Rather Like a Princess

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?