Due North

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

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

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

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

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

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

'What?' said Harry.

'Nothing.'

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

'Just looking out for you, mate,' Ron would say.

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

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

'Doing what?'

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

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

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

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

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

This was where Mr Weasley came in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr Weasley looked at his watch.

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

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

'No, Arthur,' said Mrs Weasley, lovingly and firmly.

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

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

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

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

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

'It'd be invisible,' Arthur murmured.

'Arthur!' Mrs Weasley barked.

Mr Weasley sighed.

'Yes, my dear.'

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

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

There was the wall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CRASH.

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

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

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

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

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

'I dunno...'

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

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

'You what? Oh, the house-elf.'

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

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

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

'Harry...'

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

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

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

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

That sobered Harry up as nothing else could have.

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

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

Harry looked up at the great clock with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. Ten seconds. Nine. He wheeled his trolley forward, slowly this time, until the front of it was against the barrier, and leaned on it with all his weight. The brick stayed brick. Three seconds. Two. One.

'It's gone,' said Ron, stunned. 'The train's left. What if Mum and Dad can't get back through to us? Have you got any Muggle money?'

Harry gave a hollow laugh. Mentally cursing and wishing all the malice a twelve year old boy could muster on Dobby.

'The Dursleys haven't given me pocket money for about six years. Apart from that 50p I gave you at Christmas.'

Ron put his ear against the cold brick.

'Can't hear a thing,' he said tensely. 'What are we going to do? I don't know how long it'll take Mum and Dad to get back to us.'

They looked round. People were still staring, mostly because of Hedwig.

'I think we'd better go and wait by the car,' said Harry. 'We're attracting too much atten-.'

'Harry!' Ron's eyes had lit up. 'The car!'

'What about it?'

'We can fly the car to Hogwarts!'

'But I thought...'

'We're stuck, right? And we've got to get to school, haven't we? And even underage wizards are allowed to use magic if it's a real emergency, section nineteen or something of the Restriction of Thingy...'

'Your dad won't mind?' Harry asked.

'He didn't mind last time, even before we explained everything to him. Mum didn't mind either, after she knew what went on.'

Harry nodded. There it was again, that family, and the way they simply took him in and made room. He'd have to find a way to repay them. He didn't know how yet, but he'd find it. It wasn't right for people to be that good to you and get nothing back.

And then the panic turned over inside him and became something a great deal more like excitement.

'Can you fly it?'

'Yeah, it's easy. I figured it out a while back, mate. No problem at all.' said Ron, swinging his trolley round towards the exit. 'C'mon, let's go, if we hurry we'll be able to follow the Hogwarts Express.'

They marched out through the crowd of staring Muggles, out of the station and round into the side road where the old Ford Anglia stood at the kerb. Ron unlocked the enormous boot with a series of taps of his wand, and they heaved the trunks in, put Hedwig on the back seat, and climbed into the front.

'Check no one's watching,' said Ron, and tapped the ignition.

Harry put his head out of the window. Traffic was grinding along the main road at the end, but the side street was empty.

'Alright, we're clear,' he said.

Ron pressed a large red button on the dashboard.

The car vanished. So did they. Harry could feel the seat under him and hear the engine and feel his own hands on his knees and his glasses on his nose, but as far as his eyes could tell he'd turned into a pair of eyeballs hanging four feet above a dirty street full of parked cars.

'Let's go,' said Ron's voice, from his right.

The road and the grimy buildings on either side dropped away. In seconds the whole of London lay beneath them, smoky and glittering in the sun.

Then there was a pop, and the car was back, and so were they.

'Uh oh,' said Ron, jabbing at the Invisibility Booster. 'It's faulty...'

They both pummelled it. The car vanished. Then it flickered back.

'Hold on!' Ron yelled, and he stamped on the accelerator, and they shot straight up into the low woolly cloud and everything went grey and wet.

'Now what?' said Harry, blinking at the solid fog pressing in on every window.

'We need to see the train to know what direction to go in,' said Ron. 'Dip back down again. Quickly...'

They dropped out of the cloud and twisted round in their seats, squinting at the ground.

'I can see it!' Harry yelled. 'Right ahead! There!'

The Hogwarts Express was streaking along below them like a scarlet snake.

'Due north,' said Ron, checking the compass on the dashboard. 'OK. We'll just have to check on it every half an hour or so. Hold on...'

And they went up through the clouds again, and a minute later burst out into blazing sunlight.

It was another world. The wheels of the car skimmed a sea of white fleece, under a blue sky that went on for ever and a sun too bright to look at.

'All we've got to worry about now are those muggle aeroplanes,' said Ron.

They looked at each other, and started to laugh, and for a long time they couldn't stop. It was as though they'd been dropped into somebody's dream. This, Harry thought, was the only way to travel. Past towers and swirls of snowy cloud, in a car full of hot bright sunlight, with a fat bag of toffees in the glove compartment and the thought of Fred's and George's faces when the two of them came down, smooth and spectacular, on the lawn in front of the castle.

They checked on the train as they went further and further north, and each dip under the cloud showed them a different country. London went behind them. Neat green fields gave way to wide purple moors, and villages with churches like toys, and a great grey city crawling with cars like coloured ants.

Several hours later, though, Harry had to admit that some of the fun had gone out of it. The toffees had made them thirsty and there was nothing to drink. They'd both taken their jumpers off, and Harry's T-shirt was stuck to the back of the seat, and his glasses kept sliding down his sweaty nose. He'd stopped noticing the clouds. He was thinking, longingly, of the train somewhere miles beneath them, where you could buy ice-cold pumpkin juice off a trolley from a plump, smiling witch. Why hadn't they been able to get on to the platform?

'Can't be much further, can it?' croaked Ron, hours later still, as the sun began to sink into the floor of cloud and stain it pink. 'Ready for another check on the train?'

It was still directly beneath them, winding past a snow-capped mountain. It was a good deal darker under the clouds now. Ron put his foot down to climb, and as he did, the engine began to whine.

Harry and Ron looked at each other.

'It's probably just tired,' said Ron. 'It's never been this far before...'

And they both pretended not to hear the whine getting louder as the sky went steadily darker. Stars came out in the black. Harry pulled his jumper back on, and tried not to look at the windscreen wipers, which had begun to wave feebly, as though in protest.

'Not far,' said Ron, more to the car than to Harry. 'Not far now.' He patted the dashboard nervously.

When they came down through the cloud a little later they had to squint into the darkness for a landmark they knew.

'There!' Harry shouted, and Ron and Hedwig both jumped. 'Straight ahead!'

High on its cliff over the lake, black against the dark horizon, stood the turrets and towers of Hogwarts.

But the car had begun to shudder, and it was losing speed.

'Come on,' Ron said, coaxing, and gave the wheel a little shake. 'Nearly there, come on...'

The engine groaned. Thin jets of steam came hissing out from under the bonnet. Harry found that he was gripping the edges of his seat as they flew out over the lake. The car gave a nasty wobble. Harry looked out of his window and saw the water a mile below, smooth and black as glass. Ron's knuckles were white on the wheel. The car wobbled again.

'Come on,' Ron muttered.

They were over the lake. The castle was right ahead. Ron put his foot to the floor.

There was a loud clunk, a splutter, and the engine died.

'Uh oh,' said Ron, into the silence.

The nose of the car dropped. They were falling, and gathering speed, straight at the castle wall.

'Oh, bugger!' Ron yelled, and he hauled the wheel round, and they missed the dark stone by inches as the car swung in a great arc, over the greenhouses, over the vegetable patch, out across the black lawns, and losing height every yard of the way.

Ron let go of the wheel entirely and dragged his wand out of his back pocket.

'STOP! STOP!' he bellowed, whacking the dashboard and the windscreen with it, but the ground was still coming up at them...

'MIND THAT TREE!' Harry roared, and lunged for the wheel, and it was too late.

CRUNCH.

With a bang of metal on wood that went through Harry's teeth, they hit the trunk of the tree and dropped to the ground with a jolt that threw them both forward into the dashboard.

Steam poured up from the crumpled bonnet. Hedwig was screaming in her cage. There was a lump the size of a golf ball coming up on Harry's forehead where he'd hit the windscreen, and to his right Ron let out a low, despairing groan.

'Are you OK?' Harry said urgently.

'My wand,' said Ron, in a shaking voice. 'Look at my wand.'

It had snapped nearly in two. The tip hung off it by a few splinters.

Harry had opened his mouth to say that Madam Pomfrey might be able to do something, or Flitwick, when the car moved.

It wasn't the engine. The engine was dead. The whole car lifted, a foot off the ground, on Ron's side, and dropped again with a crash that threw Harry against his door. Something had hit the roof. Something very big. The roof over Ron's head bowed in like a tin can under a boot.

'What was...'

The tree hit them again.

Harry saw it this time. A branch as thick as a man's body came down out of the dark and struck the bonnet, and the bonnet folded up like paper, and the windscreen went white and fell in over their knees in a thousand pieces. Then the branch drew back. It drew back, up and away into the black, slowly, like an arm. And Harry saw the rest of the tree.

It was moving. All of it. Every branch on it was writhing, lashing, flexing like the legs of something turned over on its back, and the trunk they'd hit was twisting on its roots, and the whole enormous thing was bending down over them, and Harry understood, with a cold that went right through him, that it was looking for them.

'Out!' he screamed. 'Ron, out, get OUT!'

A branch came through Ron's window. It didn't break the glass; there wasn't time for the glass to break; it came through the door, through the metal, and the whole side of the car crumpled in on Ron like a fist closing. Ron shouted. Harry grabbed him by the arm and the collar and hauled him across the seats, over the gear stick, and Ron came, scrabbling, with his legs still in the wreckage, and the door on Ron's side tore clean off its hinges and went spinning away across the grass.

Harry got his own door open. It opened a foot and jammed. Something hit the roof again and the foot became six inches.

'Window!'

He went out through it head first. The frame caught his hip and he fell on to the grass, and rolled, and came up on his knees reaching back for Ron. Ron's head and shoulders were out. The car lifted again, and came down, and Ron screamed as the sill came down on his leg.

'I've got you. I've got you. Pull!'

Ron pulled. Harry pulled. Ron came out of the car like a cork, and the two of them went over backwards in a heap, and a branch came down where Ron had been lying and stove the roof of the car flat to the seats.

The windows all burst at once.

Then the car came to life.

It started. Not the engine. The lights came on, both headlamps, blazing full beam across the lawn, and the horn went, one long, furious note, and the whole crumpled wreck of it reared up on its back wheels like a horse. The boot flew open and both their trunks shot out of it and skidded across the grass. The back door banged open and Hedwig's cage came flying out after them and bounced twice and lay still. And then the Ford Anglia tore itself out from under the tree, with its wheels spinning on nothing, with branches coming down all round it and missing, and swung round once, and roared off into the dark of the Forest with its one remaining door flapping, and was gone.

Harry lay on the grass and watched it go.

'Ron,' he said. 'Ron, did you see-'

The tree came down between them.

It wasn't a branch this time. It was the crown of the tree, half of it, the whole weight of the thing bending over and smashing into the ground like a felled building, and the earth jumped under Harry and threw him a yard, and when he'd got his breath back and his glasses back on there was a wall of thrashing wood in front of him where Ron had been.

'RON!'

Nothing. The branches heaved and settled and heaved.

'RON! RON, ANSWER ME!'

He went at the wood with his hands. He didn't think about it. He got hold of a branch as thick as his leg and tried to drag it aside, and it whipped out of his grip and took the skin off his palms, and he went at it again. He couldn't see anything. He could see the car's lights, far off in the Forest now, swinging about between the trees, and nothing else. No red hair. No Ron. Only the tree, flexing and creaking and settling its weight down on the place where his best friend had been lying three seconds before, and the thought came up through him, clear and cold and quite certain: he's under that. He's under that and he's dead, and it's your fault, you made him come, you made him fly the car, everything you touch...

The voice had never been so loud.

'Ron,' Harry said, and it came out as nothing, a breath. 'Ron, please.'

He was on his knees in front of the branches. He had no wand out. He'd forgotten he owned one. He heard the tree creak above him, a long, slow groan of wood under strain, and he didn't look up, because there was nothing above him that mattered, and...

Something hit him in the side like a bull.

He went over sideways, and a branch the width of a door came down where he'd been kneeling and buried itself a foot in the turf, and the ground kicked, and Harry was on his back in the grass with Ron Weasley on top of him, filthy, bleeding from a cut over one eye, and very much alive.

'MOVE, you stupid...'

Ron was up. Ron had him by the back of his jumper and was hauling. Harry got his feet under him.

'I thought you were-'

'Not yet! Go! GO!'

They ran. The tree came after them. It couldn't move its roots, but it didn't need to; its reach was enormous, and it swung at them with branch after branch, and every one of them came down like a hammer. Harry heard one go past his ear with a sound like a whip. Ron shoved him sideways and a second buried itself where they'd been. They zigzagged. They fell over the trunks and got up. A branch swept low across the grass like a scythe and both of them jumped it, and Ron landed badly and went down, and Harry went back for him and got him up by the arm, and another branch cracked down between them, and they went round it in opposite directions and met on the far side, running.

And then they were out of range.

They knew it because the next blow fell short, and hit the grass ten feet behind them with a thud they felt in their feet, and the one after that fell shorter still. They staggered on another twenty yards for good measure before they stopped, and bent over with their hands on their knees, and sucked at the air.

Behind them, the tree went on lashing at nothing, slower and slower, like a dog that has lost the scent.

'That thing could've killed us! What was Dumbledore thinking, putting that there?' Ron said irritably, between gulps.

'It's probably guarding something. Dumbledore always has his reasons. He's the most brilliant wizard of our age, and very wise,' Harry said, with heat, and with a reverence that would have surprised anyone who hadn't heard him on the subject before.

Ron opened his mouth. He shut it again. He knew, because his mother had said so at the kitchen table in a voice that made the crockery hum, exactly what Molly Weasley thought of Albus Dumbledore for leaving Harry where he'd been left for eleven years, and Ron had risked his neck on a chessboard for a Stone that Dumbledore had apparently known perfectly well they were going after. He didn't share Harry's opinion of the Headmaster. He hadn't for some time. But Harry's face, when he talked about Dumbledore, was the face of someone holding on to something, and Ron had got a good deal better over the summer at knowing when not to kick a thing out from under his friend. So he said nothing at all.

'Can you believe our luck?' Ron said miserably instead, crouching to pick up Scabbers, who'd come out of his pocket in the last dash and was sitting dazed in the grass. 'All the trees on these grounds, and we found the one that fights back.'

He looked over his shoulder at the ancient thing, which was still swaying and flexing its branches in a way that was somehow worse now that it was slow.

'Come on,' said Harry wearily. 'We'd better get up to the school...'

It was not at all the arrival they'd pictured. Stiff, cold, bruised and bleeding, with their trunks scattered across half an acre of lawn and the lump on Harry's head throbbing in time with his heart, they collected what they could, found Hedwig's cage, which was dented but whole, and Hedwig inside it, who had a great deal to say to both of them, and began the long drag up the slope to the great oak doors.

'I think the feast's already started,' said Ron, dropping his end of the trunk at the foot of the steps and crossing quietly to a bright window. 'Hey, Harry, come and look. It's the Sorting!'

Harry hurried over, and the two of them pressed their faces to the glass and looked into the Great Hall.

Thousands of candles hung in the air above the four long tables, and the golden plates and goblets glittered under them, and overhead the enchanted ceiling, which always showed the sky outside, was thick with stars. Through the forest of pointed black hats Harry could see a line of frightened first-years filing up the Hall, and Ginny among them, easy to spot by her hair. Professor McGonagall, with her hair in its tight bun and her spectacles catching the light, was setting the Sorting Hat on its stool.

Harry remembered that hat. He remembered sitting under it, a year ago, with the whole Hall watching and the Hat muttering in his ear, and the long, horrible seconds when he'd thought it was going to say Slytherin. It hadn't. Gryffindor had got him, and Ron, and Hermione, and every Weasley there'd ever been, and last term the two of them had helped win Gryffindor the Cup off Slytherin for the first time in seven years.

A very small boy with mousy hair had gone forward to put the Hat on. Harry's eyes slid past him to the staff table, and to Dumbledore in the middle of it, with his silver beard and his half-moon spectacles shining in the candlelight. A few seats along sat Gilderoy Lockhart in robes of aquamarine. And down at the end, huge and hairy, drinking deeply from his goblet, was Hagrid.

'Hang on...' Harry muttered. 'There's an empty chair at the staff table... where's Snape?'

Professor Severus Snape was Harry's least favourite teacher, and Harry had the honour of being Snape's least favourite pupil. He taught Potions, and he was cruel, and sarcastic, and disliked by everybody who wasn't in his own house, which was Slytherin.

'Maybe he's ill!' said Ron hopefully.

'Maybe he's left,' said Harry, 'because he missed out on the Defence Against the Dark Arts job again!'

'Or he might have been sacked!' said Ron, warming to it. 'I mean, everyone hates him'

'Or maybe,' said a very cold voice directly behind them, 'he's waiting to hear why you two didn't arrive on the school train.'

Harry spun round.

Severus Snape stood on the step behind them with his black robes stirring in the cold wind off the lake. He was thin and sallow, with a hooked nose and greasy black hair to his shoulders, and he was smiling, and the smile told Harry everything he needed to know about how much trouble they were in.

'Follow me,' said Snape.

They didn't dare look at each other. They followed him up the steps and into the vast, echoing Entrance Hall, where the torches burned in their brackets and the smell of the feast came drifting out of the Great Hall, and Snape led them away from the light and the smell and the warmth, down a narrow stone stair into the dungeons.

'In!' he said, opening a door halfway along the cold passage.

They went into Snape's office, shivering. The walls were lined with shelves of large glass jars, and in the jars floated things that Harry didn't, just now, want to know the names of. The fireplace was black and empty. Snape shut the door and turned round.

'So,' he said softly. 'The train isn't good enough for the famous Harry Potter and his faithful sidekick Weasley. Wanted to arrive with a bang, did we, boys?'

Harry drew breath. He had the whole thing ready, Dobby and all.

'Okay, sir, it was the barrier at King's Cross. There's this house-elf, right. And...'

'Silence!' said Snape coldly. 'What have you done with the car?'

Ron gulped. It wasn't the first time Snape had given Harry the impression of being able to see straight into his head. A moment later he understood, as Snape unrolled that evening's Prophet and held it up.

'You were seen,' he hissed.

FLYING FORD ANGLIA MYSTIFIES MUGGLES, said the headline.

'Bugger,' said Harry.

Snape gave him a fierce look, and then began to read aloud.

'"Two Muggles in London, convinced they saw an old car flying over the Post Office tower... at noon in Norfolk, Mrs Hetty Bayliss, while hanging out her washing... Mr Angus Fleet, of Peebles, reported to police..." Six or seven Muggles in all. I believe your father works in the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office?' He looked up at Ron, and the smile got nastier. 'Dear, dear... his own son...'

Harry felt as though one of the tree's bigger branches had got him in the stomach. If anyone found out Mr Weasley had enchanted the car... he hadn't thought of that. He hadn't thought of it once.

'I noticed, in my search of the grounds, that considerable damage appears to have been done to a very valuable Whomping Willow,' Snape went on.

'Professor, that tree nearly killed us both. We -.'

'Again, Silence!' snapped Snape again. 'Most unfortunately, you are not in my house, and the decision to expel you does not rest with me. I shall go and fetch the people who do have that happy power. You will wait here.'

Harry and Ron stared at each other, white-faced.

Harry wasn't hungry any more. He felt sick. He tried not to look at the large, slimy something hanging in green liquid on the shelf behind Snape's desk. If Snape had gone for Professor McGonagall, head of Gryffindor, they were barely any better off. She might be fairer than Snape, but she was every bit as strict.

Ten minutes later Snape came back, and sure enough it was Professor McGonagall with him.

Harry had seen her angry before. Either he'd forgotten how thin her mouth could go, or he'd never seen it go this thin. She raised her wand the moment she came through the door, and both of them flinched, but she only pointed it at the empty grate, and fire sprang up in it.

'Sit,' she said, and they backed into the two chairs by the fire.

'Explain,' she said, with her glasses glinting.

Ron told it. He started with the barrier that wouldn't let them through, and went on from there.

'... so we had no choice, Professor. We couldn't get on the train.'

'Why didn't you send us a letter by owl? I believe you have an owl?' Professor McGonagall said coldly, to Harry.

Harry gaped at her. Now she'd said it, it was so obviously the thing to have done that he couldn't think why it hadn't crossed his mind.

'I... I didn't think...'

'That,' said Professor McGonagall, 'is obvious.'

There was a knock at the office door, and Snape, looking happier than Harry had ever seen him, opened it.

The Headmaster stood there.

Harry's whole body went numb. Dumbledore was looking unusually grave. He looked down his long crooked nose at the pair of them, and Harry found himself wishing, quite sincerely, that he and Ron were back under the Whomping Willow.

The silence went on for a long time.

'Please explain why you did this,' said Dumbledore.

Shouting would have been better. Harry hated the disappointment in that voice more than he'd have hated anything. He found he couldn't look Dumbledore in the eye, and told the whole story to his own knees instead.

He left out one thing only, which was that the car was Mr Weasley's; he told it as though he and Ron had happened to find a flying car parked outside the station. He made very sure Dumbledore heard about Dobby, and the letters, and the barrier, and whose fault every bit of it was. He didn't mention Malfoy, because he had no proof. He knew Dumbledore would see through the business with the car in a second, but Dumbledore asked nothing about it. When Harry finished, the Headmaster only went on looking at them over his spectacles.

'We'll go and get our stuff,' said Ron, in a hopeless sort of voice.

'What are you talking about, Weasley?' barked Professor McGonagall.

'Well, you're expelling us, aren't you?' said Ron.

Harry looked quickly at Dumbledore.

'Not today, Mr Weasley,' said Dumbledore. 'But I must impress upon both of you the seriousness of what you have done. I will be writing to both your families tonight. And I must warn you that if you do anything of this kind again, I will have no choice but to expel you.'

Snape looked as though somebody had cancelled Christmas. He cleared his throat.

'Professor Dumbledore, these boys have flouted the Decree for the Restriction of Underage Wizardry, caused serious damage to an old and valuable tree... surely acts of this nature...'

'It will be for Professor McGonagall to decide on these boys' punishments, Severus,' said Dumbledore calmly. 'They are in her house, and therefore her responsibility.' He turned to Professor McGonagall. 'I must get back to the feast, Minerva. I have a few notices to give out. Come, Severus. There's a delicious-looking custard tart I want to sample.'

Snape shot Harry and Ron a look of pure venom as he let himself be swept out of his own office, and they were left alone with Professor McGonagall, who was still regarding them like an eagle that hasn't yet decided which one to eat first.

'You had better get along to the hospital wing, Weasley. You're bleeding.'

'Not much,' said Ron, wiping hastily at the cut over his eye with his sleeve. 'Professor, I wanted to watch my sister being Sorted...'

'The Sorting Ceremony is over,' said Professor McGonagall. 'Your sister is also in Gryffindor.'

'Oh, good,' said Ron.

'And speaking of Gryffindor...' Professor McGonagall said sharply, but Harry got in first.

'Professor, when we took the car, term hadn't started, so... so Gryffindor shouldn't really have points taken from it, should it?' he finished, watching her face.

Professor McGonagall gave him a piercing look. But he was sure, nearly sure, that she'd almost smiled. Her mouth looked a shade less thin, at any rate.

'You're learning, Potter. Very good. I will not take any points from Gryffindor,' she said, and Harry's heart lifted a great deal. 'But you will both get a detention.'

It was better than Harry had expected. As for Dumbledore writing to the Dursleys, that was nothing at all. They'd only be disappointed that the tree hadn't finished the job. He hoped, though, that Dumbledore would back him up about never going back there, after everything. He'd told Dumbledore all of it. So Dumbledore had to understand. Of course he would. Dumbledore was wise, and kind.

Professor McGonagall raised her wand again and pointed it at Snape's desk, and a large plate of sandwiches, two silver goblets and a jug of iced pumpkin juice appeared on it with a pop.

'You will eat in here, and then go straight up to your dormitory,' she said. 'I must also return to the feast.'

The door shut behind her. Ron let out a long, low whistle.

'I thought we'd had it,' he said, and took a sandwich.

'So did I,' said Harry, and took one too.

'Can you believe our luck, though?' said Ron thickly, through chicken and ham. 'Fred and George must've flown that car five or six times and no Muggle ever saw them.' He swallowed and bit again. 'Why couldn't we get through the barrier?'

'It was Dobby, I told you.' Harry said.

'We'll have to watch our step from now on, though,' he said, and took a grateful swig of pumpkin juice, which was the best thing he'd ever tasted. 'Wish we could've gone up to the feast...'

'She didn't want us showing off,' said Ron sagely. 'Doesn't want people thinking it's clever, arriving by flying car.'

When they'd eaten as many sandwiches as they could hold, which took some time, since the plate kept refilling itself, they got up and left the office and took the old familiar road to Gryffindor Tower. The castle was quiet. The feast was over. They passed muttering portraits and creaking suits of armour and climbed the narrow stairs, until at last they came to the passage where the Fat Lady hung in her pink silk dress.

'Password?' she said.

'Er...' said Harry.

They didn't know it. They hadn't met a prefect yet. But help was already on the way; there were feet running behind them, and they turned to see Hermione dashing up the corridor.

'There you are! Where have you been? Harry, are you okay? The most ridiculous rumours. Someone said you'd been expelled for crashing a flying car. Malfoy was glaring about it, that nasty harpy. She's probably very happy about the whole affair.'

'Well, we haven't been expelled,' Harry assured her.

'You're not telling me you did fly here?' said Hermione, sounding very nearly as severe as Professor McGonagall.

'No, we took the bus,' said Harry, drily, and a good deal more irritably than he'd meant to. How else did anybody imagine they'd got here?

'Skip the lecture,' said Ron impatiently, 'and tell us the new password.'

'It's "wattlebird",' said Hermione impatiently, 'but that's not the point...'

The rest of it was lost, because the portrait had swung open on a sudden storm of clapping.

The whole of Gryffindor was still up. They were packed into the circular common room, standing on the lopsided tables and the squashy armchairs, and they'd been waiting. Arms came through the portrait hole and hauled Harry and Ron inside, and Hermione had to scramble in after them.

'Brilliant!' yelled Lee Jordan. 'Inspired! What an entrance! Flying a car right into the Whomping Willow, people'll be talking about that one for years!'

'Good on you,' said a fifth-year Harry had never spoken to in his life, and somebody was thumping him on the back as though he'd just won a marathon.

Fred and George shoved their way to the front and said, together, 'Why couldn't you've called us back, eh?'

Ron was scarlet, and grinning, and trying not to. But Harry could see one person who didn't look happy at all. Percy's head was visible above a crowd of excited first-years, and he was plainly trying to get close enough to begin telling them off.

Harry dug Ron in the ribs and nodded at Percy. Ron saw it at once.

'Got to get upstairs. Bit tired,' he said, and the two of them started working their way towards the door on the far side of the room, and the spiral stair beyond it.

'Night,' Harry called back to Hermione, who was wearing a scowl very like Percy's.

They got across the room, still having their backs slapped, and gained the peace of the staircase, and climbed it to the very top, where the door of their old dormitory now had a sign on it that said Second-years. Inside was the same circular room, with the same five four-posters in their red velvet and the same high narrow windows. Their trunks had been brought up and set at the ends of their beds.

Ron grinned guiltily at Harry.

'I know I shouldn't've enjoyed that or anything, but...'

The door flew open, and in came the other three second-year Gryffindor boys, Seamus Finnigan, Dean Thomas, and Neville Longbottom.

'Unbelievable!' beamed Seamus.

'Cool,' said Dean.

'Amazing,' said Neville, in awe.

Harry couldn't help it. He grinned too.

Everyone was impressed with him. Everyone. And he lay awake for a while, afterwards, with the lump on his head throbbing gently and the tree going round and round behind his eyes, and wondered whether this was what it felt like to be cool.