Seventy Times Seven

‘He-he sent me this,’ said Hermione, and she held it out to them.

Harry took it. His hands were shaking so much that he could hardly keep it still. This was Malfoy’s doing. Malfoy had been told, in words of one syllable, not to insult a hippogriff to its face. She had marched straight up to one and done it anyway. Then she had sat next to him in Potions with her arm in a black silk sling, telling him she had dropped the whole business and wasn’t going to send a thing. She had been lying through her teeth. She had probably gone straight back down to the Slytherin common room afterwards to have a good laugh about it with Pansy Parkinson, Crabbe, Goyle and the rest of that spiteful crowd. The thought of them all laughing at him made his hands shake worse than ever.

The letter was damp. Enormous tears had splashed on to it, so that in places the ink had run into blue blots and the words had to be guessed at.

Dear Hermione,

We lost. I’m allowed to bring him back to Hogwarts. Execution date to be fixed.

Beaky has enjoyed London.

I won’t forget all the help you gave us.

Hagrid

‘They can’t do this,’ said Harry. ‘They can’t. Buckbeak isn’t dangerous. This is all Malfoy’s fault.’

His voice had gone odd. It was much too quiet, for one thing. It was the voice he had used in the cupboard under the stairs, years ago, when there was nobody to hear him except the spiders. Ron, who was standing nearest, gave him a sidelong look. Then he looked again, harder. Harry’s face had the look of one of Fred and George’s fireworks a second before it went off.

‘Malfoy’s dad frightened the Committee into it,’ said Hermione, wiping her eyes. ‘You know what he’s like. They’re a bunch of doddery old fools, and they were scared. There’ll be an appeal, though, there always is. Only I can’t see any hope... Nothing will have changed.’

Ron looked from one of them to the other. Hermione was crying. Harry wasn’t crying at all; he was shaking with rage, which was worse.

For a moment, Ron shut his eyes.

Ron didn’t usually do things like that. As a rule he said whatever came into his head the moment it arrived, as any of his five older brothers would have told you. But he stood there in the corridor, with a security troll grunting somewhere round the corner, and thought about Scabbers: the bloodstained sheet, the ginger hairs, the cat. He remembered Hermione saying cats chase rats, Ronald in that voice, as if he were a silly child. She still hadn’t said sorry. She might never say it. That was Hermione all over.

And there was Harry’s face. Ron had seen it go like that once before, in the summer before second year, when he had turned up at Privet Drive in a flying car to find bars on Harry’s bedroom window. He knew exactly where Harry had learnt to look like that, and he spared the Dursleys one short, savage thought. Then he opened his eyes.

Somebody had to be the bigger man, and there didn’t seem to be anybody else about. He would do it for both their sakes. Three of them was the right number, and two wasn’t. Besides, if somebody didn’t calm things down in the next ten seconds, Harry was going to go looking for Malfoy. Ron didn’t like to think what would happen when he found her.

‘Yeah, it will,’ said Ron fiercely. ‘You won’t have to do all the work alone this time, Hermione. I’ll help.’

‘Oh, Ron!’

Hermione threw her arms round Ron’s neck and burst into floods of tears. Ron, who looked as though he were being strangled by a large octopus, patted her hair with the very tips of his fingers. As the ghost of a smile came up on his face.

At last she let go of him, mopping her face on her sleeve.

‘Ron, I’m really, really sorry about Scabbers...’ she sobbed.

Ron blinked at her. He had been ready for a great many things, but he hadn’t been ready for that. Hermione Granger was saying sorry, without anybody making her, about something she had sworn for over a week wasn’t her fault! What he had just done had felt rather like swallowing a Bludger. Now, quite suddenly, it sat a good deal more comfortably in his stomach.

‘Oh well, he was old,’ said Ron, plainly glad to have his neck back. ‘And he was a bit useless. You never know, Mum and Dad might get me an owl now.’

Harry had watched the whole thing.

At first he had been too angry to take much of it in. Then, as he watched Ron, his temper had begun to cool. Ron had been right about Scabbers. He had had every reason in the world to stay angry, and he had simply stopped.

‘That,’ said Harry, and found that his voice had gone back to its proper size, ‘was decent of you, Ron.’

Ron went brick red to the tips of his ears. ‘Shut up, mate.’

‘No, I mean it.’ Harry handed Hermione back her letter. ‘No row’s worth losing her over. You were right to say it.’

‘I said shut up,’ said Ron, redder still, though he looked pleased.

They walked back to the Fat Lady together, all three of them, for the first time in over a week. Hermione carried the letter pressed to her chest as though it were Buckbeak himself. Ron talked loudly about appeals all the way. He couldn’t see that they would be very difficult. Percy would know which books to read, he said, and would probably die of happiness if anybody asked him. Harry let it wash over him.

Seventy times seven, Lupin had said. I’ve always understood that the idea was to lose count.

It was all very well for Ron. Ron had lost a rat. Harry had been lied to, to his face, by a girl who had slept next to him in the Great Hall and given him violets. When he thought about it, he was still furious. But another thought kept nagging at him all the way up the stairs, like a stone in his shoe: Ron had been in the right too, and he had let it go.

Harry didn’t know what to make of that. He went to bed, lay awake for a long time and still didn’t know.

*

He had one bit of good luck, at least.

At break on Monday morning, while Ron hung about at the end of the corridor pretending to read a notice about Gobstones, Harry tapped the one-eyed witch’s hump, muttered the password and slid down into the dark. His bag was lying exactly where he had dropped it at the bottom of the chute, with the Invisibility Cloak still stuffed inside. Nobody had found it. He climbed out again with his heart hammering, straightened his robes and went off to Herbology with a priceless family heirloom tucked in among his gardening gloves, trying to look as though he had never done anything wrong in his life.

It was about the only thing that did go right.

Since Black had broken into Gryffindor Tower for the second time, the castle had been locked up so tightly that nobody could slip down to Hagrid’s after dark. They didn’t get a chance to talk to him until Care of Magical Creatures on Wednesday morning. He seemed stunned by the verdict.

‘S’all my fault. Got all tongue-tied. They was all sittin’ there in black robes an’ I kep’ droppin’ me notes and forgettin’ all them dates yeh looked up fer me, Hermione. An’ then Lucius Malfoy stood up an’ said his bit, and the Committee jus’ did exac’ly what he told ’em...’

‘There’s still the appeal!’ said Ron fiercely. ‘Don’t give up yet, we’re working on it!’

Buckbeak was back in his old paddock, tethered at the far end by a long chain to a stake beside the pumpkin patch. He was lying in the thin spring sunshine with his wings folded, crunching something in his beak with great enjoyment, and looked as though he had found London very interesting. Harry couldn’t look at him for long.

He kept looking at Malfoy instead.

She had come down to the lesson on her own. There was no Crabbe at her elbow and no Goyle. Pansy was standing at the other end of the class with Daphne Greengrass, staring at her shoes. Malfoy stood at the back by the paddock fence, as far from Buckbeak as the fence would let her, holding her right arm a little in to her side, as she had in the autumn when it was in a sling. She paid no attention to Hagrid. Her eyes went from the stake to the chain, then to the long slope of grass that ran down from the paddock to the dark edge of the Forest. Once Harry saw her lips moving, as though she were counting under her breath.

Gloating, thought Harry, with a hard little twist in his stomach. She’s come to look at what she’s won.

When the lesson ended she hung back by the gate while the rest of the class drifted away, and asked Hagrid something in a low voice. Harry was too far away to hear the question, but he heard Hagrid’s gruff answer.

‘Dead ferrets, mostly. Why d’yeh want ter know?’

Malfoy didn’t tell him why. She turned on her heel and walked off up the lawn by herself, with her nose in the air.

*

They trudged up the lawn towards the castle among the rest of the class. Malfoy was walking ahead of them, still on her own, a thin, straight-backed figure with her silver-blonde hair pinned up in a crown of plaits that caught the sun. Harry thought she looked every bit as haughty as she had on the day they met. She never once looked round.

He hadn’t spoken a word to her since the Ravenclaw match, and to his relief she seemed to have stopped trying to make him. No notes had turned up in his books since the weekend. Nobody had leapt out at him from behind a suit of armour. She went to her lessons, ate her meals at the Slytherin table and looked straight through him whenever they passed in a corridor.

‘S’no good, Ron,’ said Hagrid heavily, when they got to the foot of the castle steps. ‘That Committee’s in Lucius Malfoy’s pocket. I’m jus’ gonna make sure the rest o’ Beaky’s time is the happiest he’s ever had. I owe him that...’

He turned round and hurried back down the lawn towards his cabin with his face buried in a handkerchief the size of a tablecloth.

Harry watched him go. When he turned back, he saw that Malfoy had stopped at the top of the steps.

She was looking at Hermione. Harry had seen Malfoy sneer at people and look bored by them; once, at the bottom of the Chamber of Secrets, she had looked at him as though he were a knight out of a storybook. He had seen her look at Hermione like this once before, outside the dungeons in September, when her brooch went missing. This was worse. Harry had never seen such hatred on anybody’s face, not even Snape’s.

Hermione had seen it too. She lifted her chin.

‘What are you looking at?’ she said. ‘Go away, Malfoy.’

Malfoy didn’t go away. She came down two steps instead, and when she spoke her voice was shaking. Harry realised with a jolt that she had been bottling something up for weeks, and that the cork had just come out.

‘I know it was you, Granger!’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Hermione said coolly. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Oh, you haven’t? You haven’t?’ Malfoy came down another step. Hermione went up one. Harry glanced at Ron, who had noticed it too; there were only about four steps between them now, and both girls were getting angrier by the second. ‘You don’t know anything about a letter, I suppose. Not a thing. Not one single solitary thing about a letter.’

‘What letter?’ said Hermione. ‘I don’t read your letters, Malfoy. I’ve got better things to do with my time.’

‘You’ve got nothing to do with your time! You’ve got nothing to do with your time but poke your nose into business that isn’t yours!’ Malfoy’s voice was rising. Two Hufflepuffs who had been dawdling at the bottom of the steps stopped dawdling to stare. ‘Always sneaking about where you’ve no right to be! You think I don’t know? You think I’m stupid?’

‘I’m telling you I don’t know what you’re on about!’ said Hermione, whose voice was rising too. ‘What letter? Written to who?’

‘To whom,’ said Malfoy savagely. ‘Don’t pretend. Don’t you dare pretend. You know exactly what you did.’

Over at the end of the steps, Harry spotted Pansy Parkinson. She had turned the colour of cold porridge. He supposed she didn’t like fights any more than he did.

‘This is ridiculous,’ said Hermione, though she didn’t move away. ‘You’ve finally gone round the bend, Malfoy. Everybody always said you would.’

That was a mistake. Harry saw it hit home. Malfoy went perfectly white, then two bright red spots appeared high on her cheekbones.

‘You’ve been messing around with me all year. My brooch, my hair, all of the nasty things you’ve done to humiliate me. Then you sent the letter! I won’t stand for it any more. You and your Je-’

She never finished the sentence.

Hermione punched her. It was a proper punch, with the full weight of a girl who carried a dozen books about with her every day, and it knocked Malfoy back against the stone balustrade.

‘My family are descended from the Normans!’

Bang! Malfoy’s shoulders hit the stone again.

‘Normans!’

Bang!

‘NORMANS!’

Bang!

‘That’s exactly what they would say!’ screamed Malfoy.

Then she grabbed two handfuls of Hermione’s hair, and they went over together.

It was the nastiest fight Harry had ever seen, and he had grown up with Dudley. The two of them rolled down the last of the steps in a tangle of black robes and flailing legs. Hermione’s bag split, scattering books in every direction. Malfoy’s plaits came down. Somebody screamed; it might have been one of the Hufflepuffs or it might have been Pansy. Malfoy’s nails were in the side of Hermione’s face; Hermione had a fistful of silver-blonde hair. Neither of them made a sound except for a low, furious panting. They looked as though they meant to keep going until one of them was dead.

There was blood on the gravel. Harry couldn’t tell whose it was.

He looked at Ron, and Ron looked back at him. They nodded to each other.

Harry seized Malfoy round the waist from behind. Ron grabbed Hermione. They heaved.

It was like trying to separate two cats in a sack. Malfoy’s heel cracked Harry on the shin; Hermione’s elbow caught Ron on the nose. At last, with a loud ripping noise that turned out to be the sleeve of Malfoy’s robes, the girls came apart. Ron dragged Hermione backwards up the steps. Harry hauled Malfoy the other way.

‘You’re a nasty, spiteful bully!’ Hermione screamed, struggling in Ron’s grip. There were three long scratches down her cheek, beaded with red, and her hair was sticking out round her head like a burst cushion. ‘You deserve everything that’s coming to you! Everything! For trying to take what isn’t yours!’

‘Mine?’ Malfoy shrieked back. ‘You think he’s yours? You sneaking, scheming, frizzy little thief, I’d rather be a bully than a thief...’

Then, without any warning, she turned round in Harry’s arms and buried her face in his shoulder.

She had done exactly the same thing in September, in the paddock, when Buckbeak opened her arm. She had fallen against Harry then, shaking all over, with warm blood running down her sleeve.

‘Harry.’ Her voice was muffled by his robes. ‘Harry, please. I didn’t. The letter. I didn’t, I swear I didn’t, I swear on my mother, you have to believe me...’

Over the top of her head, Hermione made a noise like a boiling kettle.

Malfoy’s head whipped round. ‘Don’t you dare look at him like that, Granger, don’t you dare, he isn’t yours to look at...’ A moment later her face was pressed into his shoulder again, both hands clutching his robes. ‘Please. Please, Harry. Please.’

Then she twisted round again, without letting go. ‘I know about the brooch, Granger. I know. I know about my ribbons...’ And she was back against his robes, muffled, her breath hot through the cloth. ‘I didn’t send it. I didn’t. I didn’t.’

Harry didn’t move.

Everything he had learnt at Privet Drive told him what this was. It was the next move in a game. She had lied to him before and she was lying to him now. If he put his arms round her, she would wait until he had let his guard down. Then there would be hooded figures on the lawn again, or something worse, and it would hurt more than it had the first time. Kindness is the first half of something.

He shut his eyes.

He didn’t mean to. It simply happened, as it had happened to Ron in the corridor on Saturday. He thought of Ron letting go of Scabbers, though he had been in the right. Lupin came into his head too, with the lamp flame shrinking to a blue bead beside him, saying I find it difficult every single day. Seventy times seven came to four hundred and ninety. The idea, Lupin had said, was to lose count.

He didn’t know what to believe about the letter, or about Malfoy either, and that frightened him. If he did this, he would be doing it blind, like stepping off his broom in the dark and hoping there was something underneath.

Be brave, thought Harry. The thought seemed to come from a good deal further down than his thoughts usually did.

He opened his eyes.

Malfoy was whimpering. She had stopped shouting at Hermione altogether. She was clinging to the front of his robes with both fists, her face hidden, saying please over and over in a small, cracked voice the Slytherin common room had certainly never heard. Her shoulders were shaking. There was a long scratch across the back of one of her hands where Hermione had caught her, and blood on the torn lace at her wrist.

He thought of Snape in the office, with his lip curled. You will no doubt be gratified to hear that she did not ask me to punish you. Not once.

Harry put his arms round her.

He didn’t do it very well, because he had hardly ever done it before. But he did it, and he felt her go quiet, as though she couldn’t believe it either.

‘Dracina,’ he said quietly. ‘The letter. Tell me. Just tell me what happened.’

She lifted her face. It was blotchy and wet, with a graze along one cheekbone. Her silver eyes were swimming.

‘I wrote it,’ she whispered. ‘I did write it. That night, after you came to the wing to tell me I was horrible, and I screamed at you. I was so angry, Harry. Everybody had been looking at me. I wanted... I just wanted to hurt them back. That savage and the bird, for what they did to me. Then in the morning I couldn’t send it. I couldn’t. I left it on the table by my bed. I told you in Potions I’d decided, and I had. And somebody...’ Her voice broke. ‘Somebody took it while I was asleep.’

Hurt them back.

The words went into Harry like a splinter.

He had heard them before. Tom Riddle had said them in the Chamber, in his soft, reasonable voice: Don’t you want to hurt them back? Harry had said them to himself more times than he could count: at the bottom of the garden at Privet Drive, in the cupboard with the door locked, in a dream in November, with his wand pointing at his aunt and something old watching him from the doorway. It always sounded fair. But as far as Harry could see, whenever anybody actually did it, things only got worse for everybody, until nobody could remember who had started it.

Harry sighed.

‘I believe you,’ he said.

Malfoy stared at him. Then her face crumpled, and she began to cry again, harder than ever. Harry had never in his life made anybody cry because they were happy, so it took him a moment to recognise it.

She opened her mouth. For a second he thought she was going to tell him something else; her lips had already formed the first word. Then she looked at him properly and closed her mouth again.

Dracina had said a great many pretty things this year. She had been charming to Longbottom in Defence Against the Dark Arts, keeping an eye on Harry to make sure he was watching. She had said sorry into a cauldron. None of it had cost her a thing. She had never actually done anything kind for one of Harry’s friends. She couldn’t, not openly, with Crabbe and Goyle writing home every week to a father who read every word. But she could do something kind where nobody would see. Anybody could say nice things. It was doing them that counted.

She stepped back out of his arms and wiped her face with the back of her torn sleeve, very carefully. When she spoke again, her voice was nearly steady.

‘I’m going to fix everything,’ she said. ‘I’m going to make it right, Harry. You’ll see.’

To Harry, this sounded extremely ominous. Before he could ask what she meant, she had turned on her heel. She stopped halfway up the steps, though, beside Hermione, who was still pinned in Ron’s arms. She looked her up and down, from the bleeding cheek to the wild hair.

‘You can’t keep him by stealing letters, Granger,’ she said softly. ‘You can’t keep anybody that way. You took mine to make him hate me, and I’m going to prove it. Ask Weasley how well you look after things that aren’t yours. Ask him about his rat.’

Hermione lunged at her. Ron held on.

‘I never touched your stupid letter!’ Hermione screamed after her. ‘I never touched any of it! Ron, let go of me-’

‘No,’ said Ron firmly, and didn’t. Which was partly because he was somewhat, maybe a little, quite enjoying holding Hermione. Not that he’d admit that to her.

Malfoy went up the steps and through the great oak front doors without looking back, with Pansy Parkinson scurrying after her. The two Hufflepuffs, deciding that the show was over, slunk off round the side of the castle to tell everybody they knew.

Harry stood at the bottom of the steps with somebody else’s blood on the front of his robes.

It had been a beastly thing to say about Scabbers. But Harry had been standing three feet away when the fight started, and somewhere at the back of his mind he knew perfectly well who had thrown the first punch.

He picked up Hermione’s books.

When he straightened up, Ron had let go of her at last. He was dabbing very awkwardly at the scratches on her cheek with his sleeve, and she was letting him. They were talking in low voices about Scabbers, about Saturday, about whether Ron had really meant what he said about forgiving her, even after that. Ron said he had. Hermione said thank you. It ought to have been the nicest thing Harry had heard all week.

But the whole time she was talking to Ron, Hermione didn’t take her eyes off the oak doors Malfoy had gone through. She glared at them as though she were trying to set them on fire.

‘You see what she’s doing?’ she said, the moment Harry came within earshot. ‘You do see it, Harry? That was all an act. The crying, the clinging, please, Harry. It’s all part of her game. She’s been playing it since the first day of term, and you just... you just let her-’

Harry was taken aback by Hermione’s anger.

‘Hermione,’ he said slowly. ‘What did she mean? All year, she said. Her brooch. Her hair.’

Hermione’s face went cold and stone-like.

‘I don’t know what she means,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what any of it means. I’ve never touched anything of hers. Never. Not a single thing. She’s making it up, Harry, she makes everything up, that’s what she does...’

She said it very fast, without looking at him. Harry heard a small, clear voice in his head point out that she had sounded exactly like this in their second year, crouched over a bubbling cauldron in one of Moaning Myrtle’s cubicles with her hair frizzing in the steam, telling him and Ron that everything was perfectly under control. Hermione was one of his very best friends. She had waited outside the hospital wing for him. In September she had gone to the library for him and come back with four books. He didn’t want to believe she could lie to his face, but he couldn’t stop thinking it.

Hermione must have seen something in his face, because she grabbed his arm.

‘Harry, you’d better beat her in the Quidditch final!’ Hermione said shrilly. ‘You just better had, because I can’t stand it if Slytherin wins!’

Ron, who was gaping at Hermione as though she had sprouted a second head, glanced at his watch and gave a yelp.

‘We’re late for Charms,’ he said. ‘We’d better go.’

They ran, taking the marble staircase two steps at a time. Hermione hugged her bag to her chest; she had mended it with a jab of her wand, rather crookedly, so that it was still leaking quills. Harry’s shin throbbed where Malfoy had kicked it. Ron’s nose had started to bleed in a small, steady way, which he dealt with by tipping his head back as he ran, so that he went up the stairs like a horse that had seen something nasty in a hedge.

‘You’re late, boys!’ Professor Flitwick squeaked at them, the moment Harry had the door open. ‘Come along, quickly, wands out, we’re experimenting with Cheering Charms today, we’ve already divided into pairs-’

Harry and Ron slid into the last empty desk at the back. They had just started unbuckling their bags when Ron twisted round on his stool.

‘Where’s Hermione gone?’

Harry looked round too. There was no sign of her. She hadn’t come into the classroom at all, though Harry could have sworn she had been at his elbow, puffing and clutching her lopsided bag, when he pushed open the door.

‘That’s weird,’ said Harry, staring at Ron. ‘Maybe-maybe she went to the toilet or something?’

But Hermione didn’t turn up for the rest of the lesson.

This was a pity, in a way, because it was the best Charms lesson they had ever had. Cheering Charms turned out to be exactly what they sounded like. Within ten minutes Neville was giggling helplessly into his sleeve, and Dean had to be sent out to calm down after Seamus cheered him so hard that he couldn’t stop laughing at a chair. Ron did Harry rather too well on his first attempt. For the next quarter of an hour Harry sat beaming at the ceiling in a happy, silly daze. He kept thinking what a lovely colour the stone was, how kind Professor Flitwick looked when he squeaked, how warm Malfoy had been in his arms on the castle steps, how nice it had been when she stopped shaking...

He came to with a jerk. Ron was giving him a very odd look.

‘You what?’ said Harry.

‘Nothing,’ said Ron. ‘Nothing at all, mate. I think I overdid it.’

There was still no Hermione by the time the bell went.

‘She could’ve done with a Cheering Charm on her too,’ said Ron, as the class filed out for lunch, every one of them grinning from ear to ear. The charms had left them all feeling as though they had been wrapped in warm towels.

Nor was Hermione at lunch.

Somewhere round about the apple pie, the Cheering Charms began to fade. Harry found that the warm towel had gone. Underneath it was the same cold, uneasy feeling as before, with a new worry on top. Hermione never missed lessons. She would have come to Charms on a stretcher with both legs in plaster, taking notes.

‘You don’t think Malfoy did something to her?’ said Ron anxiously, as they hurried up the stairs towards Gryffindor Tower.

‘No,’ said Harry.

It came out a great deal louder than he had meant. A second-year Hufflepuff on the landing above jumped and dropped her Remembrall.

‘No,’ he said again, more quietly, but just as fiercely. ‘She wouldn’t. She was in pieces, Ron, you saw her. She was in no state to go hunting anybody down. Anyway, she isn’t... she wouldn’t do something like that. Not sneaking about. If she wanted to have a go at Hermione, she’d do it to her face, in front of everybody. You know she would. She’s just done it.’

He stopped, rather out of breath. He had no idea where all that had come from. That morning he would have believed anything of Malfoy.

Ron looked at him for a while. Then he sighed. It that special sort of sigh, The one Ron had been heaving every so often since about halfway through their first year, and only ever about one subject. He put a hand on Harry’s arm, gave it a squeeze and let go.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘All right.’

He didn’t say anything else. As far as Ron could see, there was a war going on in the castle, with Harry as the prize, and it had got a lot nastier since breakfast. He had a strong feeling that the safest place for himself was well out of the line of fire. He had a horrible feeling that Harry had been hit already.

They edged past the security trolls, who grunted at them, and gave the Fat Lady the new password.

‘Flibbertigibbet.’

The portrait swung forward, and they climbed into the common room.

Hermione was at a table by the window, sound asleep, with her cheek squashed against the number charts in an open Arithmancy book. The scratches Malfoy had given her had already faded to thin pink lines, as though somebody had dabbed something on them. As Harry sat down next to her, he caught a faint whiff of something green, like crushed leaves.

Ron sat down on her other side, and Harry prodded her arm.

‘Wh-what?’ Hermione jerked upright, staring wildly round the room. ‘Is it time to go? W-which lesson have we got now?’

‘Divination, but it’s not for another twenty minutes,’ said Harry. ‘Hermione, why didn’t you come to Charms?’

‘What? Oh no!’ Hermione squeaked. ‘I forgot to go to Charms!’

‘But how could you forget?’ said Harry. ‘You were with us till we were right outside the classroom!’

‘I don’t believe it!’ Hermione wailed. ‘Was Professor Flitwick angry? Oh, it was Malfoy, I was thinking about her and I lost track of things!’

Harry opened his mouth and then shut it again. He had a sudden picture of Hermione thinking about Malfoy so hard that she had walked straight past a door. He didn’t much like it.

‘You know what, Hermione?’ said Ron, eyeing the vast Arithmancy book that had been her pillow. ‘I reckon you’re cracking up. You’re trying to do too much.’

‘No, I’m not!’ shouted Hermione. She pushed her hair out of her face and looked round helplessly for her bag. ‘I just made a mistake, that’s all! I’d better go and see Professor Flitwick and say sorry... I’ll see you in Divination!’

She was halfway to the portrait hole when she turned back. She was looking at the front of Harry’s robes, where a rusty smear of Malfoy’s blood had dried on the cloth. Her lips went very thin.

‘Scourgify,’ she said, with a flick of her wand.

The smear vanished, and so did most of the colour from Harry’s robes, in a patch the size of a dinner plate. Hermione didn’t seem to notice. She gave the clean patch a small, satisfied nod, the way Aunt Petunia nodded at a freshly scrubbed floor, and was gone.

‘Er,’ said Ron.

‘Yeah,’ said Harry, looking down at himself.

*

Twenty minutes later they found Hermione hovering under the silver ladder to the Divination classroom. She looked extremely harassed.

‘I can’t believe I missed Cheering Charms! And I bet they come up in our exams; Professor Flitwick hinted they might!’

They climbed through the trapdoor into the stuffy, dimly lit tower room, where the usual sickly perfume hit them at once. Every little round table held a crystal ball, glowing softly with a milky mist. The three of them took a wobbly table near the back.

‘I thought we weren’t starting crystal balls until next term,’ Ron muttered, peering suspiciously at the armchairs in case Professor Trelawney was hiding in one of them.

‘Don’t complain, this means we’ve finished palmistry,’ Harry muttered back. ‘I was getting sick of her flinching every time she looked at my hands.’

‘Good day to you!’ said the familiar misty voice. Professor Trelawney swept out of the shadows in a jangle of bangles, her huge spectacles flashing. Parvati and Lavender, their faces lit milky white by their own crystal ball, quivered with excitement.

‘I have decided to introduce the crystal ball a little earlier than I had planned,’ said Professor Trelawney, settling herself in an armchair by the fire to gaze round at them all. ‘The fates have informed me that your examination in June will concern the Orb, and I am anxious to give you sufficient practice.’

Hermione gave a loud snort.

‘Well, honestly... “the fates have informed her”... who sets the exam? She does! What an amazing prediction!’ she said, without bothering to lower her voice.

Harry and Ron choked. There was no knowing whether Professor Trelawney had heard, because her face was in shadow, and she gave no sign of it.

‘Crystal gazing is a particularly refined art,’ she went on dreamily. ‘I do not expect any of you to See when first you peer into the Orb’s infinite depths. We shall start by practising relaxing the conscious mind and external eyes...’

Ron was seized by a fit of silent sniggering and had to cram his knuckles into his mouth.

‘...so as to clear the Inner Eye and the superconscious. Perhaps, if we are lucky, some of you will See before the end of the class.’

Harry looked at the crystal ball in the middle of their table. Then, before he could think better of it, he put up his hand.

In September he had sworn that he would never ask Professor Trelawney anything again as long as he lived. But he didn’t like the way she said See, with a capital letter, as though it belonged to her. Harry had seen something once, lying on the floor of the Chamber of Secrets, as clearly as he could see the fire now.

‘Yes, Harry, dear?’

‘I was only wondering, Professor.’ His ears were already going hot. ‘About people who See things without a crystal ball. In the Bible, I mean. The prophets. They had visions all the time. They didn’t have crystal balls, or tea leaves, or anything. Does that count?’

Somebody giggled. It was Lavender.

Professor Trelawney lowered her eyelids slowly behind her spectacles, like a woman who has been handed a plate of something nasty at a party.

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘The Muggle scriptures. My poor dear boy. Those are folk tales. Desert folk tales, written down long after the fact by people who had no Inner Eye whatsoever: shepherds who had eaten the wrong sort of mushroom, old men who had sat out too long in the sun. A true Seer does not require a burning bush.’ She laid one hand on the crystal ball before her, tenderly, as though it were a cat. ‘A true Seer requires the proper instruments of the art.’

‘Right,’ said Harry. ‘Sorry.’

He stared down at the crystal ball, his face burning. Parvati and Lavender were whispering behind their hands. Across the table, Hermione had pressed her lips together so hard that they had vanished.

So the crystal gazing began. Harry felt extremely foolish, goggling at the mist with his mind supposed to be empty, while this is stupid kept swimming across it like a goldfish. Ron’s silent giggling was no help, and nor was Hermione’s tutting.

The trouble was that his mind, once he had emptied it, wouldn’t stay empty. Things kept bobbing up in it, none of them from the crystal ball. First came the painting on the fourth floor, with the two brothers at their two altars, one column of smoke going up straight and white while the other crawled away along the ground. Mind the door-sill. After that came the boy who had gone through the ice on the lake, and the girl with her fingers on her friend’s mended arm. Lupin appeared at the foot of the marble staircase, with his head bowed and his lips moving. Last of all came Ron, shutting his eyes in the corridor on Saturday.

Lately Harry had begun to feel like somebody walking down a long road who notices, after a while, that the same car keeps driving past him.

‘Seen anything yet?’ he whispered, after fifteen minutes of staring had produced nothing at all.

‘Yeah, there’s a burn on this table,’ said Ron, pointing. ‘Someone’s spilled their candle.’

‘This is such a waste of time,’ Hermione hissed. ‘I could be practising something useful. I could be catching up on Cheering Charms-’

Professor Trelawney was drifting between the tables now, murmuring over people’s shoulders as she peered into their crystal balls. When she reached theirs, Harry heard himself speak up again.

‘Professor? If wizards don’t believe in all that, the Muggle stuff, I mean... then why do we have Christmas?’

Professor Trelawney stopped dead.

‘Christmas,’ she said, as though he had mentioned a rather vulgar relation, ‘is a very ancient festival of the turning year, my dear. The Muggles borrowed it from us. Then they dressed it up in their own little stories, as they generally do. Wizards keep it for the feasting, for the giving, for the light in the darkest days. Nobody expects you to believe in anything.’

‘But it’s called Christmas,’ said Harry. ‘It’s got Christ in it. It’s His birthday.’

‘It is called many things,’ said Professor Trelawney airily. ‘Names are merely labels, dear. The Inner Eye looks beneath them.’

Harry thought of Christmas dinner, with thirteen of them crammed round a single table, and of the enormous trees in the Great Hall. Nobody had said grace, though everybody had pulled crackers. There was something else he had been wondering about since the first week of September, and suddenly it wouldn’t wait.

‘What about Saint George, then?’ he said. ‘He’s a saint. He’s in churches. There’s a window of him, in… where I live, with the dragon. Is he a Muggle story as well?’

To his surprise, Professor Trelawney gave a tinkling, indulgent laugh, the kind people give when they know far more than you and find it rather sweet that you don’t.

‘Oh, my dear. Saint George was one of us. A wizard. A very gallant one, by all accounts: a knight of the old school, with a lance in one hand and his wand in the other. He slew his dragon by magic, as any sensible wizard would. The poor Muggles who witnessed it couldn’t account for what they’d seen, of course; so George very graciously allowed them to believe that it had been their God.’ She smiled down at Harry. ‘It was the kindest thing to do. Muggles do so like a story.’

Harry didn’t say anything.

He was thinking about the Chamber of Secrets: the basilisk turning on Malfoy as she lay senseless on the stone, and himself planting his feet on either side of her with the sword raised. Something had flowed into his arms then that wasn’t his. It was nothing he could have managed by himself on the best day of his life. It had been lent to him for exactly as long as he needed it. Even as he ran at the snake, he had thought of the window in the church Aunt Petunia had taken them to one Christmas: the painted knight, the dragon, the lady in white in the corner.

Professor Trelawney had never been in the Chamber of Secrets. She had never had a basilisk come at her out of the dark.

There was the Ravenclaw match, too: a hundred feet up, one hand on his broom, with three hooded figures on the grass below, and the silver bursting out of him with a ringing sound like a struck bell. Lupin had told him the Patronus didn’t come from you alone. Something derived from God, he had said, meeting something in your own soul. Lupin wasn’t the sort of person who said things he didn’t mean.

Harry realised that his face had stopped burning.

‘So he fooled them,’ he said.

‘He spared them, dear. There is a difference.’

‘Is there?’ said Harry. ‘Only, if he let them think God did it, but God didn’t, that’s lying. And if God did do it...’

‘God,’ said Professor Trelawney, wrinkling her nose slightly at the word, as Aunt Petunia did on the rare occasions she was forced to say magic, ‘did not do it, Mr Potter. Muggles invent their gods to explain what they cannot understand. Thunder. Plague. Wizards.’ She sighed, so that her shawls rose and fell. ‘It is a very primitive habit of mind. One sees things that aren’t there, and calls them signs.’

Ron made a small noise into his fist. Hermione had suddenly become very interested in the candle burn on the table.

‘Right,’ said Harry. He looked thoughtfully down into the crystal ball, at the mist going slowly round and round inside it. ‘So it’s only Muggles who make things up.’

Professor Trelawney’s eyes narrowed behind her spectacles. For a moment Harry thought she had understood him. Then she simply rearranged her shawls with a great clinking of beads and drifted off to Neville’s table, where she was able to tell Neville, at some length, that he would shortly lose something precious.

‘Harry,’ Hermione breathed, without looking up. She sounded half shocked, half delighted.

Harry said nothing. His heart was beating rather fast, and he felt wider awake than he had done for a week.

Ten minutes later, Professor Trelawney came rustling past them again.

‘Would anyone like me to help them interpret the shadowy portents within their Orb?’ she murmured, her bangles jingling.

‘I don’t need help,’ Ron whispered. ‘It’s obvious what this means. There’s going to be loads of fog tonight.’

Harry and Hermione both burst out laughing.

‘Now, really!’ said Professor Trelawney, as every head in the room turned towards them. Parvati and Lavender looked scandalised. ‘You are disturbing the clairvoyant vibrations!’

She swept over and bent low over their crystal ball. Harry’s heart sank. He had a horrible feeling he knew exactly what was coming.

‘There is something here!’ Professor Trelawney whispered. She lowered her face towards the ball until it was reflected twice over, very small, in her enormous glasses. ‘Something moving... but what is it?’

Harry would have bet everything he owned, Firebolt included, that it wasn’t good news. All the same, at some point in the last half-hour he had stopped being frightened of her.

‘Is it a dove, Professor?’ he asked politely. ‘Only, I’d like to know which sort of sign it is before I start writing my will. Whether it’s a Muggle one, or a real one.’

Ron fell off his pouffe.

Professor Trelawney didn’t so much as glance at him. She kept gazing into the crystal ball.

‘My dear...’ she breathed at last, lifting her eyes to Harry’s face. They were swimming with sorrow. ‘It is here, plainer than ever before... my dear, stalking towards you, growing ever closer... the Gr-’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ said Hermione loudly. ‘Not that ridiculous Grim again!’

Professor Trelawney turned her magnified eyes on Hermione. Parvati whispered something in Lavender’s ear, and the two of them started glaring at Hermione too. Professor Trelawney drew herself up, quivering with fury.

‘I am sorry to say that from the moment you have arrived in this class, my dear, it has been apparent that you do not have what the noble art of Divination requires. Indeed, I don’t remember ever meeting a student whose mind was so hopelessly mundane.’

For a moment, nobody spoke.

‘Fine!’ said Hermione suddenly. She stood up, cramming Unfogging the Future into her lopsided bag. ‘Fine!’ she said again, swinging the bag on to her shoulder so violently that she nearly knocked Ron off his pouffe for the second time. ‘I give up! I’m leaving!’

While the whole class gaped, Hermione stamped over to the trapdoor, booted it open and climbed out of sight.

The class took a good few minutes to calm down. The Grim seemed to have gone clean out of Professor Trelawney’s head. She turned away from their table, breathing rather hard, and pulled her gauzy shawl tight round her thin shoulders. She didn’t look at Harry again for the rest of the lesson. Whenever she passed their table, she did so with her nose in the air, as though it smelt.

‘Ooooo!’ said Lavender suddenly, making everybody jump. ‘Oooooo, Professor Trelawney, I’ve just remembered! You saw her leaving, didn’t you? Didn’t you, Professor? “Around Easter, one of our number will leave us for ever!” You said it ages ago, Professor!’

Professor Trelawney gave her a misty smile.

‘Yes, my dear, I did indeed know that Miss Granger would be leaving us. One hopes, however, that one might have mistaken the Signs... The Inner Eye can be a burden, you know...’

Lavender and Parvati were thrilled. They shuffled their chairs round to make room for Professor Trelawney at their table.

Harry distinctly remembered her saying parted from this circle for good in September, which wasn’t the same thing at all. He kept his mouth shut, because he was too cross to trust himself.

‘Some day Hermione’s having, eh?’ Ron muttered to him, looking awed.

‘Yeah...’

Harry looked down into the crystal ball. There was nothing in it but white mist, going slowly round. Had she really seen the Grim in there again? Was it going to be waiting for him? With the Quidditch final getting closer every day, he could do without another brush with death.

Then again, he thought, Ron had found a candle burn and a weather forecast in that same ball. He turned it round to face the wall and didn’t look at it again.

*

Hermione was sitting on her bag at the bottom of the North Tower staircase, with her arms folded. She didn’t look the least bit sorry. If anything, she looked like somebody who had just been let off a detention.

‘I’ve never felt better,’ she announced, before either of them could speak. ‘Never. I should have done that months ago. All those wasted hours. The cups of tea. The smell. I’ll have to write to Professor McGonagall. It’ll give me an hour back, at least. A whole hour!’

‘You’ve dropped a subject,’ said Ron, staring at her. ‘You. Hermione Granger.’

‘I’ve dropped nonsense.’ Hermione got up. Then she turned to Harry, and her face changed. ‘Harry. What you said to her. About the dove.’

‘I know,’ said Harry. ‘I shouldn’t have.’

‘I didn’t say that.’ Hermione hitched her bag on to her shoulder. ‘It was the cleverest thing anybody’s ever said in that room, and she didn’t even notice. I don’t believe a word of it, any of it, you know I don’t. But if you’re going to argue theology, Harry, you might at least argue it with somebody who knows the first thing about it. Not a woman who gets her news from tea leaves.’ She looked at him very straight. ‘Go and see the Fat Friar. I told you in September. You never went.’

Harry opened his mouth to say that he had been busy, what with dementors, Black, Quidditch, Snape and Malfoy.

He closed it again.

‘All right,’ he said.

Hermione was so surprised that she forgot to look triumphant.

*

It took him nearly an hour to find the Friar.

Ron and Hermione came too. Ron said he had promised in September to stand guard outside so that nobody laughed, and a Weasley kept his word, even when it was about dead monks. They tried the Great Hall first. Then they tried three different corridors where Nearly Headless Nick said he had seen the Friar only a moment ago, my dear fellow. They even tried the Grey Lady’s favourite window, where the Grey Lady gave Harry an odd, searching look and drifted away without a word.

In the end they found him on the ground floor, at the far end of the corridor that led down to the kitchens. A tall window there looked out across the lawns to the lake, and the sun was going down behind the mountains. The Friar was floating in front of the glass with his plump hands folded over his stomach, watching the water turn gold, like a man who has just eaten a very good dinner.

Ron and Hermione stopped at the corner.

‘We’ll be here,’ said Ron. ‘Shout if he starts on about fig cakes again.’

Harry walked down the corridor alone, feeling more ridiculous with every step. He had faced Voldemort twice. Now he was going to ask a ghost about God, and his palms were sweating.

‘Young Potter.’ The Friar didn’t turn round. ‘The Seeker. I did wonder when you’d come. Your friend with the hair told me, oh, months ago, that you might.’

‘Hermione,’ said Harry.

‘Hermione. Yes. A formidable young woman. She asked me three questions about the Synod of Whitby and corrected me on two of the answers.’ The Friar turned round at last, beaming. ‘What can I do for you?’

Harry had practised what he was going to say all the way down the stairs. He couldn’t remember a word of it.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘That’s the problem. I’m not sure about... a lot of things. About God, mostly. About why everybody here hates it. Christianity, I mean. Hermione says the wizards and the Church have been at each other’s throats for fifteen hundred years.’

‘Does she?’ The Friar considered this. ‘Well, she’s half right, which is a great deal better than most. Sit down, lad. You’re making the window nervous.’

There was a stone ledge under the window, and Harry sat down on it. The Friar sank lower in the air until his transparent face was almost level with Harry’s. He studied Harry for some time, kindly and without any hurry, rather as you might watch somebody on the edge of a cold swimming pool, wondering whether they were going to jump in.

‘She also says you’re fourteenth-century,’ said Harry.

The Friar laughed, a big round laugh that went rolling off down the corridor towards the kitchens.

‘Fourteenth! Bless her. I’m flattered, truly. No, I’m older than that by a long chalk. That’ll be when somebody first got round to writing me down, I expect. I spent a few hundred years haunting my own priory, on the Wash, until King Henry pulled it down to sell the lead off the roof. I came home to Hogwarts after that.’ He beamed round at the stone walls as though they belonged to him.

‘Are you really a friar?’ said Harry.

‘A monk, strictly. Benedictine. The friars came along a couple of hundred years after I’d died, but the name stuck to me like porridge, and I gave up correcting people round about the time of the Armada.’ He chuckled. ‘When I was a boy, this school was a new thing. People came up from the villages to stare at it. A school! For witches and wizards! On a crag, in all that weather! Half of them gave it ten years. Helga Hufflepuff boxed my ears in my first week for turning the porridge into frogspawn.’

Harry stared at him. ‘You knew her?’

‘Knew her? She caught me with my hand in the honey crock more times than I can count. A great woman, Helga. A wonderful cook. Always made sure we were fed well.’ The Friar sighed happily. ‘But you didn’t come to hear about my misspent youth. You came to ask why the wizards hate the Church.’

‘She said it was all right for a while. At the start.’

‘So it was. Here, for a long while, it was.’ The Friar folded his hands again. ‘When I was young, half the lads who left this school went into the Church. Muggle-born boys like myself, mostly. Their mothers didn’t know what to do with them. A son who could set a broken leg by looking at it was a frightening thing to have about the house, but a monastery would take him and be glad of him. Most monks weren’t wizards, mind you. Most of them were ordinary men who got up in the dark to sing. But if you were a wizard, with a mind to spend your life mending people, a habit was the coat to wear.’

‘What about witches?’

‘Oh, the girls went home.’ The Friar smiled. ‘Back to their villages, mostly, to be the wise woman. The healer. The one you sent your boy running for in the night when the baby came wrong, or the fever wouldn’t break; the one who sat up with the dying to say the prayers with them when the priest couldn’t come. Half the parishes in England had one. The priest knew perfectly well what she was, and he’d nod to her on the way out of Mass.’

‘And nobody minded?’

‘Somebody always minds. But mostly we believed, those of us who were wizards, what I believed: that God had given us magic on purpose.’ He said it quite simply, as though he were remarking that the lake was wet. ‘That it was a gift, and gifts are given for something. He doesn’t make mistakes of that size, young Potter. A man who can heal with a look has been handed a job of work. Doing it is a kind of prayer.’

Harry thought about Madam Pomfrey regrowing the bones in his arm in a single night, after Lockhart had removed them. He wondered whether she would have called it a prayer, and rather doubted it.

‘Who told you that?’ he said. ‘That it was a gift.’

A soft, faraway look came over the Friar’s face, as though he were trying to make out something on the other side of a misty valley.

‘An old man,’ he said. ‘When I was a boy here, in the early days, when the hall had no more than half a roof on it and there wasn’t a gate at all. He came up out of the valley one winter, on foot, in the snow. Very tall. Older than the hills, I thought then, and I’ve not had cause to change my mind. A grey hat with the point fallen over, a stick taller than he was, boots that had walked a very long way. The hall door opened for him before anybody had touched it.’ The Friar smiled. ‘He sat by the kitchen fire half the night with a lot of muddy first-years, smoking, telling us stories. He told us the gift had been given, long ago, to men who needed it, by Somebody who had never given up on them. Most people had long since forgotten who had passed it on. You are not the first to carry it, he said. Don’t let anybody tell you it’s yours to do as you like with.’

Harry had an odd feeling that he had heard about this man before, though he couldn’t think where.

‘What was his name?’

‘Do you know,’ said the Friar, ‘I never asked. It didn’t seem the sort of thing you asked him.’

Neither of them said anything for a moment. Out on the lake, a long ripple ran across the golden water.

‘But it was heresy, though,’ Harry said. ‘Wasn’t it? Magic. That’s what it says in A History of Magic. The Church said magic was heresy. That’s why they burnt people.’

The Friar threw back his head and roared with laughter.

‘Bathilda Bagshot!’ he said, wiping his eyes, though nothing came out of them. ‘Oh, dear Bathilda. She’s never set foot in a monastery in her life, more’s the pity; it might have done her prose some good. Tell me, young Potter. Have you ever heard of the Canon Episcopi?’

‘Is it a spell?’

‘Ha! In a manner of speaking. It’s a rule of the Church, a very old one. It was already old when I was a novice, copied into all the bishops’ books.’ The Friar made himself comfortable in mid-air. ‘It said that certain women, who believed they rode out at night on the backs of beasts, with a heathen goddess at their head, flying over half of Christendom before cockcrow, were deceived. They were dreaming it. The Devil was putting pictures in their heads to lead them astray. It said, too, that anybody who believed a creature could be changed into another creature, except by the God who made it, was worse than a fool. He was next door to a heretic, because he was giving to a man what belongs to God alone.’

Harry thought about this.

‘So the Church said magic wasn’t real.’

‘It said that believing in it was the sin. Which put a wizard in a peculiar position, you’ll agree, sitting in the back pew of a Sunday with a perfectly good wand up his sleeve.’

Harry laughed before he could stop himself. ‘Bit awkward.’

‘Exceedingly awkward. So we read it the other way about.’ The Friar’s eyes twinkled. ‘If changing one creature into another belongs to God alone, yet here we are, doing it, then it must be His, mustn’t it? Lent to us. A wizard who thanks God for his magic, praises him for it, then uses it in His service, isn’t a heretic, as we saw it. He’s a steward. That’s how we squared it, and rather neatly, I always thought.’

‘And the Church just went along with that?’

‘Here, mostly, yes. You must understand that this island was a different place from the Continent. When they came at last to make laws about it, in England, in Wales, in Scotland too, they made it a felony. A crime, like horse-stealing, or setting fire to your neighbour’s hayrick. Not a heresy. A felony is about what you have done to your neighbour. A heresy is about what you are.’ The Friar spread his hands. ‘There’s all the difference in the world between being hanged for stealing a horse and being burnt for what you are.’

‘I’m not sure the horse thief would see the difference, Fire wouldn’t tickle them either.’ said Harry.

The Friar laughed so hard that his rope belt swung to and fro like a bell-pull.

‘No. No, I don’t suppose he would. You’ve a tongue on you, young Potter. Good. Keep it. A man who can’t make a joke about his faith generally hasn’t looked at it very hard.’ He grew a little more serious. ‘The Church never minded what we used to call natural magic. Herbs. Physic. Reading the stars to know when to sow. There were monks in every county doing it, and the bishops took the cures along with everybody else. What the Church couldn’t abide, and quite right too, was the other sort. Calling up spirits. Bargaining with things in the dark. Of the Dark more like,’

‘Like a diary,’ said Harry, before he could stop himself. ‘A diary that writes back.’

The Friar looked at him sharply. For a moment he wasn’t smiling at all.

‘Exactly like that,’ he said. ‘Signing yourself over to some creature, a servant of Satan most likely, in return for power. That’s idolatry, lad. That’s the First Commandment broken clean in half: thou shalt have no other gods before me. A man who sells himself to a demon for power isn’t a misunderstood herbalist. He’s a traitor. The Church said so, and I’d have said so too.’

‘So what went wrong?’ said Harry.

‘A little at a time,’ said the Friar, ‘the way most things go wrong.’ He looked out at the lake. ‘I was dead by then. I watched. There was a Dominican called Nider, a clever man, who wrote a great fat book about ants, of all things. Somewhere in the middle of it he started writing that witches weren’t deluded old women at all. They were an army. A secret church, with the Devil for its bishop.’

‘In a book about ants,’ said Harry.

‘In a book about ants. I did say he was clever. I never said he was sensible.’ The Friar sighed. ‘Then two more Dominicans wrote a far worse book: the Malleus Maleficarum. The Hammer of Witches. Fourteen eighty-six, that was, and I remember the smell of the ink. After that it was a heresy, an organised one, which was a great deal worse than any sin or crime. A pact with the Devil; Christ abandoned; treason against Heaven itself. Once you’ve decided your neighbour is a traitor to Heaven...’ He stopped. ‘Well. There’s nothing you won’t do to him, after that. You’ll even do it in God’s name.’

He was silent for a while, and Harry didn’t interrupt. Harry was thinking of his History of Magic essay, which he had started at his desk in Privet Drive in July and finished outside Florean Fortescue’s. He remembered Florean leaning over his shoulder and saying they weren’t wicked, write that. Most of them.

‘I can’t blame them,’ the Friar said at last. ‘The wizards. For what they feel now. I watched friends burn, young Potter. People who had never done anything in their lives but help. Bathilda treated it like a joke, ignoring where those spells came from. Why they were necessary. I won’t pretend to you that I don’t understand why half the wizards in this castle say God the way they do.’ Then, unexpectedly, his face creased up again. ‘But they keep Christmas, you know. Every witch and wizard in Britain. They laugh at Him all year round. Then on the twenty-fifth of December they put up trees, pull crackers and eat themselves sick in honour of His birthday, singing His carols because they like the tunes. I’ve watched them do it for five hundred years.’ He chuckled. ‘I’ve come to believe it’s a joke. His joke, I mean. They’ll keep His feast every year without the least idea whose feast it is. He has a wicked sense of humour about these things, lad. You’ll find that out.’

Harry looked down at his hands. He found it easier to say the next part to them.

‘I don’t think I know how to do it,’ he said. ‘Believe, I mean. Properly. I wasn’t brought up with any of it. My aunt took me to church once, at Christmas, because the neighbours had started going. I didn’t know when to stand up. I sat down in all the wrong places. Everybody else knew the words.’ He pulled a face. ‘I felt as if I’d broken into somebody’s house. Like a burglar who’d come for the hymn books.’

The Friar gave a great startled bark of laughter that sent a spider scuttling off the window frame.

‘Then I come here, and everybody thinks it’s mad. Seamus laughed when I asked about signs. Trelawney laughed. Even Ron thought it was a Muggle thing.’ He picked at a loose thread on his sleeve. ‘I’m a wizard. I’m supposed to think it’s all Muggle rubbish. That’s what everybody here thinks. And I don’t know any of it, I don’t know the Bible, I don’t know the prayers, I can’t even...’ He stopped. ‘I’ve been thinking about it for about five minutes. Everybody else has been going their whole lives. I don’t see why anybody would want me turning up now.’

The Friar didn’t answer at once.

‘Everybody in that church was new to it once,’ he said. ‘Every one of them. Even the ones who knew all the words. Especially them, sometimes; the words can get in the way.’ He tilted his round head on one side. ‘As for breaking in, you haven’t broken into anybody’s house. The door was open. It always has been. Nobody’s going to ask you for a ticket.’

Harry’s head jerked up.

‘Somebody said that to me,’ he said. ‘In the summer. Exactly that.’

‘Did they?’ said the Friar mildly. ‘Sensible fellow.’

Down the corridor, Ron and Hermione were still standing at the corner. Ron was pretending very hard to study a portrait of a fat spaniel. Hermione wasn’t pretending at all; she was watching them with her arms folded.

‘Now then,’ said the Friar. ‘I’ve answered your questions, or tried to. Will you answer one of mine?’

‘All right.’

‘What brought it on?’ The Friar’s voice was gentle. ‘All this. Boys of thirteen don’t generally come looking for dead monks in corridors because of a History of Magic essay. Something happened to you.’

Harry didn’t answer.

He had told one person in his whole life, and she had told him first. He had spent most of a year since then telling himself that it had been the venom, or a bang on the head, or a dream, because if it wasn’t any of those, he would have to think about what it was. He had been laughed at in Divination only that afternoon. He could feel Ron and Hermione watching the back of his neck from forty feet away.

He took a deep breath, the way he did before a dive.

‘In the Chamber of Secrets,’ he said, ‘last year. When the basilisk bit me. I was dying. I know I was, I could feel it. And then something... somebody... It was warm. It was like being held. There was a voice. It said your work is not yet done, my child. And then I felt strength that wasn’t mine, Afterwards, after I’d killed the basilisk and stabbed the diary, there was a man by one of the fallen pillars. Watching me.’ He made himself keep going. ‘He had long brown hair, and a beard. He was wearing something plain and pale; Malfoy said afterwards it was a white robe, with nothing on it. He didn’t do anything. He just looked at me. And he looked...’ Harry swallowed. ‘He looked proud of me.’ Harry hadn’t dared say it for nearly a full year. The very idea of acknowledging anyone being proud of Harry made him afraid that idea was wrong, or would be snatched from him. Nobody was supposed to be proud of the cursed child who slept in a cupboard under the stairs.

The Friar didn’t say anything.

‘I think it was Jesus,’ said Harry. His voice came out very small. ‘I think I saw Jesus. I’ve never told anybody except Malfoy. She was there. She saw him too. She asked me if I’d seen him before I could ask her.’

He waited for the laugh he had been expecting for nearly a year, but none came.

The Friar had stopped moving altogether. His round transparent face had lost its smile, and for the first time since Harry had known him he looked his age, which was very old indeed.

‘What did he do?’ he asked quietly. ‘Exactly. Tell me exactly.’

So Harry told him: the warmth that had come up under the burning of the venom and put it out; the strength in his arms when the basilisk went for Malfoy; the sword catching fire; the look on the man’s face. The man had very nearly smiled, he said, when Harry tried to ask him to get Ginny and Malfoy out. He even owned up to crossing himself on the platform at King’s Cross in front of everybody, feeling like an idiot. Last of all he described the dementors, and the Patronus that wouldn’t come in January, because he had begun to wonder if the man in the Chamber had been wrong about him.

The Friar listened to every word. He asked questions, but he never once asked whether Harry had hit his head. He wanted to know what colour the light had been, whether the man’s feet had touched the floor, what Malfoy had said, word for word. When Harry got to the strength in his arms, the Friar nodded slowly, as though he had been expecting it.

‘Professor Trelawney says Saint George was a wizard,’ Harry said, when he had finished. ‘She says he killed the dragon by magic and let the Muggles think God did it.’

‘Does she now.’ The Friar’s mouth twitched. ‘Well, George was a wizard. Your Professor Trelawney has that much right. As for whose strength he killed his dragon with...’ He gave Harry a long look out of eyes like old windows. ‘I should say that you’re in a rather better position to judge that than she is.’

Harry opened his mouth, realised he didn’t know what he had been going to say, and closed it again.

‘Two witnesses,’ said the Friar softly. ‘You know, in the old law, the word of two witnesses was enough to hang a man. It ought to be enough to make a lad wonder. I believe you, young Potter. For what a dead man’s word is worth.’

Harry’s eyes were stinging. He stared very hard out of the window at the lake.

The sun had set and the gold had drained out of the water. A long way above them, a bell was ringing for dinner, and Harry heard the distant thunder of feet on the stairs.

‘I’d better go,’ he said, getting up. ‘I’ll miss dinner. Thank you. I mean it. Thanks.’

‘One more thing, before you go and fill yourself up.’

Harry turned back.

The Friar had floated higher, into the window, where the last grey light shone straight through him and made him look hardly there at all.

‘You said you saw Him,’ he said. ‘In the Chamber. As if you’d found Him, down there, by accident, at the bottom of a drain. But nobody finds Christ, young Potter. He doesn’t come and go like a wizard, popping into rooms. He was there before you went down into the Chamber. He’s here now, in this corridor, with a dead friar and a boy who’s going to be late for his pudding. All you did, down there, was notice Him. You happened to notice the way He was looking at you.’

Harry didn’t move.

‘And that pride you saw.’ The Friar’s voice was very gentle. ‘Nobody was surprised by you down there, lad. He was watching you do exactly what He had always known you could. You’ll make a hash of things now and then, like the rest of us, but that won’t change the way He looks at you.’ He smiled. ‘He was proud of you, Harry Potter. You saw it yourself.’

Harry didn’t trust himself to speak.

He had wanted somebody to look at him like that for as long as he could remember. He had searched for it in the photograph album Hagrid had given him, in his father’s face, in the wedding picture, turning the pages so often that the corners had gone dog-eared. He had looked for it in Wood’s face after a good catch, and in Lupin’s. Nobody ever had, until the man in white in the Chamber.

‘Go on,’ said the Friar kindly. ‘Your friends are getting cold. The tall one’s been reading that portrait for a quarter of an hour, and it’s a portrait of a dog.’

Harry went.

Ron and Hermione fell into step on either side of him at the corner without asking him anything, which was the best thing they could possibly have done. They went along to the Great Hall together in the crowd. Harry ate his dinner, talked about Quidditch with Ron and listened to Hermione explain, at great length, why Divination was not a proper branch of magic. He didn’t turn into a Christian over the shepherd’s pie. He wasn’t at all sure that was how it worked.

All the same, halfway through his treacle tart, he looked down the long tables at the hundreds of candles floating under the enchanted ceiling, and wondered who had lit the very first one.

*

The Easter holidays turned out to be anything but a rest. No third year had ever been set so much homework, and Neville Longbottom spent most of the fortnight looking as if he were about to burst into tears. He wasn’t the only one.

‘Call this a holiday!’ Seamus Finnigan bellowed at the whole common room one afternoon. ‘The exams are ages away, what’re they playing at?’

Hermione had it worst of all. Even with Divination gone, she still had more subjects than anybody else in the year. She was always the last person up at night, hunched over her books by the dying fire, and in the morning she was at the library door before Madam Pince had lit the lamps. She had developed shadows under her eyes like Lupin’s, and she looked as though a single unkind word would reduce her to tears.

Ron had noticed all of this. For Hermione’s sake he’d taken over Buckbeak’s appeal. Whenever he could get away from his own essays, he was buried in enormous, musty volumes such as The Handbook of Hippogriff Psychology and Fowl or Foul? A Study of Hippogriff Brutality. He was so caught up in them that he forgot to glare at Crookshanks.

Getting hold of the books had been a struggle in the first place.

‘Somebody’s got them,’ he told Harry furiously, on the first Monday of the holidays, slamming a library slip down on the common room table. ‘Both of them. And the Annotated Guide to the Grounds, the old one with the map of the Forest edge in the back, Pince says. Out since the week before last, on the same ticket. Guess who.’

Harry didn’t need to guess. Ron’s face said it for him.

‘She’s hiding them,’ said Ron. ‘That’s what she’s doing. Sitting on every book in the library about hippogriffs, so we can’t use them for the appeal. Her and her dad. They’re not happy with killing him, they want to make sure nobody can even argue...’

Harry didn’t say anything. He was remembering a girl on the castle steps, with blood on the lace at her wrist, promising to put everything right. He couldn’t see how hoarding library books would put anything right.

‘Maybe she’s reading them,’ he said.

Ron gave him the sort of look he might have given Harry if he had suggested that Snape was taking up ballet.

The books turned up again the following Monday, all three of them, stacked neatly on the end of Madam Pince’s desk before anybody else was awake. Ron pounced on them with a whoop. Somebody had left a thin green ribbon in the Handbook, and Harry noticed, though Ron didn’t, that the page it marked had been thumbed so often that the corner had gone soft. It was the opening page of a chapter called Approaching the Unfamiliar Hippogriff: Courtesy, Distance and the Low Bow.

‘She’s been looking up how to get it to attack people,’ said Ron darkly, tugging the ribbon out and dropping it on the floor. ‘Typical.’

Without quite knowing why, Harry picked up the ribbon and slipped it into his pocket. That night he tucked it into the back of The Lord of the Rings, next to the first one. He was getting pretty far in and needed an extra bookmark.

*

Meanwhile, Harry had Quidditch practice every single day, with Wood lecturing him about tactics in between, so his homework had to be squeezed in wherever it would fit. The final against Slytherin was fixed for the first Saturday after the holidays. Slytherin were top of the table, two hundred points clear of Gryffindor, so Gryffindor would have to beat them by more than two hundred to win the Cup. Wood kept pointing out that this left a good deal of it up to Harry, because a caught Snitch was worth a hundred and fifty points.

‘So you must catch it only if we’re more than fifty points up,’ Wood told Harry, morning, noon and night. ‘Only if we’re more than fifty points up, Harry, or we win the match but lose the Cup. You’ve got that, haven’t you? You must catch the Snitch only if we’re-’

‘I KNOW, OLIVER!’ Harry yelled.

Gryffindor House could talk about nothing else. They hadn’t won the Cup for seven years, not since Ron’s brother Charlie had been Seeker, and people in the common room still spoke of Charlie as though he had been a minor saint. Somebody had stuck a paper lion in the empty space in the trophy cabinet, where everybody could see it. Still, Harry doubted whether anybody in the House, not even Wood, was as desperate for this win as he was.

Malfoy was part of it. Harry hadn’t forgotten the hooded figures at the Ravenclaw match. He had forgiven her for those, or at least he was trying to, but a small, mean part of him still longed to beat her fair and square, just once, with the whole school watching.

Mostly, though, it was the rest of them: Flint, Montague and the entire Slytherin table, who had drummed their goblets on the wood on Monday morning when the news about Buckbeak got round. Above all, it was a man in a fur-lined cloak who had stood up before a roomful of doddery old wizards to say his bit, after which the Committee had done just as he told them. Harry couldn’t touch Lucius Malfoy, nor the Committee either. What he could do was take the Quidditch Cup away from Lucius Malfoy’s old House with the whole school looking on, and he wanted that more than he had ever wanted anything.

As far as the rest of the castle could tell, the feud between Harry and Malfoy had never been worse.

That was what Harry found so odd. Ever since the fight on the steps, Malfoy had been nastier to him in public than ever before. She sneered at him in the Entrance Hall, loudly enough for every Slytherin within earshot to hear. She told anyone who would listen that his Firebolt was a vulgar toy that would fall to pieces in a stiff breeze. She was still, according to everybody, livid about the mud in Hogsmeade, and even angrier that Potter had wriggled out of being punished for it. When Harry passed her on the second-floor landing with half the team round him, she curled her lip so far that Seamus claimed afterwards he could count her back teeth.

But when nobody else was looking, she never looked at him like that.

Harry had started to notice, without meaning to. In the library she sat with her back to him and never turned round. When he met her on the stairs without Crabbe and Goyle, her face gave nothing away. One evening, as he was walking back from practice behind Katie and Alicia, who were arguing about Chaser formations, he passed an empty classroom on the ground floor. The door was open a crack. Malfoy was inside on her own, standing in front of a suit of armour that somebody had dragged in from the corridor, and while Harry watched, she bowed to it.

It was a long, slow bow from the waist, nothing like a curtsey. All the while she kept her eyes wide open, fixed on the armour’s visor, without blinking once. She held it for a slow count of ten. Then she straightened up, took one step forward and bowed again.

Harry walked on before she could spot him. He supposed it was some sort of pure-blood etiquette lesson; perhaps the Malfoys were holding a ball at Easter, and she would have to bow to the Minister for Magic. All the same, it gave him a funny feeling he couldn’t explain, though he had forgotten about it by dinner time.

*

On Easter Sunday, Harry woke to find an egg on his pillow.

It was a chocolate egg the size of a Quaffle, wrapped in green tissue paper that crackled as he picked it up. Harry had never been given an Easter egg in his life. Dudley had always got nine or ten, but this one was nothing like Dudley’s. The chocolate was very dark, with a thin gold line round its middle where the two halves joined. Somebody had painted a golden Snitch on one side, with tiny careful strokes of a brush. On the other side, in letters so small that Harry had to hold the egg up to the window, was a message in white icing:

I made it myself. Truly. D.

Harry sat in bed holding it, not sure how he felt. He remembered a thin box pushed into his hands in the rain on the first night of term, with twelve violets inside, each one finished by hand, each a little different from the rest. He wondered how on earth she had got the egg up here without anybody seeing. Then Ron sat up in the next bed, caught sight of it and said, ‘Blimey,’ in a voice of deep respect.

Taking it down to breakfast was a mistake.

Hermione spotted it the moment they sat down and went rigid. She looked from the egg to the green tissue paper to the little painted Snitch. Very slowly, she turned her head to look along the Hall towards the Slytherin table.

‘Where did you get that?’

‘It was on my bed,’ said Harry.

‘On your bed. In the boys’ dormitory. In a guarded tower.’ Hermione put down her toast. ‘Harry, you don’t know where it’s been. You don’t know what’s in it. Don’t you remember what happened with the Firebolt? Things don’t just appear on people’s beds, not with Sirius Black on the loose. It could be cursed. It could be anything. Give it to me, I’ll take it to Professor McGonagall straight after-’

‘No,’ said Harry.

Hermione blinked. ‘What?’

‘No,’ said Harry again. He hadn’t known he was going to say it until he did. ‘It’s an egg, Hermione. It’s chocolate. Black isn’t sending me chocolate eggs with D on them.’

‘That’s exactly what somebody would want you to think...’

Hermione whipped out her wand regardless and tried three different revealing charms on the egg, one after another, while half the Gryffindor table looked on with interest. Nothing happened. The egg went on sitting there on its tissue paper, looking innocent and extremely delicious.

‘Right,’ said Ron. He leant across, snapped off a piece and stuffed it into his mouth before anybody could stop him. He chewed with his eyes shut. ‘If I die,’ he said thickly, ‘tell Mum it was worth it.’

He didn’t die.

‘Corr, that’s absolutely divine. Harry, you’ve got to try some.’ Ron said as if he just touched the heavens.

Harry broke off a piece for himself, and it was the best thing he had ever tasted.

Over at the Slytherin table, Malfoy was sitting bolt upright with an untouched plate in front of her. The moment he looked up, Harry knew that she had been watching him all through breakfast, as still as a cat beside a mouse hole. As he bit into the chocolate, she went pink to the roots of her hair. Then she looked down, snatched up her fork and began cutting her bacon into very small, very neat squares.

Hermione had noticed too; Harry saw her notice. Without a word, she picked up her plate, walked round to the other side of the table and sat down directly opposite him, so that her bushy head blocked out the Slytherin table completely.

‘I’ve made you something too,’ she said brightly, and pushed a roll of parchment across the table at him.

It was a colour-coded revision timetable covering every hour of every day from now until the exams in June. The only gaps were the Quidditch practices, marked in red with the note Wood, unavoidable. Looking more closely, Harry saw that a great many of the free hours had been filled in, in tiny neat handwriting, with the words Library, H.G.

‘So you won’t fall behind,’ said Hermione. ‘We can do it together. Every evening. I’ve worked it all out.’

‘Er,’ said Harry. ‘Thanks, Hermione.’

Ron, who was reading the timetable upside down, made a noise like a slow puncture. When Harry glanced at him, he was gazing up at the enchanted ceiling with the expression of a man who has spotted two Hungarian Horntails eyeing each other across a field, only to realise that he is standing right in between them.

*

By the end of the holidays, feelings between Gryffindor and Slytherin was running higher than anybody could remember before a match. Fights kept breaking out in the corridors. The worst of them left a fourth-year Gryffindor and a sixth-year Slytherin in neighbouring beds in the hospital wing, each with a bunch of leeks growing out of his ears. Dean was talking about football hooligan tactics. In case the stands turned into a battlefield.

Harry got more of it than anybody. He could hardly go to a lesson without some Slytherin sticking out a foot to trip him. Wherever he went, Crabbe and Goyle seemed to lurk nearby, slouching off with disappointed faces whenever they saw how many Gryffindors were with him. Wood had ordered that Harry should never be left alone, for fear the Slytherins would try to injure him before Saturday. Everywhere Wood went, he carried a beater bat Harry was sure he nicked straight out of the Quidditch supply closet. Wood looked like he was looking for an excuse to use it on a Slytherin. The entire House threw itself into the job so happily that Harry was late for everything, because he could never get anywhere through the crowd that went with him.

The twins took a turn on the escort now and then, chattering all the way.

‘Saw your girlfriend coming up out of the kitchens last night,’ George told him on the Tuesday, quite casually, as they walked him to Transfiguration. ‘On her own. Carrying a parcel.’

‘She’s not my-’

‘Smelt worse than Ron’s socks,’ said Fred. ‘The parcel, not her. Her, she smelt lovely, like a flower shop. I’ve got a theory.’

‘He’s got a theory,’ said George.

‘My theory is that she’s bribing the house-elves,’ said Fred. ‘With something dead. Probably wants them to spit in our porridge before the match. You want to watch what you eat, Harry.’

Harry promised he would. It never occurred to him to wonder what sort of dead thing might have been in the parcel, or who it was really meant for, which was a great pity.

He was far more anxious about his Firebolt than about his own neck. He kept it locked in his trunk whenever he wasn’t on it, and between lessons he kept dashing back up to the tower to make sure it hadn’t been stolen.

*

On the eve of the match, nobody in Gryffindor Tower even pretended to work. Hermione herself had put her books away.

‘I can’t work, I can’t concentrate,’ she said nervously.

The common room was deafening. People were still in awe of Ron for punching Sirius Black in the face. And asked him for advice if any Slytherin tried to take liberties. Fred and George were coping with their nerves by making more noise than everybody else put together. Oliver Wood sat hunched in a corner over a little model of the pitch, muttering as he pushed tiny players about with the tip of his wand. Fred’s jokes kept Angelina, Alicia and Katie in fits of laughter. Harry sat a little apart with Ron and Hermione, trying very hard not to think about the morning, because whenever he did, his insides seemed to turn over.

‘You’re going to be fine,’ said Hermione, who looked terrified herself.

‘You’ve got a Firebolt!’ said Ron.

‘Yeah...’ said Harry. His stomach squirmed.

It was a relief when Wood suddenly leapt to his feet.

‘Team! Bed!’

Harry had a bad night.

In his first dream he had overslept, with Wood bellowing at him, ‘Where were you? We had to use Neville instead!’ In the next, Slytherin flew out on to the pitch mounted on dragons instead of brooms. Malfoy’s was the largest, a long, glittering silver-green brute with a face like the statue in the Chamber of Secrets, and she sat on its neck jeering at him because he had no dragon to ride. Harry was racing along flat out, trying to dodge a gout of flame, when he noticed that his Firebolt had vanished from under him. All he had left was a sword, long and bright, with it’s blade on fire. He plummeted, and woke with a jerk.

For a few seconds he didn’t know where he was. Then he remembered that the match was still to come. He was lying safe in his four-poster, and Madam Hooch would never in a million years let anybody play on a dragon.

His mouth was dry. He crept out of bed, trying not to wake anybody, and poured himself a goblet of water from the silver jug under the window.

Outside, the grounds lay silent. Not a breath of wind moved the trees of the Forbidden Forest, and even the Whomping Willow stood still, looking as harmless as a willow ever could. It was going to be perfect weather for a match.

Harry set down the goblet. He had half turned back towards his bed when a movement outside caught his eye.

An animal was creeping across the moonlit lawn.

Harry snatched his glasses off the bedside table, rammed them on and was back at the window in a flash. Please not the Grim-not now-not the night before the match-

He pressed his nose against the glass. It took him a frantic minute to find it again, slinking along the edge of the trees now... Then he saw that it was only a cat...

Weak with relief, Harry gripped the windowsill. He would have known that bottlebrush tail anywhere. It was only Crookshanks...

But was it only Crookshanks?

Harry narrowed his eyes, squashing his nose flat. Crookshanks had stopped, and Harry was almost certain he could make out something else, moving among the shadows under the trees.

Then it came out into the moonlight: an enormous, shaggy black dog, padding silently across the lawn, with Crookshanks trotting at its side like an old friend.

Harry gaped. What could it mean? If the cat could see it too, surely it couldn’t be a death omen meant for Harry?

‘Ron!’ Harry hissed. ‘Ron! Wake up!’

‘Huh?’

‘I need you to tell me if you can see something!’

‘S’all dark, Harry,’ Ron muttered thickly. ‘What’re you on about?’

‘Down here-’

Harry spun back to the window. The cat and the dog were nowhere to be seen. He climbed on to the sill and pressed his face to the glass to see right down to the foot of the castle walls, but the shadows there were empty. Where had they gone?

From the next bed came a long, contented snore.

*

When the team came into the Great Hall next morning, the clapping was so loud that Harry’s ears rang. He couldn’t keep a grin off his face, because Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff were applauding too. From the Slytherins came a long, nasty hiss.

Malfoy, Harry noticed, was even whiter than usual.

She wasn’t joining in. The Slytherins round her were jeering, yelling what they would do to Wood and pretending to swoon whenever Harry glanced at them, but Malfoy sat in the middle of them with her head down, writing. She was scribbling furiously on a sheet of parchment, scratching things out and starting again. As Harry went past the end of the Slytherin table, he caught sight of it. It looked like some sort of plan, with a rough square, a long curving line, a row of short strokes like the teeth of a comb, a cross with a ring round it and dozens of arrows.

Tactics, thought Harry. She’s working out how to stop me. A month ago it would have bothered him much more than it did now.

Wood spent the whole meal pleading with them to eat, though he didn’t swallow a mouthful himself. Long before anybody else had finished, he chivvied them out of the Hall to go and test the conditions on the pitch. Everybody clapped them out.

‘Good luck, Harry!’ called Cho.

Harry felt his face go hot.

That was the one thing all morning that made Malfoy raise her eyes from her parchment. She turned her head and looked at Cho Chang for a long moment, with no expression at all, the way you might look at a spider in the bath. The quill in her hand snapped in two. Across the Hall at the Gryffindor table, Hermione had gone stiff in her seat, her lips moving very fast without a sound, as though she were reciting a list.

Neither of them noticed the other, because they were both much too busy with Cho.

Ron noticed both of them. He sat with a sausage halfway to his mouth, wondering whether to feel glad that they weren’t trying to kill each other for once, or frightened about what was going to happen to Cho Chang.

After some thought, he decided to be frightened.

*

‘OK, lads. No wind to speak of. Sun’s a bit bright, that could impair your vision, watch out for it, ground’s fairly hard, good, that’ll give us a fast kick-off-’

Wood strode up and down the empty pitch, peering about him, while the rest of the team straggled along at his heels. At last they saw the doors of the castle open far away, and a stream of tiny figures began pouring down the lawn.

‘Changing rooms,’ said Wood tersely.

Nobody spoke while they pulled on their scarlet robes. Harry wondered whether everybody else felt as he did, as though he had swallowed something at breakfast that was still alive. It seemed only seconds before Wood was saying, ‘OK, it’s time, let’s go-’

The noise hit them like a gale as they walked out on to the pitch.

Nearly every seat in the stands was scarlet. Gryffindor lions roared from every flag and scarf. There were banners painted with LIONS FOR THE CUP! or GO GRYFFINDOR! Only behind the Slytherin goalposts was there a solid block of green, two hundred strong, with silver serpents glinting on their flags. Snape sat at the very front, dressed in green like the rest, wearing a thin and unpleasant smile. Crabbe and Goyle sat just behind him. They weren’t looking at the Gryffindors at all; they were both watching Malfoy.

‘And here are the Gryffindors!’ yelled Lee Jordan, who was commentating as usual. ‘Potter, Bell, Johnson, Spinnet, Weasley, Weasley and Wood. Widely acknowledged as the best team Hogwarts has seen in a good few years-’

Whatever he said next was lost in a storm of boos from behind the green goalposts.

‘And here come the Slytherin team, led by Captain Flint. He’s made some changes in the line-up and seems to be going for size rather than skill-’

The Slytherins booed again, but Harry secretly agreed with Lee. Every one of Malfoy’s team-mates was built like a wardrobe, which made her look tiny.

‘Captains, shake hands!’ said Madam Hooch.

Flint and Wood marched up to each other to shake hands, each plainly hoping to crush the other’s knuckles to powder.

‘Mount your brooms!’ said Madam Hooch. ‘Three... two... one...’

Her whistle was drowned out as fourteen brooms leapt into the air. The rush of wind flung Harry’s fringe back, and as soon as his feet left the ground, his nerves disappeared. Glancing over his shoulder, he found Malfoy close behind him. Then he sped away in search of the Snitch.

He had hardly gone fifty feet when the singing began.

It was Dean, naturally. Harry could see him on his feet at the front of the Gryffindor stand, waving his arms like a conductor, while the whole stand roared out the song from the year before. Dean had obviously decided that last year’s threat to take fifty points off them had worn off over the summer.

‘And they’re singing I’m a slimy snake, I’ve got no balls,

I’m a slimy snake I’ve got no balls...’

As Harry swooped over the Gryffindor stand, he saw Professor McGonagall’s mouth go thin in the commentators’ box. But before she could get hold of the megaphone, the Slytherins started singing back.

There was no shouting. They had clearly practised. They sang it slowly, swaying from side to side with their hands pressed to their hearts, as though they were at a funeral:

‘Potter, Potter, off he goes,

Down like a sack when the cold wind blows,

Where’s his mummy? Where’s his dad?

Dead in a ditch, and isn’t that sad!’

Then every one of them flopped sideways on to the benches at once, pretending to faint.

The Gryffindor stand exploded. Over all the rest, Harry could hear Seamus bawling something that would have earned him a month of detentions if Professor McGonagall had caught it. The Hufflepuffs were booing, and even the Ravenclaws, who usually stayed out of things, were on their feet shouting at the Slytherins. Lee Jordan had turned purple in the commentators’ box; Professor McGonagall had both hands clamped round the megaphone to stop him using it.

Harry kept on flying with his face perfectly still. He had been called worse names by people who meant them a lot more. All the same, he was not going to let the Slytherins see how far that one had gone in.

Malfoy drew level with him.

For a few seconds the two of them flew side by side, high above the pitch, with the singing drifting up from below. Harry glanced across, waiting for her to sneer.

She didn’t. Her face had gone a dark, dull red. She was staring down at her own House pretending to faint, with the same look she had worn on the path to the pitch in the rain, on the day she had threatened her own team with her father. She opened her mouth and took a breath, as though she were about to say something.

Then she closed it again and wheeled away from him without a word.

Harry stared after her. Was it all an act? Had all that sneering in the Entrance Hall, all the poison she had poured on him in front of everybody, been put on for Crabbe and Goyle, sitting behind Snape? Or for whoever they wrote to every week?

He didn’t have time to wonder any more.

‘And it’s Gryffindor in possession, Alicia Spinnet of Gryffindor with the Quaffle, heading straight for the Slytherin goalposts, looking good, Alicia! Argh, no-Quaffle intercepted by Warrington, Warrington of Slytherin tearing up the field-WHAM!-nice Bludger work there by George Weasley, Warrington drops the Quaffle, it’s caught by-Johnson, Gryffindor back in possession, come on, Angelina-nice swerve around Montague-duck, Angelina, that’s a Bludger!-SHE SCORES! TEN-ZERO TO GRYFFINDOR!’

Angelina flung up a fist as she swooped round the far end of the pitch. Below her, the scarlet stands went wild-

‘OUCH!’

Marcus Flint had slammed into Angelina so hard that he nearly knocked her off her broom.

‘Sorry!’ Flint called, over a storm of booing. ‘Sorry, didn’t see her!’

Next moment Fred Weasley’s club came spinning through the air and cracked Flint on the back of the skull. Flint’s face hit his broomstick, and his nose began to pour with blood.

‘That will do!’ Madam Hooch screamed, darting in between them. ‘Penalty shot to Gryffindor for an unprovoked attack on their Chaser! Penalty shot to Slytherin for deliberate damage to their Chaser!’

‘Come off it, Miss!’ Fred bellowed. Madam Hooch only blew her whistle again. Alicia moved up to take Gryffindor’s shot.

‘Come on, Alicia!’ yelled Lee into the hush that had fallen over the crowd. ‘YES! SHE’S BEATEN THE KEEPER! TWENTY-ZERO TO GRYFFINDOR!’

Harry wheeled round to see Flint, his robes spattered with blood, line up for Slytherin’s penalty. Wood hung in the air in front of his hoops with his jaw set like a trap.

‘’Course, Wood’s a superb Keeper!’ Lee told everybody, while Flint waited on the whistle. ‘Superb! Very difficult to pass-very difficult indeed-YES! I DON’T BELIEVE IT! HE’S SAVED IT!’

With a rush of relief, Harry raced off to hunt for the Snitch, though he kept one ear on Lee. Whatever happened, he had to keep Malfoy away from the Snitch until Gryffindor were more than fifty points ahead.

‘Gryffindor in possession, no, Slytherin in possession-no!-Gryffindor back in possession and it’s Katie Bell, Katie Bell for Gryffindor with the Quaffle, she’s streaking up the field-THAT WAS DELIBERATE!’

Montague, one of the Slytherin Chasers, had cut across in front of Katie and made a grab for her head instead of the ball. Katie spun head over heels in mid-air. She clung on to her broom somehow, but the Quaffle tumbled out of her arms. There was another blast on Madam Hooch’s whistle as she swooped on Montague and gave him a furious telling-off. A minute afterwards, Katie sent the penalty sailing past the Slytherin Keeper.

‘THIRTY-ZERO! TAKE THAT, YOU DIRTY, CHEATING-’

‘Jordan, if you can’t commentate in an unbiased way-!’

‘I’m telling it like it is, Professor!’

Harry’s heart leapt. There was the Snitch, a tiny glint of gold, hovering low beside one of the Gryffindor goalposts. But he mustn’t touch it yet. If Malfoy saw it...

He put on a look of sudden, ferocious concentration, swung the Firebolt round and tore off in the other direction, towards the Slytherin hoops. It worked: Malfoy came hurtling after him, obviously sure he had seen the Snitch at that end. She was a fraction late in following him, though, as if something had caught her eye first. If she had glanced at the foot of the Gryffindor goalposts before she turned, Harry was much too busy to notice.

WHOOSH.

A Bludger whizzed past Harry’s right ear, sent by Derrick, the gigantic Slytherin Beater. Then another-

WHOOSH.

The second one grazed his elbow. Bole, the other Beater, was coming at him too, and Harry glimpsed the pair of them closing in from opposite sides with their clubs raised-

At the very last moment, he shot straight upwards. Bole and Derrick smashed into each other with a horrible crunch.

‘Ha haaa!’ Lee crowed, while the two Beaters reeled apart, clutching their heads. ‘Too bad, boys! You’ll need to get up earlier than that to beat a Firebolt! And it’s Gryffindor in possession again, as Johnson takes the Quaffle-Flint alongside her-poke him in the eye, Angelina!-it was a joke, Professor, it was a joke-oh no-Flint in possession, Flint flying towards the Gryffindor goalposts, come on now, Wood, save-!’

Too late: Flint had scored. The green end went mad with joy. Lee’s language was so shocking that Professor McGonagall made a grab for the megaphone.

‘Sorry, Professor, sorry! Won’t happen again! So, Gryffindor in the lead, thirty points to ten, and Gryffindor in possession-’

Harry had never played in such a filthy match. Gryffindor’s early lead had driven the Slytherins half mad, and now they would stop at nothing to get the ball. Bole whacked Alicia with his club, then swore he had mistaken her for a Bludger. George paid him back with an elbow across the nose. Madam Hooch gave a penalty to each side. Angelina scored Gryffindor’s; Wood pulled off another brilliant save from Slytherin’s. That made it forty-ten.

The Snitch had vanished again. Malfoy stuck to Harry’s side as he circled high above the game searching for it, and he kept reminding himself that he mustn’t catch it until Gryffindor were more than fifty points ahead.

What puzzled Harry was that he couldn’t tell whether Malfoy’s eyes were on the Snitch or on him.

Every time they swept past the Slytherin stand, she put on a show. She jeered at him, laughing high and scornfully, loud enough for the front rows to hear: ‘Is that the famous Firebolt, Potter? My grandmother had a better broom for sweeping the stables!’ She cut across his path so close that he had to swerve. The Slytherins cheered her on. But the moment they were high up out of everybody’s hearing, she went completely silent. She simply flew beside him with a set face, watching the air.

Once, when Derrick sent a Bludger at Harry out of the sun, Malfoy swerved across in front of him. It hit her on the shoulder with a thud that Harry heard from ten feet away. She swayed on her broom, white to the lips, then straightened up again without a sound. Harry decided that Derrick must have mis-hit it.

Then Katie scored, making it fifty-ten. The twins circled round her with their clubs up, ready for any Slytherin who fancied revenge, which left Wood unprotected. Bole and Derrick spotted it at once. They drove both Bludgers into his stomach, one, two, and he rolled clean over in the air, clinging to his broom with all the breath knocked out of him.

Madam Hooch was incandescent.

‘YOU DO NOT ATTACK THE KEEPER UNLESS THE QUAFFLE IS WITHIN THE SCORING AREA!’ she screamed at the pair of them. ‘Gryffindor penalty!’

Angelina put the penalty away. Sixty-ten. A few seconds later, Fred smashed a Bludger into Warrington, who dropped the Quaffle. Alicia snatched it out of the air and drove it home. Seventy-ten.

The scarlet stands were screaming themselves raw. Gryffindor were sixty points ahead, so a catch now would win the Cup. Harry could feel the entire stadium watching him as he wheeled high above the game, with Malfoy streaking along behind him.

Then he saw it.

It was glittering a little way above him, perhaps twenty feet up. Harry flattened himself on the Firebolt and sent it shooting upwards, with the air roaring past his head. His fingers reached out-then, without warning, the broom began to slow down-

Horrified, he twisted round. Malfoy had lunged forward along her broom. She had grabbed the Firebolt’s tail with both hands and was dragging him backwards.

‘You-’

Harry could have punched her. Then he saw her face.

She looked sorry, and slightly sick.

‘I’m sorry, Harry. I... my father...’

Her voice died away when she saw how he was looking at her. She let go of his broom as though it had burnt her, and she looked so ashamed that for a moment Harry forgot to be angry. Below them, just behind Snape, Crabbe and Goyle were on their feet, cheering.

What the bloody hell is she playing at? he thought irritably.

The Snitch had disappeared again.

It made Harry angrier than ever, and more determined to win. So, by the look of her, was Malfoy.

‘Penalty! Penalty to Gryffindor! I’ve never seen such tactics!’ Madam Hooch was shrieking, as she zoomed up towards Malfoy, who was scrambling back into her seat on her Nimbus Two Thousand and One.

‘YOU CHEATING SCUM!’ Lee was bawling, ducking and weaving to keep the megaphone away from Professor McGonagall. ‘YOU FILTHY, CHEATING BIT-’

For once, McGonagall didn’t tell him off. She had lost her hat. She was on her feet, stabbing a furious finger in Malfoy’s direction, yelling every bit as loudly as Lee. With several Gaelic curse words that would’ve no doubt sounded very foul if either Harry or Dracina knew Gaelic.

Alicia was so furious when she took the penalty that it went yards wide. The Gryffindors were losing their heads; the Slytherins, thrilled by their Seeker’s foul, came at them harder than ever.

‘Slytherin in possession, Slytherin heading for goal-Montague scores-’ Lee groaned. ‘Seventy-twenty to Gryffindor...’

From then on, Malfoy flew as though she would rather die than lose.

Harry was marking her now so tightly that their knees kept bumping. He wasn’t going to let her get anywhere near the Snitch.

‘Get out of it, Potter!’ Malfoy yelled, wrenching her broom round only to find him in her way again.

She yelled it very loudly indeed. At that moment, they happened to be right over the Slytherin stand.

‘Angelina Johnson gets the Quaffle for Gryffindor, come on, Angelina, COME ON!’

Harry looked round. Every single Slytherin except Malfoy, even their Keeper, was charging up the pitch at Angelina to cut her off-

Harry spun the Firebolt round and threw himself flat along the handle. He hurtled at the Slytherins like a cannonball.

‘AAAAAAARRRGH!’

The Slytherins flew apart like skittles, leaving Angelina a clear path to the hoops.

‘SHE SCORES! SHE SCORES! Gryffindor leads by eighty points to twenty!’

Harry, who had come within a whisker of crashing into the stands, braked hard, swung round and raced back to the centre of the pitch.

Then he saw something that made his heart stop.

Malfoy was diving, with triumph all over her face. Just above the grass, at the bottom of her dive, a speck of gold was winking-

Harry sent the Firebolt plunging after her, but she had far too great a start-

‘Go! Go! Go!’ Harry urged his broom.

He was gaining on her. He ducked flat as a Bludger from Bole whined over his head. He was at her ankles. He was level with her-

Harry hurled himself forward, letting go of his broom with both hands, and struck Malfoy’s arm aside-

‘YES!’

He swooped up out of the dive with his fist held high, and the noise from the stands was like a bomb going off.

Harry rose above the crowd with a high, strange singing in his ears, while the little golden ball fluttered its wings helplessly against his fingers. Wood got to him first, crying so hard he could barely see where he was going. He flung an arm round Harry’s neck and sobbed into his shoulder. Two heavy thumps told Harry that Fred and George had arrived, then came the girls’ voices, all three at once: ‘We’ve won the Cup! We’ve won the Cup!’ Clinging to one another in a great tangle of arms, the whole team drifted down to the grass, shouting themselves hoarse.

Gryffindors were pouring over the barriers in their hundreds. People were slapping their backs. Harry was dimly aware of the din, and of being squashed from every side. Then he was up in the air, with the rest of the team, riding on the shoulders of the crowd. From up there in the sunshine he caught sight of Hagrid, covered from head to foot in scarlet rosettes.

‘Yeh beat ’em, Harry, yeh beat ’em! Wait till I tell Buckbeak!’

Percy was leaping about like a boy half his age, every scrap of his dignity gone. Professor McGonagall was crying harder than Wood, dabbing at her eyes with a Gryffindor flag the size of a bedsheet. Ron and Hermione were shoving their way through the crush to reach him, though when they got there neither of them could say a word. They just stood there beaming up at him as he was carried off towards the stands, where Dumbledore was waiting with the great silver Quidditch Cup.

What a pity, Harry thought, that there wasn’t a dementor anywhere about...

As Wood, still weeping, put the Cup into his hands, and squeezed Harry’s shoulder as Harry raised the cup high over his head, he felt he could have conjured the greatest Patronus there had ever been.

Then he looked down.

The Slytherin team were standing in a sullen knot at the edge of the pitch with their brooms over their shoulders, while the scarlet tide flowed round them. Flint was spitting on the grass. Montague was kicking the turf. Bole and Derrick scowled up at the Cup, then at Harry, with exactly the sour hatred he would have expected.

Malfoy stood a little way off from the rest of them, her broom dangling from one hand. Her green robes were torn at the shoulder where Derrick’s Bludger had hit her. Harry was expecting her to look just as sullen as the rest of Slytherin. But she didn’t. She was looking up at Harry, at the Cup over his head, with Wood still sobbing in his ear, and her face was shining. She looked proud of him, as if she had always known he would do it.

Harry had only ever been looked at like that once before, by a man standing beside a fallen pillar in the Chamber of Secrets.

All at once, like somebody getting a joke a day late, Harry saw it.

She had been slow to follow his feint because she had already spotted the Snitch by the Gryffindor goalposts, but she had followed him anyway. That Bludger had been meant for him, and she had let him think it was an accident. The shouting had only ever happened over the Slytherin stand. The grab at his broom had been for Crabbe and Goyle’s benefit, because a girl with a father like hers could not be seen to lose without a fight. Afterwards she had said sorry. As for the dive, she had waited until Gryffindor were sixty points clear, when a catch would win them the Cup, then gone down where Harry couldn’t possibly miss her. Now that he came to think of it, she had held her arm out a little too wide and a little too loosely, as if she wanted it knocked out of the way.

It had all been an act. She had wanted him to win, as her way of saying sorry.

Harry held the Cup above the roaring crowd and looked down at her. He realised that he wasn’t angry with her any more.

It was almost, he thought, as though Malfoy had been his friend all along. She simply wasn’t free to say so, not with her father’s orders and expectations hanging over her. Imprisoning her.

On the edge of the pitch, so slightly that nobody else in the whole stadium could have noticed, Dracina Malfoy smiled.