The Best Man

Harry never had any clear memory of getting back.

He knew, afterwards, that he must have done it: back through the crowded shop with Hermione's cloak round his shoulders, since she'd made him take it at the door; down through the trapdoor he could never afterwards find twice; along an hour of earth-smelling dark with his wand lit; up the slide on his elbows, which should have been impossible, which he managed anyway; out through the witch's hump into the corridor. He remembered none of it. The tunnel might have been ten feet long. His body had walked it for him, the way his body had once walked him home from school past the gang of Dudley's friends on the corner, eyes down, pace even, nothing showing, while his mind lived somewhere else; it was an old skill, walking while absent, and he hadn't known he still had it until he surfaced, blinking, in front of the Fat Lady's replacement with no idea how long he'd been standing there.

His head was full of the words from the pub. It wouldn't empty. Sirius Black and James Potter. The ringleaders. Best man. Godfather. He'd run the conversation so many times on the walk back that the voices had worn grooves in his brain, Fudge's plummy rumble, McGonagall with her sudden head cold, Hagrid roaring about comfort; the words went round like water round a drain, always down to the same place.

Why had nobody told him?

Dumbledore knew. Dumbledore had known for twelve years. Hagrid knew; Hagrid had taken the motorbike from Black's hands. Mr Weasley knew, Fudge knew, apparently every adult in the wizarding world knew; they'd had twelve years, between them, in which somebody might have sat Harry down and said the words your parents didn't just die, Harry, they were grassed on. Nobody had. They'd told him he had his mother's eyes. They'd told him about Quidditch, about Gryffindor, about gobstones; they'd sent him back to Privet Drive every July with the truth folded up small in their pockets, and he thought, standing in front of the portrait with his fists in his robes, that he could tell exactly how it had been decided. Better not. Poor boy. It would only upset him. Grown-ups deciding, over his head, in rooms he wasn't in, what Harry could bear to know about his own dead. The Dursleys had done it with a car crash. The wizards had done it with kindness; it came, in the end, to the same locked door.

'Password?' said Sir Cadogan, for the third time.

Harry gave it. He went in.

Something odd happened at dinner, except that it wasn't odd, not to Harry; it was only odd to everybody else. People moved away from him.

Nobody could have said they did it. There was no moment at which anybody stood up; there was simply, around Harry Potter at the Gryffindor table, a little more room than there was anywhere else, a sort of moat. First-years who'd spent all term trying to sit near the famous scar found reasons to be further along. The talk nearest him was quieter than the talk further away. He wasn't doing anything. He sat, he ate, he passed the potatoes when asked; but something was coming off him, steady, like cold off a window, and the school, which had spent two years telling itself stories about the boy who'd finished a possessed professor at eleven, who'd gone down into the Chamber at twelve, who'd walked out of it carrying a sword, was discovering all at once that it believed them. Hogwarts had seen rage this term exactly once before, on a flooded pitch, coming off an old man in half-moon spectacles as a hundred dementors went back over the stands like smoke; the younger students hadn't forgotten it. Nobody wanted to find out what the junior version looked like from close up.

Ron and Hermione ate with him, one on each side, saying nothing that mattered. They couldn't say anything that mattered; Percy had planted himself across the table, full of Hogsmeade, full of Penelope, full of the responsibilities of the season, and every time there was a silence he filled it, so the three of them passed the whole meal in a code of glances. Are you all right? He isn't all right. Later.

The common room, when they got up to it, was uninhabitable. Fred and George, in a spirit of end-of-term celebration, had let off half a dozen Dungbombs in the space of an hour; the room was a fog of it, first-years were hanging out of the windows gulping the December air, the twins were conducting the chaos from the hearthrug like men who considered it their finest work. Harry took one look. Fred would want to know if the map had worked. George would want details of Honeydukes. He couldn't, tonight, stand in that fog being winked at; so he slid along the wall while the twins were taking a bow, went up the spiral stairs, and let the dormitory door shut the noise away behind him.

The room was empty. The window was blue-black, the snow still coming down past it, lit faintly from windows below.

He went to his bedside cabinet, moved his books off it, dug underneath, and found what he was looking for: the photograph album, bound in leather, that Hagrid had given him at the end of his first year. Hagrid had filled it by writing off to everybody who'd ever known Lily and James Potter. Harry had spent whole evenings with it once. He could have recited every photograph in it in order, page by page, left to right. He sat down on his bed, pulled the hangings round him out of old habit, hiding the way he'd hidden in the cupboard with a torch, and began to turn the pages, quickly, looking for one picture in particular; past his mother holding a baby with black hair who kept trying to grab her nose, past the garden one, his father's arm round his mother while she laughed at something outside the picture, past a small house he didn't let himself look at, until.

There.

The wedding. He'd always liked this one. His father waving up at him, delighted, black hair standing up in every direction exactly as Harry's did; his mother on his father's arm, shining with happiness in a way photographs of living people never quite managed. Harry had looked at this picture a hundred times. He'd looked at his parents in it, which was the point of it; he'd never once looked at anybody else.

He looked now.

There was a third figure, laughing, with one hand on James Potter's shoulder. The best man. Harry held the album close to the gap in the hangings, where the light came through, and stared at a face he'd seen before only in a newspaper on a bus: except that he wouldn't have known it. The man in the Prophet had been a ruin, waxy, sunken, with dead matted hair. The man at the wedding was handsome. He was young, dark, careless, laughing at something off the edge of the photograph, with a sort of ease about him, the ease of somebody who'd never in his life stood outside a door wondering whether he was wanted on the other side of it; the two of them, Black and his father, had the same laugh, Harry noticed, the identical angle of the head. Brothers, Flitwick had said. You'd have thought they were brothers.

Had he already turned, when this was taken?

Harry searched the laughing face for it, hunting through a cupboard he already knew to be empty. Was it there already, behind the wedding smile, a man standing beside his best friend doing sums for somebody else? Had he stood there, an arm's reach from Lily Potter in her wedding dress, already knowing what he was? Did he ever think, grinning at the photographer, that he was looking at twelve years of Azkaban, twelve years that would eat the face right off him?

But they don't touch him, Harry thought, staring into the young laughing eyes. That's what Fudge said. The dementors don't reach him. He sleeps fine. Black had sat in a cell for twelve years with the worst of his life playing on a loop, the way Harry's played whenever the cold came, except that it hadn't played, had it, because the worst of Black's life didn't trouble Black. He'd asked for the crossword. The thing that lived at the bottom of Harry now, his mother's last minute, the bargain pushed across the table, the laugh, the name, lived there because of this man in this photograph; this man heard none of it. He missed the crossword.

Harry shut the album. He did it carefully. The old Harry, the cupboard Harry, didn't slam things; slamming things brought heavy feet on the stairs.

He put the album away in the cabinet, took off his glasses, got into bed in his clothes, and drew the hangings tight all round, so that he was in a small dark box of his own making, which had always been the one place nobody could get at him.

The door opened.

'Harry?' Ron's voice, pitched low, uncertain.

Harry lay still. He breathed slowly, evenly, in the rhythm of sleep, a rhythm he could do perfectly, had been able to do since he was six; you learnt it fast in a house where being awake at the wrong time was a crime. Ron hovered a moment. The door clicked shut.

Harry rolled onto his back with his eyes open.

The hatred came then, in the dark, with nobody to see it. It came up through him like something injected, cold at first, then hot, then both at once, poison moving by the veins; he lay quite still while it went everywhere, into his hands, into his jaw, behind his eyes, and he found that the picture had come with it. Black's wedding face hung on the darkness above him as though somebody had pasted it inside the hangings. He watched it laugh. He gave it things to do, or it did them without being given; he saw, as clearly as a film, a street he'd never stood in, a fat kindly boy with a face rather like Neville Longbottom's squaring up with his wand shaking, shouting something broken about Lily, about James; he saw the street open up. He heard, in a voice he'd never heard, because he had no idea what Black's voice sounded like, a low excited mutter in some curtained room: it's done, my Lord... they've made me Secret-Keeper... and then the other voice answering, high, cold, delighted, the exact laugh, the one that lived in him, the one the dementors wound up like a gramophone whenever they came close.

Black had taken all of it. Not just two people in a house, but everything. The little brother behind the mirror glass. The sister. The grandparents. Christmases that had happened to other boys. A mother at a school gate; a father teaching him to fly; a bedroom that had always been his, with his name done in wooden letters on the door, the kind Dudley had. Somebody who came when he cried in the night. Eleven years in a cupboard with the spiders, Aunt Petunia's voice through the door, Dudley's fists, the lock, the dark, the smallness, the hunger, every separate day of it, laid end to end; one man had signed for the whole of it, in one sentence, in one curtained room, then gone laughing to a street full of bodies.

Harry would make him sorry.

He thought it in the dark, calmly, with his eyes open, in words of one syllable, which is how the truest things get thought. He would find a way. He'd hurt him back. There was a place in Harry where things like this were kept, a place the Dursleys had built, brick by brick, over eleven years of shouting and blows to the head, without ever knowing they were building anything; it had held, so far, nothing but the small change of revenge, blown-up aunts, a ticket to Brazil for a snake. It took Sirius Black in like a vault taking bullion.

He fell asleep near dawn, with the hangings shut, holding the thought the way he'd once held the green ribbon.

*

'Harry, you... you look terrible.'

It was nearly eleven on the Sunday, the last morning of term. Harry had woken to a silent dormitory, Ron's bed empty, Neville's stripped, Seamus's and Dean's trunks gone from the ends of theirs; the Hogwarts Express had left, then, with the rest of them in it. Half the Slytherins would be on it too, in the good carriages, Malfoy Manor at the far end of the line. He'd missed it going. He was glad. He dressed slowly, with the particular heaviness of a short sleep after a bad night, then went down the spiral stairs into a common room emptied of everything: the fog of Dungbombs aired away, the fire built high, the whole of Gryffindor House reduced overnight to Ron, eating a Peppermint Toad with one hand pressed to his stomach, plus Hermione, who'd laid out her books across three tables as though staking a claim for the holidays.

It was Hermione who'd spoken. She was peering up into his face with her quill stopped.

'I'm fine,' said Harry.

He sat down. The fire was hot on his legs. Somewhere outside, muffled by snow, a door boomed; the castle had the sound of a house with nearly everybody gone out of it, bigger, emptier, full of listening.

'Harry, listen.' Hermione put the quill down altogether. She looked at Ron first, one quick glance, and Harry saw the glance for exactly what it was, because he'd spent his childhood reading the looks that passed between adults over his head; they'd rehearsed this. They'd sat here, while he slept, working out their lines. 'Yesterday... what we heard... anyone would be in a state over it. Anyone. Only promise us you won't do anything mad.'

'Mad like what?' said Harry.

'Mad like going hunting for Black,' said Ron sharply.

The line had been drilled; Ron delivered it looking at the carpet. Harry said nothing. He watched the fire. He was discovering, this morning, a thing about the anger: that it had stopped being weather, stopped coming in gusts as it had all term, and had settled instead into a climate. It was simply there now, under everything, steady, cold at the edges, warm at the centre, like a banked fire in a grate; he could think inside it quite clearly. He was thinking inside it now. He was thinking that Black was somewhere within an owl's flight of this room; that the dementors, who could hollow out a grown wizard, slid off him like rain off a charmed window; that everybody from Fudge downwards had failed to hold him twelve years ago, and showed every sign of failing now.

'You are, aren't you,' said Ron. He'd sat forward. 'You're actually thinking about going after him.'

'He took everything from me,' said Harry. His own voice came out of him flat, even, frighteningly reasonable. 'Everything I was ever going to have. He's not going to just... sit out there while every Ministry idiot in a bowler hat fails to find him. He'll pay for it. I'll make him pay for it.'

'You really don't look well, you know,' Hermione said again, peering anxiously into his face.

'I'm fine.'

But the climate had shifted while he spoke, without warning, as it kept doing now; Black laughing in a crater. The Dursleys. The cupboard with his name not on it, the spiders, the slots of light through the door; Aunt Petunia's face when she looked at him, that pinch, as though he were a smell; the years of Dudley's cast-offs, washed grey; the birthdays, eleven of them, with nothing in them at all; take the boy to the zoo or leave him with Mrs Figg; being the thing that was arranged around, the thing in the second bedroom, the thing under the stairs. One childhood. You only got the one. His had gone to a man who did crosswords in Azkaban, and somewhere under all the snow out there the man was walking about, free, fed, laughing, while Harry sat by a borrowed fire in a borrowed castle, going back, every July, to the people who'd kept him in a cupboard, because there was nowhere else on the whole round earth that he belonged to.

'I haven't got anyone,' he heard himself say. 'That's what he did. You two go home in the summer. Everyone goes home. I go back to people who used to lock me in. I haven't got a family. I had one for fifteen months. I can't even remember it.'

The fire cracked. Hermione had gone very still, both hands flat on her book.

'You've got us,' said Ron.

He said it without any drama at all, which was what made it land; he said it as though stating the time. 'You've got me, haven't you. You've got Mum, who knits you a jumper every Christmas, same as me, same as Fred, same as all of us, you've seen it, you're on her list. You reckon she does that for every stray Gryffindor that turns up? You've got Dad, who had you put under Weasley on a Ministry list, I saw him do it. Ginny'd walk into a fire for you. Even Percy... all right, bad example.' Ron's ears had gone red; he ploughed on, looking at the Peppermint Toad rather than at Harry. 'What I mean is, mate, you keep saying you haven't got a family like it's a fact, it's not. You've got one. It's got too many redheads in it, the ghoul bangs the pipes all night and says his Prince will come for him, but it's yours if you want it. It's been yours for ages. You're the only one who hasn't noticed.'

Harry's throat shut.

For a second, for two, it was dangerously close to working; he felt the whole morning tilt, felt his eyes go hot, felt himself stand at the top of a long warm slide with the Burrow at the bottom of it, the ghoul, the one-handed clock that told you it was time to feed the chickens, Mrs Weasley making him mince pies because you're skin and bone, the jumper that was the first thing anybody had ever made for him with their hands...

And then he remembered.

He remembered the steps in June, the sun on them, the whole school going past with their trunks, Dumbledore's voice, the old words, the old magic, the blood. While you live under her roof, while you can call that house your home, Lord Voldemort cannot touch you there. Protection bought with his mother's life, kept in his aunt's unloving veins; the one gift Lily Potter had ever been able to leave him, which came with a condition, renewed every July that he went on calling Privet Drive his home. He could stand in the Burrow's kitchen all summer wanting it; the want changed nothing. He would go back to the cupboard people. He'd always go back to the cupboard people. The slide tipped him somewhere else entirely, and what came out of him came out with bitterness enough to strip paint.

'Yeah,' he said. 'They're a lovely family, yours. You know I think that. I'd take it. I'd take it tomorrow, I'd take the ghoul, I'd sleep in the broom shed.' His voice was climbing; he could hear it climb, and couldn't stop it. 'Only I can't, can I. Not really. Because of Black, because of Voldemort, I can't ever really be in it. You know what I am to a family, Ron? I'm a target painted on the kitchen wall. Everyone who's ever loved me is dead or hunted, that's my life, so the closer your mum gets to me the more she's standing where my mum stood. One day something comes out of the dark for me, something always comes out of the dark for me, and it goes through whoever's in front. I don't get a family. I get people in front of me. That's not the same thing.'

'Harry-'

'And you know what I get instead?' He was on his feet now; he didn't remember standing. 'I get them. Every time one of those things comes near me, every single time, I get my mother. Begging. I know the words now, Ron, I could write them out for you. I see my dad die. I see my mum die. I hear her offer, I hear him laugh at the offer, I hear him do it anyway. That's my family. That's my only copy of them. Other people get memories; I get the soundtrack of the murder, played back every time something in a hood gets hungry near me. I can't dream any more, everything turns into the fog with the hands in it. I can't think of anything happy without it curling up at the edges. Everything's gone cold, sharp, angry, and-'

He stopped, breathing hard, because the room had begun, very slightly, to vibrate; a window latch was buzzing in its socket like a trapped wasp. He shut his eyes. The latch went still.

'That's the dementors,' said Ron quietly. 'That's what they do, mate. Even from the gates. Dad says you don't have to be near them, being in the same grounds is enough, like living downwind of something. Everyone's felt it this year, the whole school. The corridors are darker. Everything's a bit too cold, all the time, everywhere. It's not just you, it's them. Honestly, Dumbledore should never have let them anywhere near the place-'

It was the wrong thing to say.

Harry didn't decide to shout. The shout was simply there, out of him, enormous in the empty room, before any part of him had voted on it.

'DUMBLEDORE KNOWS WHAT HE'S DOING!'

Ron froze with the Toad halfway to his mouth.

'He didn't let them, the Ministry sent them, he's fought them off every day, you saw what he did at the match, fifty of them, a hundred, one old man, he's the only one who-' Harry's voice cracked clean across the middle, climbed, kept going; it didn't sound like his voice at all, it sounded like somebody bailing water. 'He's the reason I'm alive, he saved me! He's the reason I ever got out of that house at all, eleven years, Ron, eleven years nobody came, nobody, not one letter, not one knock on the door, then his came, hundreds of his, they came down the chimney, so don't you sit there telling me Dumbledore, don't you dare tell me Dumbledore-'

He heard it.

Somewhere in the middle of the sentence he heard what he was doing, heard a thirteen-year-old boy screaming at his best friend in defence of the man who sent him back to Privet Drive every summer, screaming it as a drowning man grips a raft, because a drowning man grips a raft. If Dumbledore could be wrong, if the one adult who'd ever come for him could simply be wrong, then there had never been a rescue at all, there had only ever been the cupboard, with intervals; some part of Harry had known that for nearly three years, had kept it in the same drawer as the dog in the stand, would sooner have died than take it out to look at it.

The shout collapsed.

What came after it wasn't words. His legs sat him down without instructions; Ron was somehow there on the arm of the chair with one hand gripping Harry's shoulder, not patting it, just holding on, like a hand steadying something on a cart over cobbles, and Harry broke in half.

He cried the way he'd never once cried at Privet Drive, because at Privet Drive crying was noise, noise brought feet, and so he'd learnt by six to do it silently or not at all; he cried loudly, horribly, in great tearing sobs that hurt coming out, eleven years of them, saying things in no order. The cupboard. The lock. He told them about the lock. He told them about the dog biscuits, the Christmas of the dog biscuits, which he'd never told anybody; about standing in the garden at night aged eight looking at the lit windows of other houses; about hating them, hating Muggles, all of them, every neighbour who'd seen his face at the window, every teacher who'd believed Dudley, the whole smug world of drives, drilling, lawn sprinklers, that had watched Harry Potter starve by inches behind net curtains without one of them ever, once, in eleven years, knocking on that door; he wanted to hurt them, he said, he dreamt of hurting them, what did that make him; then Black, Black laughing in the street, Black who'd had the baby in his reach over the rubble, who'd argued for him, argued, then handed him over to the cupboard with one hand while the other was still warm from selling his mother, he'd kill him, he would, he'd find him in whatever hole the dementors couldn't reach, and he'd-

Hermione got to him somewhere in the middle of it.

She didn't say anything. She came round the table fast, knelt on the hearthrug, put both arms round him; she held on hard, with her chin against the side of his head, while he shook. Ron kept the grip on his shoulder. Between the two of them they rode it out, the whole storm of it, while the fire burnt down a bar; until the sobs came further apart, then further still, then ran down at last into silence broken only by Harry's breathing, ragged, slowing, with the small wet murmur, every so often, of what he still wanted to do to Sirius Black.

The clock over the fire ticked.

'Does Malfoy know?' Harry said at last.

His voice was wrecked. The question came out of him thick, from somewhere down near the floor of him, with his glasses off, his eyes raw; of everything he might have surfaced holding, he'd surfaced holding that.

'I think she thought you did,' Ron said. 'It's part of her game. She wants you to slay Black like the Basilisk in front of her because... well, she'd like it.'

Ron caught himself there, with the visible lurch of a man stepping back from a ledge. Harry had lifted his head; he was looking into the fire with his wet face, and whatever was moving behind it, it wasn't what Ron had braced for. Harry still seemed, after everything, somehow unaware of the thing every other person in Gryffindor Tower could have drawn him a diagram of; and this, Ron's whole posture said, wasn't the morning to hand him the diagram.

'I should've listened to her,' Harry said. 'She was trying to help me. I should've been nicer to her. She's... she's the only one who-'

He didn't finish it, because he'd gone somewhere; Ron watched him go. Harry was back in the dream, in the warm kitchen with the wand in his hand, with the voice at his shoulder that had said good, that had said that one, Harry, that one especially, that had understood, the only voice that had ever simply sat down on his side without asking him to be better than what had been done to him-

'You're going to take Malfoy's advice instead of ours?' said Ron furiously.

The fury was fear; even Harry, half gone, heard the fear in it. 'Listen... you know what Pettigrew's mother got back after Black had finished with him? Dad told me. The Order of Merlin, First Class, and Pettigrew's finger in a box. That was the biggest bit of him they could find. Black's a madman, Harry, and he's dangerous-'

'Dracina's dad must have told her,' said Harry, ignoring this entirely.

Ron let the first name go by; Harry saw him let it go, in some distant administrative part of himself, and couldn't bring himself to care. 'He was right in Voldemort's inner circle-'

'You-Know-Who. Can you not just say You-Know-Who?' interjected Ron angrily.

'I'll say Voldemort's bloody name if I please.' It came out flat as a flagstone. 'So obviously, the Malfoys knew Black was working for Voldemort-'

'-and Malfoy'd love to see you in danger so she can feel good about herself when you save her. Harry please listen to me, this is stupid. You're going to get yourself killed if you listen to her this time.'

'Harry, please.' Hermione was still on the hearthrug; her eyes had gone bright with tears that hadn't fallen. 'Be sensible about this one thing. What Black did was m-monstrous, nobody's saying it wasn't, but if you go hunting him you're doing his work for him, you're delivering yourself... your mum, your dad... they'd never have wanted you anywhere near him, would they? They'd have wanted you safe.'

'I'll never know what they'd have wanted, because thanks to Black, I've never spoken to them,' said Harry shortly.

Nobody answered that. There wasn't an answer to that; the fire ate another log, the snow lay unbroken past the windows. On the hearthrug Crookshanks, who'd slept through the entire storm with the fine indifference of cats, woke, stretched himself to twice his length, then flexed every claw he had. Ron's pocket gave a terrified quiver.

'Look,' said Ron, in the loud, bright, drowning voice of a man grabbing for any subject on earth, 'it's the holidays! Nearly Christmas! Let's... let's go down and see Hagrid, we haven't been in ages-'

'No!' said Hermione at once. 'Harry's not supposed to leave the castle, Ron, you know he's not-'

'Yeah, let's go,' said Harry, sitting up, and there was something new in his voice, something with an edge on it. 'I can ask him how come he never mentioned Black, all those times he was telling me about my mum and dad.'

This was visibly not the rescue Ron had been attempting.

'Or chess,' he said, fast. 'We could have a game of chess. Or Gobstones. Percy left a set-'

'No,' said Harry. 'Hagrid's. Now.'

*

So they fetched their cloaks, went out through the portrait hole ('Stand and fight, you yellow-bellied mongrels!'), down through a castle gone cavernous with emptiness, then out at the oak front doors into a world made of white.

The snow had stopped in the night. What it had left behind lay over everything, deep, powdery, glittering where the low sun found it; the three of them broke a trench down the lawn with their knees, soaking their socks, soaking the hems of their cloaks, their breath going up in columns. The Forbidden Forest stood along its edge like something out of a book of tales, every tree loaded with silver. Hagrid's cabin, under its fat white roof, might have been iced by a baker.

Harry walked a little ahead of the other two the whole way. He knew he was doing it; he did it anyway. It was easier, this morning, to have nobody beside him. At Privet Drive, after the bad days, he'd always wanted a wall at his back with the whole room in front of him where he could see it; the lawn was the nearest the grounds came.

Ron knocked. Nothing.

'He's never out,' said Hermione, shivering. 'Is he?'

Ron put his ear against the wood. 'There's a noise. Listen. Is that Fang?'

Harry and Hermione leant in beside him. Through the door came a sound that rose, fell, rose again: low, wet, throbbing, like a foghorn grieving.

'Should we fetch somebody?' said Ron, uneasy.

'Hagrid!' Harry hammered the door with his fist. 'Hagrid, it's us! Are you in there?'

Heavy footsteps. The door dragged open, and there stood Hagrid, filling the frame, with his eyes swollen to slits in the great hairy face, with tears sheeting down into his beard, which was already soaked.

'Yeh've heard!' he bellowed, and fell on Harry's neck.

It was like being embraced by a landslide. Hagrid was twice the size of an ordinary man on a thin day, and grief had made him boneless; the full weight came down across Harry's shoulders, buckling him at the knees, driving the air clean out of him.

'Hagrid,' Harry managed, into a quantity of beard, 'it's been lovely knowing you.'

Ron and Hermione got an arm each. Between them, staggering, they steered the sobbing mass of him back over his own threshold, across the cabin, into a chair built to his scale, where he slumped forward over the table and howled, his face running, the tears finding paths down into the tangle of his beard. The cabin was fuggy with woodsmoke. Fang was moaning under the table.

'Hagrid, what is it?' said Hermione, aghast. 'What's happened?'

Harry had already seen it. Lying open on the table among the mess of mugs was a letter, official, heavy parchment, with a seal he recognised; his stomach dropped before he'd read a word of it.

'What's this, Hagrid?'

Hagrid couldn't speak. He shoved it at Harry with one enormous hand, sobbing harder. Harry picked it up, with Ron and Hermione crowding his shoulders, then read it out.

Dear Mr Hagrid, further to our inquiry into the attack by a hippogriff upon a pupil during your lesson of the second of September, we write to confirm that the assurances of Professor Dumbledore have been accepted in full, and that no blame attaches to you in the matter.

'Well, that's all right then, Hagrid!' said Ron, clapping him on the back of one shoulder, which was as high as he could reach.

Hagrid went on sobbing. One vast hand waved at the letter: go on.

The Committee is nonetheless obliged to record its concern regarding the creature itself. The official complaint lodged by Mr Lucius Malfoy has been upheld, and the question of the animal's disposal is therefore referred to the Committee for the Disposal of Dangerous Creatures. A hearing has been set for the twentieth of April, on which date you are required to present yourself, together with the hippogriff, at the Committee's offices in London. Until that date the creature is to be kept tethered, in isolation.

There followed, in a neat column, the names of the school governors. Lucius Malfoy was not among them; he had been off that Board since June of last year. Harry looked at the column for a moment longer than he needed to. The cabin went on crackling round them. Ron was saying something, Hermione was saying something; Harry heard it from a long way off, through glass, because four words of the letter had come off the page at him, and the rest of the world had gone quiet around them.

The official complaint lodged by Mr Lucius Malfoy.

There was an official complaint. It had been lodged. It had been upheld. Harry stood with the parchment in his hand, and a dungeon in September assembled itself around him, cauldron-steam, Snape's cold, a girl with her arm in black silk at his own elbow, saying, in that clear carrying voice, with her chin up: I had written to Father, if you must know, I sat up all night, it was four pages. And then I didn't send it. I'm not going to. I've decided. He could hear it. He had the exact pitch of it filed away, because he filed everything she said, he'd been doing it for months without once admitting to himself that he was doing it; he had believed her. That was the plain fact he kept walking into, standing in Hagrid's smoky cabin with the letter in his hand. Of everything she'd ever told him, the flattery, the drama, the sling, he'd sorted that one into the small pile marked true. He'd watched her say it with ink still on the wrong hand, the left one, the writing one. He'd thought... he'd decided, somewhere between the paddock, the violets, the storm, the rail, that underneath the whole performance there was a floor you'd hit eventually, something solid, something that had held him in a hospital ward in June to say his name. All the time, he thought, those four pages must have been going quietly south by owl behind his back. The complaint was lodged. The bird would be dead by Easter, then, whatever soft wording the Committee put on it. She'd sat beside him at that bench, told him to put the roots in before the fig, told him the whole thing was dropped, the bird, the complaint, every part of it. Then she'd sent it anyway, or sent it first, then lied with the special shining sincerity she kept for lies; it didn't matter which. Either way there was no floor. Either way the kindest thing she'd ever done in front of him was a costume, like the sling, and he was Neville on the staircase, taking the offered book as though it might bite, too stupid to keep flinching.

Something in his chest had gone very tight, high up, under the collarbone. It wasn't the rage; he knew the rage by now, its climate, its weight. This was smaller, meaner, more childish, and it hurt worse: it was the feeling of the cupboard door being locked by a hand you had, against every rule you owned, begun to trust might not lock it.

He should have known better. He did know better. The Dursleys had taught him the one lesson eleven years of them taught anybody: kindness is bait. He'd learnt it before he could read. Two years at Hogwarts had started unteaching it; one girl had nearly finished the job; and the proof of what unlearning it cost was lying on Hagrid's table with a Ministry seal at the top.

A sudden sound from the corner snapped all three of them round.

Buckbeak the hippogriff was lying across the far end of the cabin like a collapsed haystack, tearing at something dark that was leaking blood into the floorboards.

'I couldn' leave him out there!' choked Hagrid. 'Tethered up in the snow, all by himself! At Christmas!'

Harry, Ron and Hermione looked at one another. On the subject of what Hagrid called interestin' creatures, the three of them had never once stood where Hagrid stood; the kindest thing you could say of most of Hagrid's enthusiasms was that they hadn't eaten anybody yet. But Buckbeak, blinking his great orange eye at them over his meal, folded in front of the fire like an enormous disreputable hearthrug, didn't look like a dangerous creature. He looked, by Hagrid's usual standards, like a pet. He looked, Harry thought, with the tightness ratcheting under his collarbone, like the first thing Hagrid had been trusted with since the school made him a teacher, which was precisely why it would be killed.

'You'll need to put up a proper defence, Hagrid,' said Hermione, sitting down, laying her hand on one massive forearm. 'A real one, with precedents. I'm sure we can show Buckbeak's safe.'

'Won' make no diff'rence!' Hagrid sobbed. 'Them Disposal devils, the lot of 'em, they're all in Lucius Malfoy's pocket! Scared of him! Always have bin! An' if it goes against me, Buckbeak-'

He drew one huge finger across his throat, then gave a wail like a ship going down, and pitched forward with his face in his arms.

'What about Dumbledore?' said Harry.

'He's done more'n enough fer me already,' groaned Hagrid, muffled. 'Got the dementors ter keep outta the castle, an' Sirius Black prowlin' about... he can' be fightin' the Committee an' all. I won' ask him.'

Ron and Hermione looked quickly at Harry. The look had a wince ready in it; here, said the look, was the opening, here was where Harry demanded to know why Hagrid, who'd talked to him about his mum and dad for two years, who'd made him an album of them, had never once said the name Black. Harry looked at Hagrid, at the great heaving shoulders, at the beard full of tears, at the red eyes of the only person who'd ever come for him on an island in the sea with a pink umbrella, with a squashed birthday cake in his coat.

He couldn't do it. There wasn't enough cruelty in him for it, not even today; today the cruelty was all spoken for.

'Listen, Hagrid,' he said instead. 'You can't give up. Hermione's right. You need a proper defence, that's all. You can call the three of us as witnesses, we were a foot away, we heard you warn the whole class about insulting them-'

'I'm sure I've read about a hippogriff-baiting case,' said Hermione, whose eyes had gone bright with purpose. 'Where the hippogriff was cleared. I'll find it, Hagrid. I'll find exactly what was argued.'

Hagrid howled louder. The sympathy appeared to be going in like salt.

Harry and Hermione both looked at Ron.

'Er,' said Ron. 'Shall I put the kettle on?'

Harry stared at him.

'It's what Mum does,' Ron muttered, shrugging. 'Whenever anyone's in a state. Tea first, talk after.'

It took a long time, a kettle the size of a bucket, many more promises of law books, witnesses, Hermione's notes; but at last Hagrid sat up, blew his nose on a handkerchief you could have rigged to a mast, and said, thickly, 'Yer right. Can' afford ter go ter pieces, can I. Not with him dependin' on me. Gotta get a grip on meself...'

Fang crept out from under the table, put his head on Hagrid's knee, and was absently crushed against it.

'I've not bin meself fer weeks,' said Hagrid, mopping his face with one hand, flattening Fang with the other. 'What with worryin' about Buckbeak, an' nobody likin' me lessons-'

'We like them!' said Hermione instantly.

'Yeah, they're great,' said Ron, whose fingers, Harry saw, had crossed themselves under the table. 'How are the flobberworms keeping?'

'They're not,' said Hagrid gloomily. 'Lost the lot. Over-fed 'em on the lettuce, see.'

'Oh no,' said Ron, with a heroic effort of the lower lip.

'An' them dementors.' Hagrid shuddered, all through his enormous frame, like a horse shaking off flies. 'Make me feel ruddy terrible, they do. Have ter go past 'em every time I fancy a drink at the Three Broomsticks. It's like bein' back in Azkaban-'

He stopped. He gulped his tea. The word had got out of him before he'd checked it; Harry, Ron and Hermione went absolutely still, as people do when something shy steps out into a clearing. Hagrid had been taken to Azkaban in their second year, held there while the Ministry wanted somebody to blame for the Chamber; he'd come back when the truth did. In all the time since, through every evening in this cabin, he'd never once said what it had been like, and none of them had ever quite dared to ask.

It was Hermione who dared now, very quietly.

'Was it bad there, Hagrid?'

'Bad.' Hagrid said it to his mug, in a voice they'd never heard him use, small, for such a vast man, like something speaking from the back of a cave. He turned the mug round once. 'There's no tellin' it to someone who's not bin. Everythin' yeh ever got wrong comes an' sits with yeh. All yer worst days, queuin' up, takin' turns. Gettin' expelled. Me dad's funeral. Partin' with Norbert.' His eyes welled again; Norbert had been his dragon, hatched on this very table, loved like a lamb. 'After a while there's no you left ter remember any of it. Just the days. I'd lie there wishin' I wouldn' wake up, an' mean it... Comin' out, though.' He drew a vast breath. 'Comin' out were like gettin' me own self handed back. I could've kissed the boat. An' them things stood watchin' me go like I were dinner walkin' off the plate.'

'But they knew you hadn't done anything!' said Hermione.

Hagrid snorted into his tea.

'Yeh reckon that weighs with them? Guilty, innocent, it's all the same off a plate. Long as the cells are full an' warm with people ter drain, they'll not trouble themselves over who deserves it.'

He went quiet, staring down into the mug, turning it slowly in both hands. When he spoke again it was almost a whisper.

'I did think about it, mind. Just slippin' his tether one night. Shooin' him off inter the hills.' A glance at the corner, where Buckbeak had gone back to his meal. 'But yeh can't explain hidin' to a hippogriff, can yeh. He'd be back on me step by breakfast, askin' after his ferrets. An' then it'd be me who'd broke the law.' He looked up at the three of them, and the tears were coming again, quietly now, which was worse than the howling. 'I can't, see. Whatever it costs. I'll not be took back ter that place. Not ever.'

*

The visit, grim as it had been, did the one thing Ron and Hermione had been praying something would do: it gave Harry's mind a job.

He hadn't forgotten Black. He couldn't have forgotten Black if he'd tried; the hatred was still down there, banked, patient, warming its hands. But a boy can't spend every waking hour sharpening one thought, not when there's a hippogriff with a date in April. So the next morning the three of them went down to the library, which they had entirely to themselves, came back under siege-loads of books, then spent the day in front of the common-room fire working through two centuries of what wizarding law had done to animals. It made ugly reading. They passed the worst bits across to one another in the fading light.

'Here's a hippogriff case, 1722... no good, it lost. Ugh. Don't read what they did to it after, it's barbaric-'

'What about this one... a manticore, 1296, cleared of savaging a woodcutter... oh. No. Cleared because the Committee couldn't find anybody willing to fetch it in...'

Harry worked at it harder than either of them.

He knew why, though he'd have bitten his tongue out before saying it aloud. Every case he copied out was a brick in a wall between Buckbeak's neck and the Committee; the Committee was in Lucius Malfoy's pocket; the complaint had come out of Malfoy Manor. Harry knew, or believed he knew, whose small spiky hand lay behind it: the hand that had written you are to look well, that had written burn this. Working for Buckbeak was the only way he had, with the whole length of England between them, of answering her. You lied to me, said every page of notes, in handwriting that got worse as the evening went on. You sat there with your ink-stained fingers, you told me you'd dropped it, I believed you, I never believe anybody, I believed you. Twice that week he caught himself at the table in the corner with a quill in his hand, the parchment headed, the first line begun: once it began Malfoy, once, which frightened him, it began Dracina; he never found a second line either time. What was there to put in it? How could you was Pettigrew, sobbing in a street at a man with a wand already out. I thought you were trailed off into territory he wouldn't map. Both attempts went into the fire, held at the corner until the flame took them, as a six-line letter from Aunt Petunia had gone onto a candle in November; burning letters, Harry reflected, watching the second one curl, was becoming the nearest thing he had to a correspondence.

The castle, meanwhile, had put on its Christmas clothes for almost nobody.

Streamers of holly ran along the empty corridors; mistletoe hung in bunches no one stood under; inside every suit of armour a mysterious light burnt, so that the hollow men glowed at their posts down the dark galleries, humming their carols through their visors, flat where they remembered the tune at all. In the Great Hall the twelve trees stood blazing with golden stars for a school that had gone home. Moving through all this unwatched splendour, Harry found that the decorations with nobody to see them reminded him of something it took him two days to place, until he had it: the Dursleys' front room done up for guests, the good crackers, the bowl of nuts, all of it arranged for the benefit of people who weren't Harry, while Harry handed round the sausage rolls with instructions to pretend he didn't exist. He kept catching the castle at it now, being beautiful at nobody, and feeling watched by the nobody it was being beautiful at.

By Christmas Eve the smell of the kitchens had climbed to every floor of the castle, rich, roasting, so thick by evening that even Scabbers put his whiskery nose out of Ron's pocket, hopeful, trembling, to sniff at the promise of it.

On Christmas morning, Harry was woken by a pillow to the head.

'Oy! Presents!'

He groped for his glasses, got them on, squinted down the half-dark dormitory. At the foot of his bed stood a small heap of parcels where no parcels had been; across the way Ron was already in the wreckage of his own, with shreds of paper round him like a nest.

'Jumper from Mum. She's got me maroon again... go on, see what colour yours is.'

Harry had got one. It was scarlet, with the Gryffindor lion worked across the chest in gold, and it had been made for him, stitch by stitch, by a woman with seven of her own, who had fed him all one summer, then put him on the list for good. Under it in the parcel were a dozen home-baked mince pies, a dark slab of Christmas cake, a box of nut brittle. Harry sat holding the jumper for a moment longer than he needed to. He was thinking, against his will, of the thing Ron had said by the fire, you're on her list; of how a person who had been given a jumper every Christmas of his life wouldn't even see it, would groan maroon again and reach past it for the next thing. He laid it on the bed beside him, very flat, smoothed it once with his hand, then said nothing.

Underneath where it had lain was a long, thin package he hadn't noticed.

'What's that one?' said Ron, a half-unwrapped pair of maroon socks dangling from his fist.

'Dunno.'

Harry tore the paper off, and a broomstick slid out onto the bedspread.

He knew what it was before his brain would let him say it. Ron said it for him. He'd dropped the socks to come across the gap between the beds in one movement, then stood over the bed with his mouth open.

'I don't believe it,' he said hoarsely.

It was a Firebolt. It was the same broom, down to the last glittering twig, that Harry had stood in front of through a shop window in Diagon Alley day after day all summer, not asking the price because the price was the sort of thing you didn't ask. The handle gleamed. When he lifted it he felt it come alive under his hand, a fine deep thrum, like a plucked string, and when he let go it stayed exactly where he'd left it, hanging in the air at the perfect height to mount, holding itself up out of nothing. His eye travelled the length of it, the registration number burnt in gold near the top, the birch twigs at the tail trimmed so fine and so even they might have been combed.

'Who sent it?' said Ron, almost whispering, as though it might startle.

'Dunno. Father Christmas.' It came out of Harry flat and dry, he hadn't decided to be funny. 'I'll have a look for a card.'

Ron pulled apart the last of the wrappings, shook them, turned them over.

'Nothing. Blimey. Who'd spend that kind of gold on you?'

'Well.' Harry turned the broom over, still stunned. 'I think we can rule out the Dursleys.'

'Bet it's Dumbledore.' Ron had begun to circle the Firebolt, drinking in every inch of it, hands behind his back as though in a museum. 'He gave you the Invisibility Cloak and never put his name to it-'

'That was my dad's. Dumbledore only passed it on.' Harry shook his head. 'He wouldn't spend hundreds of Galleons out of his own pocket on one student. He can't go handing us stuff like this-'

'That's why he wouldn't sign it!' said Ron. 'So no jealous idiot like Malfoy could go round whining it was favouritism.' He stopped circling and a slow grin spread over him. 'Hey. Malfoy.' He gave a whoop. 'Wait till she gets a look at you on this! She'll be sick as a pig! That's an international-standard broom, that is, that's what the national sides fly. And hey, don't let Dean hear me tell you that the English quidditch team are all bloody English.'

And then Harry's own mind betrayed him, because the grin on Ron's face pulled his thoughts straight back to her, as everything did now. A sore tooth pulls the tongue.

What if it was her?

It came with a little lift he despised himself for; his hand had gone up for it before his head had voted. What if the broom was hers, an anonymous thing of silk and money sent up from London with no card, because sending it with a card would have meant letting Harry refuse it in front of her, or worse, meant letting him be grateful? A Nimbus by Tuesday, if I ask. She'd said that offhand, a fortnight back; she knew his broom was splinters in a bag; this was exactly the sort of thing she did, the spare quill in Charms, the dragon-hide gloves, Mother sent these, the whole running campaign of expensive kindness aimed at a boy who'd never been given anything but trouble. For one soaring second he was ready to forgive her the letter, the lie, the whole of it, for the weight of a broom in his two hands.

Then the second passed, the cupboard closed over it, because he had the letter on Hagrid's table to set against the broom; the letter was the truer document. Kindness is bait. A girl who could sit beside you and lie about a hippogriff's life with her ink-stained hand on the desk could certainly post you a broomstick. If it was from her, the broom wasn't a gift. It was a hook with something bright on it, and he had just felt himself open his mouth for it. He set the Firebolt down on the bed as though it had got heavier.

It didn't feel right, even so. He couldn't have said why. The gloves had come with her chin up and her voice carrying, so that half the stand would know Potter had been given something; everything she gave, she gave to an audience. This had come wrapped in plain brown paper, with no name, to a boy she couldn't watch open it. That wasn't her at all. It was the one thing about the broom that his instinct wouldn't let him lay at Malfoy Manor; and his instinct, trained in a house where you learnt to read a mood before it read you, wasn't often wrong.

'I can't believe this,' he muttered, running a hand along the handle.

Ron had dropped onto the end of Harry's bed. 'Here, I know. I know who it could've been.' He snapped his fingers. 'Lupin!'

'Lupin?' Harry, in spite of everything, began to laugh. 'Ron. If Lupin had this kind of gold lying about, d'you not think he'd buy himself a set of robes that weren't held together with wishful thinking?'

'Yeah, but he likes you,' said Ron. 'He was away when your Nimbus got smashed, wasn't he, so maybe he heard about it after, popped down to Diagon Alley to make it up to you-'

'What d'you mean, away? He was ill. That's why the dementors got me, nobody could've-'

'He wasn't in the hospital wing, though,' said Ron. 'I know, because that's where I was, wasn't it, scrubbing bedpans without magic on Snape's detention, eight o'clock till half past eleven. No Lupin.'

Harry frowned at him. There was something in that he didn't like the feel of, though he couldn't have said what; it went into the drawer with the rest. 'I still can't see Lupin affording a Firebolt.'

'What are you two cackling about?'

Hermione had come in, in her dressing gown, with Crookshanks in her arms; the cat wore an expression of deep offence and a length of tinsel knotted round his neck, plainly not his own idea.

'Don't bring him in here!' said Ron, diving for the foot of his bed, scooping Scabbers out of the blankets, posting him hastily into the breast pocket of his pyjamas.

But Hermione wasn't listening. She'd dropped Crookshanks onto Seamus's empty bed and was staring at the Firebolt with her mouth open.

'Oh, Harry. Who sent you that?'

'No idea,' said Harry. 'No card. Nothing.'

Harry had braced for Hermione to be thrilled, or at the very least curious, nose already into the question of makes and prices; instead her face fell, she caught her lower lip in her teeth, held it there.

'What's got into you?' said Ron.

'I don't know,' said Hermione slowly. 'Only it's a bit odd, isn't it. This is meant to be a seriously good broom. Isn't it.'

Ron let out a long, suffering breath. 'It's the best broom there is, Hermione. There isn't a better one.'

'So it'll have cost a fortune...'

'Cost more than every broom the Slytherin team's got put together, probably,' said Ron, happily.

'Well, then. Who sends somebody a thing that expensive, and doesn't even want them to know who it was from?' said Hermione.

'Who cares?' said Ron. 'Harry, listen, can I have a go on it? Can I?'

'I don't think anybody should go near that broom just yet!' said Hermione, shrill.

Both of them looked at her.

'What d'you reckon Harry's going to do with it,' said Ron, 'sweep the floor?'

But before Hermione could answer, Crookshanks sprang off Seamus's bed straight at Ron's chest.

'GET HIM OFF! GET HIM OFF-' Ron bellowed, as the cat's claws went into his pyjamas and Scabbers launched himself up over Ron's shoulder in a scrabble of pink feet. Ron got the rat by the tail; he swung a kick at Crookshanks that missed entirely, catching the trunk at the foot of Harry's bed, toppling it, then hopped on the spot clutching his toe, swearing in a way that would have cost Gryffindor points in term time.

Crookshanks's fur stood straight up.

A thin, shrill, tinny whistle had started somewhere in the wreckage of the trunk, climbing, urgent, needling the ears. Harry knew it. He got down to dig the Pocket Sneakoscope out of the old socks it had worked loose from, where it spun, glittering in his palm like a top.

'Forgot I'd even packed that.' He had to raise his voice over it. 'I never wear these socks if I can help it-' They were Uncle Vernon's, grey, enormous, the kind of thing that came to Harry because nobody else would be seen dead in them; even his Christmas, Harry thought, had Dursley at the bottom of it. The Sneakoscope shrieked on. Crookshanks had flattened himself and was spitting at it, every hair on end.

'Get that cat out, Hermione,' said Ron, from the bed, nursing his foot. 'And can you not shut that thing up?' he added to Harry, as Hermione gathered Crookshanks up with as much dignity as either of them had left and swept out, the cat's yellow glare fixed on Ron to the last.

Harry buried the Sneakoscope back in the socks and dropped the whole bundle into his trunk. The whistling died. In the quiet after it there was only Ron's breathing and the small huddled shape of Scabbers in his hands.

It was a while since Harry had seen the rat out of the pocket. He didn't like what he saw. Scabbers had been a fat thing once; now he was gaunt, his sides going in, out, in, too fast, with the fur come away in patches, leaving the skin showing pink and old.

'He's not looking too good, is he,' said Harry.

'It's stress,' said Ron. 'He'd be fine if that great orange menace let him be.'

But Harry was remembering the witch in the Magical Menagerie, who'd said rats went about three years, no more; and unless Scabbers had been keeping some power back all this time that nobody had ever seen, he had the look of an animal nearing the end of its road. For all that Ron called him boring and useless twice a week, Harry knew well enough that Ron would be wretched if he died. He thought he understood that better than Ron did. You could love a thing fiercely for being the one thing that was yours, that nobody had handed down to you grudging, second-best; he had a length of green ribbon, kept since July, that he'd have fought the whole of Gryffindor to keep, and it was only a ribbon.

Christmas cheer was in short supply in the common room that morning.

Hermione had shut Crookshanks away in her dormitory, and was furious with Ron for the kick; Ron was furious with Crookshanks for the fresh go at Scabbers, not best pleased with Hermione either. Harry gave up trying to make the two of them speak, giving himself instead to the Firebolt, which he'd carried down to prop by the fire. Even this seemed to needle Hermione; she said nothing, but her eyes kept going to it, dark, sidelong, as they went to anybody who had ever accused her cat, as though the broom had joined the campaign against Crookshanks in person.

At lunchtime they went down.

The House tables had been cleared to the walls again, and in the middle of the Hall stood a single round table laid for a dozen. Dumbledore was there, with McGonagall, Snape, Sprout, little Flitwick; also Filch, out of his usual brown coat, buttoned instead into a tailcoat of such age that it had gone green at the seams, smelling faintly of the thing it had been kept in. There were only three pupils besides themselves, two first-years so overcome by the company that they'd stopped eating, and a Slytherin fifth-year with a face like a wet Tuesday.

'Merry Christmas!' said Dumbledore, as the three of them came up. 'So few of us, it seemed absurd to sit at the long tables. Sit, sit.'

They took three places at the end, side by side.

Harry looked up the table at Dumbledore, and his face must have shown something, because what it showed was reverence, plain, total, the look of a boy for the one man who'd reached down into the dark of Privet Drive to pull him out of it. Dumbledore caught the look. For a moment, over the crackers, something crossed the old face that nobody at the table could have named, least of all Harry; it was there and gone, folded away behind the half-moon spectacles. On Harry's other side Ron was watching Dumbledore too, and the thing on Ron's face was the exact opposite, a slow, banked resentment, growing all term, of a man who kept being kind to Harry in all the small ways while sending him back to the cupboard in the one large one. Between the two of them Harry ate his dinner and saw neither look, worshipping the one, defended by the other.

'Crackers!' Dumbledore held out the end of a great silver one to Snape.

Snape took it like it was a ticking pipe bomb; it went off with a crack like a starting pistol, delivering out of the smoke a tall pointed witch's hat with a stuffed vulture perched on the brim. Harry caught Ron's eye, so that they both had to look hard at their plates, because they were both back in the staffroom with Neville's boggart, with Snape in a green dress under that same hat, the whole school in fits. Snape's mouth went to a line. He pushed the hat at Dumbledore, who exchanged it at once for his own wizard's one and settled it on with evident pleasure.

'Tuck in,' he told them all, beaming round the table.

Harry had reached for the roast potatoes when the doors of the Hall opened again.

It was Professor Trelawney, coming towards them with that gliding walk of hers, as though the floor were doing the work. She had put on a sequined dress of deep green in honour of the day, which made her look, with her bangles and her magnified eyes, like some enormous glittering dragonfly that had got in out of the cold.

'Sibyll! What a pleasant surprise,' said Dumbledore, standing up.

'I have been gazing, Headmaster,' said Professor Trelawney, in her mistiest voice, the one that came from a long way off. 'To my very great astonishment I beheld myself setting aside my solitary luncheon, coming down to join you all. Who am I to argue with the promptings of fate? I hastened from my tower at once. You must forgive my lateness...'

'Nothing to forgive,' said Dumbledore, his eyes twinkling. 'Allow me to find you a chair.'

He drew one in the air with his wand. It turned over slowly as it formed, revolving a few feet above the flagstones, then dropped with a thud into the gap between Snape and McGonagall.

Professor Trelawney didn't sit in it. Her huge eyes had been going round the table, counting; she let out a small shriek.

'I dare not, Headmaster! Should I sit, we shall be thirteen! Nothing is more unlucky! Never forget, when thirteen dine together, the first to rise is the first to die!'

'We'll take our chances, Sibyll,' said Professor McGonagall impatiently. 'Do sit down, The turkey is going stone cold.'

Professor Trelawney hesitated. Then she lowered herself into the chair with her eyes shut and her mouth clamped, like a woman expecting the ceiling to come in on her. Professor McGonagall drove a serving spoon into the nearest tureen.

'Tripe, Sibyll?'

Professor Trelawney ignored this. Her eyes had come open again; they went round the table once more, and stopped.

'But where is dear Professor Lupin?'

'I'm afraid the poor fellow is unwell again,' said Dumbledore, waving everybody towards the dishes. 'Most unfortunate, that it should fall on Christmas Day of all days.'

Harry looked up.

It was nothing, probably. Dumbledore had said it lightly, then gone straight on to the parsnips, and nobody else at the table appeared to think twice; but Harry had spent eleven years learning to hear what was under a grown-up's voice, because at Privet Drive the words had been the least reliable part of anything anybody said. Something had been under that one. Dumbledore had glanced, in the half-second before he spoke, at the high windows, where the sky over the grounds had the flat white look of more snow coming; and he glanced at them again now, over the top of his goblet, with the corners of his mouth down. Harry thought: he doesn't know where he is. It wasn't the face of a headmaster whose colleague was tucked up two floors above with a cold. It was the face of a man waiting for word, and not getting any.

He had no way of knowing what he was looking at. He only knew that Dumbledore was worried, that Dumbledore had lied about why; he filed it, with the rest, in the drawer of things that didn't fit, which had become the fullest drawer he owned.

'But surely you knew that already, Sibyll?' said Professor McGonagall, eyebrows up.

Professor Trelawney turned a very cold look upon her.

'Certainly I knew, Minerva,' she said quietly. 'But one does not parade the fact that one is All-Knowing. I frequently conduct myself as though I were not possessed of the Inner Eye, so as not to make others nervous.'

'That explains a great deal,' said Professor McGonagall tartly.

Professor Trelawney's voice lost a good deal of its mist.

'If you must have it, Minerva, I have Seen that poor Professor Lupin will not be among us for long. He appears to know it himself. He positively fled when I offered to gaze for him-'

'Imagine that,' said Professor McGonagall drily.

'I doubt very much,' said Dumbledore, in a cheerful voice pitched just high enough to put the lid on both of them, 'that Professor Lupin is in any immediate danger. Severus, you have made up his potion again?'

'Yes, Headmaster,' said Snape.

'Good. Then we may expect him on his feet again directly.' Dumbledore turned, beaming, on the smaller of the two first-years. 'Derek. Have you had any of these chipolatas? They are particularly good this year.'

The boy went scarlet to the ears at being spoken to by the Headmaster, took the platter with both hands shaking, then got it to his plate without disaster, which Harry privately thought was the bravest thing anybody did all day.

The talk turned, somewhere over the pudding, to Professor McGonagall.

Harry never worked out afterwards how it started; Flitwick asked her something about a scar on the back of her hand, which Harry hadn't known was there. What she gave in answer wasn't what anybody at the table expected, least of all Professor Trelawney, who stopped eating altogether.

'Siberia,' said Professor McGonagall. 'Winter of sixty-six. A village that had no business existing, forty miles past the last road, full of men who had been doing something to the people in the valley below for the better part of thirty years. The Ministry declined to recognise that it was there. Somebody had to go.' She set down her spoon. 'I went with one other, a young man of roughly my own age, which is to say far too young for the work. I am not permitted to tell you his name, and I would not tell you most of what we did if I were.'

'You went in two?' said Flitwick, startled.

'There were nine of them,' said Professor McGonagall. 'Two is the right number. A great deal of what people believe about fighting is wrong, Filius, and most of it is believed by brave men.' She looked, for a moment, directly down the table at Harry, which Harry hadn't expected at all, and went on in a voice that had changed its address without changing its tone. 'He taught me three things, that man, and I have found no reason in all the years since to amend any of them. The first is that you do not announce yourself. A wand held out in front of you at a doorway is a declaration of intent; it is also a thing to be grabbed. The second is that most people are beaten by the weather and their own appetites before anybody fights them at all. We waited four days in the snow and they came out to us because they were bored. The third,' she said, with her eyes staying on Harry, 'is that the most dangerous moment in any engagement is not the beginning. It is the moment after you believe you have won, when the heat is still in you and your judgement is not. Men who survive the fight and lose everything afterwards are the rule, not the exception. He said it rather better. He said that the hard part is not learning to carry a weapon. The hard part is learning to put it down.'

There was a silence round the table.

Harry sat absolutely still with his spoon in his pudding. He was aware of Hermione, very carefully not looking at him, of Ron on his other side doing the same; he was aware that everybody at this table except perhaps the first-years knew what had been said to him and why, that nobody would ever be so vulgar as to admit it. He was aware, with the hot stubborn part of him, that he didn't want it, that a man who'd laughed in a street full of bodies wasn't a thing you put down; underneath the stubbornness, quieter, something in him said: wrath pays its wages in the morning. A ghost in a corridor had told him that six weeks ago, in another story, about another man riding uphill with four hundred swords behind him. He wished people would stop handing him the same parcel.

'And where is he now?' asked Professor Sprout comfortably, passing the cream. 'Your young man with the three rules.'

Professor McGonagall was a moment answering.

'Zanzibar Land, I believe. I've not had word of him in some years, and his son doesn't like to talk about it.' she said. 'We did a number of these things together, in the end. He was the better of the two of us, and it did him no good whatsoever; the people who use men like that use them up.' She picked up her spoon again. 'Eat your pudding, Pomona, it's going cold.'

But Harry had caught what was in her face before she turned it away, and he knew that particular arrangement of a face from the inside; it belonged to somebody talking about a person who had either died, or had gone somewhere they couldn't be written to, which was very nearly the same thing. He thought about it for the rest of the meal, between forkfuls, finding that the thinking had taken a little of the heat out of him, that he resented it, that he was glad of it, both at once.

Professor Trelawney held herself together almost to the end of dinner, which lasted two hours. Then Harry and Ron, full to the back teeth, still wearing the paper hats out of the crackers, pushed their chairs back to stand up, whereupon she shrieked.

'My dears! Which of you left his seat first? Which?'

'Dunno,' said Ron, glancing uneasily at Harry.

'It was me Professor, I'm in for it now, but I'll give it till half past for any more murder attempts this year.' Harry said with dry irritation that made Dumbledore and McGonnagall chuckle.

'I doubt it will make much difference,' said Professor McGonagall, recovering from the chuckle 'unless a mad axe-man is waiting outside the doors to slaughter the first into the entrance hall.'

Even Ron laughed. Professor Trelawney looked profoundly affronted.

'Coming?' Harry said to Hermione.

'No,' Hermione muttered. 'I want a quick word with Professor McGonagall.'

'Probably trying to see if she can take any more classes,' yawned Ron, as they went out into the entrance hall, which proved to be entirely free of mad axe-men.

Sir Cadogan, when they reached him, was having a Christmas party of his own. He had got in a pair of monks from a nearby landscape, three previous headmasters of Hogwarts, plus his fat dappled pony, who had been given something out of a bucket, and was swaying gently. Sir Cadogan pushed up his visor and saluted them with a flagon.

'Merry - hic - Christmas! Password?'

'Scurvy cur,' said Ron.

'And the same to you, sir!' roared Sir Cadogan, as the portrait swung forward.

Harry went straight up for the Firebolt, and brought it down with the Broomstick Servicing Kit that Hermione had given him for his birthday in the summer, meaning to do something to it. There was nothing to do to it. Not one twig stood out of line to be clipped; the handle had a finish on it that made the High-Finish Polish look like an insult. So the two of them simply sat with it propped between them, turning it, holding it up, finding new angles, Ron sighting down the length of the handle with one eye shut like a man judging a snooker cue, until the portrait hole opened again.

Hermione came in. Professor McGonagall came in behind her.

Harry had seen Professor McGonagall in the Gryffindor common room exactly once in two and a half years; that time she had come to tell them all that a pupil had been taken into the Chamber. Harry looked up with Ron, the broom held between them, and the bottom went out of the afternoon.

Hermione walked round the two of them without catching anybody's eye, sat down, picked up the nearest book off the table, and put it in front of her face.

'So that is it, is it,' said Professor McGonagall, coming to the fireside and looking down at the Firebolt. 'Miss Granger has just been to inform me that you have been sent a broomstick, Potter.'

Harry and Ron turned to look at Hermione. Above the top edge of her book, which she was holding upside down, her forehead had gone a deep and spreading pink.

'May I?' said Professor McGonagall.

She didn't wait to be answered. She drew the Firebolt out of their four hands, held it up, and went over it from the handle to the tail-twigs with the thoroughness of a woman who had spent a great deal of her life examining things for what had been done to them.

'Hm. And there was nothing with it, Potter? No note, no card? Nothing written at all?'

'No,' said Harry blankly.

'I see.' Professor McGonagall straightened. 'Well. I'm afraid I shall have to take this, Potter.'

'W-what?' Harry was on his feet. 'Why?'

'It will have to be checked for jinxes,' said Professor McGonagall. 'I am no expert, of course. But I daresay Madam Hooch and Professor Flitwick between them will want to strip it down-'

'Strip it down?' repeated Ron, in the voice of a man hearing that his dog is to be taken apart.

'It oughtn't to take above a few weeks,' said Professor McGonagall. 'You shall have it back the moment we are satisfied there is nothing on it.'

'There's nothing wrong with it!' said Harry. His voice came out with a shake in it that he hadn't sanctioned. 'Honestly, Professor, it's-'

'You cannot know that, Potter,' said Professor McGonagall, quite kindly, which somehow made it worse, 'not until you have flown it; flying it is precisely what is out of the question until we know it has not been tampered with. I shall keep you informed.'

She turned on her heel and carried the Firebolt out through the portrait hole, which swung shut behind her.

Harry stood where he was, staring at the place where it had gone, with the tin of High-Finish Polish still gripped in one hand. He didn't trust himself to put it down gently, so he went on holding it.

Ron, however, had swung round on Hermione.

'What did you go running to McGonagall for?'

Hermione threw her book aside. She was still pink in the face, but she got up and faced him squarely.

'Because I thought, and Professor McGonagall agrees with me, that that broom was probably sent to Harry by Sirius Black!'