Interlude: Precisely When He Means To

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.