What the Hood was Hiding

It took one night for it to look as though Ron and Hermione were finished.

Harry had watched them almost fall out plenty of times before. They had rowed about Crookshanks, about homework, about whether Divination counted as a proper subject at all, but those rows had always blown over within a day or two. This one was different. Ron wouldn't budge, and Hermione, after about four hours of being sorry, seemed to decide that she had nothing to be sorry for, which only made things worse.

Ron told anybody who would listen exactly what he thought.

'She never once took it seriously,' he said, at breakfast, at lunch, on the stairs, in the common room. 'Not once. Every single time I said that cat's trying to kill my rat, she laughed. Cats chase rats, Ron. Yeah. And now there's blood on my sheets.'

Hermione, for her part, insisted at the top of her voice that there was no proof of anything.

'Ginger hairs,' she said. 'Ginger hairs on a bedsheet, in a room Crookshanks has been in and out of since September. They could've been there since Christmas, for all anybody knows. This is silly, Ronald. You've a few hairs, a stain, and a decision you took on the last day of the holidays, because he landed on your head in the Magical Menagerie. You've never forgiven him for it.'

'He ate him-'

'You don't know that,' said Hermione. 'Have you looked under the beds? Properly? Because rats go under beds, Ronald, that's where they go, they're not complicated animals-'

This turned out to be a very bad thing to say. Ron went a dark, mottled red, told Hermione precisely what she could do with her idea of crawling about under five beds looking for a rat her cat had eaten, then stormed out of the common room.

Harry was quite sure Ron was right. He had seen the bloodstained sheet with his own eyes, along with the long ginger hairs lying across Hermione's rune translation, and as far as he could see there was only one way to explain them. Unfortunately, he made the mistake of saying so to Hermione in the common room before lessons, in what he thought was a perfectly reasonable voice.

'Okay, side with Ron, I knew you would!' Hermione said shrilly. 'First the Firebolt, now Scabbers, everything's my fault, isn't it! Just leave me alone, Harry, I've got a lot of work to do!'

After that, she stopped speaking to either of them.

*

Ron took the loss of his rat much harder than anyone had expected, Ron included.

'Come on, Ron, you were always saying how boring Scabbers was,' said Fred bracingly, over breakfast on the Friday. 'And he's been off-colour for ages, he was wasting away. It was probably better for him to snuff it quickly. One swallow. He probably didn't feel a thing.'

'Fred!' said Ginny indignantly.

'All he did was eat and sleep, Ron, you said it yourself,' said George.

'He bit Goyle for us once!' Ron said miserably. 'Remember, Harry?'

'Yeah,' said Harry. 'That's true.'

'His finest hour,' said Fred, who had given up trying to keep his face straight. 'Let the scar on Goyle's finger stand as a lasting tribute to his memory. Oh, come on, Ron, get yourself down to Hogsmeade and buy a new rat, what's the point of moaning?'

'I don't want a new rat,' said Ron, to the table, and put his head down on his arms.

There didn't seem to be much anyone could say to that. Ginny quietly pushed the toast rack a little nearer to him, which Harry thought was the kindest thing anybody had done all morning.

It was Harry who finally came up with something to make Ron lift his head.

'Come to practice tonight,' he said.

'What for? I always come to practice.'

'Yeah, but tonight you can have a go on the Firebolt afterwards.'

Ron's head shot up off his arms so fast that he knocked his spoon on to the floor.

'Great! Can I try and shoot a few goals on it?'

*

It was on the Friday that Harry began to feel slightly afraid of Hermione.

He would never have said so out loud. If anyone had asked, he would have said that she was overtired, or overworked, or both, which was perfectly true. But Harry had spent twelve years learning to tell when the mood in a room was about to turn nasty, and there was something about Hermione that day that set all his old instincts prickling.

The first time was that morning, in the corridor outside Charms.

A second-year Hufflepuff, running late, caught the strap of Hermione's bag with his elbow as he dashed past. The bag went flying, and two hours' worth of Arithmancy homework went skating across the flagstones. The boy began to stammer an apology. Harry, who was standing three feet away, saw Hermione's face as she turned round, and found that he had taken a step backwards without meaning to.

She didn't shout. Harry rather wished she had. Instead she stood perfectly still, with wisps of bushy hair escaping from her ponytail, and gave the boy a long, flat, patient look, as though he were a wasp she hadn't yet decided whether to swat. The Hufflepuff, who was eleven inches taller than she was, went white to the lips. He said sorry three more times, got down on his knees, then gathered up every last sheet of her homework in the right order.

'Thank you,' said Hermione pleasantly, and swept into Charms.

'Blimey,' Seamus breathed in Harry's ear.

The second time was at lunch.

Lavender Brown, who had never been able to bear a silence in her life, leant across the table to ask Hermione whether she'd heard about Ron's rat. Wasn't it awfully sad? She'd read somewhere that cats did that sort of thing to familiars all the time. You couldn't really blame the poor animal, could you?

Hermione put down her knife.

'Lavender,' she said. 'In October your rabbit was killed by a fox. I told you it hadn't been predicted by anybody. You cried. I was sorry for that, and I gave you my handkerchief. Now you'd like to tell me, at this table, in front of these people, that my cat is a murderer.' She picked the knife back up. 'Would you like to go on, or would you like your lunch?'

Lavender chose her lunch. She ate it with her eyes fixed on Hermione's knife the whole time, privately wondering how long it would be before Hermione turned up on the Muggle news.

*

Madam Hooch was waiting for them on the pitch that evening, bundled up in her oilskins, because Professor McGonagall still wouldn't let Harry practise without a teacher present. She held out her hand for the Firebolt before anybody had got near it, then turned it over and over in the fading light like a woman who had spent two months taking it to pieces, yet still hadn't had enough of it.

'Two months I had this in pieces on a bench upstairs, and I still can't keep my hands off it,' she said. 'Look at the balance on it. If the Nimbus series has a fault, it's a slight list to the tail end. You often find they develop a drag after a few years. They've updated the handle too, a bit slimmer than the Cleansweeps, reminds me of the old Silver Arrows.' She squinted along it with one fierce yellow eye. 'A pity they've stopped making them. I learnt to fly on one, and a very fine old broom it was too. You'd come off a Silver Arrow at a hundred feet, then the thing would circle back to hover over you until somebody came, which I can tell you from experience-'

'Er,' said Wood. 'Madam Hooch? Is it okay if Harry has the Firebolt back? We need to practise.'

'Oh. Right. Here you are, then, Potter.' She surrendered it with obvious reluctance. 'I'll sit over here with Weasley.'

She stumped off up the steps into the stands, with Ron trailing behind her.

'I suppose I'll have to let Madam Hooch have a go as well,' said Harry, watching her go. 'Might give us some favours to cash in for the next match.'

'Bribing the referee now, are we?' said George.

'Corrupted by a broomstick,' said Fred sadly. 'Mum'll be heartbroken.'

The team laughed. Wood waited, arms folded, until they had finished, then delivered his news.

'Harry. Bad news about Ravenclaw's Seeker.'

'Go on.'

'It's Cho Chang. She's a fourth year, and she's... uh, well, she's Scottish apparently. And pretty good.' Wood studied the far goalposts with great interest. 'I really hoped she wouldn't be fit, she's had some problems with injuries.'

'You hoped she wouldn't be fit,' said Angelina.

'I hoped she'd be comfortable,' said Wood, 'somewhere else, watching.' He scowled, as though Cho Chang's recovery had been arranged purely to annoy him, then cheered up. 'On the other hand, she rides a Comet Two Sixty, which is going to look like a joke next to the Firebolt.'

He gazed at Harry's broom with such naked longing that Katie had to look away.

'Okay, everyone. Let's go.'

Then, finally, Harry swung his leg over the Firebolt and pushed off.

It was better than anything he had dreamed of, and he'd been dreaming about it for two months. He had loved his Nimbus, and he had learnt everything he knew on it, but the Nimbus had always needed a little pushing. The Firebolt didn't. Harry leant the smallest fraction to the left and it was turning before he had finished thinking about it. Going from one to the other was like swapping a blunt knife for a diamond-sharp one. He flattened himself along the handle. The stadium blurred into streaks of green and grey, while the wind roared in his ears. At the south end he wrenched it round so tightly that Alicia Spinnet shrieked, then he dropped into a dive, skimmed the grass with his toes, and shot back up thirty, forty, fifty feet, the whole pitch wheeling beneath him.

There was a trick he had never managed on the Nimbus, a half-roll out of a steep climb that left you hanging upside down for a heartbeat at the top. He had fallen off trying it twice in his first year. On the Firebolt he did it without even meaning to, and came out of it the right way up, laughing.

'HARRY,' Wood bellowed from the goals, 'I'M LETTING THE SNITCH OUT!'

Harry wheeled round to race a Bludger down the length of the pitch, leaving it far behind. A glint of gold shot out from behind Wood's shoulder. Ten seconds later it was fluttering helplessly in Harry's fist.

He released it again, then counted to sixty with his eyes shut. After that he set off in pursuit, darting between his own teammates, under Katie, over Angelina, until he caught a glimmer hiding beside Katie Bell's knee. He swooped round her so close that her hair blew across her face, and snatched it a second time.

By the end of the session the whole team was flying better than Harry had ever seen it. Fred and George sent the Bludgers exactly where they meant them to go. Angelina, Alicia and Katie strung three passes together at full speed without once looking at each other. Wood saved a shot with his boot, then crowed about it for a minute and a half. When they landed, Wood walked slowly along the line of them, opened his mouth, closed it again, and found he had nothing to criticise.

'That's a first,' said George. 'Somebody write it down.'

'I can't see what's going to stop us tomorrow!' said Wood. 'Not unless. Harry, you've sorted out your dementor problem, haven't you?'

Harry's mouth went dry.

He thought of the miserable thing he could produce on a Thursday evening: a wisp of silvery fog with a faint light inside it, which hung in front of him going nowhere, draining him white while he held it there. Two months of Thursdays, and it still wouldn't move forward.

'Yeah,' he said. 'I got taught some breathing exercises and negotiation strategies. Dementors are very reasonable once you get beyond the soul sucking and draining all that's good from a place.'

Fred snorted into his sleeve. Alicia laughed out loud. Wood closed his eyes with the air of a man in pain.

Harry knew he ought to take it seriously. Wood was still looking at him, and Wood had only three months left of a seven-year career.

'Seriously though, I think...'

It came back to him then, in the two seconds before he could stop it: the cold creeping up through the soles of his feet, the lamps going out one by one, only a good man can cast it, and a boy sprawled on a classroom floor while his mother pleaded over his head.

Then it was gone, and something steadier rose up in its place. Harry was faintly surprised by how calm his own voice sounded.

'I've got a spell Professor Lupin taught me. You won't need to worry.'

Wood looked at him a moment longer. Then he reached out to clap Harry on the shoulder, hard, the same way he did with the twins when they had done something right.

'Good man. We really need you to be tip top out there. For my sake at least, mate.'

Harry nodded. He had no intention whatsoever of letting Oliver Wood down.

'The dementors won't turn up again, Oliver. Dumbledore'd go ballistic,' said Fred confidently.

'Well, let's hope not,' said Wood. 'Anyway. Good work, everyone. Let's get back to the tower, turn in early.'

'I'm staying out for a bit,' said Harry. 'Ron wants a go on the Firebolt.'

The rest of the team trooped off towards the changing rooms. Harry crossed the grass to meet Ron, who had already vaulted the barrier and was hurrying over at something close to a run. Up in the stands, Madam Hooch had fallen fast asleep with her chin on her chest.

'Here you go,' said Harry.

Ron took the Firebolt in both hands as though he were being handed the Crown Jewels, mounted it, and shot off into the gathering dusk.

Harry strolled round the edge of the pitch, watching him. Ron flew rather as he played chess, in straight lines with sudden surprises in them. He wasn't a Seeker, nor would he ever be, but he took the Firebolt up to the Gryffindor hoops to slam three goals past an imaginary Keeper. The whoop he let out after the third echoed all round the empty stadium. It was the first sound Harry had heard him make since Thursday night that had nothing to do with a rat.

Night had fallen by the time Madam Hooch woke with a snort. She told them both off at great length for not waking her, then marched them back up to the castle.

They walked up the lawn with the Firebolt over Harry's shoulder, arguing happily about its acceleration, about whether its braking charm was really better than the Nimbus's, about what it might do in a stiff crosswind at the south end of the pitch.

They were halfway to the castle when Harry glanced to his left. His heart gave a horrible jolt.

Two eyes were shining at him out of the dark.

They were low to the ground, beneath the trees at the edge of the grounds: two flat discs of reflected light, perfectly still, fixed unblinkingly on him.

Harry froze where he stood. His heart was thudding so hard that it hurt.

'What's the matter?' said Ron.

Harry pointed.

Ron pulled out his wand. 'Lumos!'

The light from Ron's wand swung across the wet lawn and up the trunk of the nearest tree. Halfway up, in the fork of two branches, with his tail curled neatly round his paws, sat Crookshanks.

'Bloody cat, Get out of here!' Ron roared.

He snatched up a stone, but he was too slow. There was a flick of orange fur among the leaves, then the tree was empty.

'See?' Ron flung the stone away in disgust. 'She's still letting him wander about wherever he wants. Probably washing down Scabbers with a couple of birds now.'

Harry didn't answer. He was standing in the wet grass, waiting for his breathing to slow down, so weak with relief that he felt slightly sick. For two whole seconds he'd been certain that the eyes in the dark belonged to an enormous black dog. The last two times he had seen that dog, something had very nearly killed him, and tomorrow he had a Quidditch match.

'Harry?'

'Nothing,' said Harry. ' That bloody Cat.'

They set off again. Before they had gone twenty yards Harry was thoroughly ashamed of himself, though he said nothing about it to Ron. All the same, he kept his eyes fixed on the lit windows of the castle until the front doors had closed behind them.

*

It was well past eleven that night when Harry crept back down to the common room for a book he had left behind. Hermione was still sitting behind her barricade of books in the corner, three candles burnt down to stubs beside her. On the far side of the room, Ron was telling Dean, at tremendous length, about the Fudge Flies Scabbers used to like. Dean still wasn't quite over Ron's football player comment from late last school year but he seemed to be tolerating Ron now.

Hermione's quill had stopped moving.

She wasn't writing at all. She was sitting perfectly still, her left hand slipped inside the collar of her robes, turning something Harry couldn't see round and round between her fingers. Her eyes were fixed on the back of Ron's head, and there was an expression on her face that Harry had never seen there before. He didn't think it was hatred, exactly. It looked more like consideration: the face of somebody standing in front of something they'd been told never to touch, working out just how much trouble they would be in if they did.

'All right, Hermione?' said Harry.

Her hand shot out of her collar so fast that she knocked a book off the table.

'Fine,' she said. 'I'm fine. I'm working.'

'Right.'

'Goodnight, Harry.'

Harry took his book back upstairs, where he lay awake for a long time. He couldn't shake off the feeling that Hermione Granger wasn't a person anybody should want as an enemy. This was a girl who followed real vampires the way Lavender and Parvati followed Take That and Boyzone. She had read every book on the subject that Madam Pince would let her sign out, had told them about the Scourge of Europe with shining eyes, always wanted to know exactly what a monster had done, in what order, to whom. And she especially favoured the gory aspects. Ron didn't see it. Ron was far too angry to see anything. He went on talking loudly about one swallow and Fudge Flies across the common room, at a girl sitting in a corner fiddling with something on a chain. Watching him gave Harry the uncomfortable feeling of watching somebody stand in an open field during a thunderstorm, holding a poker over his head.

*

Harry came down to breakfast the following morning surrounded by every other boy in his dormitory. They seemed to feel that the Firebolt deserved some sort of royal escort, and they marched him down the marble staircase in a tight little knot, with Neville walking backwards in front so as not to miss anything.

Necks craned all the way down the Great Hall as they came in. By the time they reached the Gryffindor table, half the school seemed to be whispering about it.

As Harry passed the staff table, he heard Professor McGonagall, who was buttering a piece of toast and hadn't looked up, mutter something to nobody in particular.

'More protective than those absolute glaikits in Afghanistan at least.'

Harry looked round, but she was examining her toast with tremendous concentration. Only the corner of her mouth gave her away.

Then he glanced over at the Slytherin table, and felt a glow of satisfaction so fierce that it very nearly made up for February.

The Slytherins had stopped eating. Marcus Flint was craning his thick neck to see. Montague had twisted right round on the bench. At the near end of the table sat Dracina Malfoy, her spoon frozen halfway to her mouth, staring at the Firebolt on Harry's shoulder. Harry couldn't make out her expression at all. It certainly wasn't triumph, nor was it the shining, sorrowful look he had seen so often that winter. If anything, she looked hurt.

She didn't say a single word about it. She didn't mention the Nimbus Two Thousand and One either, though it had gone back up to the Owlery wrapped in brown paper only on Thursday evening, with a note that had taken Harry four drafts.

Harry sat down feeling bothered, then felt annoyed with himself for feeling bothered. Eleven days ago he had made up his mind to stop caring what Dracina Malfoy thought about anything.

He still hadn't asked her about Buckbeak.

'Oi,' said Ron, sitting down opposite. 'Stop it.'

'Stop what?'

'That.' Ron jabbed his fork at Harry's face. 'You've gone off somewhere. You always go the same place.' He heaved the long-suffering sigh he'd been heaving about Dracina Malfoy since September, then reached across to give Harry's shoulder a brief, awkward squeeze. 'Look. Here's a thought to cheer you up. She's not playing today, is she?'

'No.'

'So for the next ninety minutes she's stuck up in the stands with Parkinson and her horse laugh. The one that makes her sound like Eeyore. A hundred feet below you, watching. Nowhere near me, either. Can't claw my face off. Can't bite my ear like she did in first year.' Ron nodded, deeply satisfied. 'First proper advantage of Quidditch I've ever found.'

Harry laughed out loud before he could help it. Because he was looking at Ron, he completely missed the look that crossed Dracina Malfoy's face at the Slytherin table: a quick, hungry, miserable look, aimed at the pair of them, at how easy they were together, at a joke she hadn't been part of.

He missed what happened next, too. Her gaze drifted on down the Gryffindor table until it reached a girl sitting by herself behind a wall of books, her jaw clenched, not laughing, not included, not being spoken to by anyone. Dracina Malfoy watched Hermione for a long moment. Then her face smoothed out, and she looked almost content.

Wood arrived and took the broom out of Harry's hands without asking.

'Put it here, Harry,' he said, setting it down among the marmalade pots with tremendous care, adjusting it until the gold lettering faced the ceiling. He stepped back to admire it like a man who has just hung a painting.

Before long, Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs were drifting over in little groups to have a look.

One of them was Cedric Diggory. He strolled down the Gryffindor table with his hands in his pockets, and Harry felt his teammates bristle slightly. Of everyone in the Hall, Cedric had the best reason to be sour this morning.

'That's a Firebolt,' said Cedric.

'Yeah.'

'May I?' He bent over it without touching it, which Harry noticed. 'They hand-finish the tails on these, did you know? Every twig matched by eye.' He straightened up, grinning. 'Congratulations. Bit much for a Hufflepuff to say with the Cup still open, but it's a beautiful broom. I'm glad it went to you.'

'Thanks,' said Harry.

'Sorry about your Nimbus. That tree's a menace.' Cedric rubbed the back of his neck, looking embarrassed. 'Listen, while I'm here. I wanted to say it to you, not just to Wood. I tried to get the Hufflepuff match replayed, but he wouldn't have it. Fair enough, really. I caught it fair. I just didn't know you'd fallen.' He pulled a face. 'Honestly, I'd have felt better if he'd let me give it back.'

Harry was so taken aback that it took him a moment to find his voice.

'It's all right,' he managed.

'Good luck today. Not too much of it.' Cedric nodded round at the rest of the team. 'Wood.'

'Diggory,' said Wood stiffly, like a man exchanging pleasantries at a funeral.

Cedric wandered back up the Hall. Harry watched him go with an odd feeling that he couldn't put a name to until breakfast was nearly over. Last year a man with gleaming teeth and excellent hair had stood at the front of a classroom telling them all how modest he was. Cedric Diggory had just apologised for winning, admired somebody else's broomstick, then walked away, all without seeming to notice he'd done anything special.

That, Harry thought, was what Lockhart had only ever pretended to be.

Next came Percy, towing Penelope Clearwater by the hand.

'Harry, you remember Penelope,' said Percy. 'Penelope wondered whether she might hold the Firebolt.'

'Course,' said Harry.

'Now, now, Penny, no sabotage!' said Percy heartily, as she lifted the Firebolt to weigh it expertly across one finger.

'I'm a Ravenclaw prefect, Percy, not a highwayman.'

'Penelope and I have got a bet on,' Percy told the team, rocking importantly on his heels. 'Ten Galleons on the outcome of the match!'

'He was very confident at the time,' said Penelope.

'I remain confident.'

'He does not,' she said. She put the Firebolt down with a smile of thanks to Harry, then went back to the Ravenclaw table.

Percy bent down as she went.

'Harry, make sure you win, lad,' he said, in an urgent whisper that carried to the end of the bench. 'I haven't got ten Galleons. Yes, I'm coming, Penny!'

He hurried off after her, and somebody handed him a piece of toast.

Harry watched him go. Percy could be pompous, and he could be unbelievably bossy; he had once trailed Harry round the castle at a distance of four paces for an entire week. But he had also spent his whole time at school being the least popular of six brothers, and somehow he had ended up with a clever, pretty girl who teased him about his nerve while letting him carry her bag. Harry discovered, rather to his surprise, that he was glad about it.

'Sure you can manage that broom, Potter?'

It was a cold, drawling voice, pitched to carry. Dracina Malfoy had come over at last for a closer look, with Crabbe and Goyle lumbering along behind her. Pansy and Daphne had stayed behind at the Slytherin table. Harry noticed that, because it meant the only ears close enough to hear belonged to two people who would repeat every word to their fathers.

'Well, if I can hold onto a broom actively trying to chuck me off, a Firebolt should be easy,' said Harry. 'So yeah. I reckon I can do it.'

'Got plenty of special features, hasn't it?' said Malfoy.

Her eyes were glittering with malice. That, at any rate, was what everyone at both tables saw. But Harry had been studying that particular face since September, and he could see what lay underneath as plainly as if she had written it on her forehead. There was a twinkle there, the one he could never stop wanting all to himself. Under the twinkle, she was frightened.

'Shame it doesn't come with a parachute... in case you get too near a dementor.'

Crabbe and Goyle sniggered, right on cue.

Nobody else in the Great Hall caught the worry in her voice, but Harry did. He also knew exactly what she needed from him now, in front of two Slytherins who wrote home every week. So he gave it to her.

'Pity you can't attach an extra arm to yours, Malfoy,' said Harry. 'Then it could catch the Snitch for you.'

The Gryffindor team roared with laughter. Angelina laughed so hard she had to put her head on Katie's shoulder. Malfoy's eyes went to slits. She spun round on her heel and swept off up the Hall, with a good deal more flounce than was strictly necessary. Harry knew perfectly well that it was a performance, put on for the benefit of the grasses in her own house.

Back at the Slytherin table, the whole team clustered round her at once. Harry could guess what they were asking: whether that really was a Firebolt lying on the Gryffindor table.

He was grinning. He couldn't help it.

Then the voice started.

It came the way it always did, from somewhere at the back of his own head. It was nobody's voice, yet all three of theirs at once: Aunt Petunia's shrillness, Uncle Vernon's bullying certainty, Aunt Marge's nasty enjoyment.

All a game to her, that. Multilayered. She lies about the letter, she lies about being sorry, she lies about your friends. Then she comes over, insults you in front of three tables, and you make a joke. You let her. You walk away pleased with yourself.

Think she's laughing with you, do you.

She's laughing at you. She'll go back down there to tell them exactly what you said, exactly how your face went, how much of a fool you are, and they'll all laugh. Like everyone laughs at you. You'll be sat up here grinning like a dog that's been thrown something.

Harry put down his fork.

He had got better at dealing with the voice over the winter. The trick wasn't to argue with it, because arguing only kept it talking. He stared at the tablecloth and waited for it to run out.

A plate of bacon appeared under his nose.

Ron hadn't said a word. He had simply reached across, taken the bacon off the serving dish and put it down in front of Harry, then gone back to his own breakfast as though nothing whatsoever had happened. He'd been doing this sort of thing since the summer before second year. Harry had told him twice that it wasn't necessary, and Ron had taken no notice.

'Eat that,' said Ron, to his own plate. 'You're no good to anyone hungry.'

Four seats along, behind her barricade of books, Hermione had looked up. She had seen Harry's face change. For a moment she half rose from the bench, her hand already reaching out; then she remembered, quite visibly, that she wasn't speaking to either of them. She sat down again, then hoisted Home Life and Social Habits of British Muggles up in front of her face like a shield.

Harry ate the bacon.

At a quarter to eleven, Wood rounded up the team and herded them down to the changing rooms.

*

It was nothing like the day of the Hufflepuff match.

It was a bright, cold morning in early March, with a pale blue sky and only the faintest breath of wind coming off the lake. Nobody would have any trouble seeing today. Harry pulled his scarlet robes over his head with his heart thumping twice as fast as usual. Underneath the nerves, though, something else was bubbling up: a fizzing, impatient happiness that only ever came on a Saturday morning before a match.

Before he did up his robes, he slid his wand out of the pocket of his school things and pushed it down inside his T-shirt, flat against his ribs, where he could get at it quickly. With any luck, it would stay there all match.

He hoped, without quite knowing why, that Professor Lupin would be up there in the stands.

Over their heads, the stands had begun to rumble with stamping feet.

'You know what we've got to do,' said Wood, as they lined up at the mouth of the tunnel. He looked slightly green. 'If we lose this match, we're out of the running. Just. Just fly like you did in practice yesterday, and we'll be okay!'

'Inspirational,' said Fred.

'He's getting better,' said George. 'Last time he just said right and went a funny colour.'

They walked out into a storm of noise.

The Ravenclaws were already waiting in the middle of the pitch, a block of blue against the grass. Their Seeker stood slightly apart from the rest, her broom resting on her shoulder. Cho Chang barely came up to Harry's chin. She had long dark hair tied back for flying, and Harry was irritated to find himself noticing that she was very good-looking indeed. When the teams lined up, she gave him a quick smile across the gap. Harry felt his face go hot, which had nothing to do with the match at all.

'Wood, Davies, shake hands,' said Madam Hooch briskly.

Wood gripped the Ravenclaw captain's hand without once taking his eyes off Cho Chang.

'Mount your brooms. On my whistle. Three. Two. One.'

The whistle shrieked. Fifteen brooms left the ground, and the Firebolt shot up through the middle of them as though it had been fired from a catapult.

Before he knew it Harry was forty feet above everyone else. He levelled off, swept once round the rim of the stadium to get his bearings, then began searching for the Snitch, while Lee Jordan's commentary floated up to him from below.

'They're off, and the big excitement this match is the Firebolt that Harry Potter is flying for Gryffindor. According to Which Broomstick, the Firebolt's going to be the broom of choice for the national teams at this year's World Championship-'

'Jordan, would you mind telling us what's going on in the match?' said Professor McGonagall.

'Right you are, Professor... just giving a bit of background information... the Firebolt, incidentally, has a built-in autobrake and-'

'Jordan!'

'Okay, okay. Gryffindor in possession, Katie Bell of Gryffindor heading for goal...'

Harry swooped down past Katie going the other way, scanning the air for a fleck of gold, then climbed again. It didn't take him long to notice that Cho Chang was glued to his tail. She could certainly fly; whichever way he turned, she was already there, slipping across his path to make him change course.

'Show her your acceleration, Harry!' Fred bellowed, hurtling by with his bat raised.

Harry put his head down. The Firebolt surged round the Ravenclaw goalposts; for a few seconds, Cho fell behind.

Down below, Katie went down the left wing with Angelina inside her, Alicia trailing, ready for the pass. The Ravenclaw Chasers swung across to meet them in a neat diagonal line, and Harry knew at once that this was going to be a hard match. Roger Davies, the Ravenclaw captain, was a big fifth-year built like a rower. He barged Angelina off her line with his shoulder, quite legally, but Katie dummied the pass, cut inside, and flicked the Quaffle through the left-hand hoop before the Ravenclaw Keeper had even moved.

'KATIE BELL SCORES!' yelled Lee Jordan. 'TEN-NIL TO GRYFFINDOR!'

The Gryffindor end leapt to its feet.

Then Ravenclaw showed what they could do.

From the restart they came down the pitch in a formation Harry had never seen a school team use before: all three Chasers flying level, passing the ball sideways in short, quick bursts, so that there was never anybody out in front to mark. Wood came out to cut down the angle. Davies flicked it past his elbow into the top of the hoop, and a groan went up from the Gryffindor stands.

Ten all.

Four minutes later it was twenty-ten to Ravenclaw. Then it was thirty-ten, and the blue end of the stadium was making a great deal of noise.

Harry hung above it all with his eyes watering, watching the match slide away from them, feeling completely helpless. That was the worst thing about being Seeker. Below him his friends were being picked apart by a team that was simply better organised, and there was nothing whatsoever he could do about it except find a tiny golden ball that wasn't there.

Then Alicia got hit.

It was a fair shot from one of the Ravenclaw Beaters, and plain bad luck. The Bludger came up from underneath her broom to strike her across the forearm with a crack that Harry heard from a hundred feet up. She stayed on her broom, but her face went white. She dropped the Quaffle, Ravenclaw scored again while she was still gasping for breath, and Madam Hooch waved play on because there was no foul to stop it for.

Forty-ten.

'And Gryffindor are in trouble here,' said Lee Jordan gloomily. 'Spinnet's taken one on the arm, Ravenclaw are three goals clear, and I'd be amazed if Wood doesn't want a time out-'

Wood did want a time out. His hand shot up, Madam Hooch blew her whistle, and the Gryffindors began drifting towards their own hoops.

Harry got there before any of them.

He dropped out of the sky so fast that two of the Ravenclaw Chasers stopped to stare, pulled out six feet above the grass, then swooped in among his own team. Then he did something he had never once done in three years of playing for Gryffindor. He started giving orders.

'Alicia. Can you grip?'

'Yes.' She had the arm tucked in against her ribs. 'It's the left. I can hold the broom with it. I can't do anything else with it.'

'Then don't come off. We need four of us up there even if one of you's a decoy, they're marking two.' He turned in the air. 'Angelina, they're square. All three of them, every time, they go across. There's nobody in front. So stop chasing the ball and stand where the ball's going to be-'

'That's what I've been-'

'I know. Do it on the outside. They're turning the same way every time, they turn into Davies because he's the big one and they're all watching him.' Harry hadn't planned a word of it. It just came pouring out of him, out of three years of hovering high above matches with nothing to do but watch. 'Fred, George. Stop defending.'

Fred lowered his bat. 'What?'

'You're both sitting on our hoops. They've got no Seeker threat, Cho's marking me, she's not looking for it, she won't go for it before I do.' Harry's voice had risen. 'So go forward. Put both Bludgers on their Chasers' turn, at the top of the arc, where they change hands. Break the square and they've got nothing.'

For half a second Harry heard himself as the others must be hearing him: a thirteen-year-old telling Fred and George Weasley how to do their jobs. He went hot all over.

'Right,' said Wood. 'Do that.'

'Do that?' said George.

'He's right. Do it,' said Wood. The look he gave Harry across the huddle stayed with Harry for a long time afterwards. 'Go on. Go.'

The next eleven minutes were the best Quidditch Harry ever played at Hogwarts, and he spent nearly all of them a hundred feet above the action.

The twins went forward. The first Bludger George sent into the Ravenclaw formation missed Davies by a foot, but it made him flinch just as he passed. The pass went wide. Angelina was waiting on the outside, exactly where Harry had told her to be. She caught it at full speed with nobody in front of her, then slammed it through the hoops.

'JOHNSON SCORES! TWENTY-FORTY!'

Then Fred hit one, the Ravenclaw line broke apart, and Katie was away down the right wing before their Keeper had even turned round.

'THIRTY-FORTY!'

Then Wood made the save of his life, flinging himself full length off the left-hand hoop to tip the Quaffle away with one glove. He threw it out again before he had even got his balance back. Alicia caught it with her good hand, her injured arm doing nothing but cling to her broom, carried it sixty yards, and passed it to Angelina.

Forty all. A roar went up from the Gryffindor end that Harry could feel in his teeth.

'THEY'VE TURNED IT ROUND!' Lee Jordan was shouting. 'I don't know what Potter said down there but whatever it was, somebody write it on a wall! Gryffindor have scored three in four minutes and Ravenclaw can't get out of their own half!'

'Jordan, impartiality-'

'That was impartial, Professor, it's a fact!'

High above it all, watching his team come alive, Harry felt something start to shift inside his chest. He was far too busy to stop to look at what it was.

Then he saw the Snitch.

It was hovering a foot above the grass at the Gryffindor end, right at the bottom of the barrier, where the shadows made it almost impossible to see. Harry pointed the Firebolt straight down and dived.

Cho had been hanging fifteen feet off his shoulder all match, so she came straight after him. She was good, too; she was reading the dive off his shoulders, not his eyes, which was much harder, and she was never more than a length behind. The grass rushed up at them. The noise of the crowd faded, then came roaring back. Harry was ten feet from the Snitch, his hand already leaving the handle...

A Bludger came hurtling at him from his blind side.

He never saw who had hit it. All the warning he got was a low, whining whistle a split second before it reached him. He flung the Firebolt sideways into a roll that no other broom in the stadium could have managed, and the heavy iron ball shot past so close to his ear that it ruffled his hair.

When he came out of the roll, the Snitch was gone.

The Gryffindors groaned. The Ravenclaws, who knew a brilliant shot when they saw one, applauded their Beater loudly.

George Weasley showed what he thought of it by walloping the second Bludger straight at the Beater responsible. It came at him so hard and so fast that the Ravenclaw had to turn a complete somersault in mid-air to keep his teeth.

After that, Gryffindor simply pulled away.

Forty became fifty, then sixty. The beautifully drilled Ravenclaw team began bickering among themselves in mid-air. Katie scored again. Alicia scored with her good hand, off one of Wood's long clearances. By the time the Gryffindor supporters had started singing, the score was eighty-forty, and Lee Jordan had given up all pretence of being impartial.

'Gryffindor lead by forty, eighty points to forty, and look at that Firebolt go! Potter's really putting it through its paces now, see it turn... Chang's Comet is just no match for it, the Firebolt's precision-balance is really noticeable in these long-'

'JORDAN! ARE YOU BEING PAID TO ADVERTISE FIREBOLTS? GET ON WITH THE COMMENTARY!'

It was somewhere around then, as he banked into the wind at the south end of the pitch, that Harry noticed what had happened to him.

The doubt had gone.

He went looking for it, the way you go looking for a sore tooth with your tongue. It had been there that morning. It had been there at practice, in the changing room, in the History of Magic classroom every Thursday evening since January: only a good man can cast it, a boy lying on the floor, a feeble fog with a lamp inside it that refused to move. He could remember it perfectly well. He just couldn't find it any more.

In its place was something much simpler. It had been building up underneath him over the last half hour, one piece at a time: Wood saying do that, Angelina standing where he had told her to stand, a roll at full speed that he hadn't known he could do until he had done it.

I'm good at this. I'm not pretending. I'm actually good at this.

Then Ravenclaw remembered they were a Quidditch team, and things got dangerous again.

They scored three goals in six minutes, all of them Davies, all of them hard, and the Ravenclaw end came roaring back to life. Eighty-seventy. Harry did the maths without wanting to: ten points in it. If Cho caught the Snitch first, Gryffindor would lose by a hundred and forty.

He dropped lower, beneath the other players, searching the pitch. A Ravenclaw Chaser shot across in front of him, and he ducked under her without slowing. Then he spotted it: a pinprick of gold, wings blurring, looping round the base of the Gryffindor goalposts.

Harry accelerated.

Cho came at him from his blind side. She'd been hovering fifteen feet away all match, and now she swung herself across his path.

She did it perfectly. She didn't touch him at all; she simply put herself exactly where he was about to be, which was perfectly legal, if very nearly impossible, so that Harry had to wrench the Firebolt upwards to avoid ploughing straight into her.

'HARRY, THIS IS NO TIME TO BE A GENTLEMAN!' Wood bellowed from the goals. 'KNOCK HER OFF HER BROOM IF YOU HAVE TO!'

Harry righted himself to find Cho twelve feet away.

She was grinning at him.

The Snitch had disappeared again.

'Nice one,' Harry called, before he could stop himself.

'Thank you,' she called back.

Harry took the Firebolt up until he was twenty feet above the whole game, then hung there, thinking. A moment later Cho drifted up to join him. She stopped at exactly the same height, forty feet away, and simply waited.

She hadn't been looking for the Snitch for ages, Harry realised. She had worked out, coolly and quite correctly, that Ravenclaw's best chance of winning was for her to stick to Harry like glue, leaving her Chasers to do the rest.

All right, Harry thought. If you want to follow me, you can follow me.

He pointed the Firebolt at the ground and dived.

He did it properly. He threw everything he had into it, lying flat along the handle with his chin almost touching the wood, plunging through the middle of the stadium at an angle that brought the whole Gryffindor end to its feet, screaming. He hurtled down past the hoops towards the turf, staring at an empty patch of grass as though his life depended on it.

Cho came after him, of course. She was twenty feet behind, closing fast.

Forty feet from the ground, Harry pulled up hard.

The Firebolt came out of it as no other broom could have done. Harry felt the strain shudder up through the handle, up his arms, into his shoulders, then the ground was falling away beneath him. He was climbing again, so fast that the blood drained out of his head.

Cho shot past underneath him, much too fast, wrestling with her Comet. To her enormous credit, she didn't hit the ground. But by the time Harry levelled out, she was eighty feet below the match, struggling slowly back up.

And there, sparkling in the pale sunshine high over the Ravenclaw goalposts, was the Snitch.

Harry aimed the Firebolt straight at it.

Nothing in the stadium could catch him now. He could feel the speed of the broom humming up through his hands. Fifty yards. Forty. The gold was growing larger; he could see the blur of its wings. Far below him, Lee Jordan had stopped making sense. Thirty yards, twenty...

'Oh!' screamed Cho, from somewhere below him. She was pointing.

Harry looked down.

Three dementors were standing on the grass at the edge of the pitch, directly beneath him, their hooded heads tipped back towards him.

He didn't stop to think.

There was no cold, though he only noticed that afterwards. There was no fog, no sliding feeling, no woman's voice. There was only a boy who had spent the last hour finding out what he could do, who had a wand tucked against his ribs, and whose hand was already reaching for it.

He pulled it out, pointed it down past his own feet at the figures on the grass, and roared.

'EXPECTO PATRONUM!'

Something shot from the tip of his wand.

It wasn't fog. It wasn't a lamp wrapped in cloud. It was huge, shining, solid silver-white, and it tore out of him in one piece, streaking straight downwards with a ringing sound like a struck bell. Harry didn't stay to watch it land. He'd been halfway through something when he started, and he meant to finish it.

He turned his face back to the Snitch. His head was perfectly clear. It was eight feet away, still climbing.

He jammed the wand back against the handle under his left hand, stretched out his right, and closed his fingers round the frantic little ball.

Madam Hooch's whistle blew. Two hundred and thirty to seventy.

Harry swung round in mid-air, high above the Ravenclaw end, with the Snitch fluttering in his fist and the entire stadium on its feet beneath him. The rest of his team came tearing towards him from all over the pitch.

They hit him all at once. The Firebolt sank a yard under their weight. So many people were hugging Harry so hard that for one alarming moment he thought he was going to be knocked off his broom. Fred had him round the neck, yelling something nobody would ever be able to make out.

'THAT'S MY BOY!' Wood kept yelling, into Harry's ear, from somewhere in the middle of it. 'THAT'S MY BOY!'

Angelina kissed him on the cheek. Katie kissed him so enthusiastically on the cheek that his glasses went askew. Alicia flung her good arm round his neck, said something he couldn't hear, then set off down the pitch towards the castle, cradling the other one.

They came back down to earth in one great scarlet tangle, more or less by accident, with Harry's feet never quite touching his broom. The roar from the Gryffindor stands was the loudest thing he had ever heard.

*

Harry's feet had barely touched the grass when a crowd of Gryffindors came stampeding on to the pitch, with Ron at the front of it.

'YES!' Ron bellowed, seizing Harry's arm to hoist it into the air like a boxing referee. 'YES! YES!'

'Well done, Harry!' said Percy, arriving pink and beaming. 'Ten Galleons to me! Must find Penelope, excuse me-'

'Good for you, Harry!' roared Seamus Finnigan.

'Ruddy brilliant!' Hagrid's voice boomed from somewhere above everybody's heads.

'That was quite some Patronus,' said a quiet voice at Harry's elbow.

Harry turned to find Professor Lupin standing just behind him. He looked pleased, yet at the same time badly shaken.

'The dementors didn't affect me at all!' said Harry. 'I didn't feel a thing!'

'That would be because they... er... weren't dementors,' said Professor Lupin. 'Come and see.'

He steered Harry through the jostling crowd towards the far corner of the pitch, where the barrier ran down to the touchline.

'You gave Miss Malfoy quite a fright,' said Lupin.

Harry stared.

Writhing about on the grass was a great black heap of cloth with arms and legs sticking out of it at odd angles. Four people were trying to fight their way out of a set of hooded robes that had been rigged up to look like three tall figures: Crabbe, Goyle, Marcus Flint, and, on the very top, with grass in her hair, Dracina Malfoy. She had plainly been perched on Goyle's shoulders.

Harry looked at them for a long moment.

What he felt wasn't what he had expected. First came a hot flash of fury. Then, underneath it, a sick sort of disappointment. But the feeling that rose up through both of them, and stayed, was hurt. It settled low in his chest like a cold stone.

He knew the difference, that was the trouble. He had spent six months learning it. Telling him at breakfast that his broom needed a parachute had been an act, put on for Crabbe, for Goyle, for Flint, for every Slytherin who wrote home to Daddy. Harry had played his part in it, and he had enjoyed it.

But this was different. Nobody had been watching this. She had smuggled three other people into stolen robes, crept under the barrier at the far end of the pitch, and waited for the exact moment when Harry was a hundred feet up with one hand stretched out for the Snitch. If his Patronus had failed, as it had failed every single Thursday since January, he would have fallen off his broom in front of the whole school for the second time that season. Gryffindor would have lost the Cup.

It wasn't a performance. It was sabotage, pure and simple.

Friends didn't sabotage your Quidditch matches. Enemies did.

Enemies who smiled at you across the Entrance Hall. Enemies who sent you dragon-hide gloves and lent you their broomsticks. Enemies who sat beside you in a dungeon in September with ink on the wrong hand, murmuring into their cauldron, in a small, stiff voice that sounded as though it cost them something, that they had decided not to send the letter after all. Enemies who lied about the letter to get close to you, so that they could make a fool of you later.

He should have known better than to trust a Slytherin. He should have known better than to trust Malfoy.

'An unworthy trick!' Professor McGonagall was shouting.

She was standing over the struggling heap with her hat knocked crooked, and Harry had never seen her look so angry, not once in three years.

'A low and cowardly attempt to sabotage the Gryffindor Seeker! Detention for all of you, and fifty points from Slytherin! I shall be speaking to Professor Dumbledore about this, make no mistake! Ah, here he comes now!'

Nothing could have made Gryffindor's day more perfect.

Professor Dumbledore came strolling across the grass with his hands clasped behind his back, in no hurry at all. He didn't shout. He simply gazed down at the four of them in their heap of stolen robes for a long moment, with an air of mild yet genuine interest, rather as though somebody had shown him an unusual kind of beetle.

'Dear me,' he said. 'And on such a fine afternoon.'

Harry saw Dumbledore look from Malfoy to Harry. And the look he gave Harry was strange. Harry could swear that Dumbledore almost looked sorry. Sorry for him? No, that couldn't be it.

Ron had fought his way to Harry's side. He took one look at the Slytherins, then collapsed against Harry, helpless with laughter. Malfoy was trying to get out of her robe, only getting more tangled up; she had Crabbe by the sleeve, screaming at him. Somewhere underneath them both, Goyle had got his head stuck, and was turning round in slow circles on the grass with his arms stretched out in front of him.

Then she wrenched herself free, scrambled to her feet, shoved her hair out of her eyes, and looked straight across the twenty feet of grass between them at Harry.

Her face changed.

There was no act in it at all. Four or five different things chased one another across it in a single second, and the one it settled on was guilt: plain, naked, undisguised. On that proud, pointed face it was almost shocking. She took half a step towards him, her mouth already opening.

Harry let her see his face.

He let her see all of it: the fury, the hurt, everything. He held her eyes just long enough to be sure she had understood. Then, slowly, deliberately, he turned his back on her, and he didn't look round again.

Behind him, he heard her stop. When Ron glanced back a moment later, his laughter faltered.

'Blimey,' he muttered. 'She looks like somebody's kicked her.'

Harry didn't reply.

'Come on, Harry!' said George, shouldering his way through. 'Party! Gryffindor common room, now!'

'Right,' said Harry.

*

After that, he put his face away. He managed it beautifully, all the way up the lawn and all through the afternoon. Nobody noticed a thing. He was fairly sure nobody noticed, which meant he was still every bit as good at it as he'd been at ten years old. There was a small, miserable sort of satisfaction in that.

It was an old feeling, after all. It was the oldest one he had.

He walked up to the castle in the middle of a cheering crowd, carrying the best broom in the country, having just played the match of his life. Underneath it all, the voice in his head had started a conversation he'd been having with himself since he was about five.

You knew.

That was always the first thing it said. You knew what she was. You let yourself forget, and look what happened.

The Dursleys had taught him this lesson, carefully, from the time he could walk, and they'd been very thorough about it.

He remembered his sixth birthday, when Aunt Petunia had come to the cupboard door to tell him, quite kindly, that there was a parcel for him on the kitchen table. He had gone in with his heart fluttering like a bird. It had been a pair of Uncle Vernon's old socks, wrapped in newspaper, and all three of them had stood watching his face while he unwrapped it. That had been the whole point. The socks hadn't mattered. The paper hadn't mattered. What they had wanted to see was his face when it fell.

He remembered Dudley holding a sweet out at arm's length, just long enough for Harry to reach for it, then snatching it back.

He remembered Dudley's fist breaking his glasses in the playground, and the teacher who had let Dudley off, because boys would be boys. He remembered how his shoulders still crept up round his ears whenever he heard heavy footsteps in a corridor, and how he had learnt, before he could even read, to keep very still in the dark of the cupboard until Uncle Vernon had gone past.

He remembered the dinner lady at St Grogory's who had slipped him an extra bread roll every day for a fortnight, until Aunt Petunia came in to complain about the jumper. After that, the dinner lady never looked at him again. That had hurt more than all the people who had never been kind to him in the first place.

That was the lesson, drummed into him over and over by experts: kindness is the first half of something. Nobody was nice to you for nothing. If somebody was nice to you, it meant they were stringing you along, and the only question was how long they would let you dangle before they let go. And the one thing you must never, ever do, the stupidest thing of all, the thing that always cost you, was hope.

And he had hoped. That was what he couldn't forgive, trudging up the lawn. Not her. Himself.

He had sat on the end of her hospital bed in June and watched her laugh, really laugh. He had held her in Hagrid's paddock with her blood all over his hands. He had read eleven words about a foot-rest nine times over in the Owlery. He had stood in the Entrance Hall in February, about to ask her about the letter, and had taken her broomstick instead, because some stupid part of him had decided the ground under his feet was solid, that if he just kept standing on it, it would hold.

They let you have it for a bit, said the voice, with Uncle Vernon's certainty and Aunt Petunia's shrillness. That's how it works. They let you have it, so it hurts more when they take it away.

Harry climbed the marble staircase with his hand clenched round the Firebolt, his face doing what his face had done since he was about five years old, which was absolutely nothing at all.

He had got as far as the first-floor corridor when somebody said his name.

'Harry.'

Professor Lupin was coming up the stairs behind him, his hands deep in the pockets of his shabby robes.

'I shan't keep you from your own party,' he said. 'I only wanted a word before the whole of Gryffindor gets hold of you. Walk with me as far as my office.'

They set off along the corridor together. Somewhere above them the party had already begun; they could hear it through two floors of solid stone. Lupin said nothing until they had turned the corner.

'When you cast that charm this afternoon,' he said, 'how far through it did you get before you knew it had worked?'

Harry thought about it.

'I didn't,' he said. 'I just said it.'

'Yes. That is what I thought, from where I was standing.' Lupin walked on a few paces. 'You've been coming to that classroom every Thursday since January to produce a very respectable shield, and every Thursday I have watched you try to push it forward by main force, as though you were leaning on a door. Today you did not push it anywhere. You simply put it where it needed to be, then went back to what you were doing.'

'I wasn't scared,' said Harry. 'They weren't real, so I wasn't scared, so it worked.'

'That's one reading.' Lupin stopped at the foot of the next staircase. 'I would offer you another, if I may. You spent an hour this afternoon finding out what you are actually able to do. Then somebody asked you for a hard thing, and you did not stop first to ask yourself whether you were the sort of person who could. That is not the absence of fear, Harry. That is a different thing altogether, and it is a great deal more useful, because the absence of fear is not available to anybody.'

Harry looked down at his boots.

'What did it look like?' he asked.

The pause that followed went on for just a little too long.

'Bright,' said Lupin.

'That's not an answer.'

'No,' agreed Lupin, 'it is not.' He was smiling, but he had gone rather pale. 'I would rather you saw it for yourself than took my word for its shape. Ask me again at the end of term.'

They had reached the corridor outside his office. Lupin took out his key, but he didn't put it in the lock.

'Harry.'

'Sir?'

'There is a thing you do with your face,' said Lupin, 'and you did it on the lawn this afternoon, about four seconds after you saw who was under those hoods.'

Harry felt the back of his neck go cold.

'I don't know what you mean.'

'I expect that is true, in a way. It is not something a person decides.' Lupin turned the key over in his fingers. 'I will not ask you what it was about, because you would tell me it was nothing, then we should both have to live with that. I shall say one thing instead, and then you can go to your party.'

He unlocked the door. Firelight spilled out across the flagstones.

'Whoever taught you that trick,' said Professor Lupin, 'taught you very well. It will be with you for the rest of your life, and it is not your fault that you have it. But I have had a certain amount of practice at the same trick myself, so you may as well know that it doesn't work on anybody who has that practice.'

Harry stood there with the Firebolt on his shoulder, saying nothing whatsoever.

'Go on, then. Thirteen is extremely young for what you did out there today. James would be proud of you.'

The door closed.

Harry took the last two floors at a jog, because if he walked he would have to think. By the time he reached Sir Cadogan, he had pushed the whole conversation to the back of his mind along with everything else. The only part that had stuck was that one word: bright.

The party didn't stop. It roared on through the afternoon, through dinner, which nobody bothered going down for, and on into the night.

Anyone would have thought they had already won the Cup, and in a way they very nearly had. Lee Jordan stood on a table to do the last ten minutes of commentary all over again, twice. Wood went round the room telling anybody who would stand still what Harry had said in the huddle, improving it each time, until by nine o'clock Harry had apparently given a four-minute speech in mid-air under heavy fire. Fred and George slipped out of the portrait hole after lunch, not coming back until teatime. When they did, they were staggering under crates of butterbeer and pumpkin fizz, their pockets bulging with bags of Honeydukes sweets.

Alicia came back from the hospital wing at about six with her forearm strapped up and strict orders not to fly for a week. Fred and George carried her shoulder-high to the fire, having apparently decided that this was the proper way to treat the wounded.

'How did you do that?' shrieked Angelina, ducking as George began pelting the crowd with Peppermint Toads.

'With a little help from Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs,' Fred murmured, leaning close to Harry.

Wood had found a slate from somewhere. He propped it on the mantelpiece, seized a stub of chalk, and began walking the whole room through the sums.

'Right. Attention. ATTENTION.' He rapped the slate. 'Slytherin are top. We are second, as of about half past twelve this afternoon, which is somewhere we haven't been all season.'

'Hooray,' said George.

'Be quiet, this is important. In the final we play Slytherin.' He scrawled it up. 'If we beat them by fewer than two hundred points, the Cup goes down to the dungeons, where it will be polished every morning by Marcus Flint. If we beat them by more than two hundred points-'

'We win it,' said Katie.

'We win it,' said Wood, 'for the first time in seven years.'

'Hooray,' said George again.

'Be quiet.' Wood put down the chalk, then gazed at the slate for slightly too long. 'Two hundred points. Against that team. With that broom.'

'Oliver,' said Angelina gently, 'you're crying on the mantelpiece.'

'I am not.'

'You are a bit.'

'It's the smoke,' said Wood, and went off to find another butterbeer.

Somebody had started a song in the corner that had eleven verses, nine of them about Oliver Wood. Neville, who had drunk one and a half butterbeers, had become the most confident person in Gryffindor Tower as a result. He was giving the room his impression of Marcus Flint trying to get out of a hooded robe, and to everybody's astonishment it was extremely good.

Harry found Ginny standing at the end of the Firebolt, which had been laid across two chairs with a queue of admirers in front of it.

'Go on,' he said.

'I wasn't going to-'

'Everyone else has. Fred sat on it.'

Ginny touched the handle with one finger, very quickly, then wrapped both hands round it. Harry recognised the look on her face at once. He had worn exactly the same one himself, pressed against a shop window in Diagon Alley.

'It's lighter than it looks,' she said.

'I know.'

'When Charlie writes, I'm going to tell him I've held one.' She laid it down again with enormous care. 'Harry. You didn't fall off.'

'No.'

'I watched the whole thing through my fingers.' She turned scarlet to the tips of her ears. 'Anyway. Well played.'

She hurried off to find Fred, who was trying to feed a Peppermint Toad to the portrait of a sleeping knight.

Harry took the Firebolt up to the dormitory before the party could get any wilder, laid it carefully along the top of his trunk, then came back down. He had no intention of losing sight of it twice in one term.

It was about an hour later that Ron came and perched on the arm of Harry's chair. He had two bottles of butterbeer. He handed one to Harry, then didn't say anything at all for a while.

'You've gone off somewhere again,' he said eventually.

'I'm all right.'

'I know.' Ron took a swig of butterbeer. 'That's why I'm not asking.'

Harry looked at him.

'When Scabbers went,' said Ron, to the fire, 'you didn't go on at me about it. You didn't tell me it was only a rat. You've just been there, these last couple of days, being in the same room.' He shrugged one shoulder. 'So I'm sat here.'

Harry couldn't think of anything to say to that which wouldn't spoil it, so he drank his butterbeer instead. The two of them sat with their feet up on the same fender while Fred and George set fire to something small in the corner. On top of a table, Lee Jordan was doing the last ten minutes of commentary for the third time.

Only one person in the room wasn't joining in.

Hermione had a whole corner to herself by the window, three tables pushed together, with a book the size of a paving slab propped open in front of her: Home Life and Social Habits of British Muggles. She'd been on the same page for at least half an hour.

Harry slipped away from the table where the twins had started juggling bottles, then went over to her. Perhaps, he thought, they could cheer each other up.

'Did you even come to the match?' he asked.

'Of course I did,' said Hermione, her voice oddly high, her eyes still fixed on the page. 'And I'm very glad we won. I think you did really well, but I need to read this by Monday.'

Harry sat down on the arm of the chair opposite.

He hadn't planned to say it. He had come over meaning to talk her into a sandwich, but what came out instead was the thing he'd been carrying up the lawn all afternoon.

'Hermione. You were right about Malfoy.'

Hermione's head jerked up.

'I was about a hundred feet up,' said Harry. 'I had one hand on the Snitch. If that charm hadn't worked I'd have come off, and it's never worked, not once, not properly, she doesn't know that but I do.' He turned a Peppermint Toad over and over in his fingers without looking at it. 'In the Three Broomsticks you said she'd love me the way she'd love a broom she'd set her heart on. That it was real, and that it wasn't the kind that's about me. I thought you were being unfair.' He put the sweet down. 'You weren't being unfair. You were right.'

Hermione closed the book over her finger.

Something moved behind Hermione's face, but she didn't let it out. Deep down, there was a small part of Hermione that she'd been quietly feeding all term, a part she had privately given a name to and didn't much like. It sat up at this, warm and pleased. Here he was at last, bringing her the very thing she'd been shouting at him about since September. She took that part firmly by the scruff of the neck and put it away, which she had become much better at doing. When she spoke, there was no trace of it in her voice.

'Oh, Harry,' she said. 'I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. I hoped I was wrong.'

'Did you?'

'...Mostly,' said Hermione. Harry laughed, which surprised them both.

'Come on, Hermione, come and have some food,' he said, glancing over at Ron, who was sitting by the fire with Dean. Harry wondered whether this might be the night Ron finally decided to make peace.

'I can't, Harry. I've still got four hundred and twenty-two pages to read!' said Hermione, her voice wobbling dangerously. 'Anyway...'

She glanced across at Ron as well.

'He doesn't want me to join in.'

'Crookshanks might've eaten Scabbers, Hermione. Please be a little sympathetic.'

At that precise moment, with the timing of a boy who has been handed a gift from heaven, Ron said loudly, across the whole common room:

'If Scabbers hadn't just been eaten, he could have had some of those Fudge Flies. He used to really like them-'

Hermione burst into tears.

Before Harry could say a word, she had snatched up the enormous book. She fled, sobbing, past the fire, past Ron, who looked up a second too late, and up the girls' staircase with her free hand pressed over her face.

Harry stayed where he was.

He had only been sticking up for his best friend. That was all. Ron had lost a rat he had only been given because the family couldn't afford an owl, and he had loved it anyway. Hermione wouldn't say a single word that sounded like sorry. Both of those things were true at the same time, and Harry was heartily sick of being stuck in the middle of them. He hadn't wanted to make her cry.

He went over to the fire.

'Maybe we should just drop it,' he said.

'No,' said Ron flatly.

'Ron-'

'If she just acted like she was sorry.' Ron was staring into the flames. 'That's all, Harry. If she came over here and said I'm sorry, Ron, I should have kept him in at night, I'd have said forget it by Tuesday, you know I would. But she'll never admit she's wrong, Hermione. She's still acting like Scabbers has gone on holiday or something.'

Harry studied the side of Ron's face for a while, then decided to leave it.

At one o'clock in the morning the portrait hole swung open, and there stood Professor McGonagall in a tartan dressing gown, with her hair in a net. She didn't say a word. She didn't need to. Within two minutes the entire room had emptied itself up the two staircases.

Harry and Ron climbed to their dormitory still arguing cheerfully about the Bludger that had nearly taken Harry's ear off, about whether a Comet Two Sixty could ever have pulled out of that last dive. Harry got into bed, drew his curtains against the moonlight, then fell asleep before his head had properly settled on the pillow.

And then he dreamt.

He was in a forest, at night. The Firebolt was over his shoulder. Somewhere ahead, a silver-white shape was moving between the trees, and every time he came close to seeing it properly, it slipped away behind another trunk.

Dracina was there.

She was walking beside him in a silver dress, which was ridiculous in a forest in the middle of the night, and she looked utterly enchanting. She wasn't saying anything cruel at all. She beckoned him on. She was telling him he was nearly there, that nobody else could have spotted it, that nobody else would have followed it so far. That it was their little secret. Every word sank into Harry like warm water. The letter, the hooded robes, the whole wretched afternoon slid clean out of his head, and he didn't even notice them go.

All he wanted was to catch the silver thing, with her beside him, saying those things.

It drew further away. He hurried; it hurried too. Soon he was running, and somewhere in the dark ahead he could hear hoofbeats, quickening. He was sprinting now, branches whipping at his face, the drumming of hooves growing ever louder, until he swerved round the trunk of an enormous tree into a clearing and...

'AAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHH! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!'

Thump

'Agh, you bloody-'

Footsteps hurrying away.

Harry's eyes flew open.

It was pitch dark, and for a moment he couldn't work out which way up he was. There was a thump somewhere in the room, the scuffle of feet, then Seamus Finnigan's voice from the far side of the dormitory: 'What's going on?' Harry thought he heard the door bang shut. He scrabbled at his bed curtains until he found the gap, wrenched them apart, and at that moment Dean Thomas's lamp flared into life.

Ron was sitting bolt upright in bed. One side of his hangings had been ripped clean away. His face was as white as his sheets.

'Black! Sirius Black! With a knife!'

'What?'

'Here! Just now! Slashed the curtains! Woke me up! I was so startled I twatted him right in the face! He ran off!'

'Yeah, right,' said Dean Thomas.

'Oh, come off it, you should know all about violence considering you... like football and all that.'

Dean, who had only recently forgiven Ron for what he had said about 'footballers' back in their first year, sat up very straight, looking dangerous. The whole argument would have flared up again then and there if Harry hadn't already been out of bed.

He was staring at Ron's curtains.

They hadn't just fallen down. They'd been slashed: one long, ragged cut running from the rail to the floor, straight through the heavy fabric, as though somebody had dragged something very sharp down them with tremendous force.

'Black really was here?' said Harry, half amazed, half afraid.

'Yeah,' said Ron.

'And you really chinned him right in the face?'

'Yeah I did.' Ron sat up a little straighter, looking rather proud of himself, and some of the colour came back into his cheeks. 'My dad always said you shouldn't sneak up on a man whilst he's asleep. And he'd know after all the bollocks old Mundungus Fletcher used to pull on him when he was younger.'

'Ron-' Harry began, meaning to tell him it was the best thing he had ever heard, but he never got the chance.

'Who shouted?'

'What're you doing?'

Footsteps were thundering on both staircases. Harry and Ron hurried down to the common room. The fire had sunk to a few red embers. Empty bottles and sweet wrappers lay everywhere. There was nobody there at all.

'Are you sure you weren't dreaming, Ron?'

'I'm telling you, I saw him! I decked him right in his dirty bloody face!'

'What's all the noise?'

'Professor McGonagall told us to go to bed!'

Sleepy faces were peering down from both staircases. Lavender and Parvati appeared in matching pink nightdresses; Neville came down clutching his pillow.

'Excellent, are we carrying on?' said Fred Weasley brightly.

'Everyone back upstairs!' said Percy, who had somehow found time to put his Head Boy badge on over his pyjamas.

'Perce. Sirius Black!' said Ron faintly. 'In our dormitory! With a knife! Woke me up!'

Nobody in the room moved.

'Nonsense!' said Percy, though he had gone rather pale. 'You had too much to eat, Ron. Had a nightmare-'

'I'm telling you, look at my bloody curtains!'

'Now, really, enough's enough!'

Professor McGonagall had returned. She swept through the portrait hole, the tartan dressing gown flapping round her ankles, to glare at every single one of them in turn.

'I am delighted that Gryffindor won the match, but this is getting ridiculous! Percy, I expected better of you!'

'I certainly didn't authorise this, Professor!' said Percy, swelling indignantly. 'I was just telling them all to get back to bed! My brother Ron here had a nightmare-'

'IT WASN'T A NIGHTMARE!' Ron yelled. 'PROFESSOR, I WOKE UP, AND SIRIUS BLACK WAS STANDING OVER ME, HOLDING A KNIFE!'

Professor McGonagall looked at him over the top of her spectacles for a long moment.

'Don't be ridiculous, Weasley. How could he possibly have got through the portrait hole?'

'Ask him!' Ron jabbed a trembling finger at the back of the portrait. 'Ask him if he saw-'

With one last suspicious look at Ron, Professor McGonagall climbed back out through the portrait hole. Every single person in the common room leant towards the gap, listening.

'Sir Cadogan, did you just let a man enter Gryffindor Tower?'

'Certainly, good lady!' cried Sir Cadogan.

Nobody, on either side of the portrait, said anything at all.

'You. You did?' said Professor McGonagall. 'But. But the password!'

'He had them!' said Sir Cadogan proudly. 'Had the whole week's, my lady! Read 'em off a little piece of paper!'

When Professor McGonagall came back through the portrait hole, every scrap of colour had drained out of her face.

'Which person,' she said, in a voice that wasn't steady, 'which abysmally foolish person wrote down this week's passwords and left them lying around?'

Nobody moved. Nobody breathed.

Then, from somewhere near the back, came a very small noise, like a mouse that has been trodden on.

Every head turned. Neville Longbottom was standing at the foot of the staircase in his fluffy slippers, still clutching his pillow, shaking from head to foot. Very slowly, he put up his hand.

'Neville,' said Harry, with a mixture of incredulity and long-suffering annoyance, 'this is the third bloody time...'