermione, but look at the state of this classroom. He didn’t have a clue what he was doing.’

‘Rubbish,’ said Hermione. ‘You’ve read his books. Look at all those amazing things he’s done...’

‘He says he’s done,’ Ron muttered.

Harry nodded. He didn’t look round at the far corner of the wrecked classroom, where Dracina Malfoy was still sitting, long after the bell, with a small black book open on the desk in front of her and a quill moving fast, writing down what she’d rather have died than say.

Harry spent a good deal of the next few days ducking out of sight whenever he saw Gilderoy Lockhart coming along a corridor.

Colin Creevey was harder to dodge. Colin seemed to have learned Harry’s timetable by heart, and nothing in the world gave him more pleasure than saying, ‘All right, Harry?’ six or seven times a day and getting, ‘Hullo, Colin,’ back, however worn-out Harry sounded when he said it. He could be wearing, Colin. But Harry found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he didn’t mind it as much as he let on. It was rather nice, if he was honest, to have somebody following him about with that look on his face. It was a bit like having a little brother who thought you’d hung the moon. Harry had never had anybody think that about him, and he liked it a good deal more than he’d have admitted to Ron.

Hedwig was still furious with him about the car. Ron’s wand was still misbehaving, and outdid itself on Friday morning in Charms by leaping out of his hand and hitting tiny Professor Flitwick squarely between the eyes, where it raised a large, throbbing green boil. So, one way and another, Harry was glad to get to the weekend. He, Ron and Hermione meant to go down and see Hagrid on Saturday morning.

Harry, however, was shaken awake several hours before he’d have chosen by Oliver Wood, captain of the Gryffindor Quidditch team.

‘Whassamatter?’ said Harry groggily.

‘Quidditch practice!’ said Wood. ‘Come on!’

Harry squinted at the window. A thin mist hung across a sky that was only just going pink and gold. Now that he was awake he couldn’t understand how he’d slept through the row the birds were making.

‘Oliver,’ Harry croaked, ‘it’s the crack of dawn, mate.’

‘Exactly,’ said Wood. His eyes were shining with something that wasn’t altogether sane. ‘It’s part of our new training programme. Come on, grab your broom and let’s go. None of the other teams have started training yet. We’re going to be first off the mark this year...’

Yawning, and shivering a bit, Harry climbed out of bed and hunted for his Quidditch robes, muttering under his breath about mad Scotsmen in words he’d learned from Ron.

‘Good man,’ said Wood. ‘Meet you on the pitch in fifteen minutes.’

Harry loved Quidditch. He loved it with all his heart. But just then, with his feet on the cold floor and the dormitory still grey, he’d have throttled Oliver Wood sooner than Dobby.

He pulled on his kit and scribbled a note for Ron. He stood over it for a moment with the quill in his hand, wondering whether to leave one for Hermione too, and decided that the wisest course was not to, because if she knew where he’d gone she’d have been in the stands by half past six with her arms folded, and he didn’t want to think about why. He took his broom and went down through the empty common room, and he’d got as far as the portrait hole when there was a clatter on the stairs behind him.

It was Colin. He came down three steps at a time with his camera swinging wildly on its strap and a grin on his face that Harry couldn’t help liking.

‘Harry! Harry! I’ve done it! Look, I’ve developed it, look!’

He held out a photograph. In it, a black-and-white Lockhart was tugging with both hands on an arm that Harry recognised as his own. Harry was pleased to see that his photographic self was putting up a stiff fight and refusing point-blank to be dragged into view. As they watched, Lockhart gave up and slumped against the white border of the picture, panting.

‘Will you sign it?’ said Colin eagerly.

‘No,’ said Harry flatly, with a look round to be sure the room was really empty. ‘Sorry, Colin, I’m in a hurry. Quidditch practice.’

He climbed through the portrait hole.

‘Oh, wow! Wait for me! I’ve never watched a Quidditch game before!’

Colin scrambled through after him.

‘It’ll be really boring,’ Harry said quickly, but Colin wasn’t listening. His face was alight.

‘You were the youngest house player in a hundred years, weren’t you, Harry? Weren’t you?’ said Colin, trotting beside him. ‘You must be brilliant.’

Harry’s chest went out an inch without his telling it to. He just might be, he thought. He might just be, at that. And he was so warmed by it that he heard himself say, ‘Come on, then. If you’re coming, keep up.’

‘I don’t really understand Quidditch,’ said Colin breathlessly. ‘Is it true there are four balls? And two of them fly round trying to knock people off their brooms?’

‘Yes,’ said Harry heavily, and settled in to explain it. ‘They’re called Bludgers. There are two Beaters on each team, who carry clubs to beat the Bludgers away from their side. Fred and George Weasley are the Gryffindor Beaters.’

‘And what are the other balls for?’ Colin asked, missing two steps because he was gazing up at Harry with his mouth open.

‘Well, the Quaffle, that’s the biggish red one, is the one that scores goals. Three Chasers on each team throw the Quaffle to each other and try to get it through the goalposts at the end of the pitch. They’re three long poles with hoops on the end.’

‘And the fourth ball...’

‘... is the Golden Snitch,’ said Harry, ‘and it’s very small, very fast and difficult to catch. But that’s what the Seeker’s got to do, because a game of Quidditch doesn’t end until the Snitch has been caught. And whichever team’s Seeker gets the Snitch earns his team an extra hundred and fifty points.’

‘And you’re Gryffindor Seeker, aren’t you?’ said Colin, in awe.

‘Yes,’ said Harry, as they came out of the castle on to grass soaked with dew. ‘And there’s the Keeper, too. He guards the goalposts. That’s it, really.’

Colin didn’t stop asking questions the whole way down the lawns, and Harry only shook him off at the door of the changing rooms.

‘I’ll go and get a good seat, Harry!’ Colin called after him in his piping voice, and ran off towards the stands.

He was a good lad, Harry thought, watching him go. A good lad.

The rest of the team were already inside, and Wood was the only one who looked properly awake. Fred and George sat puffy-eyed and tousled beside Alicia Spinnet, a fourth-year, who seemed to be asleep against the wall. Opposite them the other two Chasers, Katie Bell and Angelina Johnson, were yawning in unison.

‘There you are, Harry, what kept you?’ said Wood briskly. ‘Now, I wanted a quick word with you all before we actually get out on the pitch, because I spent the summer devising a whole new training programme, which I really think will make all the difference...’

He held up a large diagram of a Quidditch pitch, covered in lines and arrows and crosses in half a dozen colours of ink. He tapped it with his wand and the arrows began to crawl across it like caterpillars. As Wood launched into his tactics, Fred’s head drooped sideways on to Alicia’s shoulder, and he began to snore.

The first board took nearly twenty minutes. There was a second board under it, and a third under that. Harry sank into a stupor as Wood went on, and on.

‘So,’ said Wood at last, and jerked Harry out of a dream about what he could have been eating in the Great Hall at that very minute, ‘is that clear? Any questions?’

‘I’ve got a question, Oliver,’ said George, who’d woken with a start. ‘Why couldn’t you have told us all this yesterday, when we were awake?’

Wood wasn’t pleased.

‘Now listen here, you lot,’ he said, glowering at them. ‘We should have won the Quidditch Cup last year. We’re easily the best team. But unfortunately, owing to circumstances beyond our control...’

‘Sorry, lads. I was busy being in mortal danger from Vol... You Know Who.’

Wood nodded.

‘No worries, Harry. I won’t fault it. You’re a bloody hero. But I’m just saying it did us no good last year. So this year, give us some notice before you go off to save Hogwarts or the whole wizarding world, yeah?’

‘I’ll be sure to put it down in my diary,’ Harry said.

The whole team went up in laughter, and even Wood had to stop and get himself back under control. The final match was still, plainly, eating at him.

‘This year, we batter the competition, or I batter you lot. Is that understood?’ Wood shouted, and he seized his broom and led them out, and his team followed, stiff-legged and yawning.

They’d been in the changing room so long that the sun was properly up now, though wisps of mist still lay on the grass. As Harry walked out on to the pitch he saw Ron and Hermione in the stands.

‘Aren’t you finished yet?’ Ron called, incredulous.

‘Haven’t even started,’ said Harry, looking with naked envy at the toast and marmalade they’d brought out from breakfast. ‘Wood’s been teaching us new moves.’

‘You didn’t leave me a note,’ Hermione called down. She said it lightly. Her face wasn’t light.

‘Sorry. I was in a hurry.’

‘I found it anyway,’ said Hermione, and went back to her toast.

Harry mounted his broom and kicked off, and the cold morning air hit him in the face and woke him up far more thoroughly than Wood’s three boards had. It was wonderful to be back on the pitch. He went round the whole stadium at full speed, racing Fred and George.

‘What’s that funny clicking noise?’ called Fred, as they hurtled round the corner.

Harry looked into the stands. Colin was up in one of the highest seats with his camera to his eye, taking picture after picture, and the sound of it carried oddly in the empty stadium.

‘Look this way, Harry! This way!’ he shrilled.

‘Who’s that?’ said Fred.

‘That’s Colin. He’s a good lad. He just wants my attention,’ replied Harry.

‘What’s going on?’ said Wood, frowning, as he skimmed over to them. ‘Why’s that first-year taking pictures? I don’t like it. He could be a Slytherin spy, trying to find out about our new training programme.’

‘He’s in Gryffindor,’ said Harry quickly.

‘And the Slytherins don’t need a spy, Oliver,’ said George.

‘What makes you say that?’ said Wood testily.

‘Because they’re here in person,’ said George, and pointed.

Several figures in green robes were walking out on to the pitch with broomsticks in their hands.

‘I don’t believe it!’ Wood hissed. ‘I booked the pitch for today! We’ll see about this!’

He shot for the ground, landed a good deal harder than he’d meant to, and staggered as he got off his broom. Harry, Fred and George came down after him.

‘Flint!’ Wood bellowed at the Slytherin captain. ‘This is our practice time! We got up specially! You can clear off now!’

Marcus Flint was even bigger than Wood, and there was a look of trollish cunning on his face as he answered.

‘Plenty of room for all of us, Wood.’

Angelina, Alicia and Katie had come over too. There were no girls on the Slytherin side. They stood shoulder to shoulder facing the Gryffindors, and every one of them was leering.

‘But I booked the pitch!’ said Wood, spitting with rage. ‘I booked it!’

‘Ah,’ said Flint, ‘but I’ve got a specially signed note here from Professor Snape. I, Professor S. Snape, give the Slytherin team permission to practise today on the Quidditch pitch, owing to the need to train their new Seeker.‘

‘You’ve got a new Seeker?’ said Wood, thrown. ‘Where?’

And from behind the six large figures in front of them, a much smaller one pushed, shoved and tutted her way through.

It was Dracina Malfoy. She looked enormously pleased with herself, and she gave Harry the smug look she gave him in Potions whenever her cauldron came out the right colour and his didn’t.

‘Of bloody course,’ said Harry.

Dracina huffed.

‘Aren’t you Lucius Malfoy’s daughter?’ said Fred, looking at her with dislike.

‘Funny you should mention Dracina’s father,’ said Flint, and the whole Slytherin team smiled wider. ‘Let me show you the generous gift he’s made to the Slytherin team.’

All seven of them held out their brooms. Seven brand-new, highly polished handles, and seven sets of fine gold lettering that spelled Nimbus Two Thousand and One, gleamed under the Gryffindors’ noses in the early sun.

‘Very latest model. Only came out last month,’ said Flint carelessly, flicking a speck of dust off the end of his. ‘I believe it outstrips the old Two Thousand series by a considerable amount. As for the old Cleansweeps...’ He smiled nastily at Fred and George, who were both holding Cleansweep Fives. ‘... sweeps the board with them.’

Nobody on the Gryffindor team could find anything to say. Malfoy was smirking so hard that her silver eyes had gone to slits.

‘Oh, look,’ said Flint. ‘A pitch invasion.’

Ron and Hermione were coming across the grass to see what was going on.

‘What’s happening?’ Ron asked Harry. ‘Why aren’t you playing? And what’s she doing here?’

He’d seen the green Quidditch robes.

‘I’m the new Slytherin Seeker, Weasley,’ said Malfoy smugly. ‘Everyone’s just been admiring the brooms my father’s bought our team.’

Ron gaped at the seven superb broomsticks.

‘Good, aren’t they?’ said Malfoy smoothly. ‘But perhaps the Gryffindor team will be able to raise some gold and get new brooms too. You could raffle off those Cleansweep Fives. I expect a museum would bid for them.’

The Slytherin team drew breath to laugh, and Harry got in first.

‘You think some pretty thing can make up for talent?’ he asked, accusingly.

And something happened to Malfoy’s face.

The twinkle came up in her eyes, the one from the common-room floor, and she went pink, the exact pink she’d gone in Madam Malkin’s a year and a lifetime ago when a boy who didn’t know who she was had asked her whether she was a princess. And Harry heard what he’d said. And he had, at the same instant, the feeling again, the one he didn’t have a word for, the one that wanted that twinkle to stay exactly where it was and never go anywhere else.

‘You... you think I’m pretty?’

Her voice had gone soft. She looked, for a moment, as though she’d gone somewhere else entirely, somewhere a long way off and very pleasant, and had every intention of staying. Harry didn’t notice any of that. He’d said the wrong thing. He knew, too, precisely what Malfoy would do with it, which was tease him into the ground with it for the rest of his life, so he’d better get out while he could.

‘I... I meant the brooms, actually,’ Harry said.

Malfoy came back from wherever she’d been. The pink went to red. She stamped up to him until they were almost nose to nose, and she was the taller of the two, by an inch, and she used it.

‘Choose your words more carefully next time. Stupid Potter!’

And she thumped him, in the chest, so unexpectedly that he went back a step and nearly sat down.

‘Don’t you dare touch him!’

Hermione was between them before Harry had got his balance. She’d come from nowhere, and she was in Malfoy’s face with such fury that Malfoy actually stepped back.

It lasted about a second. Then Malfoy came forward again, and the two of them were nose to nose, and Harry could see Hermione’s fists and Malfoy’s teeth.

‘I’ll touch him whenever I want, you disgusting thieving Mudblood!’ Malfoy snarled.

The whole Gryffindor team cried out at the word. Fred and George went for her and were caught by Angelina and Katie. But nobody caught Hermione, Hermione had got two handfuls of Malfoy’s hair before anyone could move, and Malfoy had got hers, the pair of them went round in a circle on the grass screaming at each other.

Harry had to get Malfoy off. He’d seen what she’d done to Ron in the stands last year, and he wasn’t going to watch her do it to Hermione. He went in with both hands. The trouble was that there were two girls and a great deal of hair, but even within the confusion he got Malfoy by both arms, from behind, and pulled her clear.

She twisted round in his grip. For one second she looked at him, close, with that twinkle, and then she remembered herself and shoved him off with both hands.

‘Stupid bloody Potter!’ she screamed.

‘Get away from him!’ cried Ron, and his wand came up.

There was a bang that echoed round the stadium, and a jet of green light shot out of the wrong end of Ron’s wand and hit him in the stomach, and he went over backwards on to the grass.

‘Ron! Ron! Are you all right?’ squealed Hermione.

Ron opened his mouth. Nothing came out. Then he gave an almighty belch, and several slugs slid out of his mouth and into his lap.

The Slytherin team were helpless. Flint was bent double, clinging to his new broom to stay upright. Malfoy was on all fours, beating the grass with her fist, and the sight of that made Harry angrier than anything else that morning.

The Gryffindors had gathered round Ron, who was belching up large, glistening slugs at a steady rate. Nobody seemed to want to touch him.

‘We’d better get him to Hagrid’s, it’s nearest,’ Harry said to Hermione, who nodded bravely, and the two of them hauled Ron up by the arms.

‘What happened, Harry? What happened? Is he ill? But you can cure him, can’t you?’

Colin had come down from the stands and was dancing alongside them as they left the pitch. Ron gave a tremendous heave and more slugs ran down his front.

‘Oooh,’ said Colin, fascinated, and raised his camera. ‘Can you hold him still, Harry?’

‘Get out of the way, Colin!’ said Harry angrily.

He and Hermione got Ron out of the stadium and across the grounds towards the edge of the Forest.

‘Nearly there, Ron,’ said Hermione, as Hagrid’s cabin came into sight. ‘You’ll be all right in a minute... almost there...’

They were twenty feet from the door when it opened, and it wasn’t Hagrid who came out. Gilderoy Lockhart, in robes of the palest mauve, came striding into the sunshine.

‘Quick, behind here,’ Harry hissed, and dragged Ron behind a bush. Hermione followed, with some reluctance.

Harry swore at Lockhart inside his head. Ron was leaking slugs into the undergrowth and Lockhart had to be here, now, making the whole morning about himself, and smelling, from twenty feet, of lavender.

‘It’s a simple matter if you know what you’re doing!’ Lockhart was saying loudly, back over his shoulder. ‘If you need help, you know where I am! I’ll let you have a copy of my book. I’m surprised you haven’t already got one. I’ll sign one tonight and send it over. Well, goodbye!’

And he strode off towards the castle.

Harry waited until he was out of sight, then pulled Ron out of the bush and up to Hagrid’s door and knocked, hard. Hagrid opened it at once, looking thoroughly grumpy, and his face cleared the moment he saw who it was.

‘Bin wonderin’ when you’d come ter see me. Come in, come in. Thought you mighta bin Professor Lockhart back again.’

Harry and Hermione got Ron over the threshold and into the one-roomed cabin, with its enormous bed in one corner and its fire crackling in another. Hagrid didn’t seem in the least put out by Ron’s condition, which Harry explained in a hurry as he lowered Ron into a chair.

‘Better out than in,’ Hagrid said cheerfully, and set a big copper basin in front of him. ‘Get ‘em all up, Ron.’

‘I don’t think there’s anything to do except wait for it to stop,’ said Hermione anxiously, as Ron bent over the basin. ‘That’s a difficult curse to work at the best of times, but with a broken wand...’

Hagrid bustled about making tea, and Fang the boarhound slobbered on Harry.

‘What did Lockhart want with you, Hagrid?’ Harry asked, scratching Fang’s ears.

‘Givin’ me advice on gettin’ kelpies out of a well,’ growled Hagrid, moving a half-plucked cockerel off the table and setting down the teapot. ‘Like I don’ know. An’ bangin’ on about some Banshee he banished. If one word of it was true, I’ll eat my kettle.’

It was most unlike Hagrid to run down a Hogwarts teacher, and Harry looked at him in surprise. Hermione, on the other hand, said in a voice rather higher than her usual one, ‘I think you’re being a bit unfair. Professor Dumbledore obviously thought he was the best man for the job...’

‘He was the on’y man for the job,’ said Hagrid, holding out a plate of treacle toffee while Ron coughed wetly into the basin. ‘An’ I mean the on’y one. Gettin’ very difficult ter find anyone fer the Dark Arts job. People aren’t too keen ter take it on, see. They’re startin’ ter think it’s jinxed. No one’s lasted long fer a while now. So tell me,’ said Hagrid, with a jerk of his head at Ron, ‘who was he tryin’ ter curse?’

Harry sighed.

‘Okay. So it’s a long story, Hagrid. But Malfoy was trying to antagonise us all. She and the Slytherin team were making a big fuss over their new bloody brooms just to make us all jealous. I told her that those pretty things couldn’t make up for any talent, and...’

‘Actually, mate. You said "some pretty thing". Big difference,’ Ron pointed out, from the basin.

‘Yeah... b-but it was obvious what I meant. Malfoy still thought I said she was pretty. Then she went mental!’

Hagrid’s eyes narrowed. He looked at Ron. Ron shrugged, and then, slowly, nodded, and Hagrid nodded back, and the two of them seemed to have had a whole conversation in it without a word spoken, and Harry hadn’t the faintest idea what it was about.

‘I see,’ said Hagrid. He said it very diplomatically.

‘She attacked Harry!’ Hermione added firmly.

‘Yeah!’ said Harry. ‘T-then she said she’ll touch me whenever she liked, after Hermione told her to stop. Then she called Hermione a Mudblood. And it just went to chaos.’

‘That’s a horrible thing to call another witch,’ said Hagrid. He sounded scandalised, and he looked at Hermione with real feeling, and with something else under it that might have been a dawning understanding of exactly what the two witches in question had been fighting over. ‘An’ that’s when Ron got cursed?’ Hagrid asked.

‘Yes. After I tried to get Malfoy off of Hermione. I grabbed her, and Ron must’ve thought he was saving me from her. So he used his wand, but it backfired.’

‘An’ why’d you grab Malfoy?’ Hagrid asked. There was something odd in his voice.

‘W-well, because she’s dangerous. You saw how she was with Ron last year. She’s so spiteful, a-and mean too, Hagrid.’

‘Right,’ said Hagrid, and sighed.

‘I thought Harry was very brave, Hagrid,’ Hermione added.

Hagrid sighed again, and rubbed the back of his neck.

‘Of course. Harry is very brave,’ Hagrid said. ‘It’s not right that Miss Malfoy called you that, Hermione. An’ they haven’t invented a spell our Hermione can’t do,’ he added, proudly, and Hermione went a brilliant magenta.

‘It’s a disgusting thing to call someone,’ said Ron, wiping his sweaty forehead with a hand that shook. ‘Dirty blood, see. Common blood. It’s mad. Most wizards these days are half-blood anyway. If we hadn’t married Muggles we’d’ve died out. We all know Squibs come from bloody incest. But all them lot like the Lestranges and the Blacks would rather marry their sisters than a Muggle-born.’

‘What’s a Squib?’ said Harry.

‘Someone born to wizard parents who hasn’t got any...’ Ron stopped, heaved, produced two slugs, and went on. ‘... any magic. Can’t do a thing. It’s rare. Dad reckons it’s what you get when the same five families keep marrying each other for three hundred years. Doesn’t stop them doing it.’

‘I don’t get why they’re so precious about it,’ said Harry. ‘All of it. The blood. Dumbledore told me, in the hospital wing last year, that Muggle-borns are probably just recessive. From old magical ancestors, way back. So it’s all the same blood anyway, isn’t it? There’s nothing to be precious about.’

‘That’s the magical equivalent of pseudoscience, Harry, for want of a better word,’ said Hermione, who’d gone pink again, this time with interest. ‘Nobody’s ever actually tested it. There’s no data at all. I’d like to do the research myself when I’ve got time, properly, with a control group...’

‘Well, whatever it is,’ said Harry, ‘we should all be on the same side. All of us. Wizards, I mean. Muggle-born, pure-blood, half, whatever. We ought to be standing together. Especially against...’ He thought of a frying pan, and a lock, and three days. ‘There are some dreadful Muggles out there. Really dreadful. Not all of them. Your parents seem all right, Hermione, they seem lovely. But there’s enough of the other kind that we can’t afford to be fighting each other over whose grandad was what.’

He hadn’t known he was going to say all that. It had come up on its own.

Ron lifted his head out of the basin. There was a slug on his chin and his eyes were bright.

‘Yeah,’ he said thickly. ‘Yeah. That’s it, Harry. All in it together. You’re right. Mum says that. Dad says that.’ He belched. ‘Sorry.’

‘I’m with you, Harry,’ said Hermione. She said it very simply, and very seriously, as though it were a vow. ‘Whatever you decide. I think it’s a lovely idea.’

‘And anyone who thinks you’re less than them because of your parents,’ said Harry, warming to it, ‘can say it to me, and I’ll tell them you’re one of the cleverest witches there’s ever been. Anyone. Malfoy included.’

Hermione didn’t answer.

She was looking at him with her mouth slightly open and her eyes gone very far away, in a manner Harry had seen once already that morning, on somebody else, and had no name for in either case.

‘Hermione? You all right?’

‘Yes,’ said Hermione, from a long way off. ‘Yes. I’m fine, Harry.’

Hagrid looked from Hermione, to Harry, to the door, through which Dracina Malfoy had so recently been discussed, and sighed for a third time, in the manner of a man who has just understood that his young friend is standing in the middle of a battlefield and hasn’t noticed the wands.

‘Bu’ maybe it was a good thing yer wand backfired,’ he said, steering for safer ground with the skill of long practice. ‘’Spect Lucius Malfoy would’ve come marchin’ up ter school if yeh’d cursed his daughter. Least yer not in trouble.’

Harry would have pointed out that trouble didn’t come a great deal worse than slugs pouring out of your mouth, but he couldn’t, because Hagrid’s treacle toffee had welded his jaws together.

‘Harry,’ said Hagrid suddenly, as if a thought had just struck him. ‘Gotta bone ter pick with yeh. I’ve heard you’ve bin givin’ out signed photos. How come I haven’t got one?’

Furious, Harry wrenched his teeth apart.

‘I have not been giving out signed photos,’ he said hotly. ‘If Lockhart’s still putting that about...’

Then he saw that Hagrid was laughing.

‘I’m on’y jokin’,’ he said, and clapped Harry genially on the back, which sent him face first into the table. ‘I knew yeh hadn’t really. I told Lockhart yeh didn’ need teh. Yer more famous than him without tryin’.’

‘Bet he didn’t like that,’ said Harry, sitting up and rubbing his chin.

‘Don’ think he did,’ said Hagrid, with his eyes twinkling. ‘An’ then I told him I’d never read one o’ his books, an’ he decided ter go. Treacle toffee, Ron?’ he added, as Ron came up out of the basin.

‘No thanks,’ said Ron weakly. ‘Better not risk it.’

‘Come an’ see what I’ve bin growin’,’ said Hagrid, as Harry and Hermione finished their tea.

In the little vegetable patch behind the cabin were a dozen of the biggest pumpkins Harry had ever seen. Each one was the size of a boulder.

‘Gettin’ on well, aren’t they?’ said Hagrid happily. ‘Fer the Hallowe’en feast... should be big enough by then.’

‘Hagrid, what the bloody hell have you been feeding them? Pumpkin steroids?’ said Harry.

Hagrid looked over his shoulder to make sure they were alone.

‘Well, I’ve bin givin’ them... you know... a bit o’ help.’

Harry noticed Hagrid’s flowery pink umbrella leaning against the back wall. He’d had reason before now to think that the umbrella wasn’t all it appeared; in fact he had a strong suspicion that Hagrid’s old school wand lived inside it. Hagrid wasn’t meant to do magic. He’d been expelled in his third year, and Harry had never found out why. Any mention of it and Hagrid would clear his throat and go mysteriously deaf until somebody changed the subject.

‘An Engorgement Charm, I suppose?’ said Hermione, halfway between disapproval and amusement. ‘Well, you’ve done a good job on them.’

‘That’s what yer little sister said,’ said Hagrid, with a nod at Ron. ‘Met her jus’ yesterday.’ He looked sideways at Harry, and his beard twitched. ‘Said she was jus’ lookin’ round the grounds, but I reckon she was hopin’ she might run inter someone else at my house.’ He winked at Harry. ‘If yeh ask me, she wouldn’ say no ter a signed...’

‘Oi, shut up, that’s Ron’s sister,’ said Harry.

Ron snorted with laughter and sprayed the ground with slugs.

‘Watch it!’ Hagrid roared, and hauled Ron away from his pumpkins.

It was nearly lunchtime, and since Harry had had one piece of treacle toffee since dawn, he was keen to get back to the castle and eat. They said goodbye to Hagrid and walked back up, Ron hiccuping now and then but producing only two very small slugs.

‘She hit you,’ said Ron, halfway up the lawn. ‘Malfoy. Actually hit you.’

‘I know. I was there.’

‘In the chest. Because you said she was pretty.’

‘I didn’t say she was pretty.’

‘You said some pretty thing.’

‘About the brooms, Ron.’

‘Right,’ said Ron, and hiccuped, and had the grace to say nothing more. Hermione, on Harry’s other side, had said nothing at all since the hut, and walked very close.

They’d barely set foot in the cool of the Entrance Hall when a voice rang out.

‘There you are, Potter, Weasley.’

Professor McGonagall was coming towards them, looking stern.

‘You will both do your detentions this evening.’

‘What are we doing, Professor?’ said Ron, nervously suppressing a burp.

‘You will be polishing the silver in the trophy room with Mr Filch,’ said Professor McGonagall. ‘And no magic, Weasley. Elbow grease.’

Ron gulped. Argus Filch, the caretaker, was hated by every student in the school.

‘And you, Potter, will be helping Professor Lockhart answer his fan mail,’ said Professor McGonagall.

Harry’s heart filled with a dread he’d last felt watching a turban come off the back of a man’s head.

‘P-Professor, please. Not that. I’ll go head first into the Forbidden Forest again if you like. I’ll pick the mushrooms. I’ll lick all the toads and consort with the forest hags. I’ll learn tunes from the centaurs. Whatever you want, Professor. Just not that.’

Professor McGonagall’s mouth did something it very rarely did, which was twitch, and the twitch got away from her and became, briefly, a chuckle. She covered it with a cough.

‘Mr Potter, if you wanted to do it, it wouldn’t be much of a punishment, would it? Anyway, Lockhart requested you specifically.’

‘Bugger,’ Harry said under his breath.

‘Language, Mr Potter,’ McGonagall said, doing her best to sound indignant through what was left of the chuckle. ‘Eight o’clock sharp, both of you.’

Harry and Ron slouched into the Great Hall in the deepest gloom, with Hermione behind them wearing a well-you-did-break-school-rules expression. Harry found he didn’t fancy his shepherd’s pie as much as he’d thought he would. Both he and Ron were sure they’d got the worse deal.

‘Filch’ll have me there all night,’ said Ron heavily. ‘No magic! There must be about a hundred cups in that room. I’m no good at Muggle cleaning.’

‘I’d swap any time,’ said Harry hollowly. ‘I’ve had loads of practice with the Dursleys. Answering Lockhart’s fan mail... I reckon Lockheart likes men.. Ugh.’

Saturday afternoon melted away, and in what felt like no time at all it was five to eight and Harry was dragging his feet along the second-floor corridor to Lockhart’s office. He set his teeth and knocked.

The door flew open at once. Lockhart beamed down at him.

‘Ah, here’s the scallywag!’ he said. ‘Come in, Harry, come in.’

The walls shone by the light of a great many candles with countless framed photographs of Lockhart. He’d signed several of them. Another large pile sat on his desk.

‘You can address the envelopes!’ Lockhart told Harry, as though this were an enormous treat.

‘You’re too kind,’ Harry said, meaning the opposite.

‘Oh, yes. I really am. Thank you for noticing, Harry. This first one’s to Gladys Gudgeon, bless her. Huge fan of mine.’

The minutes crawled. They crawled on their stomachs. Lockhart, to be fair to him, did nothing worse than talk, but the lavender came off him in waves, and the waves got higher as the evening went on. Lockheart definitely liked men. Just look at how he dressed. Harry let Lockheart’s voice wash over him and said ‘Mmm’ and ‘Right’ and ‘Yeah’ at intervals. Now and then a phrase surfaced, like ‘Fame’s a fickle friend, Harry’ or ‘Celebrity is as celebrity does, remember that’. The candles burned down, and the light moved over the dozens of Lockharts on the walls, every one of them watching him. Harry’s hand ached. He was writing out, for what felt like the thousandth time, somebody’s address, this one a Veronica Smethley, and thinking, please let it be nearly time, please, it’s got to be nearly time...

And then he heard something.

Something quite apart from the spitting of the candles and Lockhart’s drone about his readers. A voice. A voice that went into the bone, a voice of breathtaking, ice-cold venom.

‘Come... come to me... let me rip you... let me tear you... let me kill you...‘

Harry jumped so hard that a great lilac blot spread across Veronica Smethley’s street.

‘What?’ he said loudly.

‘I know!’ said Lockhart. ‘Six solid months at the top of the bestseller list! Broke all records!’

‘No, for God’s sake, not that!’ said Harry frantically. ‘That voice!’

‘Sorry?’ said Lockhart, puzzled. ‘What voice?’

‘That... that voice that said... didn’t you hear it?’

Lockhart was looking at him in high astonishment.

‘What are you talking about, Harry? Perhaps you’re getting a little drowsy? Merlin, look at the time! We’ve been here nearly four hours! I’d never have believed it. The time’s flown, hasn’t it? It always does when people are around me.’

Harry didn’t answer. He was straining every nerve to hear the voice again. But there was nothing now except Lockhart telling him, ‘You mustn’t expect a treat like this every time you get detention, Harry.’

‘Oh, I hope so, Mr Lockhart,’ Harry said, dazed, and left.

It was so late that the common room was almost empty. Harry went straight up. Ron wasn’t back. Harry pulled on his pyjamas, got into bed, and waited.

Half an hour later Ron came in, nursing his right arm and bringing a powerful smell of polish into the dark.

‘My muscles have all seized up,’ he groaned, and dropped on to his bed. ‘Fourteen times he made me buff up that Quidditch Cup before he was satisfied. And then I had another slug attack all over a Special Award for Services to the School. Took ages to shift the slime... How was it with Lockhart?’

Keeping his voice low so as not to wake Neville, Dean and Seamus, Harry told Ron exactly what he’d heard.

‘And Lockhart said he couldn’t hear it?’ said Ron. Harry could see him frowning in the moonlight. ‘D’you think he was lying? But I don’t get it. Even someone invisible would’ve had to open the door.’

‘I know,’ said Harry, lying back and staring up at the canopy of his four-poster. ‘I don’t get it either.’

October came in wet, and brought a cold with it that got into the stone of the castle and stayed there.

Madam Pomfrey was run off her feet. Half the school seemed to be sneezing, and the staff weren’t much better, and her Pepperup Potion went out of the hospital wing by the gallon. It worked at once, and it left whoever drank it smoking at the ears for several hours afterwards, so that the corridors between lessons looked like a railway station.

Ginny Weasley had been looking peaky for a week, and Percy had decided that it was his responsibility as a prefect, and as her brother, to do something about it.

‘Drink it,’ said Percy, at breakfast, standing over her with the bottle.

‘I’m fine.’

‘You’re grey, Ginny. You’ve been grey since Tuesday. Mum would want...’

‘Mum isn’t here,’ said Ginny, but she drank it, because it was quicker than arguing with Percy and she wanted to impress Hary by downing the whole thing in one gulp. She knew her brothers were impressed by that sort of thing amongst themselves. Two seconds later steam came pouring out from under her hair. With hair the colour of Ginny’s, the effect was of a small girl whose head had caught fire.

‘Better?’ said Percy, satisfied.

‘I’m going to kill you,’ said Ginny, through the smoke, and went back to her toast.

Harry, watching from further down the table, found he was looking past her at the Slytherin table. Dracina Malfoy was sitting at the end of it, a little apart from Pansy Parkinson and the others, and she didn’t look well either. She was pale even for her, with smudges under her silver eyes as though she hadn’t been sleeping. She wasn’t eating. She wasn’t even shouting at Crabbe and Goyle. She had a small black book open beside her plate and she was writing in it with her head bent close, and every so often she’d stop, and wait, and read something, and her lips would move.

Then she looked up, quite suddenly, as if somebody had said her name, and found Harry looking at her, She shut the book so hard that Pansy jumped.

‘What are you staring at, Potter?’ she called, the length of two tables.

‘Nothing,’ said Harry. ‘You look awful.’

‘You look awful, idiot!’ said Malfoy. It didn’t have much behind it. She tucked the book away inside her robes, and after that she didn’t look at him again, which was unusual enough that he noticed it.

‘Leave her,’ said Hermione, at his elbow. She’d seen the whole thing. ‘She’s probably got a cold. I hope it’s a bad one.’

The rain came down for days. It came in drops the size of bullets and hammered on the windows until you stopped hearing it. The lake rose. The flowerbeds turned into little brown rivers. Hagrid’s pumpkins went on swelling until they were the size of garden sheds, and squatted in his vegetable patch in the downpour like a row of orange boulders.

None of it made the slightest difference to Oliver Wood, who held training three times a week whatever the sky was doing. Which was how Harry came to be walking back up to Gryffindor Tower one stormy Saturday afternoon, a few days before Hallowe’en, wet to the skin and caked in mud to the knees.

It hadn’t been a happy practice, quite apart from the weather. Fred and George had been down to the pitch the day before, to spy on the Slytherins.

‘Seven green blurs,’ Fred had reported, in the changing room, dripping. ‘That’s all you can see. Seven green blurs, going past like something the Muggle air force would have.’

This made Oliver perk up. He’d told Harry before his dad was in the RAF. He even showed Harry a big magazine full of muggle jet planes and explained at length their payloads and the damage they could do. As enthusiastically as he or Ron explained Quidditch results. Which was very enthusiastic indeed.

‘Jump-jets,’ said George. ‘Dad’s got a picture of one in the shed. They go straight up.’

‘They don’t go straight up,’ said Wood, who was white about the mouth.

‘Those brooms near enough do,’ said Fred. ‘And Malfoy’s on one. She’s not bad, either, Oliver. I’m not saying she’s good. I’m saying she’s not bad.’

Wood had looked at Harry then, and said nothing. That had been worse than if he’d said something. Some threat of violence or motivational speech. But Wood was silent.

So Harry squelched along the corridors with his mind on brooms, and was so far inside his own head that he almost walked into Nearly Headless Nick, who was drifting along the same corridor in the opposite direction, looking thoroughly put out. He was reading a letter. When he saw Harry, he folded it up irritably and tucked it away somewhere about his ghostly person.

‘Good afternoon, young Potter,’ said Nick. ‘You look troubled.’

‘Likewise,’ said Harry. ‘What’s wrong?’

Nick huffed and shoved a ghostly bit of parchment into an unseen pocket . It was quite a thing to watch, a ghost huffing; there was no breath in it, and it came out all the same.

‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ he said, in the voice of somebody to whom it is very much something. ‘It’s only that I’ve been turned down for the Headless Hunt. Again. Not that I wanted to join, you understand. Hacking about the countryside on horseback with my head under my arm, playing Head Juggling, Head Polo, Horseback Head Juggling. Why should I want to be part of that? It’s the principle of the thing, Harry. Forty-five blows. Forty-five, with a blunt axe, on the twenty-third of... well. It doesn’t matter when. And at the end of it there was still an inch of skin and sinew holding my neck on, and on account of that one inch, I’m not good enough for Sir Patrick Delaney-Podmore. One inch!’

‘Sorry, mate. That’s rotten,’ said Harry, and meant it.

‘Thank you. It is rotten. And it’s bad enough to be refused,’ Nick went on, warming to it, ‘without the whole castle knowing. Do you know who stopped me on the stairs this morning to offer her condolences? That Malfoy girl. The Slytherin one. Sweet as anything, and laughing the whole time behind those eyes. She’d had it from the Bloody Baron, who must have had it from somebody else, I can’t think who. They’re dreadful gossips, ghosts.’

‘Yeah,’ said Harry dryly, ‘ghosts are known for gossiping.’

He meant it as a joke, more or less, about the sheer absurdity of the thing. A year and a bit ago he hadn’t believed in ghosts at all, and now here he was being told that they couldn’t keep a secret. But Nick turned to him with an expression of the deepest gratitude, as though Harry had laid a hand on his arm.

‘Finally,’ said Nick. ‘Finally somebody understands. You’ve no idea, Potter. It’s a nightmare, being a ghost. You’d think five hundred years would give a fellow some perspective, but no. All that gnashing and wailing and moaning. All of them, all the time, on and on about how they died. The circumstances. The indignity. The Grey Lady won’t speak to anyone, the Baron won’t stop speaking about his chains, and as for the Friar...’ He shook his head, carefully, so that it stayed on. ‘But I’m being very rude. What’s bothering you, young man? Is there anything I can do?’

Harry thought about it.

‘Don’t suppose you know a bloke who can find me seven Nimbus Two Thousand and Ones that fell off the back of a lorry?’ he said. ‘A wizard lorry.’ He stopped. ‘Do wizards even have lorries?’

Nick opened his mouth, with the look of a ghost giving the question his full and serious consideration. And then something brushed past Harry’s ankle, and he looked down into a pair of yellow eyes like lamps.

Mrs Norris. Filch’s skeletal grey cat, who served him as a sort of deputy, and who seemed to have a nose for Harry the way some dogs have a nose for truffles.

‘You had better make a brave retreat, Harry,’ Nick said quickly. ‘He’s in a foul temper. He’s got a cold, and some third-years splattered frog brains all over the ceiling of dungeon five, it was a nasty mess and he’s been cleaning it all morning. If he sees you dripping all over the place...’

‘Right,’ said Harry, and backed away from the accusing stare of Mrs Norris.

He wasn’t quick enough. There was some connection between him and that cat that he’d never got to the bottom of, some kind of invisible string, and it was tied to Filch at the other end. Out of a tapestry to Harry’s right burst Argus Filch, wheezing, with a tartan scarf wrapped round his head and his nose an unhealthy purple, looking wildly about for a rule-breaker.

‘Filth!‘ he cried, and his eyes bulged, and his jowls shook, and he pointed a quivering finger at the muddy puddle that had dripped out of Harry’s Quidditch robes. ‘Mess and muck everywhere! Nasty little children, tramping their corruption up and down, and who cleans it? Who’s on his knees at midnight scrubbing it out of the flags? I’ve had enough of it, I tell you! Follow me, Potter!’

So Harry gave Nick a gloomy little wave, and followed Filch back downstairs, doubling the number of muddy footprints on the floor as he went.

He’d never been in Filch’s office before. Most students went to a good deal of trouble to keep it that way. It was dingy, had no window, and a single oil lamp hung from the low ceiling over a desk, and there was a smell of fried fish about the place that seemed to have soaked into the walls. Wooden filing cabinets lined the room. From the labels on them, Harry could see that they held the particulars of every pupil Filch had ever punished. Fred and George had a drawer to themselves. On the wall behind the desk hung a collection of chains and manacles, very lovingly polished. Everybody knew that Filch was forever begging Dumbledore to let him hang students up by their ankles, and looking at the shine on those chains, Harry believed it.

Filch snatched a quill out of a pot and began rooting about for parchment.

‘Dung,’ he muttered furiously, ‘great sizzling dragon bogies... frog brains... rat innards... I’ve had enough of it... make an example... where’s the form... yes...’

He found a long roll of parchment in his drawer and spread it out and dipped the quill.

‘Name... Harry Potter. Crime...’

‘Enduring you for far too long, Filch,’ said Harry.

Filch growled at him.

‘I have to do so much cleaning. It’s only a bit of mud to you, boy, but to me it’s an extra hour scrubbing!’ Filch shouted, and a drip shivered on the end of his bulbous nose. ‘Crime... befouling the castle... suggested sentence...’

He dabbed at his nose and squinted at Harry, and Harry waited with his breath held to be sentenced.

But as Filch lowered the quill, there was an almighty BANG on the ceiling of the office, so loud that the oil lamp swung on its chain.

‘PEEVES!’ Filch roared, and flung the quill down in a passion. ‘Little gobshite, I’ll have you this time! I’ll have you!’

‘Ew’ said Harry. Not wanting to see Filch ‘have’ poor Peeves no matter how annoying Peeves could be. Whatever Lockhart had was spreading apparently. Uncle Vernon spoke of this.  

And without a backward glance at Harry he ran, flat-footed, out of the office, with Mrs Norris streaking along at his heels.

Harry didn’t much like Peeves. But he felt something very like gratitude towards him at that moment. Whatever Peeves had done up there, and it had sounded as though he’d dropped something the size of a wardrobe, it might take Filch’s mind off Harry.

He supposed he’d better wait. He sank into a moth-eaten chair beside the desk. There was only one thing on the desk besides his half-written form, and that was a large, glossy purple envelope with silver writing on it. Harry looked at the door. Nothing. He picked up the envelope. Sod Filch. Thought Harry. His curiosity taking over.

KWIKSPELL

A Correspondence Course in Beginners’ Magic

Harry flicked it open and drew out a sheaf of parchment. More silver curlicues on the front page:

Do your charms fizzle where others’ sparkle? Do you mumble your incantations in company for fear of getting them wrong? Do the young people at family gatherings exchange looks when you pick up your wand? You are not alone! Kwikspell is the all-new, never-fail, rapid-result, simple-to-learn method that has transformed the lives of hundreds of witches and wizards just like you!

Mrs P. Hoskins of Wolverhampton writes: "For years I couldn’t so much as warm a teapot without setting light to the cosy. Since Kwikspell, my Scouring Charms are the talk of the street!"

Mr L. Ashby of Kendal writes: "My brother-in-law always laughed at my wandwork. He has not laughed since Lesson Four, chiefly because he is presently a hatstand. Thank you, Kwikspell!"

Harry turned the pages, fascinated. Why on earth would Filch want a correspondence course in beginners’ magic? Did that mean he wasn’t a proper wizard? He’d got as far as Lesson One: Holding Your Wand (Some Useful Tips) when he heard shuffling footsteps outside, and he stuffed the parchment back in the envelope and threw it on the desk as the door opened.

Filch looked triumphant.

‘That vanishing cabinet was extremely valuable!’ he was saying to Mrs Norris, with relish. ‘We’ll have Peeves out this time, my sweet.’

His eyes fell on Harry. Then they went to the Kwikspell envelope, which, Harry saw a moment too late, was lying two feet from where it had been.

Filch’s pasty face went the colour of brick. Harry braced himself. Filch hobbled to the desk, snatched up the envelope, and flung it into a drawer.

‘Have you... did you read...?’ he spluttered.

‘No,’ Harry lied quickly.

Filch’s knobbly hands were wringing each other.

‘If I thought you’d read my private... not that it’s mine... for a friend... be that as it may... however...’

Harry stared at him. He’d never seen Filch look so mad. His eyes were bulging, a tic was going in one pouchy cheek, and the tartan scarf did nothing to help.

‘Very well... go... and don’t breathe a word... not that... however, if you didn’t read... go now, I’ve got to write up Peeves’s report... go...’

Harry went. He couldn’t believe his luck. He sped out of the office and up the passage and up the stairs, and he was fairly sure that to get out of Filch’s office without a punishment must be a school record of some kind.

‘Harry! Harry! Did it work?’

Nearly Headless Nick came gliding out of a classroom. Behind him Harry could see the wreckage of a large black-and-gold cabinet that looked as though it had been dropped from a considerable height.

‘I persuaded Peeves to crash it right over Filch’s office,’ said Nick eagerly. ‘Thought it might distract him...’

‘Was that you?’ said Harry. ‘You’re a legend, mate. Yeah, it worked, I didn’t even get detention. Thanks, Nick!’

They set off up the corridor together. Nick, Harry noticed, still had Sir Patrick’s letter in his hand.

‘I wish there was something I could do for you,’ Harry said. ‘About the Headless Hunt.’

Nick stopped dead, and Harry walked straight through him, which he regretted at once; it was like stepping through a cold shower with his clothes on.

‘But there is something you could do for me,’ said Nick excitedly. ‘Harry, would I be asking too much... but no, you wouldn’t want...’

‘What is it?’ said Harry.

‘Well, this Hallowe’en will be my five hundredth deathday,’ said Nearly Headless Nick, drawing himself up with great dignity.

‘Oh,’ said Harry, unsure whether to look sorry or pleased. ‘Right. Sorry about that, or… uh I’m happy for you, I guess.’

‘I’m giving a party. Down in one of the roomier dungeons. Friends are coming from all over the country. It would be such an honour if you’d attend. Mr Weasley and Miss Granger would be most welcome too, of course. But I dare say you’d rather go to the school feast?’

He hung on Harry’s answer with an expression of such hope that it was painful to look at.

‘No,’ said Harry quickly. ‘I’ll come. I owe you one. It wouldn’t be right to refuse.’

‘My dear boy! Harry Potter, at my Deathday Party!’ Nick hesitated, and his face lit up even more. ‘And do you think you could possibly mention to Sir Patrick how very frightening and impressive you find me?’

‘Yeah, mate. O-of course,’ said Harry.

Nearly Headless Nick beamed at him.

Up in Gryffindor Tower Harry peeled off his robes, which had begun to dry stiff, and got into a dry jumper with a gratitude he couldn’t have put into words, and went down to the common room and told Ron and Hermione what he’d agreed to.

‘A Deathday party?’ said Ron. ‘Instead of the feast?’

‘I owe him. He dropped a cabinet on Filch for me.’

‘Harry, that’s wonderful,’ said Hermione, and she’d sat up straight. ‘Hardly anybody living ever gets invited to one of those. Do you know how many ghosts there’ll be? From all over the country? We could ask them anything. Their history, their culture, the way they lived, the way the world was when they were alive. It’s a golden opportunity. Most historians would give their eye teeth. We ought to take full advantage.’

‘Take advantage of what?’ said Ron. ‘A load of moany old ghosts going on about how they died? What are they going to teach us? How to get your head nearly chopped off?’

‘Ronald,’ said Hermione, in the voice of a patient teacher with a slow pupil, ‘none of us should throw away knowledge just because it doesn’t come with pudding. Some of those ghosts were alive before Hogwarts was even built.’

Ron shrugged and went back to his chess problem. Hermione’s face fell, as it always did when somebody didn’t share her excitement, and she looked down at her book.

‘You’re welcome to come,’ Harry said. ‘You can tell me who they all are. You probably know about all of them already, seeing how clever you are.’

Hermione came back to life like a lamp being lit. She shifted along the sofa until she was right up against Harry’s side, closer than there was really any need for, so close that he could feel her elbow in his ribs, and she didn’t seem to notice how close she was, and if she did she didn’t seem to mind.

Ron looked up from the chessboard, saw Harry’s face, and came to the rescue.

‘Go on, then, Hermione,’ he said. ‘Who are they all? Who’s the Wailing Widow? I’ve heard of her.’

It was the right question. Hermione turned to him and opened her mouth, and what came out was a torrent.

‘Oh, the Wailing Widow’s from Kent, she drowned herself in a well in thirteen ninety-two after her husband went off to the Crusades and didn’t come back, only it turned out he did come back, a week later, so she’s been wailing about that ever since. And there’s a knight from Wales who had a crossbow bolt go straight through his visor at the Battle of Crécy, and a lady from Yorkshire who was bricked up inside a chimney by her own steward, they found her in eighteen hundred and twelve when they swept it, and there’s a monk from Glastonbury who was hung, drawn and quartered by Henry the Eighth’s men, so he comes in four pieces and the pieces don’t always agree on where to go, and...’

She went on. The deaths got worse and worse, and her eyes got brighter and brighter with each one. Harry sat back against the cushions with Hermione’s elbow out of his ribs at last and gave Ron a look of pure gratitude over the top of her head.

Rain was still lashing the windows, which had gone black, but the common room was bright and warm and cheerful. Firelight glowed on the squashy armchairs where people sat reading or talking or doing homework or, in the case of Fred and George, finding out what happened when you fed a Filibuster firework to a Salamander. Fred had liberated the bright orange, fire-dwelling lizard from a Care of Magical Creatures class, and it was now sitting on a table, smouldering gently, with a ring of interested people round it.

Harry was on the point of telling Ron and Hermione about Filch and the Kwikspell course when the Salamander went off. It shot into the air spitting sparks and bangs and whirled round the room like a Catherine wheel, showering tangerine stars from its mouth, with Percy bellowing himself hoarse at the twins underneath it, until at last it dived into the fire with a series of explosions and stayed there. And between Percy and the stars and the explosions, Filch and his purple envelope went clean out of Harry’s head.

By the time Hallowe’en came, Harry was cursing himself for ever having promised.

The rest of the school was looking forward to the feast. The Great Hall had been hung with the usual live bats, Hagrid’s monstrous pumpkins had been carved into lanterns big enough for three men to sit in, and there was a rumour going round that Dumbledore had booked a troupe of dancing skeletons for after the pudding.

‘A promise is a promise,’ Hermione reminded Harry, bossily, at breakfast. ‘You said you’d go to the Deathday Party.’

She said you. She meant we. And she meant, as became clear over the course of the day, that she wasn’t going to give him the smallest opportunity to wriggle out of it. She was at his elbow on the way to Charms. She was at his elbow on the way out of it. She was waiting at the bottom of the stairs when he came down from the dormitory to fetch a book he’d forgotten, and he hadn’t told anybody he was going up.

‘How did you know I’d be here?’ said Harry.

‘You forgot your Standard Book of Spells,’ said Hermione. ‘You always forget it on Thursdays.’

He hadn’t known that himself.

At lunch she sat so close to him on the bench that he had to eat his shepherd’s pie with his left elbow tucked into his side, and she talked to him the whole way through it about the Grey Lady, and every so often she touched his arm to make a point.

‘Hermione,’ said Ron, at last, through a mouthful of potato, ‘give him a bit of room, will you? He’s got to use that arm.’

Hermione moved half an inch.

‘Bit more,’ said Ron.

She moved another half-inch, and gave Ron a look, and Ron gave her one back, and Harry ate his pie and had the odd feeling, not for the first time that term, that a conversation was going on over his head in a language he didn’t speak.

At seven o’clock Harry, Ron and Hermione walked straight past the doors of the Great Hall, which were standing open on a blaze of gold plates and candlelight and the smell of roasting, and turned their steps instead towards the dungeons.

‘I can smell the roast potatoes,’ Ron said, in a hollow voice, as the smell followed them across the Entrance Hall. ‘I can smell them, Harry.’

‘Keep walking.’

They’d reached the top of the dungeon stairs when Harry glanced back, for no reason at all, and saw a flicker of white-blonde hair on the marble staircase. Somebody was going up. Away from the feast, alone, at a quick, light run, with one hand pressed flat to the front of her robes as though she were holding something against her. Then the stairs turned and she was gone.

‘What?’ said Ron.

‘Nothing,’ said Harry. ‘Thought I saw Malfoy.’

‘Good. Hope she’s going to be sick somewhere.’

Harry thought no more about it. He’d have plenty of reason, later, to wish he had.

The passage down to Nick’s party had been lined with candles too, but there was nothing cheerful about them. They were long, thin, jet-black tapers, and they burned a bright, cold blue, and the light they gave off made all three of the living faces in the passage look like the faces of the drowned. It got colder with every step. Harry pulled his robes tight, and as he did he heard a sound like a thousand fingernails being drawn down an enormous blackboard.

‘Is that supposed to be music?’ Ron whispered.

‘They’re ghosts, mate,’ Harry replied.

That was all the explanation Ron needed.

They turned a corner and found Nearly Headless Nick at a doorway hung with black velvet.

‘My dear friends,’ he said mournfully. ‘Welcome, welcome... so pleased you could come...’

He swept off his plumed hat and bowed them in.

It was an extraordinary sight. The dungeon was full of hundreds of pearly, see-through people, most of them drifting round a crowded floor and waltzing to the frightful, quavering sound of thirty musical saws played by an orchestra on a platform draped in black. Overhead a chandelier blazed midnight blue with a thousand more black candles. Their breath went up in clouds in front of them. It was like walking into a cold store.

‘Shall we have a look round?’ Harry suggested, mostly to get some feeling back into his feet.

‘Careful not to walk through anyone,’ said Ron nervously, and they set off round the edge of the floor.

They passed a huddle of gloomy nuns, and a ragged man wrapped in chains, and the Fat Friar, the cheerful ghost of Hufflepuff, deep in conversation with a knight who had an arrow sticking out of his forehead. The Bloody Baron, gaunt and staring and silver with blood, had a wide space all round him that nobody seemed eager to step into, and Harry didn’t blame them.

Hermione was bouncing on her toes. She’d got a quill and a small notebook out of her pocket, and before Harry could stop her she’d stepped up to a tall, mournful monk who, now that Harry looked, was not quite assembled, and was holding his left arm on with his right.

‘Excuse me,’ said Hermione. ‘I’m so sorry to bother you. Are you Brother Aldric? From Glastonbury? I’ve read about you. Is it true that you hid the abbey’s books from the King’s commissioners in a cave on the Tor, and that they never found them?’

The monk looked down at her. It was clear that nobody had asked him about anything but his quartering for about four hundred and fifty years.

‘Young lady,’ he said, in a voice like a cellar door, ‘it is entirely true. Would you care to know where?’

‘Oh, would I,’ said Hermione, and her quill went to the page, and Harry and Ron left her to it and went on alone, for about thirty seconds, which was how long it took her to write down the answer and come running after them.

‘He told me!’ she said, glowing. ‘Harry, he told me! I’m going to write to-’

Then her face changed, and she stopped dead.

‘Oh no. Turn back, turn back, I don’t want to talk to Moaning Myrtle...’

‘Who?’ said Harry, as they reversed hastily.

‘She haunts the girls’ toilet on the first floor,’ said Hermione.

‘She haunts a toilet?’

‘Yes. It’s been out of order all year, because she keeps having tantrums and flooding it. I never went in there anyway if I could help it. It’s awful trying to go to the loo when she’s wailing at you over the top of the cubicle...’

‘Look, food!’ said Ron.

On the far side of the dungeon was a long table covered in black velvet, and they made for it with some eagerness, and stopped dead a yard short of it in horror.

The smell was unspeakable. On handsome silver platters lay great rotten fish. Cakes burned to charcoal were heaped on salvers. There was a haggis crawling with maggots, and a slab of cheese gone green and furry, and in pride of place an enormous grey cake shaped like a tombstone, with tarry icing that spelled out:

Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington

died 31st October, 1492

‘Lovely,’ said Harry. ‘Just what I wanted when the Hallowe’en feast is going on.’

He looked at Hermione, and if looks could have killed she’d have been joining the party as a guest of honour. Hermione had the grace to go red.

As he watched, a portly ghost came up to the table, crouched, and walked slowly through it with his mouth held open wide, so that one of the stinking salmon passed straight through his face.

‘You’ll get there eventually, mate,’ said Harry encouragingly.

‘Almost,’ said the ghost sadly, and drifted off.

‘I expect they let it go off so it’ll have more flavour,’ said Hermione knowledgeably, holding her nose and leaning in for a closer look at the haggis. ‘For them, I mean. They can just about taste it if it’s strong enough...’

‘Can we move? I feel sick,’ said Ron.

They’d barely turned round when a little man shot out from under the table and stopped in mid-air in front of them.

‘All right, Peeves?’ said Harry warily.

Peeves was the very opposite of every ghost in the room. There was nothing pale or see-through about him. He was wearing a bright orange party hat and a bow-tie that spun round on its own, and he had a wide, wicked grin on his wide, wicked face.

‘Nibbles?’ he said sweetly, and held out a bowl of peanuts wearing a fine fur of fungus.

‘No thanks,’ said Hermione.

‘Heard you,’ said Peeves, and his eyes danced. ‘Heard you talking about poor Myrtle. Ever so rude, you was, about poor Myrtle.’

He drew in a great breath and bellowed, ‘OI! MYRTLE!’

‘Oh, no, Peeves, don’t tell her what I said, she’ll be really upset,’ Hermione whispered, frantic. ‘I didn’t mean it, I don’t mind her at all... er, hello, Myrtle.’

A squat ghost of a girl had come gliding up to them. She had the glummest face Harry had ever seen, half hidden behind lank hair and a pair of thick, pearly glasses.

‘What?‘ she said, sulkily.

‘How are you, Myrtle?’ said Hermione, in a voice so bright it hurt. ‘It’s nice to see you out of the toilet.’

Myrtle sniffed.

‘Miss Granger was just talking about you,’ said Peeves slyly, into Myrtle’s ear.

‘Just saying... saying how nice you look tonight,’ said Hermione, glaring at Peeves.

Myrtle looked at Hermione with deep suspicion.

‘You’re making fun of me,’ she said, and silver tears were already welling in her small, see-through eyes.

‘No! Honestly! Didn’t I just say how nice Myrtle’s looking?’ said Hermione, and drove her elbows into Harry’s and Ron’s ribs at once.

‘Oh, yeah...’

‘She did...’

‘Don’t lie to me,’ Myrtle gasped, and the tears were pouring down her face now, while Peeves sniggered happily over her shoulder. ‘D’you think I don’t know what they call me behind my back? Fat Myrtle! Ugly Myrtle! Miserable, moaning, moping Myrtle!’

‘You’ve left out "spotty",’ Peeves hissed in her ear.

Moaning Myrtle burst into heartbroken sobs and fled the dungeon, and Peeves went after her, pelting her with mouldy peanuts and yelling, ‘Spotty! Spotty!‘

‘Oh, dear,’ said Hermione sadly.

Harry watched the place where Myrtle had gone. He felt rather bad about it, and he couldn’t have said exactly why, except that he knew what it was to be called names down a corridor and have nobody stop it.

‘She sounded like me,’ he said, half to himself. ‘Before Hogwarts.’

Hermione looked at him. Ron looked at the floor.

Nearly Headless Nick came drifting towards them through the crowd.

‘Enjoying yourselves?’

‘Oh, yes,’ they lied.

‘Not a bad turnout,’ said Nick, with pride. ‘The Wailing Widow came all the way up from Kent... It’s nearly time for my speech, I’d better go and warn the orchestra...’

But the orchestra stopped at that very moment, and so did everybody else in the dungeon, and turned, in excitement, as a hunting horn rang out.

‘Oh, here we go,’ said Nick, bitterly.

A dozen ghost horses burst out of the dungeon wall, and on every one of them sat a rider with no head on his shoulders. The crowd went wild. Harry started to clap too, and stopped at once when he saw Nick’s face.

The horses galloped into the middle of the floor and pulled up, rearing and plunging. At the front was a large ghost with his bearded head under his arm, blowing the horn, and he jumped down, held his head up high over the crowd so it could see (everyone laughed), and strode over to Nick, cramming his head back down on his neck as he came.

‘Nick!’ he roared. ‘How are you? Still hanging on by a thread, eh?’

He gave a great booming laugh and clapped Nick on the shoulder, which nearly undid all Nick’s careful work.

‘Welcome, Patrick,’ said Nick stiffly.

‘Live ‘uns!’ said Sir Patrick, catching sight of Harry, Ron and Hermione, and he gave an enormous pretend jump of astonishment, and his head fell off again, and the crowd howled.

‘Very amusing,’ said Nick darkly.

‘Don’t mind Nick!’ shouted Sir Patrick’s head, from the floor. ‘Still sulking because we won’t have him in the Hunt! But I ask you, look at the fellow...’

‘Oi. You’re not invited. Get out!’ Harry shouted.

He hadn’t known he was going to do it. It came out of him the way the speech in Hagrid’s hut had, it rang round the dungeon, and two hundred ghosts turned and looked at the living boy in the middle of the floor.

Sir Patrick’s head, from the flagstones, gave Harry a look of the most aristocratic contempt.

‘We go where we please, boy!’ it said, with a sneer that made Harry wonder, for a second, whether it was some relation of Malfoy’s.

‘Nick’s a great ghost,’ Harry said, loud and clear, so that Sir Patrick couldn’t miss a word of it. ‘And he’d plaster the walls with all of you lot if you didn’t keep running away from him on your horses.’

There was a short, astonished silence. Somewhere at the back of the room, one of the gloomy nuns gave a single scandalised giggle. And Nick, beside him, looked at Harry with an expression that Harry would remember for a long time, the expression of somebody who has waited five hundred years for anyone at all to take his side.

‘If I could have everyone’s attention,’ said Nick, loudly, and with a great deal more steadiness in his voice than there had been a moment before, ‘it’s time for my speech!’

He strode to the platform and climbed up into an icy blue spotlight.

‘My late lamented lords, ladies and gentlemen, it is my great sorrow...’

Nobody heard much more. Sir Patrick and the rest of the Headless Hunt had just begun a game of Head Hockey, and the crowd was turning to watch. Nick tried gallantly to get his audience back, and gave up when Sir Patrick’s head went sailing past his nose to loud cheers.

Harry was very cold by now, and very hungry.

‘I can’t stand much more of this,’ Ron muttered, his teeth chattering, as the saws started up again and the ghosts went back to their waltz.

‘Let’s go,’ Harry agreed.

They backed towards the door, nodding and smiling at anybody who looked their way, and a minute later they were hurrying back up the passage of black candles.

‘Pudding might not be finished yet,’ said Ron hopefully, leading the way towards the steps to the Entrance Hall.

And then Harry heard it.

‘... rip... tear... kill...‘

It was the same voice. The same cold, murderous voice he’d heard in Lockhart’s office. For half a second he thought it was a stray thought of his own about Dobby. Then he stumbled to a halt and caught at the stone wall, and listened with everything he had, peering up and down the dim passage.

‘Harry, what’re you…?’

‘Hang on, hang on, it’s the voice!’

‘... so hungry... for so long...‘

‘Listen!‘ said Harry urgently, and Ron and Hermione froze where they stood and watched him.

‘... kill... time to kill...‘

The voice was getting fainter. Harry was sure of it. It was moving away from them. It was moving up. A mixture of terror and excitement took hold of him as he stared at the black ceiling. How could it be going up? Was it a phantom of some kind, that went through stone as though it weren’t there?

‘This way,’ he shouted, and he ran.

Up the steps, into the Entrance Hall. It was no good trying to hear anything there; the noise of the feast was roaring out of the Great Hall. Harry tore up the marble staircase to the first floor, with Ron and Hermione clattering after him.

‘Harry, what are we...’

‘SHH!’

He strained his ears. And, far off, from the floor above, and fading, he heard it.

‘... I smell blood... I SMELL BLOOD!‘

Harry’s stomach turned over.

‘It’s going to kill someone,’ he said. ‘Whatever it is. It’s going to kill someone, now.’

He saw Hermione’s face. She’d gone quite white, and she was looking at him with real fear,  it was fear of the thing he couldn’t see, because she believed him. He saw Ron’s face. Ron was looking at him the way you’d look at a mate who’d just told you the walls were talking, and you’d known him long enough to be sure he didn’t make things up, and so the only other answer was that he’d finally gone round the bend.

There wasn’t time to explain. Harry went up the next flight three steps at a time.

The second floor was deserted. Everybody in the castle was at the feast, and the corridors had been left to the torches, and the torches had burned low.

Harry stopped at the top of the stairs and listened. Nothing. Then, a very long way off, a sound that might have been a voice and might have been the wind in a chimney.

They went left.

The corridor was long and the torches were far apart, so that they walked from light into dark and into light again, and in each stretch of dark Harry found he was holding his breath. Their footsteps came back to them off the walls, a little late, as though somebody were walking just behind them. Ron looked round twice. There was nobody there.

They came to a junction. Harry stood in the middle of it and turned his head one way, and then the other, like a dog trying to catch a scent.

‘Harry,’ Ron whispered. ‘Mate. There’s nothing...’

‘Shh.’

Somewhere ahead of them, water was dripping. A slow, patient drip, with a long gap between each fall, like a clock that had run down.

They went towards it.

The passage narrowed. The windows here were tall and black and the rain was running down them in sheets, and every so often lightning lit the whole length of the corridor white and then dropped it back into the dark, and in the second after each flash Harry’s eyes were full of shapes that weren’t there. A suit of armour. A tapestry. A shadow that might have been a doorway, or a figure standing very still in a doorway, and when the next flash came it was a doorway after all.

The drip got louder. The floor under their feet was wet. Harry looked down and saw that they were walking through a shallow sheet of water, spreading out across the flagstones from somewhere ahead, and in the torchlight it was black.

He couldn’t hear the voice any more. That was worse than hearing it. Wherever it had been going, it had got there.

‘Harry,’ said Hermione, very quietly. Her hand had found his sleeve. ‘Harry, I don’t like this.’

‘Harry, what was that all about?’ said Ron, behind them, wiping the sweat off his face with his sleeve, though the corridor was freezing. ‘I couldn’t hear anything...’

But Hermione gave a sudden gasp, and pointed down the corridor.

‘Look!’

Something was shining on the wall ahead.

They went towards it slowly, squinting into the dark. Between two of the tall windows, in letters a foot high, something had been daubed across the stone, and it glimmered red in the light of the torches.

THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS HAS BEEN OPENED.

ENEMIES OF THE HEIR, BEWARE.

There was a great puddle of water on the floor beneath it, and the puddle was where the dripping was coming from.

And then, all three of them together, they saw what was hanging above the puddle.

It was Mrs Norris.

She was hanging by her tail from the bracket of a torch, and she was stiff as a board, as stiff as a thing that has been dead for hours, and her eyes were wide open and staring at nothing.

Hermione screamed. She turned and threw herself at Harry and got both arms round him and buried her face in his chest, and Harry, who had no idea what to do with his own arms, stood there with them half lifted and stared over the top of her head at the dangling cat. Hermione didn’t let go. If anything, she held on harder, and pressed closer, and burrowed into him as though she meant to stay there.

For a few seconds none of them moved.

Then Ron said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’

‘Shouldn’t we try and help...’ Harry began, awkwardly, over Hermione’s hair.

‘Trust me,’ said Ron. ‘We don’t want to be found here.’

It was too late.

A rumble, like thunder a long way off, told them the feast had ended. From both ends of the corridor came the sound of hundreds of feet on the stairs, and the loud, happy chatter of people who’d eaten a great deal, and the next moment students were spilling into the passage from both directions at once.

The chatter stopped. The bustle stopped. The noise died away, row by row, from the front backwards, as the people at the front saw the cat. Harry, Ron and Hermione stood alone in the middle of the corridor, in the water, under the writing, as the silence spread out through the mass of students pressing forward to see.

Then somebody shouted into it.

‘Enemies of the heir, beware! You’ll be next, Mudblood!’

It was Dracina Malfoy.

She’d pushed her way to the front of the crowd. She looked dishevelled, as though she’d been running, and her hair had come loose, and she was pale, paler even than she’d been at breakfast that week, almost grey. She was pointing straight at Hermione. And her silver eyes were alive with something. Harry knew the twinkle. This wasn’t the twinkle. It was something that looked like it from a distance, and up close looked like something else entirely,  she was grinning at Hermione’s fear as though Hermione’s fear were the best thing she’d seen all year.

The whole corridor was looking at the cat. The cat was so horrible, and the writing so frightening, that not one person there noticed that the finger Malfoy was pointing with had a red stain on it, down the side, to the second knuckle. Not even Harry.

Harry was too angry to notice anything.

‘Leave her alone!’ he shouted. Hermione was still clinging to him and he got an arm round her, and pulled her behind him, and faced Malfoy across the water. ‘You leave her alone, Malfoy! What’s the matter with you? There’s a dead cat on the wall and that’s what you’ve got to say? Get away from her! Go on! Get out of here!’

Malfoy’s grin went. Something flickered across her face, very fast, at the sight of Harry’s arm round Hermione, and was gone. She folded her arms. She looked at him, and at Hermione behind him, and at his arm.

Then she turned on her heel and pushed back into the crowd.

As she went, she said something under her breath. Harry didn’t catch it. He caught a word, at the end, and only that one, because it was the only word she’d bothered to say clearly.

Mine.

Whatever could she mean? Harry stood in the water with Hermione shaking behind him and watched the back of Malfoy’s head go away through the crowd, and wondered what on earth it was, in all of this, that Dracina Malfoy thought was hers.

Harry couldn’t take his eyes off it. The stiff grey shape of Mrs Norris hanging from the bracket, and the red letters over it, still wet, still catching the torchlight.

Then the crowd at the far end of the corridor heaved, and broke, and somebody came shoving through it.

‘Out of the way! Out of my way, you filthy, nasty little... what’s going on? What’s all this? What are you all...’

It was Argus Filch. He’d elbowed his way to the front, wheezing, with his tartan scarf still round his neck, and he looked at the writing on the wall, and his eyes went down from the writing to the thing beneath it.

He made a sound Harry had never heard come out of a grown man. It started as a gasp and went up into something like a scream, and it was rage and grief and horror all at once.

‘My cat! My cat! What’s happened to Mrs Norris?’

And his popping eyes came down off the cat and landed on Harry.

‘You!‘ he screeched. ‘You! You’ve murdered my cat! You’ve killed her! I’ll kill you! I’ll...’

‘I’ve done no such bloody thing!’ said Harry. ‘Calm down, Filch, I never touched her.’

But Filch was past calming. He was purple from his collar to his hairline, and he was spitting, and his knobbly hands were reaching for Harry’s throat, and Harry had backed into Ron with Hermione still clinging to his arm and nowhere left to go.

‘Argus!‘

Dumbledore had arrived on the scene, with a number of other teachers at his heels. He went past Harry, Ron and Hermione in a single long stride, and laid one hand on Filch’s shoulder, and Filch’s hands dropped as though somebody had cut the strings.

‘Argus. Be still. Let me see.’

Professor McGonagall was there, and Snape, and Lockhart, and Professor Flitwick bobbing about at the back trying to see over people’s elbows. Dumbledore reached up and unhooked Mrs Norris from the torch bracket with great gentleness, as though she were something that might still break.

‘Careful,’ moaned Filch. ‘Careful with her, careful...’

‘Come with me, Argus,’ said Dumbledore. ‘You too, Mr Potter, Mr Weasley, Miss Granger.’

Lockhart stepped forward eagerly.

‘My office is nearest, Headmaster. Just upstairs. Please feel free-’

‘Thank you, Gilderoy,’ said Dumbledore.

The crowd fell back in silence to let them through. Lockhart, looking thrilled and important, hurried after Dumbledore, and so did Professors McGonagall and Snape.

When they went into Lockhart’s darkened office there was a scurry of movement all round the walls. Harry saw a number of the Lockharts in the photographs ducking out of sight with their hair in curlers. The real Lockhart lit the candles on his desk and stood back. Dumbledore laid Mrs Norris on the polished wood and bent to look at her.

Harry, Ron and Hermione exchanged tense looks and sank into chairs outside the circle of candlelight to watch.

Dumbledore’s long, crooked nose was barely an inch from Mrs Norris’s fur. He was peering at her through his half-moon spectacles and touching her very lightly here and there with his long fingers. Professor McGonagall was bent nearly as close, with her eyes narrowed to slits. Snape stood behind them, half in shadow, wearing a most peculiar expression. It was as though he were trying very hard not to smile.

And Lockhart was circling all of them like a moth, making suggestions.

‘Definitely a curse,’ he said. ‘Probably the Transmogrifian Torture. I’ve seen it many times. So unlucky I wasn’t there, I know the very counter-curse that would have...’

‘Have you considered,’ said Professor McGonagall, without lifting her eyes from the cat, ‘a parasite of the vocal cords? I’ve seen something rather like this before. A strain that spreads by language. It spread though Russian soldiers in Afghanistan and conscripts in Africa  .’

‘Ah! Yes! Of course!’ said Lockhart, lighting up. ‘The language parasites! I remember them well! I was there myself, as it happens. In Africa. I was the one who identified it, actually, I had to wrestle the thing out of the fellow’s throat with my bare hands...’

Professor McGonagall straightened up. She didn’t say anything. She only smiled, very slightly, very darkly, she’d just had something confirmed that she’d suspected for some time.

Harry saw it. He didn’t understand all of it. But he understood enough to see that Lockhart had just put his foot in his mouth. That Professor McGonagall had been standing exactly where Lockhart said he’d been, and that Lockhart had never been within a thousand miles of it.

She caught him looking. Over the top of her spectacles, across the candlelight, Professor McGonagall gave Harry a knowing look. And then, so quickly that he’d have thought he’d imagined it if he’d blinked, she winked.

Harry nodded at her. Somebody else had noticed.

Through all of this, Filch was making the most dreadful noise. He’d slumped into a chair by the desk with his face in his hands, and he was sobbing, great wet, hacking sobs.

‘She’s all I’ve got,’ he kept saying. ‘All I’ve got. Haven’t got anything else. No magic, no nothing. Just her. And now I haven’t even got her...’

Harry found, to his own surprise, that he was sorry for Filch. Loathsome as the man was, it was a hard thing to watch, and Lockhart talking cheerfully over the top of it about curses he’d broken didn’t make it any easier. Not nearly as sorry, though, as he was for himself. If Dumbledore believed Filch, Harry would be expelled. He didn’t see how he could be anything else.

Dumbledore was muttering strange words under his breath now and tapping Mrs Norris with his wand, but nothing happened. She went on looking as though she’d been recently stuffed.

‘You know, this puts me very much in mind of a little affair in Transylvania,’ said Lockhart. ‘Ugly business. A cult. Dracula worshippers, all in red. They had a cat just like this on their altar. I foiled them, naturally.’

‘Then you must know dear Julius,’ said Professor McGonagall pleasantly. ‘An old friend of mine. He was in Transylvania for some years. Always carried a whip.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Lockhart. ‘I’m very familiar with old Julius Carrow. He aided me in foiling the dark scheme of those wicked men.’

Professor McGonagall sighed. It was a small sigh, almost inaudible. She looked across at Harry again, and Harry knew perfectly well what the look meant. Whoever Julius was, he wasn’t a Carrow. Lockhart had just told another one.

Lockhart didn’t notice. He’d got into his stride.

‘There were three hundred of them, all told, and their leader was a Methuselah. Fourth generation, if you can credit it. Clan Tzi-mi-see.’ He said it slowly, as if spelling it out for a slow class. ‘A shapeshifter. A horror. Bone and flesh like wax in his hands. He came at me in the shape of a great wolf made out of men, and I said to myself, Gilderoy, it’s now or never, and I stepped forward with my wand held so’

‘He’s saying it wrong,’ Professor McGonagall murmured. She’d drifted, somehow, to the end of the desk nearest Harry’s chair, and she spoke without moving her lips very much, to the air above his head. ‘It’s Tzimisce. Three syllables, not four. And that is not how one kills one of the fourth generation. Not with a wand held so. Not with a wand at all, if one has any sense.’

Harry looked up at her. She was looking at Mrs Norris with an expression of perfect professional interest, as though she hadn’t said a word.

He made a note in the back of his head, that he was going to ask Professor McGonagall about all this one day. About Julius. About the sand and the soldiers. About how one did kill a vampire of the fourth generation, if it came to it. He had a feeling she could teach him things that weren’t on any timetable.

‘... and with a single word,’ Lockhart was saying, ‘I -’

‘Thank you, Gilderoy,’ said Dumbledore, quite gently and quite firmly, straightening up. ‘That was a most fascinating story. But I’m afraid the important matter here is a simpler one. She’s not dead, Argus.’

Lockhart stopped dead in the middle of counting the number of murders he’d prevented. Filch lowered his hands.

‘Not dead?’ he choked, peering at Mrs Norris through his fingers. ‘But why’s she all... all stiff and frozen?’

‘She has been Petrified,’ said Dumbledore.

‘Ah! I thought so!’ said Lockhart.

‘Of course you did,’ said Harry.

He knew from long experience that Lockhart hadn’t thought anything of the kind.

‘Your faith in me is most gratifying, Harry,’ said Lockhart, beaming at him.

Harry sighed. He was beginning to think that it was physically impossible to insult Gilderoy Lockhart. The man either thought Harry was joking, or took him at his word, and either way he went away pleased.

‘How she has been Petrified, I cannot say,’ said Dumbledore, and he said it in a voice that made the candles seem to flicker.

‘Ask him!’ shrieked Filch, turning his blotched, tear-stained face on Harry.

‘Come off it, Filch. I had two other people with me who could confirm I was nowhere near that cat until we found her all done up.’

‘Harry...’ said Dumbledore, firmly. Then he turned to Filch.

‘No second-year could have done this,’ Dumbledore told him, more firmly still. ‘It would take Dark Magic of the most advanced-’

‘He did it! He did it!’ Filch spat, his pouchy face going purple. ‘You saw what he wrote on the wall! He found... in my office... he knows I’m a... I’m a...’ Filch’s face worked horribly. ‘He knows I’m a Squib!’ he finished.

‘I never touched Mrs Norris!’ Harry said loudly. Any pity he’d felt for Filch had gone out of the window. He was uncomfortably aware of everybody in the room looking at him, including every one of the Lockharts on the walls. ‘And I don’t even know what a Squib is.’

Then he remembered Ron in Hagrid’s hut, between slugs. Dad reckons it’s what you get when the same five families keep marrying each other. And it came out of Harry before he could stop it.

‘Oh. Are your mum and dad siblings or something? That would explain a lot.’

‘Ruddy child, come here!’ Filch screamed, and went for him.

Professor McGonagall looked thoroughly scandalised. Something at the corner of her mouth twitched, and she had to put a hand up to it.

‘That is quite enough!‘

Dumbledore didn’t often raise his voice. When he did, the room went still to its corners. Filch stopped with his hands out. The Lockharts on the walls stopped too.

‘Argus, I will not have you accusing students of murder or Dark Magic most foul without proof.’ Dumbledore drew a breath. ‘And Harry. You will not disrespect a member of staff, or the circumstances of their birth. Twenty points from Gryffindor.’

Harry’s face fell.

‘Sorry, Professor.’

‘Apologise to Filch, not to me, Harry.’

Harry turned. Filch was standing by the desk with his chest heaving and his eyes red, and he looked so wretched that Harry found the words came easier than he’d expected.

‘Sorry, Mr Filch. That was a rotten thing to say.’

Filch grunted. It wasn’t acceptance. But he sat back down, and the room seemed to let out its breath.

‘If I might speak, Headmaster,’ said Snape, from the shadows.

Harry’s heart sank further. He was certain that nothing Snape had to say was going to do him any good.

‘Potter and his friends may simply have been in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ said Snape, with a faint curl of the lip that said he doubted it very much. ‘But we do have a set of suspicious circumstances here. Why were they in the upstairs corridor at all? Why weren’t they at the Hallowe’en feast?’

Harry, Ron and Hermione all started at once, about the Deathday Party.

‘There were hundreds of ghosts, they’ll tell you we were there...’

‘Nearly Headless Nick invited us...’

‘We had to listen to the musical saws, Professor.’

‘But why not join the feast afterwards?’ said Snape, and his black eyes glittered in the candlelight. ‘Why go up to that corridor?’

Ron and Hermione looked at Harry.

‘Because... because...’ said Harry, and his heart was thumping very fast. Something told him that it would sound extremely unlikely if he told them he’d been led there by a voice with no body that nobody else could hear. ‘Because we were tired and wanted to go to bed,’ he said.

‘Without any supper?’ said Snape, and a triumphant smile flickered across his sallow face. ‘I didn’t think ghosts provided food fit for living people at their parties.’

‘We weren’t hungry,’ said Ron loudly, and his stomach gave a tremendous rumble.

Ron found the floor very interesting after that.

Snape’s nasty smile widened.

‘I suggest, Headmaster, that Potter is not being entirely truthful,’ he said. ‘It might be a good idea if he were deprived of certain privileges until he is ready to tell us the whole story. I personally feel he should be taken off the Gryffindor Quidditch team until he is ready to be honest.’

‘Really, Severus,’ said Professor McGonagall sharply. ‘I see no reason to stop the boy playing Quidditch. This cat wasn’t hit over the head with a broomstick. There’s no evidence at all that Potter has done anything wrong.’

Dumbledore was giving Harry a long, searching look. Under those bright blue eyes Harry felt as though he were being X-rayed.

‘Innocent until proven guilty, Severus,’ Dumbledore said firmly.

Snape looked furious. So did Filch.

‘My cat has been Petrified!’ he shrieked, his eyes bulging. ‘I want to see some punishment!’

‘We will be able to cure her, Argus,’ said Dumbledore patiently. ‘Professor Sprout recently managed to procure some Mandrakes. As soon as they’ve grown to their full size, I’ll have a potion made that will revive Mrs Norris.’

‘I’ll make it,’ Lockhart broke in. ‘I must have done it a hundred times. I could whip up a Mandrake Restorative Draught in my sleep!’

‘Excuse me,’ said Snape icily, ‘but I believe I am the Potions master at this school.’

There was a very awkward pause.

‘You may go,’ Dumbledore said to Harry, Ron and Hermione.

They went, as fast as they could without actually running.

On the staircase above Lockhart’s office, in the shadow of a pillar where the torchlight didn’t reach, somebody was standing very still.

Harry nearly walked into her. He stopped, with Ron and Hermione piling up behind him, and found himself looking at Dracina Malfoy.

She wasn’t with Crabbe and Goyle. Or with anybody else. She’d been waiting, by the look of it, for some time, in the cold, with her arms wrapped round herself, and when she saw Harry she straightened up quickly, as though she’d been caught.

‘They didn’t expel you, then,’ she said.

‘No thanks to you,’ said Harry.

She ignored that. Her eyes went over him, very fast, the way you’d look over somebody who’d come in out of a storm, checking for damage.

‘Are you hurt?’

Harry stared at her.

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’ The colour went up into her face. ‘I didn’t say anything. I don’t care. I was only...’ She lifted her chin. ‘You stood in front of her. In the corridor. With everybody watching. You put yourself between her and me as though I were some... some dragon, and you were...’

She stopped. Whatever word came next, she bit it off.

‘Were what?’ said Harry, completely lost.

‘Nothing, Potter. You were nothing. You were an idiot. A proper knight would know which lady he was meant to be standing in front of.’

And she turned and went off down the stairs, very fast, with one hand pressed flat against the front of her robes, over something square and small that Harry could just see the shape of through the cloth.

‘What,’ said Ron, ‘was that?’

‘No idea,’ said Harry.

He turned round. Hermione was looking down the stairwell after Malfoy, and there was nothing on her face at all. It was completely smooth, and completely still, like a lake with something very large underneath it.

‘Hermione?’

‘She’s mad,’ said Hermione pleasantly. ‘Come on, Harry.’

When they were a floor further up, they ducked into an empty classroom and shut the door quietly behind them. Harry squinted at his friends’ faces in the dark.

‘You reckon I should’ve told the professors about the voice I heard?’ Harry asked.

‘No, mate,’ said Ron, in the friendly, careful voice you use when you’re talking a mate down off a wall. ‘I’ll be honest, mate, I thought you went a bit funny in the head. Admitting you’re hearing voices no one else can hear isn’t... well, it’s not seen well. Even by wizards.’

Something in the way Ron said it made Harry ask, ‘You do believe me, don’t you?’

‘Yeah, yeah. Course I do,’ said Ron quickly, and put a hand on Harry’s shoulder. And he did. He hadn’t, quite, on the stairs, with Harry running about listening to nothing. But that had been before the cat. ‘But to other people, it’d look a bit strange, mate.’

‘I know it’s weird,’ said Harry. ‘The whole thing’s weird. What was that writing on the wall about? The Chamber has been opened. What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You know, it rings a sort of bell,’ said Ron slowly. ‘I think someone told me a story about a secret chamber at Hogwarts once... might’ve been Bill...’

‘Well, I found out Filch is a Squib,’ said Harry.

‘Oh, really? I thought that was obvious,’ said Ron.

A clock chimed somewhere in the castle.

‘Midnight,’ said Harry. ‘We’d better get to bed before Snape comes along and tries to frame us for something else.’

For days afterwards the school could talk of nothing but the attack on Mrs Norris.

Filch made sure nobody forgot it. He paced up and down the spot where she’d been found, as though he expected the attacker to come back for another look. Harry saw him scrubbing at the message on the wall with a bottle of Mrs Skower’s All-Purpose Magical Mess Remover, and it did no good whatever; the letters went on gleaming as brightly as the night they’d been written. When Filch wasn’t guarding the scene of the crime, he was skulking about the corridors red-eyed, lunging out of alcoves at passing students and trying to put them in detention for things like ‘breathing loudly’ and ‘looking happy’.

Ginny Weasley seemed very upset about Mrs Norris. According to Ron, she was a great lover of cats.

‘She’s been crying in the girls’ dormitory,’ Ron told Harry, at breakfast, in an undertone. ‘Lavender said. Every night.’

He went down the table to sit with her.

‘But you hadn’t really got to know Mrs Norris,’ Ron told her, bracingly. ‘Honestly, Gin, we’re much better off without her. She used to sit on the stairs and wait for you to put a foot wrong.’

Ginny’s lip trembled. She was as white as the tablecloth and there were shadows under her eyes, and she didn’t seem able to look at anything for long.

‘Stuff like this doesn’t often happen at Hogwarts,’ Ron assured her. ‘They’ll catch the nutter who did it and have him out of here in no time. I just hope he’s got time to Petrify Filch before he’s expelled. I’m only joking...’ he added hastily, as Ginny went whiter still.

‘It’s not funny,’ Ginny whispered. ‘It’s not funny, Ron. That girl. The Slytherin one. She pointed at Hermione and said she’d be next. I was right behind her. I saw her face.’

‘Malfoy?’ said Harry, who’d come down the table after Ron.

Ginny looked up at him, and went pink, and then went white again, all in the space of a second.

‘She looked at me,’ Ginny said, very quietly. ‘After. When she was going. She looked right at me, and she was smiling. Like she knew something about me. Like she’d... written my name down somewhere.’

Ron put his arm round her.

‘She’s all mouth, Gin,’ he said. ‘Honestly. She does that to everyone.’

But Harry, watching Ginny’s face, wasn’t sure that she believed him, and he wasn’t sure he believed it himself.

The attack had had an effect on Hermione too. It was quite usual for Hermione to spend a great deal of time reading, but now she was doing almost nothing else. Harry and Ron couldn’t get much out of her when they asked what she was up to, and it wasn’t until the following Wednesday that they found out.

Harry had been kept back in Potions.

It had been a horrible lesson from the start. Dracina Malfoy had begun on Hermione before Snape had finished taking the register.

‘What a shame your cauldron’s so ordinary, Granger,’ she said, loudly, as they set up. ‘I suppose it’s all your parents could afford. What is it they do again? Teeth? How useful.’

Hermione was very good at Potions. But she wasn’t quite as good as Malfoy,  Harry would never have admitted this aloud. Malfoy knew it. She spent the whole double lesson making sure everybody else knew it too. When Hermione’s Swelling Solution came out half a shade too pale, Malfoy laughed. When Harry passed Hermione his knife, Malfoy said, ‘Oh, how gallant, Potter!’ in a voice that dripped. When Neville spilled his beetle eyes, Malfoy said, ‘Longbottom, you’re a disgrace to your blood, at least Granger hasn’t got any to disgrace,’ and Pansy Parkinson shrieked.

And every time she said something, she looked at Harry to see if he’d heard it.

By the end of the lesson Harry had had enough.

‘Will you shut up, Malfoy?’ he shouted, across the dungeon. ‘Just for once? Just leave her alone! What’s she ever done to you?’

The dungeon went silent. Snape, at the front, turned slowly round.

Malfoy went quiet. She didn’t answer. She looked at Harry for a long moment, with her ladle held in the air and the colour gone right out of her face, and then she put the ladle down, and took a small black book out of her robes, and opened it on the desk, and began to write.

Harry, two desks behind, could see the page. She wrote fast, in her neat, spiky hand, three or four lines. He couldn’t read them. He was too far away. But he saw her read them, and he saw her face change, and the change wasn’t a nice one.

‘Stop looking at me, Potter,’ she said, without lifting her head. ‘Stop looking at me. You haven’t got the right. You’ve given it away.’

‘What are you on about?’

‘Ten points from Gryffindor for shouting in my lesson,’ said Snape silkily. ‘And you’ll stay behind, Potter, and scrape the tubeworms off the desks.’

So Harry stayed behind and scraped, by the time he’d finished, and been inspected, and had a hurried lunch on his own, he’d forgotten about the book. He went up to meet Ron in the library, and on the way he saw Justin Finch-Fletchley, the Hufflepuff from Herbology, coming towards him along the corridor with two of his friends.

Harry had just opened his mouth to say hello when Justin saw him, went pale, turned round on the spot, and walked very fast in the opposite direction.

‘Justin?’

Justin didn’t look back. His friends did. One of them, Hannah Abbott, the girl with the plaits, looked back at Harry over her shoulder with frightened eyes, and Harry heard her say, as they turned the corner, ‘... told you, he was right there under the writing, and my gran says...’

The rest was lost.

Harry found Ron at the back of the library, measuring his History of Magic homework. Professor Binns had asked for a three-foot composition on ‘The Medieval Assembly of European Wizards’.

Hermione was there too, at the next table, writing out Harry’s essay for him. She still insisted on doing it, very firmly, whatever Ron said about it.

‘Hermione, he’s got to learn it himself,’ Ron had said, more than once.

‘He’s got enough to do,’ Hermione had said, every time, and gone on writing.

She looked up as Harry sat down, and her face lit, and she began to explain it to him, because she said he ought at least to know what was in it.

‘The thing you have to understand, Harry, is that there wasn’t one wizarding world in the early Middle Ages. Not really. Not even in Britain. There were the southern sorcerers, round London and the old Roman towns, who did magic the Greek and Roman way, with Latin and Greek incantations and a great deal of geometry. And then there were the druids in the Midlands and Wales and the North, Brythonic and Cymric and Cornish, who did it with songs and with stone and with the seasons, and the two lots couldn’t stand each other. And that’s before you even get to the Viking families in the North-East, who didn’t leave when the Saxons took Jorvik, they just stopped saying they were Norse, and the Picts up in Scotland with their own kind of magic altogether, all knots and tattoos and things. Every one of those communities thought they were the real wizards and everybody else was a fraud. They fought about it for centuries. Hogwarts was the first place they were all made to sit down in the same room, in nine hundred and ninety, and even then it took another two hundred years before they’d marry each other. And wand magic, the way we do it now, didn’t really settle down into what we’d recognise until the seventeen hundreds.’

Harry winced. It was a great deal to take in. But he had to admit that he’d understood more of it in two minutes from Hermione than in two months from Professor Binns, who had the gift of making a war sound like a bus timetable.

‘I don’t believe it, I’m still eight inches short...’ said Ron furiously, letting go of his parchment, which sprang back into a roll, ‘and Hermione’s done four feet seven inches, and her writing’s tiny.’

Hermione gave a small, self-satisfied little tilt of the head.

Harry told Ron about Justin Finch-Fletchley running away from him.

‘Dunno why you care. I thought he was a bit of an idiot,’ said Ron, scribbling away and making his letters as large as he could. ‘All that rubbish about Lockhart being so great -’

Hermione got up and vanished between the shelves for a few minutes, and when she came back she looked irritable, and at last seemed ready to talk.

‘All the copies of Hogwarts: A History have been taken out,’ she said, sitting down next to Harry, closer than she needed to. ‘And there’s a two-week waiting list. I wish I hadn’t left my copy at home, but I couldn’t fit it in my trunk with all the Lockhart books.’

‘Why do you want it?’ said Harry.

‘The same reason everyone else wants it,’ said Hermione. ‘To read up on the legend of the Chamber of Secrets.’

‘What’s that?’ said Harry quickly.

‘That’s just it. I can’t remember,’ said Hermione, biting her lip. ‘And I can’t find the story anywhere else...’

‘Hermione, let me read your composition,’ said Ron desperately, checking his watch.

‘No, I won’t,’ said Hermione, suddenly severe. ‘You’ve had ten days to finish it.’ She turned to Harry, and the severity went out of her face. ‘You can, though, Harry. I’ve almost finished your essay. I won’t let you fail.’

‘I only need another two inches, go on...’ said Ron.

The bell rang. Ron and Hermione led the way to History of Magic, bickering.

On the way out, Harry passed the long table under the window where the younger students sat, and saw Dracina Malfoy there, alone, with a heap of books in front of her. It was a strange heap. There were two fat volumes of wizarding genealogy, with the Malfoy crest on the spine of one, and on top of them, open, a big, old, battered picture book of the sort that small children are given at Christmas. The page it was open at showed a painted knight in silver armour kneeling in front of a girl with long pale hair, in a tower, and the knight was holding out his sword to her, hilt first.

Malfoy saw him looking. She slammed the book shut so hard that Madam Pince shot out from behind her desk, and swept it under the genealogies, and glared at him with her face burning.

‘What, Potter?’

‘Nothing,’ said Harry, mystified, and went on to History of Magic.

History of Magic was the dullest lesson on the timetable, and today was no exception. Professor Binns drifted in through the blackboard, opened his notes, and began to read from them in a voice like a distant vacuum cleaner left running in an empty house, and inside a quarter of an hour the whole class had gone glassy. Every so often somebody would come to long enough to copy down a name or a date, and then sink again.

He’d been going for half an hour when something happened that had never happened before.

Hermione put her hand up.

Professor Binns, who was in the middle of a remarkably dull account of the International Warlock Convention of 1289, looked up and seemed to see a raised hand for the first time in a century and a half.

‘Miss... er...?’

‘Granger, Professor. I was wondering if you could tell us anything about the Chamber of Secrets,’ said Hermione, clearly.

Dean Thomas, who’d been gazing out of the window with his mouth open, jerked as though he’d been stung. Lavender Brown’s head came up off her arms. Neville’s elbow slid off the edge of his desk.

Professor Binns blinked.

‘My subject is History of Magic,’ he said, in his dry, wheezing voice. ‘I deal in facts, Miss Granger. Not in myths and legends.’ He cleared his throat with a small noise like a twig snapping. ‘In the September of that year, a sub-committee of Sardinian sorcerers...’

He faltered. Hermione’s hand was up again, and her face was the face of someone who has been refused something she very much wants and has no intention of taking no for an answer. If Professor Binns hadn’t already been dead, Harry thought, he’d have had reason to be nervous.

‘Miss Grange?’

‘Please, sir. Don’t legends always have some basis in fact?’

Professor Binns looked at her in such astonishment that Harry was sure no student had ever interrupted him before, in life or out of it.

‘Well,’ he said slowly, ‘yes. One could argue that, I suppose.’ He peered at Hermione as though he’d never properly looked at a student before. ‘However, the legend you refer to is so very sensational. So very... lurid...’

But the whole class was hanging on his words now. Every face in the room was turned to him. Harry could see that it had thrown him completely. He’d never had an audience before. He didn’t know what to do with one.

‘Oh, very well,’ he said at last. ‘Let me see. The Chamber of Secrets. You will all know, I take it, that this school was founded something over a thousand years ago. The exact year is a matter of some dispute...’

‘Nine hundred and ninety, Professor,’ said Hermione.

‘Yes, yes, quite so. By four of the most gifted witches and wizards of that age. The houses bear their names. Godric Gryffindor. Helga Hufflepuff. Rowena Ravenclaw. Salazar Slytherin. They raised these walls together, in a wild place, a long way from the eyes of the common people, for it was a time when magic was feared, and those who practised it were hunted.’

He paused, and gazed about the room, blearily, as though looking for the thread.

‘For a time, the four worked in concert. They went out into the country and sought out children who showed the signs, they then brought them here to be taught. But in time they quarrelled. The quarrel was chiefly between Slytherin and the other three. Slytherin desired that the school be more particular in whom it took. He held that magic ought to be taught only to those born of magical families. He mistrusted children whose parents were not of our kind. He believed them unreliable. A danger.’

Which was a load of rubbish, as far as Harry could see. Wizards were so busy keeping their blood pure that they were turning away their own and turning out Squibs like Filch. There were far, far more dangerous Muggles coming into Britain than any Muggle-born witch. Even Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia would have agreed with him on that one.

‘In the end,’ Professor Binns went on, ‘there was a bitter falling-out between Slytherin and Gryffindor on this very question, and Slytherin left the school.’

He paused again, and pursed his lips, so that he looked like a very old tortoise that had swallowed something sour.

‘That much the sources will bear,’ he said. ‘Reliable sources. But the plain facts have been, over the years, overgrown by a great deal of fanciful nonsense, which goes by the name of the Chamber of Secrets. The tale is that Slytherin built a hidden room within this castle of which the others knew nothing. That before he left, he sealed it, so that none might open it until his own true heir came to the school. And that this heir, and the heir alone, would be able to break the seal, release the horror that waited inside, and with it cleanse the school of all those unworthy to learn magic.’

There was a silence when he’d finished. It wasn’t the usual sleepy silence of Professor Binns’s lessons. It was an uneasy one, and every eye in the room was still on him, waiting for more.

Professor Binns looked faintly put out.

‘The whole thing is perfect nonsense, of course,’ he said. ‘Naturally the school has been searched for such a chamber, many times over, by the most learned witches and wizards. It does not exist. It is a story to frighten the credulous.’

Hermione’s hand was in the air again.

‘Sir. What exactly do you mean by "the horror" inside the Chamber?’

‘It is generally held to be some sort of monster,’ said Professor Binns, in his thin, dry voice, ‘which the heir of Slytherin alone can command.’

The class exchanged nervous looks.

‘I tell you, there is no such thing,’ said Professor Binns, shuffling his notes. ‘No Chamber. And no monster.’

‘But, sir,’ said Seamus Finnigan, ‘if the Chamber can only be opened by Slytherin’s true heir, nobody else would be able to find it anyway. Would they?’

‘Nonsense, O’Halloran,’ said Professor Binns, with some irritation. ‘If a long line of Hogwarts headmasters and headmistresses have not found the thing - ’

‘But, Professor,’ piped up Parvati Patil, ‘you’d probably have to use Dark Magic to open it.’

‘A wizard who does not use Dark Magic is not therefore incapable of it, Miss Pettigrew,’ snapped Professor Binns. ‘I repeat, if the likes of Dumbledore -’

‘But maybe you’ve got to be related to Slytherin, so Dumbledore couldn’t -.’ began Dean Thomas, and Professor Binns had had enough.

‘That will do!’ he said sharply. ‘It is a myth! It does not exist! There is not one scrap of evidence that Slytherin ever built so much as a secret broom cupboard! I regret having told you so foolish a tale! We will return, if you please, to history. To solid, believable, verifiable fact!’

And within five minutes the class had sunk back into its usual stupor.

Why couldn’t they learn about vampires? Harry thought, propping his chin on his hand. That Angelus bloke Hermione kept going on about, gruesome as he was, sounded a great deal more interesting than a load of old warlocks arguing about Sardinia.

‘I always knew Salazar Slytherin was a twisted old loony,’ Ron said to Harry and Hermione, as they fought their way through the packed corridors at the end of the lesson to drop off their bags before dinner. ‘But I never knew he started all this pure-blood stuff. I wouldn’t be in his house if you paid me. Honestly, if the Sorting Hat had tried to put me in Slytherin I’d’ve got the train straight back home...’

‘All this pure-blood nonsense is dragging us down, Ron. But what do we even do to sort it out?’ asked Harry.

‘I don’t know, mate.’

Hermione nodded fervently. But Harry didn’t say any more. His stomach had just dropped, unpleasantly.

He’d never told Ron and Hermione that the Sorting Hat had seriously thought about putting him in Slytherin. He could remember it as clearly as if it had happened that morning. The small voice in his ear, a year ago, under the brim. You could be great, you know. It’s all here, in your head. Slytherin would set you well on the road to it. And Harry, who’d already heard what Slytherin turned out, had thought, not Slytherin, not Slytherin, with everything in him, and the Hat had said, Well, if you’re quite sure... better be GRYFFINDOR.

As they were swept along in the crush, Colin Creevey went past them. He could be a nuisance, Colin. But he was so keen about everything that Harry always made time for him.

‘Hiya, Harry!’

‘Alright, Colin?’

But Colin was so small that he couldn’t hold his own against the tide that was carrying him towards the Great Hall. They heard him squeak, ‘See you, Harry!’ and he was gone.

‘What’s a boy in his class saying about you?’ Hermione wondered.

‘Oh, I’m a dark wizard and Salazar Slytherin’s heir, I reckon,’ said Harry. He sighed, and shook his head, and thought of Justin Finch-Fletchley turning on his heel in the corridor at lunchtime. Eton boy, indeed.

‘People here’ll believe anything,’ said Ron in disgust.

‘Too bloody right,’ Harry nodded, and was grateful.

The crowd thinned, and they got up the next staircase without trouble.

‘D’you really think there’s a Chamber of Secrets?’ Ron asked Hermione.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, frowning. ‘Dumbledore couldn’t cure Mrs Norris, and that makes me think that whatever attacked her might not be... well. Human.’

As she said it, they turned a corner and found themselves at the end of the very corridor where it had happened. They stopped, and looked.

It was just as it had been that night, except that there was no stiff cat hanging from the torch bracket, and there was an empty chair standing against the wall under the message.

THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS HAS BEEN OPENED.

‘Oh, not again, for God’s sake,’ Harry moaned.

‘That’s where Filch has been keeping guard,’ Ron muttered.

They looked at each other. The corridor was empty.

‘Can’t hurt to have a poke round,’ said Harry, and he dropped his bag and got down on his hands and knees and crawled along the flagstones, looking for clues.

‘Scorch marks!’ he said. ‘Here... and here...’

‘Come and look at this!’ said Hermione. ‘This is funny...’

Harry got up and went over to the window next to the message. Hermione was pointing at the topmost pane, where twenty or so spiders were scuttling and shoving, apparently fighting each other to get out through a small crack in the glass. A long silvery thread hung down from it like a rope, as though they’d all climbed it in a mad hurry to be gone.

‘Have you ever seen spiders act like that?’ said Hermione, wonderingly.

‘No,’ said Harry. ‘Have you, Ron? Ron?’

He looked over his shoulder. Ron was standing well back, and looked as though he were fighting the urge to run.

‘You all right, mate?’ asked Harry.

‘I. Don’t. Like. Spiders,’ Ron hissed, as though Harry were pointing a gun at him.

‘I never knew that,’ said Hermione, looking at Ron in surprise. ‘You’ve used spiders in potions loads of times...’

‘I don’t mind them dead,’ said Ron, who was looking carefully at everything in the corridor except the window. ‘I just don’t like the way they move...’

Hermione giggled.

‘It’s not funny,’ said Ron fiercely. ‘If you must know, when I was three, Fred turned my... my teddy bear into a dirty great spider, because I broke his toy broomstick. You wouldn’t like them either if you’d been holding your bear and all of a sudden it had too many legs and...’

He stopped, and shuddered.

Hermione was plainly still trying not to laugh. Harry gave her a look that told her to pack it in, and then went and gave Ron’s shoulder a squeeze, the way Ron had done for him, more times than he could count, all summer.

Feeling that they’d better get off the subject, Harry said, ‘Remember all that water on the floor? Where did that come from? Someone’s mopped it up.’

‘It was about here,’ said Ron, recovering himself enough to walk a few paces past Filch’s chair and point. ‘Level with this door.’

He reached for the brass handle, and snatched his hand back as though it had burned him.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Harry.

‘Can’t go in there,’ said Ron gruffly. ‘That’s a girls’ toilet. Mum was always very clear about that.’

‘Oh, Ron, there won’t be anyone in there,’ said Hermione, getting up and coming over. ‘That’s Moaning Myrtle’s place. Come on, let’s have a look.’

And ignoring the large OUT OF ORDER sign, she opened the door.

It was the most dismal, depressing bathroom Harry had ever set foot in. Under a big, cracked, speckled mirror stood a row of chipped stone basins. The floor was damp, and gave back the dull light of a few candle-stubs burning low in their holders, and the wooden cubicle doors were scratched and flaking, and one of them was hanging off its hinges.

Hermione put a finger to her lips and went down to the end cubicle.

‘Hello, Myrtle. How are you?’

Harry and Ron went to look. Moaning Myrtle was sitting on top of the cistern, picking at a spot on her chin.

‘This is a girls’ bathroom,’ she said, looking at Ron and Harry with deep suspicion. ‘They aren’t girls.’

‘No,’ Hermione agreed. ‘I only wanted to show them how... er... nice it is in here.’

She waved vaguely at the filthy mirror and the wet floor.

‘Ask her if she saw anything,’ Harry mouthed at Hermione.

‘What are you whispering?’ said Myrtle, staring at him.

‘Nothing,’ said Harry quickly. ‘We wanted to ask -’

‘I wish people would stop talking behind my back!’ said Myrtle, in a voice thick with tears. ‘I do have feelings, you know. Even if I am dead.’

‘Myrtle, nobody wants to upset you,’ said Hermione. ‘Harry only...’

‘Nobody wants to upset me! That’s a good one!’ Myrtle howled. ‘My life was nothing but misery in this place, and now people come and spoil my death!’

‘We wanted to ask you if you’d seen anything odd lately,’ said Hermione quickly. ‘Because a cat was attacked right outside your door on Hallowe’en.’

‘Did you see anybody near here that night?’ said Harry.

‘I wasn’t paying attention,’ said Myrtle, with great drama. ‘Peeves upset me so much I came in here and tried to kill myself. And then, of course, I remembered that I’m... that I’m...’

‘Already dead,’ said Ron helpfully.

Myrtle gave a tragic sob, rose into the air, turned over, and dived head first into the toilet, splashing water all over the three of them, and vanished. From the direction of her muffled sobs, she’d come to rest somewhere round the U-bend.

Harry and Ron stood with their mouths open. Hermione shrugged wearily.

‘Honestly, that was almost cheerful, for Myrtle. Come on, let’s go.’

Harry had barely shut the door on Myrtle’s gurgling when a loud voice made all three of them jump.

‘RON!‘

Percy Weasley had stopped dead at the top of the stairs, prefect’s badge gleaming, with an expression of total shock on his face.

‘That’s a girls’ bathroom!’ he gasped. ‘Mum was always very clear that we weren’t to go into the ladies’ room. It’s for girls, and we’re not girls, Ron! What were you -?’

‘Just having a look round, mate,’ Ron shrugged. ‘Clues, you know...’

Percy swelled up in a way that reminded Harry very strongly of Mrs Weasley.

‘Get... away... from... there...’ he said, and strode towards them flapping his arms as though he were herding chickens. ‘Don’t you care what this looks like? Coming back here while everyone’s at dinner...’

‘Why shouldn’t we be here?’ said Ron hotly, stopping short and glaring at him. ‘Listen, we never laid a finger on that cat!’

‘That’s what I told Ginny,’ said Percy fiercely. ‘But she still seems to think you’re going to be expelled. I’ve never seen her so upset, crying her eyes out. You might think of her. All the first-years are thoroughly over-excited by this business -’

‘You don’t care about Ginny,’ said Ron, and his ears were going red. ‘You’re just worried I’m going to mess up your chances of being Head Boy.’

‘Five points from Gryffindor!’ said Percy tersely, fingering his badge. ‘And I hope it teaches you a lesson! No more detective work, or I’ll write to Mum!’

And he strode off, with the back of his neck as red as Ron’s ears.

Ron cursed him under his breath all the way to the tower, in terms that would have cost Gryffindor considerably more than five points if Percy had heard them.

Harry, Ron and Hermione chose seats as far as possible from Percy in the common room that night. Ron was still in a foul temper, and kept blotting his Charms homework. When he reached absent-mindedly for his wand to remove the smudges, it set the parchment on fire. Fuming almost as much as his homework, Ron slammed The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 2 shut.

To Harry’s surprise, Hermione did the same.

‘Who can it be, though?’ she said quietly, as though they’d been in the middle of a conversation about it. ‘Who’d want all the Squibs and Muggle-borns out of Hogwarts?’

‘Let’s think,’ said Ron, in mock puzzlement. ‘Who do we know who thinks Muggle-borns are scum?’

He looked at Hermione. Hermione looked back at him, unconvinced.

‘If you’re talking about Malfoy -’

‘Of course I am!’ said Ron. ‘You heard her. "You’ll be next, Mudblood!" She was pointing right at you, Hermione. It’s all because she’s...’

Ron stopped. He rubbed his ear, where Malfoy had bitten it.

‘She’s what, Ronald?’ Hermione asked.

Her voice had gone dark. Harry couldn’t understand why. Even if it was about Malfoy.

Ron glanced at Harry, with something that looked very like sympathy, and Harry couldn’t understand that either.

‘Come on, you’ve only got to look at how she looked then to know it’s her. Remember the state of her. It’s...’

‘Malfoy, the heir of Slytherin?’ said Hermione sceptically.

‘Malfoy hates me,’ said Harry. He said it as a plain matter of fact, and he didn’t notice Ron look away. ‘Look at her family. All dark wizards. They’ve all probably been in Slytherin. She fits the bill. I bet she’s Slytherin’s heir. It’d be just like her. That’s why she got that ruddy house-elf to stop me going to Hogwarts.’

‘They could’ve had the key to the Chamber of Secrets for centuries!’ said Ron. ‘Handing it down, parent to child.’

‘Well,’ said Hermione, cautiously, ‘I suppose it’s possible...’

‘But how do we prove it?’ said Harry darkly.

‘There might be a way,’ said Hermione slowly. She dropped her voice even lower, with a glance across the room at Percy. ‘Of course, it would be difficult. And dangerous. Very dangerous. We’d be breaking about fifty school rules, I expect. But the chance to finally humble that dreadful girl. To show...’

She looked at Harry.

‘Uh... everyone. Yes, everyone! Show him... I mean them. Show them how dreadful that girl is.’

‘If, in a month or so, you feel like explaining, you will let us know, won’t you?’ said Ron irritably.

‘All right,’ said Hermione coldly. ‘What we’d need to do is get inside the Slytherin common room and ask Malfoy a few questions without her realising it’s us.’

‘But that’s impossible,’ Harry said, as Ron laughed.

‘No, it’s not,’ said Hermione. ‘All we’d need would be some Polyjuice Potion.’

‘What’s that?’ said Ron and Harry together.

‘Snape mentioned it in class a few weeks ago...’

‘Oh, right. I must’ve missed it in between all the times Malfoy kept shouting about how much better she was at Potions than me,’ Harry said dryly.

‘You actually listened to that greasy git?’ asked Ron.

‘It transforms you into somebody else,’ said Hermione, ignoring both of them. ‘Think about it! We could change into three of the Slytherins. Nobody would know it was us. Malfoy would probably tell us anything. She’s probably boasting about it in the Slytherin common room right now, plotting how to hurt Harry. If only we could hear that foul girl.’

‘This Polyjuice stuff sounds a bit dodgy to me,’ said Ron, frowning. ‘What if we were stuck looking like three of the Slytherins for ever?’

‘It wears off after a while,’ said Hermione, waving her hand impatiently.

Harry found that her tone was all wrong. It was too insistent, and too eager, and there was something underneath the eagerness that he didn’t like, something dark and very fixed, as though she’d been thinking about this for a lot longer than one evening. It frightened him a bit, if he was honest..

‘But getting hold of the recipe will be very difficult,’ Hermione went on. ‘Snape said it was in a book called Moste Potente Potions, and it’s bound to be in the Restricted Section of the library.’

There was only one way to get a book out of the Restricted Section. You had to have a note of permission, signed by a teacher.

‘Oh, I didn’t realise it’d be that easy,’ said Harry sarcastically.

‘Hard to see why we’d want the book, really,’ said Ron, ‘if we weren’t going to try and make one of the potions.’

‘I think,’ said Hermione, ‘that if we made it sound as though we were only interested in the theory, we might stand a chance...’

‘Oh, come on, no teacher’s going to fall for that,’ said Ron. ‘They’d have to be really thick...’

Harry sighed, and looked into the fire, and thought of a man in forget-me-not blue telling a tall tale of three hundred cultists and a fourth-generation Tzi-mi-see.

He had a feeling he knew exactly which teacher it would be.

There was, Harry had found, no getting out of Defence Against the Dark Arts.

He had tried. He’d thought quite seriously about a sore throat, and rather more seriously about Fred and George’s offer of a sweet that would bring him out in green spots for an afternoon, but Hermione had found out about the spots and given him such a look that he’d dropped the idea at once. So twice a week he climbed the stairs to Lockhart’s classroom, sat at the very back, and endured it.

At least there were no more pixies. That had been finally and absolutely settled on the steps outside the Great Hall, in front of what felt like half the school.

Harry had been coming up from breakfast with Ron when they heard Professor McGonagall’s voice. It wasn’t a loud voice. It never needed to be. It simply arrived, the way cold arrives when somebody opens a door in January, and every conversation on the steps stopped dead to let it through.

‘A word, Gilderoy.’

Lockhart turned, beaming, with a sheaf of signed photographs under one arm. ‘Minerva! I was just telling Sinistra...’

‘I’m aware of what you were telling Professor Sinistra. I could hear it from the staff table. I’d like you to hear something from me instead.’ She came down two steps, so that she stood above him, and somehow that made her seem about as tall as the North Tower. ‘You released a cage of Cornish pixies into a room full of twelve-year-olds and then hid under your desk. Mr Longbottom spent a quarter of an hour hanging from a chandelier by his ears. If you bring one more living creature into a classroom in this castle without my written permission, I will see to it personally that you leave Hogwarts by the window the pixies used. Have I made myself clear?’

Somebody behind Harry let out a low whistle. Lockhart’s smile stayed exactly where it was, but the rest of his face seemed to have gone somewhere else entirely.

‘Crystal, Minerva. Ha! Crystal. Though I do think you’ll find the pixies were a most valuable practical...’

‘I think,’ said Professor McGonagall, ‘you’ll find I wasn’t asking.’

She swept past him. As she went by Harry, her eyes flicked sideways to his, and for half a second one corner of her mouth went up.

So the pixies stopped. Unfortunately, Lockhart decided, in his boundless stupidity and ego, that if he couldn’t bring monsters into the classroom, the next best thing was to bring himself. From then on Defence Against the Dark Arts was a platform for teaching the students about Gilderoy Lockhart. He spent most of every lesson reading aloud from his own books, doing all the voices, striding up and down between the desks with one hand pressed to his heart, and the theatrical flair with which he did it told Harry, and most of the class, a great deal more about Lockhart’s character, or lack of it, than he’d probably meant it to.

Hermione relished every word.

She sat in the front row with her quill poised and her lips very slightly parted, giving Lockhart the same sort of attention that she normally reserved for Harry alone. Hermione really was a dear friend. But if there was one good thing to be said for Gilderoy Lockhart, it was that for two hours a week the full beam of Hermione’s intensity was pointed somewhere else, and Harry could sit in the back row and breathe.

There was no such mercy from Lockhart himself. Lockhart couldn’t do anything at all, it seemed, without dragging Harry into it.

‘Harry! Up you come. I need a Tzi-mi-see.’

‘A what?’ said Harry.

‘You’ll recall,’ said Lockhart to the class, while Harry trudged to the front, ‘that I mentioned in passing, to Harry and to one or two of my colleagues, my little difficulty with a vampire cult. What I didn’t mention, out of sheer modesty, was the rest of it.’ He arranged Harry by the blackboard with his arms raised, like a scarecrow. ‘Now. You are a Methuselah. Fourth generation. Ancient. Terrible. Snarl a bit, Harry. There we are. And what nobody knew, what not even the Ministry knew, was that my Tzi-mi-see was not acting alone.’ He paused, and let the pause swell. ‘He was in league with another. An elder of the Clan Ventrue. A creature so old he’d forgotten his own name, and called himself only... the Master.’

Somebody in the second row gasped. It was Hermione.

‘The Master,’ said Lockhart, lowering his voice, ‘is the grandsire of none other than the infamous Angelus.’

Hermione gasped again, louder, and her hand went to her bag, where Harry happened to know she kept three pictures of Angelus folded inside the cover of Gadding with Ghouls. One was an engraving and two were cut out of a book on vampire history, and in all three he was brooding. Harry had seen her looking at them under the table in Charms. It reminded him uncomfortably of Aunt Petunia, who watched every documentary about serial killers that Channel 4 put on, with her mouth slightly open and her tea going cold, while Uncle Vernon glared at her from the other armchair.

‘Two of them,’ Lockhart went on. ‘Two Methuselahs, and one Lockhart. And what did I do? I did what any of you would have done, if you’d spent a fortnight being trained in close combat by the Slayer.’

‘The what?’ said Seamus.

‘The Slayer, Mr Finnigan. The Chosen One. There is only ever one at a time, you know, and she was kind enough to show me a few of her little tricks. A wonderful girl. Hit like a troll.’ He made a few slow chopping motions in the air with the side of his hand. ‘I took them both, hand to hand. No wand. Bare knuckles, against the two most dangerous creatures in Eastern Europe. Fall down, Harry. Fall down, you’re defeated.’

Harry fell down.

He had no idea what a Slayer was, but it sounded important, the way Lockhart said it, like a title in a fairy story. He lay on the cold floor looking at the underside of Lockhart’s desk, on which somebody had carved G.L. IS A WANKER, and wondered whether he could get away with staying down there until the bell.

Then Hermione put her hand up.

‘Yes, Miss Granger! A question!’

‘It’s only that I’m a bit confused, sir,’ said Hermione, and she did sound confused, and rather apologetic about it. ‘Because I’ve read three books on the Aurelian line, and all three of them say the Master’s been trapped since nineteen thirty-seven. Under a town in California. Something went wrong with a ritual and he’s been sealed in ever since, and he can’t get out. So I don’t understand how you could have fought him in Eastern Europe, sir. Unless it was before nineteen thirty-seven? But then you wouldn’t have been born.’

Lockhart blinked.

There was a silence. It was a very long silence, the kind that seems to fill up a room like water. Harry, still lying on the floor, turned his head and saw Lockhart’s teeth, which were showing, though he wasn’t exactly smiling.

‘A psychic projection,’ said Lockhart at last, brightly. ‘Of course! Well spotted, Miss Granger, take five points. The Master, being sealed in, as you so rightly say, sent a projection of himself. Many of the very old ones can, you know. Terribly draining for them. Which is how I was able to beat him, really, if I’m honest, though I’d never say so in print. Up you get, Harry.’

Hermione said nothing. She lowered her hand, and looked down at her notes, and very slowly put the cap back on her ink bottle.

She didn’t say anything else for the rest of the lesson. Harry, back at his desk, kept glancing at her, hoping. He thought perhaps something had finally gone through.

The next lesson, Lockhart seemed to sense it too.

There was a restlessness in the classroom now that hadn’t been there before. People were passing notes. Dean was drawing Lockhart being eaten by a vampire in the margin of his book, and doing it rather well. Even Lavender Brown had stopped sighing. And Lockhart, who could apparently feel an audience slipping away from him the way other people feel rain coming, did the only thing he could think of.

‘Harry! Harry, my boy. Up to the front!’

Harry stayed where he was for a second, gripping the edge of his desk. If he hadn’t had a very good reason for keeping Lockhart in a good mood, he’d have refused outright. But he had, so he got up.

‘Today,’ said Lockhart, ‘Harry is a werewolf.’

‘Brilliant,’ Ron muttered, behind his hand.

‘Now, Harry, you are the beast. A deep growl from the chest, please, that’s it, that’s it, splendid. Picture it, class. A moonlit pasture outside Wagga Wagga. The sheep scattering like dandelion clocks. And this great slavering brute bearing down on me across the grass. Throw your head back, Harry! Howl! Louder, louder... marvellous! Now. He sprang, and I turned aside, so... and I caught him by the scruff as he went past, so... and down he went into the mud, with my knee in the small of his back, which I shan’t actually do to Harry, ha ha. One hand to pin him. The other to press my wand to the great vein of his neck. And then, gathering the very last of my strength, I performed the Homorphus Charm. Fiendishly difficult. Fiendishly. Whimper, Harry. No, sadder than that. Think of something tragic.’

Harry thought of the cat flap in his bedroom door at Privet Drive, and the tin of cold soup that had come through it once a day, and whimpered.

‘There we are! And before my very eyes the fur fell away, the snout drew in, the claws shrank back into fingernails, and there knelt a man, weeping, in the moonlight, with his whole life given back to him. And to this very day,’ said Lockhart, with a catch in his voice, ‘the mothers of that little village tell my name to their children at bedtime.’

The bell rang. Lockhart sprang to his feet as though he’d been the one on the floor.

‘For Thursday, an ode! Twelve lines at the very least, on the subject of my triumph at Wagga Wagga. The finest will be rewarded with a signed copy of Magical Me!’

The class began to leave. Harry went back to the rear of the room, where Ron and Hermione were waiting.

‘Now?’ Harry muttered, steeling himself for more time in the company of this utter dandy of a man.

‘Not yet,’ said Hermione. ‘Let them all get out first.’

A strange calm had come over her. Harry noticed it, and didn’t know what to make of it. She was watching Lockhart sort his photographs at the desk, and her face was quite still, and quite cool, and it seemed that Lockhart had indeed lessened himself in Hermione’s mind. Whatever hesitation she’d had about tricking him was gone.

The last of the Hufflepuffs went out. The door swung shut.

‘All right.’ She said.

She put on her sweetest smile like a mask before a bank robbery. Then she went up to Lockhart’s desk with a piece of paper clutched tightly in her hand, still smiling, and as she went Harry watched her shoulders hunch up, and her steps go small and shy, until by the time she reached the desk she was the nervous fangirl she’d been only yesterday. Harry and Ron followed close behind.

‘Professor Lockhart? Sir? I’m ever so sorry to bother you,’ said Hermione, in a breathless little voice Harry had never heard her use before. ‘Only I wondered... I’d like to borrow a book from the library. For background reading. But it’s kept in the Restricted Section, and Madam Pince won’t let me have it unless a teacher signs for it.’ She held out the paper, and her hand trembled very slightly, as if from nerves. ‘It’s about slow-acting venoms. I thought it might help me understand that part in Gadding with Ghouls... the bit where you...’

‘Gadding with Ghouls!’ Lockhart took the note from her and smiled at her with every tooth he had. ‘Now there’s a book. Between ourselves, I think it might be the best thing I’ve ever written. You liked it?’

‘Oh, loved it,’ breathed Hermione. ‘When you caught the last ghoul with nothing but a tea-strainer, I had to put it down and walk round the room.’

‘Well!’ said Lockhart warmly. ‘I’m sure nobody could object to my lending a helping hand to the brightest witch in her year.’ And he drew out of his robes a gigantic peacock quill, which shimmered blue and green in the light from the window.

He caught Ron staring at it, with his lip curled up nearly to his nose.

‘Rather fine, isn’t it?’ said Lockhart, delighted. ‘I keep it for signings, mostly.’

He signed the note in a great looping scrawl that took up half the page, and gave it back. Hermione took it and folded it with fumbling fingers, very slowly, as if her hands were shaking with the honour of it, and slid it into her bag.

For a moment Harry felt a cold feeling go down the back of his neck. He was frightened, suddenly, by just how good Hermione was at this. He remembered Hagrid, last year, and how she’d smiled at him and asked him just the right questions in just the right voice until he’d told them about Fluffy without noticing he’d done it.

‘And now, Harry,’ said Lockhart, turning the whole radiance of his smile on him. ‘The first Quidditch match of the season is tomorrow, unless I’m much mistaken. Gryffindor and Slytherin! I hear you’re quite the little flier. I played Seeker myself, you know. I was asked to try out for England, as it happens, but I felt the call to foil dark deeds had the greater need of me. Still! If ever you want a little one-to-one coaching, you’ve only to say. I’m always glad to share what I know with the less gifted.’

Harry growled, and he only just stopped it from getting out past his teeth. And for one moment, in his mind’s eye, Lockhart’s face swapped places with Dobby’s, and Harry found that he wanted to bang it on something.

Then he turned and hurried out after Ron and Hermione.

‘That bastard. I bet he’s never even touched a snitch in his whole rotten, lying, philandering life.’

He made himself calm down. It took the length of the corridor. Then he took the note from Hermione and looked at it.

‘He signed it,’ he said, staring at the enormous loops. ‘He never even read what it was for.’

‘Course he didn’t. He’s got sawdust where his brain should be,’ said Ron. ‘Doesn’t matter. We’ve got it, haven’t we?’

‘Maybe... Maybe he’s not as good as I thought he was.’ mumbled Hermione.

She was clutching her copy of Gadding with Ghouls to her chest, with both arms wrapped round it, the way a small girl holds a doll she’s been told she’s too old for.

They dropped their voices as they came into the hushed stillness of the library. Madam Pince, the librarian, was a thin, irritable woman who looked like an underfed vulture, and who regarded every student who came through the doors as a person who’d probably come to set fire to something.

‘Moste Potente Potions,’ she said, reading the title off the note in a voice of deep suspicion. She looked at Hermione, who had gone a bit sad and quiet again. She’d been fine at the desk with Lockhart, but somewhere on the stairs she’d lost it, and now she looked as if she might cry.

Ron took over. He put his hand on the small of Hermione’s back, quite gently, the way his mum did to Ginny, and stepped up to the desk.

‘It’s for her extra reading, Madam Pince,’ he said. ‘She does a lot of it.’

Madam Pince held the note up to the light, and peered at it, and turned it over, as though she was quite sure she’d find a forgery if she only looked hard enough. But it passed. She stalked off between the towering shelves without a word and came back several minutes later carrying a large and mouldy-looking book, which she handed over as though she were handing over a baby to people she didn’t trust. Hermione put it carefully into her bag.

They turned to go, trying not to walk too fast or look too guilty, and came round the end of the Arithmancy shelves face to face with Dracina Malfoy.

She had an armful of books, and Pansy Parkinson at her elbow. She stopped dead when she saw them. Her grey eyes went to Harry first, the way they always did, as quick as a reflex. Then they went to Ron’s hand, which was still resting on Hermione’s back. Then to Hermione’s face, which was pink at the eyes.

Something bright and nasty came into Malfoy’s expression.

‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘Has he dropped you, Granger? Lockhart? I heard you’d been giving him the big eyes in class. I’m afraid he’s not really in the market for a teeth healer’s daughter. Not even a clever one.’

Pansy giggled.

‘Leave it, Malfoy,’ said Harry.

‘Leave it, Malfoy,’ Malfoy mimicked. But her voice had gone a little high. ‘Never mind, Granger. You’ve always got Potter to cry on, haven’t you? You’ve always got Potter.’

Hermione’s face changed.

The sadness went out of it, all at once, the way a light goes out when someone pinches a candle. What was left was perfectly smooth and perfectly polite. She shifted the bag on her shoulder, the bag with the book in it, and stepped a little closer to Harry, close enough that her arm brushed his.

‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘I have. Haven’t I?’

Malfoy stared at her. The colour drained out of her face so fast that for a moment Harry thought she might be ill. Her free hand went to the front of her robes and pressed there, flat, over something small and square, and Harry saw her fingers tighten on it until the knuckles went white.

‘Come on, Pansy,’ she said, in a voice like a thread pulled too tight, and pushed past them.

‘What,’ said Ron, when she’d gone, ‘was that?’

‘Nothing,’ said Hermione. ‘Come on.’

She was smiling slightly. Harry didn’t know why, and somehow he didn’t like to ask.

Five minutes later they were barricaded into Moaning Myrtle’s out-of-order bathroom once again. Ron had objected, on the grounds that it smelled and Myrtle was mental, and Hermione had overruled him on the grounds that it was the last place anyone in their right mind would ever come, which meant they’d be left alone. Moaning Myrtle was sobbing noisily in her cubicle. They ignored her, and she ignored them.

Hermione laid Moste Potente Potions open on the edge of the sinks, very carefully, and the three of them bent over the damp, foxed pages.

It was obvious at a glance why the book was kept in the Restricted Section. Some of the potions in it did things that didn’t bear thinking about, and the illustrations were worse. There was a man who appeared to have been turned inside out and was looking rather surprised about it, and a witch with several extra pairs of arms growing out of the top of her head.

‘There,’ said Hermione, and her voice had gone eager and breathless, though not in the way it had been for Lockhart. She’d found a page headed The Polyjuice Potion. It was illustrated with drawings of people halfway through turning into other people, and Harry fervently hoped the artist had made up the expressions of agony on their faces.

‘I’ve never seen anything this complicated,’ Hermione said, running her finger slowly down the list. ‘Not even in the back of the sixth-year book. Lacewing flies. Leeches. Fluxweed, knotgrass... well, that’s fine, those are all in the student cupboard, we can just take them. But look at this. Powdered Bicorn horn, I’ve no idea where we’d get that. And Boomslang skin, shredded, and that’s going to be awful. And then a piece of whoever it is we’re turning into.’

Harry looked over the list. He read it twice, and with each line he felt his stomach sink a little further, and he did what he always did when he was worried, which was to try and drown it in sarcasm.

‘Oh, brilliant,’ he said. ‘That’s fine, then. We’ll just nip down to Snape’s private stores, shall we? Knock on the door? Excuse me, sir, sorry to bother you, have you got any Boomslang skin going spare? Shredded, if it’s no trouble. He’ll probably throw in a biscuit.’

‘Harry.’

‘And the Bicorn. Where’s a Bicorn, Hermione? Is there a Bicorn shop? Is it in Diagon Alley next to the ice-cream place?’

‘Harry.’ Hermione put her hand on his arm. Her eyes were very bright. ‘You’ll work it out. You always do. You’re brave, and you’re clever when it matters, cleverer than anyone gives you credit for, and you’ll think of something. And I’ll be right there with you. I’ll be with you the whole time. You don’t have to worry about a thing.’

It did nothing whatever for Harry’s mood.

He was grateful, of course. She was his friend, and she meant it kindly, and he had no idea at all that there might be any other way of meaning it. But he was a bit taken aback all the same. She hadn’t heard a word he’d said. She’d swept right past it, the way you’d sweep crumbs off a table. And there was something else, too, that he couldn’t quite put his finger on, something about the way she’d gone so very still and so very set ever since the moment they’d decided it was Malfoy. As though the potion, and the rules, and the danger, didn’t matter to her nearly as much as the fact that it was Malfoy they had to foil.

Ron sighed, and rubbed the back of his neck, and looked at the ceiling.

Harry caught his eye. Ron had the expression of somebody standing between two fierce dogs, with a sausage in each hand.

‘What?’ said Harry.

‘Nothing,’ said Ron. ‘Just wondering if I’ll live to see fourteen, that’s all.’

Then Hermione shut the book with a snap.

‘Well, if you two are going to give up, fine,’ she said. There were bright pink patches on her cheeks and her eyes were brighter than usual. ‘I don’t want to break rules, you know. I think threatening ME is far worse than brewing up a difficult potion. But if you don’t want to find out if it’s Malfoy, I’ll go straight to Madam Pince now and hand the book back in ...’

‘Hermione Granger,’ Harry said incredulously. ‘Are you asking us to break the rules?’

He clapped a hand to his chest and made a great show of looking scandalised, to tease her.

‘Never in my life,’ said Ron, ‘did I think I’d hear you talking us into breaking rules. Go on, then. We’re in. Only I’m not drinking anybody’s toenails. I want that clear before we start.’

Harry nodded hard, standing with Ron on this one.

‘How long’s it going to take, anyway?’ said Harry.

Hermione, looking happier, beamed at Harry and opened the book again. It was a very particular sort of beam, and it reminded him, all of a sudden and much too vividly, of Malfoy in the Forbidden Forest last year, when she’d tricked him into holding her hand and started calling him by his first name. That had been exactly the same look. The look of a girl who’d got her own way, for once. Not that Harry was fussed. Not at all.

‘Let me see. The fluxweed has to be gathered when the moon’s full, and the lacewings want stewing for three whole weeks,’ said Hermione, counting on her fingers. ‘So if we can get everything, I’d say we’re looking at a month.’

‘Oh, so it’s very quick then.’ remarked Harry dryly.

Hermione laughed, a real laugh, and nudged him.

‘A month?’ said Ron. ‘A whole month? She could’ve murdered every Muggle-born in the castle by then!’

But Hermione’s eyes narrowed again, dangerously, and he went on very quickly, ‘Right, right. it’s the best plan we’ve got, so full steam ahead, I say.’

Hermione was still giving him a dark look. Ron smiled at her hopefully, the way you’d smile at a dog you weren’t sure about. Then she turned away to the door, to check that the coast was clear, and he leaned in close to Harry and muttered out of the side of his mouth.

‘It’ll be a lot less hassle if you can just knock slimy Malfoy off her broom tomorrow.’

‘Ron...she’s a girl.’ Said Harry.

‘Yeah...’ Ron said.

He looked at Harry for a long moment, and something worried came into his freckled face and stayed there. Harry had said it as though it were a perfectly obvious rule, the sort of thing everybody knew, like not hitting someone who was wearing glasses. But Ron had heard something else in it. He’d heard that Harry was slowly, slowly starting to notice that Malfoy was a girl. And that, as far as Ron was concerned, was much more dangerous than any broom, whether or not Malfoy turned out to be the Heir of Slytherin.

Word travels quickly at Hogwarts, and the story of Harry’s performance as the Wagga Wagga werewolf was all over the castle by dinner. Harry was halfway through his shepherd’s pie when Professor McGonagall appeared at his shoulder.

‘Potter. A moment, if you would.’

He followed her out into the Entrance Hall, wondering what he’d done. She led him to a window alcove, out of the way of the stream of students coming and going, and stood looking at him with her lips pressed together.

‘I’m told,’ she said, ‘that you were a werewolf this morning.’

‘Er,’ said Harry. ‘Yes, Professor.’

‘And that Professor Lockhart subdued you by kneeling on you and casting the Homorphus Charm.’

‘Yes, Professor.’

Professor McGonagall closed her eyes briefly, as though praying for strength.

‘Then you’d better listen to me very carefully, Potter, because there will come a day, I’m sorry to say, when what you know about werewolves matters, and I’m not going to have the only thing in your head be that man’s nonsense.’ She held up one finger. ‘First. There’s no such charm. There is no spell that turns a werewolf back into a man, not on the full moon or on any other night. If there were, I can think of several people who’d be very glad of it. A werewolf in its wolf shape doesn’t stop to be knelt on. It doesn’t feel pain the way you or I do. It’s quicker than you, and stronger than you, and if it gets within arm’s reach of you, you’re already dead. So you don’t let it get within arm’s reach. You Stun it from a distance, from as far away as you can manage, and you don’t do it alone. Three Stunners at once, from three different directions, is the very least. One is a waste of breath.’

Harry nodded, trying to fix every word in his head.

‘Second. If it comes to killing, and I very much hope it never will, it’s silver. It’s always silver. Silver blades, silver shot, silver dust if that’s all you have. Not because of any curse, but because the creature simply can’t bear it. Third.’ She hesitated. She looked out of the window at the dark grounds, and when she spoke again her voice had dropped. ‘Third, Potter, and this is the one nobody will teach you here. Not every werewolf was bitten.. Regardless of if they’re bitten or not, They call themselves the Garou. They don’t think of themselves as cursed at all. They think of themselves as soldiers. They serve something they call Gaia, which I suppose is the Earth, and they’re at war with something they call the Wyrm, which I suppose is everything else.’

‘Are they... dangerous?’ said Harry.

Professor McGonagall gave him a look over the top of her spectacles.

‘In their war shape,’ she said, ‘which they call the Crinos, they stand nine feet tall. And there’s something about the sight of them that does something to the mind. The Delirium, it’s called. Muggles who see one forget it, or go mad, or both. Most wizards aren’t much better off. I once watched a very brave man, an Auror, a war hero, see one come round the corner of a barn, and drop his wand and stand there weeping like a child.’ She was quiet for a moment. ‘If you ever meet one, Potter, and it’s angry, you don’t fight it. You don’t Stun it. Three Stunners won’t trouble it any more than a cat’s sneeze would. You run, and you hope that whatever it’s angry with isn’t you. And if you find yourself somewhere very old and very green, a ring of stones, say, or a spring in a wood where the trees feel as though they’re watching, you leave the way you came and you don’t touch anything. That’ll be one of their places, and they don’t take kindly to visitors.’

‘Right,’ said Harry faintly. ‘Run. Don’t touch anything.’

‘And if it has black fur,’ said Professor McGonagall, ‘and it’s dancing, run faster.’

Harry stared at her. She didn’t smile.

‘Some of them have gone over to the other side,’ she said simply. ‘Like people. Now go and finish your dinner. And Potter...’

‘Yes, Professor?’

‘If Professor Lockhart asks you to play a vampire again, you may tell him from me that a Tzimisce doesn’t fall down when you hit it. It comes apart and walks off in several directions.’

She went back into the Great Hall. Harry stood in the alcove for a while longer, saying silver, three Stunners, run, black fur, run faster over and over to himself under his breath, until he was fairly sure he’d remember it. He’d been beginning to suspect, since the business in Lockhart’s office, that Professor McGonagall had lived a very colourful life before she came to Hogwarts to teach Transfiguration. Now he was certain of it. Nobody learned about the Delirium from a book.

When Harry got back to the Gryffindor table, his shepherd’s pie had gone cold, and there was somebody sitting on the bench at the end of it who had no business being there.

Dracina Malfoy had perched herself sideways on the very end of the bench, as though she’d only stopped for a second and might get up at any moment, which was the only reason, Harry supposed, that nobody had thrown her off yet. Fred and George were watching her with deep interest. Neville had shuffled as far away from her as it was possible to shuffle without sitting in Dean’s lap.

‘Potter,’ she said, when she saw him. ‘There you are.’

‘What do you want?’ said Harry, sitting down.

‘Nothing. I came to look at you. I wanted to see what a loser looks like the night before he loses.’ She tilted her head, and her long pale hair slid over one shoulder. ‘It looks quite a lot like you, as it turns out.’

‘Thanks,’ said Harry. ‘That all?’

‘No.’ She hesitated. It was only a tiny hesitation, a hitch in her breath, but Harry noticed it. ‘It’s going to rain tomorrow. Everyone says. You’d better wear your goggles, Potter. If you get water on those ridiculous glasses you won’t be able to see your own hand, and I don’t want anybody saying I only won because you were blind. I want to beat you properly.’ Her eyes flicked over his face. ‘You’ve got... you look tired. You’d better sleep. I won’t have you making excuses.’

‘He’s eating, Malfoy,’ said Hermione.

She’d come round the end of the table with a book under her arm, and she sat down on Harry’s other side, close, and didn’t look at Malfoy at all. She looked only at Harry. She reached over and moved his goblet a little nearer his hand, the way you’d do for somebody you’d been doing it for all your life.

‘You’ve hardly touched that, Harry,’ she said. ‘Shall I get you some more? It’s gone cold.’

Malfoy stood up.

‘I wasn’t talking to you, Mudblood,’ she said, in a very low, very clear voice, and three or four people near them drew in their breath. ‘I wasn’t talking to you at all. I don’t know why you think you’re allowed to be part of it.’

She walked away. Clicking for Crabbe and Goyle. Who still kept downwind of Neville. She walked very straight and very fast, and she didn’t look back, but Harry saw her stop by the Slytherin table and stand there a moment with her back to the room and her hand pressed against her robes. Then she went out of the Great Hall without sitting down.

‘Part of what?’ said Harry.

‘Who knows,’ said Hermione serenely, and passed him the gravy.

Harry woke early on Saturday morning and lay for a while thinking about the coming Quidditch match.

He was nervous. Mainly he was nervous at the thought of what Wood would say if Gryffindor lost. He should have been worried about the Slytherin brooms, too, those sleek, wicked Nimbus Two Thousand and Ones that went like the wind, and he was. But mostly, if he was honest, he was worried about Dracina Malfoy. She’d try to distract him. She’d try to mess him up, somehow, so that Slytherin would win.

A little voice in his head asked the very annoying question of just how she was going to do that.

Harry didn’t answer it. He was twelve, and girls were only just beginning to look interesting, and he’d have died before he admitted even to himself what the answer might be. He rolled over and put his pillow over his head. It didn’t help. Her face was still there, right behind his eyes, with her stupid silver eyes and her stupid smirk and her stupid hair, and it was saying goggles, Potter, in that odd, quick, not-quite-sneering voice.

He had never wanted to beat Slytherin so badly in his whole life.

After half an hour of lying there with his insides churning, he got up, got dressed, and went down to breakfast early. He found the rest of the Gryffindor team huddled together at the long, empty table, all looking pale and tight around the mouth, and none of them saying much.

Wood was eating porridge with a dreadful steady determination, as if he’d been told he’d need it to survive a siege. Katie Bell was tearing a slice of toast into very small pieces and not eating any of them. Fred and George had built a kind of tower out of the marmalade jars and were staring at it.

The Great Hall slowly filled up around them. At about half past eight the Slytherin team came in.

They came in all together, in a knot, the way they’d done everything since they’d got their brooms, with Flint at the front like the prow of a ship. Malfoy was at the back of them. Her hair had been plaited, tightly, in a crown round her head, the way the girls in the old paintings wore it when they were going riding, and woven through the plaits were thin ribbons of Slytherin green. It must have taken somebody an hour.

She looked over at the Gryffindor table as she passed. She didn’t look at the team. She looked straight at Harry, and her chin came up a little. Harry had the strangest feeling that she was waiting for him to say something about it.

He didn’t know what she wanted him to say. He looked down at his eggs.

At that moment Hermione arrived, with Ron yawning behind her. Hermione took one look round the Hall, and sat down next to Harry, and laid her hand lightly on his arm.

‘How are you feeling?’ she said. ‘You look pale. You ought to eat something, Harry, honestly, you’ll fall off.’

Her hand stayed where it was. Harry, who was used to Hermione fussing, didn’t think anything of it. But across the Hall, over Hermione’s shoulder, he saw Dracina Malfoy go perfectly still at the Slytherin table, with her fork halfway to her mouth.

Then she put the fork down. She took a small black book out of her robes and opened it on her knee, under the edge of the table where the teachers couldn’t see it, and she began to write. She wrote fast, without looking up, her quill jerking across the page, and her face had gone the colour of the tablecloth, except for two hard red spots high up on her cheeks.

She stopped writing. She waited. Then she bent her head lower over the book, and as Harry watched she nodded once, slowly, like somebody agreeing to something.

‘Harry? You’re not listening.’

‘Sorry,’ said Harry. ‘What?’

‘I said eat your toast,’ said Hermione, and took her hand away at last, and smiled.

As eleven o’clock drew near, the whole school began to make its way down to the Quidditch stadium. It was a muggy, heavy sort of day, with low grey cloud sitting on the tops of the mountains and a feeling of thunder in the air, as though the sky were holding its breath.

Harry was halfway across the lawn when somebody tugged at his sleeve.

It was Ginny Weasley. She was wearing a Gryffindor scarf that was much too long for her, wound round three times, and she’d gone bright red right up to the roots of her hair.

‘Harry. Good luck,’ she said, in a rush. ‘I mean... I hope you win. I know you will. You were brilliant last year, Ron said, and you’ll be brilliant today, and...’

She ran out of words. She stood there, scarlet, twisting the end of the scarf round her fingers.

‘Thanks, Ginny,’ said Harry, rather touched.

Ginny gave a squeak and fled.

Harry turned, smiling a little, and found that the Slytherin team were walking down the lawn not twenty feet away. They’d stopped. Malfoy had stopped. She was looking past Harry, at Ginny’s small, retreating, red-haired back, and there was no expression on her face at all. It was the same blankness Harry had seen on Hermione’s face on the stairs, a smooth stillness with something moving underneath it, and seeing it on Malfoy gave him a cold, crawling feeling at the back of his neck that he didn’t understand.

Then she saw him looking,  her lip curled, and she was herself again.

‘Your little fan club’s out early, Potter,’ she said. ‘How many have you got now? I can’t keep count.’

She walked on before he could answer.

Ron and Hermione caught him up at the door to the changing rooms.

‘Good luck, mate,’ said Ron, thumping him on the shoulder. ‘Flatten them.’

Hermione didn’t say good luck. She reached up and straightened the collar of his robes, which didn’t need straightening, and smoothed it down with both hands.

‘Come back in one piece, Harry,’ she said. ‘Come back to me. To us, I mean. In one piece. Promise.’

‘It’s only Quidditch,’ said Harry.

‘Promise.’

‘All right,’ said Harry, bewildered. ‘I promise.’

Hermione nodded, and let go of his collar, and went off with Ron towards the stands without looking back.

The team pulled on their scarlet Gryffindor robes and then sat down on the benches to listen to Wood’s usual pep talk. Wood paced up and down in front of them. He’d got the look he always had before a match, of a man about to lead a cavalry charge into the mouth of a cannon.

‘Right. I’m not going to lie to you. Their brooms are faster than ours,’ he said. ‘Much faster. There’s no use pretending otherwise. But a broom’s a stick with a bit of polish on. It doesn’t fly itself. We’ve put in more hours than they have. We’ve flown in wind, we’ve flown in rain, we’ve flown in hail...’

‘And sleet,’ said George darkly. ‘Don’t forget Tuesday. I’ve still got sleet in my ears.’

‘...and today,’ said Wood, raising his voice over him, ‘today we make them sorry they ever let Malfoy pay her way onto that team.’ His chest was heaving. He swung round on Harry. ‘And it’s on you, Harry. It’s you who’s got to show them that a Seeker needs more than a father with a fat Gringotts vault. You beat Malfoy to that Snitch, or you die trying. Because we’re winning today. We have to win today.’

‘Lovely and relaxed, then, Harry,’ said Fred, and winked.

When they walked out onto the pitch, a roar of noise came up to meet them. It was mostly cheering, because Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff were desperate to see Slytherin beaten, but through the cheers came the boos and hisses of the Slytherins in their stand, like a kettle coming to the boil. Madam Hooch, the Quidditch teacher, had Flint and Wood shake hands. They did it with their teeth showing and their eyes locked, squeezing until their knuckles went white.

‘When I blow,’ said Madam Hooch, putting the silver whistle to her lips. ‘Three. Two. One.’

The whistle shrieked. Fourteen brooms shot up into the heavy air.

And as they rose, the singing started.

Dean Thomas had been working on it since the summer holidays. He’d written it on the backs of envelopes and in the margins of his Potions notes, and for three weeks he’d been taking Gryffindors aside one at a time in the common room and teaching it to them under his breath, until there was hardly a Gryffindor left in the castle who didn’t know every word. It was to a tune Dean said he’d learned on the terraces at West Ham, and it was roared out by two hundred voices from the Gryffindor stand, while Dean stood on his seat at the front and conducted them with a rolled-up programme.

‘Oh, they come up from the dungeons with their brand-new shiny brooms,

And their daddies paid for every one, and their daddies paid for the rooms,

And they think a bag of Galleons makes a Seeker out of fools,

But we know what they’re missing, lads, and we know what’s in their schools!’

Then the whole stand drew breath together, and Harry, circling high above it, heard the chorus come up like a wave breaking.

‘And they’re singing I’m a slimy snake, I’ve got no balls,

I’m a slimy snake I’ve got no balls,

I’m a slimy snake

I’ve got no balls

Where’ve they gone?

You never had them, fools.’

The Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws had picked it up by the second chorus. By the third it was coming from three sides of the stadium at once, and the stamping of feet on the wooden boards made the whole structure shake.

The Slytherin stand went berserk. Harry, swooping low over it, saw a sixth-year climb onto the rail and shake both fists, and a whole row of them get to their feet at once and surge towards the steps that led across to the Gryffindor stand, and Crabbe’s older cousin take his jacket off.

‘THAT WILL DO!‘

It was Professor McGonagall. She’d seized Lee Jordan’s magical megaphone out of his hands, and her voice came out of it like a thunderclap, so loud that a flock of rooks rose screaming out of the Forbidden Forest.

‘MR THOMAS, YOU WILL SIT DOWN. EVERY ONE OF YOU WILL SIT DOWN. IF I HEAR ONE MORE VERSE OF THAT, ONE MORE WORD, GRYFFINDOR WILL LOSE FIFTY POINTS AND I WILL PERSONALLY SEE TO IT THAT NOBODY IN THAT STAND SEES ANOTHER MATCH THIS YEAR. AND YOU, IN THE SLYTHERIN STAND, IN THE GREEN SCARF, PUT YOUR JACKET BACK ON THIS INSTANT.’

The singing died. The Slytherins, muttering, sank back into their seats.

Harry, passing the Gryffindor stand a few seconds later, caught a glimpse of Dean sitting down slowly with a look of deep disappointment on his face.

‘Aw, Professor,’ he was saying. ‘It was just getting good. We’d have had a proper ruck in a minute. They’d have all been in detention for a month...’

Then Harry was past, and climbing, and looking for the Snitch.

He’d barely got level with the top of the stands when there was a rush of air beside him, and a flash of green and silver, and Dracina Malfoy was there.

She’d come up from below him at a speed his Nimbus Two Thousand could never have matched, and now she pulled in level, a few feet away, and matched his pace exactly, without even seeming to try. Her plaits were coming loose already in the wind. She looked flushed, and furious, and pleased with herself all at once.

‘Hear that, Potter? Slimy snake?’ she shouted. ‘That’s what your lot think is clever! That’s the best Gryffindor can do!’

‘I didn’t write it,’ said Harry.

‘You laughed. I saw you.’

‘I didn’t laugh!’

‘You smiled. That’s worse.’ She swung her broom round in a tight little circle round him, very close, close enough that he had to jerk his knees in, and came back level. ‘Look at this broom, Potter. Look at it. Do you know how fast it is? Watch.’

And she was gone. She shot away from him in a great climbing spiral, round and round and up and up, faster and tighter, until she was a green dot against the grey cloud. Then she flipped over at the top and came down again in a long, beautiful, plunging dive, pulled out of it a foot above the heads of the Slytherin stand, so that the whole front row ducked, and swept round in a perfect curve and back up to Harry, glowing.

She looked at him. She was breathing fast.

‘Did you see that?’ she said. ‘Potter. Did you see?’

There was something in the way she said it that didn’t fit. It sounded almost like a question, like a real one. Like she wanted to know.

‘Yeah,’ said Harry. ‘Very nice. Is the Snitch up there, then, or were you just showing off?’

Malfoy’s face went scarlet.

‘I wasn’t showing off! I was warming up! Not that you’d know what that is, Scarhead, flying about on that old twig like somebody’s grandmother!’

‘Scarhead,’ she said again, with relish. ‘Scarhead Potter. Scarhead, Scarhead.’

‘Scarhead?’ Harry said. ‘Well, it’s better than Pottyhead, I’ll give you that. Still pretty rubbish, though.’

Malfoy screamed.

It wasn’t a word. It was a real, proper, full-throated scream of rage, the scream of a girl who’d been told she couldn’t have something, and it rang across the pitch so loudly that Madam Hooch, far below, looked up with her whistle halfway to her mouth.

‘Rubbish? How DARE you! You don’t get to call anything of mine rubbish, you... you speccy, scrawny, ungrateful, orphaned...’

A Bludger came hurtling out of nowhere, straight at Harry’s head.

Harry ducked. He felt the wind of it through his hair. George Weasley went streaking past him and walloped it with his bat, sending it rocketing away towards Adrian Pucey.

‘Look out, Harry!’

But the Bludger didn’t go towards Adrian Pucey. Halfway there it seemed to change its mind. It curved, in the air, as if it were on a string, and came back.

Harry dropped like a stone, and it shot over him.

‘Weird,’ he muttered, pulling up.

It came again. And again. It didn’t seem to care about anyone else on the pitch. Fred hit it, and it came back. George hit it, and it came back. It came at Harry from below and from above, and once from directly behind, so that he only heard it at the last second, a hum like a hornet the size of a melon, and threw himself flat along the handle of his broom. After the fourth attack Fred and George took up positions on either side of him, so close that Harry could hear them breathing, and from then on every time the Bludger came one of them was there to whack it away.

And the whole time, between attacks, there was Malfoy.

She was everywhere. She’d fall in beside him, and swerve across in front of him, so that he had to haul his broom aside to avoid her, and drop away and come up underneath him again. Once she flew so close, from behind, that she caught the tail of his broom with her hand and gave it a sharp yank. The Nimbus slewed sideways and Harry nearly went into Fred.

‘Oi!‘ Fred bellowed. ‘Foul! Madam Hooch! FOUL!’

But Madam Hooch was at the far end of the pitch, blowing her whistle furiously at Marcus Flint, who’d just barged Angelina Johnson so hard she’d had to go round the goalposts twice to stop herself. She hadn’t seen. Malfoy laughed, and was gone.

Then, for the first time, Harry saw the Snitch.

It was hovering in front of the Gryffindor goalposts, a little winking speck of gold, just above Wood’s left shoulder. Wood hadn’t noticed it. Harry flattened himself to the broom and went for it, and out of the corner of his eye he saw a green streak doing the same thing, from the other side of the pitch, much faster.

They arrived together.

Malfoy came in at an angle, so that she cut right across his front, and as she did it her elbow came out, and caught Harry hard in the ribs, and knocked the breath clean out of him. He doubled over the handle. Katie Bell, who’d been passing with the Quaffle, got the other elbow, apparently by accident, as Malfoy swung round, and dropped the Quaffle with a yell.

By the time Harry had his breath back, the Snitch had gone.

‘Foul!‘ he gasped. ‘That was a foul!’

‘Was it?’ Malfoy was hanging in the air above him, upside down, with her knees locked round her broom and her loosening plaits dangling. ‘I don’t hear a whistle, Potter. Do you hear a whistle? I don’t hear a thing.’

Madam Hooch was blowing her whistle again. But she was blowing it at Pucey and Warrington, who’d just sandwiched Alicia Spinnet between them, and she had her back to them both.

‘She can’t see everything at once,’ said Malfoy softly. She swung herself the right way up. ‘That’s the trouble with rules, isn’t it? Somebody has to be looking.’

Then she bent forward over her broom, so that her face was quite close to his, and her voice dropped lower still.

‘You said I was pretty, Potter.’

‘What?’

‘On the pitch, With the brooms. You said I was a pretty thing. Everybody heard you.’

‘I said some pretty thing,’ said Harry, his face going hot all the way down his neck. ‘I said some pretty thing. I meant the broom! I meant your brooms!’

‘That’s the same.’

‘It is NOT the same!’

‘It is, actually. You can’t take it back.’ Her silver eyes were bright and hard and strange. ‘You said it, and I heard it, and you’re not allowed to take it back, not ever, and if you try -’

The Bludger came round again. Fred and George both got to it at once, and there was a crack like a pistol shot, and when Harry looked back, Malfoy had gone.

Stupid Malfoy, he thought furiously, climbing. Stupid Malfoy with her stupid pretty... with her stupid face. He hadn’t said it. He hadn’t. He hadn’t meant it. Not like that.

It was some time before he noticed that he’d done three laps of the pitch without looking for the Snitch once.

Down in the Gryffindor stand there seemed to be some sort of trouble. As Harry dipped low over it, he heard a long, piercing blast on a whistle, and saw Dean Thomas standing on his seat again, with a referee’s whistle in his mouth and a little square of red card held high over his head.

‘RED CARD!’ Dean was bellowing. ‘RED CARD! That’s a straight red, that! That’s a red in any league in the world! Off! Get her OFF!‘

‘What’s he on about?’ Harry heard somebody say.

‘It’s from football,’ said Seamus. ‘Muggle thing. You get a red card, you’re sent off.’

‘Football?‘ A big Ravenclaw sixth-year in the row behind had leaned over the barrier, scornfully. ‘That’s the one where they kick a ball about on the ground for an hour and a half and nobody scores? My cousin took me once. I’ve had more excitement watching Flobberworms breed.’

Dean took the whistle out of his mouth and turned round slowly.

‘Say that again,’ he said.

‘I said it’s boring. Kicking things. What’s the point of a game where nobody can even fly?’

‘You want to come down Upton Park on a Saturday,’ said Dean, going red, ‘and say that to the Chicken Run, mate, and see how far you get.’

‘Ooh, I’m terrified.’

Dean began to climb over the seat. The Ravenclaw began to climb over the barrier. Two or three of his friends stood up behind him.

‘All right! All right, all right,’ said Ron.

He’d shoved his way in between them, with his hands up, and his ears going red, and he was talking very fast. ‘Look, it’s a good game, all right? Dad’s mad on it, he’s always on about it. Twenty-two of them, and only one ball, it’s dead clever when you think about it. And Quidditch is better, all right, but that doesn’t mean you have to go round thumping people for it, does it? Does it? Sit down, Dean. Go on, mate. Sit down. Malfoy’s not worth a fight.’

Dean sat down, muttering. The Ravenclaw, after a moment, did too.

Harry swung away, smiling in spite of himself, and as he turned he saw Hermione.

She was in the middle of the Gryffindor stand, a little apart from everybody else. She had a pair of binoculars up to her eyes. Harry raised his hand to wave, thinking she was watching him. But the binoculars weren’t pointed at him. They followed a point some way behind him and above, steadily, patiently, turning slowly as their target turned, and when Harry twisted round to see what she was looking at, he saw that it was Malfoy.

Hermione didn’t lower the binoculars when he waved. He wasn’t sure she’d even seen him.

The Bludger came at him again, out of nowhere, and he forgot about it.

And then, suddenly, Malfoy saw the Snitch.

Harry knew it at once from the way she moved. She’d been drifting near the Slytherin goalposts, hands loose, looking bored, and all at once she went rigid, and dropped, and shot away towards the far corner of the pitch, low and fast. Harry wrenched his broom round and went after her. But she had the faster broom, much faster, and she’d had a head start, and he could see it now, the gold flicker, darting about just ahead of her outstretched hand.

He wasn’t going to catch her. He knew he wasn’t.

In the Gryffindor stand, Dean Thomas rose to his feet again. And the singing came back, louder than before, and this time the words were new.

‘She’s a slimy snake, she’s got no Snitch,

She’s a slimy snake, she’s got no Snitch,

Daddy’s gold,

Daddy’s brooms,

Daddy’s girl,

Can’t catch a cold, can’t catch a thing, Malfoy!’

Malfoy’s head came up. Her hand, a foot from the Snitch, faltered.

She turned on her broom, actually turned, right round in the air, and stared at the Gryffindor stand, and her face went from white to purple in the space of a heartbeat.

‘HOW DARE YOU!‘ she shrieked. ‘How DARE you! Do you know who I am? Do you know who my FATHER is? He sits on the Board of Governors! He could have every one of you thrown out! He could have your whole stand knocked down! You common, bellowing, Muggle-loving rabble, I’ll have you... I’ll have your names, I’ll have ALL your names, I’m writing them DOWN...’

‘MR THOMAS!’ roared Professor McGonagall through the megaphone. ‘TWENTY POINTS FROM GRYFFINDOR! SIT DOWN!’

But it was too late. The Snitch had gone. Malfoy whirled back round to find nothing in front of her but grey air, and let out another wordless scream that made the Slytherin Beaters wince.

It had started to rain.

Harry felt the first heavy drops fall on his face and spatter across his glasses. Within a minute it was coming down properly, in long grey slanting lines, and the stands had blurred into smears of red and green and blue. He realised he had no idea what was happening in the rest of the game. He’d been watching nothing but the Bludger, and Malfoy, and Malfoy, and the Bludger.

‘...and Pucey scores again, I’m afraid,’ came Lee Jordan’s voice, thin and miserable through the rain. ‘Which makes it sixty points to Slytherin and still not a sausage for Gryffindor, which is accurate, I’m told, but I’d just like it on record that I’m not happy about it...’

‘Jordan.‘

‘Sorry, Professor.’

Sixty points. The Slytherins’ expensive brooms were doing exactly what they’d been bought to do. And the mad Bludger was still doing everything it possibly could to knock Harry out of the sky. Fred and George were flying so close to him now, on either side, that he couldn’t see anything at all except their arms and their bats and the rain, flailing and swinging, and he didn’t have a hope of looking for the Snitch, let alone catching it.

‘There’s something... wrong... with this thing,’ panted Fred, swinging at it with all his strength as it came in for yet another go. ‘It’s been... got at...’

‘Time out,’ said George through his teeth, trying to signal to Wood with one hand and keep the Bludger off Harry’s nose with the other. ‘We need a time out, now...’

Wood had seen. Madam Hooch’s whistle shrilled out across the pitch, and Harry, Fred and George went into a steep dive for the ground, with the Bludger still pelting after them, trying to get one last go in.

They landed in a spray of mud. The Gryffindor team huddled together, dripping, while the Slytherins in the crowd jeered and stamped.

‘What’s happening up there?’ said Wood. Water was running off the end of his nose. ‘They’re murdering us. Fred, George, where were you when that Bludger knocked Angelina off her line? She’d have scored!’

‘Twenty feet up, Oliver,’ said George savagely, ‘stopping the other one from killing Harry. Somebody’s done something to it. It’s not interested in anyone else. It’s not gone for anyone else. It’s had one target all match. The Slytherins have fixed it.’

‘They can’t have,’ said Wood, looking wildly from one twin to the other. ‘Both Bludgers have been locked up in Madam Hooch’s office since our last practice, and they were fine then.’

Madam Hooch was striding towards them across the pitch. Over her shoulder, Harry could see the Slytherin team in a row, hovering, pointing at him and laughing.

‘Listen,’ said Harry quickly, as Madam Hooch got nearer. ‘While you two are glued to me, the Snitch could do a lap round my head and I’d never see it. Go back and help the others. I’ll handle the mad one myself.’

‘Don’t be daft,’ said Fred. ‘It’ll take your head clean off.’

Wood was looking from Harry to the twins and back again, his face working.

‘Oliver, you can’t be serious,’ said Alicia Spinnet angrily. ‘You can’t just leave Harry on his own with that thing. We should ask for an inquiry, get it looked at properly...’

‘I’m not losing us the bloody match!’ shouted Harry.

He felt his resolve set hard inside him as he said it, the same thing that had kept his fingers locked round his broom last year while Quirrell tried to shake him off it in front of the whole school. And he was also, quite frankly, fed up to the back teeth with Dracina Malfoy, who was hovering at a distance over the Slytherin end, blowing raspberries at him.

‘We’re not handing Slytherin the match over one rogue Bludger!’ he said. ‘Tell them, Oliver! Tell them to leave me be!’

‘This is your fault, this is,’ George said to Wood furiously. ‘"Catch the Snitch or die trying." Brilliant thing to go and say to him, that was. Really brilliant.’

Madam Hooch had reached them.

‘Are we ready to carry on?’ she asked Wood.

Wood looked at Harry. He looked at him for a long moment, at the rain running down Harry’s glasses and the mud on his knees and whatever it was in his face. And something went across Wood’s own face that Harry had never seen there before, not even in the very worst of last season. Harry couldn’t have said what it was. If he hadn’t known better, he’d have said Wood looked frightened. Not of the Bludger. Of him.

‘Right,’ said Wood quietly. ‘Fred. George. You heard him. Leave Harry alone. Let him handle the Bludger himself.’

The rain was coming down harder than ever. When Madam Hooch blew her whistle, Harry kicked off hard and shot straight up into it, and heard the tell-tale whoosh of the Bludger behind him at once. He went higher and higher, looping and swerving and spiralling, zigzagging, rolling, with the Bludger a few feet behind him the whole way, and the rain stinging his face like gravel.

He wasn’t going to let it beat him. He wasn’t going to let the rain beat him either. And he certainly wasn’t going to let Dracina Malfoy beat him, with her stupid pretty face, and her stupid pretty smile, and her stupid pretty eyes.

He dropped. He rolled sideways, right over, so that for a second he was hanging upside down beneath his broom, and the Bludger went screaming past over the top of him. He swung himself up again, and turned on the spot in a tight, flat spin, and the Bludger, coming back, missed him by an inch, and he dived, and pulled up, and dived again. He heard the crowd gasp. He heard Lee Jordan shout something that might have been WHOA. It was, though Harry didn’t know it, the best flying he had ever done in his life.

When he came out of it, breathless, Malfoy was waiting for him.

‘What was that, Potter?’ she called. She was sitting on her broom with her ankles crossed, sidesaddle, as though she were in a drawing room. ‘All that twirling about! Have you taken up ballet? Is that what they’re teaching in Gryffindor now, pirouettes? You’ll want a little pink tutu next.’

Harry scowled at her through the rain.

Then she said, in a different voice, a smaller and much softer one, ‘I could teach you, if you like. I had lessons for years. Mother made me, at the Manor. There was a man from Paris. You drop your shoulder when you turn, you see, that’s why you wobble, you need to keep it...’ She stopped. ‘I could show you. If you asked me. If you’d only ask.’

She tried to make it sound like teasing. Harry could hear her trying. She put a little laugh at the end, as though it were all part of the joke. But it wasn’t teasing at all, and they both knew it, Harry stared at her, completely baffled. Twenty minutes ago she’d tried to break his ribs.

‘I’m not asking you for anything,’ he said.

Something closed in her face like a door.

‘No,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t. You’d ask her, wouldn’t you.’

‘What?’

‘Her!‘ Malfoy’s voice cracked right up the middle. ‘Granger! Always Granger! What’s she got? What’s she got? Books? I’ve got books! I’ve got a whole library, I’ve got a wing! She sits next to you, and she touches your arm, and she does your collar up for you, I saw, I saw her, like she owns you...’

‘You’re mental,’ said Harry. ‘What’s Hermione got to do with anything?’

‘Everything!’ Malfoy shrieked. And then, quite suddenly, she went calm. It was a horrible calm. Her face smoothed out, and her eyes went flat, and when she spoke again her voice was almost gentle. ‘Don’t worry, Potter. She won’t always be there. Nothing lasts forever. Not even Mudbloods.’

A chill went through Harry that had nothing to do with the rain.

Before he could say anything, Malfoy had seen something. Her head jerked round. She shot off towards the Hufflepuff end, and Harry, his heart thumping, saw a speck of gold glinting in the rain, and went after her.

It was the fiercest chase of the match. They went the length of the pitch side by side, so close that their knees knocked together, both of them flat to their brooms, both of them reaching. Malfoy grabbed a handful of his robes and dragged at them. Harry, hardly thinking, grabbed a handful of hers and dragged back. She kicked at his broom. He swerved into her, hard, and felt her bounce off him, and heard her gasp, and was ashamed and glad at the same time. Down in the stands the Gryffindors were on their feet, and the Slytherins were on their feet, and the whole stadium was one long, rising roar.

‘Let go, Potter!’

‘You let go!’

‘You’re going to lose! You’re going to lose in front of everyone, in front of her, in front of all of them.’

‘Not to you!’

‘Yes to me! Only to me! You only ever lose to me!’

The Snitch jinked upwards and vanished into the rain. They both pulled up, gasping, glaring.

And the Bludger came out of the grey at Harry’s left side, straight at his head, a dark blur, faster than he could move.

Malfoy moved first.

She threw her broom across in front of him, so suddenly that Harry didn’t understand what she was doing, right across the Bludger’s path. It clipped the tail of her Nimbus with a crack like a breaking branch. Her broom spun round twice, three times, flinging her sideways. For a horrible second she was hanging on with one hand. Then she’d hauled herself back up, white to the lips, her plaits come right down now and plastered dark and wet across her face.

The Bludger, as if baffled, swung away and went round in a wide circle to try again.

‘There!‘ Malfoy screamed at him. Her voice was shaking. ‘That’s how it’s done, Potter! That’s how you stand in front of somebody! Did you see? Did you SEE?’

‘You flew into it!’ said Harry. ‘Are you mad? What were you trying to do, block me off?’

Malfoy stared at him. Her mouth opened, and closed, and opened again, and nothing came out. Then her eyes filled up, and she wiped at them furiously with the back of her glove, and smeared mud across her face.

‘I hate you,’ she said thickly. ‘I hate you, Potter. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.’

They hung there, facing each other, about a dozen feet apart, in the pouring rain. Neither of them moved. Harry was breathing hard. Malfoy was breathing hard. Neither of them was looking for the Snitch any more, and somewhere far below Lee Jordan was saying something about Slytherin scoring again, and neither of them heard it.

And then Harry saw it.

The Snitch was hovering just above Malfoy’s head. It was so close it was almost touching her hair, its tiny wings blurring, a bright, impudent little spark of gold sitting right on top of her, as if it had been put there.

She hadn’t seen it. She was looking at Harry.

For an agonising moment, Harry didn’t move. He didn’t dare. If he shot towards her now, she’d look up. She’d look up and see it, and she’d only have to lift her hand.

He stayed still a second too long.

WHAM.

The Bludger had got him at last. It came in from below and smashed into his right elbow with a force that seemed to go right through him and out the other side, and Harry heard, quite distinctly, over the rain, the bone go. There was a moment when nothing hurt at all. Then the pain arrived, white and enormous, roaring up his arm into his shoulder and his neck and his teeth.

He slid sideways off his rain-slick broom. He only stopped himself falling by hooking one knee over the handle, and he hung there, dazed, with his right arm dangling useless at his side, swinging like a thing that belonged to somebody else.

The Bludger came pelting back for a second go. It was aiming at his face this time. Harry swerved out of its way, somehow, and in his numb, ringing head there was room for one idea only, one single bright idea, like a lamp at the end of a tunnel.

Get to Malfoy.

Through a haze of rain and pain he tipped his broom down and dived for the pale, shimmering, sneering face below him.

He saw her eyes go wide. He saw the fear come into them. She thought he was coming for her.

‘Don’t you dare!‘ she screamed. She’d thrown up her hands in front of her face. ‘Don’t you DARE, Potter! You can’t! You can’t touch me! You can’t afford to touch me! I’m the heir! I’m the heir of the noble and ancient House of Malfoy! My father will hear about this! My father...’

The heir. The word went into Harry’s ringing head like a splinter and stuck there. But there wasn’t time to think about it.

He took his good hand off his broom.

He was steering with nothing but his knees now, and the broom bucked and slewed under him like a living thing, and the rain was in his eyes and his glasses were running with it, and he could see nothing at all but a smear of silver and a single gold point of light. He went past Malfoy so close that his sleeve brushed her cheek. He heard her shriek. He reached out, past her ear, into the air above her head, and made a wild, blind snatch at nothing.

His fingers closed on something small and cold, that beat against his palm like a heart.

He had it. He had it.

And he was falling.

He had no hands on his broom. The ground was coming up at him, very fast, green and brown and streaming with water, and he heard a great yell go up from the crowd below him, a yell with his name in it. He clamped his knees together. He tried to lean back. The broom tilted, and juddered, and went on diving. Somewhere behind him he could hear the Bludger, still coming, still humming its terrible hornet’s hum. The grass was close enough now that he could see the separate blades of it, flattened by the rain. He shut his eyes.

He hit the mud with a great wet thud that knocked every bit of air out of his body, and rolled off his broom, and lay still.

His arm was lying at a very strange angle. He looked at it vaguely. It didn’t seem to be anything to do with him. Through the pain, which was coming in great hot waves now, he could hear, as though from a long way off, a lot of whistling and shouting and stamping. He made himself look at his left hand instead. His fingers were still locked round the Snitch.

‘Oh,’ Harry said, faintly, to nobody in particular. ‘We’ve won, then.’

And then the edges of the world went soft and grey, and began to fold in.

As they did, he heard a scream. It came from somewhere close by, from above him, high and cracked and desperate, and it was screaming his name. His first name.

‘Harry! HARRY! Harry, are you... oh, please, please, are you all right? Harry, answer me! HARRY!’

Hermione, he thought hazily. Or Ron. One of them, anyway.

It was a pretty voice, whoever it was. Even screaming. It was rather like the voice of a princess.

Then everything went black.

He came round with rain falling on his face. He was still lying on the pitch, and somebody was leaning over him.

In his dazed state, for one muddled moment, he expected a princess. A girl with silver-blonde hair, and silver eyes. Instead he saw a great glittering row of very white teeth.

‘Oh, not you, sod off.’ Harry said, coming round.

It was Lockhart.

‘Don’t spread it to me,’ Harry told him thickly. In his fuzzy head it seemed perfectly clear that whatever malignance Lockhart had, it was catching, and that it had already got Filch who tried to have his way with Peeves. ‘It already got to Filch. Uncle Vernon knows about you people.’

‘Delirious, poor lad,’ Lockhart announced loudly, to the anxious crowd of Gryffindors pressing in all round them. ‘Doesn’t know what he’s saying. Don’t you worry, Harry. I’ll have that arm right as rain in a jiffy.’

‘No you won’t. Get away from me!’ shouted Harry.

He trusted Lockhart to fix his arm about as far as he trusted Lockhart’s sexuality. He tried to sit up, but the pain was terrible. Then he heard a familiar clicking noise somewhere nearby.

‘Colin, lad. I know you mean well but this isn’t the time. I don’t want a photo of this, mate.’ he said loudly, through the pain.

The clicking stopped, guiltily.

‘Lie still, Harry, there’s a good fellow,’ said Lockhart soothingly.

‘No, I’m good.’ Harry said firmly.

‘Nothing to it. A little charm I’ve done a hundred times.’

‘I want Madam Pomfrey!’ Harry shouted through clenched teeth. ‘I want the hospital wing!’

‘He ought to go up, really, Professor,’ said Wood, who was covered in mud from head to foot and couldn’t stop grinning, even though his Seeker was lying on the ground in pieces. ‘What a catch, Harry. What a catch. That was the best you’ve ever made. I’d put money on it.’

Through the thicket of legs around him, Harry could see Fred and George Weasley wrestling the rogue Bludger into its box. It was still fighting like a cat in a sack.

And beyond them, at the foot of the Slytherin stand, there was Malfoy.

She’d landed. She was standing in the mud with her broom thrown down beside her, and she was bending over, low, hissing furiously at something close to the ground in the shadow of the stand. Harry couldn’t see what it was. It was something small, and it seemed to be cowering. He squinted through his streaming glasses. Then there was a crack, like a whip, very faint over the rain, and whatever it was had gone, and Malfoy straightened up with her hands pressed over her face.

She stood like that for a moment. Then she snatched up her broom and stalked off towards the castle without looking back once, her shoulders hunched, her plaits all down her back, stamping through the puddles so hard that the water flew up round her knees.

Sore loser, Harry thought, through the pain. She was just angry because she’d lost. That was all.

‘Give me a little room, everybody,’ said Lockhart, who was rolling up the sleeves of his jade-green robes.

‘Oh God, I’m going to die.’ Harry groaned.

Nobody seemed to be making the slightest attempt to stop him.

A strange, horrible feeling started at Harry’s shoulder and spread all the way down to the tips of his fingers. It felt as if somebody had pulled a plug out of his arm, and everything inside it was quietly draining away. He didn’t dare look. He’d screwed his eyes shut and turned his face away into the mud, and so he didn’t see what happened. But he heard it. He heard the people above him gasp, all at once, and Colin Creevey start clicking away again like a madman.

His arm didn’t hurt any more. But it didn’t feel anything like an arm, either.

‘Ah,’ said Lockhart. ‘Hmm. Yes. Well, that does happen now and then. But the important thing, the thing to hang on to, is that nothing’s broken any more. Not one bone! So, Harry, if you’d just trot along up to the hospital wing... Mr Weasley, Miss Granger, be good enough to take him up... and Madam Pomfrey will just, ah, tidy up the edges a little.’

Harry got to his feet. He felt oddly lopsided. He took a deep breath and looked down at his right side, and what he saw there very nearly put him straight back on the ground.

Hanging out of the end of his sleeve was something that looked like a long, pink, wobbly sock full of custard. He told his fingers to move. Nothing moved. Lockhart hadn’t mended the bones in Harry’s arm.

He’d taken them out.

‘You utter poof-’

But Madam Pomfrey had arrived, at a run, with her apron flapping and her cap askew, and she took Harry firmly by his good elbow and steered him away before he could finish.

‘I quite agree with you, Mr Potter,’ she muttered to him, out of the side of her mouth, as she marched him off the pitch. ‘Every word. They’re spreading, they are. But it’s not a thing you say to a member of staff, and certainly not in front of witnesses.’

Madam Pomfrey wasn’t at all pleased.

‘He ought to have been brought straight to me!’ she stormed, once she had Harry sitting on the end of a bed in the hospital wing, and she held up the sad, floppy remains of what, half an hour earlier, had been a perfectly good arm. It hung from her hand like a piece of wet washing. ‘A broken bone I can put right in a second. One flick! But growing them back from nothing...’

‘But you can, can’t you?’ said Harry desperately. ‘You can grow them back?’

‘Oh, I can do it,’ said Madam Pomfrey grimly, throwing him a pair of pyjamas. ‘Don’t you worry about that. But it’s going to hurt, Potter, and you’ll be here all night.’

Hermione waited outside the curtain drawn round Harry’s bed while Ron helped him into the pyjamas. It took ages. Stuffing a boneless arm into a sleeve, Harry discovered, was like trying to post a jellyfish through a letterbox.

‘She’ll sort it, mate,’ Ron kept saying, as he worked. ‘Pomfrey’s brilliant. She grew Charlie a whole new ear once, after a Welsh Green had a go at him. You can’t even tell which one it was. Well, you can a bit. It’s slightly bigger. But you’d never know.’

Harry didn’t know whether he wanted to torture Dobby or Lockhart more at this point. In his head he’d already worked his way through several very satisfying plans for both, and was just starting on a third.

‘Honestly, Hermione,’ Ron called through the curtain, as he finally got Harry’s limp fingers out through the cuff. ‘If Harry’d fancied having all his bones took out, he’d have put his hand up and asked.’

‘Everybody gets things wrong sometimes,’ Hermione said, though she didn’t sound as though she quite believed it any more. ‘It doesn’t hurt now, though. Does it, Harry?’

‘No,’ said Harry. ‘It doesn’t do much of anything, though.’

He swung himself onto the bed, and his arm flapped after him uselessly, like a sleeve with nobody in it.

Hermione and Madam Pomfrey came round the curtain. Madam Pomfrey was carrying a large bottle with a label that said Skele-Gro.

‘You won’t get much sleep tonight,’ she said, pouring out a steaming beakerful and handing it to him. ‘Growing bones is a horrible business.’

So was drinking the Skele-Gro. It burned all the way down, like swallowing a lit candle, and Harry coughed and choked and his eyes watered. Madam Pomfrey went off still tutting about dangerous sports and incompetent teachers, and left Ron and Hermione to help him swallow some water.

‘We won, though,’ said Ron, a grin breaking across his face. ‘That was some catch you made. Malfoy’s face ... She looked... well she was very upset!’

‘Was she?’ said Harry.

‘Yeah.’ Ron’s grin slipped a bit. He looked down at the blanket, and picked at a loose thread on it. ‘When you hit the ground, she came down after you. Right down. Fast too. Nearly landed on you. And she was screaming, mate. Screaming at you. Not like when she’s having a go. Like... I dunno. Like she was scared. And then Lockhart turned up and she just... went. Crying. Properly crying, I mean, I could see it from the stand.’

He didn’t say anything else. He’d worked out a long time ago why Malfoy might scream like that when Harry hit the ground. He wasn’t stupid. But he also wasn’t going to be the one to say it out loud, not to Harry, and certainly not with Hermione sitting right there. Some things, Ron felt, a bloke was better off not knowing about until he was a lot older and a lot further away.

‘She was acting strange all match,’ said Harry slowly. ‘She kept going on about Hermione. And she flew into the Bludger. On purpose, I think. And then she was crying at me, and saying she hated me...’

‘I want to know how she fixed that Bludger, I saw her too. She clearly did it based on her reaction. She was just tantruming because Slytherin lost’ said Hermione darkly.

She said it with great certainty, and she didn’t look at either of them while she said it. She was looking at the door of the hospital wing, as if she expected someone to walk through it.

Ron sighed. He knew that wasn’t quite true, even if he didn’t know the whole truth himself. But he’d also seen Hermione’s face when Malfoy came down after Harry, and he wasn’t about to draw that kind of anger down on himself. He kept his mouth shut.

‘Yeah,’ said Harry meekly. ‘Yeah, I suppose.’

That must be it, thought Harry. It must be.

‘We’ll put that on the list, then,’ he said, sinking back onto his pillows. ‘Things to ask her once we’ve had the Polyjuice. I hope it tastes better than this muck, though.’

‘With bits of Slytherin floating in it?’ said Ron, patting Harry on the good arm. ‘I wouldn’t bet on it, mate.’

At that moment the door of the hospital wing banged open. The rest of the Gryffindor team had arrived to see Harry, soaked to the skin and plastered with mud.

‘Unbelievable flying, Harry,’ said George. ‘I’ve just seen Marcus Flint yelling at Malfoy. Something about having the Snitch on top of her head and not noticing. Malfoy didn’t seem too happy. She’d already stomped off in a fit after losing and then Flint went after her. She screamed at him and ran off down to the dungeons.’

They’d brought cakes, and sweets, and bottles of pumpkin juice. They crowded round Harry’s bed and were just getting going on what promised to be a very good party when Madam Pomfrey came storming down the ward at them like a ship in full sail.

‘Out! The lot of you! This boy has thirty-three bones to grow back before morning, and he won’t do it with you lot shrieking round him like a flock of seagulls! OUT!’

And out they went. Hermione went last. She stopped at the door, and looked back at Harry, and lifted her hand, and then she was gone, and Harry was left alone with nothing to take his mind off the stabbing pains in his arm.

He must have dozed, because when he next opened his eyes the light from the windows had gone dim and orange,  there was a faint, sweet smell in the air that hadn’t been there before.

Somebody had been. There was a small white box on his bedside cabinet, tied up with a thin green ribbon. The ribbon was creased, as though it had been tied in something else first, and untied in a hurry.

Harry fumbled it open one-handed. Inside, nestled in tissue paper, were sugared violets, a dozen of them, purple and frosted and perfect. And tucked in among them was a little folded card. He opened it with his teeth.

Drink all of your Skele-Gro. Don’t you ever, ever be so stupid again.

That was all. There was no name. The writing was small and neat and spiky, and the last word had been pressed so hard that the nib had gone through the card. Harry frowned at it. He had the oddest feeling he’d seen the writing somewhere before, quite recently, but his head was thick with Skele-Gro and pain and he couldn’t for the life of him think where.

‘Madam Pomfrey?’ he called. ‘Who brought these?’

Madam Pomfrey put her head out of her office.

‘A young lady,’ she said, and her face went oddly soft for a moment. ‘Wouldn’t give her name. Stood at the end of your bed for about ten minutes while you were sleeping and cried fit to flood the place. Then she made me promise faithfully not to tell you who she was, which I shan’t. Eat one if you like, Potter, they’ll take the taste of the Skele-Gro away.’

She went back into her office.

Harry looked at the violets. A girl. Crying. He thought of a long red-and-gold scarf wound round three times, and a bright red face, and a squeak.

Ginny, he thought. It must have been Ginny. That was nice of her.

He ate one. It tasted exactly like the sugared violets that had been on top of Aunt Petunia’s pudding on the night of the Masons’ dinner, right before Dobby had dropped the whole thing on Mrs Mason’s head, and that wasn’t a memory Harry particularly wanted. But it did take the taste of the Skele-Gro away. He put the card under his pillow, without quite knowing why, and lay back, and waited for the night.

Hours and hours later, Harry woke very suddenly in the pitch dark and gave a little yelp of pain. His arm now felt as though it were stuffed full of large splinters. For a second he thought that was what had woken him. Then, with a lurch of horror, he realised that somebody was dabbing at his forehead with a sponge in the darkness.

‘Gerroff!‘ he said loudly. And then, as his eyes adjusted, ‘Dobby!’ Harry said with relish.

Oh, how Harry was going to enjoy finally educating Dobby on the depths of his folly.

Dobby’s face lit up.

‘Dobby is so pleased to hear Harry Potter is pleased to see him.’

Harry’s wicked grin fell off his face. He was pleased to see Dobby. Just not in any way Dobby would have liked.

The house-elf’s goggling, tennis-ball eyes were peering at him through the dark. A single tear was trickling down the length of his long, pointed nose.

‘Harry Potter is at Hogwarts,’ he whispered wretchedly. ‘Dobby warned him, sir. Dobby warned him and warned him. Why did Harry Potter not go home, sir, when the train went without him?’

Harry heaved himself up on his pillows and pushed Dobby’s sponge away.

‘What are you doing here?’ he said. ‘And how d’you know about the train?’

Dobby’s lip trembled. And all at once Harry was seized by a suspicion.

‘It was you,’ he said slowly. ‘It was you who shut the barrier. You stopped us getting through!’

‘Indeed yes, sir,’ said Dobby, nodding his head so hard that his ears flapped. ‘Dobby hid and watched for Harry Potter and sealed the gateway When the mistress found out, she ordered Dobby to iron his hands. Such a temper she has. Dobby doesn’t understand. Dobby followed her orders as she said.’

He showed Harry ten long, thin fingers, all wrapped in bandages.

Harry didn’t understand either. He stared at the bandages. Surely stopping Harry from coming to Hogwarts was exactly what Malfoy had wanted, if she’d ordered it in the first place. Why did she have to be so infuriatingly contradictory? Why couldn’t she ever just want one thing?

‘But Dobby did not mind his hands, sir,’ Dobby went on, ‘for Dobby thought Harry Potter was safe at home. Not once did Dobby think Harry Potter would find some other road to the school!’ He was rocking backwards and forwards now, shaking his ugly head. ‘When Dobby heard that Harry Potter was in the castle after all, sir, Dobby was so shocked he let the master’s supper catch fire! Dobby was beaten so hard, sir, that Dobby could not sit down for a week...’

Harry quite liked the sound of that. For one happy moment he imagined that it had been him doing the beating. But then he looked at Dobby properly, at the bandages and the bruises and the filthy pillowcase, and felt annoyingly, unwillingly sorry for him. He slumped back on his pillows.

‘You nearly got Ron and me expelled,’ he said fiercely. ‘You’d better clear off before my bones come back, Dobby, or I’m going to hurt you far worse than any Malfoy could. And I’ll enjoy it too.’

Dobby smiled weakly.

‘Dobby is threatened with death most days, sir. Five times, on a good day.’

He blew his nose on a corner of the grubby pillowcase he wore, looking so pitiful that Harry felt his anger draining away, in spite of himself.

‘What’s that you’re wearing, anyway?’ he asked.

‘This, sir?’ Dobby plucked at the pillowcase. ‘It shows that Dobby is bound, sir. A house-elf can only be freed if his family gives him clothes, sir. Real clothes. And so the family is very careful never to hand Dobby so much as a glove, sir, for then Dobby could walk out of the door and never come back.’

He mopped his bulging eyes, and then said, quite suddenly, ‘Harry Potter must leave, sir! Dobby was sure his Bludger would be enough to...’

‘That was YOURS!’ Harry shouted in rage. ‘You tried to bloody kill me,’

‘No, sir! Not kill you, sir, never that!’ squeaked Dobby, horrified. ‘Dobby wants Harry Potter alive! Harry Potter sent home with broken bones is better than Harry Potter staying here, sir! Dobby only meant Harry Potter hurt enough to be packed off home!’

Harry rolled over. He reached out with his good arm. He’d been lying there for hours imagining exactly this, and with the quick reflexes Quidditch had given him he caught Dobby by the throat.

‘I’m NOT going back! Not the Dursleys! Not ever! Do you hear me? Did you even SEE what they DID to ME?’

‘I.. I...’

Dobby’s eyes were swimming. He looked on the very edge of tears, and his skinny little throat was working under Harry’s fingers. And in spite of himself, in spite of all his rage, Harry let him go.

‘Oh, if Harry Potter only understood!’ Dobby groaned, and more tears dripped off his nose onto the ragged pillowcase. ‘If he only knew what he is to us, sir! To the small ones, the bound ones, the lowest of the low! Dobby remembers, sir. Dobby remembers how it was when He Who Must Not Be Named was strong. House-elves were kicked like dogs, sir. Worse than dogs. Dobby is still kicked, sir, it is true,’ he added, drying his face on the pillowcase, ‘but less, sir, much less, since Harry Potter beat the Dark Lord. Harry Potter lived, sir, and the Dark Lord fell, and it was like the sun coming up, sir, for those of us who never thought we would see it rise again... And now terrible things are coming to Hogwarts, sir, perhaps they have come already, and Dobby cannot let Harry Potter stay while the old horror comes round again, now the Chamber of Secrets has been opened a second...’

Dobby froze, horror-struck. Then he snatched up Harry’s water jug from the bedside cabinet and broke it over his own head, and toppled off the bed out of sight. A moment later he crawled back up, cross-eyed, muttering, ‘Bad Dobby. Very bad Dobby...’

‘So there is a Chamber of Secrets?’ Harry whispered. ‘And it’s been opened before? When? Tell me, Dobby!’

He caught hold of the elf’s bony wrist, because Dobby’s hand was creeping back towards the remains of the water jug.

‘But I’m not Muggle-born,’ Harry said. ‘What’s the Chamber got to do with me?’

‘Ah, sir, ask no more, ask no more of poor Dobby,’ stammered the elf, his eyes huge in the dark. ‘Dark deeds are planned in this place, even the Mistress does not know of it all. Only that Harry Potter is in danger. But Dobby knows. Dobby knows too much and Master has instructed Dobby not to tell anyone. Even the Mistress. Dobby still told her a little which was bad of Dobby. But not the Di... no, Dobby won’t say. BAD DOBBY! Harry Potter must not be here when the dark deeds happen. Go home, Harry Potter. Go home. Harry Potter must not meddle in this, sir, ‘tis too dangerous’

‘Who’s doing it, Dobby?’ Harry said, keeping a tight grip on Dobby’s wrist to stop him reaching for the jug again. ‘Who’s opened it? And who did it the last time?’

‘Dobby cannot say, sir! Dobby must not! Dobby will not!’ squealed the elf. ‘Go home, Harry Potter, go home!’

‘I’m. Not. Going. Back!’ hissed Harry fiercely. ‘Hermione’s Muggle-born. She’s my best friend. If the Chamber’s really open, she’ll be the first one it goes after.’

‘Harry Potter would die for his friends!’ moaned Dobby, in a sort of wretched rapture. ‘Such courage, sir! Such a heart! But he must save himself, sir, he must, Harry Potter must not...’

Dobby went rigid. His bat-like ears quivered.

Harry had heard it too. There were footsteps coming along the passage outside.

‘Dobby cannot be found here!’ breathed the elf, terrified. There was a loud crack, and Harry’s fist was suddenly clenched round thin air.

Harry growled. He’d been denied the chance to choke Dobby to death. He slumped back into bed, his eyes on the dark doorway of the hospital wing, as the footsteps came nearer.

The next moment Dumbledore came backing into the ward. He was wearing a long woolly dressing-gown and a nightcap, and he was carrying one end of what looked like a statue. Professor McGonagall came in a second later, carrying the feet. Between them, they lifted it onto a bed.

‘Fetch Poppy,’ Dumbledore said quietly, and Professor McGonagall hurried past the end of Harry’s bed and out of sight.

Harry lay very still and pretended to be asleep. He heard low, urgent voices, and then Professor McGonagall swept back into view with Madam Pomfrey close behind her, pulling a cardigan on over her nightdress. There was a sharp intake of breath.

‘What’s happened?’ Madam Pomfrey whispered, bending over the figure on the bed.

‘There has been another attack,’ said Dumbledore. ‘Minerva came upon him on the stairs.’

‘He had grapes with him,’ said Professor McGonagall. ‘A whole bunch, beside him on the step. We think he was coming up here to see Potter.’

Her eyes went, for just a moment, to Harry’s bed. Harry kept his own eyes almost shut and didn’t breathe.

His stomach gave a dreadful lurch. Slowly, very carefully, he raised himself a few inches on his pillows, so that he could see the statue on the bed. A shaft of moonlight lay across its staring face.

It was Colin Creevey.

His eyes were wide open. His hands were held up in front of him, clutching his camera.

All of Harry’s anger went out of him at once.  Colin was a good lad. He followed Harry about like a puppy, and took too many photographs, and asked too many questions, and he looked up to Harry as if Harry were somebody worth looking up to. He’d only been coming to bring him grapes. He hadn’t deserved this. He hadn’t deserved anything like this.

Damn Malfoy, Harry thought. Damn her. He thought of her shrieking at the Gryffindor stand that she was writing all their names down. He thought of her saying nothing lasts for ever, not even Mudbloods in that terrible, gentle voice. He thought of George saying she’d run off down to the dungeons, screaming. And he thought of her face, the moment before he’d dived, and the word she’d shrieked at him. Heir.

If she was really the Heir of Slytherin, he’d stop her. He’d stop her as surely as he’d stop Voldemort.

‘Petrified?’ whispered Madam Pomfrey.

‘Yes,’ said Professor McGonagall. ‘And I don’t like to think... If Albus hadn’t happened to come down for a cup of cocoa, he might have lain there till morning. Or something might have come back to finish...’

The three of them stood looking down at Colin. Then Dumbledore leaned forward and gently worked the camera out of Colin’s stiff fingers.

‘Albus,’ said Professor McGonagall quickly, ‘do you think he might have got a picture of whoever...’

Dumbledore didn’t answer. He opened the back of the camera.

‘Good heavens!’ said Madam Pomfrey.

A jet of steam had hissed out of it. Harry, three beds away, caught the sharp, bitter smell of burnt plastic.

‘Melted,’ said Madam Pomfrey wonderingly. ‘The whole inside of it. Melted.’

‘That’s no hex I know,’ said Professor McGonagall, very quietly. ‘And I know a great many, Albus. Rather more than I’d like to.’ She looked up at him. ‘What does it mean?’

‘It means,’ said Dumbledore, ‘that the Chamber of Secrets has been opened once more.’

Madam Pomfrey clapped a hand over her mouth. Professor McGonagall stared at Dumbledore.

‘But Albus... surely... who?’

‘The question isn’t who, Minerva,’ said Dumbledore, his eyes on Colin’s face. ‘The question is how.’

And from what Harry could see of Professor McGonagall’s face in the shadows, she understood that no better than he did.

Harry lay back down in complete despair. He felt the card under his pillow crackle as his head pressed down on it, and he didn’t notice.

Not Colin, he thought. Why Colin?

Harry might have been quite bored in the hospital wing, under the watchful eye of Madam Pomfrey. Luckily, he was in agonising pain from having thirty-three bones slowly regrown, and that kept him busy.

He passed the long grey hours of early morning cursing under his breath and working out all the nasty things he was going to do to a rotating cast of people. He started with Dobby. Then he moved on to Lockhart. Then, a bit less certainly, Malfoy. Then back round to Dobby again, because Dobby had been first and deserved the most.

Every so often he glanced across at Colin’s bed. The curtains had been drawn round it, to give Colin a bit of dignity while he lay there, Petrified, with his camera still held up in front of his face. Harry was more and more sure that whatever had done it was some sort of creature, and that it was under Malfoy’s control, and the thought made him so angry that he ate the last of the sugared violets without tasting it. They’d been left by a stranger. Probably Ginny. She was a bit funny around Harry, these days, and he’d noticed. It made sense to him. Not that he’d ever take advantage. She was Ron’s sister, and younger than him, too. You didn’t do that to your best mate. Harry knew that much.

Seeing that he was awake, Madam Pomfrey came bustling over with a breakfast tray. While he ate she took hold of his right arm and began bending it, and straightening it, and pulling each of his fingers in turn, as though she were checking the keys on a piano.

‘That’ll do nicely,’ she said, as Harry spooned porridge clumsily into his mouth with his left hand and dripped some on the blanket. ‘Everything’s where it ought to be. Eat up, and then you can go.’

Harry dressed as fast as he could. He was desperate to get to Ron and Hermione and tell them about Colin, and Dobby, and everything. He pulled his jumper over his head, grabbed his wand, and hurried out of the ward.

There was somebody sitting on the window seat just outside the doors.

It was Dracina Malfoy. She was huddled up in the corner of the seat with her knees drawn up and her arms round them, and for a moment Harry didn’t recognise her, because she looked so ill. There were deep violet shadows under her eyes, as though she hadn’t slept in a week. Her hair, which was always so perfect, was loose and tangled, and there was ink on her fingers, a great deal of ink, black and smeared, right up to the knuckles. Her lips were moving. She was talking to herself very quietly, in a rapid, steady murmur, the way people say their times tables.

She saw him and stopped.

‘Is it back?’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Your arm.’ Her eyes went to it and stayed there. ‘Is it back? All the bones? Can you move your fingers?’

Harry, bewildered, wiggled them at her.

Malfoy let out a long breath, and something in her shoulders seemed to give way. Then, quite suddenly, she laughed. It was a high, thin, odd little laugh that went on slightly too long.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘Good. Then he was wrong, wasn’t he? He said you’d never fly again. He said it didn’t matter, because you wouldn’t need to, after. But you can. So he doesn’t know everything.’ She stopped, and blinked, as though she’d heard herself. ‘Not that I care. Get away from me, Potter. Why are you always looming?’

‘Who said I’d never fly again?’ said Harry. ‘Flint?’

‘Go away.‘

She put her face down on her knees. Harry stood there a moment longer, completely lost, and then went, because there didn’t seem to be anything else to do. When he looked back from the end of the corridor she’d lifted her head again, and her lips were moving again, and she was looking at the wall as if somebody were standing there.

As he passed the library, Percy Weasley came strolling out of it, looking in much better spirits than the last time they’d met.

‘Ah, Harry! Splendid flying yesterday, quite splendid,’ said Percy. ‘You’ll be pleased to hear Gryffindor have gone top for the House Cup. Fifty points, all down to you!’

‘Thank you Percy but hopefully I’ll never have to pull that trick again.’

Percy gave a sensible little chuckle and wagged his finger at Harry.

‘Oh, you.’ said Percy, doing his very best to look and sound personable. It wasn’t working. But Harry couldn’t fault him for trying. At least he wasn’t moaning at him for once.

‘Oh, me.’ Harry replied, doing his best to be charming, so as not to look suspicious. ‘Have you seen Ron anywhere? Or Hermione?’

‘I haven’t, no,’ said Percy, and his smile faded. ‘I do hope Ron hasn’t gone and got himself into another girls’ lavatory...’

Harry let out a false laugh that he hoped sounded reassuring.

‘Oh no, I’m sure he’s busy with other...things.’ Harry said, trying not to sound suspicious.

He walked off. Then, when he was quite sure Percy had gone the other way, he doubled back and made for the exact place Percy had told Ron off for going. He couldn’t think why Ron and Hermione would be in Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom again. But he checked very carefully that there was no sign of Filch or any prefects, and then he opened the door, and heard their voices coming from inside a locked cubicle.

‘Only me,’ he said, shutting the door behind him.

There was a clunk, a splash, and a gasp from inside the cubicle, and then Hermione’s eye appeared at the keyhole.

‘Harry! You nearly gave me a heart attack. Quick, get in. How’s the arm?’

‘It’s good. The agonizing pain of regrowing my bones built character.,’ said Harry dryly.

He was trying not to think about the horrible pain of it all by making a joke of it. Dobby would pay. That preening poofter Lockhart would pay. Maybe even Malfoy would pay, if she really had anything to do with it. But for some reason, a reason Harry couldn’t quite bring himself to admit, he couldn’t quite make himself believe that Malfoy had anything to do with it. Not all the way. Not even after everything she’d said, and everything she’d done, and the way she’d looked on that window seat just now, muttering at nobody.

He squeezed into the cubicle. An old cauldron was balanced on the lavatory seat, and a crackling noise from underneath the rim told him they’d lit a fire under it. Conjuring up small, portable, waterproof fires was one of Hermione’s specialities.

‘We’d have come and found you,’ said Ron, as Harry fumbled the cubicle door locked again, ‘only we thought we’d better make a start on the Polyjuice. This is the safest place for it. Nobody comes in here. Well, nobody except Myrtle.’

Harry began to tell them about Colin. It was harder than he’d expected. His voice went strange halfway through, because he kept thinking about the grapes, and about Colin creeping up the stairs in the dark to bring them to him, and if Harry hadn’t been in the hospital wing then Colin wouldn’t have been on those stairs at all.

But Hermione was already nodding.

‘We know,’ she said. ‘Professor McGonagall was telling Professor Flitwick about it at breakfast, and we heard. That’s why we’ve started early.’

She saw his face. She put down the bundle of knotgrass she was holding and took hold of both his hands.

‘Harry, listen to me. It is not your fault. You were lying in bed with no bones in your arm. You didn’t send him up there. You didn’t ask him to come. You didn’t do anything at all except be someone he looked up to, and that’s not a crime.’ She squeezed. ‘Whoever did this did it. Not you. Her.’

‘The sooner we get a confession out of Malfoy, the better,’ snarled Ron. ‘D’you know what I think? She was in such a foul temper after the Quidditch match and Flint had a go at her, she took it out on Colin.’

‘There’s something else,’ said Harry, watching Hermione tear up bundles of knotgrass and throw them into the potion. ‘Dobby came to see me. In the middle of the night.’

Ron and Hermione looked up, amazed.

Harry told them everything Dobby had told him, and all the things he hadn’t. He told them that it had been Dobby who’d sealed the barrier at King’s Cross, and that he was sure now that it had been Malfoy who’d ordered him to keep Harry away from Hogwarts.

‘Only then she made him iron his hands for doing it,’ Harry said. ‘He showed me. He’s got bandages on all ten fingers. And he said she’s got a terrible temper. He doesn’t understand what she wants, and neither do I.’ He rubbed his face. ‘It doesn’t make any sense. Why would you order someone to do something and then punish them for doing it?’

Ron and Hermione listened with their mouths open.

‘Hang on,’ said Hermione. ‘The Chamber’s been opened before? He actually said that?’

‘Well, that’s it, then. That settles it,’ said Ron triumphantly. ‘Lucius Malfoy. He was here, wasn’t he, when he was a kid? He must have opened it back then, and now he’s gone and told dear old Dracina how to do it. Course he has. It’s obvious. I just wish Dobby’d said what sort of monster it is. How’s it getting round the castle without anyone seeing it? That’s what I want to know.’

‘It might be invisible,’ said Hermione, prodding leeches down to the bottom of the cauldron with a stick. ‘Or it might be able to change its shape. Look like a suit of armour, or a tapestry, or something. There’s a thing called a Chameleon Ghoul that can...’

‘You’ve read too many books, Hermione,’ said Ron, tipping a bag of dead lacewings on top of the leeches. He screwed up the empty bag and looked round at Harry. ‘So. Dobby shut the barrier on us. And now he’s broken your arm.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘You know what, mate? That elf’s going to keep on saving your life until you’re dead.’

By Monday morning the news that Colin Creevey had been attacked, and was lying as though dead in the hospital wing, had spread right through the school.

The air was suddenly thick with rumours and suspicion. The first-years took to moving round the castle in tight little huddles, as though they were afraid they’d be picked off if they went anywhere alone. Ginny Weasley, who sat next to Colin in Charms, was beside herself. The two of them had made friends at the start of term, apparently, over how much they both admired Harry, which Harry found very flattering and embarrassing in equal measure when Ron told him. Fred and George, though, were going about cheering her up all wrong.

‘Boo!‘

Harry, coming down the staircase to breakfast on Tuesday, saw George leap out from behind a statue of Boris the Bewildered, covered from head to foot in shaggy orange fur. Ginny screamed so loudly that a portrait of a sleeping monk fell off its nail.

‘Got you!’ said George happily. ‘Go on, Gin, you’ve got to laugh, it’s...’

‘You pair of absolute...’ Percy came charging down the stairs, purple in the face, with his Prefect badge flashing. ‘Do you know she’s been having nightmares? Do you? She’s been waking up the whole dormitory! That’s it. That is it. I’m writing to Mum. Tonight. And I shall tell her exactly what you’ve been doing, and exactly who has been doing it, and I shall underline your names twice.’

The fur and the boils stopped after that.

Harry found Ginny afterwards, sitting on the bottom step with her face in her sleeve.

‘You all right?’ he said awkwardly, sitting down next to her.

Ginny jumped about a foot. Then she went red, and shook her head, and then nodded, and then shook it again.

‘It’s Colin,’ she said, into her sleeve. ‘He was going to show me how his camera worked. He said he’d teach me to make the pictures move. And now he’s...’ She swallowed. ‘And it’s not just that. It’s... Harry, can I tell you something?’

‘Course.’

‘Malfoy stopped me. Yesterday. In the corridor by the Charms classroom.’ Ginny’s voice had dropped to a whisper. ‘She came right up close and she looked at me for ages, like I was something she was trying to remember. And then she asked me, Do you love him? Just like that. Do you love him?‘

‘Love who?’ said Harry.

Ginny looked at him. She went, if possible, even redder. She opened her mouth, and closed it again, and looked at her shoes.

‘I don’t know,’ she mumbled. ‘She didn’t say. But I didn’t answer. I just ran. And when I looked back she was writing something down. In a little black book. And smiling.’

Harry felt something cold go down his back.

‘Stay with Ron,’ he told her. ‘Or with Hermione. Don’t go anywhere on your own. All right?’

Ginny nodded, and wiped her nose on her sleeve, and looked at him as though he’d just given her a present.

Meanwhile, out of sight of the teachers, a roaring trade had sprung up all over the castle in talismans, amulets and other protective objects. Neville Longbottom bought a large, evil-smelling green onion, a pointed purple crystal and a rotting newt’s tail before the other Gryffindor boys in his dormitory pointed out that he was in no danger at all, being a pure-blood and therefore very unlikely to be attacked. They also pointed out, while they were at it, that Neville could perfectly well look after himself, seeing as he’d taken on Crabbe and Goyle single-handed last year. But Neville, as usual, had an excuse ready for that, and for why it didn’t count, and why he wasn’t really brave, or able to do anything much at all.

‘It went for Filch’s cat first, didn’t it?’ Neville said, clutching the onion. His round face was pale with fright. ‘And Filch is a Squib. And I’m practically one. Everyone knows. Gran says so all the time. It’s only a matter of time before it works out I’m-’

‘Neville.’ Harry put down his quill. ‘You’re not a Squib. You’re nowhere near. You’ve got a wand and it works, doesn’t it? I’ve seen it work.’

‘Sometimes,’ said Neville.

‘Everyone’s only works sometimes. Look at Seamus. He set fire to his eyebrows on Thursday.’ Seamus, across the dormitory, said ‘Oi,’ without much conviction. ‘And you battered Crabbe and Goyle by yourself because you thought it was the right thing to do.Neville. I don’t care what your gran says. You’re as brave as anyone in Gryffindor. Braver than most.’

Neville looked at him for a long moment. Then he went pink, and smiled, and put the onion down on his bedside table, and after a while he even stopped holding his nose near it.

It was at dinner, a few days later, that Harry first noticed something was wrong at the Slytherin table.

He’d only looked across because he’d heard somebody laugh, and it was such an odd sound in the subdued, rumour-filled Great Hall that half the people near him had looked too. It was Malfoy. She was sitting at the end of the Slytherin table, a little apart, with her plate full and untouched in front of her and her fork lying beside it. She’d laughed at nothing. There was nobody near her. She was looking at the empty space on the bench beside her and smiling, and her lips were moving.

Pansy Parkinson, two places down, edged a little further away and leaned across.

‘Dracina? Who are you talking to?’

‘Nobody,’ said Malfoy at once, without turning round. Then, more softly, still smiling at the empty air, ‘Tom.’ Then, sharply, as if she’d been caught, ‘Nobody! I said nobody, Pansy, are you deaf?’

‘Who’s Tom?’ Ron muttered.

‘Dunno,’ said Harry. ‘Some Slytherin?’

‘There isn’t a Tom in Slytherin. Not in our year. There’s Theodore Nott, but nobody calls him Tom.’ Ron shuddered. ‘She’s going round the twist, mate. You can see it.’

Hermione said nothing at all. She was watching Malfoy over the rim of her goblet with a small, thoughtful, satisfied expression, the way you’d watch a rival’s candle burn down.

In the second week of December Professor McGonagall came round as usual, collecting the names of everyone who’d be staying at school over Christmas. Harry, Ron and Hermione all signed her list. They’d heard that Malfoy was staying too, which struck them as extremely suspicious. The holidays would be the perfect time to use the Polyjuice Potion and wheedle a confession out of her.

Harry saw it happen. He was coming out of Transfiguration behind Professor McGonagall, and Malfoy was waiting in the corridor, and she stepped in front of Professor McGonagall and took the list and the quill from her hand without being asked and wrote her name on it, in a fast, spiky scrawl.

‘Your parents are content for you to stay, Miss Malfoy?’ said Professor McGonagall.

‘Father’s busy,’ said Malfoy. ‘And I’m needed here.’

‘Needed?’

‘I’ve got work.’ She handed the quill back. ‘Lots of it.’

Professor McGonagall looked at her for a moment, over the tops of her square spectacles. Then she did something Harry had never seen her do to a Slytherin. She put out one hand and tilted Malfoy’s chin up, quite gently, so that the light from the window fell on her face.

‘Miss Malfoy. When did you last sleep through the night?’

Malfoy jerked her chin away.

‘I sleep perfectly well, Professor. Thank you.’ She stepped back. ‘I’ve never slept better. I have the most wonderful dreams.’

She walked off. Professor McGonagall watched her go with her mouth pressed into a thin line, and then she looked down at the name on her list for rather a long time, and Harry, who’d seen her look at a great many things in that way over the past few weeks, didn’t like it at all.

The only trouble with the holiday plan was that the potion was only half-made. They still needed the Bicorn horn and the Boomslang skin, and the only place in the castle to get them was Snape’s private store-cupboard.

‘Easy enough.’ Harry told them all, meaning the exact opposite.

Privately he thought he’d rather walk up to Slytherin’s legendary monster and introduce himself than have Snape catch him robbing his office.

‘What we need,’ said Hermione briskly, as Thursday afternoon’s double Potions came closer and closer, ‘is a distraction. Something big enough that nobody’s looking at Snape’s office door. Then one of us slips in and gets what we need, and slips out again.’

Harry and Ron looked at her nervously.

‘And it had better be me who does the actual taking,’ Hermione went on, in a matter-of-fact voice. But there was that edge in it, the hidden one that came into it these days whenever she was talking about anything to do with Malfoy. ‘You two are on your last chance as it is. One more thing and you’ll be expelled. I haven’t got a single mark against me. So all you’ve got to do is cause enough chaos to keep Snape busy for five minutes or so.’

Harry smiled feebly. Deliberately causing chaos in one of Snape’s Potions lessons was about as safe as tickling a sleeping dragon on the nose.

‘Oh, just chaos,’ he said. ‘Right. Fine. In Snape’s dungeon. With Snape in it. Snape, who docked me five points last week for breathing in a sarcastic way. Do you know what he’ll do, Hermione? He’ll take me apart. He’ll use bits of me in the next lesson. You’ll be stirring me into your Swelling Solution.’

‘You’ll be fine.’

‘He’ll have me pickled. He’ll put me in a jar on his shelf with all the other horrible things and nobody will ever-’

‘Harry.’ Hermione looked at him, very steadily. ‘You faced Quirrell. You faced Voldemort, with his face sticking out of the back of somebody’s head. You can face Snape for five minutes. I’ve got complete faith in you. I always have.’

Harry opened his mouth. He found he didn’t really have an answer to that, so he shut it again.

‘Fine,’ he said grumpily. ‘Fine. I’ll do it. But if he pickles me, I’m going to haunt you. Both of you. I’m going to haunt Ron’s socks.’

‘They’re already haunted,’ said Ron. ‘Go on, then. What d’you want to set off?’

Potions lessons were held in one of the big dungeons, and Thursday afternoon’s began the way they always did. Twenty cauldrons stood steaming between the wooden desks, with brass scales and jars of ingredients ranged along the benches beside them. Snape drifted through the fumes like a bat through smoke, dropping acid little remarks on the Gryffindors’ work, while the Slytherins sniggered their approval.

Dracina Malfoy, who was Snape’s favourite, kept flicking puffer-fish eyes at Ron and Harry. Ron and Harry both knew perfectly well that if they flicked anything back, they’d be in detention before they could say unfair. She’d been absolutely dreadful to both of them since the Quidditch match. Still sore about losing, Hermione said, and taking it out on Harry, who’d beaten her.

Harry’s Swelling Solution was much too runny. Malfoy was quick to point it out.

‘Oh dear, Potter. Look at that. It’s like gravy.’ And then, to Harry’s horror, she got up from her own bench and came over to his, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, and picked up his stirring rod. ‘You’re doing it wrong. You’ve been doing it wrong all term. Anticlockwise, Potter, anticlockwise, seven times, then once the other way, I told you that in October...’

‘You didn’t tell me anything in October,’ said Harry. ‘Get... leave it, Malfoy. Leave my potion alone. Give that back.’

She didn’t give it back. She stirred, slowly, seven times, anticlockwise, with her head bent over his cauldron so close that the steam curled up round her face and dampened the loose strands of her hair. Her hand was steady, but there was a tremor in her other hand, the empty one, which kept opening and closing at her side as if it were used to holding something and couldn’t find it.

From two tables away came a low, rumbling sound. It took Harry a moment to realise it was Hermione. She was growling. Quite quietly, deep in her throat, like a lioness watching something come too near her cubs.

Malfoy didn’t look round. She didn’t so much as flick her eyes in Hermione’s direction. It was as though Hermione weren’t in the room at all, as though there were simply an empty space at that table where nobody worth noticing happened to be standing.

‘There,’ said Malfoy softly, laying the rod down. ‘That’s better. You see? You’d be hopeless without me.’

She went back to her own bench. Harry stared after her, his face burning, with no idea at all what had just happened.

But he had more important things to think about. He was waiting for Hermione’s signal, and he barely listened as Snape paused at his desk to sneer at the potion, which was, much to Snape’s evident disappointment, now exactly the right thickness. Snape moved on to torment Neville. Hermione caught Harry’s eye across the dungeon, and nodded.

Harry ducked down behind his cauldron, pulled one of Fred’s Filibuster fireworks out of his pocket, and gave it a quick prod with his wand. It started to fizz and spit. He knew he only had seconds. He straightened up, took aim, and lobbed it across the dungeon, and it dropped neatly into Goyle’s cauldron with a small plop.

Goyle’s potion went off like a bomb.

It erupted out of the cauldron in a great fizzing green fountain and came down over half the class. People shrieked as the Swelling Solution spattered them. Seamus’s ear inflated like a pink cushion. Pansy Parkinson’s lip swelled up over her chin. Malfoy got a faceful, and her nose began to blow up like a balloon, bigger, and bigger, until her eyes were crossing to look at it.

Harry bit the inside of his cheek so hard he tasted blood. It was no good. A snort escaped him anyway.

Malfoy heard it. Her head swung round, nose and all, and she looked straight at him over the top of it, and her eyes went wide and wet and furious.

‘You!‘ she shrieked, though it came out thick and honking, through the nose. ‘Wad you laughing? Wad you laughing ad be? By father will hear aboud this! By father will find oud whoever did it ad he’ll... he’ll punish theb...’

Goyle was blundering about with his hands clapped over his eyes, which had swollen up to the size of dinner plates, and walking into the desks. Snape was trying to restore order and find out what had happened. In the middle of all the confusion, Harry saw Hermione slide quietly out through the door.

‘Quiet!‘ Snape’s voice cracked across the dungeon like a whip. ‘QUIET! Anyone who has been splashed will come to my desk at once for a Deflating Draught. And when I discover who is responsible for this, they WILL be sorry.’

Harry tried very hard not to laugh as he watched Malfoy hurry forward, her head drooping under the weight of a nose like a small melon. He managed it. Just.

Half the class lumbered up to Snape’s desk, some weighed down by arms like clubs, others unable to talk through enormous puffy lips. As they did, Harry saw Hermione slip back into the dungeon, with the front of her robes bulging. When everybody had swallowed a dose of antidote and the swellings had all gone down, Snape swept over to Goyle’s cauldron and fished out the blackened, twisted remains of the firework.

The dungeon went very quiet.

‘Should I ever learn,’ Snape said softly, ‘who threw this... I will see that person FINALLY expelled.’

Harry arranged his face into what he hoped was an expression of mild, innocent puzzlement. Snape was looking straight at him. The bell, which rang ten minutes later, had never sounded so sweet.

‘He knows,’ Harry said to Ron and Hermione, as they hurried back towards Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom. ‘He knows it was me. I could see it.’

Hermione tipped the stolen ingredients into the cauldron and began to stir feverishly.

‘Two weeks,’ she said happily. ‘Two weeks, and it’s done.’

‘He can’t prove anything, though,’ Ron said to Harry. ‘What’s he going to do?’

‘He’s Snape,’ said Harry, as the potion frothed and bubbled. ‘He’ll think of something horrible.’

Hermione wasn’t listening. She’d stopped stirring. She was staring down into the cauldron, and the happy look had gone right off her face.

‘She touched your things,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Malfoy. In Potions. She came over to your bench and she picked up your stirring rod and she stirred your potion.’ Hermione’s voice was very low and very even. ‘Your potion, Harry. Your cauldron. And she stood right up next to you, right up next to you, as if she had every right to be there, and she said you’d be hopeless without her.’

‘Yeah, well, she’s mental,’ said Harry uncomfortably. ‘You said so yourself. It doesn’t matter.’

‘It matters.’ Hermione began to stir again, slowly. Seven times. Anticlockwise. Harry didn’t think she knew she was doing it. ‘It matters a great deal. Some people need to learn where they’re not wanted. And if they won’t learn...’ She smiled, suddenly and brightly, at the potion. ‘Well. That’s what the Polyjuice is for, isn’t it? To find out exactly what she’s been doing. And then everybody will know. And then she’ll be gone.’

Ron looked at Harry. Harry looked at Ron. Neither of them said anything at all.

A week later, Harry, Ron and Hermione were crossing the Entrance Hall when they spotted a little knot of people clustered round the noticeboard, reading a piece of parchment that had just been pinned up. Seamus Finnigan and Dean Thomas waved them over, looking excited.

‘They’re doing a Duelling Club!’ said Seamus. ‘Starts tonight! I could do with some duelling lessons, me. You never know when they’ll come in useful...’

‘What, you think Slytherin’s monster’s going to challenge you to a duel?’ said Ron. 

But he read the notice with interest all the same.

‘Might be handy, though,’ he said to Harry and Hermione, as they went in to dinner. ‘Fancy it?’

Harry and Hermione did. So at eight o’clock that evening they hurried back down to the Great Hall.

The long tables had vanished. In their place, a golden stage had appeared along one wall, lit by thousands of candles that floated overhead. The enchanted ceiling was velvety black again, scattered with frosty stars, and most of the school seemed to be crammed in underneath it, all clutching their wands and buzzing with excitement.

‘Who d’you think’s going to teach it?’ said Hermione, as they edged into the chattering crowd. ‘I read that Professor Flitwick was a champion duellist when he was younger. I hope it’s him.’

‘Just so long as it isn’t...’ Harry began.

He ended with a groan. Gilderoy Lockhart was striding onto the stage, resplendent in robes of deep plum. Behind him, in his usual black, came Snape.

‘Of course, of bloody course,’ moaned Harry.

Lockhart waved his arms for silence.

‘Gather round, gather round, everybody! Can you all see me? At the back there? Can you all hear me? Wonderful!‘ He beamed round at them all. ‘Professor Dumbledore has been gracious enough to let me set up this little Duelling Club, so that I may train you all to protect yourselves, as I myself have had to do on more occasions than I could possibly count. For the full and thrilling details, of course, you’ve only to consult my books.’

He swept an arm towards Snape.

‘And may I present my assistant for the evening, Professor Snape! He informs me he’s dabbled in a little duelling himself, in his time, and he’s very sportingly agreed to help me show you how it’s done before we begin. Now, there’s no need for any of you to worry. I promise faithfully I’ll give him back to you in one piece. You’ll still have a Potions master on Monday, ha ha!’

‘Shame,’ Ron muttered in Harry’s ear. ‘Be nice if they both went up in smoke.’

Snape’s upper lip was curling slowly upwards. Harry couldn’t understand why Lockhart was still smiling. If Snape had looked at Harry like that, he’d have been out of the Hall and halfway to the Forbidden Forest by now.

Lockhart and Snape turned to face each other and bowed. At least, Lockhart bowed, with a great deal of twirling of his hands and a flourish at the end. Snape gave a single irritable jerk of the head. Then they raised their wands in front of them, like swords.

‘You’ll observe,’ Lockhart told the silent crowd, ‘that we are holding our wands in the traditional duelling stance. On the count of three, we each cast our first spell. Naturally, neither of us will be trying to kill the other.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ Harry murmured, watching Snape’s teeth.

‘One... two... three...’

Both of them swung their wands up and back over their shoulders. Snape cried out, ‘Expelliarmus!‘

There was a dazzling flash of scarlet light. Lockhart was blasted clean off his feet. He flew backwards off the end of the stage, hit the wall with a thump, and slid down it to sprawl on the floor.

Malfoy and some of the other Slytherins cheered. Hermione didn’t. She was sullen.

‘I hope it hurt’ she whispered through her fingers, about the fallen Lockhart.

‘Me too.’ Said Harry. Ron nodded in agreement.

Lockhart was getting unsteadily to his feet. His hat had fallen off and his wavy hair was standing up on end.

‘And there you have it!’ he said, tottering back up onto the stage. ‘A Disarming Charm! As you can see, I’ve been parted from my wand... ah, thank you, Miss Brown, how kind... Yes. A capital idea to demonstrate that one, Professor Snape. Though, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, you did rather telegraph it. I could see it coming from a mile off. If I’d wanted to block it, it would have been child’s play. I simply thought it would be more instructive for the students to see it land...’

Snape was looking murderous. Perhaps Lockhart noticed, because he said, quite quickly, ‘Well! That’s quite enough demonstrating for one evening! I’ll come among you and put you into pairs. Professor Snape, if you’d be so good as to lend a hand...’

They moved through the crowd, matching people up. Lockhart put Neville with Justin Finch-Fletchley. But Snape reached Harry and Ron first.

‘I think it’s time,’ Snape said, with a thin smile, ‘that the famous trio had a little time apart. Weasley, you’ll go with Finnigan. Potter...’

Harry had already moved automatically towards Hermione.

‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ said Snape, smiling coldly. ‘Miss Malfoy. Come here, if you please. I’d be curious to see what you make of our celebrated Mr Potter.’

Of course it had to be Dracina Malfoy, Harry thought. No matter. He’d trounce her, the same way he’d trounced her at Quidditch.

‘And Miss Granger. You may go with Miss Bulstrode.’

Malfoy came strutting over, smirking. Behind her came a Slytherin girl Harry vaguely recognised, Millicent Bulstrode, broad and square-shouldered, who looked as though she’d be more at home wrestling trolls than duelling. Hermione gave her a weak smile. It was not returned.

‘Face your partners!’ called Lockhart, back up on the stage. ‘And bow!‘

Harry and Malfoy barely dipped their heads. Neither of them took their eyes off the other.

Close to, she looked worse than she had on the window seat. Much worse. The shadows under her eyes had gone almost purple, and her skin had a waxy, greyish look to it, like a candle that’s been left in a cold room, and her eyes were too bright. She was breathing quickly. There was a fever-spot of colour high up on each cheek. Harry couldn’t help noticing how unhealthy she looked, and he didn’t know why it bothered him as much as it did.

‘I’m not going easy on you, Potter. I’ll make you see!’

Whatever it was that Malfoy wanted Harry to see, it couldn’t be anything good.

‘Wands up!’ shouted Lockhart. ‘On my count of three, you cast your charm to disarm your partner. Only to disarm them, mind. Let’s not have any accidents. One... two... three...’

Harry swung his wand up over his shoulder. But Malfoy had already started on two.

‘Everte Statum!‘

The spell hit Harry square in the chest like a swinging door. He went backwards off his feet and turned right over in the air, and landed hard on his back, with all the breath knocked out of him and the candles spinning overhead. Somebody near him gasped. He heard Malfoy laugh, a high, wild, delighted laugh.

‘Did you see? Did you see that, Potter? I told you!’

He was up before he’d properly thought about it. He pointed his wand straight at her.

‘Rictusempra!‘

A jet of silver light caught Malfoy in the stomach. She doubled up, wheezing, as though somebody were tickling her all over at once, and for a second she was laughing for real, helplessly, tears springing out of her eyes. But even doubled over she kept her wand up. And through the laughter she gasped out the next spell before Harry was ready for it.

‘Tarantallegra!‘

Harry’s legs went mad. They jerked out from under him and began to dance, a frantic, kicking, high-stepping quickstep, all by themselves, and he couldn’t stop them. He went jigging sideways across the floor into a knot of Ravenclaws, who scattered.

‘Ha! Look at him! Look at the hero!’ Malfoy had got her breath back. She came after him, wand out, and her voice was rising with every word. ‘Dance, Potter! Go on! You liked it so much with the Bludger, all your twirling about! I said I’d teach you, didn’t I? I said I’d teach you if you only asked!’

‘Finite!‘ Harry gasped, jabbing his wand at his own knees. It was the one counter-charm he knew. It half worked. His legs slowed to a wobbly shuffle, and he caught himself on a pillar, and turned, and fired back the first thing that came into his head.

‘Flipendo!‘

Malfoy flicked her wand sideways. The jinx glanced off it in a spray of blue sparks and hit a suit of armour behind her, which fell over with a crash like a cutlery drawer being emptied down the stairs.

‘Steady on!’ called Lockhart from the stage. He sounded startled. ‘Steady on, Miss Malfoy! I did say disarm, I did distinctly say disarm, didn’t I...’

Neither of them heard him.

All around them, people had stopped their own duels to watch. Harry was dimly aware of it, a widening ring of faces at the edge of his vision. Neville and Justin had stopped. Ron and Seamus had stopped. Even Hermione and Millicent Bulstrode, who’d been locked together in a sort of headlock, had broken apart and were staring. But Harry wasn’t looking at any of them. He was looking at Malfoy.

She was different. He’d known she was different for weeks, really, without letting himself think about it. But now, here, with her wand pointed at him, he could see it clearly for the first time. It wasn’t the old Malfoy at all, the sneering, preening one with Crabbe and Goyle at her elbows. This one’s eyes were too wide, and too bright, and they didn’t blink enough. Her left hand kept going to the front of her robes and pressing there, flat, over a place where nothing was, and then jerking away again as though it had burned her. And she kept glancing to one side, quickly, the way you’d glance at somebody standing next to you to see if they approved.

There was nobody standing next to her.

‘Furnunculus!‘ Harry shouted.

She ducked it. It went over her head and hit Crabbe, and Crabbe howled as his face erupted in boils.

‘Is that it?’ Malfoy said. ‘Is that all you’ve got? Boils? Boils, Potter? You’re supposed to be the Boy Who Lived! You’re supposed to be special!  He said you were special! He said you’d understand, in the end, he said I’d only have to be patient...’

‘Who said?’ Harry shouted. ‘Who are you talking about?’

‘Nobody!‘ Her voice cracked. ‘Densaugeo!‘

Harry threw himself sideways. The jinx skimmed past his ear and hit the floor, and the flagstone it hit sprouted a row of long, yellowish teeth. A girl near the front screamed.

‘Miss Malfoy!’ Lockhart had come to the very edge of the stage. His smile had gone a bit fixed. ‘Harry! I really must... ha ha... I really think that’s quite enough of...’

‘Shut up!‘ Malfoy screamed at him, without looking round.

Lockhart shut up.

Harry saw his face as he did. It was a very strange face. All the bounce had gone out of it, all at once, like air out of a balloon, and what was left looked suddenly older. Lockhart was staring from Malfoy to Harry and back again, and his lips were moving soundlessly, and Harry, just for a second, had the oddest feeling that Lockhart had understood something. Something he’d read about in a book, maybe. Or even written about. Lockhart’s hand went to his collar and loosened it. He took a small step backwards.

‘Locomotor Mortis!‘ Harry yelled, which was a jinx he’d only ever seen Malfoy use on Neville, and it astonished him that he even knew it.

It caught her legs. They snapped together. She toppled, and went down on one knee, and for a moment she just knelt there on the cold floor of the Great Hall with her wand hand braced against the stones, panting, her pale hair hanging round her face.

Then she looked up at him through it.

‘You ate them,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you?’

‘Ate what?’

‘All of them. Every single one. And you didn’t even...’ Her voice wobbled, badly. ‘You didn’t even know. You didn’t even wonder. You think it was her, don’t you? Or that little Weasley. You think it was some... some...’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ Harry shouted. He honestly didn’t. He was cross, and sore, and very confused, and he’d had about enough. ‘You’re mad, Malfoy! You’re mad! You go round being horrible to everyone, you’re horrible to Hermione, you’re horrible to Ron, you’re horrible to me, and then you get upset because I don’t know what you’re on about! What’s wrong with you?’

‘You!‘ she screamed. ‘You’re what’s wrong with me!’

She broke the Leg-Locker with a slash of her wand, the counter-jinx coming out of her in a snarl, and was on her feet again.

Snape stepped down off the stage.

He came towards them quite slowly, through the ring of watching students, which parted for him, and Harry thought he was going to put a stop to it. But he didn’t. He stopped a few yards away, with his wand half raised, and he looked at Malfoy. Not at Harry. Only at Malfoy. And something happened to Snape’s face that Harry had never seen happen to it before.

It went grey. It went quite grey, and quite still, like he’d seen a ghost, and for a moment the sallow, sneering look was wiped off it entirely and there was nothing there at all but a sort of terrible recognition.

‘Foolish girl,’ Snape said, very low. It wasn’t meant for anyone to hear. Harry only heard it because he was the nearest. ‘Foolish, foolish girl. They never look back. They never once...’

He stopped. His mouth closed hard. He raised his wand.

‘Enough,’ he said, much louder. ‘Miss Malfoy. Potter. Lower your wands. You will both...’

‘Rictusempra!‘

‘Tarantallegra!‘

The two jinxes crossed in the air. Snape had to jerk aside to avoid them both, and his black robes flared out round him, and from somewhere in the crowd somebody laughed, nervously, and was very quickly hushed. Lockhart had come down from the stage now, too, on the other side. Between them, the two teachers tried to close in.

‘Now, now, now,’ said Lockhart, holding up both hands, as if he were trying to calm a pair of hippogriffs. ‘Let’s all just take a deep breath. Perhaps... perhaps a little demonstration of blocking, eh? Blocking’s terribly important! Harry, why don’t you... and Miss Malfoy, if you’d just...’

Neither of them looked at him. Every time Snape or Lockhart stepped forward, Harry and Malfoy shifted round each other, still circling, still firing, and the teachers had to step back again or be hit. It was like trying to separate two cats in a sack. Harry was hardly aware of them at all. There was only Malfoy’s white face across the gap, and her wand, and her voice.

‘Saint Potter! Precious perfect Potter! Can’t even see what’s in front of his face!’

‘Better than what’s in front of yours! Bleach-head!’

‘Half-blood!‘

‘Daddy’s girl!‘

‘Granger’s lapdog!‘

‘At least she’s not mental!‘

That landed. Harry saw it land. Malfoy flinched as if he’d hit her with something solid, and for a second her eyes went completely black, all pupil, and Harry felt a thrill of real fear go through him for the first time.

All round the Hall the watching students had gone quiet. It wasn’t the excited quiet of a crowd at a fight any more. It was the other kind. A first-year Hufflepuff near the doors had started to cry. Two Ravenclaw girls were holding on to each other. And yet nobody was leaving. They were all leaning in, frightened and fascinated at once, the way people lean in to watch a storm come over the hills.

‘They’re going to kill each other,’ somebody whispered.

‘Look at her face...’

‘Look at his...’

Malfoy was swaying on her feet now. She was exhausted. Harry could see it. Her wand arm had begun to shake, and her breath was coming in sobs, and she’d gone so pale she was almost transparent, like Nearly Headless Nick. She looked as though one more spell would knock her over. And she looked desperate. More desperate than Harry had ever seen anybody look.

She lifted her wand one last time.

‘Fine,’ she whispered. ‘Fine. If you won’t see... I’ll show you.’

And she cried, ‘Serpensortia!‘

The end of her wand exploded. Harry watched, frozen, as a long black snake shot out of it, fell heavily to the floor between them, and reared up, ready to strike. There were screams. The crowd surged backwards, and suddenly there was a great empty space in the middle of the Hall, and people were shoving and scrambling for the doors.

‘Don’t move, Potter,’ said Snape. He sounded almost lazy again. He was enjoying the sight of Harry standing motionless, eye to eye with an angry snake. ‘I’ll deal with...’

‘Leave this one to me!’ cried Lockhart.

He brandished his wand at the snake, and there was a loud bang. The snake, instead of vanishing, was flung ten feet into the air and came down again with a smack on the floor. Furious, hissing horribly, it slithered straight towards Justin Finch-Fletchley, who’d been too slow to run, and raised itself up again in front of him, fangs bared, poised to strike.

Harry didn’t know what made him do it. He didn’t even decide to. One moment he was standing still and the next he was walking towards it, and he heard himself shouting at the snake, ‘Leave him! Get back! Leave him alone!‘

And, miraculously, inexplicably, the snake stopped.

It slumped to the floor, as limp as a coil of wet rope, and turned its flat head, and its eyes found Harry’s. It looked at him. Harry thought afterwards, almost respectfully. As if it were waiting to be told what to do next.

Harry felt the fear drain out of him. He knew the snake wouldn’t hurt anybody now. Though he couldn’t have explained how he knew.

He looked up.

Malfoy was staring at him.

She was standing quite still in the middle of the empty floor, with her wand hanging forgotten at her side. All the anger had gone out of her face. All the exhaustion, too. Her lips had parted. Her eyes had gone huge and shining, the damned twinkle larger than ever and fixed on Harry. Her silver eyes were fixed on him with an expression that Harry had never seen on anybody’s face before and couldn’t put a name to. If he’d had to put a name to it, he might have said it looked like the expression of somebody in church.

‘It’s you,’ she breathed. ‘It is you. It was always you. He said...’

She pressed both hands flat against her robes, over her heart, and her face lit up from the inside like a lamp. She looked, for that one moment, happier than Harry had ever seen her. Happier than he’d seen anybody. And it frightened him more than everything else that evening put together.

He looked away from her. He looked at Justin, and grinned, expecting Justin to look relieved, or puzzled, or grateful. He’d just saved his life, after all.

Justin wasn’t any of those things. He was white, and shaking, and furious, and terrified.

‘What’s your game, Potter?’ he shouted. ‘What d’you think you’re doing?’

And before Harry could say a single word, Justin had turned on his heel and run out of the Hall.

Snape stepped forward, waved his wand, and the snake vanished in a little puff of black smoke. But Snape, too, was looking at Harry in an unexpected way. It was a shrewd, calculating look, a weighing look, and Harry didn’t like it at all. He was also dimly aware of an ominous muttering all round the walls of the Great Hall, a low, rising, rustling murmur, like the sound of a lot of people saying the same thing to each other at once.

Then somebody tugged at the back of his robes.

‘Come on,’ said Ron’s voice in his ear. ‘Move. Come on. Now.’

Ron steered him out of the Hall, with Hermione hurrying along beside them. As they went through the doors, the people on either side drew away from them, as though they were frightened of catching something. Harry looked back, once, over his shoulder.

Malfoy hadn’t moved. She was still standing in the middle of the floor where the snake had been, still with her hands pressed over her heart, watching him go. Pansy was tugging at her sleeve. She didn’t seem to notice. She was smiling, and her lips were moving, and Harry would have bet anything he owned that she was talking to someone who wasn’t there.

Harry had no idea what was going on, and neither Ron nor Hermione explained a thing until they’d dragged him all the way up to the empty Gryffindor common room. Then Ron shoved Harry into an armchair and stood over him.

‘You’re a Parselmouth,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t you say?’

‘I’m a what?’ said Harry.

‘A Parselmouth!’ said Ron. ‘You can talk to snakes!’

‘I know,’ said Harry. ‘I mean, that’s only the second time I’ve ever done it. The first time I set a boa constrictor on my cousin Dudley at the zoo, by accident... it’s a long story... but he deserved it. The snake was telling me it had never been to Brazil, and I sort of let it out without meaning to. That was before I even knew I was a wizard...’

‘A boa constrictor told you it had never been to Brazil?’ said Ron faintly.

‘So?’ said Harry. ‘Loads of people here can do it. Can’t they?’

‘No,’ said Ron. ‘No, they can’t. It’s not a normal sort of thing, Harry. It’s really rare. And this is bad. This is really, really bad.’

‘What’s bad?’ said Harry, beginning to get angry. ‘What’s wrong with everybody? Look, if I hadn’t told that snake to back off Justin...’

‘Oh. Is that what you said to it?’

‘What d’you mean? You were there. You heard me.’

‘I heard you speaking Parseltongue,’ said Ron, ‘snake language. You could have been saying anything. No wonder Justin panicked, Look, you’re my mate and I know you meant well. But from everyone else’s perspective you sounded like you were egging the snake on or something. They might... They might think it was creepy, mate.’

Harry gaped at him.

‘I was talking a different language? But I didn’t know... how can you talk a language and not even know you’re doing it?’

Ron shook his head. Both he and Hermione were looking as though somebody had died. Harry couldn’t see what was so terrible about it.

‘D’you want to tell me what’s wrong with stopping a dirty great snake biting Justin’s head off? I saved him a job with the Headless hunt. Who’d want to plod about with that lot of idiots?’

Harry’s attempt at a joke didn’t land. Ron sighed, in exactly the same way Mrs Weasley sighed at Mr Weasley whenever he started talking about electricity.

‘It matters,’ said Hermione at last, in a hushed voice. ‘It matters, Harry, because that’s what Salazar Slytherin was known for. Talking to snakes. It’s why Slytherin’s emblem is a serpent in the first place.’

‘Ah’ Harry said, realising everything at once. ‘Bugger.’

‘Yeah, Hermione’s right mate. This looks dreadful for you. I’m just being honest. But it’s not good. Not good at all for you, mate.’ Ron had his hand on Harry’s arm, supportively. ‘Give it till breakfast and they’ll all be saying you’re his long-lost great-great-great-great-grandson.’

‘But I can’t be..,’ said Harry, with a panic he couldn’t quite explain.

The last thing he needed, or wanted, was to be lumped in with the sort of dark wizards the Malfoys were descended from.

‘You’d have a hard job proving it,’ said Hermione. ‘He was alive a thousand years ago. For all anybody knows, you might be.’

Ron went up to bed not long afterwards, yawning and still shaking his head. Harry stayed by the fire. After a while, he realised Hermione had stayed too.

She’d curled up in the armchair opposite with her knees tucked under her, and she was looking at him in the firelight. Not reading. Just looking.

‘You were amazing tonight,’ she said quietly. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

‘I was a Parselmouth tonight,’ said Harry gloomily. ‘Apparently that’s bad.’

‘I don’t care what you are.’ Hermione said it very simply, the way you’d say the sky was blue. ‘If you were Slytherin’s great-great-whatever-grandson, I wouldn’t care. If you were a snake yourself, I wouldn’t care. You’re Harry. That’s all that matters. And I’m not going anywhere. Whatever they say about you tomorrow. Whatever anyone says.’

‘Thanks, Hermione,’ said Harry, and meant it.

She was quiet for a moment.

‘She looked at you,’ she said. ‘Malfoy. After. Did you see how she looked at you?’

‘She looked mad.’

‘Yes,’ said Hermione. ‘She did.’ She got up, and smoothed down her skirt, and paused by his chair, and for a second her hand rested on the top of his head, very lightly, like a bird landing. ‘Go to bed, Harry. Don’t worry about any of it. I’ll take care of things. I always do.’

Harry lay awake for hours that night. Through a gap in the hangings of his four-poster he watched snow beginning to drift past the tower window, and wondered.

Could he be descended from Salazar Slytherin? He didn’t know anything about his father’s family, after all. The Dursleys had never let him ask questions about his wizarding relatives. Never.

Very quietly, he tried to say something in Parseltongue. The words wouldn’t come. It seemed he needed to be face to face with a snake to do it.

I’m in Gryffindor, Harry told himself. The Sorting Hat put me in Gryffindor. It wouldn’t have done that if there was any Slytherin in me...

Oh, wouldn’t it, said a nasty little voice at the back of his mind. Have you forgotten what it said? Have you forgotten where it wanted to put you first?

Harry rolled over. He kept seeing Malfoy’s face. Not the furious face, or the mad one. The last one. The shining one. It’s you. It was always you. He didn’t understand it at all, and the not understanding sat in his stomach like a cold stone.

He’d see Justin tomorrow in Herbology, he told himself. He’d explain. He’d tell him he’d been calling the snake off, not egging it on, which, he thought angrily, punching his pillow into shape, any idiot ought to have worked out for himself.

By the next morning, however, the snow that had started in the night had thickened into a blizzard so heavy that the last Herbology lesson of term was cancelled. Professor Sprout wanted to put socks and scarves on the Mandrakes, which was a fiddly job she wouldn’t trust to anyone else, now that it mattered so much for the Mandrakes to grow quickly and bring Mrs Norris and Colin Creevey back.

Harry fretted about it by the fire in the Gryffindor common room, while Ron and Hermione spent their free lesson playing wizard chess.

‘Harry, honestly,’ said Hermione, exasperated, as one of Ron’s bishops dragged her knight off his horse by the ankle and hauled him, kicking, off the board. ‘Either sit still or go and find him. You’re making me lose.’

‘You were losing anyway,’ said Ron.

Harry wasn’t listening. He was watching the little stone knight, who’d got back to his feet at the edge of the board and was shaking his tiny fist at the bishop and calling for his horse. For no reason Harry could have explained, it made him think of Malfoy. Of Malfoy kneeling on the floor of the Great Hall with her hair round her face. Of a picture book with a knight in it, slammed shut.

That irritated him. So he got up and left through the portrait hole, wondering where Justin might be.

The castle was darker than it usually was in the daytime, because of the thick, swirling grey snow at every window. Shivering, Harry walked past classrooms where lessons were going on and caught snatches of what was happening inside. Professor McGonagall was shouting at somebody who, by the sound of it, had turned his friend into a badger. Harry resisted the urge to take a look and walked on, thinking that Justin might be using his free lesson to catch up on some work, and deciding to try the library first.

A group of the Hufflepuffs who ought to have been in Herbology were indeed sitting at the back of the library. But they didn’t seem to be doing much work. Between the long rows of high bookshelves, Harry could see that they had their heads close together, deep in some absorbing conversation. He couldn’t tell whether Justin was among them. He was walking towards them when some of what they were saying reached his ears, and he stopped, hidden in the Invisibility section, to listen.

‘...so I said to Justin, stay up in the dormitory,’ a stout boy was saying. ‘Keep your head down. If Potter’s picked him out as the next one, the best thing he can do is not be seen for a bit. He’s been half expecting something like this, you know, ever since he let slip to Potter he was Muggle-born. Told him he’d had a place at Eton and everything. You don’t go telling people that sort of thing with Slytherin’s heir wandering about, do you?’

‘So you really think it’s Potter, Ernie?’ said a girl with blonde plaits anxiously.

‘Hannah.’ The stout boy said it very solemnly. ‘He talks to snakes. Everyone knows that’s what dark wizards do. Go on. Name me one decent wizard who could talk to snakes. You can’t. They used to call Slytherin himself Serpent-tongue.’

There was a good deal of heavy murmuring at this. Ernie went on.

‘Think about what was on that wall. Enemies of the Heir, Beware. Potter falls out with Filch, and next thing you know, Filch’s cat’s been done. And that little first-year, Creevey, he’s snapping away at Potter lying in the mud at the match, getting right on his nerves, and next thing you know, Creevey’s been done too.’

‘But he’s always seemed so nice,’ said Hannah uncertainly. ‘And he’s the one who got rid of You-Know-Who. He can’t be all bad. Can he?’

Ernie lowered his voice mysteriously. The Hufflepuffs bent their heads closer, and Harry edged nearer so that he could hear.

‘Nobody knows how he lived through that. Think about it. He was a baby. That curse should have blown him to bits. You’d have to be a really powerful dark wizard to come out of something like that in one piece.’ He dropped his voice still further, until it was hardly more than a breath. ‘Maybe that’s why You-Know-Who went after him in the first place. Didn’t fancy the competition. Makes you wonder what else Potter can do that he hasn’t shown us yet.’

Harry couldn’t take any more. He cleared his throat loudly and stepped out from behind the bookshelves. If he hadn’t been feeling so angry he’d have found the sight that greeted him funny. Every one of the Hufflepuffs looked as though they’d been Petrified on the spot, and the colour was draining out of Ernie’s face as though somebody had pulled a plug.

Harry decided to go theatrical, to mock the sheer idiocy of it. He drew himself up and spread his arms wide.

‘Greetings, pathetic mortals’ said Harry. ‘ It is I, the Dark Lord Potter. And I’m looking for Justin Finch-Fletchley.’

He wiggled his fingers at them spookily. He was quite determined to show these idiots just how stupid they’d sounded.

It didn’t work. Instead, the Hufflepuffs’ very worst fears had clearly just been confirmed. Hannah let out a small squeak. They all turned and looked fearfully at Ernie.

‘What d’you want him for?’ said Ernie, in a quavering voice.

Harry dropped his arms. He dropped the act, too, and let the irritation into his voice.

‘I want to explain to him about the snake. What really happened at the Duelling Club.’

Ernie bit his white lips. Then he took a deep breath.

‘We saw it,’ he said. ‘All of us. We were there.’

‘Brilliant, then with those bountiful wizard given powers of observation, you must’ve noticed that, after I spoke to it, the snake backed off?’ said Harry.

‘What I saw,’ said Ernie stubbornly, though he was trembling all over as he said it, ‘was you hissing at it, and sending it at Justin.’

‘No I bloody didn’t you colossal idiot. Wind your neck back in. I tried to save him from the snake that MALFOY summoned, I might add.’

‘He was lucky, that’s all I’m saying,’ said Ernie. ‘He was very lucky. And before you start getting any ideas,’ he added hastily, ‘my family goes back nine generations of witches and wizards, every single one, and my blood’s as pure as anybody’s in this school, so...’

‘I don’t care what sort of blood you’ve got!’ said Harry fiercely. ‘Those ideas are bloody dreadful and need to change. Anyways, Why would I want to attack Muggle-borns? I was raised by muggles, you thick plonker.’

‘Everyone says you can’t stand those Muggles you live with,’ said Ernie quickly.

Harry laughed. It was a short, bitter sort of laugh.

‘Nobody could live with the Dursleys and not hate them,’ he said. ‘You come and spend a summer in my bedroom, and we’ll see how much you like them.’

He turned on his heel and stormed out of the library, earning himself a filthy look from Madam Pince, who was polishing the gilded cover of a large spellbook.

He blundered off along the corridor, hardly noticing where he was going, he was in such a fury. The result was that he walked straight into something very large and solid that knocked him flat on his back.

‘Hagrid! Sorry,’ Harry said, looking up.

Hagrid’s face was completely hidden by a woolly balaclava crusted with snow, but it couldn’t possibly have been anybody else, since he filled most of the corridor in his moleskin overcoat. A dead rooster dangled from one of his huge gloved hands.

‘Steady, Harry,’ he said, pulling the balaclava up so he could talk. ‘Wha’ are yeh doin’ out o’ class?’

‘Cancelled,’ said Harry, getting up. ‘What’re you doing up here?’

Hagrid lifted the floppy rooster.

‘Tha’s the second one this term,’ he said. ‘Foxes, maybe. Or a Blood-Suckin’ Bugbear. Either way, I’ll be needin’ the Headmaster ter say I can put a charm round the hen-coop.’ He peered more closely at Harry from under his thick, snow-speckled eyebrows. ‘Yeh all righ’, Harry? Yeh look all het up.’

Harry couldn’t bring himself to repeat what Ernie and the other Hufflepuffs had been saying about him.

‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Got to go, Hagrid. Transfiguration’s next and I need my books.’

He walked off, still seething.

Wizards were all mental, he thought. Mental and thick, the whole lot of them. He walked on, cursing and muttering under his breath about the state of wizarding society, and the stupidity of anyone who’d believe a word Ernie Macmillan said, and the stupidity of Ernie Macmillan, and the general, all-round, thoroughgoing stupidity of everybody.

He’s been half expecting something like this, you know, ever since he let slip to Potter he was Muggle-born...

Harry stamped up a staircase and turned along another corridor, which was particularly dark. The torches had been blown out by a strong, icy draught that was whistling in through a loose pane in one of the windows. The snow was flinging itself against the glass. Harry slowed down without meaning to.

Somebody was singing.

It was very faint, and it was coming from somewhere further along the corridor, or perhaps round the corner at the far end, it was hard to tell with the wind. It was a girl’s voice. It was high and sweet and a little cracked, and it was singing something slow and old-fashioned, a lullaby, the kind of song you’d sing to a baby to get it to sleep. Harry couldn’t make out the words. But there was something about it that made the hairs rise on the back of his neck, the way they had on the night of the Deathday Party, when he’d heard the voice in the walls.

‘Hello?’ he said.

The singing stopped. He heard, very faintly, the sound of quick light footsteps going away round the far corner. Then there was nothing but the wind.

Myrtle, Harry told himself. Probably Myrtle, wandering. She’d sounded a bit like Myrtle. A bit.

He was halfway down the passage when he tripped headlong over something lying on the floor.

He turned to squint at what he’d fallen over, and felt as though his stomach had dissolved.

Justin Finch-Fletchley was lying on the flagstones, rigid and cold, with a look of shock frozen on his face and his eyes staring blankly up at the ceiling. And that wasn’t all. Beside him was another figure, the strangest sight Harry had ever seen.

It was Nearly Headless Nick. But he wasn’t pearly-white and see-through any more. He’d gone black and smoky, and he was floating, quite still and quite flat, six inches above the floor. His head was half off, and his face wore exactly the same expression of shock as Justin’s.

Harry scrambled to his feet. His heart was going like a drum. He stared at them both, and something rose up in him that wasn’t quite fear and wasn’t quite anger, but was a great deal of both.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, no, no. Not now. Not you. Justin, you idiot, what are you doing up here? You were supposed to be in your dormitory! Ernie told you to stay in your dormitory! And you...’ He rounded on the floating, smoky shape of Nick. ‘You’re dead! You’re already dead! How do you even... how does something do that to a ghost?’

Neither of them answered. Of course they didn’t. Justin went on staring at the ceiling.

‘D’you know what this is going to look like?’ Harry said to them, and his voice was shaking. ‘D’you have any idea? I was just in the library, telling half of Hufflepuff I’m not the Heir of Slytherin, and now I’m standing over you on my own in a dark corridor and you’re the one who ran away from me last night. They’re going to say I did it. They’re all going to say I did it! You couldn’t have got Petrified anywhere else, could you? You couldn’t have picked a corridor with somebody in it?’

As he stood there, a door right beside him burst open with a bang, and Peeves the poltergeist came zooming out.

‘Well, if it isn’t Potty Potter, out all on his own!’ Peeves cackled, knocking Harry’s glasses askew as he bounced past. ‘Where’s Potty going? What’s Potty sneaking about for, eh? What’s Potty...’

Peeves stopped, halfway through a somersault. Upside down, he’d caught sight of Justin and Nearly Headless Nick.

All of Harry’s anger went out of him in one go. He knew exactly what Peeves was going to do.

Peeves flipped himself the right way up, filled his lungs, and, before Harry could stop him, screamed, ‘ANOTHER ONE! ANOTHER ONE’S BEEN GOT! THE LIVING AND THE DEAD, THERE’S NOBODY SAFE! RUN! RUN FOR IT! ANOTHER ONE’S BEEN GOOOOOT!‘

Bang. Bang. Bang. Door after door flew open all down the corridor, and people came flooding out. For several long minutes there was such confusion that Justin was in real danger of being trodden on, and people kept standing in Nearly Headless Nick and leaping out of him again with yells of horror. Harry found himself pinned flat against the wall while the teachers shouted for quiet. Professor McGonagall came running, followed by her own class, one of whom still had black-and-white striped hair. She raised her wand and set off a loud bang that brought instant silence, and ordered everyone back into their classrooms.

The scene had barely begun to clear when Ernie the Hufflepuff came pelting round the corner, panting.

‘Caught him!’ Ernie shouted. His face was stark white. He flung out his arm and pointed dramatically at Harry. ‘Caught him red-handed!’

‘Enough, Mr Macmillan!’ said Professor McGonagall sharply.

Peeves was bobbing overhead, grinning wickedly down at it all. Peeves always loved chaos. As the teachers bent over Justin and Nearly Headless Nick, examining them, he burst into song.

‘Oh Potter, the plotter, he’s at it again,

He’s stiffened the students and now the dead men...’

‘Out, Peeves!’ barked Professor McGonagall, and Peeves shot away backwards down the corridor, with his tongue stuck out at Harry.

Justin was carried up to the hospital wing by Professor Flitwick and Professor Sinistra of the Astronomy department. But nobody seemed to know what to do about Nearly Headless Nick. In the end, Professor McGonagall conjured a large fan out of thin air and handed it to Ernie, with instructions to waft Nearly Headless Nick up the stairs. This Ernie did, fanning Nick along ahead of him like a silent black hovercraft.

That left Harry and Professor McGonagall alone together.

‘Come with me, Potter,’ she said.

‘Professor,’ said Harry at once, ‘I swear I didn’t...’

‘It isn’t my decision to make, Potter,’ said Professor McGonagall curtly.

They marched in silence round a corner, and she stopped in front of a large and extremely ugly stone gargoyle.

‘Sherbet lemon!’ she said.

This was evidently a password, because the gargoyle sprang suddenly to life and hopped aside, and the wall behind it split in two. Even full of dread about what was coming, Harry couldn’t help being amazed. Behind the wall was a spiral staircase that was moving smoothly upwards, like an escalator. As he and Professor McGonagall stepped onto it, he heard the wall thud shut behind them. They rose in circles, higher and higher, round and round, until at last, feeling slightly dizzy, Harry saw a gleaming oak door ahead of them, with a brass knocker in the shape of a griffin.

He knew where he was being taken now. This had to be where Dumbledore lived.

The old man came up the road from Hogsmeade on foot, in the dark, with the first of the snow.

He could have come any other way he liked. He could have come by broomstick, or by Floo, or by simply deciding that he was no longer in the place he’d been and was now in this one instead, which was how most wizards did it these days, with a crack like a breaking branch and a faint smell of singed air. But he had always liked to walk the last mile to anywhere. You saw more on foot. You saw the shape of the land and the lie of the trees and the way the light fell, and you arrived knowing where you were, which was more than could be said for most people.

He was very tall, and very old, he leaned on a staff of knotted grey wood that was taller than he was. He wore a long grey cloak, much patched, a tall grey hat with a wide brim,  a crown that drooped over to one side, and a silver scarf, and a pair of boots that had walked a very long way indeed. He had a long grey beard that the wind kept trying to blow over his shoulder, and a pair of bushy eyebrows that stuck out beyond the brim of his hat, and under the eyebrows a pair of eyes that were bright and sharp and kind and, just at the moment, extremely pleased with themselves.

Under his left arm, wrapped in old oilcloth and tied with string, he carried a long, narrow package.

If anyone had been on the road to see him, which nobody was, they might have thought he was late. It had gone eight o’clock, and the castle lights were already lit.  He had said in his letter that he would come before the snow. But the old man knew very well that he wasn’t late. He was never late. He arrived, he would have told you, precisely when he meant to, and if that happened to be after everybody else had stopped expecting him, that was their affair.

His name, at present, was Ambrose Greyhame.

He’d had other names. A great many of them, over a great many years, in a great many languages, some of which nobody spoke any more and one or two of which nobody had ever spoken but him. He’d been called a good many things to his face, and rather more behind his back. He’d been a pilgrim and a counsellor and a bringer of bad news and a nuisance. He’d been, for one long, strange stretch of years, a sort of adviser to a young king in the West Country, a boy with a sword and a round table and a great deal more courage than sense, and he’d been called something else entirely then, and the name had stuck to him so firmly that it was printed on the cards in Chocolate Frogs to this day. He’d bought one in Hogsmeade on his way through, out of curiosity. He’d looked at the picture for some time. He’d thought the nose was quite wrong, and the beard was far too tidy, and he’d laughed so loudly that the witch behind the counter at Honeydukes had dropped a jar of Pepper Imps.

At the castle gates he stopped, leaned on his staff, and looked up.

The two winged boars stood on their pillars on either side of the gate, frosted with new snow. Beyond them the drive wound up between the dark trees to the castle itself, and the castle rose up out of the night with its hundred towers and its thousand lit windows, golden against the black mountains, so big and so bright and so full of the sound of young voices that for a moment the old man simply stood and drank it in, the way a man who has walked all day drinks cold water.

‘Well,’ he said aloud, to the boars. ‘Well, well. Just look at it.’

The last time he’d stood on this spot, there had been no gate. There had been no drive and no boars and no greenhouses and no Quidditch pitch, and no owlery, and no Forbidden Forest, either, because the forest hadn’t been forbidden to anybody yet, it had simply been the forest. There had been a half-built hall of grey stone on the crag above the lake, a great deal of mud, and four young people standing in the mud shouting at one another.

He smiled at the memory. He couldn’t help it.

They’d been impossible, the four of them. Quite impossible. The tall, proud girl from the glens, who thought anything that couldn’t be written down in a book wasn’t worth knowing. The red-headed young firebrand from the moors, who thought anything that couldn’t be settled with a sword wasn’t worth settling. The round, sensible, warm-hearted farm girl from the valleys, who’d fed them all and made them sit down and been, the old man privately thought, the cleverest of the lot. And the dark, clever, watchful young man from the fens, who spoke to the adders in the reed-beds and trusted nobody, he had good reason not to.

Four different sorts of magic. Four different peoples from four different cultures of the isle. Four ways of doing the same thing, every one of which thought the other three were doing it wrong. It had taken him eleven years to get them to sit down at the same table. He had broken two staffs on that table, banging them on it for order.

And yet here it all was, a thousand years and more later, still standing, still lit, still full.

He thought of how far back it really went, further than the hall on the crag, further than the four young people in the mud. He thought of a time when the ice had lain on these mountains a mile thick, and gone back at last, groaning and cracking, and the meltwater had come down out of the north in a flood that went on for a hundred years and drowned whole countries. He thought of what had been drowned with them. The black towers by the warm seas, the temples where men had worshipped a great serpent and fed it.  The sorcerers who’d learned their magic from the thing that lived in those temples, and paid for it dearly. All gone. All under the water. And afterwards, on the cold new shores, a few frightened families huddled round a few small fires, with nothing at all, and no one to teach them anything except what they could find out for themselves.

He had been sent to them, then. Sent by the One who did not often send anybody. He beyond the golden gates who had a great deal of patience, and who had never once, in all the long ages, quite given up on Man. Ambrose sat by those small fires in the dark, in the skins and the smoke, and he’d taught the first of them the first words. Little things. How to call a flame. How to ask the rain to wait. How to heal a cut. How to tell, when a voice came to you out of the dark offering you power, that it was never the voice of a friend.

It had taken thousands of years. And they had gone off in a hundred different directions with what he’d given them, They quarrelled about it, had forgotten half of it, and made up the rest, until at last he’d had to round up four of the most quarrelsome of all, stand them in the mud on a crag above a lake and make them build something together.

‘You did well, all of you,’ the old man said softly. ‘Better than I ever told you..’

The wind took his words away over the snow. He shifted the long package under his arm, and pushed the gate, which had been locked by a great many enchantments, and which opened for him at once with a little creak, rather the way a dog rolls over for someone it knows.

He went up the drive.

Inside, the castle was warm, loud, and smelled of woodsmoke, roast potatoes and wet wool. The old man loved it at once and with his whole heart. He stood in the Entrance Hall and turned slowly round, with his head tipped back and his hat in danger of falling off, looking up at the great marble staircase, the hundreds of portraits,  the hourglasses full of jewels against the far wall, and the stars painted on the ceiling high above, and he laughed out loud.

‘Hourglasses!‘ he said, delighted. ‘Points! Oh, that’s very good. Whose idea was that? That’ll have been Rowena’s. That’s exactly the sort of thing she’d have done. Make a competition of it, and then make sure everybody wins something.’

A suit of armour beside him creaked, and turned its helmet, and looked at him. He nodded to it politely. It nodded back.

He went up the staircase. He didn’t hurry. He went up one flight, and along a corridor, and up another flight, which moved halfway up and deposited him somewhere he hadn’t been expecting to be, which made him laugh again. He went past a tapestry of trolls in tutus, and stood in front of it for a whole minute with his head on one side, then went on, chuckling into his beard. He went past a portrait of a fat friar eating a pie, who looked up with his mouth full and his eyes popping, and lowered the pie very slowly, and bowed. He went past a painting of a knight on a fat grey pony who drew his sword and challenged him to single combat, and the old man drew himself up and challenged him back, very gravely, then said he was afraid he’d have to leave it for another day, as he was expected elsewhere. The knight was so pleased he fell off his pony.

Round the next corner he met the poltergeist.

Peeves was hanging upside down in the middle of the corridor, with a bag of what looked like ink pellets, waiting for somebody to come along. He saw the old man, and his eyes lit up wickedly. He drew back his arm.

Then he stopped.

He looked at the old man for a long moment, upside down, with his arm still raised. The old man looked back at him, mildly, from under his eyebrows. He didn’t say anything at all. He didn’t need to.

Peeves lowered his arm. He turned himself the right way up, very slowly, and put the bag of ink pellets behind his back, and then, with the expression of a small boy who has suddenly remembered that he has to be somewhere else, he shot backwards through the wall and was gone.

‘Hm,’ said the old man, and walked on.

He met only one other thing on his way, and that was on a quiet landing near the top of a tower, where the moonlight came in through a tall window and lay across the floor in a long silver bar. A ghost was standing in it, looking out at the snow. She was tall, pale, and very beautiful, in a long gown with a high collar. She had the look of somebody who had been waiting for something for a very long time, and had stopped expecting it to come.

She turned, and saw him, then went perfectly still.

‘You,’ she whispered. ‘It’s you. You came to my mother. When I was very small. I remember. You sat by the fire with her and you argued all night, and in the morning she said you were the only man in the world who’d ever won an argument with her...’

The old man put one finger to his lips.

The Grey Lady looked at him, and her pale eyes filled with something that would have been tears, if ghosts could cry. Then she bowed her head, and stepped back into the shadows. He went past her, and touched his hat to her as he went.

He was looking for Albus. He’d meant to go straight up to the office, but the castle had been so very full of things to look at, and he’d got side-tracked, as he so often did. And then, a few corridors on, he heard something that side-tracked him further still. He heard shouting. A great many voices, raised and frightened and excited all at once, coming up from somewhere below him. And underneath them, cutting through them, two voices that were louder than all the rest, and younger, and fiercer, flinging words at each other like stones.

There was a crash, and a scream, and a flash of light that lit the stairwell blue.

The old man’s eyebrows went up. He turned, and went down the stairs, quite quickly for someone so old, and came out at the back of the Great Hall.

Nobody saw him come in.

Partly that was because nobody was looking. Every face in the Hall was turned the same way, towards the middle of the floor, where the long tables had been cleared away and a crowd of children in black robes had pressed back into a wide, ragged ring. But partly it was because the old man didn’t want to be seen, and when he didn’t want to be seen, he generally wasn’t. He’d learned a great deal about not being noticed over the years. He’d learned some of it from small, quiet folk who’d been better at it than any wizard he’d ever met. He drew his grey cloak a little closer round him, and the light of the floating candles seemed somehow to slide off it, and he became, to anyone who happened to glance his way, nothing more than a shadow by a pillar.

Then he looked at the duel.

There were two of them in the middle of the ring, a boy and a girl, perhaps twelve years old. They were circling each other with their wands out. A long-nosed man in black and a bright man in plum-coloured robes were hovering at the edges of the cleared space, trying to get between them and quite failing to, and every so often one of the children would send a jinx crackling across the gap, and the crowd would flinch back like long grass in a wind.

The old man looked at the boy first.

He was small for his age, and thin, and his black hair stuck up at the back as though it had never once in its life been introduced to a comb. He wore round glasses mended with tape. There was a scar on his forehead, a thin one, shaped like a bolt of lightning. But it wasn’t the scar the old man was looking at. He’d known about the scar. He’d read about it in a letter, a long letter, in a slanting hand, that had come to him across the sea the summer before.

He was looking at the boy’s face.

It was the set of the jaw that did it. And the way the boy stood, with his weight forward and his shoulders squared, small and battered. Quite obviously frightened and quite obviously not going to give an inch. And the eyes behind the taped-up glasses, which were green, startlingly green, the green of new leaves with the sun behind them. Those had come down through the mother. The old man knew that, too. They’d come down a long way, through a great many mothers, a great many sons and daughters, quiet people in quiet places who’d never known what they carried and had passed it on anyway.

But the rest of it...

The old man had a sudden, sharp memory, so vivid that for a moment he could smell the pipe smoke and the spilled ale. A crowded inn in the rain. A tall, weather-stained man sitting in a dark corner with his boots up on a stool and his hood pulled low, watching everybody, saying nothing, looking for all the world like a vagabond nobody would trust with a farthing. And then pushing back his hood. And that face.

You’d be proud of him, old friend, the old man thought. You’d be very proud indeed.

Under his arm, wrapped in its oilcloth, the long package seemed to stir. It was only very slight. Anyone else would have thought they’d imagined it. But the old man felt it, a faint warmth through the cloth, like a hearthstone that has kept the heat of the day, and he pressed his arm against it, gently, the way you’d lay a hand on a dog that has heard its master’s step and wants to go to him.

‘Not yet,’ he murmured. ‘Not yet. Patience. It’s not time.’

Then he looked at the girl.

She was very fair. Her hair was so pale it was almost silver, and it fell long and straight down her back, or had done, before the duel had pulled half of it loose. Her face was pointed and fine-boned and proud. And her eyes, when she turned her head and the candlelight caught them, were grey. Not the grey of slate, or of rain. The clear, bright, shining grey of starlight on still water, of mist on a river at dawn in a very old wood.

The old man drew in his breath.

He’d known a face like that, too. A prince of the forest folk, a lightfoot archer with a bow and a quiver and an infuriating habit of keeping score. The old man found that he was smiling.

Then he stopped smiling.

Because there was something else about the girl. Something underneath. He felt it before he saw it, like a draught under a door before you notice the door has been left open. A coldness. A pull. It hung about her like a smell, though there was no smell, and it was strongest round the front of her robes, over her heart, where her left hand kept going, and pressing flat, and jerking away, as though she were feeling for something that should have been there and wasn’t.

He knew that coldness, the fire and malice that followed it. He had felt it before, once, long ago, in a little round room with a fire in the grate, something gold and heavy lay in it, and whispered, and wanted.

This wasn’t that. Not quite. It wasn’t anything like so great. The old man had made sure the knowledge to make such a thing had been lost. But he knew the knowledge remained, half forgotten but still there despite his efforts. Carried forward by dark hands like that damn Stygian’s. Over thousands of years and several forgotten ages. This hadn’t been made by the same hands, the same craft, or for the same purpose. But it had been made in the same way. Something had been put into something else, on purpose, a piece of someone poured into a vessel, so that it could wait, whisper, and be carried. To make the one who carried it love it, and need it, and hold it tighter and tighter until they couldn’t let go. It had got its hooks into this girl. Deep. He could see it in the way she glanced sideways, between spells, at the empty air beside her, as if somebody were standing at her elbow. He could see it in her eyes, which were too bright, and didn’t blink enough.

‘Oh, my dear,’ the old man said softly. ‘Oh, my poor child. What have you picked up?’

‘Who said?‘ the boy was shouting across the floor. ‘Who are you talking about?‘

‘Nobody!‘ the girl screamed back, and her voice cracked straight down the middle, and she threw a jinx that sprouted teeth from the flagstones.

The old man watched a moment longer. He saw how she looked at the boy, under all the shrieking, when she thought nobody could see. He saw how the boy looked at her, not knowing that he did. And he saw, three or four rows back in the crowd, a girl with a great deal of bushy brown hair standing very still and watching the pair of them with no expression at all, and he raised one eyebrow at that, too.

Then he turned, quietly, and went out of the Hall the way he’d come. It wasn’t his duel. He had business. And whatever was hanging round that girl’s neck, metaphorically speaking, it was not a thing to be dealt with by an old man stepping out from behind a pillar in front of half a school. His Lord had made it very clear such things were a young man’s game now. It would need thinking about. It would need Albus.

He found the gargoyle without any trouble. He stood in front of it and leaned on his staff and considered it. Albus did have a sweet tooth.

‘Pear drop,’ he said.

The gargoyle didn’t move.

‘Acid Pop. Fizzing Whizbee. Peppermint humbug. Cockroach Cluster. No, he’d never.’ He thought a little longer. ‘Sherbet lemon.’

The gargoyle sprang aside.

‘Every time,’ the old man said fondly, and stepped onto the moving stair.

The office at the top was empty. Albus wasn’t there. There was a note on the desk, in the same slanting hand as the letter, and it said, Ministry. Fudge in a flap again. Back by morning, I hope. Make yourself at home, my friend, I know you will anyway. Do NOT feed Fawkes the Fizzing Whizbees, they give him hiccups.

The old man laughed, and sat down in the chintz armchair by the fire, he laid the long package across his knees, and took out a pipe.

The bird on the golden perch by the door opened one eye. It was a very sorry-looking bird. Half its feathers had fallen out, and the rest were dull and ragged, and it looked like a turkey that had been plucked by somebody who’d lost interest halfway through.

‘Hello, old fellow,’ the old man said gently. ‘Not long now, is it? Not long at all. You’ll feel better soon.’

The bird made a soft, croaking sound, and closed its eye again.

The old man lit his pipe with a touch of one finger to the bowl. On that finger he wore a plain ring with a single red stone, and as the tobacco caught, the stone glowed for a moment like an ember, as though it were the ring that had done the lighting and not the finger at all. He sat by the fire all night, while the snow thickened outside the tall windows, and the silver instruments on the spindly tables whirred and puffed, and the portraits of old headmasters snored in their frames. Every so often he blew a smoke ring. Every so often the smoke ring changed shape on its way to the ceiling, into a little ship, or a little tree, or a little mountain with a red light at the top, and once into a tiny dragon that flew round the room twice and settled on the head of a sleeping portrait, which sneezed.

Albus came back a little after ten the next morning, in the middle of a blizzard, with snow on his shoulders and his beard and his hat, looking very tired.

He stopped in the doorway.

Then his whole face changed. The tiredness didn’t go out of it, quite, but something came up underneath it, like a lamp being lit behind a dusty window, and for a moment he wasn’t well past a hundred at all. He was eleven, standing in a meadow by a river in the West Country, and an old man in grey had just made a dandelion clock explode into a thousand floating stars.

‘Ambrose,’ he said.

‘Albus, my dear boy.’

Dumbledore crossed the room in four long strides, and the old man got up, and they embraced, two very old men with long beards in the middle of a cluttered office, and held on to each other for rather a long time.

‘You came,’ said Dumbledore, when he let go. His eyes were very bright behind his half-moon spectacles. ‘In this weather. I half thought you wouldn’t.’

‘I said I’d come before the snow.’

‘You came with the snow. Last night. I know you did, the gargoyle’s been sulking.’

‘I came,’ said Ambrose Greyhame, with great dignity, ‘precisely when I meant to. Sit down, Albus, you look done in. Was it very bad?’

‘It’s always very bad. Cornelius means well. He simply means it very loudly, and very often, and without the faintest idea what to do about anything.’ Dumbledore lowered himself into the chair behind his desk with a sigh. Then he looked across at his old teacher, and smiled, a real smile, crinkling all the way up to his eyes. ‘Do you remember the river?’

‘Which river? There’ve been a great many rivers.’

‘The one at the bottom of the lane. At home. The summer I was eleven. You found me down there skimming stones because I’d been sent out of the house for setting fire to the curtains,  you sat down on the bank beside me and asked me if I’d ever thought what I could do with a good stick.’

The old man chuckled. ‘I remember. You said a stick was for hitting things with. You were very sure.’

‘And you spent the next six summers proving me wrong.’ Dumbledore glanced up at the staff leaning against the arm of the chintz chair, grey and knotted and taller than either of them. ‘There aren’t five wizards living who can do what you taught me with a staff, Maybe old Mad Eye, But you know. Not even the Unspeakables. They’ve all forgotten. They think it’s a quaint old country thing, like Morris dancing. They all use wands now, and only wands, and they think a wand’s the beginning and the end of it.’

‘A wand’s a fine thing,’ said the old man. ‘A wand’s a staff that’s gone to town and learned manners. But it’s good to remember where it came from.’

‘You taught her too,’ Dumbledore said, after a little while. ‘That last summer. Do you remember? Greta.’

The fire crackled.

‘I remember,’ said the old man quietly.

‘She took to it faster than I did.’ Dumbledore was looking into the fire. There was a smile on his face, a small one, but there was something terribly sad underneath it. ‘Of course she did. She took to everything faster than I did. She had that way of looking at a thing and just understanding it all at once. Whilst I was still reading the instructions. Do you remember the morning she turned the whole river to light? Just to see if she could? I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I thought...’ He stopped. ‘Well. I was very young.’

‘You were both very young.’

‘Yes.’ Dumbledore took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. ‘I still think about her, you know. Most days. Isn’t that foolish? After all these years. After everything.’ He put the spectacles back on. ‘I still think it might have gone differently. If I’d said something. If I’d been braver, or cleverer, or less in love. If I’d only seen sooner where she was going.’

The old man said nothing. There was nothing to say. He’d been there, at the very beginning, and he’d been there at the end, too, in the ruins, with the smoke going up. He had his own regrets about Greta, and they were not small ones.

Dumbledore shook himself, a little, like a dog shaking off water.

‘You have it?’ he said, in a different voice.

The old man picked up the long package from the arm of his chair. He held it a moment in both hands, looking at it. Then he laid it across the desk between them.

‘I have it,’ he said. ‘As you asked.’ He kept his hand on it. ‘Albus. Are you sure? Is it truly needed? Now? It’s slept a long time since Godric used it. It’s earned its rest. I’d sooner not wake it, if it can be helped.’

Dumbledore looked at the package for a long moment. Then he nodded, slowly.

‘I wish it weren’t,’ he said. ‘You don’t know how much I wish it. But it will be. Soon.’

He reached out and drew the package towards him. He didn’t unwrap it. He only laid his long thin hands flat on the oilcloth, and Ambrose saw his fingers tremble very slightly at whatever it was they felt underneath. 

‘It’s been broken, you know,’ the old man said softly. ‘Once. A very long time ago. Long before your castle. Long before the four of them ever saw it. Broken right through, at the foot of a mountain, in the worst hour of the world. And made again..’ He looked at the shape of what lay under the wrapping. ‘Things that have been broken and made again are often the strongest of all. Remember that, when the time comes. It doesn’t mind being broken. It’s done it before.’

Dumbledore bowed his head.

‘I saw the heir,’ said Ambrose.

Dumbledore looked up quickly.

‘Last night. I didn’t mean to. I got side-tracked, as I always do, and there was a great commotion in the Hall, and I went to look.’ The old man’s face softened. ‘He was duelling. A slip of a thing, all knees and elbows and spectacles, with a girl twice as fierce as he was throwing everything she had at him, and he never once stepped back. Not once. I’ve known grown men, Albus, men who’d fought in wars, who’d have stepped back.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘I knew about the Stone. You told me, in your letter. The chessboard and the potions and that wretched Quirrell with his dark passenger. I thought, a brave boy, and a lucky one. But to see him. To see him with my own eyes...’ He was quiet for a moment. ‘He has the look, Albus. He has the very look. My old friend would be most proud of him.’

Dumbledore didn’t answer at once. When he did, his voice was very low.

‘He’s had a hard life, Ambrose. A very hard one. And it’s going to be harder.  So much harder. Tom isn’t finished with him. I don’t think Tom will ever be finished with him, not while one of them is still alive. And I’m the one who’ll have to send him out to meet it. Again, and again, and again. Every year a little further. Every year a little worse.’

‘I know,’ said the old man gently. ‘I know what it costs you. I can see it on you. You carry it about like a stone in your pocket, and you think nobody notices the weight.’

Dumbledore laughed, a short, unhappy laugh.

‘Do you know what he did at the end of last year? In the hospital wing? He looked at me. He woke up, after the Stone, after Quirrell, after everything, and he looked up at me from his pillow as though I were…’ Albus sighed. ‘He sees Hogwarts as his saviour. So I as Headmaster of Hogwarts am his saviour. Such trust, Ambrose. Such complete and utter trust. Such awe. As if I could put anything right. As if I’d never once made a mistake in my life. As if he trusted me to save him. As surely as the Americans trust old Superman or Captain America to save them.’ His hands tightened on the oilcloth. ‘And when I told him only a portion of the truth about his mother’s power, her ancestry… he cried.’

The old man said nothing.

‘He was so moved to know he was loved. That even in death his parents loved and protected him. He spent his whole life with those dreadful muggles and never knew of that love. He just cried. Given something he thought had always been denied him. I  knew he had to go back. I knew it was for his own good.’ Dumbledore’s voice had gone very flat and very quiet. ‘I stared at birds out of the window and I have never in all my long life hated anybody quite as much as I hated myself just then. Because it’s my fault. Not all of it. But enough. I left him on that doorstep. I left him there with those people. I told myself it was the only way, and perhaps it was, and I’ve been telling myself so ever since, and every summer he comes back to me a little thinner and a little quieter, and he still looks at me as though I’m his saviour.’

There was a long silence. Fawkes, on his perch, made a small, sad sound.

‘Albus,’ said the old man at last, very gently. ‘The protection must hold. You know that. It’s older than you know, what his mother gave him. Older than she knew. It runs back through her a very long way, through a great many people who never knew what they were passing on. While he calls that house his home, while her blood lives under that roof, the dark creature that’s hunting him cannot touch him there. Not Tom. Not Tom’s true master. He has to go back to them at the end of this year. And the next. For his own sake. You know he does.’

And for a moment, just for a moment, Dumbledore was angry.

The old man felt it before he saw it. The air in the office went suddenly heavy and still, like the air before a thunderstorm. The little silver instruments on the spindly tables stopped whirring, all at once, and stopped puffing, and fell silent. The fire in the grate sank down low and blue. The portraits on the walls, who’d all been pretending to sleep, opened their eyes. And Albus Dumbledore sat behind his desk with his hands flat on the oilcloth and a look in his blue eyes that very few living people had ever seen there and fewer still had walked away from.

He was angry at Ambrose for saying it. He was angry at the Dursleys, for the cupboard and the bars on the window and the cat flap in the door and every single thing they’d ever done and every single thing they’d never done. But most of all, and the old man could see it quite clearly, he was angry at himself. For agreeing. For allowing it. For every summer he’d let it happen.

Then it passed.

The fire came back up, yellow and crackling. The instruments started whirring again, a little sheepishly. Dumbledore let out a long breath, and his shoulders came down, and he was only a tired old man again.

‘I know,’ he said quietly. ‘I know he does. Forgive me.’

‘There’s nothing to forgive.’ The old man leaned forward. ‘And listen to me, my boy. He’s not alone. Not any more. I saw his friends last night. There’s a red-headed lad who dragged him out of that hall by his collar with half the school muttering at him, and never once let go of his arm. And there’s a bushy-haired girl who watches over him like a hawk over its nest. A little too like a hawk, perhaps, but she’d walk into fire for him, I’d stake my hat on it.’ He paused. ‘And the fair one. The girl he was duelling. There’s something dark on her, Albus, something that’s got hold of her and won’t let go, you’ll want to look into that, and soon. But under the darkness, she cares for him too. More than she knows how to say. More than she knows what to do with.’

Dumbledore laughed.

It was not a happy laugh. It was short and bitter, and it seemed to surprise even him. He looked away, towards the window, where the snow was flying past in thick grey sheets.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I’d noticed that. Fair, and fierce, and very clever, and quite sure she knows exactly what’s best for everybody. And so very much in love that she’d burn the whole world down to keep him in it.’ He was quiet for a moment. ‘I’ve seen that before, you see. I know how it ends.’

The old man’s face fell.

‘Albus. Forgive me. I didn’t think. I didn’t mean to-’

‘It’s quite all right.’ Dumbledore turned back from the window and smiled at him, and it was very nearly a real smile. ‘It’s not your fault, Ambrose. It’s simply what comes of being old. When you’ve lived as long as I have, your memories aren’t neatly put away in drawers any more. They’re all lying about underfoot, like a field full of old mines left over from some war nobody remembers. You can walk across it quite safely for years and years. But sooner or later, somebody you love says something perfectly ordinary, and puts their foot down in just the wrong place.’ He spread his hands. ‘And bang. It’s nobody’s fault. Just life. Far too much of it’

The old man looked at him for a long time with great tenderness.

‘Is there anything else I can do?’ he said at last. ‘Anything at all? You know you only have to ask. I could stay a while. I could look into the girl, and that thing she’s carrying. I could -’

‘No.’ Dumbledore shook his head slowly. ‘No, my dear friend. Thank you. You’ve done more than enough, bringing me this.’ He laid his hand on the package. ‘And I have a great deal of work to do. I suspect I’m about to have a great deal more.’

As if in answer, there came, from somewhere far below them, faint through the stone and the snow, a long, wild, gleeful shriek. Then doors banging. Then a great many voices shouting at once. Then the bang of a wand, sharp as a gunshot, and silence.

The two old men looked at each other.

Dumbledore got up and went to the window. He stood there a moment, and his face went very grey.

‘Another attack. I can feel it.’ he said quietly.

The old man came and stood beside him. He didn’t say anything. He put his hand on Dumbledore’s shoulder, and the two of them stood together in the cold light from the window, listening to the voices dying away below.

Then, after a while, quite faintly, they heard the grinding of stone. Somebody had given the password to the gargoyle. The moving staircase had begun to turn.

‘That’ll be Minerva with him. They’ll think it was him, you know. Half the school thinks it already.’ said Dumbledore.

‘Then you’ll have to make sure he knows you don’t.’

‘Yes.’

The old man turned away from the window, and picked up his staff, and settled his tall grey hat more firmly on his head.

‘I’ll go,’ he said. ‘He oughtn’t to see me. Not yet. One day, perhaps.’ He hesitated at the edge of the rug. ‘Albus. Hear an old man out, before I go.’

Dumbledore turned from the window.

‘None of us chooses the age we’re born into,’ said Ambrose Greyhame. ‘Not you, not me, not that boy on the stairs. We don’t get to choose the times. All we get to choose is what to do with the hours we’re handed. And you’ve done well with yours, my boy. Better than you think. Far better than you’ll ever let yourself believe.’ He smiled, and the room seemed warmer for it. ‘There’s good in this world, Albus. There’s a great deal of it. It’s always been worth fighting for. That boy is worth fighting for. And I’ve lived long enough to know that the light lasts longer than the dark, in the end, however long the night.’

‘Thank you,’ said Dumbledore softly.

‘But don’t forget.’ The old man’s voice dropped, and something came into his face that made him look, for a moment, very old indeed, and very tall, and not altogether like a man. ‘Don’t you ever forget, Albus. Tom Riddle is not the root of this. He’s a leaf. He’s one leaf on a very old tree. The one who planted that tree was singing out of tune before this world was ever made. He’s been the serpent in the hot lands, and the dragon in the north, and the dark lord of a dozen ages, and now the Muggles draw him in their picture books with horns and a tail and a pitchfork. They laugh at him, and think he isn’t real. He’d like that. He’s always liked being laughed at. It means nobody’s watching.’ He gripped his staff. ‘Tom’s only a symptom. The sickness is older, and it’s growing. I can feel it growing. I’ve felt it for many years. His power has grown. First gradually and now more quickly. You are running out of time.’

Dumbledore nodded slowly. His face was very sad.

The grinding of the stair came closer. There were footsteps on it now, two sets, one quick and hard and one slower, dragging a little.

Dumbledore turned towards the door.

When he turned back, the chintz armchair by the fire was empty. There was nobody standing on the rug. There was nothing at all to show that anyone had been there, except a faint, sweet smell of pipe smoke, and a single smoke ring, drifting slowly up towards the ceiling. As Dumbledore watched, it changed its shape. It became a little ship, with a high prow and a single grey sail, and it sailed away across the office towards the tall west window, and through the glass, and out into the snow, and was gone.

Dumbledore stood looking at the window for a moment longer.

Then he picked up the long, narrow package from his desk. He carried it across the office to the shelf behind his chair, where a battered, patched, frayed old wizard’s hat sat in a heap of dust. He laid the package very carefully inside the brim of the hat. The hat seemed to swallow it quite impossibly, and then lay there looking exactly as it always had. From somewhere deep inside it came a muffled sound, almost like a sigh. The sound of something that had recognised an old friend.

Dumbledore straightened up. He took off his spectacles and wiped them on his sleeve and put them back on. He smoothed his beard. He went and sat behind his desk, and folded his long hands on the blotter, and arranged his face into something calm and kind and untroubled, the face of a man with nothing on his mind but sherbet lemons.

There was a knock at the door.

‘Come in,’ said Dumbledore.

Professor McGonagall rapped twice on the oak door with the griffin knocker.

‘Come in,’ said a voice from inside.

Harry’s insides turned over. He’d been in trouble before, plenty of times. He’d been in Snape’s office and Filch’s office and McGonagall’s own office, and once, last year, in the Forbidden Forest at midnight with something drinking unicorn blood a few feet away from him. But he’d never been here. Hardly anybody ever came here. And he was coming here now because people thought he’d done something terrible.

Professor McGonagall opened the door, and they went in.

Dumbledore was behind his desk. He rose as they entered, and looked at Harry over his half-moon spectacles, a long, quiet, searching look that Harry couldn’t read at all. Then he looked at Professor McGonagall.

‘Mr Finch-Fletchley,’ Professor McGonagall said, low and quick. ‘And Sir Nicholas. The corridor by the loose window. Potter found them.’

‘So I gathered.’ Dumbledore came round the desk. ‘I’d better see them both at once, I think. Poppy will want me. Harry, would you be good enough to wait here for me? I shan’t be long. Make yourself comfortable.’

And he went out with Professor McGonagall, and the door closed softly behind them, and Harry was alone in Dumbledore’s office.

For a moment he simply stood there on the rug, with his hands in his pockets, too nervous to move.

Then, slowly, with a trepidation that was nearly reverence, he began to look round. He couldn’t help it. He wondered how many people ever got to see this room, and for a moment, just a small one, he let himself feel very special indeed.

It was a large and beautiful circular room, full of funny little noises. A number of curious silver instruments stood on spindle-legged tables, whirring and emitting little puffs of smoke. The walls were covered with portraits of old headmasters and headmistresses, all of whom were snoozing gently in their frames. There were witches in tall hats and wizards in long beards, and one very fat old wizard with a pipe and a parrot, and a thin-lipped witch with her hair scraped back so tightly that she looked astonished even asleep. So many strange and eccentric wizards and witches. There was also an enormous, claw-footed desk, and, sitting on a shelf behind it, a shabby, tattered wizard’s hat. The Sorting Hat.

But it was one of the portraits that Harry found his eyes going back to.

It hung a little apart from the others, between two bookcases, and the first odd thing about it was that it didn’t move. It wasn’t asleep. It simply wasn’t a wizard painting at all. It was a perfectly ordinary Muggle oil painting, in a plain gold frame, of a man in golden armour, the man in it was quite still, the way people in Muggle paintings always are.

The second odd thing was the man himself.

His head was completely bald. Not a hair on it. And his skin was blue, a deep, calm, even blue, like the sky just after the sun has gone down. He was wearing a sort of high-collared golden breastplate covered in strange curling designs, and he was looking out of the painting with an expression Harry had only ever seen on Dumbledore himself: very patient, very wise, and very, very kind, as though he’d been watching over something precious for a long time and expected to go on watching for a long time yet. There was a little brass plate screwed to the bottom of the frame. It said, For Albus. From your friend who keeps watch. May the Power protect you.

Harry stared at it for a long time. He had the oddest feeling, though he couldn’t have said why, that the blue man in the gold armour was somebody important. Maybe some magical being or just a human who happened to have funny coloured skin. Then he shook himself,  turned away, and his eyes fell on the Sorting Hat again.

He hesitated.

Then he looked at the door. Then at the sleeping portraits. Then he walked round the desk, very quietly, lifted the Hat off its shelf, and put it on.

It was much too big for him and slid down over his eyes, just as it had done the last time he’d worn it. And it was heavier than he remembered. Much heavier. As he settled it on his head, something inside the brim seemed to shift, he heard very faintly, a sound like a bell that has been struck a long way off. Then it was gone, and he was sitting in the dark inside the Hat, waiting.

‘Back again so soon?’ said a small voice in his ear. ‘Something on your mind, I’d say, Harry Potter. Something sharp.’

‘Er... yes,’ Harry muttered. ‘Sorry. Sorry to bother you. I only wanted to ask -’

‘Whether I got it wrong,’ said the Hat briskly. ‘Whether you’re where you belong. Yes. I’ve had a great many people ask me that over the years. I’ll tell you what I tell them all: you were a hard one to place, Potter. One of the hardest. But I don’t change my mind, and I haven’t changed it about you.’

Harry’s heart leapt.

‘That sadness and pain, that need to prove yourself, the drive and resolve I noticed in you before even you did, these are all traits that Slytherin always prized.’

Harry’s heart came down again, rather hard.

He sat very still under the Hat. He didn’t know if it meant Slytherin the house or Slytherin the man. It had sounded, just then, a little like both.

‘But Slytherin’s evil,’ he said. ‘Everybody knows that. Slytherins are... they’re all...’

‘Evil?‘ The Hat’s voice had gone sharp. If a hat could bristle, it was bristling. ‘Salazar Slytherin was never evil, boy. Never. He was difficult. He was proud, and he was suspicious, and he had good reason to be, given what had been done to people like him before the four of them ever came together. He quarrelled with Godric over a great many things, and at the end over one thing too many. Then he went away. It broke Helga’s heart. But evil? No. He would never have stood for it. Not in himself. And never, ever in his house.’ There was a pause, and when it spoke again, the Hat’s voice was quieter, and almost wistful, like it was talking about somebody it knew. 

‘Do you want to know something, Harry Potter? When I touched your mind, that first night, saw who you were and what you’d been through, what you’d made of it... of all the minds I’ve ever sat on, yours reminded me the most of Slytherin’s.’

Harry didn’t know what to say to that. It frightened him, a bit.

‘Godric would have been proud of you too,’ the Hat added, almost kindly, as if it had felt him flinch. ‘Make no mistake about that. Very proud. But I’ll say it again, because you need to hear it, and nobody else is going to say it to you. You’d have done well in Slytherin. Very well. And there’d have been no shame in it. Not one bit.’

Harry thought, suddenly and without meaning to, of Dracina Malfoy. Of the shining look on her face in the Great Hall. Of the word heir, screamed at him across a duel. He thought that she might very well be the Heir of Slytherin, and he found that the thought made him sadder than he’d have admitted to anybody. But he didn’t know why.

‘But all the dark wizards,’ he said. ‘All of them. They all came out of Slytherin. Voldemort did. Everyone says so.’

‘That’s not Slytherin’s fault,’ said the Hat. ‘Slytherin takes the ambitious, and the cunning. And there’s nothing wicked in either of those, not in itself. But they’re common enough in wicked men, I grant you. Just as common as Gryffindor’s courage, or Ravenclaw’s cleverness. Any of those can be turned to evil, in the wrong hands. Even Hufflepuff’s kindness, even its loyalty and its welcome, can be bent, Harry, by somebody who’s convinced herself she’s working for the greater good.’ The Hat paused, as though it were remembering someone. ‘And a great many of the darkest wizards I ever sat on started off with the very best of intentions. Oh, yes. The very best. Before they were drawn away. Before the master of all that darkness got his hooks into them and pulled.’

‘Who?’ said Harry. ‘Who’s the master of-’

The Hat made a sudden noise. It was a horrible, choking, gagging sort of noise, as though somebody had shoved something down its throat. And then it went limp on Harry’s head, and was silent, and when he pulled it off it was nothing but a crumpled, patched old hat in his hands, and it didn’t say another word.

‘Hello?’ said Harry, giving it a little shake. ‘Are you all right? What did you...’

The gagging noise came again.

But it wasn’t coming from the Hat. Harry spun round.

He wasn’t alone after all. On a golden perch behind the door sat a bird. It was the most decrepit-looking bird Harry had ever seen. It looked like a half-plucked turkey. Its eyes were dull, its feathers were sparse and grey, and as Harry watched, two more of them drifted off its tail and floated to the floor. It looked back at him balefully and made its gagging noise again.

Harry thought it looked very ill. He was just thinking that all he needed was for Dumbledore’s pet bird to drop dead while he was alone in the office with it, when the bird burst into flames.

Harry yelled and backed away into the desk. He looked wildly round for a jug of water, a vase, anything, but there wasn’t one. The bird, meanwhile, had become a ball of fire. It gave one long, loud, ringing shriek, and the next second there was nothing left of it at all but a small, smouldering heap of ash on the floor beneath the perch.

‘Ah,’ said a mild voice behind him. ‘I see you’ve met Fawkes.’

Harry jumped so violently he nearly dropped the Sorting Hat.

Dumbledore was standing just inside the door. Harry hadn’t heard it open. He hadn’t heard anything. And he had no idea how long Dumbledore had been there.

He looked up at him. And he couldn’t help it, he looked at him with exactly the same feeling he’d had in the hospital wing at the end of last year, lying in bed with the Stone gone and Quirrell gone and Dumbledore sitting beside him: the feeling that here was the one person in the whole world who could put anything right. It must have shown on his face. And something flickered across Dumbledore’s face in answer. It was only there for a moment. It looked almost like pain. Harry noticed it, and found it odd, and then it was gone and Dumbledore was only smiling at him, and Harry decided he must have imagined it.

‘Have you... have you been there the whole time, Professor?’

Dumbledore chuckled.

‘Only for the more interesting part,’ he said. ‘I didn’t like to interrupt. It sounded like a fascinating conversation. The Hat so rarely gets anyone to talk to. It gets terribly lonely up on that shelf.’

Harry went red and put the Hat back very carefully where he’d found it. Then he pointed at the little pile of ash.

‘Um, that wasn’t me, by the way, professor. That bird looked quite ill. I’m very sorry,’ Harry said, nervously but kindly.

To his astonishment, Dumbledore smiled.

‘And not before time,’ he said. ‘He’s been looking simply dreadful for days. I’ve been telling him to stop dawdling and get on with it.’ He chuckled at the look on Harry’s face. ‘Fawkes is a phoenix, Harry. When the time comes for a phoenix to die, it bursts into flame, and then it rises again out of its own ashes. Watch.’

Harry looked down, just in time to see a tiny, wrinkled, newborn chick poke its head out of the ashes. It was every bit as ugly as the old one.

‘It’s a pity your first sight of him should be on a Burning Day,’ said Dumbledore, settling himself in the high-backed chair behind his desk. ‘Most of the time he’s really very handsome. Scarlet and gold, like a sunset. Remarkable creatures, phoenixes. They can lift enormous weights, and their tears will heal almost any wound, and there is no friend more faithful in the world. They’re some of the very last remnants of a long gone age, Harry.’

In the shock of Fawkes going up in flames, Harry had forgotten why he was there. But it all came flooding back as Dumbledore folded his long hands on the desk and fixed him with that penetrating, light-blue stare.

Before Dumbledore could say another word, though, the office door flew open with an almighty bang and Hagrid burst in. He had a wild look in his eyes, and his snowy balaclava was perched on top of his shaggy black head, and the dead rooster was still swinging from his fist.

‘Professor Dumbledore, it weren’t Harry!’ Hagrid said urgently. ‘I was talkin’ to him, sir, I was talkin’ to him not two minutes before tha’ lad was found, there’s no way he coulda...’

Dumbledore opened his mouth, but Hagrid was in full flood, and waving the rooster about as he talked, so that feathers went everywhere.

‘...an’ I’ll say it to the Ministry, sir, I’ll say it in front o’ the whole Wizengamot if I’ve got ter...’

‘Hagrid...’

‘...yeh’ve got the wrong one, Professor, I know Harry, he’d never in a million...’

‘Hagrid!‘ said Dumbledore loudly. ‘I do not believe that Harry attacked anybody.’

‘Oh,’ said Hagrid. The rooster sank slowly to his side. ‘Oh. Righ’. Well. I’ll... I’ll jus’ wait outside, then, Professor.’

And he stomped out again, looking very embarrassed, and shut the door behind him with enormous care.

‘You don’t think it was me, Professor?’ said Harry, hardly daring to hope.

‘I do not, Harry,’ said Dumbledore, brushing rooster feathers off his blotter. But his face had gone grave again. ‘Nevertheless, I should like a word with you.’

Harry waited, his heart thumping, while Dumbledore considered him over the tips of his long fingers.

‘I must ask you, Harry,’ he said gently, ‘whether there’s anything at all you’d like to tell me. Anything you think I ought to know. However small. However strange.’

Harry didn’t know what to say.

He thought of Malfoy shouting, ‘You’ll be next, Mudblood!’ at Hermione, in front of the whole school, on the night Mrs Norris was found. He thought of all her strange, wild behaviour since, and the duel, and the way she’d looked at him afterwards. He thought of the Polyjuice Potion, bubbling away quietly in Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom. Then he thought of the voice he’d heard, twice now, in the walls, and remembered what Ron had said about hearing voices that nobody else could hear. And he thought about what everyone was saying about him, and the cold, creeping dread that he was somehow, in some way he didn’t understand, connected with Salazar Slytherin.

And for a moment, sitting in that big chair in that big room, Harry Potter was nothing but a scared little boy.

‘I... no. No, professor. Everything is being handled.’

Dumbledore raised an eyebrow.

Harry cursed himself silently. Being handled. What had he gone and said that for?

‘Not to worry, Harry,’ Dumbledore said, in a warm, grandfatherly voice. ‘I’m sure you have this all well in hand and are keeping yourself safe.’

He leaned very heavily on the last word.

Harry nodded. Dumbledore nodded back, contentedly, as if that settled it.

If Harry had been a little older, or a little less frightened, he might have noticed what was in Dumbledore’s eyes just then. He might have seen the grave concern there, and known that Dumbledore knew perfectly well he’d just been lied to. He might even have seen, behind the concern, how carefully Dumbledore was weighing things up: what he could do, and what he couldn’t, and how far he could move without stirring up something much bigger and much older than a schoolboy’s secret, something that was waiting, out there in the dark, for him to make exactly that mistake. But Harry wasn’t older, and he was very frightened, and so he only saw an old man smiling kindly at him over his spectacles.

Dumbledore rose, and came round the desk, and laid a gentle hand on Harry’s shoulder, and walked him to the door himself.

Hagrid was waiting outside on the landing, wedged into the space at the top of the moving staircase with his knees up round his ears, still clutching the rooster.

‘All righ’, Harry?’ he said anxiously, struggling up. ‘He didn’ blame yeh? Course he didn’. Course he didn’. I knew he wouldn’. Dumbledore’s got more sense than the whole Ministry put together.’ He clapped Harry on the back so hard his glasses slid down his nose. ‘Come on. I’ll walk yeh back ter the tower. Not havin’ yeh go on yer own, not with things the way they are.’

They went down the moving staircase together, which was a very tight squeeze, and past the gargoyle, and along the corridors, with the snow still beating against the dark windows. Hagrid kept up a steady stream of talk the whole way, about the rooster, and the Blood-Sucking Bugbear he was going to have a word with if he ever caught it, and how Fang had got his head stuck in a bucket on Tuesday. Harry knew he was doing it on purpose, to stop him thinking. He was grateful.

At the foot of the Gryffindor staircase, Hagrid stopped.

‘Harry,’ he said, and his beetle-black eyes had gone serious. ‘Them Hufflepuffs. An’ the rest of ‘em. Whatever they’re sayin’. Yeh don’ listen to it, righ’? Yeh hear me? I knew yer mum an’ dad. There wasn’ a dark bone in either of ‘em, an’ there’s not one in you.’ He hesitated. ‘An’ if there’s somethin’ yeh’re not tellin’ Dumbledore, which I’m not sayin’ there is, mind, but if there was... yeh can always tell me. Any time. I won’ go blabbin’.’

Harry thought of the last time Hagrid had been trusted with a secret, and of a stranger in a hood buying him drinks in the Hog’s Head, and Fluffy, and a dragon egg. He managed a smile.

‘Thanks, Hagrid,’ he said. ‘I know.’

The double attack on Justin and Nearly Headless Nick turned what had been nervousness into real panic.

Oddly enough, it was what had happened to Nearly Headless Nick that seemed to frighten people most. Everybody had their own theory about what could have done it to Justin. But what could possibly do that to a ghost? What terrible power could hurt someone who was already dead? People asked each other in whispers in the corridors and over breakfast, and nobody had an answer, and the not having one was worse than any answer could have been. There was very nearly a stampede to book seats on the Hogwarts Express so that people could go home for Christmas.

‘Carry on like this and it’ll just be us,’ Ron said to Harry and Hermione, watching the queue for Professor McGonagall’s list stretch halfway down the corridor. ‘Us, and Malfoy, and Crabbe and Goyle. That’ll be cosy. Christmas crackers with the Slytherins. I can’t wait.’

Crabbe and Goyle, who always did whatever Malfoy did, had put their names down to stay over the holidays too. Harry suspected they were quietly relieved that Neville was going home.

But Harry was glad most people were leaving. He was sick of it. He was sick of people flattening themselves against the walls when he came round a corner, as if he might bite. He was sick of the muttering, and the pointing, and the hissing, actual hissing, as he went past, from people who seemed to think it was funny. Even Malfoy joined in. But oddly enough, she only ever did it when Crabbe and Goyle were with her, and even then it was a feeble sort of hiss, and she always looked at him afterwards as if she were waiting to see whether he’d liked it.

Fred and George, on the other hand, thought the whole thing was hilarious.

‘Stand aside, stand aside!’ Fred bellowed, striding ahead of Harry down the third-floor corridor one morning, scattering terrified second-years. ‘Heir of Slytherin coming through! Thoroughly evil! Mind your ankles!’

‘Highly dangerous!’ George chimed in from behind. ‘Do not make eye contact! Do not offer him food! He bites!’

Percy came round the corner and stopped dead.

‘This,’ he said icily, ‘is not a joke.’

‘Move, Percy,’ said Fred. ‘Harry’s got places to be.’

‘He’s popping down to the Chamber of Secrets,’ said George, ‘for a nice cup of tea and a biscuit with his giant fanged pet.’

‘Oh, don’t,’ Ginny wailed. She’d come up behind them with an armful of books, and her face was white. It was what she said every time Fred asked Harry at the top of his voice who he was planning to finish off next, or George jumped back from him in the Great Hall and held up a huge clove of garlic to ward him off. ‘Please don’t. It’s not funny.’

Harry didn’t mind. It made him feel better, if anything, that Fred and George at least thought the idea of his being Slytherin’s heir was completely ridiculous.

But their antics seemed to be drawing in Dracina Malfoy.

Every time she passed them in a corridor while Fred and George were at it, she slowed down. She watched. And there was a look on her face that Harry couldn’t make head or tail of. It wasn’t a sneer. It was almost approval. As though Fred and George had finally, by accident, said something she agreed with. For some bizarre reason, probably to do with her being a bully in general, Malfoy had begun telling anyone who’d listen that Harry Potter was the Heir of Slytherin, and that he would rise, and that he’d rid the school of every last Mudblood in it.

‘It’s because she’s dying to tell everyone it’s really her,’ said Ron, with an air of great wisdom. ‘You know what she’s like. She can’t stand anyone being better than her at anything. And now you’re getting all the credit for her dirty work and she’s having to go round pretending she’s pleased about it.’

‘But she’s saying it seriously, not sarcastically. That’s what’s bothering me,’ said Harry.

He was remembering the Duelling Club. The snake slumped on the floor. The look on her face when she’d seen it obey him.

‘It’s like she actually believes it,’ Harry finished.

‘She’s not right in the head, Harry. We’ve all seen that now,’ Hermione insisted.

Ron put a hand on her shoulder, without saying anything.

Harry looked at Hermione properly, and didn’t much like what he saw. She’d been completely fixated on the Polyjuice Potion for weeks, and it showed. She looked tired, and pale. She’d started snapping at people, at Neville, at Ron, even once at Professor Flitwick, and there was an intensity in her that was even fiercer than usual, as though something inside her had been wound up very tight and was still being wound.

‘Not for long,’ said Hermione, under her breath. ‘Soon...’

She said it with a sort of relish. Harry didn’t know what she meant by it, and he didn’t like to ask.

Then Hermione seemed to notice Ron’s hand on her shoulder. She looked at it for a second as though she’d forgotten he was there. Then she reached up and gave it a quick, grateful squeeze, and some of the tightness went out of her face, and she was herself again.

‘The Polyjuice’s nearly ready. We’ll be getting the truth out of her any day now,’ Hermione said, with satisfaction.

That night, Harry couldn’t sleep. At about three in the morning he gave up trying, and went down to the common room for a glass of water, and found that the fire was still lit.

Hermione was asleep in the armchair nearest it.

She had Moste Potente Potions open on her lap and her quill still in her hand, and there was a long smear of ink across her cheek where she’d dropped off on top of her notes. She was muttering in her sleep. Harry went over to wake her and tell her to go up to bed, and as he bent down he caught a few of the words.

‘I was first... she can’t have... ’

Harry stood very still.

Then Hermione’s eyes flew open, and she saw him, and she sat bolt upright so fast that the book slid off her lap and hit the floor with a thump.

‘Harry! What... what time is it?’

‘Late,’ said Harry. ‘You were asleep. You were talking.’

‘Was I?’ Hermione bent quickly and picked up the book. Her cheeks had gone pink. ‘What did I say?’

Harry hesitated.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t make it out. Go to bed, Hermione. You look done in.’

She went. But Harry stayed by the fire for a long time afterwards, looking at the embers, with an odd, uneasy feeling that he didn’t have a name for.

He had another one of those feelings two days later, on the last afternoon of term, when Malfoy caught him alone.

It was on a staircase between the Charms corridor and the library. Harry had gone back for a book Ron had left behind, and Malfoy came down the stairs as he was going up, without Crabbe, or Goyle, or Pansy, or anybody. She stopped two steps above him, so that for once she was taller.

‘Potter.’

‘Not now, Malfoy.’

‘I’m not going to hex you.’ She looked round quickly, up and down the empty stairs, the way people do when they’re about to tell a secret. Then she leaned down towards him, and her voice dropped so low he could barely hear it. ‘I know.’

‘Know what?’

‘It’s all right. You don’t have to pretend. Not with me.’ Her eyes were enormous. There were shadows under them so dark they looked like bruises. ‘I saw you. With the snake. I know what you are. And I won’t tell. I’d never, ever tell. I just... I wanted you to know that I know. And that I’m on your side. I’ve always been on your side. Even when it didn’t look like it. Especially when it didn’t look like it.’

‘Malfoy, I’m not the Heir of Slytherin,’ said Harry slowly, as if he were talking to somebody very young, or very ill. ‘I’m not. I was telling that snake to leave Justin alone.’

She smiled at him. It was a very tender smile, and a very patient one, and it made Harry’s skin crawl.

‘Of course you were,’ she said softly. ‘Of course you were, Harry. That’s what you’d have to say. I understand. He said you would.’

‘Who said?’

But she’d already gone, running lightly down the stairs, and when he leaned over the banister to shout after her, she’d vanished round the corner, and all he could hear was her footsteps, and then, very faint, the sound of her laughing.

At last the term ended, and a silence as deep as the snow on the grounds settled over the castle.

Harry found it peaceful rather than gloomy. He liked having the run of Gryffindor Tower with Hermione and the Weasleys. They could play Exploding Snap as loudly as they liked without anybody complaining, and practise duelling in private in the empty common room, with the furniture pushed back against the walls. Fred, George and Ginny had all decided to stay at school rather than go out to Egypt with Mr and Mrs Weasley to visit Bill. Percy, who disapproved of what he called their childish behaviour, didn’t spend much time in the common room. He’d already told them, very pompously, that he was only staying over Christmas because it was his duty as a Prefect to support the teachers through this difficult time.

Harry didn’t care why any of them were staying. He was just glad they were. He’d started, very tentatively, and without ever saying so out loud, to think of the Weasleys as a sort of family. Not his family, exactly. He didn’t dare think that. But something near it. And having all of them there with him at Christmas, filling up the tower with noise and Exploding Snap and Fred’s fireworks, was the closest thing to a proper family Christmas he’d ever had.

On Christmas Eve the snow stopped, and the sun came out on a world gone white and blazing, and the Weasleys dragged him out into the grounds for a snowball fight.

It was brilliant. It was war. Fred and George built a fort by the frozen lake and defended it with snowballs that had been bewitched to chase people, and Ron and Harry stormed it, and Ginny, who turned out to have a throwing arm like a Beater’s, took Percy’s hat off at forty yards when he came out to tell them all to be careful. Hermione had come out too, in two scarves, and stood on the edge of it all laughing, and every so often somebody would hit her by accident and she’d shriek and throw one back very badly, and somehow it always seemed to land on Ron.

At one point, flat on his back in a snowdrift with Fred sitting on his chest, Harry looked up at the castle. And saw, very high up, in one of the tall windows on the lake side of the castle, a pale face.

Somebody was watching them. A girl, with long fair hair. She had both hands pressed against the glass. She was quite still, and even from all the way down there, Harry thought she looked terribly alone.

Then Fred shoved a handful of snow down the back of his neck, and when Harry had finished yelling and looked up again, the window was empty.

Later, when they’d all gone in to thaw out by the fire, Ginny sidled up to him. She’d gone very red, the way she always did.

‘I’ve got you something,’ she said in a rush. ‘For Christmas. It’s not much. It’s only... I made it.’

It was a card. She’d painted it herself, and it showed a little figure on a broomstick, with black hair and round glasses, catching a golden Snitch against a blue sky. It wasn’t very good. But it had obviously taken her ages.

‘It’s brilliant, Ginny,’ said Harry, and meant it. ‘Thanks.’

Ginny went redder still, and squeaked, and fled up the girls’ staircase. Harry propped the card up on the mantelpiece, next to the treacle fudge he was planning to soften, and when he turned round Hermione was looking at it. She didn’t say anything at all.

Christmas morning dawned cold and white.

Harry and Ron, the only ones left in their dormitory, were woken at a very early hour by Hermione, who burst in fully dressed, carrying presents for both of them.

‘Up!’ she said loudly, and dragged back the curtains at the window, so that a blaze of white snow-light fell across both beds.

‘Hermione,’ Ron groaned, throwing an arm over his eyes. ‘You can’t come in here. It’s the boys’ dormitory. There are rules.’

‘Happy Christmas to you too,’ said Hermione, and threw his present at him. ‘I’ve been up nearly an hour. I’ve just been down to add the last of the lacewings. It’s ready.’

Harry sat up, suddenly wide awake.

‘You’re sure?’

‘Completely,’ said Hermione, shoving Scabbers aside so that she could sit on the end of Ron’s bed. Scabbers squeaked indignantly. ‘And if we’re going to do it, I think it ought to be tonight.’

At that moment Hedwig swooped in through the window, carrying a very small package in her beak.

‘Hello, you,’ said Harry happily, as she landed on his bed. ‘Have you forgiven me, then? For the car?’

She nibbled his ear affectionately, which was a much better present than the one she’d brought him. That turned out to be from the Dursleys. They had sent Harry a single toothpick and a note telling him to find out whether he could stay at Hogwarts over the summer holidays, too.

Harry turned the toothpick over in his fingers and laughed. He had no idea what the Dursleys were going on about. He had no intention of ever going back to them again. Not ever. He’d be going home with the Weasleys come the summer. Mrs Weasley had said so herself, in the kitchen at the Burrow, with her hand on his head. As long as you want.

The rest of Harry’s presents were a great deal more satisfactory. Hagrid had sent him a large tin of treacle fudge, which Harry decided to soften by the fire before he tried to eat it. Ron had given him Flying with the Cannons, a book of interesting facts about his favourite Quidditch team. And Hermione had bought him a magnificent eagle-feather quill, long and dark and glossy, in a little box lined with green velvet.

‘Do you like it?’ she said anxiously, watching his face. ‘I didn’t know if you’d... I wanted to get you something you’d use every day. Something you’d keep.’

‘It’s brilliant, Hermione,’ said Harry. ‘Thanks.’

He opened the last present. It was a new hand-knitted jumper from Mrs Weasley, a deep, warm, Gryffindor red this time, with a gold H on the front, and a large plum cake. He held the jumper for a long moment without saying anything. Last year’s had been the first present anybody had ever given him. This one was the second Christmas in a row that somebody had thought of him. He found that he was so delighted, and so touched by how thoughtful and kind Mrs Weasley was, that he had to look out of the window for a bit until his eyes stopped stinging.

Then he propped up her card on his bedside table, with a fresh stab of guilt. He was thinking of Mr Weasley’s car, which nobody had seen since it had crashed into the Whomping Willow and roared off into the Forest, and of the bout of rule-breaking that he and Ron were planning for later that very evening.

Nobody, not even somebody who was dreading drinking Polyjuice Potion in a few hours, could have failed to enjoy Christmas dinner at Hogwarts.

The Great Hall looked magnificent. There were a dozen frost-covered Christmas trees, and thick streamers of holly and mistletoe criss-crossing the ceiling, and enchanted snow falling, warm and dry, from the enchanted sky. Dumbledore led them in several of his favourite carols, with Hagrid booming louder and louder with every goblet of eggnog he put away. Percy hadn’t noticed that Fred had bewitched his Prefect badge so that it now read Pinhead, and kept asking them all what they were sniggering about.

Once, between the turkey and the pudding, Harry looked up and found Dumbledore watching him from the staff table. Dumbledore smiled, and raised his goblet very slightly, the way you’d raise a glass to a friend across a room. Harry raised his pumpkin juice back. He felt warm right through to his toes.

He didn’t even care that Dracina Malfoy was making loud, snide remarks from the Slytherin table.

She was wearing a new blouse. It was dark green silk with little silver buttons all the way down, and very obviously expensive, and she was talking about it, loudly, to the whole of the near-empty Slytherin table, so that every Slytherin there had to hear about where it came from and how much it had cost. She kept checking their faces for a reaction. Then, every single time, she’d check Harry’s.

Harry wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. He kept his face perfectly blank and went on eating his pudding. He wasn’t going to look annoyed, and he wasn’t going to look upset, and he certainly wasn’t going to look jealous, which was what she was obviously after.

Except that it didn’t seem to be what she was after either. The blanker he looked, the more frustrated she got. By the time the crackers came round she’d stopped talking about the blouse altogether and was just glaring at him, with her lips pressed together and her knuckles white round her goblet, as though he’d failed some test that he hadn’t known he was sitting. It was so annoying.

With a bit of luck, Harry thought, Malfoy would be getting what was coming to her in a few hours’ time.

Although, privately, and despite everything Hermione said, Harry still wasn’t sure. He still had a sneaking feeling that tonight might turn out to prove Dracina wasn’t the heir at all. Maybe there was a perfectly rational explanation for all of it. Maybe she just liked going round the castle at night, talking to herself, and saying Tom to empty chairs, and telling people they’d be next, and looking at snakes as if they were birthday presents. Maybe she was just very, very keen on interior decoration. Maybe the hissing in the walls was the plumbing.

Of course it was Malfoy, Harry told himself firmly. Of course the heir had to be Dracina. What other explanation could there possibly be?

He found that he didn’t feel nearly as sure of it as he’d have liked.

Harry and Ron had barely finished their third helpings of Christmas pudding when Hermione hustled them out of the Hall to go over the plan for the evening.

‘We still need a bit of the people you’re changing into,’ said Hermione, in a very matter-of-fact voice. But it was that same insistent tone she always seemed to use now when the subject was Malfoy, as though she were sending them off to the supermarket for a box of washing powder that she needed for a war. ‘And obviously, it’ll be best if you can get something of Crabbe and Goyle’s; they’re Malfoy’s best friends, She tells them everything. I’ve watched her. She confides in them even though they’re so gormless. She doesn’t even notice how stupid they are.’

She said it smugly.

‘Great plan, Hermione,’ Harry said dryly. ‘But you’re missing that we also need to make sure the real Crabbe and Goyle can’t burst in on us while we’re interrogating her. In your war plan, did you ever figure that into it?’

Hermione nodded. She’d known he’d ask, and she’d been waiting for it, and she knew the answer would impress him.

‘It’s all taken care of,’ she went on smoothly, sailing straight past the stunned looks on Harry and Ron’s faces. She held up two plump little chocolate cakes, beautifully iced. ‘These have got a Sleeping Draught in them. Only a simple one. All you need to do is leave them somewhere Crabbe and Goyle will find them. You know how greedy they are, and how thick. They’ll eat them, they won’t even think. Then, once they’re out cold, you pull out a few of their hairs and put them away in a broom cupboard till we’re done.’

Harry and Ron looked at each other in disbelief.

‘And then we feed them to the fishes, I suppose?’ Harry said dryly.

‘Hermione, I don’t think...’ Ron said diplomatically, trying to find the words.

‘Hermione, Please. This could go really badly wrong,’ said Harry insistently.

But there was a steely glint in Hermione’s eye that was not at all unlike the one Professor McGonagall sometimes got.

‘Without their hair the Potion’s worthless,’ she said sternly. ‘A month’s work down the drain. You do want to find out what Malfoy’s up to, don’t you? Or have you changed your minds?’

‘All right,’ said Harry. ‘All right. Fine. What about you, then? Whose hair are you going to be yanking out?’

‘Oh, I’ve got mine already!’ said Hermione brightly. She pulled a tiny glass bottle out of her pocket and held it up. There was a single dark hair inside it. ‘Millicent Bulstrode. At the Duelling Club, remember, when she had me in that headlock? This was on my robes afterwards. And she’s gone home for the holidays, so I’ll just have to tell the Slytherins I’ve decided to come back early.’

She bustled off to check on the Potion again. Ron turned to Harry with an expression of deepest doom.

‘Have you ever,’ he said, ‘in your whole life, heard of a plan with more ways of going wrong?’

‘No, first time for me, mate,’ Harry said sarcastically.

And despite how dire it all was, they both burst out laughing.

But to Harry and Ron’s complete amazement, the first part of the plan went exactly as smoothly as Hermione had said it would.

They hung about in the empty Entrance Hall after Christmas tea, waiting. Crabbe and Goyle had stayed behind on their own at the Slytherin table, working their way through fourth helpings of trifle. Harry had balanced the two chocolate cakes on the end of the banisters, where nobody could miss them.

There’d been a scene at the Slytherin table, just before. Harry had seen it on his way out. Malfoy had left something lying beside her plate while she reached for the cream, something small and black, and Goyle had absently put out one fat hand towards it. Then Malfoy had turned on him like a cat. She’d screamed at him. She’d snatched it up, clutched it to her chest, and screamed at him, right there in the Great Hall in front of the staff table, until Goyle had gone purple and Professor Sprout had half risen from her seat. Then she’d stormed out with the thing held against her heart, leaving Crabbe and Goyle looking sullen and bewildered over their trifle.

It was the black book. Harry was sure of it. He’d seen it before, in Potions, with the ink sinking into the page. He’d seen her hand go to it at the Duelling Club, again and again, as if she couldn’t help it. And he was starting to notice, now that he thought about it, that the book was never very far from Malfoy. Not ever. Not at meals, not in lessons, not in the corridors. She carried it everywhere. It was precious to her. But why?

Now Crabbe and Goyle came shambling out of the Great Hall, and Harry and Ron ducked behind a suit of armour next to the front doors.

‘Bloody hell, look at them. They could play for one of Dean’s football teams if they ever started having English people again. The state of them,’ Ron whispered ecstatically.

Crabbe had spotted the cakes. He pointed them out to Goyle with a grunt of delight, and grabbed them both, and gave one to Goyle. Grinning stupidly, they each stuffed a whole cake into their large mouths. For a moment they both chewed greedily, with looks of triumph on their faces. Then, without the slightest change of expression, they both toppled over backwards onto the floor.

Much the hardest part was getting them into the cupboard across the hall.

Harry got Crabbe under the arms and heaved. Crabbe weighed about as much as a small rhinoceros, and he had a great deal more of him in places than seemed strictly necessary, and by halfway across the hall Harry was muttering several distinctly unchristian words under his breath at Crabbe’s expense. Ron gave him a look of deep sympathy and support. Then he got hold of Goyle’s ankles, and heaved, and launched into a tirade of his own that went on all the way to the cupboard door and would have made Fred and George proud.

Once the pair of them were safely stowed among the buckets and mops, Harry yanked out a couple of the bristles that covered Goyle’s low forehead, and Ron pulled out a few of Crabbe’s hairs. They also took Crabbe and Goyle’s shoes, because their own would be far too small once they had Crabbe and Goyle’s feet. Then, still stunned at what they’d just done, they sprinted up the marble staircase towards Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom.

‘Bloody hell,’ cried an exasperated Ron, as it began to sink in what they were actually about to do.

‘I know, Ron. I know,’ Harry waved his hands.

‘Bloody Hermione,’ groaned Ron.

‘I know, that too. Bloody hell...’ Harry sighed.

They went on like that the whole way up, bitterly agreeing with each other about what a way it was to spend Christmas Day, and whose fault it all was, until they reached the bathroom.

They could hardly see for the thick black smoke pouring out of the cubicle where Hermione was stirring the cauldron. Pulling their robes up over their faces, Harry and Ron knocked softly on the door.

‘Hermione?’

They heard the scrape of the lock, and Hermione came out, shiny-faced and anxious. Behind her they could hear the gloop, gloop of the bubbling, treacle-thick Potion. Three glass tumblers were standing ready on the toilet seat.

‘Have you got them?’ Hermione said breathlessly.

Harry held up Goyle’s hair between finger and thumb with a great dramatic flourish, like a magician producing a rabbit out of a hat. Hermione giggled.

‘Brilliant. And I’ve smuggled these out of the laundry,’ she said, holding up a small sack. ‘Bigger robes. You’ll need them once you’re the size of Crabbe and Goyle.’

The three of them stared down into the cauldron. Close to, the Potion looked like thick, dark mud, bubbling sluggishly.

‘I’ve done it right,’ said Hermione, nervously going over the splotched page of Moste Potente Potions one more time. ‘I’m sure I have. It looks exactly how the book says it ought to look... Once we’ve drunk it, we’ve got one hour exactly, and then we turn back into ourselves.’

‘What now?’ Ron whispered.

‘Now we split it into three, and put the hairs in.’

Hermione ladled big dollops of the Potion into each of the glasses. Then, with her hand trembling, she shook Millicent Bulstrode’s hair out of its little bottle into the first glass.

The Potion hissed like a kettle coming to the boil and frothed up wildly. A second later it had turned a sickly sort of yellow.

‘Eurgh,’ said Ron, eyeing it with loathing. ‘Millicent Bulstrode, extra strength. That’s going to taste foul, that is.’

‘Go on, then,’ said Hermione. ‘Yours.’

Harry dropped Goyle’s hair into the middle glass, and Ron put Crabbe’s into the last one. Both glasses hissed and frothed. Goyle’s went the khaki colour of a bogey. Crabbe’s went a dark, murky brown.

‘Cream of Goyle soup. Lovely,’ Harry said, drier than a desert after a heatwave.

Ron and Hermione reached for their glasses.

‘Hang on,’ said Harry. ‘We’d better not all drink them in here: once we turn into Crabbe and Goyle we won’t fit. And Millicent Bulstrode’s... well she’s a big girl, Hermione.’

‘Fair point,’ said Ron, unlocking the door. ‘One each, then. Separate cubicles.’

Taking great care not to spill a drop, Harry slipped into the middle cubicle.

‘Everyone ready?’ he called.

‘Ready,’ came Ron’s voice, and then Hermione’s.

‘On three, then. One... two... three...’

Harry held his breath and tipped the whole lot down his throat in one go. It went down like cold gravy with lumps in it, and it tasted of boiled socks, and underneath the socks of something much worse that he didn’t want to think about.

For a second, nothing happened.

Then his stomach clenched like a fist. Something hot and heavy went rolling outwards from it, through his chest and down his arms and into his legs, and he fell forward onto his hands on the cold tiles, gasping. It felt as though somebody had got hold of him at both ends and was rolling him out like pastry. His hands swelled under his eyes like dough left by a fire, the fingers going thick and blunt, the knuckles coming up like walnuts. His shoulders pushed outwards with a horrible creaking ache, and he heard the seams of his robes give way one after another, pop, pop, pop, like a row of buttons. His forehead crawled. His scalp crawled. And his feet, crammed into his own trainers, felt as though they were being crushed in a vice.

Then it was over, all at once, the way a cramp lets go.

Harry lay with his cheek on the stone floor, breathing hard, listening to Myrtle moaning to herself somewhere at the far end of the bathroom. Very slowly he sat up. He prised off his trainers. He peeled off the rags of his own robes, which now came barely past his knees, and dragged on the big spare ones from Hermione’s sack, and stuffed his huge new feet into Goyle’s enormous shoes. The world was swimming. It took him a moment to work out why. He pulled his glasses off, and the blur cleared at once. Goyle, it seemed, could see perfectly well. It was about the only thing Goyle could do perfectly well.

He let himself out of the cubicle and went to the cracked mirror over the sinks.

Goyle looked back at him. The little dull eyes, sunk deep under a shelf of brow. The heavy, drooping jaw. The hair growing so low on the forehead that there was barely any forehead left at all. Harry lifted one hand and touched his own cheek, and Goyle lifted one hand and touched his, and Harry felt his stomach turn right over.

The door of the next cubicle banged open, and Crabbe came out.

Except it was Ron. It was Ron looking out of Crabbe’s face, pale and stunned, and that was much worse than Crabbe looking out of it. He came over and stood next to Harry at the mirror and stared at himself.

‘I’ve got his nose,’ said Ron, in a slow, thick voice that wasn’t his at all. He poked it. ‘Look at it. It’s like a potato that’s given up on life.’

Harry looked at the two of them in the mirror, side by side, Crabbe and Goyle, huge and lumpen and vacant, and the thought came into his head before he could stop it. What on earth did someone as pretty as Dracina ever see in these two thickos? Why would she want them following her about everywhere?

He waved the thought away. It was a stupid thing to wonder. Why did he keep thinking about Dracina at all?

His watch strap was biting into Goyle’s wrist like a tourniquet. He let it out to the last hole.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Clock’s ticking. And we haven’t even worked out how we’re getting into their common room yet.’

‘Don’t frown,’ said Ron, wincing. ‘Mate, please. Goyle’s face isn’t built for frowning. It looks like it’s about to slide off.’ He went and thumped on Hermione’s door. ‘Come on, Hermione, we’ve got to go...’

‘I... I’m fine,’ said Hermione’s voice, from the other side of the door. It was high and strange. ‘I’m fine. But I’m not coming. You’ll have to go without me.’

‘Hermione, nobody’s going to laugh, honest. We all look horrible. Look at us. We’re Crabbe and Goyle...’

‘I’m not coming,’ said Hermione. Her voice had gone up even higher, and there was panic in it, and something else, something furious. ‘I said I’m fine! Go! You’re wasting time! Don’t worry about me! Just go!’

‘Are you sure you’re all...’

‘GO!‘

Ron looked at Harry, bewildered. Harry looked back.

‘Come on,’ he said at last, reluctantly. ‘She said go.’

As they went, Harry thought he heard something from behind the cubicle door. It was a small, wet, whimpering sound, the sound of somebody trying very hard not to cry. And under it, quite faintly, Hermione’s voice.

‘I thought I did it right. I thought I was right.’

Harry stopped.

‘Get a move on, mate,’ said Ron, in Crabbe’s voice, tugging at his sleeve. ‘We’ve only got an hour. She’ll be all right. She’s Hermione.’

They went.

Halfway down the stairs, Harry and Ron both stopped dead at the same moment, and looked at each other in horror.

‘We don’t know where it is,’ said Ron. ‘The Slytherin common room. We haven’t got a clue.’

‘Then we’ll have to follow somebody,’ said Harry. ‘Act natural. Act like them.’

They tried. They did their best, on the way down the marble staircase, to walk the way Crabbe and Goyle walked, which was a sort of slouching, knuckle-dragging shamble with the shoulders hunched up and the mouth hanging open. They weren’t very good at it. Ron kept forgetting and walking normally. Harry kept forgetting to let his mouth hang open.

All they needed now was a Slytherin they could follow down to the Slytherin common room. But the Entrance Hall was deserted.

‘Any ideas?’ Harry muttered.

‘They always come up from over there in the mornings,’ said Ron, nodding towards the entrance to the dungeons.

The words were hardly out of his mouth when a girl with long curly hair came out of it.

‘Scuse me,’ said Ron, hurrying up to her. ‘We’ve, er, forgotten how to get back to our common room.’

The girl looked him up and down.

‘Your common room?’ she said stiffly. ‘I’m in Ravenclaw.’

She walked off, looking back over her shoulder at them suspiciously.

They went down the steps into the dungeons, Goyle’s great flat feet slapping on the stone so loudly that Harry winced at every step. The passages branched, and branched again, and wound back on themselves like a ball of wool a kitten had been at. There wasn’t a soul about. They went deeper and deeper under the castle, and the air got colder and wetter, and every few minutes one or other of them looked at his watch and wished he hadn’t.

‘Oh, brilliant,’ Harry muttered, after the third dead end. ‘Marvellous. Really. Who designed this place? Who looked at a dungeon and thought, you know what this needs, more corridors that go nowhere? I hope Slytherin enjoyed himself. I hope he had a lovely time.’

‘Oi,’ said Ron. ‘Stop that.’

‘Stop what?’

‘That. That’s you. That’s not Goyle. Goyle doesn’t do sarcasm, mate, Goyle doesn’t know what sarcasm is. You’re standing there being all dry and clever with his face on, it’s creepy. Grunt or something.’

Harry grunted. It came out rather sarcastically.

Fifteen minutes had gone, and they were beginning to panic, when a door creaked somewhere up ahead.

‘Finally,’ breathed Ron. ‘Slytherin. Got to be.’

Somebody was stepping out of a little side room into the passage. They hurried towards him, and then both pulled up short, and Harry felt his heart drop into Goyle’s enormous shoes. It was Percy.

‘Percy?’ said Ron, startled out of being Crabbe. ‘What are you doing all the way down here?’

Percy drew himself up. He’d gone rather pink about the ears.

‘I hardly think,’ he said, ‘that’s any concern of yours. Crabbe, is it?’

‘Er... yeah. Yeah. Crabbe. That’s me.’

‘Then you can take yourself off to bed, Crabbe, and your friend with you,’ said Percy severely. ‘Roaming about down here in the dark, with things the way they are. It’s asking for trouble.’

‘Well, you’re roaming about down here,’ said Ron.

‘I,’ said Percy, swelling, ‘am a Prefect. It’s my job to roam. Whatever’s loose in this castle isn’t going to go for a Prefect.’

There was a sharp clicking sound behind them, like somebody snapping their fingers. Harry turned round.

Dracina Malfoy was sauntering up the passage towards them. She was still wearing the green silk blouse, with a black cloak thrown over it, and she had her chin up and her hands in her cloak pockets, and for once she looked exactly like her old self: proud, bored, and perfectly sure that the whole world had been arranged for her convenience.

She clicked her fingers again.

‘Crabbe. Goyle. There you are. I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Have you been pigging out in the Great Hall all this time? Come on. Now.’

‘They’ll do no such thing,’ said Percy. ‘They’re going straight to bed. And so are you, Miss Malfoy. It isn’t safe for students to be...’

Malfoy looked at him. She looked at him slowly, up and down, from his polished shoes to his polished badge, and the corner of her lip curled.

‘Isn’t it, Weasley? How very good of you to say so. I’ll be sure to tell my father how concerned you were. He’s a governor of Hogwarts, you know. He takes a very great interest in the conduct of the prefects. Particularly the ones from families who can’t afford new robes.’ She tilted her head. ‘Is that a new badge, Weasley? It looks very shiny. Did your whole family have to club together for it?’

Percy went scarlet, from his collar to the roots of his hair.

‘Now look here-’

‘No, you look here.’ Malfoy took one step towards him. She wasn’t tall, but somehow she seemed to tower. ‘These two are coming with me. To our common room. Which is where you’ve just told them to go. So you’ve got exactly what you wanted, haven’t you? Unless you’d like to stand here and argue about it, in a dark corridor, where it isn’t safe. Is that what you’d like? I’m sure Father would be fascinated to hear about it.’

Percy opened his mouth, and shut it again, and opened it.

Then he stepped back. He did it stiffly, with enormous dignity, as though stepping back had been his own idea all along.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Straight there. All three of you.’

Malfoy swept past him. Harry and Ron shuffled after her. As they passed Percy, Harry saw him staring after Malfoy with a look of the most profound dislike, and heard him mutter something under his breath.

‘...and I only hope Harry’s got more sense than to go anywhere near that one, that’s all I can say, because if he does, Merlin help him...’

Harry nearly turned round. What on earth did Percy mean by that? Go near her? Why would Harry go anywhere near Malfoy? He couldn’t think what Percy could possibly be on about.

‘Peter Weasley,’ said Malfoy, with disgust, as they turned the corner. She clicked her fingers again, without looking round, and kept walking. ‘Prowling about down here like he owns the place.’

‘Percy,’ said Ron, before he could stop himself.

‘What?’

‘His name is Percy.’

‘Whatever,’ said Malfoy, with a wave of her hand. ‘Peter, Percy, it’s all the same. There are so many of them, I can’t be expected to keep count. They breed like Flobberworms.’

Ron’s huge hands curled into fists. Harry trod on his foot.

Malfoy didn’t notice. She was walking fast, and talking faster, and it took Harry a little while to realise that she wasn’t really talking to them at all. She was just talking. It all came pouring out of her, the way water comes out of a burst pipe.

‘And that stupid Potter didn’t even notice my blouse. Did you see him? Sitting there stuffing his face. I wore it all through dinner and he didn’t so much as look. I had it sent from Paris. Paris. But of course he wouldn’t notice. How could he? Those Muggles brought him up. Those disgusting, ignorant, horrible Muggles. They never taught him anything. They never taught him how to appreciate fine things. Nice things. Pretty things. He wouldn’t know a beautiful thing if it sat down next to him at dinner.’

She was quiet for about five steps.

‘I’m better than him at Potions, you know. Much better. I stirred his Swelling Solution for him and it came out perfect, and Professor Snape couldn’t even find anything wrong with it, did you see the Professor’s face? And I got him to look at me the other day. In the Charms corridor. Properly look. For nearly three whole seconds. I counted.’ Another few steps. ‘He’s got a bit of his hair that sticks up at the back. It never goes down, whatever he does to it. Have you noticed? It’s so stupid. He ought to do something about it. He’s lost weight again, too. He’s always losing weight. Someone ought to make him eat more. I don’t know why nobody ever makes him...’

Harry walked behind her in a sort of daze. It was the strangest thing he’d ever listened to. Every other word out of her mouth seemed to be Potter. Stupid Potter, or something she’d noticed about Potter, or something Potter had done that was stupid, or something about Potter that she’d seen. He didn’t know what to make of it. It was all so nasty. Wasn’t it?

Then her face changed.

‘And Granger,’ she said.

Her voice had dropped. It had gone quiet, and flat, and very, very cold, and Harry felt the hair rise on the back of Goyle’s thick neck.

‘Always Granger. Always there. Always sitting next to him, and touching him, and doing his collar, and buying him presents. I know she does. I know she did. Who does she think she is?’ Malfoy’s hands had come out of her pockets and were clenching and unclenching at her sides. ‘That’s what they are, you know, Mudbloods. That’s what they do. They’re thieves. They steal magic that was never meant for them, they steal places at our schools, they steal everything they can get their dirty hands on. They steal things that don’t belong to them.’ She laughed, a horrible little laugh. ‘But not for much longer. Oh, no. Not for much longer. We’ll see how much she can steal when she...’

She stopped. She stopped walking, too, quite suddenly, in front of a stretch of bare, damp stone wall.

‘Pureblood,’ she said.

She said it with relish, rolling it round her mouth like a sweet. A stone door concealed in the wall slid open.

Harry sighed inwardly. Even when she didn’t know anybody was listening, even when it was only Crabbe and Goyle, all Dracina Malfoy could ever do was prove, over and over and over again, what a bully she was. He hadn’t liked a single thing she’d said about him. Not one. He hadn’t noticed, because he didn’t know how to notice it, the worry in the things she’d said, and the longing, the way she’d counted the seconds he’d looked at her, the way she’d wanted somebody to make him eat. He’d only heard stupid. And he hadn’t liked what she’d said about Hermione, either. Not at all. She’d talked about Hermione as though she had plans for her. As though there were something she was going to do.

Once again, in spite of all her cruel words, Harry found himself hoping that she wasn’t the Heir of Slytherin.

He followed her through the gap in the wall.

They came out into the Slytherin common room.

It had been dug out of the bedrock under the castle, and it felt like it. The walls were rough, bare stone, beaded with damp, and the ceiling hung so low that Crabbe’s head, on Ron’s shoulders, very nearly brushed it. Lamps of thick green glass swung from it on long iron links, giving out a light the colour of pondweed, so that everything in the room looked as though it were under water. Which, Harry realised with a little lurch, it was. Somewhere over their heads, through all that rock, was the black lake. He thought he could almost hear it pressing down. A fire was burning in a vast stone hearth, and the mantelpiece above it had been carved, by somebody with a great deal of time and a nasty imagination, into a long row of grinning skulls with serpents winding in and out of their eye sockets. A tapestry on the far wall showed a long-dead witch in green doing something extremely unpleasant to a dragon. Every chair was black. Every cushion was green. Every candlestick was a silver snake. It was cold, and it was damp, and it was gloomy, and it looked, Harry thought, like every evil wizard’s lair in every story he’d ever read, all rolled into one.

He thought of the Sorting Hat. Salazar Slytherin was never evil, boy. He looked round at the skulls and the chains and the nasty tapestry, and he thought that it was all very well for the Hat to say so. But the place where Slytherin’s own students slept every night seemed to have gone out of its way to prove every single thing anybody had ever said about them.

The stone door slid shut behind them.

The moment the wall closed behind them, a change came over Malfoy.

It was as though somebody had cut a string. All the pride went out of her shoulders. She went to the high-backed chair nearest the fire and sank into it, and sat there, very small and hunched, with her knees drawn up, and the green light from the lamps fell on her face, and Harry saw properly, for the first time that evening, how ill she looked.

It was worse, in that light, than it had been at the Duelling Club. Much worse. Her skin had a greyish, waxy sheen to it, and her lips were pale, and the shadows under her eyes had spread until they nearly met her cheekbones. Her hair, which she’d always been so particular about, was lank and dull. She looked like someone who’d been ill for a long time and hadn’t told anyone.

From inside her cloak she took out a small black book.

She held it in both hands, in her lap. Like a little girl holds a kitten. Her thumbs moved slowly over the cover, stroking it. And as she held it, some of the tightness went out of her face, and she let out a long, soft breath, as though she’d been holding it all day.

‘You two can go,’ she said, without looking up. ‘Go and do... whatever it is you do. I’ve got work to do.’

Ron, beside him, began to get up. Harry didn’t.

‘What’s that?’ he heard himself say. ‘That book. Dracina, what is that?’

He didn’t even realise he’d called her by her first name. It just came out. But Ron noticed. Harry felt him go still beside him, and then heard him let out a long, slow breath through Crabbe’s nose, the breath of somebody who has seen something coming for a very long way off and now it’s arrived. Ron didn’t say anything.

Malfoy didn’t seem to notice either. She waved one hand vaguely.

‘It’s just a diary, Goyle. Don’t fuss. I’ve told you. I write things in it. My thoughts. Then there’s Tom. He’s ever so supportive.’ She smiled down at the book, a soft, private smile. ‘He understands everything. Everything. Nobody’s ever understood me the way Tom does.’

‘Who’s Tom?’ said Harry.

Malfoy looked up at him. She looked genuinely surprised.

‘Tom,’ she said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. ‘Tom. My friend. Honestly, Goyle. I’ve told you about Tom. I’ve told you both. Loads of times.’ A little line appeared between her eyebrows. ‘Haven’t I? I’m sure I have. I’m sure I...’

Her fingers tightened on the book. Harry saw the knuckles whiten.

‘I’ve been having... trouble remembering things,’ she said slowly. ‘Lately. Little things. It’s nothing. It’s just...’ Her voice had gone strange and far away, as though she were talking from the other end of a long corridor. ‘I keep finding myself places. Do you know? I’ll be sitting in here, by the fire, talking to Tom. And then I’ll... I’ll be somewhere else. On a staircase. Or in a corridor I don’t know. Once I was in a bathroom, an old girls’ bathroom, the one that’s broken and out of order, all on my own, in the dark,  The taps were running, and I didn’t know how I’d got there. I didn’t know how long I’d been there. My shoes were wet.’ She looked down at her hands. ‘And there was something on my hands. Red. Like paint. And I couldn’t think where it had come from, and I had to scrub and scrub...’

Harry felt something cold creep up his spine and settle at the back of his neck. An old girls’ bathroom, all broken and out of order. The taps running. He thought of the flooded corridor outside Myrtle’s bathroom on the night Mrs Norris was found. He thought of the words on the wall, glittering wet and red in the torchlight.

‘Did you tell Tom?’ he said, very carefully. ‘About losing time?’

‘Of course I did. I tell Tom everything.’ She smiled again. ‘He said not to worry. He said it’s only because I’m tired. He said I mustn’t tell anyone else, because they wouldn’t understand, they’d try to take him away from me, and then I’d be all alone again. And he’s right. He’s always right.’ She laid her cheek against the cover of the book for a moment, like a child against a pillow. ‘I am tired. I’m so tired, Goyle. All the time. And I feel ill. My head hurts. I can’t eat. It must be stress. It’s that Mudblood girl.’ Her face twisted. ‘She won’t leave him alone. She won’t leave what’s mine alone. Every time I look round she’s there, touching him, and I can’t sleep, I lie awake thinking about it, and Tom says...’

She stopped. She blinked, and seemed to come back from somewhere.

‘But it doesn’t matter how ill I feel,’ she said, quite briskly. ‘Tom’s been ever so understanding about Harry. He says...’ She caught herself. Her chin came up. ‘About stupid Potter, I mean. About stupid Potter.’

She opened the book on her knee. Then she took a quill out of her cloak pocket, and a little bottle of ink, and uncorked it, and dipped the quill, and bent over the blank page. She seemed to have forgotten completely that Crabbe and Goyle were there.

Harry was hanging on every word. He didn’t know he was doing it, but he was sitting forward on the very edge of his chair with his huge hands clenched on his knees, watching her face as if he could do something about whatever was wrong with it if only he watched hard enough. He wanted to tell her to put the book down. He wanted to take it out of her hands and throw it on the fire. He didn’t understand why. He only knew that there was something about that book, the way she held it, the way it seemed to drink her up while she held it, that frightened him more than anything she’d said.

It had something to do with the Chamber. He was sure of it. He didn’t know how, and he didn’t know why, but the book and the Chamber were tangled up together somehow, and Dracina was tangled up in the middle of them both.

Ron was watching him. Harry didn’t notice.

Then, quite suddenly, Malfoy laughed. She shut the book with a snap and stood up.

‘Oh! I nearly forgot. I’ve got something to show you. Wait there.’

She went off through a door on the far side of the room, taking the book with her, and came back a minute later holding what looked like a newspaper cutting. She shoved it under Ron’s nose.

‘There. That’ll cheer you up.’

Harry saw Ron’s eyes widen in shock. He read the cutting fast, let out a very forced laugh, and passed it to Harry.

It had been cut out of the Daily Prophet, and it said:

MINISTRY OFFICIAL FINED OVER FLYING CAR

Arthur Weasley, who heads the Ministry’s Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office, has been ordered to pay a fine of fifty Galleons after admitting to enchanting a Muggle motor car.

Mr Lucius Malfoy, a member of the Board of Governors of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, into whose grounds the car was flown and crashed earlier this year, has demanded that Mr Weasley step down. ‘This man has made the Ministry a laughing-stock,’ Mr Malfoy said. ‘He has no business writing our laws. His absurd Muggle Protection Act ought to be thrown out at once.’

Mr Weasley could not be reached for comment. His wife informed this newspaper’s reporters that if they did not get off her doorstep she would set the family ghoul on them.

‘Well?’ said Malfoy impatiently, as Harry handed it back. ‘Isn’t it hilarious?’

‘Yeah,’ said Harry flatly. ‘Hilarious.’

‘Arthur Weasley’s so in love with Muggles he ought to break his wand over his knee and go and live with them,’ said Malfoy, with deep contempt. ‘You’d never think the Weasleys were pure-bloods. Not the way they carry on.’

Ron’s face, or rather Crabbe’s, had gone purple and was twisting with fury.

‘What’s wrong with you, Crabbe?’ Malfoy snapped.

‘Bellyache,’ Ron grunted.

‘Well, take yourself off to the hospital wing, then, and kick a few of the Mudbloods in there on your way past. From me.’ Malfoy snickered. ‘Do you know, I can’t believe the Prophet still hasn’t printed a word about the attacks.’ She went on, thoughtfully, ‘Dumbledore must be keeping it all quiet. He’ll be thrown out if it doesn’t stop. Father says he’s the worst Headmaster this school’s ever had. He adores Muggle-borns. No proper Headmaster would ever have let a little worm like Creevey through the gates.’

And she lifted an imaginary camera to her eye, and began to snap away at the air, bouncing up and down on her toes with her eyes huge and shining. It was a cruel impression, and a very good one.

‘Oh, Harry! Harry, Harry, can I have a picture? Can I have two? Will you sign it? Will you sign my arm? Can I carry your bag, Harry? Can I be you, Harry?’

She dropped her hands and looked at them.

Harry was so angry he couldn’t move. Colin was lying in the hospital wing, as stiff as a board, with his camera still held up in front of his face. Colin had never done anything to anybody. He’d only ever been excited, and friendly, and a bit too much. He didn’t deserve any of it. Of course, just as Harry had been starting to get really worried about Malfoy, just as he’d been starting to feel sorry for her, she’d gone and shown him all over again, exactly how nasty she could be.

‘What’s the matter with you two?’

Far too late, Harry and Ron forced themselves to laugh. But Malfoy seemed satisfied. Perhaps Crabbe and Goyle were always slow on the uptake.

She sat back down by the fire, and pulled the black book back into her lap, and her face changed again. It went soft. It went far away.

‘I think I know who the heir is,’ said Malfoy reverently. ‘I could help him.’

She stroked the cover of the book.

‘If only he’d let me,’ she said longingly.

Harry stared at her.

Surely she couldn’t mean him. Surely. But then he remembered the Duelling Club, and the snake lying down at his feet, and her face, shining like a lamp. It’s you. It was always you. And the staircase, and I know what you are, and I won’t tell. Maybe she really did think it was him. All because he happened to be able to talk to snakes.

And if she thought it was him...

Then she didn’t think it was her.

Harry’s mind was racing so fast he could hardly keep up with it. If Dracina didn’t believe she was the heir, then maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she wasn’t the one controlling the creature at all. Maybe she didn’t even know where the Chamber was. But then, what about the book? What about the red on her hands, and the wet shoes, and the bathroom with the taps running, and the hours she couldn’t remember? What about Tom, who told her not to tell anyone, and who was always right? The book had something to do with all of this. Whatever the book was. He was more and more sure of it.

Ron’s jaw had dropped so far that Crabbe’s face looked even more gormless than usual. He’d been completely, absolutely certain that Malfoy was the heir. Luckily, Malfoy didn’t notice. And Harry, thinking fast, leaned forward.

‘But you must have some idea who’s behind it all...’

‘You know I haven’t, Goyle, how many times do I have to tell you?’ snapped Malfoy. ‘And father won’t tell me anything about the last time the Chamber was opened, either. Of course, it was fifty years ago, so it was before his time, but he knows all about it, and he says that it was all kept quiet I knew he was planning something with it. But not what. I thought I was able to warn...’

She trailed off.

‘That stupid house elf didn’t follow my orders properly. It never does. It’s broken!’

She was shaking with rage. Her hands were trembling on the book. She mumbled something under her breath, so low that Harry only just caught it.

‘It’s not my fault.’

Then she composed herself, with an effort that Harry could actually see, smoothing her face out like somebody smoothing a crumpled sheet.

‘I think Father was trying to tell me, I read between the lines. Father knows I’m smart enough to do that. He said in not so many words that last time the Chamber of Secrets was opened, a Mudblood died. So I bet it’s only a matter of time before one of them’s killed this time ... I hope it’s Granger,’

She said it with relish, and giggled. It was a high, thin, mad sort of giggle, and it went on for much too long, and it made every hair on Goyle’s thick arms stand up.

Then, quite suddenly, her face dropped, and went grave and frightened.

‘I think he’s being forced to do something with the Chamber. I... I don’t know what but he tried to warn me. I don’t think he wanted to do this at all. But... but we can take advantage. Tom said so. He wants me and Ha...’

She trailed off again, staring into the fire, lost in thought. Her lips went on moving, but no sound came out.

Harry felt sick. He was beginning to understand, now, much more clearly than he wanted to, that this book, this diary, whatever it really was, was making Dracina very, very ill. Not just tired. Not just stressed. Ill. In her head. She’d gone from giggling to frightened to somewhere else entirely in the space of a few breaths, and none of it seemed to be coming from her at all. It was coming from the book. From Tom.

Beside him, Ron was clenching Crabbe’s gigantic fists until the knuckles cracked. He was still back on I hope it’s Granger. Harry could see it in his face. Feeling that it would give the game away rather badly if Ron punched Malfoy in the mouth, Harry shot him a warning look, and said quickly, ‘D’you know if they caught whoever did it? Last time?’

‘Oh, yes...’ said Malfoy. She seemed to come back to herself with a jerk. ‘Yes. They were expelled. Thrown out. They’ll be rotting in Azkaban, I expect, if they’re still alive.’

‘Azkaban?’ said Harry, before he could stop himself.

Malfoy looked at him in disbelief.

‘Azkaban, Goyle. The wizards’ prison? On the island? With the Dementors?’ She shook her head slowly. ‘Honestly. If your brain got any slower it would start going backwards.’

She shifted restlessly in her chair.

‘Father hinted to me to keep out of danger and let the heir of Slytherin get on with it. He says the school needs ridding of all the Mudblood filth, but not to get mixed up in it. As I said, I really don’t think his heart is actually in it. I think he’s worried about me but I can handle myself. I know Ha- uh the heir wouldn’t hurt me. Of course, Father has got a lot on his plate at the moment. You know the Ministry of Magic raided our Manor last week?’

Harry did his best to make Goyle’s dull face look worried.

‘Mm,’ said Malfoy. ‘Not that they found much. Father’s got some rather precious Dark artifacts, you know. Very old. Very valuable. But we’ve a room under the floor of the drawing room that nobody knows about. Nobody from the Ministry would ever find it. They walked right over the top of it.’ She smiled a small, smug smile. ‘Twice.’

Ron caught Harry’s eye. Harry saw him file that away.

At that moment, two Slytherin girls came through from the dormitories and wandered towards the fire. One of them was Pansy Parkinson. The other was a thin, dark girl Harry thought was called Tracey Davis. They were laughing.

‘...honestly, can you imagine?’ Pansy was saying loudly. ‘Potter? The Heir of Slytherin? Potter? Have you seen him? He’s like a broom handle with glasses on. A strong wind would have him over. Can you imagine Salazar Slytherin’s great-great-whatever looking like that?’

Tracey sniggered.

Harry felt Malfoy go rigid in the chair beside him. She’d stopped breathing. Her fingers had closed on the diary so hard that the cover creaked.

‘I expect those Muggles he lives with starve him,’ Pansy went on, with a toss of her head. ‘They must do. He’s skin and bone. Well, I’d starve him too, if I had to live with him. I bet it’s a punishment for being so annoying...’

Malfoy came out of the chair like a cork out of a bottle.

‘SHUT UP!‘

Pansy jumped about a foot in the air. Tracey squealed.

‘Shut up, shut up, shut UP! How dare you! How dare you say that! You don’t know anything! You don’t know anything about him, you stupid, stupid, stupid...’

She was screaming. It wasn’t like the screaming on the Quidditch pitch, or in the Great Hall at the Duelling Club. It was worse. It was wilder. The words were tumbling out of her so fast, and so jumbled, and so high, that Harry could only catch bits of them, here and there, like pieces of something broken being swept along in a flood.

‘...the heir... he’s the heir, you... you show some respect... you’ll all have to show respect, all of you, when he... how dare... it’s not my... it wasn’t my... I told it, I told that stupid... I said warn him, I said warn... and it went and... three days... three days, Pansy, and bread, and... and bars... on the window... it’s not my fault... I didn’t know... how could I have known... he’ll rise, he’ll rise and they’ll all be gone, every last one, and then he’ll... and then he’ll come for... his... his princess... and it’ll all be... it’ll all be all right... it’ll all...’

And somewhere in the middle of it, the rage ran out.

Harry watched it happen. Her voice cracked, and wobbled, and went thin, and the screaming turned into something else. Something much worse to listen to. Her shoulders began to shake. Her face crumpled. By the end of it she wasn’t shouting at Pansy at all any more. She’d sunk down onto the hearthrug with her arms wrapped round herself and she was crying, great ugly, gulping sobs, rocking backwards and forwards, the way Dobby had rocked on the end of Harry’s bed in the hospital wing.

‘It wasn’t my fault,’ she wept. ‘It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t... the bars... it wasn’t...’

Pansy, white-faced and frightened, dropped down beside her and put her arms round her.

‘Shh. Shh. Dracina, it’s all right. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean... I didn’t know you... shh. It’s all right. Nobody’s saying it’s your fault. Shh...’

Harry sat frozen in his chair. Bars. Three days. Bread. Something had gone through him at the word bars like an electric shock. For a single wild second he thought... But no. How could she know? How could Dracina Malfoy possibly know anything about that? She couldn’t. It was nonsense. She was raving. She didn’t know what she was saying. Dobby. He told her. He told her because she told him to…warn him? Not stop him. But somehow Dobby interpreted it wrong. But why did Dracina even do all of that?

Ron nudged him. Hard.

Harry looked round. Ron didn’t say anything. He just pointed, very slightly, with one fat finger.

The diary was lying on the seat of the chair Malfoy had leapt out of. She’d dropped it when she stood up. It was lying there on the green velvet, all on its own, small and black and shabby, with nobody’s hand on it for the first time Harry could remember.

Harry nodded.

He stood up. He walked over to the chair, as slowly and stupidly as he could manage, the way Goyle would walk, and picked up the diary, and tucked it inside his robes. It was oddly cold against his chest. Malfoy didn’t look up. Pansy didn’t look up. Nobody was looking at anything but the sobbing girl on the hearthrug.

Then he walked to the stone wall, and Ron came after him, and it slid open for them, and they were out.

‘Mate,’ Ron began, in a hoarse whisper, the moment the wall had closed behind them. ‘Mate, what the hell was...’

He stopped. Harry had stopped too. They were both staring at each other.

Ron’s hair was turning red.

It was happening at the roots first, a flame of colour creeping up through Crabbe’s dull brown. And his nose was getting longer. Harry looked down at his own hands. They were shrinking. The fingers were thinning out. He could feel the shoulders of Goyle’s robes beginning to slide down his arms.

‘Run!‘ said Harry.

They ran. Harry’s feet were sliding about inside Goyle’s enormous shoes, and he had to hitch up his robes with both hands as he shrank. They pelted along the dungeon passages, round corners, up steps, with their bodies changing under them as they went, and burst up into the dark Entrance Hall, which was full of a muffled hammering. It was coming from the broom cupboard where they’d shut Crabbe and Goyle.

They kicked off the shoes, left them in a heap outside the cupboard door, and sprinted up the marble staircase in their socks, all the way to Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom.

‘Well,’ Ron panted, as he slammed the bathroom door behind them, ‘that wasn’t for nothing. All right, we still don’t know who’s doing it. But I’m writing to Dad first thing tomorrow, and I’m telling him to have a look under the Malfoys’ drawing room. And,’ he added, looking at Harry, ‘it’s not her, is it? It’s not her. She doesn’t even think it’s her. She thinks it’s you.’

‘No,’ said Harry slowly. ‘I don’t think it is her. Not the way we thought.’

He checked his face in the cracked mirror. He was back to normal. He put his glasses on, and the world came back into focus. Then he looked down at the small black book in his hand.

He didn’t know what it was. He didn’t understand any of it. But he knew one thing. That book had something to do with all of this. With Dracina going places she couldn’t remember. With the red on her hands and the wet shoes and the taps running in a girls’ bathroom. With the voice that told her she mustn’t tell anyone, and that it was always right. With the Chamber. And whatever else it was, getting it away from her had to be a good idea. She was going absolutely mental. And from everything she’d said, Harry was almost certain now that the book was what was doing it to her.

Ron was hammering on the door of Hermione’s cubicle.

‘Hermione, come out, you’re not going to believe-’

‘Go away!’ Hermione squeaked.

Harry and Ron looked at each other.

‘What’s wrong?’ said Ron. ‘You’ve got to be back to yourself by now. We are...’

But Moaning Myrtle came gliding through the door of the cubicle. Harry had never seen her looking so happy.

‘Ooooooh, just you wait,’ she said, with deep satisfaction. ‘It’s horrible!’

They heard the lock slide back, and Hermione came out. She was sobbing, and she had her robes pulled right up over her head.

‘What’s up?’ said Ron uncertainly. ‘Are you still a bit... Millicent-ish? Have you got her nose or something?’

Hermione let her robes drop.

Ron backed into the sink.

Her face was covered in black fur. Her eyes had gone yellow, with narrow slits for pupils. And two long, pointed, furry ears were poking up out of her bushy hair.

‘It was a c-cat hair!’ she howled. ‘It must have been off M-Millicent’s cat! It was on her robes and I never thought to... and you’re not supposed to use the P-Potion for animals! It says so! It says so in the book!’

‘Oh,’ said Ron. ‘Oh, blimey.’

‘Everyone’s going to tease you,’ said Myrtle happily. ‘For ever.’

‘It’s all right, Hermione,’ said Harry quickly. ‘It’s all right. We’ll take you up to the hospital wing. Madam Pomfrey won’t ask anything. She never does...’

Hermione burst into fresh tears. She lunged forward, towards Harry, with her arms out.

But Ron was quicker. He stepped in between them, and caught her, and held on to her tightly, furry face and all, and let her cry into the front of his robes. Over the top of her head, he gave Harry a look. It was a knowing sort of look, a leave this one to me, mate sort of look. Harry gave it back to him with real gratitude, and squeezed Ron’s arm.

It took a very long time to persuade Hermione to leave the bathroom. Moaning Myrtle sped them on their way with a delighted cackle.

‘Ooooh, just wait till they all see your tail!’

Madam Pomfrey, as Harry had promised, didn’t ask a single question. She took one look at Hermione, and her lips went very thin, and she said only, ‘Polyjuice gone wrong, is it? Animal hair? Hm,’ in a voice that made it quite clear she’d seen this before, probably more than once. Then she whisked Hermione into a bed in the far corner and pulled the curtains round it.

Before she went behind them, Hermione caught hold of Harry’s sleeve with one furry hand.

‘Don’t tell anyone,’ she whispered fiercely. ‘Promise me. Don’t let anyone come and see me like this. And don’t let her find out. Not her. Promise, Harry.’

‘I promise,’ said Harry.

‘And I want to hear everything,’ Hermione added, sniffing. ‘Everything she said. Tomorrow. Every word.’

The curtain closed.

It was very late when Harry and Ron finally got back to Gryffindor Tower. The common room was empty. Fred and George must have gone up hours ago. The fire had sunk to a red glow, and the only sound was the wind in the chimney.

Harry sat down in the armchair nearest the fire and took the diary out of his robes.

It was very ordinary to look at. It was small and thin, with a shabby black cover worn pale at the corners, the sort of thing you’d find for a few pence in a junk shop. Harry opened it. The pages were blank. Every single one. He riffled through the whole thing, from the front to the back, and there wasn’t a mark on any of them. Not a word. Not a blot. Not the faintest trace of everything Dracina had poured into it.

‘Nothing,’ said Ron, looking over his shoulder. ‘It’s empty. How can it be empty? She’s been writing in it for months. We’ve seen her.’

‘I don’t know’ said Harry slowly. ‘In Potions. I saw her write in it. Then she looked at it like..like it responded to her.’

He turned it over. On the back cover, in faded gold letters, almost worn away, was a name.

1. M. Riddle.

Harry stared at it. And for a moment, everything in the room seemed to go very quiet.

‘T,’ said Ron, in a small voice.

‘Tom,’ said Harry.

He opened the front cover again, more carefully this time. Printed in tiny letters inside, half rubbed away, was a date. It was fifty years old. Almost exactly fifty years.

It was fifty years ago, Dracina had said. The last time the Chamber was opened.

Ron let out a long, low whistle, and sat down very suddenly on the arm of the chair.

‘Fifty years,’ he said. ‘Harry. Fifty years.’

‘I know.’

They sat and looked at it for a long time, neither of them saying anything. The fire ticked and settled in the grate.

And as Harry sat there, with the diary open on his knees, he found that his hand had drifted, all on its own, towards the eagle-feather quill that Hermione had given him that morning, lying on the table beside the chair. He found that he wanted, quite badly, very badly indeed, to dip it in ink and write something on that clean, blank, waiting page. Just one line. Just to see. Just to see if anybody would write back.

He snatched his hand away as though the quill had bitten him.

‘What?’ said Ron, startled.

‘Nothing,’ said Harry. His heart was hammering. ‘Nothing. I just... I don’t think we should write in it. Not yet. Not till we know what it is.’

‘You weren’t going to, were you?’

‘No,’ said Harry. ‘No. Course not.’

He shut the diary. He took it up to the dormitory, and wrapped it in his Invisibility Cloak, and pushed it right down to the very bottom of his trunk, underneath everything else, and shut the lid, and locked it.

Then he lay in bed in the dark for a long time, listening to Ron’s breathing, thinking about a girl crying on a hearthrug in a room under the lake, with her friend’s arms round her and her own wrapped round nothing at all.

It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my fault. The bars...

He wondered whether she’d noticed yet that it was gone.

He wondered what she would do when she did.

Madam Pomfrey wouldn’t let them in.

Harry and Ron went up to the hospital wing first thing on Boxing Day morning, still in their new jumpers, and found the doors firmly shut and Madam Pomfrey standing in front of them with her arms folded, like a very small, very stern gatekeeper.

‘No visitors,’ she said.

‘But we only want to see if she’s-’

‘No visitors, Mr Potter. Not you, not Mr Weasley, not the Minister for Magic himself. Miss Granger has had a very nasty shock, and a nastier transfiguration, and I’ll not have her fretted at while I’m trying to put her face back the way it was. Off you go.’

‘Is she all right, though?’ said Harry. ‘Is she...’

Madam Pomfrey’s face softened, just a fraction.

‘She’ll mend,’ she said. ‘It’ll take time. These things always do. Animal hair’s the very worst, it gets right down into the roots. But she’ll mend.’ She looked at the two of them, in their matching Weasley jumpers, and something in her face softened a little further. ‘She asked after you both. Last night. Before she’d let me do a thing for her, she wanted to know you’d got back safely. Now go.’

They went.

Harry was worried about Hermione. He kept seeing her face, furry and wet with tears, in the cracked mirror of Myrtle’s bathroom. He kept hearing her voice through the cubicle door. I thought I did it right. I thought I was right. It had been the most frightened he’d ever heard her sound, and it hadn’t been the fur she was frightened of. Or not only the fur.

But he had something more pressing on his mind.

The diary.

He didn’t understand it. He’d shoved it to the very bottom of his trunk on Christmas night, wrapped up in the Invisibility Cloak, and told himself he’d leave it there until they knew what it was. And he had. Mostly. But he kept thinking about it. At breakfast he thought about it. Over Exploding Snap he thought about it. He’d be in the middle of a sentence and find that his mind had wandered off upstairs to the dormitory and was lifting the lid of his trunk, all on its own, to make sure the diary was still there. There was something about it that drew him. It fascinated him. It was like a word on the tip of his tongue. It even seemed, in some odd way he couldn’t account for, familiar, as though it were something he’d known a long time ago and half forgotten.

He tried his best to get on with the rest of the holidays. Term would start again soon enough, and everyone would come back, and go back to flattening themselves against the walls when he walked past. He wanted to enjoy the quiet while it lasted.

Ron, it turned out, was determined to make sure he did.

‘Come on,’ Ron said, on the afternoon of Boxing Day, appearing at the foot of Harry’s bed with two pairs of gloves and a very sly look. ‘Get your boots on.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘Out. Fred and George’ve told me something.’ Ron dropped his voice. ‘There’s a way into the broom shed round the back of the pitch, where the lock’s broken. They’ve been using it for years. Wood doesn’t know. Nobody’s going to be out there in this.’ He nodded at the window, where the snow lay thick and white over the grounds and the sky was a hard, clean blue. ‘Fancy a fly?’

They flew for two hours.

Ron had a school broom that pulled to the left and shuddered every time it went over twenty feet, and Harry had his Nimbus, and the whole of the white, empty Quidditch pitch was theirs. They raced each other round the goalposts. They threw snowballs at each other from the air, which was much harder than it sounded, and Ron got Harry square in the back of the neck from thirty feet away and nearly fell off his broom laughing. Harry taught Ron the loop he’d done to dodge the Bludger, and Ron fell off doing it, into a snowdrift, and came up spitting snow and roaring with laughter, and Harry laughed so much he had to land.

They lay on their backs in the snow afterwards, side by side, getting their breath back, looking up at the blue sky with their breath going up in clouds.

‘Best Christmas I’ve ever had,’ said Harry, after a while. ‘This one and last one. I mean it.’

Ron was quiet for a moment.

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’ Harry turned his head. ‘Before Hogwarts, Christmas was... I mean, it was Dudley’s day. Mostly I just stayed out of the way. Last year was the first year anyone ever gave me anything. And this year...’ He couldn’t find a way to finish it. He looked back up at the sky. ‘Thanks, Ron. For all of it. For being my mate. I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t.’

Ron went red right up to his ears. He looked very hard at a cloud.

‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘You daft prat.’ Then, after a moment, more quietly, ‘Same, mate. You know. Same.’

They lay there until the cold got into their bones, and then went in for tea, and Ron, Harry noticed, put two extra sausages on Harry’s plate when he thought Harry wasn’t looking. He did it every meal now. He’d been doing it since the summer, since the bars on the window. He never said anything about it, and Harry never said anything about it either. But he noticed. He always noticed.

The day after Harry took the diary, Malfoy went absolutely mad.

Harry didn’t see the start of it. Nobody in Gryffindor did. There were only a handful of Slytherins left in the whole school over the holidays, but every one of them saw what happened, and by lunchtime it was all over the castle.

According to the gossip, Malfoy had woken up and started looking for something. She’d turned out her trunk. Then she’d turned out everyone else’s. Then she’d started on the common room, pulling cushions off chairs and books off shelves and the rugs off the floor. When she still couldn’t find it, she’d started screaming. She’d screamed at Pansy, and at Tracey Davis, and at Crabbe and Goyle, who’d turned up at breakfast with no shoes and no idea where they’d been for most of Christmas night. She’d thrown a candlestick at a prefect. Even among the Slytherins, Malfoy had always been known as haughty, and downright rude when she felt like it. But this was something else. This was unhinged. She’d gone round the whole dungeon accusing everybody she could find of stealing it.

And then she’d come up to breakfast.

Harry was halfway through a bowl of porridge when the doors of the Great Hall banged open and she came in.

She looked dreadful. She was still in her nightdress, with her school cloak thrown over the top of it and buttoned up wrong, and her feet were bare on the cold stone. Her hair was a wild white tangle. Her eyes were huge and pale and staring and red-rimmed, and they were going everywhere at once, darting from table to table, from face to face, from hand to hand, as if she expected to catch somebody holding the thing she’d lost.

Pansy Parkinson came running in after her, and two or three other Slytherins, and a big, worried-looking Hufflepuff prefect who must have met them on the stairs.

‘Dracina, please, come back down, come on, you’re not well...’

Malfoy shook her off.

‘Where is it?’ she said. Her voice was hoarse, as though she’d been screaming for hours. ‘Where is it? Somebody’s got it. Somebody’s taken it. Thief. Thief.’ She went along the end of the Hufflepuff table, staring into people’s laps, under their plates, into their bags. A second-year shrank away from her. ‘Was it you? Was it you? You’ve got it, haven’t you? You’ve got it in your pocket. Give it back. Give it back. It’s mine. It’s mine, it’s precious, it was given to me, it was meant for me...’

‘Dracina,’ said Pansy, almost crying. ‘Dracina, what’s yours? Nobody’s got anything. Please...’

But Malfoy didn’t seem to hear her. She didn’t seem to know Pansy was there. Even Pansy, long-suffering Pansy, who had put up with Malfoy for years without a word of complaint, couldn’t get through to her. Malfoy was in a world of her own. She was muttering. She was talking to herself, in a high, fast, breathless whisper, and Harry, who had gone very still with his spoon halfway to his mouth, could hear some of it from where he sat.

‘...they took it, they took it from me, nasty sneaking thieving little... I looked, I looked everywhere, under the beds, in the drawers, in the cracks... it’s mine, mine, my precious, I found it, it came to me... I want it back... I need it... they’ll be sorry, they’ll all be sorry, when I find out which one...’

She grabbed a plate of toast off the Hufflepuff table and flung it against the wall. Then a jug of milk. Then a dish of marmalade, which hit the Ravenclaw table and showered three first-years. The Hufflepuff prefect tried to take hold of her arm and she whirled round and scratched his face, three long red lines down his cheek, and he let go with a yell.

‘Thief!‘ she screamed at him. ‘Thieves! All of you! Every one of you, you’re all thieves, you’re all the same...’

And then her eyes found Harry.

Her gaze went past him, and stopped, and came slowly back. She looked straight at him, down the whole length of the Gryffindor table. And something went across her face that he couldn’t read at all. It wasn’t quite rage. It was something much more complicated than rage.

She came towards him.

‘You,’ she said.

Ron was on his feet at once. So were Fred and George. Harry stayed where he was.

‘You,’ Malfoy said again. She stopped a few feet from him, swaying, staring down at him with those pale, bloodshot, enormous eyes. ‘Look at you. Just look at you. Sitting there. Eating your porridge. As if nothing... as if you’re just anybody. You stupid, blind, useless...’

‘Malfoy,’ said Harry, ‘you need to go to the hospital wing.’

‘Don’t you tell me what I need!’ she shrieked. ‘You don’t know anything! You don’t know anything about anything! You’re an orphan, Potter. Nobody ever taught you anything. Nobody ever wanted to. You’re a Mudblood-loving, Muggle-raised, half-starved little orphan, and you don’t even know what you are! You let them... you just let them... you let them treat you like that, like... like a dog... and you go back! Every year, you go back to them! You go back to their nasty little house and their nasty little rules and you just take it! Why do you take it? You’re better than them! You’re better than all of them! You could make them sorry, you could make every single one of them sorry, and you just sit there with your porridge and your Mudblood and your stupid, stupid face...’

She hit him.

It wasn’t a slap. It was a fist, clumsy and wild, and it caught him on the shoulder, and then she was hitting him again, both fists, on his arms and his chest and the side of his head, not hard, not really, not like Dudley, but over and over and over, sobbing as she did it.

‘It wasn’t my fault! It wasn’t my fault! I didn’t want it! I didn’t want them to do that to you, I never wanted anybody to... you weren’t supposed to... you’re supposed to rise, you’re supposed to make them all pay, the Muggles and the Mudbloods and the whole filthy... and then nobody would ever, ever hurt you again, and I’d be... I’d be right there, I’d be next to you, I’d...’

Ron reached for her. He’d got one hand on her shoulder, and was just about to haul her off Harry bodily, when the doors at the far end of the Hall swung open.

Dumbledore came down between the tables.

He didn’t hurry. He didn’t need to. Everybody in the Hall had gone quite silent, and the silence seemed to roll out ahead of him as he walked, like a carpet. He came up behind Malfoy, and Ron let go of her and stepped back, and Dumbledore laid one long, thin hand very gently on top of her tangled white head.

Malfoy stopped.

Her fists dropped. All the fight went out of her in a single breath. Her eyes rolled up, and her knees gave way, and Dumbledore caught her as she fell and lowered her, quite carefully, onto the bench beside Harry, where she lay with her head on the table and her eyes closed, as limp as a rag doll, breathing slowly and deeply.

‘There,’ said Dumbledore softly. ‘There, now.’

He looked round at the staring faces.

‘Miss Malfoy,’ he said, in a clear, calm voice that carried to every corner of the Hall, ‘is very unwell. She has contracted an uncommon complaint called Morrigan’s Fever. It is, I’m happy to say, quite curable. It is also quite unpleasant. It brings on fits of delirium, and wild fancies, and a great deal of distress, and those who suffer from it are not to be held responsible for anything they may say or do while it lasts.’ He looked very hard, over his half-moon spectacles, at the Slytherin table, and then at the Hufflepuff prefect with the scratched face, and then, for rather longer, at Harry. ‘I trust that nobody here will hold any of this against her. I’m sure she will be very sorry indeed when she is well.’

He drew out his wand and flicked it. A stretcher appeared out of thin air beneath Malfoy, and lifted her gently, and floated up to the height of Dumbledore’s elbow.

‘Come along, Miss Parkinson,’ Dumbledore said kindly to Pansy, who was crying openly now. ‘You may walk up with her, if you like.’

They went out together, Dumbledore and the floating stretcher and Pansy hurrying alongside it, holding Malfoy’s limp hand.

The doors closed behind them.

For a moment, nobody said anything. Then, all at once, everybody did.

And it was all about Harry. He could feel it. He could feel the eyes, and hear the whispers, rippling out along the tables from where he sat. Did you hear her? Did you hear what she said? ‘You’re supposed to rise.’ ‘You could make them all pay.’ She knows. She knows something. She’s in Slytherin, she’d know. She was trying to tell everyone. The heir. Potter. It’s Potter.

Harry sat very still, rubbing his shoulder where she’d hit him first, and looked down at his cold porridge.

‘Morrigan’s Fever,’ said Fred, after a moment. ‘Ever heard of it, George?’

‘Can’t say I have, Fred.’

‘Me neither.’

Ron sat down heavily next to Harry and put a hand on the back of his neck, just for a second, and squeezed. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to.

Harry sighed.

He wondered whether, with everybody busy talking about Malfoy, this might be a good time to try the hospital wing again. Madam Pomfrey would be busy. She might not notice him slip in. He might at least be able to say hello to Hermione through the curtains.

He went up alone, while Ron finished his breakfast. The doors of the hospital wing were open, for once, because Dumbledore had only just carried Malfoy through them. Harry slipped inside.

The ward was dim and quiet. Most of the beds were empty. At the far end, Colin Creevey and Justin Finch-Fletchley lay as still as statues behind their screens. Near the windows was a bed with its curtains drawn tightly all the way round, which must be Hermione’s. And right next to it, right next to it, in the very next bed, not three feet away, with Pansy sitting beside her holding her hand and Madam Pomfrey bending over her with a bottle of something purple, lay Dracina Malfoy.

Of bloody course, Harry thought.

Mercifully, the curtains round Hermione’s bed were closed. She couldn’t see who was next to her. Harry crept up to the curtains.

‘Hermione?’ he whispered. ‘It’s me.’

‘Harry!‘ The curtains twitched, but didn’t open. Her voice was thick and wobbly, as though she’d been crying a great deal and was trying hard not to sound like it. ‘Don’t come in. Please don’t come in. I don’t want you to see. I look...’ She stopped. ‘What’s going on? Somebody came in. Somebody’s in the next bed. I heard Professor Dumbledore. And somebody’s crying. Who is it?’

Harry opened his mouth.

Over the top of Malfoy’s bed, Madam Pomfrey looked up at him. She didn’t say a word. She simply gave him a look. It was a long, level, extremely meaningful look, and it said, as plainly as if she’d written it on a sign and held it up: Don’t you dare tell her.

‘Er,’ said Harry. ‘Just... someone from... someone who’s ill. Some fever thing. It’s not catching. Probably.’ He swallowed. ‘How are you feeling? Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘You don’t sound fine.’

‘I’m fine, Harry.’ There was a pause, and then, in a much smaller voice, ‘I’m not fine. I’m awful. I’ve got whiskers. And a tail. And everyone’s going to know, and I can’t stop thinking about it, how stupid I was, how I didn’t even check, I just assumed, I always just assume, and I was so sure...’

‘Hermione...’

‘Who’s in the next bed?’ Her voice had sharpened. ‘Harry. You’re not telling me something. I can hear it in your voice. Who is it?’

‘Nobody. Look, I’d better go, Madam Pomfrey’s giving me a look, I only wanted to say hello, I’ll come back, all right? We’ll come back as soon as she lets us. Me and Ron. We... we miss you. Get better. Bye!’

He fled.

He was halfway down the corridor outside when he heard the rattle of curtain rings being dragged back along a rail, very fast, and then a short, shocked silence, and then a shriek so loud that it rang off the stone walls and made a portrait of a sleeping wizard fall clean out of his chair.

‘WHAT IS SHE DOING HERE?!’

Harry ran.

He slowed down when he got back to the Great Hall. Breakfast was nearly over. Most of the few people left at school had drifted away, still muttering, still glancing at him sideways. But down at the far end of the Gryffindor table, Ron was sitting with Fred and George, and the three of them had their heads together over something under the table and were laughing so hard that Ron had tears running down his face.

Harry smiled. He started towards them.

Then he stopped.

He didn’t know why. He was standing in the middle of the Great Hall, and he could see Ron, and Ron was laughing, and he wanted very much to go and sit down and find out what was so funny. But at the same time there was something else. A tug. A pull, like a hook in his chest, drawing him the other way, up the stairs, up to Gryffindor Tower, up to the dormitory, to his trunk. To the diary.

Just for a minute, he thought. Just to look at it. Then I’ll come back down.

He turned round and went out of the Hall.

The dormitory was empty. He knelt by his trunk and dug down through his robes and his spellbooks to the very bottom, and pulled out the bundle of Invisibility Cloak, and unwrapped it, and there it was. Small, and black, and shabby, and completely ordinary.

He sat down on his bed with it.

He turned it over in his hands. He looked at the cover, the spine, and the worn gold letters on the back. T. M. Riddle. Tom. He’d known that much since Christmas night, sitting by the dying fire with Ron. Tom Riddle, whoever he’d been, fifty years ago. Then he opened it, and leafed through it, very slowly, from beginning to end.

Empty. Every page.

Harry frowned. That didn’t make any sense. He’d seen Dracina write in it. Lots of times. In Potions, at dinner, at the Slytherin table, bent over it with her quill going and her face all lit up. He’d seen her do it in the common room on Christmas night with his own eyes, through Goyle’s. So where had it all gone? Where were all the pages and pages she must have written? Had she rubbed it all out? Torn out the pages? But none of the pages were missing. It didn’t make any sense at all.

He sat looking at it for a long time.

Then he reached over to his bedside table, and picked up the eagle-feather quill Hermione had given him for Christmas, and unscrewed his ink bottle, and dipped the quill in it.

Just one word, he thought. Just to see.

He wrote, at the top of the first page, Hello.

The ink shone on the page for a moment. Then it sank into it, the way water sinks into dry sand, and was gone. The page was as blank as it had been before.

Harry stared at it.

‘Well, that’s stupid,’ he said aloud, to the empty dormitory. ‘What’s the point of a diary that erases what you write in it? How’s anyone supposed to...’

He stopped.

Something was happening on the page. Ink was oozing up out of it. Words were forming, slowly, in a neat, sloping, old-fashioned hand that wasn’t his.

Hello.

Harry nearly dropped it.

The words sat there on the page a moment, shining. Then they sank away again, the way his had done. And more came up after them.

You’re not Dracina.

Harry looked at it with his heart going very fast. Was this diary enchanted somehow? It had to be. He’d heard of books that bit, and books that screamed, and books that you couldn’t stop reading once you’d started. Fred and George had told him about one that made you speak in limericks for the rest of your life. But he’d never heard of a book that wrote back.

He felt very stupid. He felt as though he were talking to a teapot. But he dipped the quill again anyway, and wrote:

How do you know Dracina?

The ink sank. There was a pause. Then:

I’m helping her.

Harry’s mouth went tight. He thought of Malfoy in the Great Hall that morning, barefoot in her nightgown, with her eyes like that, screaming, throwing toast. He thought of the waxy grey look of her skin in the Slytherin common room, and the shadows under her eyes, and the way she’d giggled. He thought of her lying flat on a stretcher in the hospital wing right now.

He wrote, quite hard, so that the nib scratched:

You have a funny way of helping her.

He wasn’t concerned, of course. Not about Malfoy. He was just annoyed.

The ink sank away. And then, after a moment, the reply came up.

You are concerned, I see.

There was a pause. It was a second or two, no more, but it was a real pause, the kind a person makes when they’re thinking. As though whatever was on the other side of the page was looking at him. Considering him. Then another line formed.

You’re Harry Potter, aren’t you?

Harry dropped the quill.

It rolled off the bed and onto the floor, and left a little trail of ink across the floorboards. He didn’t pick it up. He sat staring at the page, with all the skin on the back of his neck prickling. How did this diary know that? How could it possibly know? He hadn’t written his name. He hadn’t written anything but four lines. What sort of dark enchantment was inside it?

The diary, as though it had sensed that he wasn’t going to answer, wrote another line.

She writes about you all the time. ALL of the time, Harry.

Harry felt something inside him relax. He actually laughed. It came out of him as a sort of triumphant snort.

Well, of course she did. That was hardly news. He bent down and fished the quill off the floor and wrote, with a certain grim satisfaction:

I know. She can’t stand me. She’s always going on at me. She’s obsessed with being horrible to me, she has been since the day we met.

The ink sank. And the reply came up almost at once, as though it had been waiting.

She is, but also you must notice what’s underneath?

Harry looked at that for a long moment.

He dipped his quill. He set the nib to the page. He was just about to write What’s underneath? when...

‘HARRY!‘

It was Ron, bellowing up the staircase from the common room.

‘HARRY, GET DOWN HERE! QUICK! YOU HAVE GOT TO SEE THIS!’

Harry jumped so hard he nearly knocked over the ink. He looked down at the diary, at the blank page, at the place where the last words had been. Then he snapped it shut, wrapped it hastily in the Cloak, stuffed it back down to the bottom of his trunk, slammed the lid, and ran.

Ron was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, purple in the face, practically hopping.

‘Come on, you’ve got to see, Fred and George’ve done the armour, all of it, the whole Entrance Hall...’

They pelted down through the castle. And when they got to the top of the marble staircase, Harry stopped dead and grabbed the banister and laughed until he couldn’t breathe.

Every single suit of armour in the Entrance Hall had come down off its plinth. There were about twenty of them. They’d formed themselves into a long line, with their steel arms round each other’s shoulders, and they were doing the can-can. They were kicking their legs up as high as they’d go, clanging and clattering, with their visors flapping, and they were singing, in deep, booming, echoing metal voices, a song that Harry was fairly sure was not a carol. Peeves was conducting them from the chandelier with a stick of celery. And Filch was running up and down the line, purple with rage, trying to grab hold of them, and every time he got near one it kicked its leg up and he had to duck.

‘Twenty-six hours,’ Fred said proudly, appearing at Harry’s elbow. ‘It took us twenty-six hours to get the timing right.’

‘Worth every one,’ said George.

Ron was hanging on to Harry’s shoulder, helpless with laughter. Harry was hanging on to Ron’s. Below them, a suit of armour with a halberd did the splits with a noise like a dropped dinner tray. Filch screamed.

Harry didn’t think about the diary again for the rest of the day.

The next day, Hermione was still in the hospital wing.

Harry woke up thinking about Malfoy. He didn’t want to. He lay in bed and tried to think about Quidditch, and about Hermione, and about the suits of armour, and he kept coming back round to Malfoy. To the things she’d said in the Great Hall. You let them treat you like that. You go back. You’re better than them. She’d been raving. Dumbledore had said she was raving. But it went round and round in his head, like a splinter in his mind that he couldn’t get out. And he needed answers about the diary anyway. If anyone knew what it was, it was her.

So after breakfast he went back up to the hospital wing.

Madam Pomfrey let him in, this time, with only a sharp look and a warning not to excite anybody. Hermione was asleep. Her curtains were drawn, and Madam Pomfrey said she’d given her something to help her rest, and Harry wasn’t to wake her. But the curtains round the next bed were drawn back, and Malfoy was sitting up against her pillows.

She looked better. Not well, but better. There was a little colour in her face, and her hair had been brushed, and her eyes had lost that terrible wide, staring look. She was glaring at Hermione’s drawn curtains as though she could see straight through them, as though she’d been glaring at them for hours. Then she saw Harry, and her whole face changed.

It lit up. There was no other word for it. For one moment, before she could stop it, she looked delighted to see him.

Then she remembered herself, and folded her arms.

‘What do you want?’

‘Came to see how you were,’ said Harry. ‘After... yesterday.’

‘I’m fine.’ But she sat up a little straighter, and pulled her blanket up, and touched her hair. ‘Morrigan’s Fever. Dumbledore says. It’s very rare. Very aristocratic. Only the best families get it.’

‘Right,’ said Harry.

He sat down on the end of the empty bed opposite. He’d thought on the way up about how he was going to do this, and he still wasn’t sure.

‘Malfoy,’ he said carefully. ‘That book you had. The black one. The one you were always writing in. What is it?’

Something went over her face. It was like watching a shutter come down.

‘Why?’ she said. ‘Why d’you want to know about that?’

‘I just wondered. You had it all the time. At meals. In lessons. I just wondered what it was. And whether... whether it had anything to do with all this. The Chamber, and...’

‘Where is it?’

‘What?’

‘Where is it?’ She’d leaned forward. Her hands had come out from under the blanket and were clutching at it, twisting it. Her voice had gone thin and quick. ‘You know, don’t you. You know where it is. I can see it in your face. You know where it’s gone. Somebody took it, somebody took it from me, and you know...’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking...’

‘Tell me!‘ The colour was coming up in her face again, two hot red patches. Her eyes had started to go wide. ‘Tell me where it is! It’s mine! It’s mine, Potter, I need it, I can’t... I can’t sleep without it, I can’t think, there’s nobody to talk to... where is it? Where is it? Is it her?’ Her head jerked round towards Hermione’s curtains. ‘Has she got it? Has that little Mudblood got my...’

‘Leave Hermione out of it.’

‘Oh, leave Hermione out of it.’ Malfoy’s lip curled. Her voice had gone high and mocking. ‘Always Hermione. Always Granger. Saint Granger, the Mudblood martyr. Do you know why she’s in here, Potter? I do. I heard Pomfrey. Whiskers. She’s got whiskers. She’s finally turned into what she’s always been, a nasty little stray moggy sniffing round where she’s not wanted...’

‘Shut up, Malfoy.’

‘Make me, Scarhead.’

‘Oh, very clever. Did you think that one up yourself, or did Crabbe help?’

‘At least my friends can read, Potter.’

‘Can they? Have you checked? I’ve seen Goyle try to open a door by reading the sign on it.’

‘That’s more than Weasley can manage. He can’t even read his own wand. It keeps exploding.’

‘At least he’s not a mental case who throws toast at prefects in her nightie.’

‘I was ILL!‘

‘You still are, by the sound of it!’

‘Well, you’re ugly!’

‘You’re mad!’

‘You’re speccy!’

‘You’re a spoilt brat!’

They were both glaring at each other now, red in the face, breathing hard, like two cats on a fence. Madam Pomfrey had put her head out of her office and was watching them with her eyebrows somewhere up near her cap.

‘You’re always going on about me,’ Harry said. ‘Always. You talk about me all the time.’

Malfoy went very still.

‘How do you know that?’ she said sharply.

Harry’s stomach dropped. He’d said too much. He thought fast.

‘Everyone knows,’ he said. ‘The Slytherins are all saying it. After what you did in the Great Hall. They’re saying you never shut up about me. They’re saying it’s all you ever talk about.’

For a moment Malfoy didn’t move at all. Then her chin came up, very high.

‘I talk about you,’ she said, ‘because I hate you. Obviously. I talk about you the way you’d talk about a... a wasp. Or a bad smell. Or a nasty rash you can’t get rid of. That’s all.’

‘Fine.’

‘Fine.’

There was a short, furious silence.

Then Malfoy looked at him, and something changed in her eyes. It went cold, and quiet, and very precise, like a needle.

‘Is that why you’re so skinny, Potter?’ she said softly. ‘Those Muggles of yours. They don’t feed you, do they?’

Harry went still.

‘They don’t feed you, and they don’t want you, and they shut you up in your room and they don’t care whether you live or die. And then every summer you go back. You get on the train and you go back to them, like a dog that’s been kicked and still comes running when it’s called. Because there’s nowhere else that’ll have you. Nobody else in the whole world. Is that it? Is that what it’s like, being the famous Harry Potter?’

Harry stood up.

He didn’t say anything. He couldn’t. Something had come up into his throat, hot and thick, and his eyes had started to sting, and he knew that if he opened his mouth it would all come out, and he would rather have died than let Dracina Malfoy see him cry. He’d never told her. He’d never told her any of it. How did she know? How could she possibly know? And of everything she could have said to him, of all the cruel, sneering, spiteful things in the world, she’d picked that.

He turned round and walked out.

‘Potter!‘ Her voice came after him, cracked and furious. ‘Potter, come back, I didn’t... come back here! Don’t you dare walk away from me! Scarhead! SCARHEAD!’

He didn’t look back.

That was it, Harry told himself, walking very fast along the corridor with his fists clenched and his eyes stinging. That was absolutely it. He was never going to speak to Dracina Malfoy again. Not ever. Every single time he started to think there might be something else there, something underneath, she proved all over again exactly what she was. A bully. A horrible, cruel, nasty bully, even when she thought nobody was watching. Especially then.

He didn’t go back to the common room. He couldn’t face it. He went up instead, as high as he could go, to a window seat on a landing near the top of the Astronomy Tower where hardly anybody ever came, and sat there with his knees drawn up, looking out at the snow.

Ron found him there an hour later.

Harry didn’t know how. He never asked. Ron just appeared at the top of the stairs, out of breath, with his hands in his pockets, and looked at Harry, and looked at his face, and didn’t ask what was wrong.

He sat down on the other end of the window seat instead.

After a minute he pulled a squashed paper bag out of his pocket and held it out.

‘Mum’s fudge,’ he said. ‘ I have the last few bits. Fred and George don’t know I’ve still got some. You can have it.’

Harry took a piece. They sat there for a while, eating Mrs Weasley’s fudge and watching the snow coming down over the Forbidden Forest.

‘Malfoy,’ Ron said eventually. It wasn’t a question.

‘Yeah.’

‘What’d she say?’

Harry didn’t answer for a long time.

‘About the Dursleys,’ he said at last. ‘About me going back. Every summer. Like a dog.’

Ron went very quiet.

Then he said, in a low, careful voice that Harry had only ever heard him use once before, in the summer, outside a window with bars on it, ‘She doesn’t know anything, mate. She doesn’t know anything about you. And you’re not going back.’ He said it fiercely. ‘Not this summer. Mum said. You’re coming to ours, and that’s that. And if those Muggles want you, they can come to the Burrow and ask for you, and Mum’ll set the ghoul on them. And Fred and George. And me.’ He shoved the bag of fudge back at Harry. ‘Have another. Go on. You didn’t eat lunch.’

Harry looked at him.

‘How d’you know I didn’t eat lunch?’

Ron shrugged and looked out of the window.

‘I always know,’ he said.

Harry took another piece of fudge. He didn’t trust himself to say anything. But after a while he leaned sideways, just a little, until his shoulder was against Ron’s, and Ron leaned back, and they sat there like that, watching the snow, until it got dark.

Malfoy was let out of the hospital wing two days after that.

She was a good deal better, Madam Pomfrey said. Well enough to go back to the dungeons, at any rate, and Madam Pomfrey made no secret of being relieved about it. It turned out that for those two days, the moment Hermione woke up and Malfoy heard her moving behind her curtains, the pair of them had been at it hammer and tongs, through the cloth, from one bed to the next, from morning until night.

Harry heard some of it himself, the one time he went up with Ron before Malfoy left. They’d barely got through the doors.

‘...and I was sitting next to him at the Christmas feast, so...’

‘You weren’t at the Christmas feast, Granger, you were in a cubicle, growing a tail...’

‘At least I’ve got a reason for being in here. You threw toast...’

‘I was ILL!‘

‘Ladies!‘ snapped Madam Pomfrey.

Neither of them could see that he’d come in. Neither of them knew he could hear. And it took Harry a good long minute, standing frozen just inside the doors with Ron trying very hard not to laugh beside him, to realise that every single thing they were shouting at each other was, somehow or other, about him.

After that, Madam Pomfrey always gave Harry a very particular look whenever he came to the hospital wing. It was a sympathetic look. A deeply, profoundly sympathetic look, the sort of look you’d give somebody who had just been told that they had to walk home through a thunderstorm without an umbrella. Harry had no idea what he’d done to deserve it. Ron seemed to know. Ron kept patting him on the back.

But the moment Malfoy was gone, Harry and Ron went to see Hermione every single day.

At first she wouldn’t let them past the curtains. She’d talk to them through the cloth, in a small, flat voice that didn’t sound like Hermione at all, and when they asked how she was she said fine, and when they told her about the suits of armour she said that’s nice, and when Ron tried to tell her a joke about Snape she didn’t laugh. Harry had never heard her like it. Hermione was never quiet. Hermione always had something to say, about everything, usually at length, usually with a reference. Now there was just this little grey voice behind a curtain.

On the third day, she let them in.

The fur was starting to come out. It was patchy now, coming away in tufts, with bits of her ordinary face showing through, pink and sore-looking. Her ears had shrunk a little. Her eyes were still yellow. She was sitting up in bed with a book open on her lap that she obviously wasn’t reading, and when they came round the curtain she put both hands over her face.

‘Don’t look,’ she said, through her fingers. ‘Please don’t look at me.’

‘We’re not looking,’ said Ron at once, and looked very hard at the ceiling. ‘See? Ceiling. Lovely ceiling. Very... ceilingy.’

Harry sat down on the chair by the bed.

‘Hermione,’ he said. ‘It’s all right. Honestly. It’s just a bit of fur. It’s going.’

‘It’s not the fur.’ Hermione lowered her hands. Her yellow eyes were swimming. ‘It’s not the fur, Harry. It’s... I got it wrong. I got it completely, stupidly wrong, and I never get things wrong, I never do, and I didn’t even check. I didn’t check the hair. I just looked at it and thought that’s Millicent’s and put it in, because I was so sure, I was so sure, I’m always so sure about everything, and I was wrong. I was wrong about the hair. And I was wrong about...’ She stopped.

‘About what?’ said Harry gently.

Hermione looked down at her hands.

‘About all of it,’ she said, very quietly. ‘I’ve been lying here thinking. There’s nothing else to do in here but think. And I’ve been thinking about the potion, and why we made it, and... it wasn’t for Colin. Was it? Or Justin. Or Mrs Norris. I told myself it was. I told you it was. But it wasn’t, really. It was for her.’ She swallowed. ‘It was because it was Malfoy. Because I wanted it to be her. I wanted to catch her out. I wanted to prove... I wanted everyone to see what she was, and I wanted you to see it, Harry, and I made it all about her and me. I made it into something personal. And it shouldn’t have been. It should never have been about that. People are lying in this ward Petrified, and I was making a potion to win an argument.’

Neither Harry nor Ron said anything.

‘And I bullied you both into it,’ Hermione went on, in a very small voice. ‘I didn’t listen. You both said it could go wrong. You said. Harry, you said it so many times, and I just talked over you. I always talk over you. I always think I know best.’ She wiped her eyes on the back of her furry hand. ‘And now look at me. Look where knowing best got me.’

‘Hermione,’ said Ron. He’d stopped looking at the ceiling. His ears had gone red. ‘Hermione, listen. You made Polyjuice Potion. In a toilet. In your second year. That’s... that’s sixth-year stuff, that is, that’s N.E.W.T. stuff. You got one hair wrong. One. That’s not stupid. That’s... I couldn’t make that in a hundred years. Nobody else in our year could.’ He scratched the back of his neck, embarrassed. ‘And it was Millicent’s fault for having a cat. Anyway.’

Hermione gave a damp, startled little laugh.

‘And you didn’t bully us,’ said Harry. ‘Well. A bit. But we went along with it. We wanted to know too. It’s not all on you.’ He hesitated. ‘But... yeah. Maybe it did get a bit... much. With Malfoy.’

‘I know,’ said Hermione. ‘I know it did.’ She looked at him. ‘I’m sorry, Harry. I’ve been... I think I’ve been a lot. Lately. Haven’t I? With you. With everything.’

Harry thought about the quill. And the collar. And the three-in-the-morning muttering in the armchair. And the way she’d growled across the Potions dungeon.

‘A bit,’ he admitted.

‘I’m going to try,’ said Hermione, ‘to be less... a lot.’ She managed a small, wobbly smile. ‘I’m not promising I’ll manage it. But I’m going to try.’

‘You’re all right as you are,’ said Ron gruffly. ‘Mostly. Just a bit less... you know. Hissing.’

‘I don’t hiss.’

‘You growled at Malfoy in Potions,’ said Harry. ‘ Like a dog.’

Hermione put her face in her hands again. But this time Harry thought she might be laughing.

There was a flurry of rumours about Hermione’s disappearance when the rest of the school came back from the Christmas holidays. Of course everyone thought she’d been attacked. So many students filed past the hospital wing trying to catch a glimpse of her that Madam Pomfrey got out her curtains again and put them all the way round Hermione’s bed, to spare her the embarrassment of being seen with a furry face.

When term started, Ron had the idea of taking Hermione’s homework up to her, to cheer her up.

‘If I’d grown whiskers,’ said Ron, tipping a great heap of books onto Hermione’s bedside table one evening, ‘I’d take it as a sign to have a bit of time off.’

‘Don’t be daft, Ron. I can’t fall behind,’ said Hermione.

But she didn’t say it the way she would have said it before Christmas, briskly, with that little lift of the chin. She said it almost wryly, and she smiled at Ron as she said it, and she picked the top book off the pile and looked at it with real gratitude. She was in much better spirits now. All the fur had gone from her face, and her eyes were slowly fading back to brown.

‘Any luck?’ she added, in a whisper, so that Madam Pomfrey wouldn’t hear. ‘With anything?’

‘Not a thing,’ said Harry gloomily.

‘I was so sure it was Malfoy,’ said Ron, for about the hundredth time since Christmas. ‘I’d have bet my wand on it. Well. Somebody else’s wand.’

Hermione didn’t say anything to that at all. A few weeks ago she’d have had plenty to say. Now she just looked down at the blanket, and Harry thought she looked a little ashamed.

‘What’s that?’ asked Harry, pointing. Something gold was sticking up out of the wastepaper basket next to her bed.

‘Nothing. Just a card,’ said Hermione quickly, trying to poke it out of sight. But Ron was too fast for her. He snatched it out of the bin, flipped it open, and read it out in a high, gushing voice.

‘To dear Miss Granger, with every good wish for a swift and complete recovery, from your devoted teacher, Professor Gilderoy Lockhart, Order of Merlin (Third Class), Honorary Member of the Dark Force Defence League, and five-times winner of Witch Weekly‘s Most Charming Smile Award.‘

He looked at Hermione over the top of it, eyebrows raised.

‘I’ve decided I don’t like Lockhart anymore. I think he’s lying about a great many things.’ said Hermione, in a huff.

She sat up straighter against her pillows. She was just drawing breath to explain, in detail, exactly what he was lying about, starting with the Master and working her way through the whole of Year with the Yeti, when Madam Pomfrey came bustling in with her evening medicine and shooed Harry and Ron out.

‘Is Lockhart the slimiest git you’ve ever met, or what?’ said Ron, as they left the hospital wing and started up the stairs towards Gryffindor Tower. ‘Devoted teacher. Ugh. I’m going to need a bath.’

Snape had given them so much homework that Harry thought he’d probably be in the sixth year before he finished it. Ron was just saying that he wished he’d asked Hermione how many rat tails went into a Hair-Raising Potion when an angry outburst from the floor above them made them both stop.

‘That’s Filch,’ Harry muttered.

They crept up the stairs and stopped, out of sight, listening hard.

‘You don’t think somebody else has been...’ Ron began, in a whisper.

They stood very still, with their heads cocked towards Filch’s voice. It sounded nearly hysterical.

‘...as if I hadn’t got enough to do! As if I hadn’t been up half the night already! Mopping, mopping, mopping, morning, noon and night! No. No. That’s it. I’ve had it. I’m going to the Headmaster...’

Footsteps stamped away. A door slammed somewhere in the distance.

They put their heads round the corner. Filch had obviously been keeping his usual watch: they were back on the very spot where Mrs Norris had been attacked. And they could see at once what had set him off. A great flood of water had spread over half the corridor, and it seemed to be still seeping out from under the door of Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom. Now that Filch had stopped shouting, they could hear Myrtle, wailing away inside, her howls bouncing off the tiled walls.

‘What’s wrong with her now?’ said Ron.

‘Come on. Let’s find out,’ said Harry.

Holding their robes up out of the wet, they splashed through the flood to the door with the Out of Order sign, ignored it, as usual, and went in.

Moaning Myrtle was crying even louder and harder than usual, which Harry wouldn’t have thought possible. She seemed to be hiding down the U-bend of her favourite toilet. The bathroom was dark. Every candle had been put out by the deluge, and the walls and floor were dripping.

‘Myrtle?’ said Harry. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Who’s that?’ gurgled Myrtle miserably from somewhere inside the plumbing. ‘Come to throw something else at me, have you?’

Harry waded over to her cubicle.

‘Why would I want to throw anything at you?’

‘Don’t ask me,’ Myrtle shouted, emerging with a wave of yet more water, which splashed onto the already sopping floor. ‘Here I am, minding my own business, and someone thinks it’s funny to throw their quills and whatever else they have on hand. She was screaming at me too. How dreadful.’

‘Myrtle, love.’

Myrtle perked up at that, immediately and alarmingly, which made Harry wince. She came floating up out of the toilet bowl and fluttered her eyelashes at him through her thick spectacles. He tried to adopt a soothing sort of tone.

‘Look, I know it’s not nice to have things thrown at you but it’s not like anything hurts you. It just goes straight through you, right?’

Myrtle crossed her arms and pouted.

‘It’s the principle of it, Harry!’ Myrtle moaned. ‘All these nasty, horrible people think they can just throw what they like at me. But THIS one was particularly horrid.’

‘Who was it?’ said Harry. ‘A girl, you said?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Myrtle, with relish. She drifted round in a slow circle above the toilet, dripping. ‘A girl. A posh girl. You could tell she was posh. She had that voice. All snooty, like she owned the place. And her hair.’ Myrtle sniffed. ‘I hated her hair. Long and straight and shiny, the way mine never would go, no matter what I did with it. I hated her the minute I saw her.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘But she was mad, Harry. Completely mad. Madder than Peeves. She came crashing in here in the middle of the night and she started searching. On her hands and knees. Under the cubicles. Behind the pipes. All over the floor, as if she’d dropped something tiny. And talking to herself the whole time.’

‘What was she saying?’

‘Oh, all sorts.’ Myrtle put on a high, wheedling, sing-song sort of voice, and Harry felt the hair go up on the back of his neck. ‘Where is it, where is it, it came here, I came here, I remember coming here... it must be here, it must, it must... it’s mine, it’s mine, they took it, filthy thieves...’ Myrtle dropped the voice. ‘Over and over, like that. Talking to herself the whole time, as if there was somebody else in here she was arguing with. And then she went over to the sinks.’

Harry went very still.

‘The sinks?’

‘The sinks.’ Myrtle pointed. ‘She stood there in front of them for ages. Just looking at them. Running her hands all over them. Over the taps. As if she was looking for something. And she was whispering, but I couldn’t hear what. Something funny. It didn’t even sound like words.’ Myrtle shivered. ‘And then she turned round and saw me and asked me where it was. Where what was, I said. I didn’t know what she was talking about! And she screamed at me. She threw her whole bloody bag at my head, and her quills, and her ink, and then she ran away crying and left the taps running.’ Myrtle’s lip trembled. ‘Nobody ever comes to see me, you know, and when they do, they’re horrible.’

‘She sounds horrible,’ said Harry slowly. He was looking at the sinks.

‘What did she look like, then?’ said Ron. ‘This posh girl? What colour was her...’

‘Why should I tell you?’ said Myrtle at once, rounding on him. ‘You haven’t even said hello. You never say hello. You come in here and splash about and you don’t even ask how I am...’

‘Hello, Myrtle,’ said Ron, through gritted teeth. ‘How are you? Lovely to see you. Now, what colour was her...’

‘Oh, now he says hello! Now that he wants something!’

‘I said hello, didn’t I? What more d’you want, a card?’

‘A card would be nice!’ Myrtle wailed. ‘Nobody ever sends me a card! I’ve been dead fifty years and not one card!’

‘Well, how am I supposed to know that? How’s anyone supposed to post a card to a toilet...’

‘Ron,’ said Harry.

‘What?’

‘You’re arguing with a ghost in a girls’ toilet.’ Harry folded his arms. ‘Just thought you’d want to know. In case you were wondering how your evening was going.’

‘OUT!‘ shrieked Myrtle. She swelled up to twice her size and her spectacles flashed. ‘Out, out, out, both of you! You’re just as bad as she was! Inconsiderate! Selfish! Rude! Nobody cares about poor Myrtle, nobody ever has, nobody ever will!’

And she dived headfirst back down her toilet with a great splash that soaked them both to the knees.

‘Mental,’ said Ron, as they squelched back out into the corridor. He was wringing out the bottom of his robes. ‘Completely and utterly mental, that one. She’s nearly as mad as...’

He stopped.

‘As who?’ said Harry.

‘Nobody,’ said Ron. ‘Nobody. Come on. I’m freezing.’

Harry looked at him. Ron didn’t look back. He’d been doing that a lot lately. He’d been watching Malfoy, Harry had noticed, ever since she came out of the hospital wing. Watching her across the Great Hall, and in Potions, and in the corridors, with his forehead creased up. Malfoy had come back from the hospital wing quieter, and thinner, and stranger. She didn’t hiss at Harry in the corridors any more. She didn’t do much of anything. She sat at the end of the Slytherin table and pushed her food round her plate and stared at nothing, and every so often her hand went to the front of her robes, and pressed there, found nothing, and came away again. And Ron watched her do it. He never said anything. But Harry could see him adding it all up.

They went back to Gryffindor Tower, changed their socks, and settled down by the fire for a game of wizard chess.

Harry was losing, as usual. His knight had just been dragged off the board by one of Ron’s castles, and his queen was looking at him with an expression of deep reproach, when he felt it again.

The tug. The hook in his chest. Pulling him upstairs. To his bed, where he’d moved the diary a few days ago, out of his trunk and into the space underneath, wrapped up in an old jumper, so that he could get at it more easily.

Just for a minute.

‘I’ve, er, just remembered,’ Harry said. ‘I’ve got to finish that Potions essay. The one on Hair-Raising Potion. I’ll be back in a bit.’

Ron looked up from the board.

‘You,’ he said slowly, ‘want to go and do your Potions homework. Now. On a Friday night. In the middle of a game.’

‘Yeah.’

‘You hate Potions homework.’

‘I hate it more when it’s late.’

Ron’s eyes narrowed. But he didn’t say anything. He just looked at Harry for a long moment, and then looked back down at the board, and moved a bishop.

Harry went upstairs.

The dormitory was empty. He knelt by his bed, and reached underneath it, and pulled out the old jumper, and unwrapped it. There was the diary. He sat back on his heels with it in his hands and felt, at once, that odd warm settling feeling, like coming in out of the cold. He reached for his quill. He opened the book.

‘I knew it.’

Ron was standing in the doorway.

Before Harry could move, Ron had crossed the dormitory in three strides and pulled the diary straight out of his hands.

‘Hey!’ Harry was on his feet. Something hot and furious had come up inside him, out of nowhere, so fast it frightened him. ‘Give it back, Ron! That’s mine! Give it back!’

Ron looked at him. He looked at Harry’s face, and his outstretched hand, and something went over his own face that might have been worry, or might have been fear.

He held the diary out. Harry snatched it.

‘All right,’ said Ron quietly. ‘All right, mate. Calm down. Here.’

Harry held the diary against his chest. His heart was hammering. He felt suddenly ashamed of himself, and didn’t know why.

‘Sorry,’ he muttered. ‘Sorry. I don’t know why I...’

‘Harry.’ Ron sat down on the end of his own bed, facing him. ‘Listen. Dad used to deal with this sort of thing all the time. At work. Cursed books, bewitched books. There was one that sang you lullabies till you dropped off and never woke up. There was one that ate a bloke’s fingers, one at a time, while he was turning the pages. Dad said the worst ones aren’t the ones that bite. They’re the ones you like. The ones you can’t put down.’ He nodded at the diary. ‘You’ve got to be careful with that thing, mate. Really careful. You saw what it did to Malfoy. It sent her round the twist. And you just went for me like... like...’

He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to. Like her, Harry thought. Like she did in the Great Hall.

He looked down at the diary in his hands, and turned it over, and looked again at the faded gold letters on the back.

1. M. Riddle.

Tom Riddle. They’d known that much since Christmas night.

‘Hang on,’ said Ron. He’d come over, warily, and was looking over Harry’s shoulder. ‘Hang on. That name. It’s been bugging me since Christmas and I’ve only just got it. Riddle. I know where I’ve seen it. He got an award. A special award, for services to the school. Fifty years back.’

Harry stared at him.

‘How on earth do you know that?’

‘Because Filch had me polishing his shield for about a hundred years, that’s how,’ said Ron bitterly. ‘In detention. When I was being sick. It was the one I chucked up slugs all over. You spend an hour scrubbing slug slime out of somebody’s name, mate, you don’t forget it in a hurry.’

Harry opened the diary at the back. On the inside of the back cover, in tiny printed letters, was the name of a newsagent’s, on Vauxhall Road, in London.

‘He must have been Muggle-born, then,’ said Harry slowly. ‘To have bought it there. On Vauxhall Road. That’s a Muggle shop. That’s a Muggle street.’

‘Well, it’s not much use to us right now, is it?’ said Ron. He was still looking at the diary, not at Harry. ‘Harry. I think if it’s dangerous, we should take it to Dumbledore. I mean it. Let him sort it out.’

Harry nodded slowly.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Yeah. Maybe.’

Ron reached out and gave his shoulder a squeeze.

‘Come on back down, then. I was about to have your king. I’m not letting you off just because you’ve got a creepy book.’

He went off down the stairs.

Harry stayed where he was, sitting on his bed with the diary in his lap, looking at the name on the back.

Tom Riddle. Who had he been? Why had he been given an award? Why did Dracina talk to his diary as though he were still somewhere inside it, like a friend, and scream for it like it was the most precious thing in the world? Was it really dangerous? Was Ron right?

‘HARRY!‘ Ron yelled up the stairs. ‘Your move!‘

Harry looked at the diary a moment longer. Then he wrapped it back up in the old jumper and pushed it back under his bed, into the dark, for later. He’d look into it properly another time. On his own.

He didn’t notice that he’d already decided not to take it to Dumbledore. He didn’t notice that the decision had been made somewhere inside him without him ever being asked. He only knew that he felt a great deal calmer once the diary was safely back where he could get at it.

He went down to lose at chess.

Hermione came out of the hospital wing, whiskerless, tailless and entirely free of fur, at the beginning of February.

She was different. Harry noticed it at once, and so did Ron, though neither of them said so for a while. It wasn’t anything big. She still carried far too many books. She still did all her homework the night it was set. She still knew the answer to everything. But in her first Transfiguration lesson back, when Professor McGonagall asked the class about the difference between a Vanishing Spell and a Banishing one, Hermione’s hand went up, the way it always did, quick as a reflex. And then, halfway up, it stopped. And came down again. And Neville, who’d been sitting there for once with his mouth half open as though he actually knew, put his own hand up, very slowly, and gave the right answer, and went pink to his ears when Professor McGonagall said Quite right, Mr Longbottom, five points.

Hermione looked over at Neville and smiled. She looked pleased. She looked as pleased as if she’d got the five points herself.

‘Since when,’ Ron whispered to Harry, ‘does Hermione not answer a question?’

Harry didn’t know. But he thought he liked it.

She was different with him, too. She still sat next to him. She still checked his homework, if he asked. But she didn’t fuss with his collar any more, or move his goblet nearer his hand, or watch him all the way across the Great Hall. She’d stopped growling at people. When Malfoy drifted past the Gryffindor table, grey-faced and silent, Hermione still went a bit stiff, and her eyes still followed her, but she didn’t say anything. She just went back to her book. It was as though somebody had loosened something that had been wound much too tight inside her, and Harry, who had never really noticed how tight it had been until it wasn’t any more, found he could breathe a bit easier around her.

On her first evening back in Gryffindor Tower, Harry showed her T. M. Riddle’s diary, and told her how they’d come by it. Most of how they’d come by it.

‘Oh, it might have hidden powers,’ said Hermione eagerly. She took the diary, and turned it over, and peered at it closely. ‘Lots of old books do. Some of them only open at certain times. Or for certain people.’

‘Well, if it has, it’s hiding them brilliantly,’ said Ron. ‘Maybe it’s just shy. Why don’t you chuck it, Harry? Honestly. Bin it.’

Harry looked at the diary in Hermione’s hands. He found he didn’t like seeing it there. He wanted to take it back.

‘It’s important somehow. Precious even...’ Harry said.

He heard himself say it. It came out in an odd, slow voice, and he didn’t know where the word precious had come from. Then he remembered. It was the word Dracina had kept using. In the Great Hall, screaming. Mine. My precious.

He cleared his throat.

‘I need to know how it relates to the Chamber. It has something to do with it.’

He stared at the diary for a moment longer.

‘And I’d quite like to know what Riddle did to get an award for special services to the school, as well,’ he added.

‘Could’ve been anything,’ said Ron. ‘Maybe he got thirty O.W.L.s. Maybe he rescued a teacher from the giant squid. Maybe he did Myrtle in. That’d count as a service to the school, that would. Everyone would’ve chipped in for a trophy.’

But Harry could see from the sudden, frozen look on Hermione’s face that she was thinking exactly what he was thinking.

‘What?’ said Ron, looking from one of them to the other.

‘Well,’ said Harry, ‘the Chamber of Secrets was opened fifty years ago. Malfoy said so. And we’ve known since Christmas that this diary’s fifty years old.’

‘Yeah,’ said Ron. ‘We’ve been over that. So?’

‘And T. M. Riddle,’ said Hermione, tapping the cover, ‘got his special award fifty years ago, too.’

‘So?’

‘Oh, Ron,’ said Hermione. But she didn’t snap it, the way she would have done before Christmas. She said it almost fondly. ‘Think. Whoever opened the Chamber last time got expelled, fifty years ago. And T. M. Riddle got a special award for services to the school, fifty years ago. So what if that’s what he got it for? For catching the heir of Slytherin? Then his diary might tell us everything. Where the Chamber is, and how you get in, and what’s down there. And whoever’s behind it this time wouldn’t want a thing like that just lying about, would they?’

‘Brilliant,’ said Ron. ‘Really brilliant. Only there’s one small problem with it, isn’t there? There’s nothing in it.’

Harry looked down.

He hadn’t told them. He hadn’t told either of them that the diary had written back to him. That it had said hello, and known his name, and asked him about what was underneath. They didn’t know. And for some reason, a reason he couldn’t have put into words, Harry felt quite strongly that he shouldn’t tell them. Not yet.

But Hermione was already pulling her wand out of her bag.

‘It might be in invisible ink!’ she whispered.

She tapped the diary three times and said, ‘Aparecium!‘

Nothing happened. Not a mark.

Undeterred, Hermione dug in her bag again and came out with what looked like a bright red rubber.

‘It’s a Revealer,’ she said. ‘I got it in Diagon Alley.’

She rubbed it hard on the page for the first of January. Nothing happened. She tried the first of February. Nothing. She tried the inside front cover and the inside back cover and the page for her own birthday, and nothing happened at all.

‘Maybe the diary is just empty. You saw how Malfoy was,’ said Ron. ‘Maybe she’s just gone mental and thought the diary was more important than it was.’

Hermione put the Revealer away. She didn’t argue. A few weeks ago, Harry thought, she’d have argued for an hour. Now she only looked at the diary, and sighed, and handed it back to him.

‘Maybe,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know everything. I’m learning that.’

Harry took the diary back. His fingers closed round it, and he felt better at once.

He knew the truth. He knew it wasn’t empty. Dracina had talked about Tom. Tom Riddle, whose name was on the back of this very book. She’d talked about him as though he were a person, as though he were somebody she spoke to. And when Harry had written in the diary, it had written back. He’d have to find out more, and soon. He needed to get back to the diary. But he had to do it without Ron and Hermione finding out. Why? He didn’t know why. He was just sure of it. He was as sure of it as he was of his own name.

Harry couldn’t have explained, even to himself, why he didn’t just throw Riddle’s diary away.

The fact was that even though it looked blank, he kept picking it up without thinking, and turning the pages, as though it were a story he wanted to get to the end of. And although Harry was quite certain he’d never heard of Tom Riddle before Christmas night, it seemed to mean something to him all the same. It was almost as though Riddle had been a friend of his once, a long time ago, when he was very small, and he’d half forgotten him. Which was absurd. He’d never had a friend before Hogwarts. Dudley had made very sure of that.

All the same, Harry was determined to find out more about Riddle. So the next day at break he went down to the trophy room to look at Riddle’s special award, with an interested Hermione and a deeply unwilling Ron, who said he’d seen enough of the trophy room to last him the rest of his life and probably the one after.

Riddle’s shield was tucked away at the back of a corner cabinet, gold, and very well polished. It didn’t say why it had been given to him.

‘Good job, too,’ said Ron. ‘Or it’d be twice the size and I’d still be in here scrubbing it.’

But they did find Riddle’s name on an old Medal for Magical Merit, and on a list of former Head Boys.

‘Sounds like Percy,’ said Ron, wrinkling up his nose. ‘Prefect, Head Boy... probably top of every class. Massive stick up his bum.’

‘Is that meant to be an insult?’ said Hermione, sounding slightly wounded. Then, after a moment, she gave a small, rueful laugh. ‘No. You’re right. I know. I’m working on it.’

Ron grinned at her.

The sun had begun to shine again, weakly, over Hogwarts, and inside the castle the mood had grown a little more hopeful. There’d been no more attacks since Justin and Nearly Headless Nick, and Madam Pomfrey was pleased to report that the Mandrakes were becoming sulky and secretive, which meant they were leaving their childhood behind them.

‘Once their spots clear up, they’ll be ready to be moved into bigger pots,’ Harry heard her telling Filch one afternoon, quite kindly. ‘And after that, it’s not long at all till we chop them up and stew them. You’ll have Mrs Norris back before you know it, Argus.’

Perhaps the heir of Slytherin had lost his nerve, Harry thought. Or her nerve. It must be getting harder and harder to open the Chamber, with the whole school on the alert. Perhaps the monster, whatever it was, was curling up somewhere at that very moment to sleep for another fifty years...

Ernie Macmillan didn’t see it that way. He was still quite convinced that Harry was the culprit, and that he’d given himself away at the Duelling Club, and he told anyone who’d listen.

‘Ernie Macmillan,’ said Harry, loudly, in the corridor outside Herbology, when Ernie had said it once too often within earshot, ‘is giving himself away as a complete plonker. Somebody might want to tell him.’

Seamus snorted. Ernie went bright red and walked off very fast.

Peeves wasn’t helping matters. He kept popping up in crowded corridors singing Oh Potter, the plotter, and he’d worked out a dance to go with it now, which involved a great deal of high kicking and a final bow.

And Gilderoy Lockhart seemed to be under the impression that he’d stopped the attacks himself. Harry overheard him telling Professor McGonagall so while the Gryffindors were lining up outside Transfiguration.

‘I really don’t think we’ll be having any more bother, Minerva,’ he said, tapping the side of his nose and winking. ‘I rather think the Chamber’s been shut for good this time. The culprit must have known I was on to them. It was only a matter of time before I had them. Very wise of them to call it a day before I came down on them like a ton of bricks.’

Professor McGonagall said nothing whatever. Her nostrils had gone very thin as she thought about what she did to that charming MI6 agent who so brazenly lied to her face for the last and very final time.

‘Do you know what the school needs now?’ Lockhart went on. ‘A lift! Something to blow away the cobwebs! A morale-booster, Minerva! I won’t say any more just now, but I’ve got just the thing...’

He tapped his nose once more, and strode off down the corridor.

Professor McGonagall watched him go. Then, very quietly, so quietly that Harry only just heard it, she said something under her breath in a language he didn’t recognise. It sounded Russian. It did not sound like a compliment.

What Lockhart meant by a morale-booster became horribly clear at breakfast on the fourteenth of February.

Harry hadn’t had much sleep, because Wood had kept them out practising until gone ten the night before, and he got down to the Great Hall a bit late. For a moment he thought he’d come in through the wrong doors.

Every wall was covered in enormous, garish pink flowers. Worse, heart-shaped confetti was drifting down from the pale blue ceiling, settling in the porridge and the marmalade and people’s hair. Harry went over to the Gryffindor table, where Ron was sitting looking as though he might be sick, and Hermione seemed to have come over a bit giggly.

‘What’s happening?’ Harry asked, sitting down and brushing confetti off his bacon.

Ron pointed at the staff table. He seemed too revolted to speak.

Lockhart was on his feet, in robes of luminous pink to match the decorations, waving his arms for quiet. The teachers on either side of him had faces like stone. Professor McGonagall had a little muscle going in her cheek. Snape looked as though someone had just made him drink a pint of Skele-Gro.

‘A very happy Valentine’s Day to you all!’ Lockhart cried. ‘And a special thank-you to the forty-six of you who’ve already sent me cards! Yes! I’ve arranged a little surprise for all of you, to brighten up the place, and believe me, it’s only the start!’

He clapped his hands. The doors from the Entrance Hall swung open, and in tramped a dozen very sour-looking dwarfs. They were wearing golden wings, and carrying little golden harps, and every single one of them looked as though they’d like to hit somebody with theirs.

‘My delightful, card-carrying cupids!’ beamed Lockhart. ‘All day long, they’ll be scurrying about the school delivering your Valentines! And that’s not all! I’m quite sure my colleagues will be only too pleased to join in! Why not pop along and ask Professor Snape how to mix up a Love Potion? Or Professor Flitwick! He knows more about Entrancing Enchantments than any wizard alive, the wicked old rascal!’

Professor Flitwick put his face in his hands. Snape looked as though the first student to ask him about Love Potions would be made to drink something very different.

And then Lockhart did something that Harry didn’t notice at the time, but remembered later. He looked down the Hall. He looked at the Gryffindor table, and found Harry. Then he looked across at the Slytherin table, at a thin, pale, silent girl sitting by herself at the very end of it. And he gave a great, broad, knowing wink, first to one, then to the other, and tapped the side of his nose.

‘Young love!‘ he mouthed, at nobody in particular, and beamed.

‘Please, Hermione,’ said Ron, as they left the Great Hall for their first lesson, ‘tell me you weren’t one of the forty-six.’

Hermione suddenly became very interested in searching her bag for her timetable.

‘I sent it before Christmas,’ she muttered at last, very pink. ‘Before I... before. The owl must have held on to it. I’d ask for it back, if I could.’

Ron let out a howl of laughter. Hermione hit him with her timetable. But she was laughing too.

All day long the dwarfs kept barging into lessons to deliver Valentines, which drove the teachers wild. And late in the afternoon, as the Gryffindors were going up the stairs to Charms, one of them caught up with Harry.

‘Oi! You! ‘Arry Potter!‘ bawled a particularly grim-faced dwarf, shoving people out of the way to get to him.

Harry went hot all over. There was a whole queue of first-years on the stairs, and Ginny Weasley was in it. He tried to get away. But the dwarf cut a path through the crowd by kicking everybody in the shins, and got to him before he’d gone two steps.

‘Got a musical message for ‘Arry Potter,’ he said, twanging his harp in a menacing sort of way. ‘In person. Special delivery. Professor’s orders. Says he’s taken a personal interest.’

‘Not here,’ Harry hissed, and tried to dodge round him.

‘Hold still!‘ grunted the dwarf, and grabbed Harry’s bag, and hauled him back.

‘Get off!’ Harry snarled, pulling.

There was a loud ripping noise, and his bag split clean in half. His books and wand and parchment and quill spilled out all over the floor, and his ink bottle smashed and splattered over the lot of them. Harry scrambled about trying to pick it all up before the dwarf could start singing, causing quite a jam on the stairs.

‘And what’s all this?’

It was a cold, drawling voice. Harry knew it at once. Dracina Malfoy was standing a few steps above him, with Crabbe and Goyle behind her, looking down at the mess.

Harry didn’t look at her. He wasn’t speaking to her. He hadn’t spoken to her since the hospital wing, and he had no intention of starting now. He started shoving everything into the remains of his bag as fast as he could, desperate to get away before Malfoy could hear whatever the dwarf was about to sing.

‘What’s all this commotion?’ said another familiar voice, and Percy Weasley arrived on the scene.

Harry lost his head completely. He tried to make a run for it. But the dwarf threw his arms round Harry’s knees and brought him crashing down on the stone.

‘Right,’ said the dwarf, sitting on Harry’s ankles. ‘Here’s your singing Valentine.’

He cleared his throat. He twanged his harp. And then, to Harry’s horror, in a surprisingly sweet, surprisingly deep, surprisingly tuneful voice, he began to sing.

‘There’s a boy with eyes like the first green of spring,

Who flies like the wind and who fears not a thing;

They locked him away and they taught him not to sing,

But he rose from the dark like a lark on the wing.

Oh, his heart is a lantern that burns in the cold,

And he stands in the gap when the night’s growing old,

And there’s one who has watched him since autumn first fell,

Who has noticed him, always, and knows him too well.

So be brave, little knight, though you don’t know her name,

She is silver and stubborn and wild as a flame,

And should any try taking you, or turn you away,

She would pull down the stars and the stones where they lay.

She will wait at her window. She’ll wait till you’re grown.

She will wait till the world has gone quiet as stone.

And she’ll hold you so close you’ll forget you were free,

When you climb up the tower, and finally see.’

The last note hung in the air. The dwarf put down his harp.

There was a silence on the staircase. It was a very strange silence. Several of the first-years seemed to have been genuinely moved. One girl was dabbing her eyes. But most people were trying very hard not to laugh, and failing, and the harder they tried the worse it got, until the whole staircase was shaking with sniggers.

Harry lay on the floor with a dwarf on his ankles and wanted to die. He wanted the stone to open up and swallow him. He’d never been so humiliated in his whole life, and that was counting Aunt Marge.

And then Ron, who’d been holding it in heroically, gave up.

‘Who,’ he gasped, clutching the banister, with tears pouring down his face, ‘who in their right mind wrote that? "Pull down the stars"? "Forget you were free"? That’s mental, that is! That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard! Who writes rubbish like that?’

Harry happened to be looking up at Malfoy when Ron said it.

He saw her face. All the colour had come up into it, right up into her hair. Her eyes were very bright. She’d been standing quite still through the whole song, Harry realised, with her hands clasped in front of her, watching him. Watching his face. And whatever she’d been hoping to see there, she hadn’t seen it. Now she turned on Ron like a snake striking.

‘You,’ she spat. ‘You... you ginger-nut biscuit, freckled, hand-me-down charity case! What would you know about anything? You couldn’t write your own name without your mummy holding the quill! You couldn’t tell a poem from a shopping list! You’ve got the brains of a Flobberworm and the manners of a gnome and you smell like that pigsty you call a house!’

‘Oi!‘ said Ron, sobering up very fast.

‘Leave him alone, Malfoy!’ Harry was struggling up, kicking the dwarf off his feet.

‘Oh, now he speaks!’ Malfoy rounded on him. ‘Now he’s got something to say! Weeks, Potter! Weeks, and not one word, and the first thing you say is to stick up for Weasley! And you just lay there! You lay there on the floor the whole time with a face like you’d swallowed a slug! Didn’t you even listen? Did you even hear it?’

‘Hear it? The whole castle heard it! Who sends someone a thing like that in front of everyone? Whoever it was must be off their head!’

Malfoy flinched as if he’d slapped her.

‘Off their head?’ Her voice went up to a shriek. ‘How dare... you ungrateful, blind, stupid, stupid...’

‘Enough!‘ said Percy, pushing his way between them. ‘That’s quite enough, the pair of you. Off you go, everybody, off you go, the bell went five minutes ago, move along, to your lessons, now.’ He began shooing the younger ones away up the stairs, some of whom were still crying with laughter. ‘And you, Malfoy.’

Harry, glancing round, saw Malfoy stoop and snatch something up off the floor. She held it up to Crabbe and Goyle with a nasty little smirk, about to say something about it. And Harry realised, with a lurch of his stomach, that it was Riddle’s diary.

It had fallen out of his bag with everything else.

‘Put that down,’ said Harry quietly.

And time seemed to slow.

Malfoy didn’t look at the diary at first. She was looking at Harry, smirking, waiting for him to beg. Then her eyes dropped, idly, to what she was holding. And Harry saw the moment she understood.

Her eyes went wide. Wider than he’d ever seen them. All the colour that had come into her face during the song drained out of it again, all at once, leaving it as white as paper. Her fingers closed on the diary. Her lips parted. She drew it slowly, slowly towards her chest, the way you’d draw in something you’d lost in deep water and never thought you’d see again, and Harry saw her whole body begin to tremble, and heard her breathe out a single word, so softly it was hardly a sound at all.

‘Mine...’

Then Percy plucked it neatly out of her hands.

‘He told you to give it back, Ms Malfoy’ said Percy, with a very small, very satisfied smile.

He handed it to Harry. Harry could see exactly what Percy was doing. He was getting his own back, for the dungeon corridor at Christmas, for Peter, for did your whole family club together for it. But Percy honestly thought it was just a schoolbook of Harry’s that Malfoy was trying to pinch out of spite. He had no idea what he’d done.

Malfoy made a noise.

It wasn’t a word. It was a sort of high, thin, keening sound, like a kettle just before it boils, and her hands came up, the fingers bent and clawed, and she took a step towards Harry, and then another, and her eyes were fixed on the diary in his hands with a look that wasn’t quite human. Harry took a step back without meaning to. Ron stepped in front of him. Malfoy’s lips were drawn right back from her teeth, and she was breathing in short, sharp hisses, and Harry thought quite clearly, she’s going to go for me, she’s going to go for my throat...

‘Oi! Another one for ‘Arry Potter!’

A second dwarf came barrelling up the stairs, shoving Crabbe out of the way with his harp. He planted himself in front of Harry, scowling, and struck up before anyone could stop him. He had a much worse voice than the first one, and he sang this one twice as loud.

‘His hair is as black as a raven at night,

And his eyes are as green as a frog in the light,

He’s ever so brave and he’s ever so kind,

And he once caught the Snitch with his arm on behind.

I wish I was clever, I wish I was tall,

I wish he would see me at all, at all,

He beat You-Know-Who when he wasn’t but small,

And he’s the best wizard and seeker of all.’

There was a short silence.

Harry looked over at the queue of first-years. Right at the back, Ginny Weasley had gone so red that she was practically glowing. She had both hands over her mouth.

And Malfoy saw her too.

Her head snapped round. Her eyes found Ginny, small and scarlet and shrinking at the back of the queue. And all the wild, clawing, unhinged fury that had been building up in her and pointing at Harry swung round, all at once, and landed on Ginny instead.

‘You,’ Malfoy breathed.

Ginny took a step back.

‘That one was yours, wasn’t it?’ Malfoy’s voice was rising. ‘Wasn’t it? I knew it. I knew it the moment he opened his mouth. It couldn’t be anyone else’s. If it was Granger’s it would at least have been clever. It would at least have wit. Granger would never write something that stupid. Frog in the light? With his arm on behind? That’s not a poem, that’s the scribble of a stupid, silly, pathetic little girl! Is that what you think he wants? Is that what you think he’s for? You think he’d ever look twice at a snivelling little Weasley nobody who can’t even rhyme...’

Ginny burst into tears. She turned and pushed her way through the first-years and ran, sobbing, up the stairs and away round the corner towards her classroom.

Harry and Ron both started forward at the same moment. But Percy got there first. He had gone a dangerous colour.

‘Malfoy,’ he said, in a very quiet, very cold voice that Harry had never heard him use before. ‘You will go to your lesson. Now. Or I will take you there myself, by the ear, and I will tell Professor Snape exactly why. Move.’

For a moment Malfoy didn’t move. She stood on the stairs staring at the diary in Harry’s hands, her chest heaving. Then Crabbe tugged her sleeve, and she shook him off, and turned, and went. But she looked back over her shoulder all the way down the stairs. Not at Harry. At the diary.

‘Mum always told me,’ said Ron, through his teeth, watching her go, ‘never to hit a girl. Never ever. She said a gentleman wizard never does, no matter what.’ His fists were clenched. His ears were scarlet. ‘But Malfoy makes it bloody hard, Harry. She makes it bloody hard. After what she just said to Ginny...’

Hermione had come up beside them. She’d seen the whole thing from further down the stairs. And Harry saw her face change as she watched Malfoy go. He saw it go smooth and still, the way it used to go, like a lake with something very large underneath. He saw her open her mouth. And he knew, somehow, that what was about to come out of it was going to be something cold and quiet and frightening, the kind of thing she’d said before Christmas over a cauldron in a toilet.

Then she closed her mouth again.

She took a breath. Her face relaxed. And when she spoke, it was in her ordinary voice.

‘What she said to Ginny was wrong,’ Hermione said. ‘And what she said to you, Ron. And to Harry. It wasn’t on. It just wasn’t. Somebody ought to go after Ginny.’ She hitched up her bag. ‘I’ll go. I’ll tell Professor Flitwick you’ll be along in a minute.’

She went off up the stairs after Ginny. Harry stared after her.

‘Did she just...’ said Ron.

‘Yeah,’ said Harry. ‘I think she did.’

It wasn’t until they’d got to Professor Flitwick’s class that Harry noticed something very odd about Riddle’s diary.

All his other books were soaked in scarlet ink. Every one. The pages were stuck together and dripping. But the diary was perfectly clean. Not a spot. Not a drop. It was as spotless as it had been before the ink bottle smashed all over it.

He tried to show Ron. But Ron was having trouble with his wand again. Great purple bubbles were blossoming out of the end of it and floating off round the classroom, and he wasn’t much interested in anything else.

Harry went to bed before anyone else in his dormitory that night. Partly this was because he didn’t think he could stand to hear Fred and George singing His hair is as black as a raven at night one more time. And partly it was because he wanted to look at Riddle’s diary again, and he knew Ron thought he was wasting his time.

He drew the curtains round his four-poster. He sat on his bed and flicked through the blank pages. Not one of them had a trace of scarlet ink on it. Then he took a new bottle of ink out of his bedside cabinet, and dipped his quill, and let a single blot fall onto the first page.

The ink shone on the paper for a second. Then, as though the page were drinking it, it vanished.

Harry’s heart was beating fast. He loaded his quill again, and wrote:

You know my name is Harry Potter.

He paused. He’d known whose diary this was since Christmas night, sitting by the dying fire with Ron, looking at the gold letters on the back. It was time he said so.

He wrote:

Tom Riddle, I presume.

The ink faded into the page. And in its place, new words rose up out of the paper, in that same neat, sloping hand.

Well done, Harry. That’s very clever of you. Just as she said.

Harry wrote again.

Dracina?

Oh yes, she goes on and on about how clever you are Harry. As I said, she talks about you all the time. Every other sentence is about you. Your demeanour, how you speak to her, your appearance, and a great many other things.

Harry already knew that Malfoy seethed over him constantly. He’d heard as much from Lucius Malfoy himself, muttering in Borgin and Burkes about the cursed Potter boy, and he’d heard it again from Dracina’s own mouth on Christmas night, when she’d moaned about him the whole way to the Slytherin common room to what she thought were Crabbe and Goyle.

She hates me, he wrote. I know that. She’s made that very clear.

The reply took a little longer, this time. When it came, it seemed to Harry to have something almost like amusement in it.

Does she? I wonder. You know, Harry, I have read a great many pages about you. I could tell you, if you wished, precisely which way your hair sticks up at the back, and on which days it is worse. I could tell you how many seconds you looked at her in the Charms corridor on the ninth of December. I could tell you the exact colour of your eyes in candlelight, according to her, and I assure you she has a great many words for it. If I may be quite candid, there are only so many pages a fellow can read on such subjects before he begins to wish she would talk about the weather.

Harry snorted. He couldn’t help it.

That doesn’t sound like hate, the diary went on. Does it? Not to me. People don’t write forty pages about something they hate. They write forty pages about something they cannot stop thinking about.

Harry sat very still.

She’s horrible to me, he wrote, more slowly. She’s horrible to everyone. She made Ginny cry today. She called Hermione a Mudblood. She said things to me about my aunt and uncle that...

He stopped. He crossed it out, though the crossing out sank into the page as well.

She is very unhappy, wrote the diary. I think you know that, really. She is a lonely girl, Harry. Lonelier than you’d imagine. She has a father who has taught her that kindness is weakness, and a house full of servants who are afraid of her, and not one friend in the world whom she trusts. She is cruel because she has never been shown how to be anything else. But underneath it, you know, she cares about you more than she cares about anything. She worries about you. She lies awake at night worrying about you. Whether you are eating. Whether you are safe. Where you go in the summers. There was the slightest pause. Did you never wonder how she knew?

Harry stared at the page.

Knew what?

But the diary seemed to have moved on.

It is not my place, of course. I am only a memory. But if I were you, Harry, I would be a little kinder to her. She has nobody else. And she would do anything for you. Anything at all. You might be surprised, one day, how much.

Harry didn’t know what to write. He sat there with the quill hovering over the page, and the curtains of his four-poster shutting out the rest of the world, and found that his face was hot, and his thoughts had gone all tangled. He thought of Malfoy in the hospital wing, lighting up when she saw him. He thought of her on the Quidditch pitch, flying in front of the Bludger. That’s how you stand in front of somebody. He thought of the song on the stairs, and her face while the dwarf was singing it, and how she’d looked at him afterwards, as though he’d failed some test. He thought of Is that why you’re so skinny, Potter? and his eyes stinging. He thought, for some reason, of a box of sugared violets.

It didn’t make any sense. None of it made any sense. She was a bully. She’d always been a bully. Hadn’t she?

He shook himself.

What are you? he wrote. You said you’re a memory. What does that mean?

Exactly what it says, came the answer. I am a memory, Harry. My memories, kept safe in these pages, for fifty years. I was sixteen when I wrote them. I knew, even then, that there were things that ought not to be forgotten. Things that other people would very much have liked to forget.

What sort of things?

Things about the Chamber of Secrets.

Harry’s heart gave a great thump against his ribs.

He nearly upset the ink bottle in his hurry.

You know about the Chamber of Secrets?

Oh, yes. I know about the Chamber. When I was at school, everyone insisted it was a myth. A fairy tale for first-years. It wasn’t. In my fifth year it was opened. The thing inside it got out and it went for students. Several of them.  In the end it killed one. A girl. I found out who had opened it, and he was expelled. But the Headmaster at the time, Professor Dippet, couldn’t bear the shame of it. He couldn’t bear people knowing such a thing had happened at Hogwarts, under his nose. So he told me I wasn’t to say a word. They put it about that the girl had died in some sort of accident. And they gave me a very handsome trophy, with my name engraved on it, and told me to keep quiet. There was the briefest pause. But I always knew it might happen again. The creature never died. And the one who could set it free was never locked away.

Harry scrawled his answer so fast his writing slanted.

It is happening again. Right now. There’ve been four attacks, five counting a cat, and nobody knows who’s doing it. Who was it last time?

I could show you, if you like, wrote the diary. You needn’t take my word for it. I could take you inside my memory. Into the night I caught him.

Harry hesitated, with his quill held above the page.

What did Riddle mean? How could anybody take you inside a memory? He glanced at the gap in the curtains, at the dormitory door, which was getting dark. When he looked back at the diary, new words were already forming.

Let me take you there, Harry.

Harry paused for a fraction of a second.

Then he wrote two letters.

OK.

The pages of the diary began to riffle, all by themselves, as though a gale were blowing through them, faster and faster, and then stopped, about halfway through the book, at the middle of June. Harry stared. The little square for the thirteenth of June seemed to have turned into a tiny window, no bigger than a postage stamp, and inside it something was moving. Light and shadow. People. His hands shaking slightly, he lifted the book and put his eye close to the little window. And before he knew what was happening he was falling forwards into it. The window was rushing outwards to meet him, swelling, opening, and he felt himself lift clean off his bed and pitch headfirst through the page, into a whirling storm of colour and darkness...

His feet hit something solid. He staggered, and stood still, shaking, as the swirling shapes around him slowed and sharpened and settled into a room.

He knew at once where he was. The round walls. The portraits, dozing in their frames. It was Dumbledore’s office. But it wasn’t Dumbledore behind the desk.

It was a very old, very frail-looking wizard, almost completely bald except for a few wispy white tufts above his ears, sitting hunched over a letter by the light of a single candle. Harry had never seen him before in his life.

‘Sorry,’ Harry said shakily. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to just barge in...’

The old wizard didn’t look up. He went on reading, with a little crease between his eyebrows.

Harry edged closer to the desk.

‘Er... I’ll go, shall I? I’ll just...’

Nothing. It was as though Harry hadn’t spoken at all. Harry wondered if he might be deaf, and raised his voice.

‘I’m really sorry to have disturbed you. I’ll be going now.’

The wizard folded the letter, sighed, got up, walked straight past Harry without so much as a glance, and went to draw the curtains across his window. The sky outside was blood-red. It must be sunset. He came back, and lowered himself into his chair, and sat twiddling his thumbs, watching the door.

Harry looked round the office. There was no golden perch. No phoenix. None of the little whirring silver instruments. No blue man in golden armour between the bookcases. This was Hogwarts the way Riddle had known it, fifty years ago, which meant that this old man was the Headmaster, not Dumbledore. And Harry himself was nothing at all here. A ghost. Nobody in this room could see him or hear him, because as far as they were concerned he hadn’t been born yet.

There was a knock at the door.

‘Come,’ said the old wizard, in a thin, tired voice.

A boy came in, taking off his pointed hat. He was about sixteen. There was a silver Prefect’s badge pinned to his chest. He was a good deal taller than Harry, and very handsome, and his hair, Harry noticed, was as black as his own.

‘Ah. Riddle,’ said the Headmaster.

‘You asked to see me, Professor Dippet?’ said Riddle. He looked nervous.

‘Sit down, my boy, sit down. I’ve had your letter.’

‘Oh,’ said Riddle. He sat, and clasped his hands together in his lap, very tightly.

‘Now, Tom.’ Dippet’s voice was kind. ‘I’m afraid it’s quite out of the question. You can’t possibly stay on at the castle over the summer. Surely you’d rather go home for the holidays? Like everybody else?’

‘No, sir,’ said Riddle at once. ‘No. I’d far, far rather stay here, sir, than have to go back to... to that...’

He stopped. He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to. Harry, standing invisible by the bookcase, understood him perfectly. Tom didn’t want to go back to wherever it was he lived. Not one bit. Just like Harry. Harry found that he’d moved closer without meaning to.

‘You spend your holidays in a Muggle orphanage, I understand?’ said Dippet, curiously.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Riddle.

And his face did something then that Harry recognised so completely that it gave him a jolt. It closed up. It went flat and still and careful, the way you’d shut a door on a room you didn’t want anybody to see into. It was the exact face Harry made whenever anybody mentioned the Dursleys. He’d seen it in the mirror. He knew it from the inside. And in that moment Harry knew that Tom Riddle hated going back to that orphanage every bit as much as Harry hated going back to Privet Drive. He felt something warm go out of him towards the tall boy in the chair. Here was somebody who’d understand.

‘You are Muggle-born, then?’

‘Half, sir. My father was a Muggle. My mother was a witch.’

‘And your mother and father are both...?’

‘My mother died almost as soon as I was born, sir. They told me at the orphanage that she lived just long enough to give me my names. Tom, after my father. Marvolo, after her own father.’

Harry’s heart went out to him again. No mother. Raised by people who didn’t want him. Counting the days every summer until he could come back to the only place that had ever felt like home. It was like looking at himself, older, in a cracked mirror.

Dippet made a small, sympathetic clucking noise.

‘The thing of it is, Tom,’ he sighed, ‘that in ordinary times, something might have been arranged. But as matters stand...’

‘You mean the attacks, sir?’ said Riddle.

Harry’s heart leapt. He moved closer still, terrified of missing a word.

‘Just so,’ said the Headmaster. ‘My dear boy, you must see it would be very foolish of me to let you stay on alone in the castle once term’s over. Particularly after this latest... this dreadful business... that poor little girl...’ He shook his head. ‘You’ll be much safer at your orphanage, Tom. Much safer. Between ourselves, the Ministry is even talking about closing the school altogether. And we’re no nearer to finding the... ah... the cause of all this unpleasantness than we were at Easter...’

Riddle’s eyes had gone very wide.

‘Sir... what if somebody were caught? If it all just... stopped?’

‘What d’you mean?’ Dippet’s voice went up in a squeak, and he sat up straight in his chair. ‘Riddle, are you telling me you know something about these attacks?’

‘No, sir,’ said Riddle quickly.

But Harry was quite sure it was exactly the same sort of no that he’d given Dumbledore in this very room before Christmas. Everything is being handled.

Dippet sank back in his chair, looking faintly let down.

‘Off you go, then, Tom...’

Riddle slid out of his chair and went out of the room, rather stiffly. For a moment, as he turned towards the door, the disappointment on his face was so exactly like Harry’s own that it made Harry’s chest ache. It was the face of somebody who’d just been told he had to leave the most wonderful, magical place in the world and go back to somewhere cold and grey and cruel, where Hogwarts might as well have been a dream. Harry had worn that face on the platform at King’s Cross last summer, watching Uncle Vernon’s car pull up.

And then, as Harry watched, the disappointment drained out of Riddle’s face. Something else came up in its place. Something hard, and set, and determined. Resolve. The very same resolve Harry felt in himself when things were at their worst. The resolve that had kept him holding on to his broom while Quirrell tried to throw him off it.

Harry followed him.

Down the moving spiral staircase they went, and out past the gargoyle into the darkening corridor. There, Riddle stopped. So did Harry, watching him. Harry could see that Riddle was thinking very hard about something. He was chewing his lip, and his forehead was creased. Then, quite suddenly, as though he’d made up his mind, he set off fast down the corridor, and Harry hurried noiselessly after him.

They didn’t meet another soul until they reached the Entrance Hall. There, a tall wizard with long, sweeping auburn hair and a long auburn beard called out to Riddle from the top of the marble staircase.

‘You’re up late, Tom. Where’ve you been?’

Harry’s mouth fell open. It was Dumbledore. A Dumbledore fifty years younger, with not a single white hair on his head.

‘The Headmaster wanted to see me, sir,’ said Riddle.

‘Well, straight up to bed with you, then,’ said Dumbledore. He gave Riddle exactly the sort of long, piercing, see-right-through-you look that Harry knew so well. ‘The corridors aren’t a place to be wandering about in, these days. Not since...’

He sighed heavily, wished Riddle goodnight, and strode off.

Riddle watched him go until he was out of sight. Then, moving quickly, he went straight down the stone steps to the dungeons, with Harry close behind him.

But to Harry’s disappointment, Riddle didn’t lead him to some hidden passage or secret tunnel. He went into the very same dungeon where Harry had Potions with Snape. The torches weren’t lit. Riddle pushed the door almost shut, and stood in the dark beside it, watching the passage outside through the crack. Harry could only just make him out.

They stood there for what felt to Harry like an hour at least. Riddle didn’t move. He didn’t fidget. He stood at the door like a statue, staring out through the gap, waiting. And just when Harry had stopped feeling tense and expectant, and had begun to wish very much that he could go back to the present, he heard something move outside.

Somebody was creeping along the passage.

The footsteps went past the dungeon door. Riddle, as silent as a shadow, slipped out through the gap and followed, and Harry went tiptoeing after him, forgetting that nobody could hear him anyway.

They followed the footsteps for perhaps five minutes. Then Riddle stopped dead, with his head on one side, listening. Harry heard a door creak open somewhere ahead. And then a voice, a low, hoarse, urgent whisper.

‘C’mon, then... c’mon... gotta get yeh out o’ here... in yeh go... into the box, quick now...’

Something about that voice tugged at Harry. He knew it from somewhere.

Riddle stepped suddenly round the corner. Harry stepped out behind him.

He could see the dark shape of a huge boy, crouched in front of an open door, with a very large wooden box beside him.

‘Good evening, Rubeus,’ said Riddle sharply.

The boy slammed the door and leapt up.

‘Tom! Wha’ are yeh doin’ down here?’

Riddle took a step closer.

‘It’s over,’ he said. ‘It’s finished, Rubeus. I’m going to have to turn you in. They’re going to close Hogwarts if this doesn’t stop.’

‘Wha’ d’yeh-’

‘I don’t believe you meant anyone to get killed. I don’t. But you can’t keep a monster as a pet, Rubeus. I suppose you let it out for a bit of exercise, and it-’

‘He never killed nobody!’ The big boy had backed up against the closed door. From behind it, Harry could hear an odd sound, a rustling, and a dry, rapid click-click-click. ‘He never!’

‘Rubeus.’ Riddle came closer still. ‘That girl’s mother and father are arriving tomorrow. The very least Hogwarts owes them is to make sure the thing that killed their daughter is put down.’

‘It wasn’ him!’ roared the boy. His voice boomed and rang down the dark passage. ‘He’d never! He never would!’

‘Stand aside,’ said Riddle, and drew his wand.

His spell lit up the whole corridor with a sudden blaze of fire-coloured light. The door behind the big boy flew open so violently that it threw him clean across the passage into the opposite wall. And out of the doorway came something that made Harry let out a long, piercing scream that nobody in the world but himself could hear.

It was enormous. A great, low, bristling body, hunched up on a forest of thick black hairy legs. A cluster of eyes, gleaming in the wandlight like a heap of wet black beads. And a pair of curved, glistening pincers, clicking.

Riddle raised his wand again. He was too slow. The thing knocked him flat as it went past him, and went scuttling away up the corridor on its dreadful legs, and was gone. Riddle scrambled to his feet and swung round after it, wand raised. But the big boy threw himself on Riddle, and wrenched the wand out of his hand, and flung him back down, bellowing:

‘NOOOOOOOOO!‘

Everything spun. The darkness swallowed it all. Harry felt himself falling, falling, and then, with a crash, he landed flat on his back on his own four-poster in the Gryffindor dormitory, with Riddle’s diary lying open on his chest.

Before he’d even got his breath back, the dormitory door opened and Ron came in.

‘Oh, there you are,’ he said.

Harry sat up. He was soaked with sweat, and shaking all over.

‘Mate, are you okay? What’s the matter?’ said Ron, looking at him with concern.

Harry stared at him.

‘It was Hagrid, Ron,’ he said. ‘Fifty years ago. It was Hagrid who opened the Chamber of Secrets.’

Harry, Ron and Hermione had always known that Hagrid had an unfortunate soft spot for large and monstrous creatures.

In their first year he’d tried to hatch and rear a dragon in his little wooden hut, and it would be a very long time before any of them forgot the enormous three-headed dog he’d named Fluffy. So if Hagrid, as a boy, had heard there was a monster hidden away somewhere in the castle, Harry was quite sure he’d have moved heaven and earth to get a look at it. He’d probably have thought it was a dreadful shame for the poor thing to be shut up in the dark for so long. He’d have wanted to let it out for a run. Harry could just picture a thirteen-year-old Hagrid, already twice the size of everybody else in his year, trying to buckle a collar and lead onto something with a million legs and a lot of eyes.

But Harry was every bit as sure that Hagrid would never, ever have meant for anybody to die.

He half wished he’d never found out how to work Riddle’s diary at all. He loved Hagrid. Hagrid had been the first person ever to give him a birthday cake. Hagrid had come and found him in a hut on a rock in the sea. And now Harry knew this, and couldn’t un-know it, and it sat in his chest like a stone.

Ron and Hermione made him go over what he’d seen again and again. They made him tell it so many times that he was thoroughly sick of telling it, and even sicker of the long, round-and-round conversations that came after.

‘So Hagrid’s the heir of Slytherin, is he?’ Harry said, the fifth time Ron asked him to describe the spider. ‘Hagrid. Hagrid. Who cried for a week when Norbert went off to Romania. Who knits. Who calls a three-headed dog Fluffy. The great and terrible heir of Salazar Slytherin, who’s sworn to purge the school of Mudbloods, and who once spent a whole afternoon trying to get a bird with a broken wing to eat a bit of scrambled egg. That Hagrid.’

‘All right, all right,’ said Ron. ‘Nobody said he was the heir.’

‘Riddle did. More or less.’

‘Perhaps Riddle got it wrong,’ said Hermione slowly. ‘Perhaps he caught the wrong person. It might have been a completely different creature doing the attacks, and Hagrid’s thing just happened to be...’

‘What, two monsters?’ said Ron flatly. ‘In one castle? At the same time? How many d’you reckon this place has got room for?’

‘We always knew Hagrid got expelled,’ said Harry miserably. ‘And it must have stopped, after. The attacks. Once Hagrid was gone. Or Riddle wouldn’t have been given his award, would he?’

Ron tried coming at it from another direction.

‘Riddle does sound a lot like Percy, though,’ he said. ‘Who asked him to go and grass on Hagrid? Nobody. He just went and did it. Typical swot.’

‘But Ron,’ said Hermione quietly, ‘somebody died.’

‘And if they’d shut the school,’ said Harry, ‘Riddle would’ve been sent back to that orphanage. For good. I don’t blame him for wanting to stay here. I’d have done anything...’

He stopped.

His thoughts had gone back, without his meaning them to, to the Dursleys. To frying pans and rolling pins. To the cat flap in the bottom of his bedroom door, and the bars on his window, and a slice of cold bread pushed through to him three times a day, when they remembered. To what it would mean, to be told he could never come back here. Never. To be locked in that little room at Privet Drive with nothing to look forward to, ever again.

Ron saw his face change. He’d always been able to see it. He reached over and gave Harry’s shoulder a rough, quick shove, the sort of shove that meant something else entirely.

‘Well, they’re not shutting it,’ he said firmly. ‘And you’re not going back there. Not ever. You’re coming to ours. So that’s that, isn’t it? There’s no use thinking about it.’

Harry felt the coldness in his chest ease a little. He managed a grin.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Yeah. That’s that.’

But later that night, lying in bed, he found himself thinking about Tom Riddle again. About his face when Dippet had said orphanage. Harry knew that face from the inside. He’d made it a thousand times. And it came to him that perhaps, out of everybody in the whole castle, out of everybody he’d ever met, Tom Riddle was the only person who would really, truly understand. Not Ron, who had a mum who knitted him jumpers. Not Hermione, whose parents sent her letters every week. Tom would understand. Tom had lived it.

His hand had crept out from under the covers, towards the edge of the bed, towards the gap underneath where the diary was wrapped in the old jumper. He wanted to talk to Tom. He wanted it very badly. He wanted to tell him about the cat flap, and the bread, and the bars. He’d never told anybody all of it. But Tom would listen.

Harry pulled his hand back.

He lay very still, staring at the canopy of his four-poster. Then he turned over, and put his back firmly to the edge of the bed, and made himself think about Quidditch until he fell asleep.

Ron bit his lip, the next day, and said, a bit hesitantly, ‘Harry. You bumped into Hagrid in Knockturn Alley, didn’t you? Before term?’

‘He was buying Flesh-Eating Slug Repellent,’ said Harry at once. ‘For the cabbages. He said.’

None of them said anything for a while.

Then Hermione asked the hardest question of all, in a very small voice.

‘Do you think we ought to go down and ask Hagrid? About all of it?’

‘Oh, yeah, that’d be lovely,’ said Ron. ‘Afternoon, Hagrid. Nice weather. Lovely bit of rock cake. By the way, you haven’t let anything big and hairy and murderous out in the castle recently, have you? Only we were wondering.‘

In the end they decided they wouldn’t say anything to Hagrid unless there was another attack. And as the days went by, and then the weeks, and there wasn’t so much as a whisper from the voice in the walls, they began to hope they’d never have to ask him why he’d been expelled at all.

It was nearly four months now since Justin and Nearly Headless Nick had been Petrified, and almost everybody seemed to have decided that whoever was behind the attacks had given up for good. Peeves had finally got bored with Oh Potter, the plotter. Ernie Macmillan asked Harry, quite politely, to pass him a bucket of leaping toadstools in Herbology one afternoon. And in March, several of the Mandrakes threw a loud, wild party in Greenhouse Three, which kept half of Hufflepuff awake and made Professor Sprout very happy indeed.

‘Once they start trying to climb into each other’s pots,’ she told Harry, beaming, with a pair of earmuffs round her neck, ‘that’s how we’ll know they’re grown. And then we can wake up those poor souls in the hospital wing.’

Dracina Malfoy had not been well, all that spring.

Harry noticed it without wanting to. She’d come back from the hospital wing after Christmas quieter and thinner and stranger, and since the Valentine’s Day staircase, since Percy had plucked the diary out of her hands and given it back to Harry, she had got worse. She had gone grey, and thin, and quieter still. She hardly ate. She didn’t sneer at anybody. She didn’t even look at Harry, much. She sat at the end of the Slytherin table and stared at nothing, and every so often her hand went to her robes and pressed there, and found nothing, and fell away. Once, in Potions, Harry saw her sitting with her quill hovering over a blank bit of parchment for the whole double lesson, not writing anything, just waiting, as though she expected the parchment to write back. Snape, who never noticed anything a Slytherin did wrong, noticed that. Harry saw him watch her with his lips pressed together.

Harry told himself he didn’t care. He told himself he wasn’t going to speak to her again, and he didn’t. But he noticed.

The second-years were given something new to think about over the Easter holidays. It was time to choose their subjects for the third year, and Hermione, for one, took it extremely seriously.

‘This could decide our entire futures,’ she told Harry and Ron, as the three of them pored over the long list of new subjects in the common room, ticking things off.

‘I just want to drop Potions,’ said Harry.

‘Can’t,’ said Ron gloomily. ‘You have to keep all your old ones. Otherwise I’d have binned Defence Against the Dark Arts the day Lockhart turned up.’

‘But Defence is vital!’ said Hermione. Then she caught herself, and stopped, and said in a different voice, ‘Well. It should be.’

‘Not the way he does it,’ said Ron. ‘All I’ve learned from Lockhart is never let pixies out of a cage. And never let Lockhart near your arm.’

Neville Longbottom had had letters from every single witch and wizard in his family, each of them telling him something different about what to pick. He sat in a corner surrounded by them, looking more and more frightened, reading the list with his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth and asking anybody who came near him whether they thought Arithmancy sounded harder than the Study of Ancient Runes.

Dean Thomas, who’d grown up with Muggles like Harry had, although those muggles weren’t English, shut his eyes, waved his wand over the list, and signed up for whatever it was pointing at when he opened them.

Hermione signed up for absolutely everything. She didn’t ask anybody’s advice at all. But Harry noticed she didn’t lecture anybody about their choices, either, which a few months ago she certainly would have.

Harry smiled grimly at the thought of what Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia would say if he tried to talk to them about a career in wizardry. Still, he wasn’t completely without guidance. Percy Weasley was only too eager to share his wisdom.

‘It all depends what you’re aiming for, Harry,’ Percy said, settling himself in the armchair opposite with the air of a man about to give a lecture. ‘It’s never too soon to start thinking about the future. I’d recommend Divination, personally. Now, people will tell you Muggle Studies is an easy option. I don’t agree. I think every witch and wizard ought to have a proper understanding of the non-magical world, especially if they’re going to be working alongside it. Look at Father. He’s dealing with Muggle business every day of his life. Charlie, of course, was always more the outdoors sort, so he went in for Care of Magical Creatures. You’ve got to play to your strengths, Harry. That’s the secret.’

But the only thing Harry thought he was really any good at was Quidditch. In the end, he signed up for the same new subjects as Ron, on the grounds that if he turned out to be hopeless at them, at least he’d have somebody friendly to be hopeless with.

‘You know you’re cleverer than you think you are, mate,’ said Ron, when Harry told him so. He said it quite matter-of-factly, without looking up from his own list. ‘You always do this. You go round thinking you’re thick, and then you go and work out something nobody else can. You worked out the Stone. You talked that snake down. You’d be all right at anything, you would. You just think you wouldn’t ‘cause of them.’

He didn’t say them who. He didn’t need to.

Harry looked down at his list. He didn’t know what to say to that. He wasn’t used to people saying things like that to him. But it stayed with him for the rest of the evening, warm, like a coal in his pocket.

Gryffindor’s next match was against Hufflepuff. Wood had them practising every single night after dinner, so that Harry hardly had time for anything except Quidditch and homework. But the practices were getting better, or at least drier, and on the evening before Saturday’s match he went up to his dormitory to drop off his broomstick feeling that Gryffindor’s chances of winning the Cup had never looked brighter.

His good mood didn’t last long.

At the top of the stairs to the dormitory he met Neville Longbottom, who looked frantic.

‘Harry! Harry, I... I didn’t... somebody’s... I’ve just come up and found...’

Neville’s round face was blotchy and pink. His hands were twisting together. He couldn’t seem to look Harry in the eye. He kept glancing at the door behind him, and then at the floor, and then at Harry’s ear, and then at the floor again.

He pushed the dormitory door open. Harry looked in.

The contents of his trunk had been flung all over the room. His school cloak lay on the floor in a heap, torn right down one side. The bedclothes had been ripped off his four-poster, and the drawer had been yanked clean out of his bedside cabinet, and everything in it had been tipped out across the bare mattress. It looked as though a small whirlwind had been through, or a very large dog.

Harry walked slowly over to the bed, with his mouth open, treading on a few loose pages of Travels with Trolls.

He and Neville were pulling the blankets back onto the bed when Ron, Dean and Seamus came in. Dean swore loudly.

‘Blimey, Harry. What happened?’

‘No idea,’ said Harry.

But Ron was looking at Harry’s school robes, which were lying across the end of the bed. Every single pocket had been turned inside out.

‘Somebody’s been looking for something,’ Ron said quietly. ‘Something they wanted. Is anything gone?’

Harry began picking up his things and throwing them back into his trunk. His Potions kit. His quills. His socks. His spellbooks. His Gryffindor scarf, the long one, the one he wore to matches, should have been on the hook at the end of his bed, and it wasn’t, and he couldn’t find it anywhere, and he thought that was odd, but it was only a scarf. His Invisibility Cloak was still there, crumpled up at the very bottom of the trunk, which was something; whoever it was hadn’t known what it was, or hadn’t cared. It was only when he threw the last of the Lockhart books back in on top of it, and went to check the space under the bed, and found the old jumper lying there in a heap, unwrapped and empty, that he realised what was really missing.

‘Riddle’s diary’s gone,’ he said to Ron, in an undertone. ‘And my scarf. My match one. That’s gone as well.’

‘What?‘

Harry jerked his head at the door, and Ron followed him out. They hurried back down to the common room, which was half empty, and went over to Hermione, who was sitting by herself in a corner reading a book called Ancient Runes Made Easy.

Hermione looked appalled when they told her.

‘But only somebody in Gryffindor could have done that,’ she whispered. ‘Nobody else knows the password. Nobody else could even have got in...’

Harry didn’t say anything. He was thinking, with a sick, sinking certainty: Malfoy. It had to be. She’d seen it. On Valentine’s Day, on the stairs, she’d had it in her hands. Percy had taken it off her and given it back to him in front of everybody. Harry had seen her face. She’d been waiting ever since. Weeks and weeks. Grey and silent and waiting. And now she’d come for it.

But how had she got in?

‘It must’ve been a Gryffindor,’ said a small voice behind them.

It was Neville. He’d followed them down. He was standing a little way off, twisting the hem of his jumper, still not quite looking at anybody.

‘It must have been,’ he said again, rather quickly. ‘Mustn’t it? Like Hermione says. Nobody else knows the password. So it must have been someone in Gryffindor. Somebody in our house. It must have.’

‘Yeah,’ said Harry slowly.

He looked at Neville. And Neville, just for a second, looked back, and then his eyes slid away again to the fire.

Harry wasn’t convinced. He knew Malfoy had got in here before. He’d never forget it. At the end of last year, the night they’d gone down through the trapdoor, she’d been standing in this very common room, and Neville had confessed to him afterwards, red-faced and miserable, that he’d been the one who told her the password. That she’d been nice to him. That nobody was ever nice to him.

Harry really, really hoped Neville wasn’t lying to them now.

But there were only two ways it could have happened, and he didn’t much like either. Either Neville had let Dracina Malfoy into Gryffindor Tower all over again and was standing here lying to their faces about it. Or it really had been somebody in Gryffindor. Somebody who’d taken the diary, and turned out every pocket he had, and pinched his scarf as well, for reasons Harry couldn’t begin to think of.

He found he didn’t know which was worse.

And underneath it all, under the fury and the worry, there was something else. It came creeping up while he stood there by the fire with Ron and Hermione talking in low voices round him. It was a hollow, aching, pulling feeling, like hunger. He wanted the diary back. He wanted it back so badly it frightened him. He wanted to sit on his bed with the curtains drawn and open it, and write, and see the words come rising up out of the page in that neat, slanting hand. He wanted to talk to Tom. Not to ask about the Chamber. Not even to ask about Hagrid. Just to talk. To know him. To be known.

It was so strong that for a moment Harry actually swayed on his feet.

Then he stopped himself. He stood very still and made himself think about his own thoughts. What he was feeling right now.

These weren’t quite his thoughts. He was sure of it, suddenly. They felt like his. They sounded like his. But there was something underneath them, something smooth and patient that didn’t belong to him at all, like a hand on the back of his neck, steering.

That’s what it had done to her, Harry thought. That’s what it had been doing to Dracina, all year. Making her want it. Making her need it. Making her go mental without it, turning out cupboards and screaming at people and throwing toast. And maybe it had made her come here, tonight, to get it back, and rip his things apart doing it.

The diary was the key. He was surer of it now than ever. It had something to do with the Chamber. Something to do with Hagrid, and Tom, the girl who’d died fifty years ago, Colin and Justin, Mrs Norris. He just couldn’t see how.

He didn’t sleep much that night. He lay in the dark with the curtains drawn, thinking about Malfoy.

He kept coming back to what Tom had written. That she worried about him. Whether he was eating. Whether he was safe. Where he went in the summers. And then: If I were you, Harry, I would be a little kinder to her. She has nobody else. And he thought about the singing Valentine, and her face while the dwarf sang it. She is silver and stubborn and wild as a flame. Silver. Who else had silver eyes? And he thought about the box of sugared violets he’d decided had been from Ginny, and the card with the spiky handwriting he’d seen somewhere before. And the Quidditch pitch, and Malfoy throwing her broom in front of the Bludger. That’s how you stand in front of somebody.

Maybe Tom was right. Maybe there was something underneath. Maybe, if he looked hard enough at the horrible things she said, there’d be something else hiding behind them, something she couldn’t say straight out. Maybe he ought to be kinder to her. Maybe...

Oh, listen to him, said the voice.

It was the old voice. The one that lived at the back of his head and had lived there for as long as he could remember. The one that sounded a bit like Uncle Vernon and a bit like Aunt Petunia and a bit like Dudley’s gang in the playground, and a great deal like Harry himself on his worst days.

Listen to the freak. Something underneath. Thinks a girl like that secretly fancies him . Thinks the nasty things are secretly nice things. She called you an orphan in front of the whole Great Hall, boy. She called you a kicked dog. She laughed at Colin. She made Ginny cry. And you’re lying here making excuses for her, because some book told you to. Nobody is kind to you unless they want something. You know that. You’ve always known that. Has anybody ever been nice to you, before Hogwarts, without wanting something back?

Harry lay very still in the dark.

The voice had a point. The voice usually did. He’d spent ten years learning that when somebody said something cruel to you, it was because they meant it, and that if you went looking for a nicer meaning underneath you’d only get hurt worse when you didn’t find one. He’d spent ten years learning not to hope. It wasn’t a lesson you forgot just because you’d changed schools.

And anyway, Tom was only a book. A memory in a book. What did a memory know?

Except that Tom had known his name. And Tom had known about the summers.

Harry turned over and pressed his face into his pillow. He didn’t know what to think. He didn’t know what to believe. And the not knowing went round and round in his head until the sky outside the window began to go grey.

They woke to brilliant sunshine and a light, fresh breeze.

‘Perfect conditions!’ Wood announced at the Gryffindor table, heaping scrambled eggs onto the team’s plates as though he were stoking a boiler. ‘Couldn’t ask for better! Harry, eat up, you look like death. You need a proper breakfast in you.’

Harry wasn’t listening. He was staring down the long, crowded Gryffindor table, wondering whether whoever had taken Riddle’s diary was sitting right there in front of him, passing the toast.

Hermione had been on at him to report the theft. Harry didn’t want to. If he went to a teacher, he’d have to explain about the diary. All of it. How they’d found it, and what it did, and what he’d seen inside it. And then how many people would know why Hagrid had been expelled fifty years ago? Harry didn’t want to be the one who dug all that up again.

He looked across the Hall at the Slytherin table instead. And he stared.

Dracina Malfoy was laughing.

She was sitting in the middle of the Slytherin table, not at the end, with Pansy on one side of her and Tracey Davis on the other, and she was laughing at something Pansy had said, with her head thrown back. The grey had gone right out of her face. Her cheeks were pink. Her hair was shining, brushed smooth and pale and gleaming down her back like it had been at the start of the year, and her eyes were bright and clear, and she was eating. She had a full plate in front of her, bacon and eggs and toast and mushrooms, and she was working her way through it with an appetite Harry hadn’t seen her show in months. She looked well. She looked better than well. She looked as though somebody had lit a lamp inside her.

She looked, Harry thought, with a horrible lurch, exactly like somebody who’d got back the thing she’d lost.

Except...

Except that when she’d had it before, she’d looked dreadful. Ill, and grey, and waxy, with shadows under her eyes like bruises. The diary hadn’t made her shine. It had made her sick. And losing it hadn’t made her shine either. Without it, she’d gone hollow and grey and silent, picking at her food at the end of the table. Harry had seen her with the diary and he’d seen her without it, and not once, in either state, had she looked anything like this. So if she’d got it back, why wasn’t she ill again? Why was she glowing?

Harry frowned. It didn’t fit. None of it fitted.

‘Harry?’

He jumped. Ginny Weasley had slid onto the bench next to him.

She looked awful. Harry hadn’t noticed, these last few weeks, how awful she’d started to look, because he hadn’t been noticing much of anything except Quidditch and diaries. But now, close up, in the bright morning light, he saw it all at once. She was as white as the tablecloth. There were dark smudges under her eyes. She’d lost weight; her face had gone pinched and sharp. Her fingers were stained with ink, right up to the knuckles, and she was wearing her Gryffindor scarf, the long one, wound round and round her neck three times, even though it was a warm, bright morning and they were indoors.

‘Ginny,’ said Ron, frowning. ‘You all right? You look terrible.’

‘I’m fine,’ said Ginny. She didn’t look at Ron. She was looking at Harry, and her eyes were enormous. ‘Harry. I need to tell you something. It’s... it’s really important. I’ve been trying to tell you for ages, only I didn’t know how, and I didn’t know if you’d believe me, and I...’

She stopped. She was twisting the end of the scarf round and round her inky fingers.

‘What is it?’ said Harry.

‘I saw...’ Ginny swallowed. ‘Last night. I saw somebody. I couldn’t sleep and I came down for a drink and I saw...’

‘Saw what?’ said Ron.

Ginny opened her mouth.

‘Ah. Ginny. There you are.’

Percy had appeared behind them, looking pale and harassed and important, with a sheaf of parchment under his arm.

‘If you’ve finished, I’ll have that seat, Ginny. I need a word with Wood about the stands. Off you go.’

Ginny leapt up as though she’d been stung. She looked at Percy, and then at Harry, with a strange, desperate expression, and then she said ‘Nothing! It’s nothing, it doesn’t matter,’ and ran out of the Great Hall, with the long scarf flying out behind her.

‘What was all that about?’ said Harry.

Ron shrugged, but he was frowning after his sister.

‘Dunno. She’s been weird for weeks. Mum says she’s been writing home about nightmares.’ He watched the doors swing shut behind her. ‘She’s always writing in that diary of hers, too. Every night. Under the covers. Percy says the girls in her dormitory have been on at him about it.’

Harry looked at him.

‘She’s got a diary?’

‘Had it for years. Mum gave it her. Pink thing, with a lock.’ Ron caught Harry’s expression. ‘What? Loads of girls have diaries, Harry. Hermione’s got one. It’s not... she wouldn’t have... Ginny?’ He laughed, but it came out a bit uncertain. ‘She can’t even get past the Fat Lady when she’s had a cold. She couldn’t turn out your trunk if you paid her. And what would she want your scarf for?’

He stopped.

He looked at Harry. Harry looked at him. They were both thinking of a long Gryffindor scarf, wound round three times on a warm morning, and a first-year girl going scarlet at the back of a queue on the stairs while a dwarf sang about Harry’s eyes.

‘No,’ said Ron firmly. ‘No. Not Ginny. No way.’

‘I didn’t say anything.’

‘You were thinking it.’

Harry looked back down the table. Neville was sitting at the far end, picking at his porridge. He wasn’t eating it. Every so often he glanced up at Harry, and then away again, very quickly, and went pink.

Then Harry looked across at the Slytherin table one more time. And this time Malfoy was looking back.

She wasn’t laughing any more. She was sitting quite still with her fork in her hand, watching him across the whole width of the Great Hall. Her face was calm and smooth and bright. And then, very slowly, she smiled at him. It was a small, private, secret sort of smile, and it was the strangest smile anybody had ever given him. It might have been mockery. It might have been triumph. It might, almost, have been fondness.

Harry had absolutely no idea which.

As he left the Great Hall with Ron and Hermione to fetch his Quidditch things, another, much more serious worry was added to the pile.

He’d just put his foot on the bottom step of the marble staircase when he heard it again.

‘...hungry... so long... so long in the dark... let me out... let me taste... kill this time... kill...’

Harry yelled out loud. Ron and Hermione both sprang away from him.

‘The voice!’ Harry spun round, looking over his shoulder, up the stairs, at the walls. ‘It’s back. I just heard it. Just now. You heard it, didn’t you? You must have!’

Ron shook his head, his eyes wide.

But Hermione had clapped a hand to her forehead.

‘Harry... oh, Harry, I think I’ve just worked something out! I’ve got to get to the library! Now!‘

And she shot off up the stairs, taking them two at a time, with her bag bumping against her back.

‘Worked what out?’ said Harry, still staring round, trying to make out where the voice had come from.

‘Loads more than I have, whatever it is,’ said Ron, shaking his head.

‘But why the library?’

‘Because it’s Hermione,’ said Ron, with a shrug. ‘Something goes wrong, she goes to the library. That’s just how she’s built.’

Harry stood at the foot of the stairs, undecided, straining his ears for the voice. But people were coming out of the Great Hall behind him now, chattering loudly, streaming out through the front doors towards the Quidditch pitch, and he couldn’t hear anything over them.

‘You’d better shift,’ said Ron. ‘It’s nearly eleven. You’ve got a match.’

Harry ran up to Gryffindor Tower, grabbed his Nimbus Two Thousand, and joined the crowds pouring across the grounds. But his mind had stayed behind in the castle, with the voice in the walls. And as he pulled on his scarlet robes in the changing room, his only comfort was that everybody was out here now. Everybody was outside, watching the match. There was nobody left in the castle for the voice to find. Nobody, he would remember later, with a feeling like falling, except Hermione.

The teams walked out onto the pitch to roaring applause. Oliver Wood took off for a warm-up lap round the goalposts. Madam Hooch let the balls out of their crate. The Hufflepuffs, in canary yellow, were standing in a tight huddle, going over their tactics one last time.

Harry had just swung his leg over his broom when Professor McGonagall came across the pitch at something between a march and a run, with an enormous purple megaphone in her hand.

Harry’s heart dropped like a stone into his boots.

‘This match is cancelled,’ Professor McGonagall announced through the megaphone, to the whole packed stadium.

There were boos. There were shouts. Oliver Wood, looking as though somebody had told him his whole family had been eaten, landed and ran towards her, still with his broom between his legs.

‘But Professor!’ he shouted. ‘We’ve got to play! The Cup! Gryffindor! We’re in with a...’

Professor McGonagall ignored him entirely.

‘Every student will go straight back to their house common room. Your Heads of House will explain everything there. As quickly as possible, please.‘

Then she lowered the megaphone, and beckoned Harry over.

‘Potter. I think you had better come with me.’

Harry couldn’t think how she could possibly suspect him this time. Then he saw Ron break away from the grumbling crowd and come running towards them as they started back towards the castle. To Harry’s surprise, Professor McGonagall didn’t send him away.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. You’d best come as well, Weasley.’

Some of the students swarming round them were grumbling about the match. Others looked frightened. Harry and Ron followed Professor McGonagall back into the castle and up the marble staircase. But this time they weren’t taken to anybody’s office.

‘This is going to be a shock,’ Professor McGonagall said, as they came near the hospital wing. Her voice was surprisingly gentle. ‘I’m sorry. There’s been another attack. Another... another double attack.’

Harry’s insides turned a horrible somersault.

Professor McGonagall pushed open the door, and they went in.

Madam Pomfrey was bending over a sixth-year girl with long, curly hair. Harry knew her. She was the Ravenclaw they’d stopped by mistake on Christmas night, when they were trying to find their way to the Slytherin common room. And on the bed next to her...

‘Hermione!‘ Ron groaned.

Hermione was lying perfectly still. Her eyes were open, and glassy, and staring at nothing. One of her hands was raised a little off the blanket, frozen in the middle of some movement, as though she’d been reaching for something.

Harry couldn’t move.

For a long moment he just stood there, at the end of the bed, looking at her. Hermione. Who’d taken both his hands in Myrtle’s bathroom, over a bubbling cauldron, and told him that what happened to Colin wasn’t his fault. Who’d lain in this very ward with whiskers, crying because she’d been wrong about something. Who’d stopped herself, on the stairs, on Valentine’s Day, and gone after Ginny instead. Who’d been trying so hard, these last weeks, to be a bit less. Who’d run off up the stairs this morning, shouting that she’d worked something out.

And then the shock went out of him, and something else came in to take its place.

It was quiet. It was very quiet and very cold and very, very still, and it spread out from his stomach all the way to his fingertips, and Harry recognised it, distantly, as fury.

Malfoy.

She’d got the diary back. Last night. She’d got it back, and this morning she’d sat at the Slytherin table glowing, laughing, eating her breakfast, smiling at him across the Hall. And now this. It was the only explanation. It had to be. She’d wanted Hermione dead. She’d always wanted Hermione dead because she was a muggleborn. I hope it’s Granger, she’d said, on Christmas night, and giggled. And now she’d got her.

‘They were found by the library,’ said Professor McGonagall. ‘I don’t suppose either of you can tell me anything about this? It was on the floor beside them.’

She held up a small, round mirror.

Harry and Ron both shook their heads, without taking their eyes off Hermione.

There was a movement at the door.

Harry turned. Somebody was standing in the doorway of the hospital wing, half in and half out, as though she’d been passing and had stopped. It was Dracina Malfoy.

She wasn’t looking at Harry. She was looking at Hermione’s bed. At Hermione’s frozen face. Her own face was perfectly calm and quite unreadable, and she stood there for a long, long moment, very still, with the sunlight from the corridor window on her shining hair.

Then her eyes moved, and found Harry’s.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘About Granger.’

Her voice was quiet and flat and odd. It didn’t sound like mockery. It didn’t sound like anything at all. It sounded like something being read off a card. And then, just at the very corner of her mouth, there was something. A flicker. It might have been the beginning of a smile. It might have been a muscle twitching. It might have been nothing.

Harry took a step towards her. He didn’t know what he was going to do. He didn’t know if he was going to shout, or grab her, or hex her, or what. He only knew that every inch of him was shaking.

‘Miss Malfoy,’ said Professor McGonagall sharply. ‘You should not be up here. Back to your common room at once.’

Malfoy went.

Harry stood there with his fists clenched so hard that his nails were cutting into his palms. He wanted to go after her. He wanted to run down every staircase in the castle after her, all the way to the dungeons, and make her tell him. Make her say it. Make her undo it. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t do anything. Professor McGonagall was standing right there, and Hermione was lying right there, and there was absolutely nothing at all that he, Harry Potter, twelve years old, could do about any of it.

He turned round and hit the stone wall beside the door. Hard. With his fist.

It hurt a great deal. He didn’t care.

‘Potter!‘

‘Mate.’ Ron had got hold of his arm. ‘Mate. Don’t. Come on. Don’t.’

Harry let Ron pull him back. His knuckles were bleeding. He looked at them, and then back at Hermione, and his eyes were burning, and he wouldn’t let them do anything else.

Professor McGonagall looked at his hand, and at his face, for a long moment. Something moved behind her square spectacles. She took out her wand and tapped his knuckles once, and the bleeding stopped.

‘I’ll take you both back to Gryffindor Tower,’ she said, heavily. ‘I have to speak to the house in any case.’

‘From this evening, every student will be back inside their house common room by six o’clock. Nobody, for any reason, is to leave their dormitory after that hour. A teacher will escort you to and from every lesson. Nobody is to visit a bathroom without a member of staff to accompany them. All Quidditch practices and matches are postponed until further notice. There will be no evening activities of any kind.‘

The Gryffindors crammed into the common room listened to Professor McGonagall in total silence. She rolled up the parchment she’d been reading from. When she spoke again, her voice was not quite steady.

‘I hardly need tell you that I have very seldom been so upset. It is very likely now that the school will be closed, unless whoever is behind these attacks is caught. If any one of you knows anything, anything at all, I am asking you to come forward.’

She climbed rather awkwardly out through the portrait hole. The moment it swung shut behind her, the Gryffindors all started talking at once.

All round Harry, people were frightened. He could see it on every face. Lavender was crying. Neville was white. The first-years had all huddled together in one corner like sheep before a storm.

Harry wasn’t frightened.

Harry was furious.

‘That makes two Gryffindors,’ Lee Jordan was saying, counting on his fingers, ‘not counting a Gryffindor ghost. And one Ravenclaw. And one Hufflepuff. Hasn’t one teacher noticed that every single Slytherin is fine? Not a scratch on any of them? Isn’t it obvious where this is all coming from? The heir of Slytherin, the monster of Slytherin, the Chamber of bloody Slytherin! Why don’t they just throw the whole lot of them out and have done with it?’

There were nods, and a scattering of applause.

Harry thought the applause was cheap. It was easy to clap. It was easy to shout. It didn’t do anything. He knew who was doing this. He knew. And he had to stop her.

Percy Weasley was sitting in an armchair behind Lee, but for once he didn’t seem to have an opinion. He was white and stunned, staring at nothing.

‘Percy’s in a state,’ George murmured to Harry. ‘That Ravenclaw. Penelope Clearwater. She’s a Prefect. I don’t reckon it ever crossed his mind the thing would go for a Prefect.’

But Harry was only half listening. He couldn’t get the picture out of his head: Hermione, lying on that hospital bed as though she’d been carved out of stone, with her hand lifted a little off the blanket. And Malfoy, standing in the doorway, in the sunlight, with that flicker at the corner of her mouth.

And if Malfoy wasn’t caught, and soon, they were going to close the school.

And if they closed the school, Harry was going back to the Dursleys. Not for a summer. For good. Forever. Back to the cat flap and the bars and the bread. No Ron. No Hogwarts. No magic. Nothing, for the rest of his life, but that little room at Privet Drive.

No. Harry’s hands clenched on his knees. No. Never. I won’t let it happen.

And for the first time, he understood exactly how Tom Riddle had felt, fifty years ago, standing at the foot of the moving staircase with his forehead creased, making up his mind. Faced with the orphanage forever. Faced with losing the only home he’d ever had. Harry knew now what that felt like. He’d have done anything, too. To escape those dreadful, evil muggles.

Ron was watching him. Harry could feel it. Ron had sat down on the arm of his chair, close, the way you’d sit close to a firework that hadn’t gone off yet, and he was talking to him in a low, steady voice, asking him things, making him answer, keeping him there.

‘Harry. Mate. Look at me. What’re we going to do?’ Ron said quietly, right in his ear. ‘Eh? Think. What do we do? D’you reckon they suspect Hagrid?’

Harry made himself breathe.

‘We’re going to go talk to him,’ said Harry assertively, making up his mind. ‘I can’t believe it’s him this time, but if he set the monster loose last time he’ll know how to get inside the Chamber of Secrets, and that’s a start.’

‘But McGonagall said we’ve got to stay in the tower, except for lessons...’

‘I don’t care. Malfoy got the creature to attack Hermione! I think,’ said Harry, more quietly and conspiratorially still, ‘it’s time to get my dad’s old Cloak out again.’

It was the only way they had of getting out of the castle to see Hagrid without anybody knowing.

They went up to bed at the usual time. They lay in the dark and waited while Neville, Dean and Seamus went over and over the Chamber of Secrets in low, frightened voices, until at last the voices trailed off one by one into snores. Then Harry and Ron got up, pulled their clothes back on, and threw the Invisibility Cloak over both of them.

It wasn’t a pleasant journey. Harry had wandered round the castle at night more than once before, but he’d never seen it so busy after dark. There were teachers patrolling the corridors in pairs, and Prefects, and ghosts, all peering into every shadow for anything out of the ordinary. The Cloak hid them, but it didn’t stop them making a noise, and there was one horribly tense moment when Ron stubbed his toe on the bottom of a suit of armour only a few yards from where Snape was standing guard. Luckily, Snape sneezed at almost exactly the same instant that Ron swore.

It was a great relief to reach the front doors and ease them open.

It was a clear, cold night, full of stars. They hurried across the dark lawn towards the lit windows of Hagrid’s hut, and only pulled off the Cloak when they were right outside his door.

A few seconds after they knocked, Hagrid flung the door open. They found themselves staring straight up the business end of a crossbow, with Fang barking his head off somewhere behind it.

‘Oh,’ said Hagrid. He lowered the crossbow slowly and peered down at them. ‘It’s you two. Wha’ are yeh doin’ out here?’

‘Oh, just here for more rock cakes, Hagrid. What do you bloody think we’re here for?’ Harry said sarcastically.

Hagrid sighed, and stood aside, and let them in.

‘What’s that for?’ said Harry, nodding at the crossbow as Hagrid propped it against the wall.

‘Nothin’... nothin’.’ Hagrid wasn’t looking at them. ‘Bin expectin’... never mind. Doesn’ matter. Sit down. I’ll make some tea...’

He hardly seemed to know what he was doing. He very nearly put the fire out, slopping water from the kettle all over it, and then smashed the teapot with one twitch of his huge hand, and stood looking down at the pieces as if he couldn’t think how they’d got there.

Harry was trying very hard to keep hold of his temper. He’d been trying all evening. But it came out anyway, in a hiss.

‘The creature got Hermione, Hagrid! They got my friend!’

‘I heard,’ said Hagrid. His voice cracked a little. ‘Oh, I heard all righ’.’

He kept glancing at the windows. He poured them each a big mug of boiling water, forgetting to put any tea in it, and he was just cutting them a slab of fruitcake when there was a loud knock at the door.

Hagrid dropped the fruitcake.

Harry and Ron looked at each other in panic. Then they threw the Invisibility Cloak back over themselves and backed away into a corner. Hagrid checked they were hidden, grabbed his crossbow, and flung the door open again.

‘Good evening, Hagrid.’

It was Dumbledore. He came in looking very grave, and behind him came a second man, a very odd-looking one.

He was short and stout, with untidy grey hair and a worried, put-upon sort of face, like a man who’d been woken up to be told his house was on fire and was still hoping it might be somebody else’s. He was dressed in the strangest mixture of clothes Harry had ever seen on a wizard: a striped Muggle suit with a bright scarlet tie, and over it a long black cloak, and on his feet a pair of pointed purple boots. He was clutching a lime-green bowler hat against his chest.

‘Dad’s boss!’ Ron breathed in Harry’s ear. ‘That’s Fudge! Cornelius Fudge! He’s the Minister for Magic!’

Harry jabbed him hard with an elbow to make him shut up.

Hagrid had gone pale and sweaty. He sank down into one of his enormous chairs and looked from Dumbledore to Fudge and back again.

‘Bad business, Hagrid,’ said Fudge, in a short, clipped voice. ‘Very bad. Had to come. Four Muggle-borns attacked now. Four. It’s gone far enough. The Ministry’s got to step in.’

‘I never,’ said Hagrid. He was looking at Dumbledore, begging. ‘Yeh know I never, Professor Dumbledore, sir. Yeh know I’d never...’

‘I wish it to be quite clear, Cornelius,’ said Dumbledore, looking hard at Fudge, ‘that Hagrid has my complete trust.’

‘Yes, yes, Albus, I know.’ Fudge shifted uncomfortably. ‘But look here. Hagrid’s got a record. It’s against him. The Ministry’s got to be seen to do something. The governors have been on at me...’

‘And I tell you again, Cornelius, that taking Hagrid away will achieve nothing whatever,’ said Dumbledore. There was something blazing in his blue eyes that Harry had never seen there before.

‘Try and see it from where I’m standing,’ said Fudge, turning his bowler round and round in his hands. ‘I’m under a great deal of pressure, Albus. A great deal. People want to see action. If it turns out it wasn’t him, he’ll be back here in no time, and not another word said about it. But I’ve got to take him. I’ve got to. I’d be failing in my duty if...’

‘Take me?’ said Hagrid. He was trembling all over. ‘Take me where?’

‘Only for a little while,’ said Fudge, not quite looking at him. ‘It’s not a punishment, Hagrid. Think of it as a precaution. If somebody else turns out to be responsible, you’ll be released with a full apology...’

‘Not Azkaban,’ Hagrid croaked. ‘Not... not Azkaban...’

Before Fudge could answer, there was another sharp rap on the door.

Dumbledore opened it. And this time it was Harry who got an elbow in the ribs, because he’d let out a gasp loud enough to hear.

Lucius Malfoy swept into the hut, wrapped in a long black travelling cloak, with a cold, contented smile on his face. Fang began to growl.

‘Ah. You’re here already, Fudge,’ he said, sounding pleased. ‘Excellent. Excellent...’

‘What’re you doin’ here?’ said Hagrid furiously. ‘Get out o’ my house!’

‘My dear fellow, you may take my word that it gives me no pleasure whatever to be inside your... your...’ Lucius Malfoy looked slowly round the little hut, at the hams hanging from the ceiling and the enormous bed and Fang drooling in his basket. ‘Forgive me. What do you call this? A house? I merely called up at the school, and was informed that I would find the Headmaster here.’

‘And what is it you want with me, Lucius?’ said Dumbledore. His voice was perfectly polite. But the fire hadn’t gone out of his eyes.

‘A sad business, Dumbledore,’ said Lucius Malfoy lazily, drawing a long roll of parchment from inside his cloak. ‘A very sad business. But the governors have come to the view that the time has come for you to step aside. This is an Order of Suspension. You will find all twelve of our signatures on it. I’m afraid we feel that you are... how shall I put it... not quite the man you were. How many attacks is it now? Two more today alone, I understand? At this rate there will soon be no Muggle-borns left at Hogwarts at all. And we all know what a grievous loss that would be.’

Harry went cold.

He was remembering Dracina, in the Slytherin common room on Christmas night, curled in the chair by the fire with the diary in her lap. Bits of it came back to him, in her strange, far-away voice. I knew he was planning something with it. But not what. And then, later, after the giggling: I think he’s being forced to do something with the Chamber... he tried to warn me. Harry looked at Lucius Malfoy’s cold, pleased face, and the parchment in his hand, and he understood all at once that this had been planned. Somehow. Some of it, at least. Lucius Malfoy had something to do with the Chamber. Harry didn’t know what. But he was sure of it, as sure as he’d been of anything.

‘Oh, now, look here, Lucius,’ Fudge was saying, looking alarmed. ‘Dumbledore suspended? No, no. No. That’s the very last thing we want just now...’

‘The appointment of the Headmaster, and his suspension, is a matter for the governors, Fudge,’ said Lucius Malfoy smoothly. ‘And since Dumbledore has so signally failed to put a stop to these attacks...’

‘But see here, Lucius,’ said Fudge. There was sweat on his upper lip. ‘If Dumbledore can’t stop them, then... well, I mean to say, who can?’

‘We shall see,’ said Lucius Malfoy, with an unpleasant smile. ‘But all twelve of us have voted, and...’

Hagrid leapt to his feet, so that his shaggy black head brushed the rafters.

‘An’ how many of ‘em did yeh have ter threaten, Malfoy? Eh? How many of ‘em did yeh have ter blackmail before they’d put their names to it?’ he roared.

‘Tut, tut. That temper of yours will land you in a great deal of trouble one day, Hagrid,’ said Lucius Malfoy. ‘If I were you, I should take care not to raise your voice like that to the guards at Azkaban. I’m told they don’t care for it.’

‘Yeh can’ take Dumbledore!’ bellowed Hagrid, and Fang cowered whimpering in his basket. ‘Yeh take him away, an’ them Muggle-borns won’ stand a chance! It’ll be killin’s next! Killin’s!‘

‘Be calm, Hagrid,’ said Dumbledore sharply. He turned to Lucius Malfoy. ‘If the governors wish me to go, Lucius, then naturally I shall step aside.’

‘But...’ stammered Fudge.

‘No!‘ growled Hagrid.

Dumbledore hadn’t taken his bright blue eyes off Lucius Malfoy’s cold grey ones.

‘However,’ he said, very slowly and very clearly, so that nobody in the hut could possibly miss a single word of it, ‘you may find, Lucius, that I am not quite so easily removed from this school as a few signatures on a piece of parchment might suggest. For so long as there is one soul left within these walls who keeps faith with me, I shall not truly have gone. And you will find that at Hogwarts, help has always come, and always will come, to those who ask for it.’

For a moment, Harry was almost certain that Dumbledore’s eyes flicked across the hut to the corner where he and Ron were standing, hidden under the Cloak.

Dumbledore gave a sly grin. Of course he knew, Harry thought. Dumbledore was wise and knew everything.

‘Very stirring,’ said Lucius Malfoy, with a little bow. ‘We shall all miss your... ah... most individual way of doing things, Albus. We can only hope that your successor will manage to prevent any... killin’s.’

He strode to the door of the hut and held it open, and bowed Dumbledore out. Fudge, still fiddling with his bowler hat, waited for Hagrid to go out ahead of him. But Hagrid stood his ground. He took a deep breath, and said, very slowly and carefully, to nobody in particular:

‘If anyone was wantin’ ter find somethin’ out... if anyone was lookin’ fer answers, say... all they’d have ter do is follow the spiders. Tha’d take ‘em righ’ where they need ter go. Tha’s all. Tha’s all I’m sayin’.’

Fudge stared at him in astonishment.

‘All righ’,’ said Hagrid. ‘All righ’. I’m comin’.’

He pulled on his moleskin overcoat. But as he was about to follow Fudge out of the door, he stopped once more, and said, very loudly:

‘An’ somebody’s goin’ ter have ter feed Fang. While I’m gone.’

The door banged shut.

Ron pulled the Invisibility Cloak off them both.

‘We’re in trouble now,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Dumbledore’s gone. They might as well shut the school tonight. There’ll be one a day, with him not here. One a day...’

Fang had begun to howl, and to scratch at the closed door.

Ron turned round. And it was then that he saw Harry’s face.

Harry was standing in the middle of the hut with his fists clenched at his sides and his whole body shaking. He was white. He was absolutely white, white to the lips, and his eyes behind his glasses had gone so dark and so hard that for a moment Ron didn’t recognise them. The air in the hut seemed to have gone heavy and strange. The flames in Hagrid’s fireplace were leaning, all of them, away from Harry, as though a wind were blowing from where he stood. The empty mugs on the table had begun, very faintly, to rattle.

‘All of them...’ Harry growled out. ‘All of the Malfoys have to pay! This is because of them!’

One of the mugs cracked straight down the middle.

‘Harry...’

‘Hermione’s stone, Ron! She’s lying up there like a statue! And Hagrid’s going to Azkaban! And Dumbledore’s gone! And he just stood there and smiled! He smiled! And she sat there this morning eating her breakfast like... like... and then she came to the hospital wing, Ron, she came and looked at her, she came to have a look...’ His voice cracked and went up. ‘And they’ll shut the school. They’ll shut it, and I’ll be sent back, I’ll be sent back there, for good, for ever, and there’s nothing I can do, there’s never anything I can do, I just have to stand there and watch as they take it all away from me!.’

The window behind him rattled in its frame. Fang had stopped howling and was cowering under the table.

‘I’m not going back! I am not going back!’

Ron didn’t back away.

He came straight across the hut instead, and took hold of Harry by both shoulders, quite hard, and held on.

‘Harry. Harry. Look at me.’

Harry looked at him. His breath was coming in great ragged heaves.

‘I know,’ said Ron. His own voice was shaking, but he didn’t let go. ‘I know, mate. I know. I’d like to see the lot of them in Azkaban too. Lucius and Dracina and their stupid peacocks and their whole stupid house. I would. But if you go off down those dungeons tonight with your face like that, you’ll do something you can’t undo, and then they’ll have you. That’s what they want. You know that’s what they want. Then it’ll be you they’re carting off, and not Hagrid, and who’s going to help Hermione then?’

Harry stared at him. His shoulders were heaving under Ron’s hands.

‘And you’re not going back,’ said Ron fiercely. ‘You hear me? Not for good. Not for a summer. Not ever. I don’t care if they shut every school in Britain. You’re coming home with us. Mum’ll fight the Ministry with her bare hands if she has to. You know she will. She’ll set Errol on them.’

Something in Harry’s face cracked, just a little.

‘Errol,’ he said, in a strange, choked voice. ‘Errol can’t fly in a straight line.’

‘Exactly,’ said Ron. ‘They’ll never see him coming.’

Harry let out a breath. It came out of him shakily, half a laugh and half something else. The flames in the fireplace slowly straightened up again. The window stopped rattling. The mugs went still on the table.

He sat down very suddenly on Hagrid’s enormous chair, and put his face in his hands.

Ron stood beside him with one hand still on his shoulder. He didn’t say anything else. He just stayed there, the way he always did, until Harry was ready to lift his head again.

When he did, his eyes were dry, and steady, and very, very determined.

‘Follow the spiders,’ Harry said quietly. ‘He said follow the spiders.’

Ron’s face went the colour of old porridge.

‘Yeah,’ he said faintly. ‘Yeah. I heard him. I was sort of hoping you hadn’t.’

Under the table, Fang whined, and crept out, and laid his huge, slobbery head in Harry’s lap. Harry put his hand on it.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s feed Fang. Then we’ll go back. We’ll need a plan.’

Summer was coming, and Harry and Ron still hadn’t found a way into the Forbidden Forest.

It wasn’t for want of trying. But the teachers had become watchful in a way Harry had never seen before. They walked the students to every lesson and back again, counting heads at every door, then they walked them up to the common room and counted them in. There didn’t seem to be a single crack anywhere in the day for two boys to slip through, Invisibility Cloak or no Invisibility Cloak. There were prefects and teachers patrolling the corridor outside the portrait hole all night now, in pairs, and Harry was quite sure that even if nobody could see him and Ron, somebody would notice the Fat Lady swinging open all by herself and nobody climbing out.

And with no Hagrid to be seen from the castle windows, striding about the grounds with Fang at his heels, the view didn’t look right either. It looked wrong in the same way that the inside of the castle looked wrong. Everything that had been solid had gone thin.

Harry and Ron had tried to visit Hermione. But there were no visitors allowed in the hospital wing at all now.

‘No. I’m sorry. No exceptions,’ Madam Pomfrey told them severely, through a two-inch gap in the door, with her foot wedged firmly behind it. ‘We can’t take the risk. There’s every chance whoever did this will come back to finish the job, and I’ll not have anyone in here who doesn’t need to be.’

‘But she’s our-’

‘I know who she is, Mr Weasley. Go back to your tower.’

The door shut.

With Dumbledore gone, a fear had spread through the castle that Harry had never known there before. It was a different fear from the one after Mrs Norris, or even after Colin. That had been a nervous, jumpy, whispering sort of fear. This was quieter and heavier, and it was everywhere. The sun was warm on the castle walls outside, but it seemed to stop dead at the windows and never come in. There was hardly a face anywhere in the school that wasn’t tight and pale. Any laughter that happened in the corridors came out high and strange and was quickly smothered, as if the person laughing had remembered where they were.

Harry saw a first-year Ravenclaw burst into tears in the middle of the Charms corridor one morning because somebody had dropped a book behind her. He saw a group of Hufflepuffs who had taken to walking with their backs against the wall, all the way down a corridor, so that nothing could come at them from behind. He saw Dean Thomas, who was afraid of nothing, sitting on the end of his bed one night with a lit wand, not sleeping, just watching the dormitory door.

‘What are you doing?’ Harry asked him.

‘Nothing,’ said Dean. He didn’t put the wand out. ‘I’m Muggle-born, aren’t I. Both of them. Mum and Dad.’ He didn’t look round. ‘Go to sleep, Harry.’

Harry kept saying Dumbledore’s last words over to himself, like a charm. I shall not truly have gone. Help has always come, and always will come, to those who ask for it. But what good were the words? Who exactly were they supposed to ask? Everybody in the whole school was as frightened and as lost as they were. There wasn’t anyone to ask. There was just a lot of pale people walking in lines.

Hagrid’s hint about the spiders was a lot easier to understand. The trouble was that there didn’t seem to be a single spider left anywhere in the castle to follow. Harry looked everywhere he went. He looked in corners, and under window-ledges, and up in the rafters of the Great Hall, and behind the tapestries. Ron helped, in the sense that he came with Harry and stood a little way back with his arms folded while Harry looked. They were hampered, of course, by not being allowed to go anywhere on their own; they had to go about the castle in a herd with the rest of Gryffindor, and most of the herd seemed quite glad of it. Harry found it maddening.

‘If they’d just let us out for ten minutes,’ he said to Ron, through his teeth, as Professor Flitwick walked them in a long crocodile from Charms to lunch. ‘Ten minutes. That’s all we need. Ten minutes and a torch and nobody counting us.’

‘We’re being guarded, Harry,’ said Ron. ‘That’s what the counting’s for. In case that creature eats one of us on the way to dinner.’

‘Nothing’s going to eat us on the way to dinner. The thing’s been quiet for weeks. We’re wasting time, and every day we waste is a day nearer them shutting the...’

He stopped. He couldn’t say it.

Ron looked at him sideways and didn’t say anything. After a moment he bumped his shoulder against Harry’s, hard, the way he did.

One person, though, seemed to be thoroughly enjoying the atmosphere of terror and suspicion.

Dracina Malfoy went about the school as though she’d just been made Head Girl. She walked down the middle of corridors so that people had to get out of her way. She tossed her shining hair. She laughed loudly in the Great Hall when nobody else was laughing at all. Harry told himself, every single time he saw her, that he was never going to speak to her again, and he kept to it. He was sure she was the one controlling the creature. He was sure of it. She’d had the diary back for weeks now, she must have, nothing else explained the way she was.

Except that she didn’t look anything like she’d looked the last time she had it.

Harry couldn’t stop himself noticing that. Last time, with the diary tucked inside her robes, she’d gone grey, thin and strange, talking to empty chairs, with ink up to her knuckles and shadows under her eyes. Now she was pink-cheeked, bright-eyed and gleaming with health, and it didn’t make sense, and the not making sense gnawed at him.

She was just as nasty as ever, though. Nastier.

‘Morning, Scarhead,’ she called across the Entrance Hall, in the second week after Dumbledore left, with Crabbe and Goyle flanking her like a pair of wardrobes. ‘Sleep well? I expect you’re used to it by now, aren’t you? Being locked in. Being counted. Being told when you can go to the toilet.’ She tilted her head. ‘Must feel just like home.’

Several people laughed. Harry’s face went hot.

‘At least we’ve got homes to go to, if they shut the place,’ she went on, as the Gryffindor crocodile shuffled past her towards the dungeons. ‘Imagine being the sort of person who’d rather be locked in a castle with a monster than go back to his own family. Imagine what that says about the family.’ Her voice dropped. ‘Imagine what they are, Potter, if you’d rather be here. Don’t you ever think about that? Don’t you ever think they ought to be made to-’

‘Shut up, Malfoy!’ said Harry, and walked on without looking at her.

He didn’t see her face as he passed, which was a pity, because it might have told him something. It had gone very still. Her lips were pressed together. And she watched him all the way to the dungeon steps, with Crabbe and Goyle shifting uncertainly beside her, with the look of somebody who had thrown a rope to a drowning man and seen him swim the other way.

Harry didn’t look back. He was too busy being angry.

That was the thing about Malfoy. She found out where you were sore and she pressed on it. She’d done it on the Quidditch pitch, and in the hospital wing, and now she was doing it in the Entrance Hall in front of half the school: taking the Dursleys, taking the cupboard and the bars and the cat flap and everything he’d never told anybody and she somehow knew, and using it like a stick to beat him with. For a laugh. For an audience. He’d thought, lying awake after the diary was stolen, that maybe Tom was right, that maybe there was something underneath. He’d thought about the violets and the Valentine and the Bludger. And then she’d gone and done this, and he’d felt like a fool for ever having thought it.

He was angry at her for that. He was angry at her for Hermione, lying up there like a statue. But under it all, worse than all of it, he was angry about the thing he couldn’t say out loud. If they shut the school, he was going back. For good.

‘They won’t,’ said Ron.

They were sitting in the common room that evening, in the corner by the window, with the last of the light going red on the lake. Harry hadn’t said anything. He hadn’t needed to. Ron had been watching his face.

‘I didn’t say anything.’

‘You didn’t have to. You’ve got your Dursleys face on.’ Ron put down the chess piece he’d been fiddling with. He looked at Harry properly, and when he spoke it was slower and more careful than Ron usually was, as though he’d been working out how to say it. ‘Listen. I’ve been thinking about this. If they shut Hogwarts, right, the Ministry’ll have about fifty other things to sort out before they get round to one second-year and where he’s living. And by the time they do, you’ll have been at the Burrow a month, and Mum’ll have fed you up, and Dad’ll have had a word with someone, and it’ll be done. They’re not going to come and drag you out of our kitchen. Nobody drags anybody out of Mum’s kitchen.’ He paused. ‘And if they try, we’ve got a ghoul. He keeps going on about being some high level servant of a Prince. But I reckon he’s talking nonsense.’

Harry laughed. It came out a bit cracked.

‘You keep saying that.’

‘Because it keeps being true.’ Ron picked the chess piece back up. ‘You’re ours now, mate. That’s just how it is. Deal with it.’

Two things happened in the week after that, and Harry didn’t know what to make of either of them.

The first was in the corridor outside the library. The Gryffindor crocodile was going one way, with Professor Flitwick at the front, and a knot of Slytherins was going the other, with Snape behind them, and the two lines had to squeeze past each other at the narrow part by the stone bench. Malfoy was near the back of hers. As she came level with Neville, who was near the back of theirs, she slowed down.

‘Longbottom,’ she said, quite pleasantly. ‘There you are. I never did say thank you properly, did I? You’ve been such a help.’

Neville dropped every one of his books.

He went white, and then red, and then white again, and he scrambled about on the floor picking them up with hands that didn’t seem to work, and he wouldn’t look at anybody. Malfoy walked on, smiling. She didn’t look back.

‘What was that?’ said Ron, frowning after her. ‘A help with what?’

‘Nothing,’ said Neville, very fast, from the floor. ‘Nothing. She’s just... she does that. She’s just being horrible. You know what she’s like.’

Harry did know what she was like. He’d watched her do exactly that to Neville for two years: single him out, say something sweet in a voice like syrup, and leave him in bits. It was the sort of thing she did. He helped Neville pick up his Herbology book, and told him to ignore her, and thought no more about it.

The second thing happened that same evening, just before six.

Harry and Ron were already in the common room when the portrait hole opened and Percy came through it with Ginny. He had her by the elbow. Ginny was crying.

‘...and I shall be writing to Mother tonight, Ginevra, I mean it this time. On your own. On the second floor. After I have told you, and Professor McGonagall has told you, and has told the entire school...’

‘I wasn’t on my own! I was... I was following...’

‘Following what?’

Ginny’s mouth shut. She looked across the room, and saw Harry looking at her, and went the colour of a tomato.

‘Nobody,’ she said. ‘Nothing. I wanted to see... I just wanted to see. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Percy. I won’t do it again.’ Ginny then pulled her elbow free and fled up the girls’ staircase,  and Percy stood at the bottom of it with his mouth open and his Prefect badge glinting, looking for once in his life as though he had absolutely no idea what to do.

‘The second floor,’ Ron said slowly, when Percy had stalked off to find some parchment. ‘That’s where the bathroom is, isn’t it? Myrtle’s. That’s where the writing was.’

‘Yeah,’ said Harry.

They looked at each other.

‘Or she was just saying that,’ said Harry. He didn’t like the way his own voice sounded. ‘To get out of trouble. People do.’

Ron didn’t answer. He was looking at the girls’ staircase with his forehead creased up, the way it had been for weeks, and his hand had drifted up to his ear.

Harry didn’t realise what Malfoy was so pleased about until the Potions lesson nearly a month after Dumbledore and Hagrid had gone.

He was sitting directly behind her. Snape had moved the Gryffindors forward, and so Harry had Malfoy’s pale, gleaming head about three feet from his cauldron for the whole of the double lesson, and could hear every word she said. She was holding court. Pansy Parkinson was on one side of her and Daphne Greengrass on the other, and Crabbe and Goyle stood behind her stool with their arms folded, like the two enormous bodyguards Harry had once seen in a picture in Uncle Vernon’s study, standing behind a vast bald man in a white suit whom Uncle Vernon had called a very successful American businessman in a tone of deep respect.

‘I always thought Father might be the one who got rid of Dumbledore,’ Malfoy was saying, and she wasn’t bothering to keep her voice down. ‘I told you he thinks Dumbledore’s the worst Headmaster the school’s ever had. Maybe we’ll get a decent Headmaster now. Someone who won’t want the Chamber of Secrets closed. McGonagall won’t last long, she’s only filling in...’

Harry’s hand tightened on his stirring rod. Father might be the one. There it was again. Lucius Malfoy, and the parchment with twelve signatures, and the smile in Hagrid’s hut. Whatever this was, it was his. All of it. Harry was sure of it now.

Snape, who had been drifting past the end of the bench, stopped dead.

It was a strange thing to watch. At the name McGonagall, Snape’s shoulders went up very slightly, the way a cat’s do when a door opens somewhere in the house. He looked round. He actually looked round, quickly, at the dungeon door, as though saying her name might bring her through it.

‘Miss Malfoy,’ he said, very quietly.

Malfoy looked up, surprised. Snape never scolded a Slytherin. Snape had never, in Harry’s memory, so much as raised an eyebrow at one.

‘You will speak of Professor McGonagall with respect,’ said Snape. His voice was low and even and quite cold. ‘In this room and in every other. Unless you would care to find out for yourself precisely why I do.’ He let that sit for a moment. ‘I would not recommend it.’

There was a short, shocked silence along the Slytherin bench. Malfoy’s mouth had come open. Then it closed again, and she said, ‘Yes, sir,’ in a very small voice, and looked down at her cauldron.

Snape swept on past Harry without a word about Hermione’s empty stool and her cold, clean cauldron. Harry watched the back of his head and hated him with a steady, quiet, thorough hatred.

Malfoy recovered quickly. She always did.

‘Sir,’ she said loudly, as Snape came back down the aisle. ‘Sir, why don’t you apply for the Headmaster’s job?’

‘Now, now, Miss Malfoy,’ said Snape. But he couldn’t quite keep the thin smile off his lips. ‘Professor Dumbledore has only been suspended by the governors. I dare say he’ll be back with us soon enough.’

‘Yeah, right,’ said Malfoy, smirking. ‘I expect you’d have Father’s vote, sir, if you wanted to apply for the job. I’ll tell Father you’re the best teacher here, sir...’

Snape’s smirk widened a fraction. He glided off round the dungeon, and was lucky not to see Seamus Finnigan, two benches back, pretending to be sick into his cauldron.

‘I’m quite surprised the Mudbloods haven’t all packed their bags by now,’ Malfoy went on, turning back to Pansy and Daphne. ‘Bet you five Galleons the next one dies. Pity it wasn’t Granger-’

Harry was halfway off his stool before he knew he’d moved.

Ron’s hand clamped round his arm like a vice and hauled him back down. Harry fought it. He didn’t even know what he’d been going to do. Shout in her face. Shove her off her stool. Something. Something worse, maybe. Ron held on, and kept holding, with a grip that didn’t let go, and Harry sat there shaking with Malfoy’s shining hair three feet from him and the word Granger ringing in his ears.

Ron was looking at the back of Malfoy’s head with an odd expression. He’d let go of Harry’s arm, slowly, when he was sure Harry wasn’t going to go for her, and now his hand had drifted up to his ear, and was rubbing it, where a small crescent of pale scar still showed if you knew where to look. Harry knew where to look. He’d seen the tooth marks the night of the Hufflepuff match last year, when Ron had come back from wherever McGonagall had taken him with four lines down his cheek and a bald patch over one temple.

Ron hadn’t forgotten any of that. But Ron, Harry had slowly come to understand, didn’t hate Malfoy the way Harry did. He’d been bitten and scratched and screamed at by her, and somewhere in all that screaming he’d heard something that Harry never had, and ever since, he’d watched her with the look of somebody working out a very long maths question. Sometimes he even looked sorry for her, which Harry couldn’t understand at all. Ron knew, better than Harry did, what she was doing. For whatever twisted-up reason, Dracina Malfoy couldn’t say a single thing to Harry without saying it on top of somebody else, without climbing up on Weasleys or Grangers or Creeveys to get the height to be heard. And Ron knew, too, what the Dursleys had done to Harry, and that Harry would never, ever stand for being handled like that, however much she was obsessed with him.

So Ron held his arm. He didn’t say anything. And then the bell rang.

It was lucky it did, because Malfoy’s last remark, tossed over her shoulder to Pansy as she reached for her bag, was about Ginny.

‘...and have you seen the little Weasley girl lately? Honestly. She looks like something that crawled out of the lake. All hunched up over that diary of hers, whispering into it, like it’s going to whisper back. Mad. The whole family’s...’

Ron came off his stool as though it had been fired from a cannon.

In the scramble of bags and books and scraping stools, nobody saw him go for her. Harry and Dean got him by an arm each, and it took both of them.

‘Let me at her,’ Ron growled, as Harry and Dean hung onto his arms. ‘I don’t care, I don’t need my wand, I’m going to kill her with my bare hands, I don’t care what happened at Quidditch, that’s my LITTLE SISTER she’s talking about, Harry! I’ll twat her so hard bloody Lucius will feel it.’

‘Hurry up, I have to take you to Herbology,’ Snape barked over the heads of the class, and off they all went in a crocodile, with Harry, Ron and Dean at the back of it, and Ron still trying to get his arms free.

It was only safe to let him go once Snape had seen them out of the castle doors and they were crossing the vegetable patch towards the greenhouses. Harry got Ron talking about Quidditch as fast as he could.

‘...and if we’d played Hufflepuff, we’d have flattened them, Wood had us so sharp. Doesn’t matter now, does it? Cup’s off. Everything’s off. It’s like being in a prison with Dean’s people.’

‘What do you mean, my people, Ron?’ said Dean.

Ron looked at Dean.

‘Football players,’ he said.

Dean gave him a long, flat look, and then shook his head and walked on ahead. Ron glanced at Harry with a sly sort of face. He knew what he said. And what he meant by Dean’s people. Ron confirmed it with that look. Ron had grown up in a house where the plates washed themselves and the garden was full of gnomes, and he knew less about the Muggle world than Harry knew about dragons. Half the time he didn’t know what things to say to Dean, and he said other ones instead. Harry knew how Dean’s people could be, maybe Ron just wasn’t used to them. There weren’t many at Hogwarts and they all seemed to be Muggleborn. It was an odd thing for someone like Harry, so used to the ‘benefits’ of multiculturalism. 

Herbology was a very quiet lesson. There were two empty places in the class now, Justin’s and Hermione’s. Professor Sprout set them all to work pruning the Abyssinian Shrivelfigs, and hardly anybody spoke.

Harry went to tip an armful of withered stalks onto the compost heap and came face to face with Ernie Macmillan.

Ernie took a deep breath. Then he said, very formally, as though he’d rehearsed it:

‘I just wanted to say, Harry, that I’m sorry I ever suspected you. I know you’d never have attacked Hermione Granger, and I’m sorry for all the things I said. We’re all in the same boat now, and, well...’

He stuck out a plump hand. Harry shook it.

‘It’s all right,’ said Harry. He found, slightly to his own surprise, that he meant it. It was such a relief to have one person look at him and not see a monster that he’d have shaken hands with Filch. ‘Forget it. Everyone was saying it.’

Ernie looked relieved too. He and his friend Hannah Abbott came and worked at the same Shrivelfig as Harry and Ron.

‘That Dracina Malfoy girl,’ said Ernie, snapping off dead twigs, ‘she seems very pleased about all this, doesn’t she? D’you know, I think she might be Slytherin’s heir.’

‘That’s clever of you,’ said Ron, who didn’t seem to have forgiven Ernie nearly as fast as Harry had.

‘Do you think it’s Malfoy, Harry?’ Ernie asked.

Harry opened his mouth to say yes. It should have been easy. He’d said it to himself a hundred times.

‘Maybe,’ said Harry.

He said it so oddly, so flatly, that Ernie and Hannah both stared at him.

He didn’t know why he’d said it. He didn’t know why yes hadn’t come out. He was thinking of pink cheeks and bright eyes, and of a girl who’d been grey and shaking the last time she’d held the diary. He was thinking of Ginny on the morning of the match, white as a sheet with ink on her hands, trying to tell him something. I saw somebody. Last night. And Percy had interrupted, and she’d run.

A second later he saw something on the ground that made him hit Ron over the back of the hand with his pruning shears.

‘Ow! What’re you...’

Harry was pointing at the earth a few feet away. Several large spiders were hurrying across it, in a line, purposefully, like people late for a train.

‘Oh,’ said Ron. He tried to look pleased. He failed completely. ‘Yeah. Brilliant. Only we can’t exactly follow them now, can we...’

Ernie and Hannah were watching curiously. Harry watched the spiders go. They went straight across the vegetable patch, under the fence, and away over the lawn, and he lost them in the grass.

‘They’re heading for the Forest,’ he said quietly. ‘Look. Straight for it.’

Ron looked even more unhappy than before.

At the end of the lesson Professor Sprout walked them all up to Defence Against the Dark Arts. Harry and Ron hung back at the end of the line so they could talk without being heard.

‘We’ll have to use the Cloak again,’ Harry said. ‘Tonight, or tomorrow. And we’ll take Fang. He goes into the Forest with Hagrid all the time, he’ll know the paths. He might be some use.’

‘Right,’ said Ron. He was turning his wand over and over in his fingers. ‘Right. Yeah. Er. Harry. There aren’t... I mean, you don’t think there are... werewolves? In there? Mum always said to steer well clear of them. She said they go funny round wizards.’

They’d reached Lockhart’s classroom and were sliding into their usual seats at the back. Harry thought of Professor McGonagall in the window alcove, with the dark grounds behind her. If it has black fur, and it’s dancing, run faster. He very much hoped there was nothing like that in the Forest. He’d quite enough to be frightened of without it.

He decided not to answer the question.

‘There’s good things in there too,’ he said instead. ‘The centaurs are all right. And the unicorns.’

Ron had never set foot in the Forbidden Forest. Harry had been in once, and had rather hoped never to go again.

Lockhart bounded into the room, and the whole class stared at him. Every other teacher in the castle was looking grimmer than Harry had ever seen them. Lockhart, on the other hand, was positively bouncing.

‘Now, now, now!’ he cried, beaming round at them. ‘What’s all this? Why the long faces?’

People exchanged looks. Nobody answered.

‘Surely you’ve all realised,’ said Lockhart, slowly, as though they were a bit slow themselves, ‘that the danger has passed? The culprit has been removed!’

‘Who says?’ said Dean Thomas loudly.

‘My dear young man.’ Lockhart smiled at him kindly, as one might smile at a very small child who had asked why the sky was blue. ‘The Minister for Magic would hardly have taken Hagrid away if he hadn’t been quite, quite certain of his guilt.’

‘Yeah, he would,’ said Ron, even louder than Dean.

‘I flatter myself, Mr Weasley,’ said Lockhart, in a self-satisfied voice, ‘that I know rather more about the circumstances of Hagrid’s arrest than you do.’

Ron opened his mouth to say that he very much doubted it, and stopped halfway, because Harry had kicked him hard under the desk.

‘We weren’t there,’ Harry muttered. ‘Remember?’

But Lockhart’s revolting cheerfulness, his little hints that he’d always known Hagrid was a bad lot, his utter certainty that it was all over now, made Harry so angry that he wanted to pick up Gadding with Ghouls and throw it straight into Lockhart’s gleaming face. He didn’t. He scrawled a note instead, and pushed it across the desk to Ron.

Tonight. Let’s do it tonight.

Ron read it. He swallowed. Then he looked sideways, at the empty seat where Hermione should have been, with her quill out and her hand already half up. The sight of it seemed to stiffen something in him. He nodded.

The Gryffindor common room was always packed these days, because from six o’clock on the Gryffindors had nowhere else to be. And they had a great deal to say to each other, so the room often didn’t empty until well past midnight.

That night it was worse than usual. Harry had gone straight up after dinner to get the Invisibility Cloak out of his trunk, and he spent the whole evening sitting on it in an armchair by the fire, waiting for the room to clear, and it wouldn’t.

Lee Jordan had got a crowd round him again. He was standing on a table.

‘...and I’m telling you, if McGonagall won’t do it, we should do it ourselves. Go down there. All of us. Tonight. Fifty Gryffindors against a few dozen Slytherins, I like those odds...’

‘Oh, brilliant, Lee,’ said Angelina Johnson. ‘And then what? Duel them in the dungeons? Half of us can’t do a Shield Charm.’

‘Then we learn...’

‘There isn’t time to learn!’ It was Lavender Brown, and her voice cracked right up the middle. She was sitting on the floor with her back to the wall and her knees drawn up, and Parvati had an arm round her. ‘There isn’t time, don’t you understand? They’re going to close it. My mum wrote. She says the Ministry’s already drawing up the letters. She says they’ll send us home on the Express next week if there’s one more, just one more, and I’ll have to go to the Muggle school in our village and I don’t know how to do anything, I don’t know what a... a fraction is, I don’t...’

She put her face in her knees. Parvati pulled her in closer.

‘They can’t shut it,’ said Neville, in a small voice, from the corner. ‘They can’t. Where would we all go?’

Nobody answered him.

Over by the window, Fred and George were being very quiet, which was so unlike them that it was worse than the shouting. They were sitting with Ginny between them. Ginny was in Hermione’s usual chair. She had a book open on her lap that she wasn’t reading, and she was pale and pinched and very still, and every so often one of the twins would say something low and make her nod, and she’d go back to staring at the fire.

Harry watched her. He couldn’t help it.

She looked dreadful. She looked worse every day. There was ink on her fingers again. She kept rubbing at it with her thumb, the way you’d rub at a stain you’d given up on. Once, when Fred got up to fetch something, Harry saw her hand go inside her robes, quickly, as though checking that something was still there, and come out again. Then she saw him looking and went scarlet and pulled her sleeves down over her hands.

I saw somebody, she’d said, on the morning of the match. Last night.

And she hadn’t said who.

Fred and George challenged him and Ron to Exploding Snap, to pass the time, and Ginny sat watching them, very subdued, in Hermione’s chair. Harry and Ron lost on purpose, over and over, as fast as they could, trying to get the games finished. But even so it was long past midnight before Fred and George yawned, and stretched, and took Ginny up to bed between them.

Harry and Ron waited in the dark, listening, until they heard two dormitory doors close somewhere above them. Then they grabbed the Cloak, threw it over themselves, and climbed out through the portrait hole, praying that no prefect would be passing at the exact moment the Fat Lady swung open on nothing.

It was another slow, careful journey through the castle, ducking round corners, flattening themselves into alcoves while Professor Sinistra went past, and then Flitwick, and then two Ravenclaw prefects having a whispered argument. At last they reached the Entrance Hall, drew back the bolt on the great oak doors, squeezed between them without letting them creak, and were out in the moonlit grounds.

‘’Course,’ said Ron abruptly, as they crossed the black grass, ‘we might get to the Forest and find there’s nothing there to follow. Those spiders might not have been going there at all. I know it looked like they were sort of going that way, generally, but...’

His voice trailed off hopefully.

They came to Hagrid’s hut. It looked sad and sorry, with all its windows dark. There was an empty bowl on the step, and another on the table inside, so somebody, Professor Sprout probably, had been coming down to feed him. When Harry pushed the door open, Fang went nearly mad with joy all the same, bounding and barking and flinging himself at them. Terrified he’d wake the whole castle with those great booming barks, they fed him treacle fudge from the tin on the mantelpiece as fast as they could, which stuck his teeth together and shut him up.

Harry left the Invisibility Cloak folded on Hagrid’s table. There’d be no need for it in the Forest. Nothing in there could see them anyway.

‘Come on, Fang,’ said Harry, slapping his leg. ‘Walkies.’

Fang bounded out of the hut after them, raced to the edge of the trees, and lifted his leg against a big sycamore.

Harry took out his wand.

‘Lumos,’ he murmured, and a small light bloomed at the end of it, just enough to show them the path.

‘Good idea,’ said Ron. ‘I’d do mine too, but, you know. It’d probably go off. Or turn into a frog.’

Harry touched his shoulder and pointed down. Two spiders were hurrying away from the wandlight, across the grass and into the shadow under the trees.

‘Right,’ Ron sighed, with the air of a man who’d been expecting the worst and had now got it. ‘Right. Fine. I’m ready. Let’s go.’

So, with Fang trotting round them, snuffling at roots and leaves, they went into the Forest.

By the glow of Harry’s wand they followed the thin, steady trickle of spiders along the path. They didn’t talk. They listened. There were twigs snapping, and leaves rustling, and once something a long way off that might have been an owl. Harry could hear Ron breathing beside him, fast and shallow, and every time a spider ran across the path in front of them Ron’s breath hitched.

‘You’re doing all right,’ Harry said quietly, after a while. ‘You know that? You hate these things. I know you do. And you’re still here.’

Ron didn’t answer for a moment.

‘Course I’m still here,’ he said at last, rather gruffly. ‘Where else would I be?’ Then, after a few more steps, in a different voice, ‘You’re a good mate, Harry. You know that? Most people wouldn’t have noticed.’

They walked on. After about twenty minutes the trees had grown so thick that the stars overhead had vanished, and Harry’s wand shone alone in a great sea of dark. And then they saw their guides leaving the path.

Harry stopped, holding the wand up, trying to see where the spiders were going. But everything beyond his little circle of light was black. He’d never been this deep in before. He could remember, very clearly, how fast everything had gone wrong last year the moment anybody left the path. But Hagrid was miles away, sitting in a cell in Azkaban, and Hagrid had said follow the spiders.

Something wet touched Harry’s hand and he jumped backwards onto Ron’s foot. It was only Fang’s nose.

‘What d’you reckon?’ Harry said. He could just see Ron’s eyes, catching the light from the wand.

‘We’ve come this far,’ said Ron.

So they followed the darting little shadows off the path and into the trees.

They couldn’t go fast now. There were roots and stumps everywhere, barely visible in the blackness, and brambles that caught at their robes. Harry could feel Fang’s hot breath on the back of his hand. More than once they had to stop so that Harry could crouch and find the spiders again in the wandlight. They walked for what felt like half an hour at least. After a while, Harry noticed that the ground was sloping downwards, though the trees were as thick as ever.

Then Fang let out a great, echoing WOOF, and both of them jumped out of their skins.

‘What?‘ said Ron loudly, grabbing Harry’s elbow and staring round into the dark. ‘What?‘

‘Something’s moving,’ Harry breathed. ‘Over there. Listen. Something big.’

They listened. Some way off to their right, something big was pushing through the trees, snapping branches as it came.

‘Oh no,’ said Ron. ‘Oh no, oh no, oh...’

‘It’s going to be all right, Ron. But we have to be quiet,’ said Harry frantically. ‘It’ll hear you.’

‘Hear me?’ said Ron, in a voice gone high and thin. ‘It’s already heard Fang!’

The dark seemed to press on their eyes as they stood waiting. There was a strange, low, rumbling noise. Then silence.

‘What’s it doing?’ Harry whispered.

‘Getting ready to jump us,’ said Ron, and swore steadily under his breath for some time.

They waited, shivering, not daring to move.

‘D’you think it’s gone?’ Harry whispered.

‘Dunno...’

And then, off to their right, there was a sudden blaze of light, so bright in all that dark that they both threw their arms over their eyes. Fang yelped and bolted, got himself tangled in a bramble, and yelped louder.

‘Harry!‘ Ron’s voice broke with relief. ‘Harry, it’s the car!’

‘The what?’

‘Come on!’

Harry blundered after him towards the light, stumbling over roots, and a moment later they came out into a clearing.

Mr Weasley’s car stood in the middle of it, empty, in a ring of thick trees under a roof of branches, with its headlamps blazing. As Ron walked towards it with his mouth open, it rolled slowly forwards to meet him, exactly like a big turquoise dog that had found its owner.

‘It’s been in here the whole time!’ said Ron delightedly, walking right round it. ‘Look at it! Look at the state of it! The Forest’s turned it feral...’

The car’s wings were scratched and plastered with mud. Where the door on Ron’s side had been there was nothing but a gap with a bit of bramble caught in it. It had obviously been trundling about the Forest on its own for months, quite happily. Fang didn’t like it at all. He pressed himself against Harry’s legs, trembling.

Harry’s breathing slowed down. He stuffed his wand back into his robes.

‘Thanks, Dad,’ said Ron, to the car, patting its bonnet. ‘Brilliant car. Best car there’s ever been.’ He leaned against it. ‘And we thought it was going to eat us! I wondered where it had got to!’

Harry squinted round the floodlit clearing for spiders. But they’d all scuttled away from the glare of the headlamps.

‘We’ve lost them,’ he said. ‘Come on. Let’s find them again.’

Ron didn’t say anything. He didn’t move. His eyes were fixed on something about ten feet above the ground, just behind Harry’s head, and his face had gone the colour of candle wax.

Harry didn’t even have time to turn.

There was a loud click, and something long and hairy seized him round the middle and swung him up off the ground so that he hung face down in the air. Struggling, terrified, he heard more clicking, and saw Ron’s feet leave the ground too, and heard Fang howling. And then he was being rushed away into the dark between the trees.

Hanging upside down, Harry saw that whatever had him was going along on six immensely long, hairy legs, with the front two holding him tight beneath a pair of gleaming black pincers. Behind him he could hear a second creature, which must have Ron. They were going down, down, into the very heart of the Forest. Harry could hear Fang somewhere behind, fighting a third one, whining. He couldn’t have shouted if he’d wanted to. His voice seemed to have stayed behind in the clearing with the car.

He never knew how long he hung there. He only knew that at some point the dark thinned enough for him to see the leaf-littered ground beneath him, and that the ground was moving. It was alive with spiders. Twisting his neck round, he saw that they’d come to the lip of a vast hollow, cleared of trees, so that the stars shone straight down into it and lit up the worst thing Harry had ever seen in his life.

Spiders. Not little spiders, like the ones swarming over the leaves. Spiders the size of carthorses. Eight-eyed, eight-legged, hairy and black and huge. The one carrying Harry picked its way down the steep side of the hollow towards a great, misty, domed web in the very middle of it, and the others came crowding in from all sides, clicking their pincers excitedly at the sight of what it had brought.

The spider let go, and Harry dropped onto all fours in the leaves. Ron and Fang thudded down beside him. Fang wasn’t howling any more. He’d gone silent and was cowering flat to the ground. Ron looked exactly how Harry felt. His mouth was stretched wide in a scream that made no sound, and his eyes were starting out of his head.

Harry realised, slowly, that the spider that had dropped him was talking. It was hard to tell, because it clicked its pincers with every word.

‘Aragog!’ it was calling. ‘Aragog!’

‘Bless you,’ Harry said.

He thought the thing was sneezing. Or choking. He didn’t know. He’d gone past fear into some strange calm place on the far side of it, where the only thing left to do was be rude.

‘Sorry. Do giant spiders sneeze?’ Harry asked.

‘HARRY!‘ Ron screamed at him. It was the first sound he’d made. He was shaking so hard that Harry could hear his teeth.

And out of the middle of the misty web, very slowly, came a spider the size of a small elephant.

There was grey in the black of its body and legs. Every one of the eight eyes on its ugly, pincered head was milky white. It was blind.

‘What is it?’ it said, clicking its pincers rapidly.

‘Men,’ clicked the spider that had carried Harry.

‘Is it Hagrid?’ said Aragog, moving closer, with its eight milky eyes wandering.

‘Strangers,’ clicked the spider that had brought Ron.

‘Kill them,’ clicked Aragog fretfully. ‘I was asleep...’

‘Hang on, hang on, we’re friends of Hagrid’s,’ Harry shouted.

His heart seemed to have climbed up out of his chest and was pounding in his throat.

Click, click, click went the pincers of the spiders all round the hollow.

Aragog paused.

‘Hagrid has never sent men into our hollow before,’ it said slowly.

‘Hagrid’s in trouble,’ said Harry, breathing very fast. ‘That’s why we’ve come.’

‘In trouble?’ said the old spider, and Harry thought he could hear something like worry underneath the clicking. ‘But why would he send you?’

Harry thought about standing up, and decided against it. He didn’t think his legs would hold him. So he spoke from the ground, as calmly as he could manage.

‘They think, up at the school, those bloody idiot wizards, that Hagrid’s been setting a... a... something on students. They’ve taken him to Azkaban.’

Aragog clicked its pincers furiously, and all round the hollow the sound was taken up by the crowd of its children. It was like applause. Except that applause didn’t usually make Harry feel sick with terror.

‘But that was years ago,’ said Aragog fretfully. ‘Years and years ago. I remember it well. That’s why they made him leave the school. They believed that I was the monster that dwells in what they call the Chamber of Secrets. They thought that Hagrid had opened the Chamber and set me free.’

‘And you... you didn’t come from the Chamber of Secrets?’ said Harry. There was cold sweat on his forehead.

‘I!’ said Aragog, clicking angrily. ‘I was not born in the castle. I come from a distant land. A traveller gave me to Hagrid when I was an egg. Hagrid was only a boy, but he cared for me, hidden in a cupboard in the castle, feeding me on scraps from the table. Hagrid is my good friend, and a good man. When I was discovered, and blamed for the death of a girl, he protected me. I have lived here in the Forest ever since, where Hagrid still visits me. He even found me a wife, Mosag, and you see how our family has grown, all through Hagrid’s goodness...’

Harry gathered up what was left of his courage.

‘So, uh, you never, um, never attacked anyone?’

‘Never,’ croaked the old spider.

‘Oh good, you’re a nice giant spider then?’ asked Harry innocently.

‘It would have been my instinct, but from respect of Hagrid, I never harmed a human. The body of the girl who was killed was discovered in a bathroom. I never saw any part of the castle but the cupboard in which I grew up. Our kind like the dark and the quiet...’

‘Ah... But I reckon you do know what did kill that girl?’ said Harry. ‘Because whatever it is, it’s back and attacking people again...’

His words were drowned in a sudden storm of clicking, and the dry rustle of many long legs shifting angrily. Huge black shapes moved all round him in the dark.

‘The thing that lives in the castle,’ said Aragog, ‘is an ancient creature we spiders fear above all others. Well do I remember how I pleaded with Hagrid to let me go, when I sensed the beast moving about the school.’

‘What is it?’ said Harry urgently.

More clicking. More rustling. The spiders were closing in.

‘We do not speak of it!’ said Aragog fiercely. ‘We do not name it! I have never even told Hagrid the name of that dread creature, though he asked me, many times.’

Harry felt, very strongly, that this was not a subject to push. Not with the hollow full of giant spiders pushing closer on every side.

Aragog seemed to have had enough of talking. It was backing slowly into its domed web. But its children went on inching forward towards Harry and Ron.

‘Right then. Sorry to be a bother. We’ll just go, then,’ Harry called desperately after Aragog, hearing leaves rustle behind him.

‘Go?’ said Aragog slowly. ‘I think not...’

‘But... but...’

‘My sons and daughters do not harm Hagrid, on my command. But I cannot deny them fresh meat, when it wanders so willingly into our midst. Goodbye, friend of Hagrid.’

‘Oh you bloody cu-’

Harry was spun round. He found himself facing a wall of ravenous giant spiders, smaller than Aragog and no less dreadful for it, and very, very hungry, clicking, with their dozens of eyes gleaming in their ugly black heads...

He went for his wand. Even as he did it he knew it was no good. There were far too many. But as he tried to get to his feet, ready at least to go down fighting, a long, loud note blared through the hollow, and a blaze of light came flooding down the slope.

Mr Weasley’s car was thundering down into the hollow, headlamps blazing, horn screaming, knocking spiders flying. Several were thrown onto their backs, their endless legs waving in the air. It screeched to a halt in front of Harry and Ron, and its one remaining door flew open.

‘Get Fang!‘ Harry yelled, diving into the front seat.

Ron grabbed the boarhound round the middle and flung him, yelping, over the seat into the back, scrambled in after Harry, and the door slammed. Ron didn’t so much as touch the accelerator. The car didn’t need him. The engine roared, and they were off, hitting more spiders as they went. They tore up the slope and out of the hollow and went crashing away through the Forest, with branches whipping at the windows, the car threading its way cleverly through the widest gaps along a path it clearly knew.

Harry yelled. He yelled out of the window at the spiders. He told them several things about their mothers, and their legs, and what they could do with their pincers, that would have done lasting damage to the self-esteem of any giant spider that heard them. Then he fell back in the seat, gasping, and looked sideways at Ron.

Ron’s mouth was still open in the silent scream. But his eyes weren’t popping any more.

Harry reached over and put his hand on Ron’s shoulder. The way Ron had done for him, so many times.

‘Are you OK?’

Ron stared straight ahead through the windscreen. He couldn’t speak.

They smashed on through the undergrowth, with Fang howling in the back, and Harry saw the wing mirror snap clean off as they scraped past a huge oak. After ten loud, lurching minutes the trees began to thin out, and Harry could see bits of sky again between them. Then the car stopped so suddenly that they were nearly thrown into the windscreen.

They were at the edge of the Forest. Fang hurled himself at the window in his desperation to get out, and when Harry opened the door he shot off between the trees towards Hagrid’s hut with his tail clamped between his legs.

Harry got out too. After a minute or so Ron seemed to get the feeling back into his arms and legs, and followed him, still stiff-necked and staring. Harry gave the car a grateful pat on the bonnet. It reversed slowly back into the trees and was gone.

Harry went into the hut to fetch the Invisibility Cloak. Fang was shaking under a blanket in his basket. When Harry came out again, he found Ron being violently sick in the pumpkin patch.

‘Follow the spiders,’ said Ron weakly, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. ‘I’ll never forgive Hagrid for that. Never. We’re lucky to be alive.’

‘I expect he thought Aragog wouldn’t hurt friends of his,’ said Harry.

‘That’s exactly Hagrid’s trouble!’ said Ron, and thumped the wall of the hut with his fist. ‘He always thinks monsters aren’t as bad as everyone says, and look where it’s got him! Azkaban!’ He was shivering so hard he could barely stand. ‘What was the point of sending us in there? What have we actually found out? I’d like to know.’

‘That Hagrid never opened the Chamber of Secrets,’ said Harry. He threw the Cloak over Ron and prodded him in the arm to get him walking. ‘He was innocent.’

Ron snorted loudly. Hatching Aragog in a cupboard clearly wasn’t his idea of innocent.

As the castle loomed up ahead of them, Harry tugged the Cloak straight to make sure their feet were covered, and eased the creaking front doors open. They crept back across the Entrance Hall and up the marble staircase, holding their breath as they passed the corridors where the sentries were walking. At last they reached the safety of the Gryffindor common room, where the fire had burned itself down to a glow. They pulled off the Cloak and climbed the winding stairs to their dormitory.

Ron fell onto his bed without bothering to undress.

Harry didn’t feel sleepy at all. He sat on the edge of his four-poster thinking hard about everything Aragog had said.

The thing in the castle, he thought, was like some sort of monster Voldemort. Even the other monsters wouldn’t say its name. But he and Ron were no nearer to knowing what it was, or how it Petrified people. Even Hagrid had never known what was in the Chamber of Secrets.

Harry swung his legs up onto the bed and leaned back against his pillows, watching the moon through the tower window.

He couldn’t see what else they could do.

The feeling came up in him slowly, from the stomach, the way it always did. It was panic, and it was anger, and he couldn’t have said where one stopped and the other started. They’d hit a wall. Every way they turned, there was a wall. Riddle had caught the wrong person. The real heir of Slytherin had walked away, fifty years ago, and nobody knew if it was the same person now or somebody new. The diary was gone. Hermione was stone. Hagrid was in Azkaban. Dumbledore was gone. There was nobody else to ask. And the days were running out, one after another, like sand through his fingers, and at the end of them was a train, and a station, and a car, and Uncle Vernon’s face.

No. Harry’s jaw set hard. No. Not without a fight.

But he didn’t know who to fight. That was the worst of it. He had all this fury in him and nowhere to put it.

He lay down, still turning over what Aragog had said. The hollow. The cupboard. The body of the girl who was killed was discovered in a bathroom. He was drifting, nearly asleep, when what seemed like the very last hope they had came to him all at once, and he sat bolt upright in bed. If anyone had looked at the moon at that moment, they would’ve noticed it shone just a bit brighter for a moment. But Harry didn’t notice at all. Despite the fact it was meant for him. God is funny about that sort of thing. 

‘Ron,’ he hissed into the dark. ‘Ron!’

Ron woke with a yelp exactly like Fang’s, stared wildly round, and saw Harry.

‘Ron, that girl who died. Aragog said she was found in a bathroom,’ said Harry, ignoring Neville’s snuffling snores from the corner. ‘What if she never left the bathroom? What if she’s still there?’

Ron rubbed his eyes, frowning in the moonlight. And then he got it.

‘You don’t think... not Moaning Myrtle?