The Blood Tells All

Madam Pomfrey wouldn't hear of letting him out before Monday.

Harry didn't argue. He hadn't the energy for it, for one thing, and for another he had learnt, over two years of visits, that arguing with Madam Pomfrey was like arguing with a door. He lay where he was put. He drank what he was given. He let her prod his ribs, count his bruises, tut over his spine, rub something cold into the back of his neck that smelt of pine needles. The only thing he wouldn't do, on the Saturday evening, with the rain still sobbing against the long windows, was let her take the bag.

'Potter, it's kindling.'

'I know.'

'It is a bag of splinters. I've seen the Willow do this to garden furniture.' She held out her hand. 'Give it here and I'll have the house-elves put it on the fire, which is all it's good for now.'

'No,' said Harry. 'Thanks. I'll keep my kindling.'

He knew exactly how stupid he looked. He knew the Nimbus was past mending, that no charm in the castle would put a dozen bits of varnished ash back into a broomstick, that the strip of handle with half a serial number on it was never going to fly again if he kept it under his pillow for the rest of his life. He kept it under his pillow anyway. Every time his hand found the drawstring in the dark, something in his chest went down hard, the way it had gone down when he'd tipped cold soup into Hedwig's empty tray through the bars of her cage. He couldn't have explained it to Madam Pomfrey. It was as if he had lost one of his friends.

The school came to cheer him up in groups.

Hagrid came first, on the Saturday night, filling the doorway, dripping, with something enormous in his arms that turned out to be a bunch of flowers. They were yellow, more or less. They looked like cabbages, if cabbages had been grown by somebody with a grudge, and they were full of earwigs, which began at once to make their way down the stems towards the sheets.

'Grew 'em meself,' said Hagrid proudly, propping them in a jug the size of a bucket. 'Thought they might cheer the place up a bit. Yeh look awful, Harry.'

'Cheers, Hagrid.'

'Fifty feet,' said Hagrid, sitting down on the end of the bed, which groaned. 'Fifty feet, an' the Willow got yer broom. I'd a good mind ter go down there with an axe.' His great hands clenched in his lap, then slowly opened again. 'But yeh don' get ter pick which ones yeh're sorry for, do yeh. Told yeh that once. Willow's only doin' what it is.'

He blew his nose then, which in Hagrid took a while, and stayed another hour talking about nothing at all, in the comfortable way he had, until Madam Pomfrey came to shift him.

Ginny Weasley came on the Sunday, just before lunch, while Madam Pomfrey had Ron at breakfast under orders to eat something, with Hermione sent off to the library for a book she claimed to need, in a condition of such advanced scarlet that Harry's first thought was that she must have a temperature. She had a card. She had made it herself, which was obvious, since it was lumpy with glue, with a scarlet lion on the front which had clearly fought her every inch of the way. She put it into his hands without a word.

He opened it.

The card sang. It sang in a high, thin, piercing voice, something about getting well soon with a tune that went round in a small circle like a trapped bee. It wouldn't stop. It got louder the longer it was open. Ginny made a strangled noise. Harry got the card shut, then had to sit on it, then wedged it under his bowl of fruit, where it went on humming to itself through the apples with a sort of muffled fury.

'Thanks, Ginny,' said Harry, meaning it. 'That's brilliant. Did you do the charm yourself?'

Ginny opened her mouth. Nothing came out. She looked at him for one more second, going from scarlet to something like plum, then fled.

She fled so fast that she nearly ran into the party arriving in the doorway, which parted for her with the air of people stepping aside for a cat.

Dracina Malfoy had come to call.

She came in slowly. The whole thing had a tempo. The ward door was held open for her by Vincent Crabbe. Pansy Parkinson came in first, on the left, carrying a flat gold box of something expensive; Daphne Greengrass came in on the right, carrying nothing but her own amusement; then came Malfoy herself, perfectly dressed, hair in its crown of plaits, the black silk sling arranged across the front of her robes like an order of chivalry. Gregory Goyle stayed outside. Harry could see one of his shoulders through the door, planted, as though he'd been told to guard it. Perhaps he had.

She stopped at the end of the bed, looked Harry over, sheets, bruises, earwigs, singing fruit bowl, then inclined her head about an inch.

'Potter.'

'Morning,' said Harry. 'Don't mind me, I'll just lie here. It's not every day a peasant gets a royal visit.'

It came out of him before he had checked it with anyone. He thought, too late, of a path in the rain, of a voice gone thin as ice, be safe on Saturday, I mean it, and wondered if the joke had been a mistake.

Malfoy lifted her chin.

'Royal is an exaggeration,' she said. 'I'm a princess. One should be accurate.'

Harry's face went hot. He felt it go, from his collar upwards, the first blush he had ever managed lying flat on his back, and he thought at once, horribly, of a shop in Diagon Alley two summers ago, a footstool, a small hand held out to him palm down, are you a princess. He'd been eleven. He hadn't known what a princess was for.

Daphne Greengrass made a small sound, which she turned into a cough.

'Sit down, then,' said Harry, before his face could get any worse. 'Your Highness.'

She sat on the visitor's chair as though it had been brought for her from somewhere better. And then, oddly, having arrived like a procession, she simply talked. She talked the way anybody might have talked at a bedside. She wanted to know what Madam Pomfrey had given him, then told him it was the wrong thing. She wanted to know if it was true that Dumbledore had walked him up to the castle himself, then said that of course it was, she had watched it from the stands. She looked at the earwigs, said 'Hagrid,' without any expression at all, then let it go. She asked, with real interest, how far up into the cloud he had followed the Snitch before the cold came, how he had known where Diggory was, whether a Nimbus turned faster than a Cleansweep in a crosswind or only felt as if it did. She knew what she was talking about. She had, after all, flown against him. Harry found that he was propped up on his elbows, talking about the bailiff-wind at the south corner with both hands, before he had properly decided to.

'You showed off,' she said, at one point. 'Down the length of the Slytherin stand. Upside down.'

'I was checking the broom.'

'You were checking something.' She examined her sling. 'It was disgraceful. Everyone said so. Pansy had to sit down.'

Pansy said nothing. Pansy wasn't, Harry noticed, listening to any of this. She had put the gold box on the table by his bed, where it was now being investigated by an earwig, then wandered a few steps down the ward with her arms folded; and she was standing now with her back half to them, looking at the bed at the far end, the one under the window, the one with the curtains, which had been Malfoy's in September. She wasn't looking at the bed, exactly. She was looking at the little table beside it, bare now, with nothing on it but a water jug. Her pug face, which Harry had seen sulky, superior, bored, spiteful, several kinds of sour, was doing none of those. It had gone small, somehow, like a face in the window of a house where something has happened. She stood looking at that bare table as though there were something still lying on it that only she could see.

Harry only saw her look at the table, then look quickly away when she caught him watching, with something in her eyes that was very like fright.

'Parkinson?' said Malfoy, without turning her head. 'You're hovering.'

'I'm not.'

'You are. Come back here and stop staring at the furniture.' She turned to Harry. 'Ignore her. She's been peculiar for weeks.'

Outside the door, there was a sudden flurry.

Harry looked past Malfoy's shoulder. Through the gap he could see the corridor beyond, where Goyle had been standing; and he saw Goyle leave it. He went sideways, fast, for a person of his size, flattening himself against the wall out of the line of the door; a second later Crabbe let go of the door to do the same thing on the other side, so that the two of them stood either side of the entrance like a pair of extremely large bookends trying to be a wall. Then Neville Longbottom went past.

Neville was carrying Trevor, who had evidently been on an expedition. He was looking at the toad. He didn't look at the hospital wing, or at the door of it, or at the two Slytherins pressed against the stones on either side of it with their eyes shut. He went on down the corridor at his usual anxious trot, round the corner, and was gone.

Crabbe opened one eye. Goyle opened the other. They came back to their posts very slowly, looking at nothing, in the manner of two people who haven't just hidden from Neville Longbottom.

Harry stared.

Then he remembered what it was. First year. The Hufflepuff match, Snape refereeing, the stands going over like dominoes; Neville, round, terrified, eleven-year-old Neville, taking on both of them at once with his fists while Malfoy, screaming, raked four lines down Ron's cheek, then bit a crescent out of his ear. Neville had been knocked cold in the end. But he had doubled Goyle up first, in front of half the school; and it appeared that neither of them had ever quite got over it.

He looked at Malfoy. Malfoy was examining her gloves with great attention, which was what she did when she was trying not to laugh.

'Your guards,' Harry said, 'They just scarpered.'

'I saw nothing.'

'Both of them.'

'Longbottom has a reputation,' said Malfoy, with dignity. 'In certain circles. I don't discuss it.' And her mouth twitched, once, at the corner, before she got it under control.

She stayed until the bell went for lunch. She rose when it rang, as though it had rung for her, brushed down her robes with her good hand, then paused at the foot of the bed.

'You'll be out tomorrow, I suppose.'

'Pomfrey says.'

'Then I'll see you tomorrow.' A small pause. 'Eat the chocolates. Parkinson chose them, so they'll be dreadful, but the thought's mine.' She turned to go, then said, over her shoulder, in a different voice, lower, pitched for him alone: 'Keep the broom. I'd keep it. It isn't stupid.'

He hadn't said anything about the broom. He opened his mouth, found he had nothing in it, and shut it again. By then she was halfway to the door with her ladies-in-waiting falling in on either side; and Daphne Greengrass, who had giggled her way through the entire visit from the doorway as though it were a play, was still giggling when she went out.

They met Hermione coming in.

It happened in the doorway. Harry saw it. Hermione had come up from the Great Hall early, as she always did, with a plate of something under a napkin held in both hands; Malfoy was going out, with her train; the door wasn't wide. For a moment the two of them stood a foot apart in the frame, face to face, with Ron somewhere in the corridor behind saying 'what?', and the whole ward seemed to hold its breath.

'Granger,' said Malfoy, warmly. 'How nice. You've brought him his lunch. I did wonder who was doing it.'

'Malfoy,' said Hermione, just as warmly. 'How lovely. You've brought him... all of you.' Her eyes went over Pansy, Daphne, the bookends. 'How generous. I hope he wasn't tired out.'

'Oh, I think he bore up. He's terribly strong. We talked Quidditch.' A pause of exquisite kindness. 'You wouldn't know.'

'No, I only do the charm that lets him see in it,' said Hermione pleasantly. 'Someone has to. Excuse me, this is hot.'

She came through. Malfoy went out. They didn't touch, though it was a narrow door; from the corridor Harry heard Daphne Greengrass begin, helplessly, to laugh again.

Hermione put the plate down on his bedside table, moved the gold box an inch to the left with one finger, as though it had been in the way, and sat down.

'Shepherd's pie,' she said. 'Eat it while it's hot. How was your visit?'

'All right,' said Harry carefully.

'Good,' said Hermione, smiling at him. The smile was perfect. Her quill, when she took it out to go on with her Arithmancy, went into the parchment like a chisel.

*

The Gryffindor team had come on the Sunday morning, in a body. This time Oliver Wood came with them.

He hadn't come on the Saturday. Fred had explained this, delicately, as Wood having walked the pitch in the rain since the final whistle, drying out his feelings. Now he stood at the foot of the bed, big, square, pale, with his hair still wet, and he said what he had come to say in a hollow, flat, dead sort of voice, like a man reading out a will.

'It wasn't your fault, Harry. I don't blame you. Not in the slightest. Nobody could have held on in that. I want you to know that.'

'Thanks, Oliver.'

'I mean it.'

'I know.'

Wood nodded. He went on standing there. After a while George took him gently by the elbow, like a man leading away a horse that has been in a fire. The team went out saying things about Ravenclaw, enormous margins, points difference, that sounded, through the shut door, like people whistling in a wood.

Ron came back at three, with the chess set. Hermione hadn't moved since lunch. They sat one on each side of him through the long grey afternoon, Ron playing him at chess on the blanket, Hermione pretending to read, both of them talking too much, both of them watching him when they thought he wasn't looking; and Harry, who had never in his life been looked after by anybody, lay between them. He was grateful. It didn't help.

Because they only knew half of it.

He hadn't told them about the dog in the stand. They knew about Magnolia Crescent; Ron had gone white enough to the lips over that one, with his uncle Bilius, while Hermione had pursed her mouth, said a stray, probably, then given him the statistics on big black dogs in rural Scotland. This time he had told nobody. Lying there with the chessboard between them, with Ron's bishop coming at him like a thug, he turned it over by himself, the way he'd turned things over at Privet Drive with nobody to tell. Twice now. Once in the gap between a garage and a fence in Magnolia Crescent, the night he had nearly gone under the wheels of a bus the size of a house; once in the highest row of an empty stand, in the rain, minutes before he fell fifty feet into the mud. Twice, and twice something had very nearly killed him.

Was that how it went, then? Would it be there every time now, at the edge of things, sitting, watching, until one day the thing that came after it finished the job? Was he going to spend whatever was left looking over his shoulder for a dog?

He tried to find the thing he had found in June. He knew where it lived; he had felt it go up through him like a flame along a fuse when the sword came out of the hat, the thing that had made him stand in front of Quirrell, in front of a basilisk fifty feet long, and not step back. He reached for it now.

His hand found the drawstring under the pillow instead. Kindling. A strip of handle with half a number on it.

He lay there with the dry wooden whisper of it in his fingers, with Ron saying 'check,' with Hermione's page not turning, and thought, quite clearly, in the flat voice from the bottom of something: what is the point. What was the point of any of it. You found the thing in yourself, you stood, you didn't step back, and they let you keep a broomstick for two years before a tree ate it. What was the point.

Then there were the dementors.

He felt sick every time his mind went there, sick in his stomach and hot in his face, the way he had felt coming round on the floor of the train with the whole compartment looking at him. Everybody said they were horrible. Ron's dad had come home from Azkaban grey. Hermione had been shaking. Wood, Fred, Angelina, Diggory, had been up in it; half the school had sat in the stands with a hundred of them pouring onto the grass. They had felt the cold. They'd been frightened, then very glad when the silver thing came out of Dumbledore's wand. But nobody else fell off. Nobody else slid down a wall. Nobody else heard, inside their own head, every time, the same woman.

He knew who she was now. He lay there between them, not telling them.

He had heard her words. Not just the scream, this time; the words, the three of them, over and over, her whole last minute spent pushing one bargain across a table at a thing that laughed. He had heard it in the stand. He heard it again all Saturday night in the hospital wing, lying awake with the storm blowing itself out beyond the glass, with the moon coming through at last in long strips across the ceiling: his mother, young, breaking, begging for not-her. Begging for him. Take me instead. Then the laugh, high, cold, delighted, like a skewer through fog; then the one syllable, the one word, which was his name.

It made him angry.

Not sad. What came up inside Harry instead was something else, hot, bright, simple, that had been waiting under the sand. Voldemort had done that. Voldemort had stood in a bedroom in a village whose name nobody had ever told Harry, laughing at a girl of twenty-one begging on her knees, then killed her, then turned the wand on a baby in a cot. And because of that Harry had lived in a cupboard. Because of that he had never once been held by anyone who was his. He'd been shown a family once, in his first year, through a sheet of glass: a mother with his eyes, a father with his hair, grandparents, a little brother, a sister, all of them smiling, all of them waving, all of them behind the mirror where he couldn't get at them, because that was all the world had ever thought Harry Potter deserved. A family you could look at. He had stopped Quirrell for that world. He had gone down a pipe for it with a basilisk at the bottom. He had stood in front of Voldemort twice now, by his count, at eleven, at twelve, in the back of a man's head, in a boy's diary; he had come out each time; the wizarding world had said well done, then sent him home to Privet Drive in July. And the only family he had ever been allowed was a picture behind glass, which Dumbledore had then taken away, for his own good. Dumbledore was wise and did that for a good reason.

Harry was so angry that he slept angry.

He went under like a stone going into a pond and dreamt of hurting them. The Dursleys. He had his wand, in the dream, with no Ministry, with nobody to tell him he mustn't. He stood in the kitchen of number four with the light coming in through the net curtains. Uncle Vernon was there, huge, purple, roaring. Harry pointed the wand at him, and with red and green flashes of light the roaring stopped. And Vernon was screaming in agony. Dudley came in from the garden, then went back out, backwards, very fast, through the glass of the door. Aunt Petunia stood at the sink with her hands in the washing-up water; she wouldn't turn round; so he made her turn round. She looked at him with his mother's eyes, which were the only thing about her that was like his mother, and he pointed the wand at those too, because those eyes were attached to hands that hit him with a rolling pin, a frying pan, and many more things besides..

The dream kept breaking.

It broke on hands. They came out of the kitchen cupboards, out from under the sink, up through the lino: grey, rotted, slimy, scabbed, hands that had been a long time in the dark. Wherever they touched him the warmth went out. The kitchen went to fog, and in the fog somebody was pleading. Somebody was begging for his life in a voice he knew. He fought the hands. He woke with his own hands up, in the moonlit ward, with the storm gone quiet, reaching out at the empty air above the bed as if there were somebody there to reach for.

There wasn't.

He lay there with his arms up for longer than he could afterwards admit, as though if he held them out long enough she might come. As though she might come in from the ward door, young, with his eyes, to sit on the bed, to put a hand on his hair, the way he had wanted her to come, so many times, into the cupboard, into the dark, when he was five, when he was seven, when he was nine, when the lock went on the door at Privet Drive with nobody ever awake for him.

He put his arms down.

It was stupid. It was the stupidest, most childish, most orphan sort of wanting there was. He knew it. He knew what came of it, because Dumbledore had told him, sitting on the floor of an empty classroom in first year with a mirror in it. Men have wasted away in front of it. Driven mad by it. That was where it went. That was what happened to boys who held their arms out at night for people who weren't coming. You went mad in front of a mirror, lost in what you saw. He shut it. He shut it like a drawer, hard, with his jaw clenched. He turned over on his face. He went back down.

He dreamt of revenge again. Only this time she was there.

Dracina Malfoy was in the dream; not the princess with the sling, but the girl with her hair down, in the rain, on the path to the pitch, with arsenic in her voice. She stood at his shoulder in the kitchen at Privet Drive. She didn't stop him. She encouraged him. She praised him. She stood very close, so that he could feel the warmth of her all down his side. When Vernon started screaming she said good. When the teachers came, the ones from the primary school who had believed Dudley every time, the one who had shut him in the stock cupboard for a thing Dudley had broken, she said go on. When the female social worker came, the one with the folder, who had looked at him laboriously over her glasses once in the front room with her head on one side, then gone away, then never come back, Dracina said that one, Harry, that one especially; he did; she laughed the June laugh, the real one, with her hand over her mouth. He put his arm round her. He didn't decide to. The way it had gone round her in the paddock when she came off the hippogriff screaming. She leant into it. She turned her face up. He was thirteen; something in him that he had no words for, that he wanted no words for, knew exactly what it wanted, and reached for it, in the only place where it was allowed.

Good, she said. You're mine.

Dracina wanted him.. No one wanted him like she did. No one praised him like she did. It made him want to impress her. He made all the muggles sorry. He hurt them back.

And all the while, the man watched.

He'd been there, Harry thought afterwards, from the beginning of the second dream, or possibly from the beginning of the first; he couldn't be sure when he had first noticed him. Sometimes he was a long way off, a shape at the end of the garden at Privet Drive, standing on the lawn beyond the broken glass of the kitchen door with the light behind him. Sometimes he was close. Once he was simply there, in the kitchen, leaning in the doorway to the hall with his arms folded, a yard from Harry's elbow, watching him cast a hex that turned Aunt Petunia's hands to useless boneless blobs whilst she cried.

Harry knew him. He was the man from the corridor on the fourth floor, the man with the fists, from the big cracked painting of two brothers on a hillside, the one whose smoke went along the ground; only he wasn't paint now. He was tall. His clothes were rough. His face, which the painter had half lost in brown varnish, wasn't lost here, and it wasn't a face that was good to look at, not because it was ugly, but because of how still it was, like a face that has been waiting at a door for a very long time. He said nothing. He never said a single word, in any of the dreams, that night or after. He watched, with his fists at his sides, and the thing that came off him was a smell.

Blood.

Harry knew it at once. He had smelt it in September, in Hagrid's paddock, when a girl with a torn arm had come off a hippogriff into his chest, screaming into his robes, and he had held her, with it all over his hands. Warm, then; copper, salt, something under it, sweetish, like a coin in the mouth. This was the same smell gone old. This was that smell after a thousand years in a shut room.

He tried everything.

He ran, in the dream, and the man was at the end of the road. He shut the kitchen door, and the man was on the other side of the glass. He turned his back to do the thing to Vernon again, with Dracina's breath on his neck saying yes, and when he turned round the man was a foot away, with his arms folded, looking at him with the cracked-paint patience of something that could outwait a mountain. He wouldn't go. It was like trying to get rid of a smell by shutting your eyes.

So, in the end, Harry did the only thing he had left, what he did to Filch, to Dudley, to the Fat Lady, when there was nothing else to do.

'Alright, mate' he said, in the dream, to the man in the doorway, 'if you're going to stand there all night, you could at least make yourself useful. There's a broom under the pillow that wants mending.'

He turned his back, and ignored him.

Behind him, the man laughed.

It was a terrible sound. Not loud. It was the laugh of something that hasn't laughed for a very long time, that has forgotten where the parts go: a rusty, startled, creaking sound, like a door opening in a house where nobody has lived for centuries; and if Harry had known what he was hearing he wouldn't have slept again that year. Nobody had heard it for longer than there had been writing. Something very old, that had watched the world from a doorway since before there were cities, had just been told to mend a broomstick by a boy of thirteen in pyjamas, and it had been so surprised that the laugh had got out before it could stop it.

It didn't get to finish.

There was light. It came from no window, in a dream with no sun in it, in a kitchen at night; it came down through the ceiling of number four, Privet Drive, in one straight beam, white, warm, perfectly clean, the colour of the dawn he'd flown into over the Burrow in a stolen car, and it fell on the man in the doorway the way a hand falls on a shoulder. He didn't scream. He had, Harry thought, been expecting it; he'd been expecting it for a very long time. He looked up into the beam with that patient, waiting, ruined face, his mouth still open on the laugh, and he burnt. He went up like the smoke on his brother's altar, white, straight, clean, in one feather, to the top of the frame.

And the dream, with nobody left to watch it, let go of him.

Harry woke.

The ward was grey. The storm had gone; the long windows were pale with the first of Sunday, soft rain on the glass. In the next bed Ron wasn't yet there. Nobody was. He lay on his back with his heart going, with his pyjamas soaked, with the smell of blood still in the back of his throat, where it stayed until breakfast.

He didn't tell anybody that either.

He only lay there, as the light came up, going over it. The hands, the voice, the man, the laugh. He thought, with a shame that made him pull the blanket up to his chin, of what he'd been doing when the man laughed, of who had been at his shoulder, of what his arm had wanted; then he thought, not of any of that, but of the light, which had been the strange part. It hadn't come for him. He'd been standing in that kitchen with his wand on his aunt. It hadn't touched him at all.

He had the oddest feeling, lying there, that it had known exactly where to look.

*

It was a relief, on the Monday morning, to be let back into the noise of the castle. There was too much of it to think in. The corridors were full of people, the Great Hall roared, there was a Charms essay he hadn't done, a werewolf essay he hadn't done, a bag to pack, a Herbology lesson to be late for; and in the middle of all of it, as the price of the noise, there was the Slytherin table.

Slytherin had had a wonderful weekend.

Gryffindor losing was only half of it. Everybody lost; Hufflepuff had taken the match, and the Hufflepuffs were being, in the manner of their house, almost unbearably decent about it. The other half was that the whole thing had gone exactly as Flint had meant it to go. Gryffindor had opened the season in a hurricane against the wrong side, with no Slytherin broom out of the shed; they had lost by a hundred; the Seeker had fallen off; and every Slytherin in the school walked into breakfast on Monday with the particular shine of people whose plan has worked. The sling, Harry noticed, had gone.

Dracina Malfoy had taken it off. She had evidently done so after walking out of the ward on the Sunday night, and she celebrated the return of her right arm by using it, publicly, all through breakfast, for everything: for the toast, the pumpkin juice, the post, her plaits, for a long languid stretch above her head like a cat on a windowsill, in full view of the Gryffindor table, that made Fred put his fork down.

'Nerve damage,' said Fred. 'Invisible. I'm moved.'

'Two months,' said George. 'That sling had a longer run than Lockhart.'

She didn't look at Harry while she stretched. She looked at the ceiling, with an expression of great contentment, like a general reviewing a battle on a map; then she said something to Daphne, who laughed, and Marcus Flint, at the far end of the table, raised his goblet to her, with a grin like a cliff falling down.

Harry looked at his porridge.

'She was never injured,' said Ron, low. 'Not after the first week. You said it yourself. It was a prop.'

'I know.'

'So she sat out the match on purpose. Her lot did. We played in that. We lost. And you...' Ron stopped. 'You know what I mean.'

'I know what you mean.'

He did. He had known it on Wednesday night, in the common room, when Wood put his head in his hands. He had known it on Thursday on the path in the rain, and had laughed about the salt. It had been funny then, the brass of it, the whole two-month theatrical run. It wasn't quite as funny now, from a hospital bed, with his broom in a bag.

Potions was double, on the Monday, in the dungeon, with a crocodile heart each.

Snape had put them on something called a Wit-Sharpening Potion, which involved the hearts, armadillo bile, ground scarab, a great deal of stirring, and an atmosphere of such cold that the cauldrons seemed to steam harder just to keep warm. Snape never once mentioned the werewolf essay; nobody was fool enough to remind him. Harry had been at his cauldron for ten minutes when the imitations began.

He didn't see who started it. He only heard, across the dungeon, a long low moan, then a snigger; then he looked up. Three Slytherins at the far bench had their hoods up, their hands inside their sleeves, and were drifting, with their arms out, in slow wobbling circles between the cauldrons, going oooooh. Crabbe was one. Goyle was one. They did it the way they had done it on Halloween on the way out of the feast, only better, because they had practised. Then one of them, with a thin, clever, carrying wail, came gliding right down the central aisle of the dungeon towards the Gryffindor benches with the hood pulled forward so that the face was all shadow, with the hands up the sleeves, with the whole body swaying, in a perfect, horrible, graceful imitation of the thing that had come up the aisle of the train in September and had put its face in at the compartment door.

It stopped in front of Ron.

It bent its hooded head towards him, slowly, the way the things on the pitch had bent theirs, all together, towards the warmest thing in the sky. It made a sound, through the hood, of long, rattling, dreadful breath, and the Slytherin bench howled.

And then it did the fall.

It let go of everything. The arms came out of the sleeves. They went up. The whole figure went backwards, slowly, loosely, exactly like a boy coming out of a cloud with nothing in his hands, down the length of the aisle in a sort of lazy swoon, then caught itself against the end of the bench a foot off the floor; and the hood fell back off silver-fair hair done up in a crown.

Harry had known. He had known from the way it moved. He had seen her move.

He looked at Dracina Malfoy, hanging off the end of the bench with both arms thrown back, giving the Slytherins their money's worth, with her mouth open on the breath of the thing that had put his mother's voice into his head, and the cold that went through him then had nothing to do with the dungeon. He thought, quite distinctly, she doesn't know. She hadn't been there when he came round. She hadn't heard, by his bed on Saturday, with the moon in strips on the ceiling, what the cold brought with it, what it said, in what voice, in whose. She didn't know what she was playing at. She was playing at the thing that had made Lily Potter beg.

Her eyes came round to him. They were very bright. They had the look in them he had seen on Friday, from the front row at an execution, the pure one, the real one.

Then they found his face.

He watched her see it. He watched her see his face, the way she had seen it on Friday when Snape said know-it-all. The brightness went out. Something else came in behind it that might have been oh; and he was never, afterwards, quite sure whether what he saw next was the mask arriving or the mask coming off.

He never found out. Ron had got there first.

Ron had been standing beside him the whole time with the crocodile heart in his hand, slimy, purple, the size of a fist. He hadn't said anything. His ears had gone the colour of the heart; and at the moment the hood fell back, he simply threw it. He threw it the way he threw a Quaffle, flat and hard from the shoulder with no wind-up at all. It crossed the dungeon in a short wet arc and hit Dracina Malfoy full in the face.

There was a sound like a dropped fish.

Nobody laughed, which was strange. The Slytherin bench, which had howled at the dementor, sat with its mouths open in dead silence while Malfoy straightened up, slowly, by the end of the bench, with a crocodile's heart sliding off her cheek, down the front of her robes; and in the silence, from behind Harry, as silently as fog, came Snape.

'Thirty points from Gryffindor,' he said, before he had even reached them. His voice was almost soft with pleasure. 'Fifty, Weasley. For assault with an ingredient, for the waste of a crocodile heart, which you will replace at your own expense, and for the entertainment you have provided my house, which I shall not forget. Miss Malfoy. The hospital wing, if you wish it.'

'I don't need the hospital wing,' said Malfoy.

Her voice was perfectly steady. She was standing very straight, with the mess all down her front, with her chin up, and she didn't look at Ron. She didn't look at Snape either. She was looking at Harry. Her eyes had gone wide, soft, sorrowing. Her hand had come up, by slow degrees, to press against her lips in distress, oh, Potter, I didn't mean, how could he; it was very well done, very well done indeed; Harry had seen her do it on Friday to a girl in tears, and he looked away. He found he had to.

Ron said, 'Worth it,' in a quiet, even, perfectly contented voice; Snape heard it, and took ten more.

'Here,' said a voice at Malfoy's elbow.

It was Hermione. She had come down the aisle with her wand out while everyone else was staring. She stopped in front of Dracina Malfoy, who had a crocodile's heart sliding into her collar, and she said, in a clear, concerned, carrying, perfectly kind voice, 'Hold still, Malfoy. Let me. Scourgify.' And the mess went. It went off the robes, the cheek, the crown of plaits, in one neat pass, leaving nothing but a faint shine. Hermione put her wand away. She looked Malfoy up and down with the air of somebody checking their work, then said, gently, with tremendous sympathy, so that the whole dungeon heard her:

'There. Honestly, you'd hardly know. It rather suited you, actually.'

And she went back to her cauldron.

Snape took five points from Gryffindor for Hermione's assistance, on the grounds that nobody had asked for it; and Malfoy stood for a second with her hand still at her mouth, with her eyes on Hermione's retreating back; what was in them wasn't sorrow of any kind.

'If it's Snape again,' said Ron, as they came up out of the dungeons after lunch towards Defence Against the Dark Arts, 'I'm not going in. I mean it. I'll skive off. I'll go to the hospital wing. I'll say I've got the plague.'

'You haven't got the plague.'

'I'll get it. Hermione, go on, look. See who's in there.'

Hermione went ahead to the classroom door, opened it an inch, put her eye to the crack; then she turned back to them, and her whole face had changed.

'It's all right,' she said. 'It's him.'

Professor Lupin was back.

He looked as though the illness had had him by the collar. His old robes, which had never fitted anybody, hung off him now as if there were less of him inside them, with the frayed cuffs further down his wrists than they'd been; there were shadows under his eyes the colour of a bruise; when he turned from the board to watch them come in, he did it slowly, like a man who had been given his body back that morning on loan. But he smiled at them. He smiled at every face that came through the door, as though each one were a small piece of good news; the class, which had come up the stairs in a sort of mutinous crouch, straightened up, surged, and burst at once into complaint.

'Sir, it's not fair, he was only covering, why should we have to do his homework-'

'-werewolves, sir, we haven't even done werewolves-'

'-two rolls of parchment-'

'-he took fifty points off Ron for a crocodile-'

'-and five off me for cleaning up-'

'-two rolls, sir, by this morning, half of us haven't-'

Lupin held up a hand. The noise went down, not all at once, but the way water goes down a drain, with a last gurgle from Seamus.

'Did any of you tell Professor Snape,' he said, with a small frown, 'that we hadn't reached that chapter yet?'

It set them all off again.

'Yes, sir, Hermione did, he said we were behind-'

'-he said it was first-year matter, what we'd been doing-'

'-he wouldn't listen to anyone-'

'-two rolls of parchment!'

Lupin looked round at them, at thirty indignant faces, Dean with his arms folded, Ron still faintly purple, Neville looking as though he'd been personally accused of something; and his mouth twitched.

'All right. Don't worry about it. I'll have a word with Professor Snape myself. Nobody needs to hand that essay in.'

There was a sigh of relief that might have moved the curtains.

'Oh, no,' said Hermione, in real dismay. 'But I've done it. I finished it on Saturday!'

'Then you shall have the pleasure of knowing more about the subject than anyone else in the room, Hermione,' said Lupin gravely, 'which I suspect you had already. Now. Hinkypunks.'

It was a good lesson. It was, after Friday, almost painfully good, like warmth getting back into a hand. He had brought them a glass tank with a thing in it: a thin, frail, smoky, one-legged creature, no bigger than a cat, that seemed to have been put together out of wisps of fog, with a small lantern dangling from one wispy hand. It looked harmless. It looked, Harry thought, as if a strong word would blow it out.

'Bogs,' said Lupin, while they took notes. 'Marshes, moors, anywhere with soft ground at night. He'll hop along in front of a traveller with that lantern of his, just far enough ahead to look like a house. People follow the light. They always follow the light.' He tapped the glass gently. 'And then...'

The hinkypunk threw itself at the inside of the tank with a wet, squelching, horrible little noise, like a boot coming out of mud, and Lavender shrieked.

The bell went at last, too soon. Everyone began to pack up, scraping chairs, hunting for quills; Harry had his bag over his shoulder, halfway to the door between Ron's back and Hermione's, when Lupin said, 'Harry. Hang on a moment, would you. I'd like a word.'

He turned back.

Lupin was laying a cloth over the hinkypunk's tank. He did it carefully, tucking the edges in, as though putting a bird to bed, then went back to his desk, where a stack of books waited to go into his old briefcase, and began sliding them in one by one.

'I heard about Saturday,' he said, without looking up. 'I'm sorry about your broom. Is it past saving?'

'Yes,' said Harry. 'The Willow got it. I've got Nimbus branded bag of kindling.'

Lupin let out a breath.

'That tree was planted within the same year I started Hogwarts,' he said. 'My first year here. There was a game people used to play, getting as close as they dared, touching the trunk. In the end a boy called Davey Gudgeon came within an inch of losing an eye, and after that we weren't allowed near it.' He closed the briefcase. 'No broomstick in the world would have come out of it whole. I'm sorry.'

Harry nodded. There was a silence, which Lupin didn't seem in any hurry to fill. He never was. Harry had noticed that he would stand and let a quiet go on for as long as it liked, Similar to how Hagrid let a fire burn down, as though quiet weren't an awkward thing but simply another thing in the room.

'You heard about the dementors as well,' Harry said. It came out hard. 'I suppose.'

Lupin looked up quickly.

'I did.' He put the briefcase down. 'Nobody on the staff has ever seen Professor Dumbledore like that, Harry. Nobody. They've been restless for weeks, down at the gates; they don't like being kept out; they like being told even less; he has been telling them since September.' A pause. 'That was why you fell. Wasn't it.'

'Yes.'

He hadn't meant to say the next thing. He had rehearsed not saying it all the way up the stairs from the dungeons. It came up anyway, past his teeth, before he could get a hand to it.

'Why? Why do they do that to me? Nobody else... I mean, am I just-'

'No,' said Lupin.

He said it so sharply that Harry stopped. It had come out of him like a snap, like a dog's jaw coming shut, and his head had come up with it.

'It is nothing to do with weakness, Harry. Put that out of your mind now.' He came round the desk. 'They affect you more than the others because the others haven't got what you've got behind you..'

A bar of thin November sun had come in through the high window, pale, with no warmth in it, and it fell across Lupin where he stood. It lit the grey in his hair, which was more than there should have been. It lit the lines of his face, which was a young face, Harry realised, under the lines, the face of somebody who ought to have been perhaps thirty-five, with a great deal written on it in a hurry.

'Dementors,' said Lupin, 'are among the foulest things that move upon the earth.'

His voice had changed. Harry heard it change. It went down, in the course of that one sentence, from the mild, tired, schoolmaster's voice into something lower, with gravel in it, that seemed to come not from his throat but from the middle of his chest. He had heard it twice before: once on the train, in the dark, with a hooded thing at the door; once in this man's office, over a smoking goblet, with the word reeks.

'They live where it is darkest. Where it is filthiest. They glory in rot. They glory in despair. They take the peace out of the air around them, the hope, every good thing, and they drain it, like a leech drains, until there is nothing left in a place but the cold.' He wasn't looking at Harry now. He was looking at the window. 'Muggles feel them. They can't see them, but they feel them pass; they call it a chill, a bad day, a street they don't like walking down. Get close enough to one and every happy memory you have will be sucked out of you, one after another. If it can, it will feed on you for long enough to make you into a thing like itself. Empty. Soulless.' The gravel had become a growl. He didn't seem to have noticed. 'The worst of your life, Harry, is what they leave you with. Only that. And the worst of yours is a thing that would knock any man off any broom ever made. You have nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing.'

Harry was staring at him.

Something was happening to Professor Lupin, and he couldn't have said what, except that it was the thing that had happened in the office when Snape came in, only it wasn't going away this time. The hair on his forearms, where the frayed sleeves had ridden up, was standing straight. His shoulders had gone up and forward, as if the robes were suddenly too narrow across the back. His nostrils were wide. When he turned his head from the window, there was a moment, a flash, no longer than a blink, when the light caught his eyes at an angle and they weren't grey-brown at all but the flat, wet, shining amber of a dog's eyes in a headlamp.

Then it was gone. He was pale, tired, patched, himself.

And Harry thought, with a crawl up his spine that had nothing to do with dementors that he was looking at this man in his patched robes who had just talked about dementors like how a soldier talks about the other side.

'When they come near me,' he said. His throat had gone tight; he stared at the desk, at the grain in the wood. 'I can hear Voldemort. Killing my mum.'

Lupin's arm moved.

It came up, fast, then it stopped, in mid-air, hung there, and went down again. He had thought better of it. Harry saw him think better of it. There was a silence in which the hinkypunk squelched softly under its cloth.

'Why did they have to come to the match,' said Harry, bitterly, into the silence. 'They were supposed to be at the gates.'

'Hunger,' said Lupin. He said it quite coolly, snapping the briefcase shut. 'Dumbledore won't let them into the castle. So there's nothing for them to feed on but each other, down there at the gates, with the whole school just out of reach up the lawn. And then a match. Hundreds of people, packed in, shouting, their hearts going... all that feeling, all in one place.' He shook his head. 'I don't think they could have resisted it. It was a feast laid out on a table.'

'Azkaban must be hell,' Harry muttered.

'Yes.' Lupin nodded, grim. 'A rock out in the sea with a fortress on it; but it's not the sea that keeps them there, or the walls. Nobody in Azkaban needs a wall. They're shut up inside their own skulls with the worst of themselves, every hour of every day, with no cheerful thought left to hold on to. Most of them are mad inside a month.'

'But Black got out,' said Harry slowly. 'He got past them. He got away.'

The briefcase slid off the desk.

Lupin caught it before it hit the floor, in one quick stoop that Harry barely saw, and straightened up with it. His face was quite blank.

'Yes,' he said. 'He must have found a way to hold them off. I wouldn't have thought it was possible. Not for twelve years. They're meant to drain the magic out of a wizard, in the end, if he's left with them long enough...'

'You made the one on the train go away,' said Harry suddenly. 'In September. You did something. The silver thing.'

'There are defences,' said Lupin. He said it carefully, 'Of a kind. But that was one, Harry, one of them, on its own in a corridor. The more there are the harder it gets. I'd not like to try it against a hundred.'

'What defences? Could you teach me?'

'I'm hardly an expert at fighting dementors. Quite the opposite, if I'm honest.'

'But if they come to another match, I've got to be able to... I can't just fall off every time, I can't-'

Lupin looked at him.

He looked for a long moment, turning it over, at Harry's set face, at his fists, at whatever it was he saw there that always seemed to remind him of something; then he sighed.

'Well. All right. I'll try. I can't promise much. But it will have to wait until after the holidays, I'm afraid; there's a great deal to get through before the end of term, and I chose a thoroughly inconvenient moment to be ill.'

Harry nodded, picked up his bag, turned towards the door.

He got as far as the hinkypunk's tank. Then he stopped, with his hand on the strap, because there was something else. It had been sitting in him since Sunday morning like a stone in a shoe, and he didn't know anybody else in the castle he could possibly say it to.

'Professor.'

'Mm?'

'Can I ask you something... stupid.'

'Those are generally the only ones worth asking.'

Harry turned round. He felt his face going hot again, which was becoming a habit, and he looked at the floor between them while he said it, quickly, before he could lose his nerve.

'I had a dream. In the hospital wing. Saturday night. It was... I was angry, in it, I was doing things, it doesn't matter what, and there was a man watching me. The whole time. He didn't say anything. He just stood there. Everywhere I went he was there. And I know of him, that's why I'm asking, he's in a painting, on the fourth floor, that corridor where they've taken the armour away, there's a big old brown picture of two men on a hill with fires. One of them talks. He talked to me, last week, and it was him. In the dream. Only not paint. Tall. Rough sort of clothes. Fists. He had a face like... like he'd been waiting at a door for about a thousand years.' He swallowed. 'And he smelt of blood. Old blood. I know what it smells like. I couldn't get rid of him, so in the end I just said something rude to him. Ignored him. He laughed. Then the sun came out, inside the dream, in the dark, and he...' He stopped. 'Burnt. He burnt. And I woke up. That's it. That's all. I told you it was stupid.'

He looked up.

Professor Lupin had gone the colour of the wall.

He was standing exactly where he'd been, with the briefcase in his hand. He hadn't moved. His face had drained to a sort of grey, with white round the mouth, as it had been in the corridor on Halloween night with his head up, breathing in. Only this was worse. His lips had come back off his teeth. His free hand, hanging at his side, had closed, slowly, into a fist, and the nails, Harry saw, were longer than nails were. There was a sound in the room that wasn't quite a sound, a low, sub-audible note, like an organ pipe in a church three streets away, and it was coming from Lupin's chest.

'Sir?'

Lupin shut his eyes.

He stood with them shut for perhaps five seconds. Harry watched his chest go in and out, once, twice, deep, slow, the way Madam Pomfrey made you breathe before she put a bone back. The note died. The hand opened. When Lupin opened his eyes they were grey-brown, and very tired.

'I can't say more about that, Harry,' he said, hoarsely. 'I can't. I'm sorry. Not now. Not... not now.'

'But you know who-'

'I can't.' The hand came up, flat, a stop. 'I'll tell you one thing. One. Then you must go.' He drew another of those long breaths. 'When a man dreams of a dark visitor like that... when a thing like that takes an interest... in the ordinary way of things, in the old days, he would have gone to seek God. Or at least a priest.' He said it without any shame at all, as plainly as he had said bogs. 'It's the only advice I've got for you. It's the only advice there is.'

Harry looked at him.

He thought of a lych-gate, a long way south, with a bench inside it. He thought of a window with a knight in it. He thought of Hermione, who didn't believe in anything the Fat Friar was likely to believe in, who would have said honestly, Harry in that voice.

'Are you...' He felt himself go scarlet. 'Sorry. Are you religious, sir?'

Lupin nodded.

'Yes.' He said, like a thirsty man given water.

Once; a single nod, with his eyes on Harry's face, as plain as the answer to any other question. Then something went across him again, a ripple, from the shoulders down, the way wind goes across a field of barley. The hand at his side closed again, hard. The note came back, low, under everything; when he spoke his voice had the gravel in it.

'Now, Harry. Please. I need you to go. Out, now, shut the door behind you. Please.' It was polite. It was perfectly polite, even gentle; underneath the politeness it was as firm, as urgent, as a hand in the small of the back. 'I'm still a little under the weather. That's all. Go on.'

Harry left fast with the door shutting behind him on a room that had gone very quiet, and he thought, going down the corridor with his heart thumping, that Lupin was going to be sick. He had looked like a man about to be ill, holding it down by main force until the room was empty. He had looked like that on the train. Harry felt, oddly, almost guilty, as though he had stood there telling stupid stories to a man who was trying not to throw up; under the guilt, lower, meaner, was something else. It was the thought that he had better not go back to make a nuisance of himself. He had better not push. He had better not be the boy who pestered Professor Lupin until Professor Lupin was fed up with him, because then there would be no lessons after Christmas, no silver thing; the next time a hundred of them came out of the dark onto the grass he would go down again, with her voice in his ears, in front of everyone.

He didn't go back.

But at the end of the corridor he stopped, with one hand flat on the cold stone of the wall; because of all the things Professor Lupin might have said to him just then, seek God had been the last one he had expected, and the only one, when he came to think about it, that hadn't surprised him at all.

*

Between one thing and another, Harry's mood lifted.

First, It was the lessons. The thought that there was a thing you could do, a thing you could learn, something you could hold up between yourself and the cold, so that he might never again have to lie on a floor hearing his mother spend the last minute of her life on him. It was a door where there had been a wall. He thought about it in Herbology, with his hands in a Puffapod; he thought about it in bed. Then, at the end of November, Ravenclaw played Hufflepuff, and flattened them.

Flattened them. Harry sat in the stands with Ron on one side of him, with Hermione on the other wrapped in so many scarves that only her eyes showed, and watched Cedric Diggory, big, steady, decent Cedric, who had offered a rematch, lose the Snitch to a tiny Ravenclaw girl who went past him like a thrown dart. He found that he was on his feet, roaring, with his fist in the air, while Ron did arithmetic beside him at the top of his voice.

'That's it! That's it, that puts us... Harry, if we beat Ravenclaw by anything over... then Slytherin... we're in it! We're back in it!'

They were. Not comfortably. One more defeat, Wood told them, in the changing room on the Monday, pacing, with the old wild light back in his eyes like a lamp somebody had relit, and they were finished, done, out of it for the year; so there would be no more defeats. There would be, instead, practice.

The rain came back for December. It came in off the mountains in a low grey haze that never quite stopped, never quite fell, so that the pitch stood under it in a permanent brown soup; and Wood worked them through it, four nights a week, with Madam Hooch wrapped in her oilskins in the stands as Professor McGonagall's rules required, as though the Cup were a thing you could dig up out of the mud if you only dug hard enough.

They were brutal. Wood had never been gentle, but there had always been something boyish in him, a sort of frantic hopefulness, that had taken the edge off; and the match had burnt it out of him. What was left was a seventeen-year-old with nothing to lose, a whistle, a Beater's bat, and a vocabulary that Harry hadn't known he possessed. He swore. He swore at the rain, the Quaffle, the hoops; he swore at Katie for a dropped pass in words that made Katie, who had grown up with four brothers, go pink to the hairline; he swore at Angelina until Angelina swore back, better, and he nodded as though that were the first good thing he had heard all evening. He had a gift for it. The swearing was the least of it. Wood had discovered, somewhere in the wreckage of Saturday, that he was funny, in a cutting, dreadful, surgical sort of way, and he used it similarly to how Snape used it, on whoever was nearest.

'Spinnet. Lovely. Was that a pass or were you trying to get it to Hogsmeade by owl?'

'Johnson, the hoop is the big round thing. The big round thing. We've been over this since first year. I'll draw you a picture.'

'Weasley. Weasley. No, the other one. No, you. Did I say hit the Bludger at Harry? Did I? Is that what you heard? Because I'd love to know which part of my face said that to you, so I can have it removed.'

The twins had it the worst, because the twins couldn't, under any conditions known to science, take anything seriously; Wood had decided that the way to cure this was with the bat. He walked behind them while they strapped their arm-guards on, hitting them. He hit them on the back of the knees, crack, on the backs of the legs; once, when George said something about Diggory's profile, squarely on the backside with the flat of the bat, hard enough to lift him an inch off the bench, so that George went up the tunnel onto the pitch walking like a man who had been on a horse for a week.

'Mate, that's child abuse!' said George, from the air, rubbing it. 'I'm writing to Mum.'

'She'll send him a thank-you card,' said Fred.

It didn't work. Nothing worked on the twins; they came off the pitch bruised, soaked, laughing, and did impressions of Wood swearing in the changing room until Wood came in, at which point they did them louder. But they flew. Harry noticed that. Underneath all of it, the Bludgers started going exactly where Wood wanted them.

He noticed something else, too, which was that Wood never once turned it on him.

It wasn't favouritism. He drove Harry harder than any of them, in the air; he had him chasing the Snitch in the dark, in the sleet, on a broom that wouldn't turn, until Harry came down so cold he couldn't undo his own gloves. But he never swore at him, never cut him, never raised the bat. And Harry, lying awake afterwards with his hands aching, worked out why. It was because he took it. Whatever Wood threw at him, however long the session went, however foul the weather, he went up; he did it; he came down; he said right; he went up again. He didn't laugh it off, because it wasn't funny. He'd been in the common room when Wood put his head in his hands. He had sat in a bed, with his broom in a bag, listening to a boy who had just lost his last season speak in a dead man's voice; he knew, the way you know the weather, what this meant to Wood. He knew what it had meant to McGonagall two years ago to walk a first-year off the pitch, to say Seeker to Oliver Wood with a straight face when no first-year had been a Seeker in a century. They had taken a chance on him. Nobody had ever taken a chance on him before. He wanted, more than he had wanted most things, to be worth it.

Wood saw. He never said so. But after one session in the second week of December, the worst of the lot, when the sleet had come across the pitch flat as thrown gravel until even Fred stopped talking, Wood held him back in the changing room while the others went up. He stood there a moment, dripping, with the bat still in his hand, looking at the floor.

'You know I'm going in June,' he said at last.

'Yeah.'

'McGonagall'll want a captain. She'll pick a Chaser, I expect; she usually does, they see the whole pitch. Angelina. She'd be right.' He turned the bat over in his hands. 'But you watch. One day, Harry, it'll be you. Not because of the Seeking. The Seeking's nothing. You could Seek with your eyes shut. It's that they'll follow you.' He looked up. 'They do already. I've seen it. The twins. They'll do anything you say, nothing I say, and they don't even know they're doing it. Angelina looks at you before she looks at me. You don't know what it is, do you. You haven't got the first idea.' He gave a short laugh, with no bitterness in it at all. 'Natural, that's what. You're a natural. At that and at the rest. Right. Go on. Get in the warm before you die of it, I need you on Saturday.'

Harry went up to the castle in the dark through the sleet, with his broom over his shoulder, with Ron beside him holding a lit wand, and didn't feel the sleet once.

He couldn't remember, afterwards, a single thing about the rest of that evening except that he had, metaphorically, not touched the ground. He ate; he must have. He did homework; Hermione said so. He went up to bed in the end with Wood's voice going round in him, one day it'll be you, and lay there in the dark grinning at the hangings like an idiot; the broom in the bag under the bed didn't seem, that night, to matter so very much after all.

*

Ron watched every practice. That hadn't changed.

What had changed was that he was no longer the only one.

Harry noticed it first in the second week of December, coming down out of the sleet at the end of a session, seeing, in the top row of the Gryffindor stand where Ron always sat, not one shape under a broken umbrella but two: Ron, hunched, with his scarf over his nose; beside him, a yard off, bolt upright, with a book open on her knee that she couldn't possibly have been reading, Hermione.

'Thought I'd get some fresh air,' she said, when he came up the steps with his broom. 'I've been in the library all day. It's good for one.'

'It's sleeting.'

'Fresh,' said Hermione firmly, 'is fresh.'

She came the next night. She came the night after, with a flask, which she held out to him at the top of the stand as he came off: hot, sweet, something with ginger in it, that she had made herself in the common room with a Warming Charm. She watched him drink it with her arms folded, in the manner of her porridge, and said nothing about it being for him in particular.

On the fourth night, Dracina Malfoy was in the stands as well.

Not the Gryffindor stand. She wouldn't have been seen dead in it. She was in the Slytherin stand, across the pitch, in the front row, with Pansy beside her holding a very large green umbrella over both of them, and she was watching the Gryffindor practice with the air of a visiting general observing manoeuvres from a hill.

'What's she doing?' said Ron.

'Observing the opposition,' said Hermione, not looking up from her book. 'I expect. It's a perfectly legitimate thing to do, Ronald. Anyone can watch a practice. The stands are open to all houses.'

'You're not watching the opposition.'

'I'm getting fresh air.'

The next night Malfoy had moved. She had come round the pitch, by the look of it, to the end stand, which was neutral, nearer; the night after that, by a process Harry couldn't follow, she had come round further still. She was sitting, with Pansy's umbrella, in the corner of the Gryffindor stand itself, three rows below Ron, in a block of empty seats, with her chin up, as though she had always sat there and couldn't think why anybody would remark on it.

Nobody remarked on it. Ron, two rows above her, had the expression of a man watching a chess clock. Hermione's page had stopped turning altogether.

Harry came off the pitch that night into the oddest silence he had ever walked into. He had meant to go up the steps to Ron, as always; he went up them, found that he had to pass Malfoy to do it, and found that she had risen, as he came level, in one movement, with a small flat parcel in her gloved hand.

'Potter.' The chin went up a degree further. 'I've noticed you fly without a decent pair of gloves. It's absurd in this weather. Mother sent these. Dragon-hide. They were going spare.' She held them out. 'I'd rather you didn't lose your fingers before you have to play us. It would make the victory less satisfying.'

Harry took them because it would have been rude not to. They were beautiful. They were black, supple, warm, lined with something soft, and they had cost, he was fairly sure, more than everything he was wearing put together.

'Thanks,' he said. 'That's... thanks.'

'Don't mention it.' Her eyes went, briefly, over his shoulder, up two rows. 'I do like to see a thing done properly.'

'Harry.' Hermione's voice, from above, perfectly pleasant. 'Your drink's getting cold. I made it fresh.'

'Granger, how sweet. Have you been sitting in the sleet all evening with a flask?' Malfoy turned, with every appearance of warm concern. 'You'll catch your death. Your hair's gone... well. It's very loyal of you. Like a dog with a Thermos.'

'I don't mind the weather,' said Hermione. 'Some of us don't sit out matches because of it.'

There was a short pause, in which the sleet could be heard quite distinctly hitting Pansy's umbrella.

'How is the arm, Malfoy?' Hermione added, kindly. 'Fully recovered? Only I noticed you were using it to clap.'

'Entirely, thank you, Granger. The nerve damage is a thing of the past. I expect you'll be relieved; I know you were so concerned about it, back when my jewellery kept finding its way into your bag.'

Hermione went white. Ron, above them both, made a small sound, like a man who has just watched a queen come out onto the board.

Harry stood between them, in the sleet, holding the gloves in one hand, the flask in the other, and understood what it must be like to be a bone between two dogs.

'Right,' he said. 'Well. Thanks, both of you. I'm going to go and get changed, before I... before anything. Night.'

He went down the steps. He didn't look back. Behind him, he could feel it, like how you feel a storm coming, the two of them watching him go; then, slowly, turning, under the umbrella, over the book, to look at each other.

*

Two weeks before the end of term, the sky lifted.

It happened in a night. They went to bed under the usual lid of grey; they woke to a white light coming in through the dormitory windows that was so bright, so clean, so entirely unexpected, that Seamus sat up to ask if the castle was on fire. It was Frost. Jack Frost had come in the night. And every blade of grass on the lawns had been painted with it; the lake was a sheet of pewter, the Forest a line of white lace; the mud that had stood on the grounds for a month was gone under a crust that rang like a plate when you stepped on it, and the sky above all of it was the pale, blank, shining white of the inside of a shell.

Christmas had come into the castle on the frost.

You could feel it in the corridors. The suits of armour, back from their cleaning, had been persuaded to hum carols, which they did badly, in bursts, with a great deal of clanking; there was holly over the doors of the Great Hall; Professor Flitwick had decorated the Charms classroom with hundreds of tiny shimmering lights that turned out, when you got close enough, to be real fairies, fluttering, sulking, occasionally biting. Everybody was talking about the holidays. Everybody was going somewhere.

'I'm staying,' said Ron, over breakfast, as though it were nothing.

'So am I,' said Hermione.

'Percy's going to be at the Burrow the whole fortnight,' said Ron. 'The whole bloody fortnight. Being Head Boy at everyone. Mum'll make me sit next to him. I'd rather stay here with the suits of armour.'

'And I need the library,' said Hermione. 'For the holidays. I've got far too much to... there are some books that only... anyway.'

Harry looked at them.

He knew better. He had known them both for two years. He knew that Ron had been talking about Christmas at the Burrow since October; he knew that Hermione, whatever she said about books, had parents, with a dentist's surgery, with a tree. They were staying because of him. They were staying so that he wouldn't be the only one in Gryffindor Tower with the suits of armour in the dark; neither of them would ever say so; he looked at his plate, with something in his throat that made it hard to swallow, and said, 'Right. Good,' in a voice that came out a bit odd. Because that nasty little voice that sounded like the Dursleys still kept telling him he didn't deserve friends as good as Ron and Hermione.

Then the notice went up.

It was pinned on the board by the portrait hole one evening, in Professor McGonagall's slanting hand, and the common room went round it like water round a stone: another visit to Hogsmeade, on the very last weekend of the term, for every third-year or above in possession of a signed form.

The common room was delighted. Everyone was delighted. Harry went and sat down.

'We can do all our Christmas shopping there,' said Hermione, as the three of them sat round the fire later with Crookshanks on her knee. She was ticking things off on a list; she was in high spirits, which Harry suspected was partly real and partly for his benefit. 'I want to get Mum and Dad some of those Toothflossing Stringmints from Honeydukes, they'd be thrilled, they're always saying nobody flosses properly. And I can get that book on Dracula's son Alucard.'

'The who?' said Ron.

'Alucard. He was a dhampir, half one of them, half not. He hunted his own father, which is quite a story, Ron, honestly, if you'd read anything. Tomes and Scrolls have it in, Madam Pince said. The library's copy has pages missing.' Her eyes had gone bright. 'Somebody's cut the illustrations out.'

Ron looked at Harry.

Hermione's feeling for Alucard, it emerged over the next half-hour, wasn't quite the feeling she had for Angelus, nor the feeling she had for the one she called William the Bloody, about whom she could be made to talk until the fire went out. But it was feeling enough. She had read everything there was on the Scourge of Europe, down to the footnotes; she had read the Belmont chronicles; she had sent away, in October, for a book on the convent in London that had come wrapped in brown paper with a Ministry stamp on it. She wanted, with a steady, unsmiling, voracious hunger that had nothing to do with the Angelus engraving she still kept folded in her bag, that had everything to do with something colder, to know what they had done. What exactly, in what order, to whom. She didn't want to know it the way Lavender wanted to know about Trelawney. She wanted it the way a person who is fascinated with bugs collects them. The same way Aunt Petunia got hot and bothered about serial killers on the news or in an ITV or Channel 4 documentary. In fact, Aunt Petunia would've thought and converted those facts and vampire pictures the same way Hermione did. The heavy breathing as she described how William the Bloody drove railway spikes into people's backsides.. Or how Angelus tormented the Society of Leopold Vampire Hunter, Daniel Holtz. It bothered Harry more than he could say. It bothered Ron worse. The two of them had sat through enough of these evenings by now to have developed a shared, wordless, sideways look, which they exchanged whenever her voice went into that particular hushed register, and which meant, on both sides, she is a bit frightening, isn't she.

'Right,' said Ron, when she paused for breath. 'Well. Dhampir. Lovely. I'm going to go and be sick with excitement in the dormitory.'

Harry didn't go up with him. He sat by the fire after the others had gone, with a copy of Which Broomstick that he had borrowed from Wood, and decided, since it appeared he was going to be the only third-year left behind in the castle again, that he might as well spend the day of the Hogsmeade visit usefully, reading up on makes.

He needed a broom. There was no getting round it. He'd been riding one of the school brooms at practice for a month, an ancient Shooting Star that smelt of the broom shed, pulled to the left, took three seconds to think about any turn, and had once, in a gust, simply stopped; Wood, watching it, had said things about it that Harry wouldn't have repeated to Hagrid. He turned the pages. He read about the Cleansweep Seven, which was cheap; the Comet Two Sixty, which wasn't; the Nimbus Two Thousand and One, which the whole Slytherin team had been riding since last year, on Lucius Malfoy's money. He came, on the last page, to a full-colour picture of a thing he had stood in front of, day after day, through a shop window in Diagon Alley, with a crowd round it, with price on request underneath. He looked at it for a long time, then shut the magazine.

It didn't seem to be the sort of thing that happened to him.

*

On the Saturday morning of the Hogsmeade visit, Harry went down to the Entrance Hall to see them off.

Ron was wrapped to the ears. Hermione had on two scarves, a hat with a bobble on it, mittens, the expression of somebody going on an expedition to the Pole with a long list. They stood either side of him in the crowd by the doors, with Filch glaring over his parchment at the front, and neither of them seemed to want to be the one to go first.

'Bring you something back,' said Ron.

'I know.'

'Loads of something.'

'Lots of something, I look forward to it, mate,' said Harry. 'Go. You'll miss it.'

They went. They went looking back, as they had on Halloween, until the crowd took them. Harry raised a hand, turned, and went back up the marble staircase on his own with his hands in his pockets. For once there were no footsteps four paces behind him; Percy had gone down to the village with Penelope Clearwater, Head Boy duties suspended for the day in favour of a different sort of patrol.

Snow had begun to fall. He saw it start, through the tall windows on the first landing: not sleet, not the grey smear of December, but real snow, big, slow, deliberate flakes, coming down out of a sky the colour of a pigeon's breast as though somebody up there had turned over a pillow. It made the castle very still. The whole building seemed to have gone quiet to watch, the way a room goes quiet when snow starts, and his footsteps on the stairs sounded loud.

He was halfway along the third-floor corridor, going nowhere in particular, when a voice said, 'Psst! Harry!'

He stopped.

There was a statue there, an old one, a witch, humpbacked, with one eye, which had stood in that corridor for as long as Harry had been in the castle without his once looking at it properly. He looked at it now, because Fred Weasley's head had come out from behind it. George's came out from the other side.

'What are you doing?' said Harry. 'Why aren't you in Hogsmeade?'

'Festive cheer,' said Fred, with a wink so mysterious it practically had a cloak on. 'Bit of early Christmas, before we go. In here.'

He jerked his head at a door across the corridor, an empty classroom; and Harry, with the feeling that he was about to be sold something, followed them in. George shut the door. He shut it quietly, with a glance each way down the corridor first, then turned round with his back to it, beaming.

'Present,' he said. 'Early. For you.'

Fred reached inside his cloak. He did it with a flourish, like a conjuror. What he brought out he laid on the nearest desk with both hands, with great ceremony, and stepped back from.

It was a piece of parchment.

It was a large piece, square, very old, worn soft at the folds, and there was nothing on it. Nothing whatever. Harry looked at it, then at them, then back at it, with the deep suspicion of a person who has known the Weasley twins for two years.

'What is it?'

'This,' said George, laying a hand on it the way you would lay a hand on the head of a favourite dog, 'is the reason we are what we are.'

'It's costing us,' said Fred, 'to give it up. I want you to know that. We talked about it last night and we decided your need was greater.'

'Besides which, we know it by heart.'

'So it's yours. We bequeath it to thee. We've no further use for it, really.'

'Lovely bit of old parchment,' said Harry, dryly. 'But what am I supposed to want it for?'

Fred shut his eyes. He shut them with a wince, the wince of a man who has been deeply wounded by someone he loved.

'A bit of old parchment,' he said, faintly. 'George. You tell him. I can't.'

'First year,' said George. 'Picture it. Two small, sweet, innocent lads-'

Harry snorted.

'Yeah, right.'

He had never, in his life, met anyone less innocent than the twins; he doubted very much that they had come out of the womb any different.

'-well, more innocent than now. We'd had a bit of a run-in with Filch.'

'Dungbomb. In a corridor. He took it personally.'

'Dragged us off to his office, didn't he, started on the usual-'

'-detention-'

'-disembowelment-'

'-and while he was going on, we happened to notice one of the drawers in his filing cabinet, which had a label on it. Confiscated and Highly Dangerous.'

'You didn't,' said Harry, who could feel himself starting to grin.

'Well, what would you have done?' said Fred reasonably. 'George dropped another Dungbomb, as a diversion, I had the drawer open in a second, and out it came.'

'It's not as bad as it sounds. We don't reckon Filch ever worked out what it did. He'll have had an idea, mind, or he wouldn't have had it in that drawer.'

'And you know how it works?'

'Oh, yes,' said Fred, with a smile of pure smug contentment. 'This little beauty's taught the pair of us more than every teacher in the building put together.'

'You're having me on,' said Harry, looking at the tattered square of nothing on the desk.

'Are we?' said George.

He took out his wand. He touched it to the parchment, lightly, with the tip, and he said, in a clear voice, as if it were a thing he said every day of his life:

'I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.'

Ink came.

It came from the point where the wand had touched, in thin lines, spreading, the way frost spreads across a window if you watch it: out, across, out again, lines meeting lines, crossing, branching, running away into every corner of the parchment like the roots of a plant seen through glass. Then, across the top, slowly, in great curling green letters that bloomed one after another like something growing, came words.

Messrs Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs

Purveyors of Aids to Magical Mischief-Makers

are proud to present

THE MARAUDER'S MAP

It was Hogwarts.

All of it. Every floor, every tower, every staircase that moved, drawn in ink in fine spidery detail with the grounds round the edges; and all over it, so that Harry put both hands flat on the desk to look, there were dots. Tiny ink dots, each with a name beside it in writing so small he had to bend to read it, and the dots were moving. Up in the top corner, in a room marked in minute script as the Headmaster's study, a dot called Albus Dumbledore was walking up and down. On the second floor, a dot called Mrs Norris was going along a corridor very slowly, stopping, going on. Peeves was ricocheting round the trophy room like a ball in a box.

Harry bent closer.

He saw, as his eye went up the familiar floors, that there was more on this map than he knew. There were passages. There were corridors drawn in the walls where he had never seen a corridor, going down under the floors, out under the grounds, past the edge of the parchment, and a good many of them seemed to lead...

'Straight into Hogsmeade,' said Fred. His finger came down on one of them. 'Seven altogether. Filch knows these four', he pointed, 'but we're pretty sure nobody but us knows about the other three. Forget the one behind the mirror on the fourth floor, that fell in last winter, you can't get through. And nobody's ever used this one, we reckon, because the Whomping Willow's planted smack on top of the entrance.' His finger moved. 'This one, though. This one comes up in the cellar of Honeydukes. We've been through it more times than I've had hot dinners, and the way in', he tapped the parchment where the third-floor corridor ran past the door of the very room they were in, 'is right outside. Through the old girl's hump.'

'Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, Prongs,' said George, with a sigh, patting the green letters. 'We owe them everything.'

'Fine men,' said Fred, with his hand on his heart. 'Toiling without reward to bring on the next generation of criminals.'

'Right,' said George, suddenly brisk. 'Don't forget to wipe it when you've done-'

'-else anyone can read it-'

'-tap it, say Mischief managed, and it goes blank. Got it?'

'Got it.'

'So, young Sir Harry,' said Fred, drawing himself up, doing, suddenly, in voice as in chin, an impression of Percy so perfect that it was almost indecent, 'mind you behave yourself.'

'See you in Honeydukes,' said George, with a wink. They went out, the pair of them, smirking. The door shut behind them, and Harry was alone in the empty classroom with the map.

He stood looking at it.

He watched the dot called Mrs Norris turn a corner, stop, and go back the way she had come, as though she had smelt something. He watched the little labelled Dumbledore pace his study. If Filch really didn't know about this one, he thought, if nobody did, then he need never go near the gates at all. He wouldn't have to pass a single hooded thing. He could simply go down, come up, and be there.

Something came floating up out of his memory, like a thing in a pond.

Mr Weasley, in Professor McGonagall's office in the small hours of a June morning, with the sword still lying on the desk: Never trust anything that can think for itself, if you can't see where it keeps its brain. He said that to Dracina just after the ordeal with Tom Riddle's diary. Harry looked at the map. It could think for itself. It showed you what it chose. It was, precisely, exactly, the sort of object Mr Weasley had meant. He stood there with his hand over it, feeling the thing that Mr Weasley would have felt, the thing that Hermione would have said, and under both of them the thing that was simply, hugely, his own wanting.

But he only wanted to go to Hogsmeade. He wasn't going to steal anything, or hurt anyone. It was a sweetshop. The twins had been using the thing for four years, and the worst that had come of it was the twins.

He put his finger on the passage to Honeydukes and traced it, slowly, down the whole length, to the little drawn cellar at the far end.

Then, quite suddenly, as though he'd been given an order he had no wish to argue with, he rolled the map up, pushed it inside his robes, crossed to the classroom door, and opened it an inch.

Nothing. The corridor was empty, with the snow falling past the window at the end.

He slid out, and round behind the one-eyed witch. What now? He got the map out again, unrolled it, and saw with a jump that a new dot had come onto it while it was in his robes, a dot labelled, in the tiny script, Harry Potter, standing halfway along the third-floor corridor, exactly where the real Harry stood. He watched it. The tiny ink Harry seemed to be doing something with a tiny ink wand. It was tapping the witch.

Harry got his own wand out and tapped the statue.

Nothing happened. He looked down. A speech bubble, the smallest he had ever seen, had come out of the ink Harry's mouth, and inside it, in letters like the legs of an ant, was one word.

'Dissendium,' Harry read, under his breath, and tapped the witch again.

The hump opened.

It split along the top, soundlessly, and swung wide into a dark hole just big enough to take somebody who hadn't had much to eat lately. Harry looked both ways down the corridor. He stuffed the map back into his robes. Then he put his hands on the cold stone, hoisted himself up, got his head into the hole first, and pushed.

'Right.' Harry said.

He went down.

It was a slide. It was stone, worn smooth by he didn't like to think how many years of Weasley bum sliding down it. It took him down in the pitch dark at a speed that left his stomach somewhere on the third floor; then it spat him out, with no warning at all, onto cold damp earth, on all fours, in a blackness so complete that he couldn't see the hands.

He got up.

'Lumos.'

The wand lit. He was in a passage. It was low, narrow, earthy, roofed with roots, like the inside of a burrow. It went away in front of him into the dark in both directions at once, which didn't seem possible, until he turned round to find that the way he had come was a blank stone wall with the mouth of the slide somewhere up in it, out of reach.

He got the map out, tapped it, and whispered, 'Mischief managed.'

It went blank at once. He looked at the empty parchment for a second, as one looks at a dog that has just done exactly as it was told, then folded it, tucked it away, and set off along the passage with his heart going hard. There was a feeling in his chest that was half excitement, half something more like fear, that didn't seem to know which it wanted to be.

It twisted. It turned. It went up; it dropped; it doubled back on itself like the burrow of some enormous rabbit that had never made its mind up. The floor was uneven, so that he stumbled, over and over, with the wand out in front of him lighting nothing but more roots. It went on for a very long time. It went on, Harry thought, for about an hour, though it was hard to tell; and all through it he had Honeydukes in his head, shelves of it, the glitter of jars, to keep him walking. His face was hot. His feet were cold through. Then, without warning, the passage began to climb.

He sped up, panting. Ten minutes on, the earth under his feet became stone; the stone became steps, worn in the middle like old soap, rising out of sight above him; he began to climb them, as quietly as he could, counting.

He got to a hundred. He got to two hundred. He lost it somewhere in the three hundreds, watching his feet, and so he didn't see the thing above him until his head hit it.

It was wood. He stood on the step, rubbing his skull, with his ears straining. Nothing. No voices, no footsteps, no sound at all beyond the roar of his own blood. He put a hand up, found an edge, pushed, very slowly. The trapdoor came up an inch, then two, and he put his eye to the gap.

A cellar. Crates, boxes, wooden stairs going up, a smell of sugar so thick that it was nearly a taste.

He climbed out. He lowered the trapdoor behind him, and when it was down he found that it had vanished: it had gone into the dusty floor so perfectly that he couldn't, kneeling, with his nose a foot off it, have said where it was. He got up. He crept towards the stair. There were voices above now, he could hear them, a murmur, with a bell going over it now and then, the small bright bell of a shop door. He had got as far as the bottom step, wondering what on earth he did next, when a door opened at the top of it, much nearer than the bell, and a voice came down.

'-and fetch up another box of Jelly Slugs while you're down there, dear, we're nearly out-'

Feet. Coming down.

Harry got behind the largest crate in the cellar in one movement. He stood with his back to it, breathing through his nose, while a pair of heavy boots came down past him to the far wall, where somebody began, with grunts, shifting boxes.

He might not get another go. He went. He slid out from behind the crate, went up the wooden stair on his toes, and looked back once from the top: a very large backside, a shining bald head, both of them buried to the shoulders in a box marked SLUGS, JELLY, 144. He opened the door at the top. He slipped through it. He was behind the counter of Honeydukes, with the shop in front of him, so he ducked, went sideways along the back of the counter in a crouch, and came up at the end of it as though he had simply been looking at something on a low shelf.

Nobody noticed.

Nobody could have. The place was crammed; it was so full of Hogwarts cloaks and scarves that Harry Potter, standing up in the middle of it, was one more Hogwarts cloak. He pushed in among them with his heart slowing, looking round, and had to bite the inside of his cheek not to laugh out loud. He was thinking of Dudley. He was thinking what Dudley's face would have done, if Dudley could have seen him now.

It was the most wonderful shop he had ever been in.

There were shelves to the ceiling. There was nougat in creamy chunks, pink coconut ice that shimmered, fat toffees the colour of honey; there was chocolate, hundreds of chocolates, in neat ranks like soldiers; there was a barrel of Every Flavour Beans you could have bathed in, another of Fizzing Whizbees, which Ron had told him about, sherbet balls that lifted you off the floor; and down one whole wall, under a sign that said Special Effects, the odd ones. Drooble's Best Blowing Gum, which filled a room with bluebell-coloured bubbles that stayed up for days. The splintery, strange Toothflossing Stringmints that Hermione wanted for her parents. Pepper Imps, tiny, black, breathe fire for your friends; Ice Mice, hear your teeth chatter and squeak; peppermint creams in the shape of toads, which were supposed to hop in the stomach, which by the look of the queue for them did; sugar quills so fine they would have shattered in a breath; exploding bonbons.

Harry squeezed past a knot of sixth-years. There was a sign in the far corner, hanging over a tray, that said UNUSUAL TASTES; under it, with their backs to him, bent over the tray with their heads together, were Ron and Hermione.

They were looking at lollipops. Red ones.

He crept up behind them.

'Ugh, no, Harry won't want one of those, they're for vampires, I expect. There's no point to them. Vampires can only consume real blood anyway,' Hermione was saying, with the firm, informative tone of somebody correcting a shop.

'What about these?' said Ron, shoving a jar under her nose. The jar was full of Cockroach Clusters.

'I'm not really into eating clusters of bugs, mate,' said Harry.

Ron very nearly dropped the jar.

'You bastard!' he said, clutching his chest with the hand that wasn't holding cockroaches, trying to suppress what appeared to be a heart attack.

'Harry!' Hermione had actually squeaked. 'What... how did you... what are you doing here?'

'Blimey,' said Ron. He had got his breath back; his face was going from white to deeply impressed. 'You've learnt to Apparate!'

'Have I, hell,' said Harry.

He dropped his voice. The sixth-years were three feet away. He told them, quickly and low, with the two of them bent in close over the Cockroach Clusters like a conspiracy, about the twins, the statue, the parchment, the ink coming across it like frost, the tunnel, the cellar, the bald head in the box of slugs.

'They gave it to you,' said Ron, when he had finished. He sounded outraged to the bone. 'Four years they've had that. I'm their brother.'

'But he won't be keeping it,' said Hermione.

She said it as though it were self-evident, as though the suggestion that he might were slightly comic. 'He's going to take it straight to Professor McGonagall. Aren't you, Harry.'

'Yes, of course I am,' said Harry. He meant the opposite.

'Are you mad?' said Ron, to Hermione, goggling. 'Hand that in? Something that good?'

'If I hand it in,' said Harry, 'I'll have to say where I got it. Filch would know in about a minute that Fred and George had nicked it from his office.'

'And what about Sirius Black?' Hermione hissed.

That stopped him.

'He could be using one of those passages,' she went on, in a fierce whisper. 'Any of them. That could be exactly how he got into the castle on Halloween, Harry, have you thought of that? The teachers have got to know about this. They've got to.'

'He can't be,' said Harry quickly. 'Not through a passage. Listen. There are seven on the map, right? Filch knows four of them already, Fred and George said, so those'll be watched. Of the other three, one's caved in, so nobody can get through. One comes out under the Whomping Willow, so you can't get out of it, not without being beaten to death. And the one I've just come up, the way in's a trapdoor in that cellar that you can't even see when you're kneeling on it, so unless he already knew it was there...'

He stopped.

He'd been going to say how could he. He found that he couldn't say it, because the question had turned round in his head as he reached for it, to look at him. What if Black did know? What if Black had always known? He stood there with the sentence hanging, with Hermione's eyes on his face, and didn't finish it.

Ron cleared his throat. He did it significantly, like Percy, and nodded over their shoulders at the inside of the shop door.

There was a notice pasted on it.

BY ORDER OF THE MINISTRY OF MAGIC, it said, in large official capitals, with the Ministry crest; and under it, in smaller type, the customers of this establishment were reminded that until further notice dementors would be patrolling the streets of Hogsmeade every night after sundown, that this measure had been put in place for the safety of the village's residents, that it would be lifted upon the recapture of Sirius Black; shoppers were therefore advised to complete their purchases well before nightfall. Merry Christmas! it finished.

'Just looking around for the first time, I always thought this town needed some abject misery and soul sucking demon creatures,' Harry said, to himself, drily, with a sort of morbid satisfaction. 'Thanks, Fudge.'

'Okay, yeah it's nasty. But look. I'd like to see Black try and break into Honeydukes with dementors swarming all over the village,' said Ron. 'Anyway, Hermione, the Honeydukes owners would hear a break-in, wouldn't they? They live over the shop!'

'Yes, but... but...' Hermione was visibly hunting for another objection, the way she hunted through an index. 'Look. It doesn't matter. Harry still shouldn't be in Hogsmeade at all. He hasn't got a form. Professor McGonagall told him not to set foot outside the castle without a teacher, he told us so himself. If anybody finds out he's here he'll be in the most appalling trouble. And it's not night yet, is it? What if Black comes today? What if he's here now?'

'He'd have a job spotting Harry in that,' said Ron, and nodded at the window.

The window was mullioned, old, with little diamond panes, and beyond them the snow was coming down so thick that the street was a white blur. Nothing could be seen in it. A dragon could have walked past unnoticed.

'Come on, Hermione,' said Ron. 'It's Christmas. Harry deserves a break.'

Hermione bit her lip.

She looked, Harry thought, extremely worried; more than worried, something else, something that was almost hurt; as if she had thought she was the person who would get Harry Potter to Hogsmeade, one day, properly, with a form, only for somebody else to get there first with a bit of parchment.

'Are you going to report me, then?' he said, grinning at her.

'Oh... of course not. Of course I'm not. But Harry, honestly-'

'Seen the Fizzing Whizbees, Harry?' said Ron, who had plainly decided that the thing to do was to keep moving, and took him by the arm. 'And the Jelly Slugs? And the Acid Pops? Fred gave me an Acid Pop once, when I was seven, told me it was a Sugar Quill. Went straight through my tongue. I remember Mum going after him with her broom.' He gazed into the Acid Pop box with a brooding, speculative look. 'You reckon Fred'd eat a Cockroach Cluster if I told him it was a peanut?'

*

Hogsmeade, when they came out into it, was a Christmas card.

Harry had seen it from the road in September, from the carriage window, in the rain; he had never been in it, never stood in its one street with the cottages on either side. They were thatched, little, crooked, each one with a thick clean pelt of snow on its roof; there were holly wreaths on the doors; the trees along the street had strings of enchanted candles in them that burnt without melting a flake; and the snow went on coming down, slow, through all of it, like something in a glass ball. Harry shivered. He had come without a cloak, which seemed, in retrospect, the act of somebody who hadn't been thinking about anything but Honeydukes. Ron and Hermione were shouting at him through their scarves as they went up the street with their heads down into the wind.

'That's the post office-'

'-Zonko's is up there, by the-'

'-we could go up to the Shrieking Shack, if you-'

'Tell you what,' said Ron, through chattering teeth, 'how about a Butterbeer? The Three Broomsticks?'

Harry had never been so willing to do anything. The wind had found the gap at the back of his collar; his hands had gone past cold into a sort of numb complaint. They crossed the road, slithering, and in a minute more were pushing through the door of a small inn, into a warmth that hit him like a wall.

It was packed. It was packed, loud, hot, smoky, cheerful, with a fire roaring at one end, every table full of cloaks; at the bar, serving a crowd of warlocks who were being extremely loud about something, there was a woman.

She was curvy. Harry's mind supplied the word before he could stop it. She had a pretty face, a quick smile, a laugh that went over the noise like a bell; she was, from the neck down, of a shape that Harry hadn't previously had much occasion to notice in anybody. He was noticing now. The way a thirteen year old boy in the midst of puberty can't help but notice when bountiful cleavage is tastefully on display.

'That's Madam Rosmerta,' said Ron, who had gone slightly red. 'I'll get the drinks, shall I?'

He went to the bar. Harry watched him go, and understood everything, because Ron had straightened his scarf on the way.

Beside him, Hermione had gone very quiet.

He didn't see it. He was looking at the bar. But Hermione, who had seen exactly where both of them had been looking, who had seen Ron straighten his scarf, who had looked down, briefly, at her own two scarves, her hat with the bobble, her mittens, stood with her mouth pressed into a line. She said not a word about any of it. Then she said, brightly, 'Come on, there's a table at the back,' and went.

There was. It was small, tucked between the window and a tall handsome Christmas tree that stood beside the fireplace with candles burning in it. They got it a second before a pair of sixth-years, then sat down with the heat of the fire on one side of them, the snow going past the window on the other.

Hermione took off her hat.

She took off her mittens, then one of the scarves, then pushed her hair back with both hands, which did nothing to it at all. Then she leant across the table a little, with her elbows on it, and smiled at him.

'Isn't this nice?' she said. 'Harry. Honestly. I'm so glad you came. I know I went on, in the shop, but I am. I'm really glad.'

'Me too,' said Harry.

'You look frozen. You should have the seat nearest the fire. Swap with me.'

'I'm all right.'

'You're not, your ears have gone white, swap.' They swapped. She watched him settle, with the firelight on her face, and there was something very careful in the way she was being, something Harry couldn't quite put his finger on; she was being nice to him. She was always nice to him. But this was nice the way the porridge had been, nice with a kind of grip in it, and he couldn't think what for. 'There. Better? You know, I was thinking, on the way up the street. About the Ravenclaw match. In January. You'll need a proper broom by then. I was wondering whether, if we all... I mean, Ron hasn't got anything, obviously, but I've got my Christmas money, so I thought, a Cleansweep, perhaps, if you didn't mind second-hand, there's a man in Dervish and Banges who-'

'Hermione. You're not buying me a broom.'

'I didn't say buy, I said-'

'Dracina offered as well,' said Harry, without thinking. 'Sort of. Last week. She said her mother could have a Nimbus sent up from London by Tuesday, as a loan, if I asked.'

There was a pause.

'Did she,' said Hermione.

'I said no. Obviously. I said I wouldn't ride anything with Malfoy money in it if it was the last broom in Scotland.' He rubbed his hands together in the heat. 'She laughed. The real one. Then she said it was a pity, because if I was going to lose to Slytherin she'd rather I lost on a decent broom, in front of her, properly. Then she sort of... looked at me. You know. The way she does. And I thought...'

He stopped.

He wasn't sure what he had thought. He'd been not sure for some weeks now; it had been getting worse, not better; here, in the heat, with the snow on the window and nobody at the table but Hermione, who had always told him the truth, it came out of him in a rush, before he could stop it, the way the question had come out of him in Lupin's classroom.

'Hermione. Do you think she means it?'

'Means what?'

'Any of it. All of it. Being nice.' He kept his voice down; the sixth-years were two tables off. 'Because I keep... look. I keep seeing things. Little things. I don't even know if they're things. On Friday, in Snape's lesson, when he called you that, she laughed. Before she stopped. I saw her face before she stopped, and it was... it was her old face. It was the slur face. Then she saw me looking. It changed, just like that, like turning a page; she was all oh, poor Granger; I thought, that's not... that was the real one, the first one, wasn't it. The second was the trick. Then I thought, no, everyone nearly laughs when somebody gets it, that's just people, she caught it, that's what matters. Then in Potions on Monday she did the dementor. At Ron. She did the fall. My fall. She did it well, Hermione, she'd practised, she'd been watching how I... then Ron threw the heart. She looked at me. She did the face again, the sorry one, the how could he one, and I couldn't look at it. I couldn't. I had to look at the wall. I don't know if it's because the face was a lie, or because I'm... because I wanted it not to be.' He stared at the table. 'She was in the stands, in the hurricane. On her own, in the front, with both hands on the rail, when the rest of them couldn't be bothered. She screamed my name. My actual name. I saw it. Then she sat out the match, on purpose, with the sling, so we'd play in it, so we'd lose. We did. I fell. She's been... you saw her. At breakfast. Stretching.' He was talking faster. He could hear it. 'She says things like nobody's permitted to kill you. She says she was halfway over the rail. Then the next day she's got a crocodile heart on her face, so I think, which one is it? Which one are you? Because she can't be both. Can she? She can't be both of them. I keep going round in circles with it. I can't... I don't know what she wants. I don't know what she wants from me, Hermione; every time I think I've got it, she does the other thing, and I-'

He heard himself. He stopped.

Hermione was looking at him.

She had, for the first half of this, been annoyed. He had seen it; her mouth had gone thin at the real one, thinner at the broom; at looked at me, you know, the way she does she had actually picked up a beer mat, put it down, then squared it with the edge of the table, the way she did when she wasn't going to say anything, when it was costing her. But somewhere around the crocodile heart the thin mouth had gone. Something else had come into her face instead, something Harry had seen there before, on the stairs on Halloween night, with her arms folded tight across whatever it was she'd been holding in. It wasn't triumph. If it had been triumph he would have known what to do with it. It was more like somebody who has been shouting across a river for months, and has just seen the person on the other bank turn their head.

'Harry,' she said quietly. 'Can I say something? And you won't... you won't think I'm just being horrible about her? Because I know I have been. I know.'

'Go on.'

'I think you're starting to see it.'

He said nothing.

'I don't mean she's evil,' said Hermione. She said it carefully, as if she had thought about the word and set it aside. 'I don't. I don't think she sits in the Slytherin common room planning things, I don't think she's that. I think she's... Harry, I've watched her for two years. I've had to. I was the thing in the way, so I watched. What I think is, she wants something. She wants it the way Malfoys want things, which is completely, so whatever gets between her and it just... isn't there to her. It doesn't count. Ron doesn't count. Neville doesn't count, except when you're watching, when he's a chance to be seen being kind. I don't count. The dementor was for Crabbe, for Goyle, for Flint, for all of them, because she has to keep them, because they write to her father; it wasn't about you at all; that's the point. It wasn't about you. You weren't in the room, for her, until you were, and then she changed her face.' Hermione took a breath. 'The sorry face is real too. That's what makes it so hard. I think she is sorry, when she sees you look like that. I think it hurts her. I just don't think it hurts her enough to make her stop doing the thing that put the look there. Not yet. Maybe not ever. I think she loves you in exactly the way she'd love a broomstick she'd set her heart on. I think that's a real sort of love, Harry, I do, people have it, and it's not nothing. But it isn't the kind that's about you.'

The fire popped. Across the room, Madam Rosmerta laughed.

'That was a lot,' said Harry, after a while.

'I've been practising it,' said Hermione, going pink. 'Since September. In my head. I didn't think I'd ever get to say it.'

'And you're not just...'

'Jealous?' She said the word straight out, which he hadn't expected, and her chin came up. 'Yes, I am. Obviously I am. I'm not stupid, Harry, I know what it looks like, me saying all this, with her... with the sling, the gloves, the way she... yes. I'm jealous. I've been jealous since before the Chamber, if I'm honest. I'm telling you anyway, because being jealous of a thing doesn't make the thing untrue, and I think you know that, or you wouldn't have asked.' She squared the beer mat again. 'And because I said I'd try. On the stairs. And I have tried. I say good morning to her. I said her plait was nice, in front of everybody, and I meant it, actually, it was nice. Every single time I try, she takes it. She turns it round. She hands it back to me with a bow on it, in front of you, and it's a knife. Every time. You just can't see the knife, because it's got your name on the handle.'

Harry sat back.

He looked at the snow going past the window. He looked at the tree, with its candles; at the fire; at Hermione, who had said what she had said, who was now sitting very upright with both hands flat on the table, waiting, as though for a mark.

He didn't know what to believe.

He sat there with it, in the warmth, with the whole roaring room going on round him. He believed Hermione. He had always believed Hermione; it was one of the fixed things, like the sun. And he believed, with exactly the same part of himself, in a girl on a path in the rain with her hood back, with her voice gone thin as ice over water, saying be safe on Saturday, I mean it. He believed in both hands on the rail. He believed in a quarter-inch of blanket, smoothed flat. He couldn't make the two things sit in the same chair, however he turned them. He thought, with a lurch, that perhaps that was the trick, that perhaps that was what she did: she handed you two things that couldn't both be true, then let you wear yourself out trying to hold them. Or perhaps there was no trick; perhaps that was simply what a person was, two things at once, and he was thirteen, with no experience of persons. He thought about her stretching at breakfast. He thought about her in the dream, at his shoulder, saying good. He thought, not for the first time, that if she had wanted to make him unable to think about anything else, she couldn't have gone about it better.

Not that he was thinking about her. He wasn't obsessed with her, or anything like it. He was simply sitting in a pub, thinking.

'Harry?' said Hermione.

'I don't know,' he said. 'I don't know, Hermione. I'll... I don't know.'

'That's all right.' She reached over, quite quickly, to put her hand on his wrist for a second, the way she had held his fingers in the dark of the Great Hall on Halloween, hard, and let go. 'That's a much better answer than you had in October.'

Ron came back then, five minutes after he had gone, with three tankards held against his chest, foaming, steaming, giving off a smell like warm toffee.

'Merry Christmas!' he said, happily, dumping them, and raised his.

Harry drank.

He had never tasted anything like it. It went down hot, sweet, a little bit like butterscotch, a little bit like nothing on earth; it went on going down, as though it had decided to warm every separate part of him from the inside out. By the third swallow his hands had stopped complaining, his ears had come back from wherever they'd been. He put the tankard down. He looked at the fire. For the first time since Saturday, he thought, he felt almost entirely like a person.

A breeze lifted his hair.

The door of the Three Broomsticks had opened again, behind him, letting in a gust of snow, of cold. Harry glanced over the rim of his tankard, idly, to see who had come in; and choked.

Professor McGonagall had just come in out of the snow.

She came in with a flurry of flakes on her cloak, shaking them off, with Professor Flitwick at her elbow, no higher than the door handle, in a bobble hat; and behind them, stooping under the lintel, came Hagrid, talking, as he always talked, to somebody whose answers nobody else could hear. The somebody came in last. He was short, plump, pinstriped, in a lime-green bowler hat with snow on the brim, and Harry would have known him at the bottom of the lake.

Cornelius Fudge. The Minister of Magic. In the Three Broomsticks.

'Bloody-'

He never got the rest out. Two hands had come down on the top of his head, one from the left, one from the right, Ron's, Hermione's, pushing with such unanimous force that his stool went backwards. He found himself on the floor under the table, on his knees, with Butterbeer running down his neck, holding an empty tankard, looking out at the world through a forest of chair legs.

Four pairs of feet went past the bar. They paused there. They turned. They came, with a leisureliness that was like a nightmare, straight across the floor towards the table beside theirs.

'Mobiliarbus!' Hermione whispered, somewhere above him.

The Christmas tree stirred. It lifted, a few inches, with a creak, with a tinkle of baubles; it drifted sideways across the floorboards like a thing on castors; it came down again with a soft thump, directly in front of their table. Harry, crouched behind its lowest branches with the pine needles in his face, saw four sets of chair legs scrape back at the next table along, heard the grunts of people settling, heard the sound of a very large man lowering himself onto a very small chair.

Then another pair of feet.

They were in high heels, sparkly ones, turquoise, and they came clicking across the floor towards the table with a tray.

'One small gillywater-'

'That's mine,' said Professor McGonagall.

'Four pints of mulled mead-'

'Ta, Rosmerta.' Hagrid.

'A cherry syrup and soda, iced, with the umbrella-'

'Mmm,' said Professor Flitwick, with a smack of the lips that Harry could hear from the floor.

'And the redcurrant rum for you, Minister.'

'Thank you, Rosmerta, m'dear. Lovely to see you again, I must say. Won't you have one yourself? Come and sit with us a moment, come, come.'

'Well, that's very kind of you, Minister, thank you.'

The heels went clicking back to the bar, then came clicking back again with a glass. Harry, on his knees among the pine needles, watched them go, watched them come, trying with real, desperate effort not to notice that from this angle, at this height, Madam Rosmerta's return journey revealed a view of Madam Rosmerta that was fully as generous, going away, as the view at the bar had been coming towards. He wouldn't have said what he was thinking to anybody under torture. But bloody hell, he thought, from under the table, with Butterbeer in his ear, Madam Rosmerta was... interesting. She was interesting in the way that Dracina Malfoy, stretching above her head at the Slytherin table with both arms, had been interesting, to a boy of thirteen in whom something had very recently, without permission, woken up to begin looking about.

His heart was going in his throat.

Why had it not once occurred to him that it was the last weekend of term for the teachers as well? How long were they going to sit there? If he was to get back into Honeydukes before it shut, back down the stairs, back along an hour of tunnel, back into the castle before dark, he needed time; and the four pairs of feet beside him had the settled, comfortable, boots-off look of people with nowhere else to be. Beside him, under the table, Hermione's knee gave a small nervous jerk.

'So what brings you out here, Minister?' Madam Rosmerta was saying. 'Not the weather, surely.'

Harry saw the lower half of Fudge turn in its chair. It turned as though to check behind it, for listeners, which there were none of, apart from a Christmas tree; and when his voice came again it had dropped.

'What else, m'dear, but Sirius Black. I expect you heard what happened at the school at Halloween.'

'A rumour reached me,' said Madam Rosmerta.

'Did you tell the whole pub, Hagrid?' said Professor McGonagall, with great weariness.

'D'you think he's still about, Minister?' Rosmerta had lowered her voice too. 'Round here?'

'I'm certain of it.'

'Only the dementors have been through the village twice. Twice, Minister. Searched every house.' There was an edge on her voice now. 'They've frightened off half my trade. It's very bad for business.'

'Rosmerta, m'dear, I care for them no more than you do,' said Fudge, and he sounded as though he meant it, uncomfortably. 'Necessary precaution. Regrettable, but there it is. I've just come from a word with some of them, as it happens. They're in a fury about Dumbledore. He won't have them inside the castle grounds.'

'I should think not,' said Professor McGonagall sharply. 'How are we supposed to teach with those horrors floating around? You've read my file, Minister. Especially those bits, I assume.'

Harry, three feet away, saw something odd. He saw the Minister's legs, in their pinstripes, give a small shudder in their chair, the way Ron's did when Hermione mentioned spiders; and the lime-green bowler, which Fudge had kept on, dipped.

'Yes, Minerva.' He laughed. It was the official laugh, the fake one, the one Harry had heard him do at the Leaky Cauldron when he was trying to get past an awkward thing. 'I know how you react against such things. At least we know those parasite creatures and those Nephilim won't be bothering us again.'

'Hear, hear,' squeaked Professor Flitwick, whose feet, Harry saw, were swinging a clear foot above the floorboards.

'All the same,' said Fudge, and the voice turned heavy, 'we must remember what they are there to keep off. Something a great deal worse. We all know what Black is capable of.'

'Do you know,' said Madam Rosmerta, slowly, as though turning it over, 'I still find it hard to credit. Of everyone who might have gone over to the Dark Side, I'd have put Sirius Black last on the list. I remember him at school, you see. I remember him when he was a boy, in here. If someone had told me then what he'd turn into, I'd have told them to lay off the mead.'

'You don't know the half of it, Rosmerta,' said Fudge gruffly. 'The worst of what he did was never made public.'

'The worst?' Her voice had gone bright with curiosity. 'Worse than murdering all those poor people?'

'Considerably worse.'

'I can't believe that. What on earth could be worse than that?'

'You say you remember him at school,' said Professor McGonagall, quietly. 'Then do you remember who his best friend was?'

'Well, of course,' said Madam Rosmerta, with a small laugh. 'You never saw the one without the other, did you? The times I had the pair of them in here... they used to have me in stitches. Sirius Black and James Potter! What a double act they were.'

Harry's tankard hit the floor with a clunk that seemed to go through the whole inn. Ron kicked him.

'Precisely,' said Professor McGonagall. 'Black and Potter. The ringleaders of their little gang. Both extremely bright, of course... exceptionally bright, in fact... but I don't believe this school has ever had such a pair for trouble. I was still very new to teaching after... my previous career. So I didn't know what to do with them and all their troublemaking. They've never been topped for their mischief.'

'I dunno,' Hagrid chuckled. 'Fred an' George Weasley might give 'em a run fer their money.'

'You'd have thought they were brothers,' Professor Flitwick chimed in. 'Black and Potter. Inseparable!'

'They were,' said Fudge. 'Of course they were. Potter trusted Black above every other friend he had, and nothing altered when they left school. Black was best man when James married Lily. Which I can tell you, broke the heart of many a witch considering how many were after James before.'

Under the table, Harry saw the small swinging feet of Professor Flitwick go suddenly still. A shudder went through the little man from the boots up, the shudder of somebody remembering a thing they had hoped to be allowed to forget: two sisters, through his Charms classes a few years apart, one black-haired, one fair, feuding for years across his classroom over the heart of a boy with untidy black hair, with hexes, with flowers, with a single-mindedness that had made Filius Flitwick, who had duelled for his living, hide behind his desk. Then Lily Evans had come. That had been that, and neither Bellatrix nor Narcissa had ever quite forgiven anybody.

'Then they made him godfather to Harry,' Fudge went on. 'Harry, of course, has no idea. You can imagine how the knowledge would torment the boy.'

Godfather.

The word went into Harry like a splinter. it was a Muggle word, from a muggle religion that Wizards chortled and shook their heads at. a word from Dudley's christening photographs, from men in suits holding babies at arm's length in the front room; His hand, on the floorboards, closed on a pine needle until it broke.

'Because Black turned out to be in league with You-Know-Who?' Madam Rosmerta whispered.

'Worse even than that, m'dear...' Fudge's voice dropped again, and went on in a low rumble, so that Harry had to stop breathing to follow it. 'It isn't widely known that the Potters knew You-Know-Who was hunting them. Dumbledore, who was working against him night and day, had a number of useful spies. One of them got wind of it, so he warned the Potters at once. He told them to go into hiding. Well. You-Know-Who was no easy man to hide from, as you'll appreciate. Dumbledore told them their best hope was the Fidelius Charm.'

'The what?' Rosmerta was breathless. 'How does that work?'

Professor Flitwick cleared his throat.

'An immensely complex piece of magic,' he said, in his squeaky voice, with the relish of a man on his own subject. 'It conceals a secret inside a single living soul. The information is hidden within the chosen person, who is called the Secret-Keeper, and from that moment it cannot be found by anybody, not by any means at all, unless the Keeper chooses to give it up. So long as the Keeper held his tongue, You-Know-Who could have searched the village where the Potters were hiding for a hundred years and never found them. He could have pressed his nose to their sitting-room window and seen nothing but curtains.'

'So Black was their Secret-Keeper?' whispered Rosmerta.

'Naturally,' said Professor McGonagall. 'James Potter told Dumbledore that Black would die before he told anyone where they were. Black was going into hiding himself, James said. And still Dumbledore was uneasy. I remember it. He offered to be the Potters' Secret-Keeper in Black's place.'

'He suspected Black?' Rosmerta gasped.

'He was sure that somebody close to the Potters had been passing You-Know-Who word of their movements,' said Professor McGonagall, darkly. 'He had suspected it for some while, in fact. That one of our own side had turned, and was feeding the other side a great deal of information.'

'And James Potter still insisted on Black?'

'He did,' said Fudge, heavily. 'And barely a week after the charm was cast-'

'Black betrayed them,' breathed Rosmerta.

'He did. He did indeed. He was tired of playing both sides, you see; he was ready to declare himself openly for You-Know-Who; and he seems to have chosen the Potters' deaths as his moment. But, as we all know, You-Know-Who came to grief that night, in little Harry Potter. His powers broken, his body gone, he fled. And that left Black in a very ugly spot indeed. His master fallen, at the precise moment when he, Black, had shown his true colours. There was nothing for it but to run-'

'Filthy, stinkin' turncoat!'

Hagrid had said it so loudly that half the pub went quiet.

'Shh!' said Professor McGonagall.

'I met him!' Hagrid growled, lower, but not much. 'I musta bin the las' ter see him before he killed all them people! I was the one what got Harry outta Lily an' James's house, after. Jus' got him out o' the ruins, poor little thing, with a great slash across his forehead an' his mum an' dad dead in the rubble... an' up comes Sirius Black. On that flyin' motorbike he used ter ride. Never crossed me mind what he was doin' there. I didn' know he'd bin their Secret-Keeper, did I. Thought he'd just heard the news an' come ter see what he could do. White an' shakin', he was. An' yeh know what I did? I COMFORTED THE MURDERIN' TRAITOR!'

'Hagrid, please,' said Professor McGonagall. 'Keep your voice down!'

'How was I ter know he wasn' grievin' fer Lily an' James? It was You-Know-Who he was grievin' fer! An' then he says ter me, "Give Harry ter me, Hagrid, I'm his godfather, I'll look after him..." Ha! But I'd had me orders from Dumbledore, an' I told him no, Dumbledore said Harry was ter go ter his aunt an' uncle. Black argued, I thought it wer' because he knew how bad those muggles wer' but in the end he gave in. Told me ter take his motorbike ter get Harry there. "I won't be needin' it any more," he says.'

The motorbike.

Harry knelt on the floorboards with his hands flat on them and felt the floor go. It was the oldest thing he owned: a roar in the dark, a great engine, a sound he had carried through the cupboard years without a picture to go with it, so old that he had thought it was a dream. He had never known whose it was. Now he knew. It had been Black's. He'd been carried through the sky, with his parents an hour dead, on the motorbike of the man who had sold them.

'I shoulda known there was summat wrong then,' Hagrid was saying, hoarsely. 'He loved that bike, what was he givin' it ter me for? Why wouldn' he need it no more? Fact was, it was too easy ter trace. Dumbledore knew he'd bin their Secret-Keeper. Black knew he'd have ter run that night, knew the Ministry'd be after him inside a few hours.' A pause, and then, lower, in a voice Harry had never heard Hagrid use: 'But what if I'd give him Harry, eh? I bet yeh he'd ha' pitched him off that bike halfway out ter sea. His bes' friend's son! But when a wizard goes Dark, there's nothin' an' no one matters to 'em after. Nothin'.'

A long silence followed.

Harry was no longer entirely sure where he was. He was on his knees in the Three Broomsticks behind a Christmas tree with Butterbeer drying stiff in his collar; he was also, somehow, in a bedroom with the roof coming in; in the roar of an engine in the dark; on a doorstep in Privet Drive with a letter tucked into a blanket. The anger, the thing that had sat ticking in him since July like a car left running, had begun, while Hagrid talked, to move. It wasn't revving now. It had been put into gear. He could feel it going up through him the way the cold went up through him when the dementors came, only the other way about, hot instead of cold, from the floor up. He knelt there, letting it come, because he couldn't have stopped it, and because, God help him, he didn't want to.

'But he didn't get away, did he?' Madam Rosmerta had said it with some satisfaction. 'The Ministry had him the very next day!'

'Alas,' said Fudge, bitterly, 'if only we had. It wasn't the Ministry that found him. It was little Peter Pettigrew. Another of the Potters' friends, you know. Half out of his mind with grief, I don't doubt, and knowing Black had been their Secret-Keeper, he went after him himself.'

'Pettigrew...' said Rosmerta. 'Not that fat little boy who was always trailing round after them?'

'Worshipped the pair of them,' said Professor McGonagall. 'Black and Potter. Never in their league, not for talent. I was often rather short with him. You can imagine how I... how I regret that, now.' She sounded, suddenly, as though she had caught a cold.

'There, now, Minerva,' said Fudge, kindly. 'Pettigrew died a hero. We had eyewitnesses... Muggles, of course, we had to wipe them afterwards... who told us how he cornered Black in the street. He was crying, they said. Sobbing. "Lily and James, Sirius! How could you?" And then he went for his wand. Well. Black was quicker, of course. Blew Pettigrew to smithereens.'

Professor McGonagall blew her nose.

'Stupid boy,' she said thickly. 'Foolish, foolish boy. He was always hopeless at duelling. He should have left it to the Ministry.'

'I tell yeh,' said Hagrid, and his voice had gone down to a growl like a dog's at a door, 'if I'd got ter Black before little Pettigrew did, I wouldn' have messed about with wands. I'd ha' ripped him limb... from... limb.'

Yes, thought Harry.

It came up out of him without any words round it, clean, like a thing surfacing. Yes. That. Limb from limb. He'd been thinking, until that moment, in sentences; he'd been thinking Black, godfather, best man, motorbike, betrayed them, one after another, like stones going into a well. Now the sentences had stopped. There was only the picture Hagrid had put into his head, and his own hands in it.

'You don't know what you're talking about, Hagrid,' said Fudge sharply. 'No one but a trained Hit Wizard from the Magical Law Enforcement Squad would have lasted a minute against Black once he was cornered. Maybe Minerva here could have a go. I was Junior Minister at Magical Catastrophes in those days, and I was one of the first to reach the scene after he did it, after he... I shan't forget it. Not ever. I dream of it, still.' The voice had gone unsteady. 'A crater in the middle of the road, so deep it had broken the sewer underneath. Bodies. Everywhere. Muggles screaming. And Black just standing there in the middle of it, laughing. Laughing, Rosmerta, with what was left of Pettigrew on the ground in front of him... a heap of bloodstained robes, and a few... a few pieces...'

The voice stopped.

There was a sound, then, of five noses being blown, more or less at once, like a small sad band tuning up.

Harry didn't blow his nose. He knelt behind the tree, and he saw it. He saw the road, the crater, the bodies, the man standing in the middle laughing; he found that he could see the man's face, though he had only ever seen it in a newspaper on a bus: the long matted hair, the sunken cheeks, the eyes. He saw it very clearly. He saw, with great precision, in a kind of white-hot calm that was far past anything he had felt for Snape in a corridor with his wand in his hand, where on that face he would put his fists first.

'Well, there you are, Rosmerta,' said Fudge thickly. 'Black was taken off by twenty members of the Squad, and Pettigrew got the Order of Merlin, First Class, which was something, I hope, for his poor mother. And Black has been in Azkaban from that day to this.'

Madam Rosmerta let out a long breath.

'Is it true he's mad, Minister?'

'I wish I could tell you he was.' Fudge spoke slowly. 'I think his master's fall unhinged him for a while, certainly. Pettigrew, the Muggles, all of that: it was the work of a cornered man. Cruel. Pointless. And yet... I saw Black, you know, on my last inspection of Azkaban. Most of them in there sit in the dark and mutter; there's no sense left in them at all. But Black was... I was astonished at how normal he seemed. He spoke to me quite rationally. It was most unsettling. You would have said he was simply bored. All he had was that contemptible nonsense rag from Lovegood. He asked if I'd finished with my newspaper, if you please, as cool as anything, said he missed the crossword. Yes. I was amazed at how little the dementors seemed to have done to him. And he was among the most heavily guarded in the place. Dementors outside his door, day and night.'

'But what's he out for?' said Madam Rosmerta. 'What's he broken out to do? Good gracious, Minister... he's not trying to get back to You-Know-Who, is he?'

'I daresay,' said Fudge evasively, 'that is his... er... his eventual plan. But we mean to have him long before that. I must say, You-Know-Who alone, without a friend in the world, is one thing... but give him back his most devoted servant, and I shudder to think how fast he might rise again.'

There was a small chink. Somebody had put down a glass.

'You know, Cornelius,' said Professor McGonagall, 'if you're dining with the headmaster, we had better be getting back up to the castle.'

One by one, the pairs of feet in front of Harry took their owners' weight again. Hems of cloaks swung down into view. The sparkling heels went clicking away behind the bar; the door of the Three Broomsticks opened on another gust of snow, then shut; the teachers, the Minister, Hagrid, were gone.

'Harry?'

Ron's face had come down under the edge of the table. Hermione's came down beside it. They were both looking at him, upside down, in the dim green light through the pine needles, and neither of them said anything else, because neither of them, for once in their lives, had anything to say.

Harry looked back at them.

He was still on his knees. He was still holding the empty tankard. He hadn't moved by so much as an inch, and he found, now, that he didn't want to move, because he didn't trust what he would do when he did. His hands were shaking. Not with cold. He looked down at them, at the pine needles stuck to his palms; he thought, quite calmly, that they were the hands of somebody's godson; that his godfather had sold his mother to a thing that laughed; that the thing had laughed, and then she had begged.

Take me instead.

He had heard her say it. He had heard her say it in a hurricane, with a hundred of them coming up the grass; on Saturday night in a hospital bed with the moon on the ceiling; he would hear her say it for the rest of his life, every time the cold came. There was a man alive in the world, somewhere out there in the snow, in a village with a sweetshop in it, who had made that happen. Who had sat at his parents' table. Who had stood up beside his father on his wedding day. Who had been handed, over the broken roof of his parents' house, the chance to take a baby from Hagrid's arms, and had argued for it.

Somewhere a long way off, in another room, a kneeling woman was saying something soft in a ravine. He couldn't hear her. He didn't want to.

The rage was overwhelming. Harry wanted to hit things. Harry wanted to kill.