The Ending Has Not Yet Been Written.

‘Shocking business... shocking... miracle none of them died... never heard the like... Merlin’s beard, it was lucky you were there, Mr Snape...’

‘Thank you, Minister.’

‘Order of Merlin, Second Class, I’d say. First Class, if I can wangle it!’

‘Thank you very much indeed, Minister.’

‘Nasty cut you’ve got there... Black’s work, I suppose?’

‘As a matter of fact, it was Potter, Weasley, and Granger, Minister...’

‘No!’

‘Black had bewitched them, I saw it immediately. A Confundus Charm, to judge by their behaviour. They seemed to think there was a possibility he was innocent. They weren’t responsible for their actions. On the other hand, their interference might have permitted Black to escape... They obviously thought they were going to catch Black single-handed. They’ve got away with a great deal before now... I’m afraid it’s given them a rather high opinion of themselves... and of course Potter has always been allowed an extraordinary amount of licence by the headmaster-’

‘Ah, well, Mr Snape... Harry Potter, you know... we’ve all got a bit of a blind spot where he’s concerned.’

‘And yet, is it good for him to be given so much special treatment? Personally, I try and treat him like any other student. And any other student would be suspended, at the very least, for leading his friends into such danger. Consider, Minister: against all school rules, after all the precautions put in place for his protection, out of bounds, at night, consorting with a werewolf and a murderer, and I have reason to believe he has been visiting Hogsmeade illegally too-’

‘Well, well... we shall see, Snape, we shall see... The boy has undoubtedly been foolish...’

Harry lay with his eyes screwed shut and listened. His head felt as though somebody had stuffed it with damp cotton wool. Every word took a long time to get from his ears to the part of him that understood things, like a letter sent by an ancient owl. His arms and legs had turned to lead. His eyelids were much too heavy to lift. He would have been quite content to lie in this soft, warm bed until he was a hundred.

‘What amazes me most is the behaviour of the dementors... you’ve really no idea what made them retreat, Snape?’

‘No, Minister... by the time I had come round they were heading back to their positions at the entrances...’

‘Extraordinary. And yet Black, and Harry, and the girl-’

‘All unconscious by the time I reached them. I bound and gagged Black, naturally, conjured stretchers, and brought them all straight back to the castle.’

Nobody said anything for a moment.

The cotton wool was thinning. As it went, something cold began to gnaw at the bottom of Harry’s stomach. I bound and gagged Black, naturally.

His eyes flew open.

He was wide awake at once. Everything was a blur, because somebody had taken off his glasses. He was in the hospital wing, and it was dark. Right at the far end of the ward, Madam Pomfrey was bending over a bed with her back to him. Harry screwed up his eyes. Under her elbow he could just make out a shock of red hair.

He turned his head on the pillow.

Hermione was in the next bed. A bar of moonlight lay across her blankets. Her eyes were open as well. She looked terrified. Harry had the odd feeling that she had been lying there watching him for some time. When she saw that he was awake, she laid a finger on her lips. Then she pointed at the door of the ward.

It was standing a few inches open. The voices were coming through the gap, from the corridor outside. One was Cornelius Fudge’s. The other was Snape’s.

Madam Pomfrey had straightened up. She came bustling back down the dark ward towards him, carrying a slab of chocolate so big that Harry thought at first it was a paving stone.

‘Ah, you’re awake!’ she said briskly.

She set the chocolate down beside him and started breaking it up with a small silver hammer.

‘How’s Ron?’ said Harry and Hermione together.

‘He’ll live,’ said Madam Pomfrey grimly. ‘As for you two... you’ll be staying here until I’m satisfied you’re- Potter, what do you think you’re doing?’

Harry had got out of bed. He hadn’t decided to. His body seemed to have done it for him. Somewhere upstairs, a man who had never been given a trial was waiting to have his soul sucked out of him, and Harry was the only person in the castle who could explain why that was wrong.

‘Thought I might stretch my legs and walk to the Headmaster’s office.’

His glasses were lying folded on the bedside table, next to the chocolate. Somebody had mended the cracked lens. Harry put them on. Then he reached for his wand. He was still wearing his torn robes; Madam Pomfrey seemed to have put him to bed in them. His left arm was bandaged from the wrist to well above the elbow. There was another bandage round his leg, under the torn trouser. His ribs only ached; Madam Pomfrey must have mended them. The claw marks were another matter. Whatever she had put on them, they hadn’t closed, and when he moved his arm a slow, hot ache went up it, so that he winced.

‘I need to see the headmaster,’ he said.

‘Potter,’ said Madam Pomfrey soothingly, ‘it’s all right. They’ve got Black. He’s locked away upstairs. The dementors will be performing the kiss any moment now-’

‘Bloody wizards...’

He was moaning. Hermione had jumped out of bed too. His shout had carried, though. The next second, the door of the ward swung open, and Cornelius Fudge came hurrying in, with Snape at his heels.

‘Harry, Harry, what’s this?’ said Fudge, looking agitated. ‘You should be in bed. Has he had any chocolate?’ he asked Madam Pomfrey anxiously.

Harry made himself take a deep breath.

He had done this before, on the terrace, only that morning. Fudge was a man who liked to be liked. You simply had to tell him how marvellous he was, and then wait for him to agree.

‘Minister,’ he said. He tried to make his voice sound grateful, which was hard, because what it wanted to do was shout. ‘I’m so glad it’s you. Honestly I am. If it were anybody else in charge, I’d be worried. But everybody says you’re fair. You don’t let people push you about. Even Snape says it.’

Snape’s eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch. Fudge didn’t notice. He had turned rather pink.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Well, well. One tries, Harry. One does try.’

‘Where is he, Minister? Black, I mean. Is he...’ Harry hunted for a word Fudge would like. ‘Is he secure?’

‘Oh, perfectly secure, my boy, perfectly. Locked up tight in Professor Flitwick’s office, on the seventh floor. Dumbledore’s with him now, I believe. Macnair’s gone down to fetch the... ah...’ Fudge glanced at Madam Pomfrey and lowered his voice. ‘The dementors. Nothing for you to worry about. Nothing at all.’

‘Only, I was thinking,’ said Harry. He made himself smile. ‘You’re so good at being fair, Minister. Wouldn’t it be even fairer if he had a trial first? He never had one, you know. Not ever. He was in Azkaban for twelve years, and nobody asked him a single question.’

Fudge’s smile slipped.

‘Harry, Harry. My dear boy. Black was... well, perhaps not tried, as such, not in the strict sense, but there was never any question... thirteen people, Harry, in broad daylight... The Kiss has been authorised. It’s all been signed.’ He spread his hands helplessly. ‘My hands are tied, I’m afraid. Quite tied.’

Harry’s temper went off like a dropped cauldron.

‘Your hands are tied,’ he said. ‘Right. Well, that’s all right, then. I’ll tell Sirius that, shall I, while they’re sucking out his soul? Sorry, Sirius, the Minister would love to help, only his hands are tied.’ He heard his own voice rising. He didn’t care. ‘Maybe somebody could untie them for you, Minister. I could lend you a knife. Sirius has got one.’

There was a short, shocked silence.

‘You see, Minister?’ said Snape softly. He had come to stand at Fudge’s shoulder, and he was looking at Harry the way a man looks at a ripe plum he is about to pick. ‘You see? Calling the man by his first name. Defending him. Offering us weapons. Confunded. Thoroughly, deeply confunded. Black has done a very professional job.’

‘The boy is distressed, Minister,’ said Madam Pomfrey sharply. ‘He has had a very severe shock. He has lost a great deal of blood. He needs rest and care, not...’ she looked at Snape, ‘...an audience.’

‘I’m not distressed,’ said Harry. ‘I’m perfectly calm. This is my calm voice. You should hear me when I’m distressed. It’s much louder than this, and it’s got more swearing in it.’

‘Harry,’ said Fudge, in the voice of a man trying to coax a cat off a roof. ‘Harry, you’re not yourself...’

‘No, I’m not, am I? I’m somebody who knows what happened tonight. That must be very confusing for you, Minister. You should try it some time. You’re a great, fa-.’

Madam Pomfrey moved faster than Harry would have believed possible. Before he could get to the end of the sentence, she had snapped off a large lump of chocolate and pushed it straight into his open mouth. While he was still spluttering round it, she put one firm hand flat on his chest and pushed. The backs of his knees met the edge of the bed. He sat down hard.

Harry glared at her. He would have liked very much to say something cutting. It was difficult, with a mouthful of chocolate.

It was also, he was forced to admit, extremely good chocolate.

‘Now, please, Minister, these children need care. Please leave-’

The door opened again.

It was Dumbledore.

Harry got the chocolate down, with a great deal of effort, and stood up again.

‘Professor Dumbledore, Sirius Black-’

‘For heaven’s sake!’ said Madam Pomfrey hysterically. ‘Is this a hospital wing or not? Headmaster, I must insist-’

‘My apologies, Poppy, but I need a word with Mr Potter and Miss Granger,’ said Dumbledore calmly. ‘I have just been talking to Sirius Black-’

‘I suppose he’s told you the same fairy tale he’s planted in Potter’s mind?’ spat Snape. ‘Something about a rat, and Pettigrew being alive-’

‘That, indeed, is Black’s story,’ said Dumbledore, looking at Snape very hard over his half-moon spectacles.

‘And does my evidence count for nothing?’ snarled Snape. ‘Peter Pettigrew was not in the Shrieking Shack, nor did I see any sign of him on the grounds.’

‘That was because you were knocked out, Professor!’ said Hermione earnestly. ‘You didn’t arrive in time to hear-’

‘Miss Granger, HOLD YOUR TONGUE!’

Hermione held it.

She shut her mouth with a small click, and she stopped arguing at once, which was so unlike her that Harry glanced round. She was gazing at Snape. It was the same calm, faraway, interested look Harry had seen on her face in the Shack, just before she helped to blast him into the wall. Her lips were moving slightly. She seemed to be working something out.

Harry had a horrible feeling that he knew exactly what it was, and that it involved a footnote.

She had been strange ever since he woke up. Now that he came to think of it, she had been strange ever since the Shack. Blasting Snape into a wall seemed to have done something to her. Harry wasn’t at all sure he wanted to know what.

‘Now, now, Snape,’ said Fudge, startled. ‘The young lady is clearly disturbed in her mind. We must make allowances...’

‘Cornelius,’ said Dumbledore. He hadn’t raised his voice, but everybody stopped talking. ‘I wonder if you would be so kind as to leave me alone with these two for a few minutes. Severus, Poppy, you too, if you would.’

‘Headmaster!’ spluttered Madam Pomfrey. ‘They need treatment! They need rest!’

‘This will not take long,’ said Dumbledore. ‘I promise you, Poppy, it really will not.’

Madam Pomfrey pursed her lips. Then she swept off down the ward towards Ron’s bed, and drew the curtains round it with a furious rattle. Fudge took out his large gold pocket watch and looked at it.

‘The dementors should have arrived by now,’ he said. ‘I’ll go and meet them. Dumbledore, I’ll see you upstairs.’

He crossed to the door and held it open for Snape. Snape didn’t move.

‘You cannot seriously believe a word of it, Headmaster,’ he said, very low. His eyes were fixed on Dumbledore’s face. ‘Black tried to kill me when we were sixteen. I trust you have not forgotten.’

‘I forget very little, Severus,’ said Dumbledore quietly. ‘Go along, please.’

Snape turned on his heel. He marched out through the door that Fudge was still holding open. The door closed behind them both.

Hermione watched it close. Harry saw her breathe out slowly, as though she were putting something away for later.

The moment the door clicked shut, Harry and Hermione both started talking at once.

‘Professor, it’s Pettigrew, he’s alive, he’s the rat! Ron’s rat, Scabbers, he’s been a rat for twelve years, which honestly explains a lot about Scabbers-’

‘He cut his own finger off, sir, so everybody would think he was dead, and the Ministry gave him the Order of Merlin for it, which I think somebody ought to look into-’

‘Lupin’s a Garou, which you know, obviously, you hired him. Only he turned into one on the lawn, because he never took his potion, which you probably didn’t know-’

‘He wasn’t well, Professor, he’d had Pettigrew chained to his wrist for an hour-’

‘And Snape’s got it all wrong, sir, every single bit of it, which I realise isn’t news to you, but-’

The corner of Dumbledore’s mouth twitched. Then, quite plainly, he chuckled. It was a warm, surprised sound, and he seemed as startled by it as they were. Then his face grew grave.

He came forward and laid his hand on Harry’s shoulder. It was a light, thin, old hand, and it felt the way Harry had always imagined a grandfather’s hand might feel, if he had ever had one.

‘Harry,’ he said. ‘Slowly, please. Tell me everything that happened tonight, from the beginning. If you tell me the truth, I promise you that I shall believe it.’

Harry looked up at him. The roaring in his head died away.

He’ll believe me. No adult had ever said that to Harry in his life. Uncle Vernon would have laughed. Snape would have curled his lip. Dumbledore had simply promised, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

For a fraction of a second, something passed across Dumbledore’s face. It was there and gone so quickly that Harry could not have said what it was. On anybody else he might have called it shame. On Dumbledore, he decided, it must have been tiredness. It was very late, after all.

So Harry began again, properly this time.

‘We went down to Hagrid’s, sir. For Buckbeak. Under the Cloak.’ He swallowed. ‘Then Scabbers got loose. Ron went after him, and then the dog came. Only it wasn’t a dog, it was Sirius...’

It came out in order now. ‘...the tunnel comes out in the Shrieking Shack, sir. Sirius was upstairs, waiting. Then Professor Lupin came, and they...’

‘The map, Harry. Tell him about the map.’

‘Professor Lupin saw us on the map, sir. That’s how he knew...’

‘And the Animagus Registry, Harry. They weren’t on it. None of them.’

She didn’t push in front of him. She didn’t try to tell it for him. She stood half a step behind his shoulder, with her fingers resting on his sleeve, and fed him the next line every time he needed it, the way a prompter might at a school play. Harry was so grateful that he didn’t notice how tightly the fingers had closed.

‘...then the dementors came, sir, by the lake. There were hundreds of them. Sirius was on the ground, and I tried to do a Patronus, only it wouldn’t...’

Dumbledore raised one hand. The torrent of words dried up at once.

‘It is your turn to listen, and I beg you will not interrupt me, because there is very little time,’ he said quietly. ‘There is not a shred of proof to support Black’s story, except your word, and the word of two thirteen-year-old wizards will not convince anybody. A street full of eyewitnesses swore they saw Sirius murder Pettigrew. I myself gave evidence to the Ministry that Sirius had been the Potters’ Secret-Keeper.’

‘Professor Lupin can tell you-’ Harry burst out. He couldn’t help it.

‘Professor Lupin is currently deep in the forest, unable to tell anyone anything. On a full moon such as this, surrounded by dementors, one with his condition will be next to impossible for a wizard to pacify. He’s already attacked and destroyed several dementors whilst wandering the forest. They’re... upset with me.’

Dumbledore looked rather pleased about that. He and the dementors, Harry knew, had never been friends.

‘Regardless of all of that, by the time Professor Lupin is human again, it will be too late, Sirius will be worse than dead. I might add that Garou are so feared and reviled by most of our kind that his support will count for very little, and the fact that he and Sirius are old friends…’

Harry’s hands had curled into fists. He could feel his nails digging into his palms. He had to put this right. He had to, before they took Sirius’s soul away for something he had never done.

‘Fine, Professor. I’ll get Lupin. I’ll... work out how to transform him back.’

Dumbledore raised his hand.

‘Harry,’ he said gently. ‘You’re one of the bravest boys I’ve ever known. Braver than me even.’

Harry stood a little taller.

‘But this is a danger you are ill prepared for. As Headmaster of this school, I have a duty of care towards all my students. I won’t send you off to be mauled by a Garou for a second time. Please for once, understand the danger you’d be putting yourself in.’

He looked down at Harry’s arm. Harry looked at it too. The bandage was clean and white. The arm underneath it was swollen and ugly, though. A little blood had come through in four thin lines.

‘It is too late, you understand me? You must see that Professor Snape’s version of events is far more convincing than yours.’

‘He hates Sirius,’ Hermione said desperately. ‘All because of some stupid trick Sirius played on him. And he tried to hurt my... hurt Harry, I mean.’

‘Sirius has not acted like an innocent man. The attack on the Fat Lady, entering Gryffindor Tower with a knife; without Pettigrew, alive or dead, we have no chance of overturning Sirius’s sentence.’

‘But you believe us.’

‘Yes, I do,’ said Dumbledore quietly.

Relief went through Harry like warm water. Dumbledore believed them. Dumbledore was wise. Harry said it to himself twice more, rather firmly, the way you might hum to drown out a dripping tap.

‘But I have no power to make other men see the truth, or to overrule the Minister of Magic...’

Harry looked up at the lined, serious face. For an angry moment, Harry wanted that power. To make people see the truth. See how dreadful their own laws were to condemn an innocent man without trial because the system said so. Or the system just couldn't be bothered. To overrule that stupid, fat waste of a Minister. But then the moment left him. For now at least.

He had always taken it for granted that Dumbledore could mend anything. Somewhere deep down, he had expected him to reach into the air and pull out an answer, the way other wizards pulled sweets out of children’s ears. Even now he was waiting for it, like a puppy waiting by the door for its master to come home. Dumbledore did not make mistakes. If he had made one about this, then he might have made one about Privet Drive, about the cupboard, about every summer of Harry’s life-

Harry shut the thought up before it could finish. Dumbledore had said Privet Drive was necessary. So it was necessary. It was all worth it, as long as Dumbledore was wise.

‘What we need,’ said Dumbledore slowly, looking from Harry to Hermione over his spectacles, ‘is more time.’

‘But-’ Hermione started. Then her eyes went perfectly round. ‘OH!’

‘Now, pay attention,’ said Dumbledore. His voice was quiet, but every word was perfectly distinct. ‘In approximately ten minutes I will be walking up to Professor Flitwick’s office on the seventh floor. I’ve told everyone who needs to know that Sirius is locked in there.’

He smiled. It was a mischievous smile, the smile of a much younger man.

‘This is not technically untrue. But when I enter the office. I... suspect I’ll find Black absent.’

Harry stared at him. Dumbledore’s eyes were twinkling, as though he had just made a joke that he did not expect anybody to understand for some time.

‘It’s the thirteenth window from the right of the West Tower. If all goes well, you will be able to save more than one innocent life tonight. But remember this, both of you: You must not be seen. Miss Granger, you know the law; you know what is at stake... You’ll need this.’

He drew something out of the folds of his robes and put it into Harry’s hands.

It was a book. It was a small one, hardly bigger than a pocket diary, bound in plain leather that had gone dark and soft with handling. There was nothing on the cover at all, no title and no name. It felt oddly heavy for its size, and oddly warm. Harry turned it over. His thumb had already found the edge of the cover-

‘I must stress that book is not to be opened, read or touched until the proper time. You’ll know when that time is. There’ll be another book waiting for you in the office. Read that first. A good book really draws you into its pages.’

He said the last few words slowly, leaning on each one. ‘The right book, Harry, can carry you into another age entirely.’

‘It was written by a very old acquaintance of mine,’ he added. ‘A great deal older than I am, if you can imagine such a thing. He has far steadier handwriting than mine.’ He looked hard at Harry over his spectacles. ‘Please understand, You. Must. Not. Be. Seen.’

Harry nodded. He put the little book carefully into the inside pocket of his robes, next to Lupin’s cross. He hadn’t the faintest idea what was going on.

Dumbledore turned on his heel. When he reached the door, he looked back.

‘Oh, and should you find yourselves delayed,’ he said, ‘you need not trouble yourselves about Madam Pomfrey. I shall arrange things with Poppy. I am going to lock you in. It is…’ he consulted his watch, ‘five minutes to midnight. Miss Granger, three turns should do it. Good luck.’

Then he was gone. The key turned in the lock behind him.

Harry stood in the middle of the dark ward with a book he wasn’t allowed to open and a head full of questions.

‘Good luck?’ he said. ‘Good luck doing what? Three turns of what? Hermione, what is he talking about? What window? What book? Why would there be...’

He stopped. Hermione wasn’t listening to him. She looked nervous, guilty and rather sick. She was fumbling at the neck of her robes, and from underneath them she pulled out a long chain of gold, as fine as a thread.

‘Harry, come here,’ she said urgently. ‘Quick!’

Harry went towards her, utterly bewildered. She held the chain out to him. Hanging from it was a tiny, glittering hourglass.

‘Here…’

She had flung the chain round his neck as well as her own. Then she took hold of him.

She pulled him in tight against her, much closer than the chain needed, so that he could feel her heart thumping. Her hands closed on the back of his robes in two hard fists. Her hair was in his face. It smelt of ink and hospital soap. Harry tried to lean back. He couldn’t.

What on earth was Hermione playing at?

‘Ready?’ she said breathlessly.

She didn’t sound frightened any more. She sounded almost happy. When Harry looked down, her eyes were half closed, and there was a small, dreamy smile on her face, as though she were thinking about something very nice indeed, a long way from here.

‘For bloody what? What are we doing, Hermione?’ Harry demanded. Something was about to happen. Every hair on the back of his neck knew it.

Hermione twisted the little hourglass. She did it once, twice, three times.

The ward melted away. Harry felt himself being hurled backwards at enormous speed, like a stone flung from a sling. Colours and shapes went streaming past him in a smear. His ears were roaring. He tried to shout and couldn’t hear himself do it-

Then there was something hard under his feet, and the world swam back into place.

He was standing beside Hermione in the empty entrance hall. A broad stripe of golden sunlight was pouring in through the open front doors and lying across the flagstones.

Harry gaped round at her. The fine chain bit into the back of his neck.

‘Hermione, what -?’

‘In here!’

Hermione grabbed his arm and towed him over to a broom cupboard on the far side of the hall. She wrenched it open, pushed him in between a mop and a stack of buckets, then pulled the door shut behind them.

It was a tiny cupboard. It was much too small for two people, and Hermione didn’t seem to mind that at all. She pressed in close against him in the dark, closer than there was any need to be, with her face tilted up towards his. Harry could feel her breath on his chin.

Even Harry noticed it. He stood rigid among the mops, and hoped with all his heart that Hermione wasn’t about to do anything untoward.

‘What…how… Hermione, what happened?’

‘We’ve gone back in time,’ Hermione whispered. In the dark, he felt her lift the chain from round his neck. ‘Three hours back...’

‘Oh, that explains everything...’ said Harry.

He had meant it to come out witty. It came out panicky instead, and rather dry, like a cough.

He felt about until he found his own leg, and pinched it hard. It hurt a great deal. So he probably wasn’t dreaming, then, however peculiar it felt. The last dream this odd he could remember, Dracina Malfoy had been in it, and it had ended quite differently.

‘What the -’

‘Shh! Listen! Someone’s coming! I think…I think it might be us!’

Hermione had pressed her ear flat against the cupboard door.

‘Footsteps across the hall... yes, I think it’s us going down to Hagrid’s!’

‘Time travel...’ Harry said, to himself, in a hollow sort of voice. ‘So... I’m in here with you. And out there too. Wonderful. Should’ve thought to make a note of the football pools results. Fat lot of good it’d do me here.’

Hermione kept her ear pressed to the door. ‘I’m sure it’s us. It doesn’t sound like more than three people... and we’re walking slowly because we’re under the Invisibility Cloak-’

She stopped, listening hard.

‘We’ve gone down the front steps...’

She lowered herself on to a bucket turned upside down. She looked desperately anxious. Her fingers were already winding her watch back three hours, by feel, in the dark. Harry, though, had a few questions he wanted answered first, and he wasn’t going anywhere until he got them.

‘So, Hermione. How did you end up with a ruddy time machine?’

He said it with the air of somebody who had given up being surprised by anything at all. A world with flying cars, moving staircases and talking hats, he thought, was bound to have time travel as well. Somebody might have mentioned it.

‘It’s called a Time-Turner,’ Hermione whispered, ‘and I got it from Professor McGonagall on our first day back. I’ve been using it all year to get to all my lessons. Professor McGonagall made me swear I wouldn’t tell anyone. She had to write all sorts of letters to the Ministry of Magic so I could have one. She had to tell them that I was a model student, and that I’d never, ever use it for anything except my studies... I’ve been turning it back so I could do hours over again, that’s how I’ve been doing several lessons at once, see? But...’

‘That chain,’ said Harry slowly. ‘You’ve been fiddling with it all year. Every time you looked at Malfoy.’

There was a short pause in the dark.

‘I have not,’ said Hermione.

Harry let it go. There were more important things than Malfoy just now. All the same, he had a strong feeling that it had been a lie.

‘Harry, I don’t understand what Dumbledore wants us to do. Why did he tell us to go back three hours? How’s that going to help Sirius?’

‘He needs us to change time, most likely,’ said Harry.

‘No, that’s not how Time-Turners work. McGonagall explained it to me as best she could. But basically you can’t change time with a Time-Turner because from our perspective, the time has already happened.’

‘Right, makes sense,’ said Harry.

‘It’s quite simple if you have a grasp of quantum mechanics, Harry.’

‘Right. As you know, I know all about that,’ Harry hissed.

‘Harry, I know it’s hard to grasp. But just understand that we can’t do anything we didn’t already do in the past... or the present... um, future. It’s all relative. We’re meant to be here or we wouldn’t be. It all makes sense, Harry.’

Harry sighed. It was an uncomfortable thing to do, with Hermione squashed up against his ribs.

‘OK. So we’re meant to be here. However long ago it is, right?’

Hermione nodded. He felt her hair move against his chin.

Harry thought. He thought for a long time, among the mops, with the smell of floor polish in his nose. Then it came to him. He could have kicked himself for not seeing it sooner.

‘Buckbeak!’ he said, far too loudly.

‘Shh!’

‘More than one innocent life. That’s what Dumbledore said. We go out and save Buckbeak. It was probably me or you under that cloak who rescued Buckbeak in the first place.’ He nodded to himself, very satisfied. Everything was falling into place, just the way it always did with Dumbledore. ‘He wants us to use Buckbeak to get at the office without being seen. Thirteenth window from the right of the West Tower. He said. This was always his plan. I always knew Dumbledore was wise. He’s so wise, Hermione. He planned all of this, obviously.’

He said it the way some people talked about the Bible. He needed it to be true just as badly.

Hermione didn’t answer at once. Harry couldn’t see her face. He could feel her fists, though. They had tightened on the front of his robes until the knuckles dug into him.

‘Obviously,’ she murmured.

She swallowed whatever else she had been going to say.

‘If we manage that without being seen, it’ll be a miracle!’ she whispered.

‘Well, we’ve got to try, haven’t we?’ said Harry.

He stood up as far as the shelf above his head would let him, and put his ear to the door.

‘OK, let’s... ugh, shift, Hermione. Why are you squeezing my arm so tightly?’

‘Sorry, just... habit.’

It took a good deal of shuffling to get out. Hermione trod on a bucket, which rang like a gong. Harry got a mop handle in the eye. At last he eased the door open an inch and put one eye to the gap.

The entrance hall was empty.

They slipped out of the cupboard as fast as they dared. Then they hurried down the stone steps. Outside, the shadows were long on the lawn, and the treetops of the Forbidden Forest had begun to glow gold again, exactly as they had three hours ago, or three hours from now, or whatever it was.

At the bottom of the steps, Harry caught a faint, sour smell on the warm air, like something that had been dead for a day or two. He had smelt it before, he thought, in this very spot, on his way down to Hagrid’s. It was gone again before he could place it.

‘If anyone’s looking out of the window-’ Hermione squeaked, peering up at the rows of glinting windows behind them.

‘We’ll run for it,’ said Harry determinedly. ‘Straight into the forest, all right? We’ll have to hide behind a tree or something and keep a lookout-’

‘OK, but we’ll go round by the greenhouses!’ said Hermione breathlessly. ‘We need to keep out of sight of Hagrid’s front door, or we’ll see us! We must be nearly at Hagrid’s by now!’

Harry was still trying to work out exactly what she meant when he started to run. His bandaged leg pulled at every stride, but it held. Hermione pelted after him. They raced through the vegetable gardens, past the rows of cabbages, to the greenhouses. There they stopped for a moment, panting, with their backs against the warm glass. Then they were off again as fast as they could go, giving the Whomping Willow a wide berth, until the trees of the Forest closed round them.

Harry stopped in the shade and turned round. Hermione came crashing in after him a moment later, gasping.

‘Right,’ she panted. ‘We need to sneak over to Hagrid’s... Keep out of sight, Harry...’

They crept along the fringe of the trees, from one trunk to the next, without a sound. Then the front of Hagrid’s cabin came into view, and they heard somebody knock on his door.

They ducked behind a broad oak and looked out, one on each side of it.

Hagrid had opened his door. He was standing in the doorway, white and trembling, looking all round to see who had knocked. Then Harry heard his own voice.

‘It’s us. We’re wearing the Invisibility Cloak. Let us in and we can take it off.’

Harry’s stomach turned over. It was his voice, all right, but it sounded wrong, thinner and higher than it did inside his head, like a recording of somebody he knew slightly.

Hagrid stood aside. The door closed. Through the window Harry watched a shape with untidy black hair pull a silvery cloak off itself, and another with bushy brown hair go to the cupboard. He watched the tea being made. He watched Hagrid’s great hands shaking on the kettle.

‘This is the weirdest thing we’ve ever done,’ Harry said fervently.

‘Let’s move along a bit,’ Hermione whispered. ‘We need to get nearer to Buckbeak!’

They crept on through the trees until they could see round the back of the cabin. Buckbeak was there, tethered to a tree at the edge of the pumpkin patch, looking nervous. He kept turning his fierce head to and fro. Every so often he stretched his neck out towards the dark edge of the Forest and sniffed the air, with his great orange eyes half shut, as though he were waiting for somebody. At the end of his tether lay a small, furry heap that was mostly bones.

‘Now?’ Harry whispered.

‘No!’ said Hermione. ‘If we steal him now, those Committee people will think Hagrid set him free! We’ve got to wait until they’ve seen he’s tied outside!’

‘That’s going to give us about sixty seconds,’ said Harry.

This was starting to look impossible.

From inside the cabin came a crash of breaking china.

‘That’s Hagrid breaking the milk jug,’ Hermione whispered. ‘I’m going to find Scabbers in a moment-’

A few minutes later, just as she had said, they heard her shriek. It was an odd thing, Harry thought, to stand behind a tree and hear your best friend shriek about something she had already found.

‘Hermione,’ said Harry suddenly, ‘what if we… we just run in there and grab Pettigrew-’

‘No!’ Hermione breathed. She looked horrified. ‘I told you before we can’t. I had a whole lecture about it from McGonagall. If I got Scabbers... Peter when we’re not meant to we could-’

‘Catastrophically harm the timeline. Yeah I know. I watched a bit of Doctor Who back in the day, Hermione. At least I tried to.’

He had tried, often. Dudley used to watch the old episodes on video on Saturday afternoons. Harry used to sidle in and perch on the very end of the sofa, as quietly as he could. He never lasted long. Sooner or later Aunt Petunia would notice him and flap him out of the room with a rolling pin, like he was a dog shooed off a clean carpet before it made a mess.

Hermione blinked at him.

‘Y-yes, Harry. That’s exactly right.’

She elbowed him gently and jerked her head towards the castle. Harry leant out a little way until he could see the distant front doors. A small group was coming down the steps: Dumbledore in front, then Fudge, then the old Committee member, then Macnair with his axe.

‘We’re about to come out!’ Hermione breathed.

A few moments later, Hagrid’s back door swung open. Harry watched himself come out of it, with Ron, Hermione and Hagrid.

It was, without any doubt at all, the strangest feeling of his life. He was standing behind a tree, watching himself standing in a pumpkin patch. The other Harry looked small and young, Harry thought, as though he hadn’t the faintest idea what was coming.

‘It’s OK, Beaky, it’s OK...’ Hagrid murmured, with his hand on the hippogriff’s neck. Then he looked round at the three of them. ‘Go on. Get goin’.’

‘Hagrid, we can’t-’

‘We’ll tell them what really happened-’

‘They can’t kill him-’

‘Go! It’s bad enough without you lot in trouble an’ all!’

Out among the pumpkins, the other Hermione flung the Cloak over herself, Ron and the other Harry. They vanished.

‘Go quick. Don’ listen...’

Somebody knocked loudly at the front of the cabin. Macnair and the others had come. Hagrid went back indoors and left the back door ajar behind him. Harry saw little patches of grass flattening one after another round the side of the cabin. Three sets of footsteps went softly away up the slope. The other Harry, Ron and Hermione had gone. The Harry and Hermione behind the oak tree, though, could now hear everything that was being said inside, through the open back door.

‘Where is the beast?’ came Macnair’s cold voice.

‘Out- outside,’ Hagrid croaked.

Harry snatched his head back out of sight. Macnair’s face had appeared at Hagrid’s window. It stayed there a long while, gazing out at Buckbeak. Then Fudge began to speak.

‘We- er- have to read you the official notice of execution, Hagrid. I’ll make it quick. And then you and Macnair need to sign it. Macnair, you’re supposed to listen too, that’s procedure-’

Macnair moved away from the glass. It was now or never.

‘Wait here,’ Harry whispered to Hermione. ‘I’ll do it.’

Fudge’s voice started up again. Harry slipped out from behind the oak. He scrambled over the fence into the pumpkins and went quickly up to Buckbeak.

‘It is the decision of the Committee for the Disposal of Dangerous Creatures that the hippogriff Buckbeak, hereafter called the condemned, shall be executed on the sixth of June at sundown-’

Harry made himself stand still. He gazed up into the hippogriff’s fierce orange eyes, taking care not to blink, and he bowed. Buckbeak considered him gravely. Then he sank down on his scaly knees and rose again. Harry started fumbling at the knot that tied the rope to the tree.

‘...sentenced to execution by beheading, to be carried out by the Committee’s appointed executioner, Walden Macnair...’

‘Come on, Buckbeak,’ Harry murmured, ‘come on, we’re going to help you. Quietly... quietly...’

‘...as witnessed below. Hagrid, you sign here...’

The knot gave a little, then jammed, half undone. Harry threw his weight on the rope, but Buckbeak had planted his front feet in the earth and would not budge.

‘Well, let’s get this over with,’ quavered the old Committee member, somewhere inside. ‘Hagrid, perhaps it will be better if you stay inside-’

‘No, I- I wan’ ter be with him... I don’ wan’ him ter be alone-’

There were footsteps inside the cabin.

‘Buckbeak, move!’ Harry hissed.

He hauled on the rope round Buckbeak’s neck. The hippogriff took one step, rustling his wings crossly. Then he stopped again and looked at Harry as though Harry had said something extremely rude. They were still fifteen feet from the trees, in full view of the back door.

‘One moment, please, Macnair,’ came Dumbledore’s voice. ‘You need to sign too.’

The footsteps stopped. Harry heaved. Buckbeak snapped his beak and dug his claws in harder.

Hermione’s white face was poking out from behind the oak.

‘Harry, hurry!’ she mouthed.

Harry heaved again. He might as well have been heaving on a house. Buckbeak had made up his mind that he wasn’t going anywhere with Harry. He was staring past him at the dark edge of the Forest instead, with his head on one side, as though he were still waiting for somebody else.

Then the back door banged wide.

‘Quick! Quick!’ Hermione moaned.

Harry dropped the rope. He sprinted for the trees and flung himself down behind the oak beside her, just as Hagrid came out into the pumpkin patch. Dumbledore came after him, then Fudge, then the old Committee member. Last of all came Macnair, swinging his axe.

Buckbeak stood where Harry had left him, a few feet from his tree, with the rope still knotted loosely to the tree.

‘He’s still there,’ Harry breathed. ‘He’s still right there. Hermione, they’re going to...’

He had failed. He had had sixty seconds, and he had wasted every one of them arguing with a hippogriff. And yet it was going to be all right, he told himself, it had to be all right, because he had already seen it happen. He had watched it from halfway up the lawn. Buckbeak had gone up into the sunset with somebody hooded on his back, so somebody had to be on his back...

It was probably me, he had said, in the cupboard.

Harry pulled the hood of his robes right down over his face. His heart was going like a drum. He would simply have to do it now, in front of all of them. He would run out, jump on and pray. He gathered himself to spring.

He never moved.

Somebody else was already running.

Whoever it was came from the far side of the cabin, from the corner by the water butt, where the shadows were deepest: a small figure wrapped from head to foot in a long black cloak, with the hood pulled down low. It ran fast and very lightly. It kept the cabin between itself and the men until the last possible moment. Then an arm came up. Something limp and furry went sailing through the air towards Buckbeak.

It was a dead ferret.

Buckbeak’s head snapped round. He lunged for it with a happy screech, and the knot Harry had half undone gave way behind him. He caught the ferret before it hit the ground, crunching. At the same moment Macnair had seen him move and raised the axe. It came whistling down through the space where Buckbeak’s neck had been a second before, and buried itself in the tree with a heavy thunk.

The cloaked figure had already reached Buckbeak’s side. It grabbed a fistful of feathers and swung up on to his back, as neatly as if it had been practising for weeks.

Buckbeak noticed Macnair at last. He reared up with a bellow of rage. His hind legs smashed straight through Hagrid’s fence in a shower of splinters. Then his great wings spread, once, twice, and he leapt into the air.

For a single instant the wind of his wings blew the rider’s hood back. The rider’s back was to the cabin. Only somebody lying flat at the edge of the trees could have seen the face under it.

Harry saw a pointed white face and a strand of silver-blonde hair whipping loose. The silver eyes were narrowed against the wind, above a mouth set harder than he had ever seen it.

Then the hood was up again, and Buckbeak was climbing away into the red evening sky.

‘Dracina...’ Harry whispered.

Hermione had hold of him. She dragged him down flat behind the oak. It hurt, but he barely noticed.

‘No one can see us!’ Hermione hissed. Her voice had gone strange and tight. ‘Especially not her...’

Harry lay on his stomach in the leaf litter. His throat had gone tight and hot.

When he spoke, his voice had gone wobbly. ‘She really meant it. She was really sorry. And she even rescued Buckbeak to make everything right.’

His eyes were stinging. He was very nearly crying behind a tree over Malfoy, which was ridiculous. He didn’t care. I’m going to fix everything, she had said on the castle steps, with blood on her sleeve. I’m going to make it right, Harry. You’ll see. She had meant it. She had meant every word. She had gone and done it in front of her father’s friends, where it could have cost her everything.

Some part of him, it seemed, had been keeping every word she had said to him since September, without once mentioning it to the rest of him. That part had just found out how much she cared, and it was so delighted that Harry didn’t know what to do with it. He decided to think about that later, or preferably never.

He was much too happy to look at Hermione.

When at last he did look round, a minute later, she had gone white to the lips. She was staring up after the speck in the sky with both hands clenched in the dead leaves, as though it had just flown off with something that belonged to her.

Then she spoke, quite steadily.

‘We don’t know where she’s going.’

Harry rolled over and looked up. The sky above the trees was red and gold. Buckbeak was only a dark shape against it now. Harry had a Seeker’s eyes, though. He could see the hooded figure on Buckbeak’s back twist round, high above the lawn. She raised her arm and waved, a long way off, towards a spot halfway up the slope. Harry knew who was standing there under the Cloak, frozen and astonished. Then Buckbeak wheeled away over the treetops and sank out of sight into the Forbidden Forest.

Out in the pumpkin patch, the uproar had begun. Hagrid was dancing.

‘BEAKY! GO ON, BEAKY! GO ON, YEH BEAUTY!’

‘Formal complaint!’ Macnair was yelling, tugging at his axe, which was stuck fast in the tree. ‘I’m lodging a formal complaint, Hagrid, on behalf of the Executioners’ Union! You planned this!’

‘I never!’ Hagrid bellowed joyfully. ‘I never planned nothin’!’

‘Now, Walden, now, let’s all keep calm...’ That was Fudge, flapping his hands. The Committee member had sat down rather suddenly on an upturned bucket and was fanning himself with his hat.

Somewhere under all the noise, Harry heard Dumbledore laughing, very quietly.

‘OK... just got to go into the Forbidden Forest,’ said Harry. He was already on his knees, raring to go.

Hermione caught his arm in both hands, very hard.

‘No, Harry. Not with...’

Her face twitched, once, at the corner of her mouth. She seemed to be choosing her words with enormous care.

‘We need to wait for that lot to clear off.’

She pointed at the pumpkin patch.

Macnair had wrenched his axe out of the tree at last. He stamped up and down the pumpkin patch with it, kicking pumpkins out of his way. Then he flung it down, rolled up his sleeves and squared up to Hagrid, with both fists raised.

‘You planned this, you great half-breed lump! I know what your mother was! Giant filth, the lot of you...’

Hagrid took hold of the front of his robes and threw him. Macnair sailed several feet through the air and landed in the pumpkins with a noise like a sack of potatoes.

‘I remember this bit,’ said Harry, with deep satisfaction.

‘Now, Hagrid,’ said Dumbledore mildly, laying a hand on Hagrid’s enormous arm. ‘I think Mr Macnair has quite understood your point.’

‘Dumbledore, he has assaulted an employee of the Ministry!’ Fudge was almost hysterical.

‘ASSAULT!’ Macnair was howling, from among the pumpkins. ‘I want him in Azkaban!’

Hagrid stood glaring down at him for a moment, breathing hard. Then he turned round, stamped back into his cabin and slammed the door so hard that the windows rattled. Dumbledore followed him in. The Minister and the old wizard from the Committee hurried after him.

‘...tethered, Dumbledore, tethered to a tree, and somebody simply flew off with him...’

Harry saw that Dumbledore’s shoulders were shaking.

He was trying very hard not to laugh. Harry had seen Dumbledore smile a great many times, and twinkle at people over his spectacles. He had hardly ever seen him so plainly enjoying himself. Harry quite liked seeing it.

They didn’t have to wait long. Macnair picked himself out of the pumpkins and limped into the cabin after the others, dragging his axe. The pumpkin patch was empty.

Going straight after Buckbeak was out of the question. He had flown much too far for them to have any idea where he had come down. Besides, the last few students were still hurrying up the lawn towards the castle before the doors were locked for the night. Harry and Hermione hurried round the edge of the Forest instead, keeping to the trees, while the dusk thickened round them. At last they found a clump of trees from which they could see the Whomping Willow.

‘There’s Ron!’ said Harry suddenly.

A dark figure was racing across the lawn. Its shout rang out through the still evening air.

‘Get away from him- get away- Scabbers, come here-’

Then two more people popped into view out of thin air, as somebody dragged a silvery cloak off them. Harry saw himself and Hermione pelting after Ron. He saw Ron dive.

‘Gotcha! Get off, you stinking cat-’

‘There’s Sirius!’ said Harry.

The enormous black dog had come bounding out from between the Willow’s roots. They saw it knock Harry flat. Then they saw it seize Ron.

‘Looks even worse from here, doesn’t it?’ said Harry, watching the dog drag Ron in among the roots. ‘Ouch- look, I just got walloped by the tree- and so did you- this is weird-’

The Willow was creaking and swiping at the air with its lowest branches. Down below, two tiny figures were darting to and fro, trying to get at the trunk. Then the tree went still.

‘That was Crookshanks pressing the knot,’ said Hermione.

‘And there we go...’ Harry muttered. ‘We’re in.’

The moment they had vanished, the tree started moving again. A few seconds later, footsteps came past their hiding place, quite close. Dumbledore and the other three were walking up towards the castle at last. Macnair’s voice floated back to them. ‘...want this axe looked at, Minister, it’s gone blunt on that blasted tree...’

‘Right after we’d gone down into the passage!’ said Hermione. ‘If only Dumbledore had come with us...’

‘Macnair and Fudge would’ve come too,’ said Harry bitterly. ‘I bet you anything Fudge would’ve told Macnair to murder Sirius on the spot...’

The four men went up the castle steps and in at the doors. For a few minutes the lawn was empty.

Then...

‘Here comes Lupin!’ said Harry.

Another figure was hurrying down the stone steps and running flat out towards the Willow. Harry glanced up. Clouds were drifting across the moon. Lupin snatched up a broken branch from the grass and jabbed the knot on the trunk with it. The tree stopped thrashing. Then Lupin, too, ducked down among its roots and was gone.

‘If he’d only grabbed the cloak,’ said Harry. ‘It’s just lying there...’

He turned to Hermione.

‘If I just dashed out now and grabbed it, Snape’d never be able to get it and-’

‘Harry, we mustn’t be seen!’

‘How can you stand this?’ he asked Hermione fiercely. ‘Just standing here and watching it happen?’ He hesitated. ‘I’m going to grab the cloak!’

‘Harry, no!’

Hermione seized the back of his robes. She did it not a second too soon. Somebody was coming along the edge of the trees, a few yards away: a lanky Ravenclaw boy Harry vaguely recognised from the year above. He had a notebook open in one hand and, of all things, a Muggle biro in the other. Every few steps he stopped to scowl up at the clouds. He had plainly sneaked out to look at the full moon, and the clouds were spoiling it for him. He walked straight past the clump of trees where they were hiding without once looking round.

‘See?’ Hermione whispered. ‘See what would have happened? We’ve got to keep out of sight!’

It was no more than a couple of minutes before the castle doors banged open again. Snape came out of them at a run, making for the Willow.

Harry’s fists clenched. Snape pulled up by the tree and stared round. Then he saw the Cloak lying in the grass. He snatched it up and held it high.

‘Get your filthy hands off it,’ Harry snarled under his breath.

‘Shh!’

Snape picked up the same broken branch and poked the knot with it. Then he swirled the Cloak round himself and was gone.

‘So that’s it,’ said Hermione quietly. ‘We’re all down there... We’ve got to get to the forest. Find Buckbeak and get back to Hogwarts to save Mr Black.’

‘Easy peasy,’ said Harry.

He meant it to sound encouraging. It didn’t, quite.

The Forbidden Forest at night was not a place Harry would have chosen to go walking.

They went in by the path Hagrid used, then left it as soon as they dared, heading in the direction Buckbeak had flown. Under the trees, the last grey of the dusk went quickly, and the green drained out of the leaves. Soon there was nothing but grey trunks and black shadows, with the sky showing through the branches overhead in ragged patches, like holes in an old blanket.

‘Lumos,’ Harry muttered. Hermione did the same. Two small circles of light bobbed along over the roots and the dead leaves.

‘Buckbeak!’ Harry called, as loudly as he dared. ‘Buckbeak!’

Nothing answered except an owl, a long way off.

Hermione had her watch held up to her wandlight every few minutes. Every time she looked at it, her mouth went a little thinner.

‘Ten o’clock,’ she said. ‘Harry, we’ve got to find him. Everything depends on finding him.’

‘We’ll find him,’ said Harry. ‘She’ll have put him somewhere safe. She’s not stupid.’

He didn’t notice Hermione’s face when he said she. He was much too busy being amazed.

‘Did you see her, though? Did you actually see her? She threw a ferret. A dead ferret, Hermione! And Hagrid said somebody left one on his doorstep last night, remember? That was her. It must have been. She was getting Buckbeak used to her smell, so he’d come to her when it mattered.’ He shook his head in wonder. ‘That’s clever. That’s really, properly clever. She must have been planning it for weeks. All those timetables she kept hiding under her elbow...’

‘Yes,’ said Hermione. ‘Very clever.’

‘And she did it right in front of Macnair! In front of Fudge! If her father ever finds out...’

‘Harry, mind that root.’

Harry stepped over the root. A moment later he was off again.

‘I knew it, you know. On the steps, when she said she was going to make it right. Everyone thought I was mad, believing her...’

‘I didn’t think you were mad,’ said Hermione. ‘I thought you were being used.’

Harry stopped walking.

‘Used?’

‘She still sent that letter, Harry.’ Hermione’s voice was very calm, the way it went before an exam she was certain she had revised for. ‘The letter to her father, about Buckbeak. She told you in Potions she’d decided not to send it. Then, at Christmas, there was a complaint. There was a Committee. There was an executioner. Somebody sent it. You don’t get an execution out of a letter nobody posted.’

‘She didn’t send it. Somebody took it while she was asleep. She told me.’

‘And you believed her.’

‘Yes,’ said Harry. ‘I did. I do.’

‘Because she cried on you.’

‘Because she meant it!’ Harry heard his voice go up and pulled it down again. ‘Hermione, she just risked everything to save Buckbeak. Why would she do that if she’d sent the letter in the first place?’

‘To make you think exactly what you’re thinking now,’ said Hermione.

They walked on. Neither of them said anything for a while. The trees were closer together here. Somewhere off to the left, water was trickling over stones.

Then Harry saw the rag.

It was hanging from a low branch just ahead of them, at about the height of his head: a long, ragged strip of black cloth, stirring slightly in no wind at all. Harry held up his wand. The cloth was rotten. It was greyish at the edges, and it gave off a faint, sour chill, like the air in front of an open fridge. There was more of it on the ground beneath the branch. A dementor must have drifted through here, low down among the trees, and snagged its cloak in passing.

The leaves under the rags were white with frost. It was the middle of June.

‘That’s...’ Hermione’s voice had gone small. ‘Harry, that’s from a dementor. They’re in the Forest too.’

They looked at each other.

He’s already attacked and destroyed several dementors whilst wandering the forest.

Not yet, though, Harry thought. At this moment Lupin was still a man, up in the Shack, arguing with Sirius about a rat. In an hour he wouldn’t be. In an hour he would be loose in here with them.

Harry swallowed. Then he made himself step round the frozen patch of leaves, and he went on. After a moment, Hermione followed.

They searched for a long time.

They found a grey feather caught on a bramble, which made Harry’s heart leap, and then nothing else at all for a quarter of an hour. They found hoofprints that might have been a centaur’s. They found a stream and followed it, because Harry had a feeling Buckbeak would want water.

Then, far away behind them, from the direction of the castle, came a howl.

It went on and on. All round them, the Forest woke up. Birds burst out of the treetops in clattering hundreds. Somewhere close by, something large went crashing away through the undergrowth in a panic.

Hermione had gone grey. ‘That’s the lawn,’ she whispered. ‘That’s us. That’s happening to us right now.’

Harry thought of the cross falling into the grass, and of the long scream that had turned into something else. His fingers had locked round his wand so hard that they hurt.

The moon came and went behind the clouds. Hermione looked at her watch again.

‘It’s gone eleven,’ she said. Her voice was shaking. ‘In a few minutes that’ll be loose in here with us. Harry, we’ve been out here for ages. We could walk round this forest all night and never find him. She could have taken him anywhere. She could have taken him to her father...’

‘Why would she take him to her father? Her father wanted him dead!’

‘I don’t know, Harry! I don’t know anything she does! Nobody does! That’s the whole...’ Hermione stopped dead on the path. ‘That’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you. You don’t know her. You only think you do.’

‘I know she saved Buckbeak.’

‘You know she saved Buckbeak tonight. Do you know what she did all the other nights? For three years?’

Her voice was shaking now. In the light of her wand, Harry saw that her face had gone a blotchy pink, and that her eyes were too bright.

‘She’s called me a Mudblood since our first week,’ Hermione said. ‘Every week, Harry. In corridors, in Potions, at the Quidditch, in front of everybody. She says it the way other people say good morning. And on the steps, before I hit her, she was going to call me something else. You heard her start it. Don’t pretend you didn’t.’

Harry didn’t pretend. He had heard.

‘And this morning,’ said Hermione. ‘In front of everybody, by the lake. You were standing right there.’

‘You brought up her dad first,’ said Harry.

Hermione flushed. ‘That isn’t the point.’

‘Her family are all pure-blood fanatics. Her father was on You-Know-Who’s side, everybody knows it, Ron says his dad’s practically certain. They think people like me ought to be... ought to be got rid of. And you want me to believe she’s suddenly nice, because she threw a ferret at a hippogriff?’

‘I don’t want you to believe anything! I just...’

‘You don’t know what she said to me,’ said Hermione. ‘That night. With the troll.’

Harry stared at her.

‘In first year,’ said Hermione. ‘At Hallowe’en. You do remember. I was in the girls’ toilets, crying, because of what Ron said about nobody being able to stand me. And she came in.’

She wasn’t looking at him any more. She was looking at the dark between the trees, at something a long way back.

‘I thought she’d come in to wash her hands or something. She hadn’t. She’d come to find me. She’d heard what Ron said; the whole corridor had heard. She stood outside the cubicle and laughed at me. She said he was right. She said nobody could stand me, and nobody ever would. She said the only reason you even spoke to me was because I was useful, and that when I stopped being useful you’d drop me like a used quill. She said you’d never look twice at a frizzy little Mudblood with teeth like a squirrel.’ Hermione’s voice cracked on the last word, and she pushed straight on through it. ‘She said you were hers. In first year. She didn’t even know you, and she said you were hers.’

Harry opened his mouth. Nothing came out.

‘So I came out of the cubicle and I said something back,’ said Hermione. ‘I said her father didn’t love her, he only liked showing her off, like a prize owl. I said it because I knew it would hurt. It did. She went white. She came at me, and then...’

She stopped.

‘Then the troll came in,’ said Harry quietly.

‘It smelt like a sewer.’ Hermione’s voice had gone flat and strange. ‘I can still smell it. I still dream about it, did you know that? The sinks coming off the wall. That club. It went for her first, Harry. It went straight for her. And for about one second, while it was going for her...’ She swallowed. ‘I was glad.’

The stream went on trickling somewhere in the dark.

‘Then you came in through the door,’ said Hermione. ‘You and Ron. You came in through that door, and you looked at me first. You came for me. Nobody had ever... I was eleven, and nobody had ever come for me before. Afterwards, when it was all over, you were there, and I held on to you. I’ve been holding on ever since.’

She laughed, a small, wet, horrible laugh.

‘And I know what she is, Harry. I know. She’s been after you since the day she met you. She’s cleverer than you are about people. She’s pretty. She’s rich. She’s got that silver-blonde hair and that voice. I haven’t got any of that. All I’ve got is knowing things, and you never, ever listen to the things I know. She’ll take you. She’ll take you and turn you into one of them, a little bit at a time, so slowly you won’t even notice. It’ll be my fault. It’ll be my fault for not being good enough to stop her.’

Harry had no idea what to say. He felt as though he had walked into the middle of a conversation that had been going on for three years without him.

‘Nobody’s taking me anywhere,’ he said at last. ‘Hermione, you’re my friend. You’re my best friend, you and Ron. That doesn’t change because...’

‘Doesn’t it?’

‘No! Why would it? I don’t understand what you think is going to happen!’

‘I know you don’t,’ said Hermione. ‘That’s the worst part.’

‘You think everybody who’s kind to you must be good,’ she went on. ‘You think Dumbledore’s wise because he believes you. Ron told me about the cupboard, Harry. He told me about the bars on your window, and the three days they kept you locked in. Dumbledore knows. He sends you back there every summer anyway. So don’t you tell me how wise everybody is.’

Harry’s face was growing hot. He didn’t understand half of this, which only made it worse.

‘What about you, then?’ he said. ‘Her brooch went missing in September. Her ribbons. Her hair, she said. She thinks you did all that. You and that chain you keep fiddling with.’

Hermione froze.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said.

It was the voice she had used in the cupboard. Harry knew that voice now.

‘Hermione...’

‘Don’t.’ She was backing away from him, with her wandlight shaking. ‘Don’t you dare take her side against me. Not tonight. Not after everything. You go and find your precious hippogriff, Harry. Find your precious Malfoy while you’re at it. I hope she’s very happy, I hope you’re both...’

She didn’t finish. She turned on her heel and stalked off into the trees, with her little light jerking away between the trunks. Harry heard her blow her nose furiously. Then the light stopped, a dozen yards off, and stayed where it was, glowing between two trees like a lamp left in a window.

Harry stood alone on the path.

He felt tired, stupid and very young. He had a feeling that he had just failed some sort of test, without ever being told what the questions were.

He tipped his head back. Through a ragged gap in the branches overhead, he could see a few stars, and the edge of a cloud with moonlight behind it.

‘This is your fault,’ he told God irritably.

He meant everything. He meant the time travel, the Forest and the hippogriff that wouldn’t be found. He meant girls. If there really was a God, Harry felt He had a great deal to answer for.

God didn’t answer.

There was a crack, like a tree trunk snapping. Then another. Then a rushing, crashing, splintering roar, coming straight towards him through the undergrowth, fast, flattening everything in its way.

Something burst out of the trees ten feet from Harry, in an explosion of leaves and broken branches.

It rose up in front of him on its hind legs, and it went on rising. Its head brushed the lowest boughs. The moon came out from behind its cloud at that exact moment, and Harry saw it plainly.

It was the werewolf.

It was worse than he remembered. He hadn’t thought it could be worse. Its grey fur was matted and black with filth. There were long rags of something dark caught in its claws, fluttering, and the cold that came off them made Harry’s breath smoke in the June air. The black burn on the end of its muzzle, where his Sickle had struck it, was still raw and open. The yellow eyes found him at once.

Its lips peeled back.

The fear came up hot from the back of Harry’s skull, the way it had on the lawn. It was no easier the second time. It was worse, because now he knew what it could do. Bear, said the small reasonable voice in his head at once. It’s only a bear. Bears live in forests-

Shut up, Harry told it.

The thing sniffed the air in long, greedy draughts. It sniffed towards the place where Hermione’s light had been, and lost interest. Then it swung its head back towards Harry, and its nostrils opened wide.

‘Wyyyrrrm,’ it said.

Harry ran.

He got three strides. Then the world tipped sideways, because a root had caught his foot, and he went down full length among the leaves. The claws went over his back. He heard them hit the oak behind him with a sound like four axes landing at once. Bark and splinters rained down on his neck.

He rolled. He scrambled up. He put the oak between himself and the thing, then another tree, then another, dodging round the trunks the way he dodged Bludgers, never running in a straight line. Behind him, trees were cracking. It wasn’t going round them. It was going through them.

Then, quite suddenly, the crashing stopped.

Harry flattened himself against a trunk. His wandlight had gone out when he fell. In the dark he could hear his own heart, the trickle of the stream, and something else: long, slow, wet breaths, somewhere above him, very close.

A voice came out of the dark. It was thick and grinding, as though it were being dragged up through a throat that had not been made for words. Harry knew it at once, which was the worst thing of all.

‘H-Harrrry...’

It was Lupin’s voice. It was what was left of it.

Harry ran again.

‘Impedimenta!’

Hermione’s voice came out of the darkness, high and furious. A jet of light hit the werewolf on the shoulder and simply wasn’t there any more.

‘Incarcerous! Confundo! Leave him ALONE!’

Ropes flew. They snapped. The Confundus Charm struck it square between the eyes and did nothing at all, because there was no thought left in that head to confuse. The creature didn’t even turn round.

Harry’s feet went out from under him again. This time it was the stream. He slid down a muddy bank, landed on his back in six inches of icy water and lay there, winded, staring up.

The creature stood on the bank above him, black against the moon. A thin cloud was sliding across the moon behind it.

It crouched to spring.

There was nowhere left to go. He raised his wand anyway, because it was the only thing he had. He held it up before him the way a knight holds up a sword, though his arm was shaking so badly that the tip of it wobbled all over the sky.

‘Come on, then,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Come on. I’m right here.’

‘Harry!’

Somebody screamed it from directly overhead.

Harry’s eyes went up. Through the gap in the trees above the stream, something enormous was coming down out of the sky, fast, with its wings half folded: a great grey shape, with a smaller, darker shape crouched on its back.

It was Buckbeak.

Dracina was riding him. Her hood had fallen back. Her silver-blonde hair had come out of its plaits and was streaming behind her like a banner. She had her wand in one hand and a fistful of Buckbeak’s feathers in the other. Her face was white, furious and quite fearless, because she was looking only at Harry.

‘Don’t you touch him you feral creature!’ she screamed.

Buckbeak hit the ground on the far bank at a gallop. He didn’t stop. He came straight on across the clearing with his wings flung wide and his head down, like a charger thundering down the lists in an old tournament, with his rider bent low along his neck. He struck the creature from the side with all his weight.

The two of them went over together in a storm of feathers and fur. Buckbeak was screeching. His talons raked the creature’s chest. His hooked beak snapped at its throat, once, twice, tearing out a mouthful of grey fur. Harry saw the gashes open in the grey hide. Then he saw them close again, crawling shut while Buckbeak was still tearing at it. Only the black burn on its muzzle stayed raw.

The creature howled. Then it twisted round, with that impossible quickness, and seized Buckbeak by the base of one wing.

Dracina was flung clear. She hit the ground hard on the edge of the stream, rolled over in the mud and lay there for a moment, stunned. When she lifted her head, her eyes kept sliding away from the creature, the way water slides off glass.

The creature heaved itself upright with Buckbeak in its grip. It lifted Buckbeak clean off the ground, though he was bigger than a horse. Then it threw him.

Buckbeak went cartwheeling away across the clearing, shrieking, with his wings beating wildly. He crashed into the bracken under the trees and lay still.

Dracina had pushed herself up on to her hands and knees. She was crawling towards Harry, through the mud and the shallow water, with her eyes fixed on him. Her face was smeared and her robes were soaked. She didn’t seem to have noticed either.

The creature stopped. It lifted its head.

It sniffed.

It had caught a new scent. Harry saw its nostrils working, and its head turned slowly away from him, towards the girl crawling through the stream. Its lips drew back. It took one step towards her. Then another.

It can smell something on her, Harry thought. Something old and rotten.

He thought of a diary, lying open on a cold stone floor in the Chamber of Secrets. He thought of what had been inside Dracina’s head for months, writing itself into her, until there had been hardly any of her left.

‘Harry!’ Hermione was beside him. She had come scrambling down the bank, and she had hold of his arm with both hands, dragging at it. ‘Harry, move! Now, while it’s not looking at you! Come on!’

‘What about Dracina?’

‘Leave her!’ Hermione’s face in the moonlight was wild. ‘Leave her, Harry, get Buckbeak, he fell that way, we can still...’

Harry wrenched his arm out of her grip.

‘Never!’ he screamed.

He was already running. He went splashing along the stream bed. He threw himself down on his knees in the water between Dracina and the creature, with his arms spread wide. He didn’t think about it at all. There wasn’t anything to think about.

‘Oi!’ he yelled up at it. ‘OI! Fleabag! Over here! I’m the one you want, remember? You want something to chew, come and chew on me, you great mangy overgrown hairy ballsack!’

The creature’s head swung back round to him.

Harry glanced back over his shoulder. Hermione was standing frozen on the bank with her wand up. It was not pointing at the werewolf. Harry honestly could not tell whether it was meant for Dracina or for him.

Then her face changed. Harry saw her shut her eyes. Her lips were moving, low and fast, too low to make out over the rush of the water.

‘Ron let it go,’ she was whispering. ‘He was right about Crookshanks, and he let it go anyway. I only said sorry after he’d made it easy for me.’ A sob. ‘I took her brooch and left it on the dungeon steps for Peeves. I turned her ribbons scarlet and gold. I made her think she was going mad, all year, and I liked it. I told myself I was looking after him. I wasn’t. I was keeping him...’

Then she said something quite clearly, as though she were saying it to somebody standing beside her, and that much Harry heard.

‘I forgive you. Both of you. I forgive you.’

Then she opened her eyes. She came sideways down the bank as she raised her wand, to get a clear shot past Harry, until she was almost level with the werewolf. This time she aimed at it, and only at it.

‘Stupefy! Impedimenta! Stupefy!’

The spells streaked past Harry’s ear one after another. They hit the creature in the chest, the throat, the face. They might as well have been snowflakes. It didn’t even blink.

But it turned its head.

It looked at Hermione, small and furious on the edge of the stream, with her wand outstretched. Then one long arm swung out, almost lazily, and caught her across the body.

Hermione flew backwards up the bank. She hit a tree with a thud Harry felt in his own chest and slid down it into the leaves.

‘HERMIONE!’

Harry’s yell rang through the clearing. The creature’s head snapped back round to him at the sound.

Behind Harry, Dracina had pressed herself against his back. She was shaking so hard that he could feel it through both their robes. Her fists were knotted in the back of his collar, and her face was buried between his shoulder blades.

The creature looked down at the two of them, kneeling in the stream.

It came.

Harry threw up his wand.

‘Protego!’

The shield burst out of the end of his wand, silvery blue and humming, at the very instant the creature sprang. It hit the shield in the middle of its leap.

On the lawn, the shield had only bounced it back, like a ball off a wall. This time it hit back. There was a sound like a great bell being struck, so deep that Harry felt it in his teeth, and the werewolf was hurled across the clearing. It flew twenty feet and crashed into the far bank. Then it rolled over several times through the bracken.

Harry stared at his own wand.

He was kneeling in the stream with the water running cold round his knees, and the shield was standing up in front of him like a wall of light. Dracina was crouched behind him with her face pressed into his back. Harry had a sudden odd picture of the three of them as they must look from above: a boy on one knee with a shining shield raised, a girl sheltering behind him, and a monster in the dark. It was like a picture out of one of the old books in the Hogwarts library, the ones with gold on the edges of the pages, where knights stood over fallen ladies and held off dragons. He had never in his life felt less like a knight.

The creature got up.

It shook itself. It threw back its head and gave a roar that sent every bird for a mile into the air. Then it came back across the clearing on all fours, so fast that it seemed to flow over the ground, and it hurled itself at the shield.

The shield held. Just.

The creature hung against it, snarling, with its claws spread on the shimmering surface. Its breath smoked against the light. Its yellow eyes were fixed on Harry, a few inches away on the other side. Then it began to tear.

It was the lawn all over again, only worse. The claws went in. They dragged. A jagged piece of the shield came away under them and fell hissing into the stream, where it went out like a dropped match. Then another came away, and another. Harry gritted his teeth and pushed at the charm with all his might. It made no difference. He could feel the shield getting thinner. He could feel it coming apart under his hands, the way wet paper comes apart.

This is it, he thought. This time it’s really it.

There was no dog coming. There was no Sirius on his knees in the grass, saying the psalm. Sirius was somewhere out on the dark lawn, bleeding, and in a few minutes the dementors would come for him. Lupin was right here, and Lupin was going to kill him.

Behind him, Dracina was whispering something into his back, over and over. He could feel her breath through his robes. He couldn’t hear a word of it. The creature was making too much noise, roaring, snarling and ripping at the shield. The shield itself was squealing under the claws.

‘I love you,’ Dracina was saying, into the wet wool between his shoulder blades. She was crying. ‘I love you. I love you. Harry, I love you...’

Harry didn’t hear any of it.

He turned his head instead, without meaning to, and looked down at her.

She was huddled against him in the stream with her knees drawn up, soaked, filthy and shaking. Her face was turned up to his. She looked about seven years old. She looked as small as she had at the bottom of the Chamber of Secrets, lying on the cold stone, when he had planted his feet on either side of her and raised the sword.

No, thought Harry.

He wasn’t going to let it have her. He didn’t know why that mattered more than his own neck just then, and there wasn’t time to wonder. He would hold this shield until his arm came off, if that was what it took.

The cross in his inside pocket had gone warm.

He felt it quite distinctly, through his robes, against his chest, as though somebody had laid a hand there. In the same moment, for no reason at all, he thought of the lawn in front of the castle. He thought of Lupin’s hoarse voice in the dark, and Sirius answering him.

Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord.

Harry looked up. The cloud had slid right off the moon. It hung over the clearing, round, white and enormous, so bright that every leaf had turned silver. The water round his knees seemed to be running with light.

Then the warmth came, and Harry knew it at once. He had felt it before, at the bottom of the Chamber, with basilisk venom burning in his arm. It came up from somewhere very deep, through his chest and down his arm into his hand. It did not feel like a spell. A spell came from you. This felt more like being a window with the sun coming through it. It felt very old. For a second Harry heard Dumbledore’s voice on the castle steps, a year ago, with the lake blazing behind him. Old magic, Harry. The magic of Elves...

The shield turned white. The silvery blue had changed. It blazed now like starlight on snow. The holes the werewolf had torn in it ran together like water until it stood whole again.

The werewolf reeled back from it with a yelp. Then the shield moved.

It went out from Harry’s wand in a single, silent wave, like a ripple spreading across a pond. It swept across the stream, up the bank and over the creature. It went straight through it.

The werewolf screamed. Harry heard a hiss like a pan of fat thrown on to a fire. Where the white light touched it, the grey fur was melting away, running off it like frost off a window in the sun. The huge shoulders were sinking. The great arms were shrinking, the claws drawing back into fingers, the long muzzle folding back into a face. The whole terrible shape of it was falling in on itself, smaller and smaller. It was as though something gentle but immensely strong had laid its hands on the wolf inside and told it to lie down.

The force of the wave struck what was left. It picked it up and threw it back against the trunk of an oak, with a thud that shook the leaves.

Then the light was gone, and the clearing was quite silent.

At the foot of the oak lay a man.

He was thin and pale, with nothing left on him but the shredded remains of his trousers. He was lying on his side with one arm flung out, and he didn’t stir. It was Lupin.

Harry stayed where he was, on his knees in the stream, with his wand still held out in front of him. He couldn’t have moved if he had wanted to. His arm was trembling all the way to the shoulder. The warmth had gone out of him as suddenly as it had come. It had left him hollow, shaking and sick, Harry felt like he felt at the very end of a Quidditch match, when you’ve caught the Snitch, with nothing left of you at all.

What was that? he thought. What did I just do?

He had no idea. He didn’t think it had been him. He wasn’t at all sure that it hadn’t.

Then a cold jolt went through him. Lupin wasn’t moving. Was he breathing? Had he... had Harry just...? He started to get up.

Before he could, Dracina flung her arms round his neck from behind, and held him there.

‘You did it,’ she was sobbing. ‘You did it, you did it, oh, Harry, you were... nobody has ever... I’ve never seen anybody do anything like that, not ever, not my father, not anybody, you were so...’ She had both arms locked round his neck. Her wet cheek was pressed against his. ‘You stood in front of me. You stood in front of me again. You always do. You always, always do...’

‘Dracina,’ said Harry, ‘I can’t breathe...’

She didn’t let go. If anything, she held on tighter.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. The words came tumbling out of her. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. For the hippogriff, for my arm, for the dementors at the match. For everything I ever said. I never meant to hurt you. I swear I never meant it, I only wanted you to look at me, and I didn’t know how else... Please forgive me. Please, Harry. I’ll do anything. Please say you forgive me...’

Harry twisted round in the water until he could see her face.

Then he did something he had never done before. He didn’t think about it first, which was probably just as well. He got one arm under her knees and the other round her back. Then he stood up out of the stream with her in his arms, the way a knight lifts a lady out of the wreck of a battle in the last chapter of a story.

She was lighter than he had expected, and much wetter. She had gone completely silent. She was staring up at him with her silver eyes very wide, and she had gone scarlet to the roots of her hair.

‘Dracina,’ he said. ‘I forgive you.’

He was beaming. He could feel it all over his face, a great stupid grin, and he couldn’t have stopped it if he had tried.

‘I forgive you. I already did, really, on the steps. I just didn’t know it yet.’ He laughed. It came out of him without his permission, shaky and enormous. ‘You saved Buckbeak. You saved me. You came down out of the sky on a hippogriff and called a werewolf a feral creature. You never meant any of it. I knew you didn’t.’ His eyes had gone wet again. ‘We can be friends now. Can’t we? Proper friends. Not in secret.’

Dracina made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a sob. Then she hid her face in his shoulder and cried as though her heart would break, with both fists knotted in the front of his robes.

Harry stood holding her in the middle of the moonlit stream. It occurred to him, rather dimly, that her head only came up to his chin. He frowned.

‘When did I get taller than you?’

Dracina’s head came up off his shoulder at once.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You used to be as tall as me. You were, at the start of the year. I remember. You used to look down your nose at me on the stairs.’

‘I have never,’ said Dracina icily, ‘looked down my nose at anybody in my life. And you are not taller than me. You are standing in a stream. On a stone, very probably. It’s an optical illusion.’ Her cheeks had gone pink. ‘And you may put me down, Potter. Immediately. I am perfectly capable of standing up by myself. I have been doing it since I was a year old.’

She didn’t let go of his robes, though.

‘How did you even find me?’ said Harry.

‘It roared, Potter. Half the Forest heard it. Then Granger started setting off fireworks.’ She sniffed. ‘I simply followed the noise.’

Harry set Dracina down carefully on the bank. Only then did he see Hermione. She had picked herself up at the foot of her tree, holding her side, with a cut on her lip and bracken in her hair. She was gripping her wand so tightly that her knuckles showed. While Harry watched, she shut her eyes and took a long, shaky breath. Then she put the wand away in her pocket.

Dracina had seen her too. Her fists stayed knotted in Harry’s sleeve, and she gave Hermione a long, cold look over his arm, the look of somebody guarding a door.

‘Don’t,’ she said softly. ‘Don’t you even look at him like that, Granger. Not tonight.’

Hermione didn’t answer. Harry hadn’t the faintest idea what either of them was talking about.

He pulled his sleeve free and splashed across the stream to Lupin. He dropped on his knees beside him.

Lupin looked terrible. His face was grey and old. There was a black mark, the size of a coin, on the end of his nose. It was the place where the Sickle had struck him. It hadn’t healed. Harry didn’t think it ever would. His chest was going up and down, though, slowly. When Harry held his hand in front of Lupin’s mouth, he could feel breath on his fingers. He was alive. Relief went through Harry so hard that his knees shook.

‘Professor,’ said Harry. ‘Professor Lupin. Can you hear me?’

Lupin didn’t move. His skin was cold to the touch, and covered in gooseflesh. He was shaking slightly, even unconscious.

‘He’s freezing,’ said Harry. ‘He’s going to freeze to death out here. We can’t just leave him lying in the...’

He felt in his pocket. His fingers found the little cross, still faintly warm. He pulled it out and pressed it into Lupin’s cold hand. Then he closed the fingers round it, one at a time.

‘There,’ he muttered. ‘That’s yours.’

Somebody was standing over him. Harry looked up. It was Dracina. She had unclasped her long black cloak, and she was holding it out at arm’s length, with an expression of deep distaste.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘Cover him up. If it means I don’t have to look at him.’

Harry took it. He tucked it round Lupin as well as he could, right up to the chin. Dracina watched him do it. Slowly the distaste went out of her face, and Harry didn’t have time to wonder what had taken its place.

‘It isn’t monogrammed,’ she added. ‘I’m not a complete idiot.’

‘Harry.’ Hermione had come down the bank. She was limping. Her voice was quiet, and very gentle, for her. ‘Harry, we can’t take him with us. We can’t be seen. If anybody finds us out here with him...’

‘I know.’

‘Dumbledore knows he’s in the Forest. He told us so. He’ll send somebody. He’ll find him.’

‘I know,’ said Harry.

He knew it perfectly well. He knew something else too, which Hermione hadn’t said. Dumbledore thought Lupin was still a werewolf. Nobody would come into the Forest for him before morning. Harry knelt there for another moment beside him, looking at the thin, scarred, kind face that had teased Sirius in the Shack about a girl called Rita, and prayed in the dark on the lawn. Lupin had tried to kill him twice tonight. Harry didn’t care in the least. He only wanted somebody to come and carry him somewhere warm.

He got up.

‘Right,’ he said, and turned to Dracina. ‘Listen. I’ve got to explain something, and it’s going to sound mad.’

‘Everything you do sounds mad, Potter. I’m quite used to it.’

So Harry explained. He did it badly, in a rush, standing in the stream with water squelching in his trainers.

‘That wasn’t me you waved to, earlier,’ he said. ‘Well, it was. It was the other me. I’m from later. From midnight. Hermione’s got a... she can go back in time, never mind how, and Dumbledore sent us back. Sirius Black’s innocent. It was Pettigrew, Peter Pettigrew. He’s been Ron’s rat for twelve years. In about an hour they’re going to lock Sirius up in Flitwick’s office and give him to the dementors. We’ve got to get him out first. Dumbledore says we need Buckbeak to get up to the window.’

Behind him, Hermione winced. Harry supposed that telling Malfoy about the Time-Turner was the last thing she had ever wanted. He didn’t see any other way.

Dracina looked at him without speaking.

‘Sirius Black,’ she said at last. ‘My mother’s cousin. The mass murderer. Is innocent.’

‘Yes.’

‘And the rat did it.’

‘Yes.’

‘And there are two of you.’

‘Yes. Well, there were. The other one’s unconscious by the lake at the moment. Or he will be soon.’

Dracina closed her eyes briefly, like somebody counting to ten.

‘Naturally I’ll help,’ she said, opening them again. She tossed her ruined hair back over her shoulder. ‘Somebody competent will have to fly the hippogriff. It certainly isn’t going to be Granger.’ She shot a glance at Hermione as she said it, and her chin came up. ‘Buckbeak trusts me. Besides, I told Pansy everything. She’ll cover for me until breakfast.’

Hermione said nothing at all.

Harry looked at her then, properly, for the first time since the argument. She was standing a little apart from them, holding her ribs, with the moonlight on her face. She looked very tired. Her eyes were red. She was watching him quietly. He would have to talk to her properly. There wasn’t time now.

There was a rustle and a crashing in the bracken at the edge of the clearing. All three of them spun round with their wands up.

It was Buckbeak.

He came limping out of the trees, looking extremely put out. One of his wings was trailing a little, and there was a long scratch down the grey feathers, but he seemed to be in one piece otherwise. He shook himself all over, so that bits of twig flew off him. Then he looked at the three of them with his fierce orange eyes, and gave a loud, offended screech, as though he wanted to know who was going to apologise to him.

Dracina ran to him.

She flung her arms round his neck without even bowing first. To Harry’s astonishment, Buckbeak let her. He lowered his great head and rubbed it against her shoulder, quite gently. A small, contented clicking noise came from his throat.

They should have gone at once. They all knew it. Instead, Hermione sat down rather suddenly on a fallen log at the edge of the clearing, as though her legs had decided for her, and pressed both hands to her ribs.

‘Harry, there’s something I don’t understand... Why didn’t the dementors get Sirius? I remember them coming, and then I think I passed out... there were so many of them...’

Harry sat down beside her. A moment later Dracina sat down on his other side, rather closer than the log required. Hermione noticed. Dracina noticed her noticing. Neither of them said anything.

‘Something came,’ said Harry slowly. ‘Right at the end, when the nearest one had its hands on me and I thought... Something silver. It drove them all off. Then it went galloping away across the lake, to the other side. Somebody was waiting for it over there.’

Hermione stared at him.

‘But what was it?’

‘There’s only one thing it could have been, to make the dementors go,’ said Harry. ‘A real Patronus. A powerful one.’

‘But who conjured it?’

Harry didn’t answer straight away. He was remembering the shape on the far shore, glimpsed in the very last moment before the dark closed over him. He was fairly sure who it had been. It couldn’t have been, though. It simply wasn’t possible.

‘Didn’t you see what they looked like?’ said Hermione eagerly. ‘Was it one of the teachers?’

‘No,’ said Harry. ‘He wasn’t a teacher.’

‘But it must have been a really powerful wizard, to drive all those dementors away... If the Patronus was shining so brightly, didn’t it light him up? Couldn’t you see-?’

‘Yeah, I saw him,’ said Harry slowly. ‘But... maybe I imagined it... I wasn’t thinking straight... I passed out right afterwards...’

‘Who did you think it was?’

‘I think-’

Harry swallowed. He knew exactly how this was going to sound.

‘I think it was my dad.’

He sneaked a look at Hermione. Her mouth had dropped wide open. Alarm and pity were fighting it out on her face. The pity was winning, which made him want to crawl under the log. On his other side, Dracina had stopped moving altogether.

‘Harry, your dad’s… well… dead,’ Hermione said quietly.

‘I know that,’ said Harry quickly.

‘You think you saw his ghost?’

‘I don’t know... no... he looked solid...’

‘But then-’

‘Maybe I was seeing things,’ said Harry. ‘But... from what I could see... it looked like him... I’ve got photos of him...’

Hermione was still gazing at him as though she were worried about his sanity. Dracina wasn’t looking at him like that at all. She was looking at him the way she had looked at him once before, on the end of a hospital bed last June, when they found out that they had both seen the man by the broken pillar. She didn’t say anything. She simply moved an inch closer.

‘I know it sounds crazy,’ said Harry flatly.

He turned away from them both and looked at Buckbeak instead. The hippogriff had wandered down to the stream and was jabbing at the soft mud with his beak, apparently hunting for worms. Harry wasn’t really seeing him. His mind had gone to James Potter, and to the three boys James had gone everywhere with. Moony. Wormtail. Padfoot. Prongs. Had every one of the four been out in the grounds tonight? Wormtail had come back from the dead this evening, after twelve years. Was it really so impossible that Harry’s dad might do the same? Perhaps he’d imagined it. The shape on the far shore had been a long way off, and blurred. All the same, for one moment, just before the dark took him, he had been so sure...

Through a gap in the trees beyond the stream, Harry could see a long, pale glimmer of water. It was the lake. The clearing was nearer the shore than he had thought. It could only have been minutes since the werewolf burst out of the trees. It felt like hours.

Something was moving on the far side of it. Harry got up off the log and went to the edge of the trees to see.

On the opposite shore, two tiny figures were running down the slope towards the water. A third was crouched at the water’s edge with its arms over its head. As Harry watched, the smaller of the two runners reached it and stopped beside it, with a wand raised.

It was him. It was the other Harry, reaching Sirius.

Harry looked down at his own feet. He was standing on a bank. He was standing on the bank opposite. Then it went galloping away across the lake, to the other side.

And then he saw the dementors.

They were sliding out of the night on all sides, drifting round the margins of the lake like a slow black tide. Every one of them was heading the same way, towards the far shore, away from where Harry stood. He wouldn’t have to go anywhere near them...

‘Stay here with Buckbeak,’ he said over his shoulder. His voice sounded strange to him. ‘Both of you. I’m just going to keep a lookout.’

He didn’t wait for an answer. He ran.

There was only one thought in his head, and it was about his father. What if it was him... what if it was really him... He had to know. The lake came closer through the trees. There was nobody about, not a footprint, not a light. Across the water, little sparks of silver were flickering on and off. They were his own feeble attempts at a Patronus.

There was a bush right at the water’s edge. Harry flung himself down behind it and peered out desperately through the leaves.

On the far bank, the little flickers of silver had shrunk to a single feeble cloud of mist.

A terrified sort of excitement went through him. Any second now...

‘Come on!’ he muttered, staring all round. ‘Where are you? Dad, come on-’

Nobody came.

Harry lifted his head and looked across the lake at the ring of dementors on the far shore. One of them was pushing back its hood. Then the last of the silver mist went out. It was time. It was the moment for the rescuer to come. And nobody was coming. Nobody was going to come, not this time...

Then he understood.

It hadn’t been his father at all. It had been himself.

Harry leapt up from his hiding place and dragged out his wand.

At that very moment the moon flashed, once, very brightly. It lit the whole lake from end to end. Harry was thinking, quite calmly, about an afternoon in January.

He was standing at the edge of this same lake, among the frozen reeds, with Dracina Malfoy. She was throwing stones out across the ice so that they skittered away over it with a long, singing whine. It’s the best noise in Britain, she was saying. One can’t buy it, apparently. He threw one too, and it sang as well. Then, for four whole minutes, neither of them said anything at all. It was the longest he had ever been comfortable in anybody’s company in his life.

He had never once thought of it as a happy memory. It was, though. It was the happiest thing he owned.

He remembered something else from that afternoon too. He remembered a boy walking out across the ice, doing beautifully, going along as though the lake were a floor. You were all right the whole way, the big Hufflepuff had said, carrying him up the lawn. You were fine till you looked down.

Harry didn’t look down.

He didn’t look at the dementors or the black water. He didn’t look at the thing he had seen tear its way out of Lupin on the lawn, or at the doubt that had sat in his chest like a stone. He kept his eyes on the far shore, and he held on to the memory as hard as he had ever held a Snitch.

‘Deliver us from evil,’ he said.

He didn’t know why he said it. They were the words Lupin hadn’t been able to finish on the lawn, before the scream took him. Harry finished them for him, quite steadily.

‘EXPECTO PATRONUM!’

He felt it.

He felt it come up through him the way the warmth had come in the clearing, from somewhere deeper than he had a name for. It came with the singing stones and the four quiet minutes. It was in his blood as well, he thought, and in his soul. The rest of it was not his at all. It seemed to have been waiting patiently for him to stop looking down.

The anger he had been carrying about since the Shack drained out of him, and the doubt went with it. For one moment Harry saw something so bright and so beautiful that he couldn’t have said what it was. It didn’t occur to him that some of the light was coming from inside him.

What burst out of the end of his wand was an animal, so bright that Harry had to screw up his eyes against it. It went out over the water at a gallop. It didn’t sink. It went across the surface of the lake as though the lake were a floor.

It reached the first of the dementors. As it came near, the dementor shrieked. Its black rags began to fizz and smoke, like paper held too close to a fire. Then it simply came apart, hissing, into tatters of shadow that blew away and were gone.

The shining animal went on. It went round the ring of dementors like a fire going round the edge of a field. The two or three nearest it shrieked, sizzled and fell to pieces. All the rest broke and fled, scattering away across the water into the dark, back towards the gates as fast as they could go.

All except one.

It had been at the back of the ring. It was bigger than the rest, and it wasn’t fleeing. It had turned round. It was coming straight across the lake towards Harry at speed, with its rotting hands stretched out in front of it and its rags streaming. The cold came off it in a wave. Harry felt the edges of the world begin to go white.

He braced himself. He didn’t know what else to do.

Then, a long way off and high up, he heard a horn.

It was a clear, bright, ringing note, like a hunting horn blown across a valley on a winter morning. It was not loud. Harry felt it in his chest, all the same.

Something fell out of the sky.

It was an arrow. It was made of the same white light as the animal on the water, and it came down out of the stars as straight as a plumb line. It struck the last dementor full in the middle of its chest.

The dementor screamed. It was a dreadful sound, high, thin and furious. Then it fizzed and hissed. It came apart into nothing, taking the cold with it.

Harry stared up at the sky. There was nothing there. There was nothing anywhere, except stars and the bright moon. He had the strangest feeling, though, that somebody up there had a very good eye, and knew exactly who he was. He thought, for no reason at all, that she had been waiting a very long time to do that.

The lake was quiet.

On the far shore, he could see the tiny dark shapes of Sirius, Hermione and himself, lying still on the grass. They were all right. He knew they were all right, because he was standing here. Now all he had to do was get Sirius out of that tower.

The shining animal had swung round. It was trotting back to him over the glassy water, light as a leaf. It was no horse. It was no unicorn either.

It was a stag.

It shone like a second moon. It came back to him over the water and up on to the bank, where it stopped. Its hooves left no mark at all on the soft ground. It looked at Harry with its great bright eyes. Then, very slowly, it lowered its head with its crown of antlers, in a bow.

‘Prongs,’ he whispered.

He stretched out his hand. His fingers were trembling. But as they reached towards it, the stag was gone. It wasn’t the ghost of his dad. But Harry hoped wherever his Father was, he was looking down at him with pride.

Harry stood there with his hand still out. Then his heart gave an enormous leap, because there were hooves behind him. He spun round.

Hermione was running towards him through the trees, towing Buckbeak by his rope. Dracina was running beside her, holding up the hem of her muddy robes.

‘What did you do?’ Hermione said fiercely. ‘You said you were only going to keep a lookout!’

‘I just saved all our lives...’ said Harry. ‘Get behind here, behind this bush, I’ll explain.’

They crouched down behind the bush, all three of them, with Buckbeak craning his neck over the top of it.

‘It wasn’t my dad,’ said Harry. ‘It was me. I saw myself, over here, from over there, the first time round. I thought it was him. So when nobody came, I...’ He waved his wand at the lake. ‘I did it.’

Hermione gaped at him. Dracina didn’t move at all.

‘Did anyone see you?’ said Hermione.

‘Yes, haven’t you been listening? I saw me but I thought I was my dad! It’s OK!’

‘Harry, I can’t believe it... You conjured up a Patronus that drove away all those dementors! That’s very, very advanced magic...’

‘I had help,’ said Harry.

He pointed upwards, at the stars.

Hermione looked up. So did Dracina. They had both seen it, Harry knew: the white stag on the water, and the arrow falling out of the sky. He could see it in their faces. Hermione was gazing upwards with a sort of uneasy awe, the way she might look at a sum that refused to come out. She didn’t believe it was God, Harry thought. Not yet. She didn’t quite disbelieve it either. Dracina was harder to read. She was looking at the sky with her lips pressed together, and Harry knew she was thinking of the Chamber. She didn’t say anything at all.

Harry didn’t need them to.

He believed it. The doubt that had sat in him by the lake, the first time round, had gone. He still didn’t know what it was inside him that had answered. He didn’t know what had turned his shield white in the clearing, or why the moon had flashed when he needed it. He didn’t know whether this meant he was a Christian now, or what you were supposed to do about it if you were. He would have to ask the Fat Friar.

They waited.

Hermione insisted on it, and for once even Dracina agreed with her. There was no use flying up to the West Tower while Dumbledore was still up there with Sirius, or before the other Harry and Hermione had vanished from the hospital wing. So they crouched at the edge of the trees with Buckbeak, and they watched.

Much later they saw a light moving on the lawn. It was Snape, on his feet at last. They watched him grope about in the grass on his hands and knees until he found his own wand. Then a light bloomed at its tip. On the way down to the lake, he stopped beside a heap of torn rags. He stooped, then straightened up with something that poured over his arm like water. Harry’s fists clenched. So that was where the Cloak had gone.

They watched Snape conjure stretchers out of thin air on the far shore, then load them, one after another: Sirius, bound and gagged; the other Harry; the other Hermione. They watched the little procession float away up the lawn, stopping to collect Ron on the way, with Snape stalking along behind it like an undertaker.

A small ginger shape limped after it across the grass, with its bottlebrush tail held up crookedly.

‘Crookshanks,’ Hermione breathed. Her eyes filled. ‘Oh, he’s all right. He’s all right.’

While they waited, Harry crept over to her. She was sitting a little apart, holding her ribs.

‘Are you hurt?’ he whispered. ‘Your ribs... it hit you really hard.’

‘I’ll live,’ said Hermione. She didn’t look at him.

‘Hermione, I’m sorry. About before. About what I said. I didn’t mean it.’

She was quiet for a moment.

‘I wasn’t protecting you, Harry,’ she said at last, very low. ‘Not really. I told myself I was, all year. I was keeping you. Like her brooch.’ She swallowed. ‘I don’t want to be like that any more.’

Harry didn’t entirely understand that either. He decided not to say so.

‘I don’t understand half of what you were on about earlier,’ he said honestly. ‘I probably never will. But you’re always there, you know? Every time. Whatever happens, you’re right there, telling me the next thing, holding on to my arm so I don’t do anything stupid. I couldn’t have done any of this without you.’ He shrugged, feeling his ears go hot. ‘I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have you, Hermione. I really don’t.’

Hermione’s face changed slowly, from the bottom up. Then her eyes lit up. She was gazing at Harry as though he had just given her full marks.

‘Oh,’ she said faintly. ‘Oh, Harry.’

‘What?’ said Harry.

‘Nothing.’ Hermione’s cheeks had gone pink. She was smiling now, a small, secret smile, and she seemed to have forgotten all about her ribs. ‘Nothing at all. I’m perfectly all right. I’m better than all right. You don’t have to say anything else. I understand.’

Harry had no idea what she understood. He decided that it was probably safer not to ask.

Dracina had heard every word. She had come over with Buckbeak’s rope in her hand, and her eyes had narrowed to silver slits. She opened her mouth, and Harry knew, from long experience, exactly what was about to come out of it. It would be something about bushy hair, or teeth, or the precise breed of beaver Hermione most resembled.

It didn’t come.

Dracina had closed her mouth again. She stood there with her pointed chin up, plainly having an argument with herself. Harry heard her mutter, so low that he barely caught it, ‘Do something. Not just say something.’

‘Granger,’ she said stiffly.

Hermione’s smile vanished at once. Her chin came up to match.

‘Malfoy.’

‘Those Stunners of yours were extremely well cast,’ said Dracina. ‘For all the good they did.’ She paused. The next part seemed to stick in her throat. ‘And what I said to you in first year. In the girls’ toilets. I have been sorry for that for a very long time.’ Another pause, longer. ‘I’m sorry for this morning already.’

Hermione stared at her. Harry could see the retort forming on her lips; he could practically see it sharpening. Then something flickered across her face. She glanced at Harry quickly. Then she looked back at Dracina.

‘I shouldn’t have said that about your father,’ she said, in a tight little voice. ‘This morning. That was a foul thing to say.’ She took a breath. ‘And your brooch, in September. That was me. I took it out of your hair in the corridor and left it on the dungeon steps, where Peeves would find it.’

Dracina’s nostrils flared. ‘I fished it out of a fire bucket, Granger. It took a week to dry.’

‘I know.’

‘And my ribbons?’

‘Scarlet and gold,’ said Hermione. ‘That was me too.’

‘Of course it was,’ said Dracina.

‘I didn’t take your letter, though,’ said Hermione. ‘I never touched it. That part wasn’t me.’

Dracina looked confused. Like her whole world view had come from Hermione having stolen the letter. And her not having done so left Dracina rudderless in deep water.

They looked at each other, two girls with mud on their faces and leaves in their hair, sitting a yard apart in the moonlight. The look was not friendly. It was the sort of look two generals might give each other across a table, before agreeing to stop shooting until after Christmas. All the same, it was not quite the look they had given each other on the castle steps.

Harry understood the part about the brooch, at least. Hermione had lied to him twice tonight, once in the cupboard about the chain and once in the Forest about the brooch. Oddly, he didn’t mind as much as he would have expected. Seventy times seven, Lupin had said. The idea was to lose count. The rest of it went straight over his head.

‘Good,’ he said, relieved. ‘That’s good. That’s all sorted, then.’

Both girls turned to look at him with exactly the same expression. Harry didn’t like it at all.

After that, Dracina went over Buckbeak’s hurt wing feather by feather, murmuring to him. By the end he was holding it neatly folded, though he still gave her an injured look.

At last, high up in the West Tower, a window lit up.

Hermione kept looking at her watch.

‘Five to twelve,’ she said at last. ‘We’ve just gone, the other us, I mean. Dumbledore’s locking the door on us this minute. He said he’d walk up there at five past. It’s now or never.’

They led Buckbeak out on to the open grass. That was when the trouble started.

‘I’ll sit behind Harry,’ said Hermione.

‘You will not,’ said Dracina.

‘I most certainly will. I’ve got the Time-Turner. If anything goes wrong, Harry needs me...’

‘If anything goes wrong, Harry needs somebody who can fly. In our very first flying lesson your broomstick rolled over on the grass and lay there, Granger. I was there. I laughed.’

‘That was three years ago!’

‘And you’ve improved so dramatically since.’

Dracina ended the argument by vaulting up on to Buckbeak’s back before anybody else could move. She gathered up the rope and looked down at them both, every inch a Malfoy, with her muddy chin in the air.

‘I shall go in front, to guide him, since he knows me,’ she announced. ‘Potter will sit directly behind me. As a strong wizard, he has a duty to hold on to a young witch and make quite certain that she doesn’t fall off the hippogriff.’

‘You just made that up!’ said Hermione.

‘It is a very old custom.’

‘It is not, you just made it up, there isn’t a book in the library...’

‘Will you both behave?’ said Harry.

They both stopped and looked at him. He had no idea why they were both being like this with him. He decided that it must be the time travel. It had probably done something to everybody’s nerves.

He climbed up behind Dracina. After a moment, with a face like thunder, Hermione climbed up behind him. She wrapped both her arms round his waist so tightly that he could hardly breathe. In front of him, Dracina reached back without turning round, took both his hands and placed them firmly on her own waist.

‘There,’ she said. ‘Now nobody will fall off.’

Hermione made a noise behind him like a kettle coming to the boil.

‘Up, Beaky,’ Dracina murmured. ‘Up, my clever boy.’ His great wings beat once, then again, labouring under the three of them, and they were in the air.

It was nothing like a broomstick. Buckbeak’s back rolled and heaved beneath them at every stroke of his wings. The ground fell away. Dracina didn’t take them over the lawn. She flew them low across the lake instead, then up round the back of the castle, in the shadow of the towers. Far below at the front, a knot of dark figures stood waiting in the moonlight. Nobody looked up. Dracina leant low over Buckbeak’s neck, steering him with her knees and her voice, quite calmly. Harry would never have admitted it to Hermione, but she flew him beautifully.

‘The West Tower,’ Dracina called back over her shoulder. ‘Count for me, Potter. Thirteen from the right.’

Harry counted. His heart was pounding.

‘...eleven... twelve... that one!’

Buckbeak swept in and hung beating in the air beside it. Harry reached out and pushed. The window swung inwards at once. It had been left unlatched.

‘Dumbledore,’ said Harry, with deep satisfaction. ‘I told you.’

He scrambled off Buckbeak’s back on to the stone sill and dropped into the room. Hermione came after him, then Dracina. Dracina leant back out of the window for a moment and laid her hand on Buckbeak’s beak.

‘Go on,’ she told him softly. ‘Back to the Forest. Hide. I’ll come and find you, I promise.’

Buckbeak gave her a long look. Then he wheeled away into the dark and was gone.

Harry turned round.

They were in a small, cluttered study. It was crammed with books from floor to ceiling. There were books on the shelves, books on the chairs and stacks of them on the floor. There was a very low desk, with a cushion on the chair in front of it, and a little set of library steps beside the bookshelves, which could only have been for Professor Flitwick to reach the high ones. A single candle was burning on the desk.

On a low shelf by the desk, wedged between two fat volumes on Charms, Harry noticed a small, plain leather book with nothing on its spine at all. It looked rather like the one in his pocket. He didn’t give it a second thought.

There was no sign of Sirius at all.

Harry stood motionless in the middle of the room. A coil of rope lay on the floor beside the chair. It had been coiled up neatly, the way a tidy old wizard might coil a hosepipe. The chair had been shoved back from the desk.

‘Well,’ said Dracina, after a long pause. She folded her arms. ‘So much for Dumbledore’s wonderful plan. Your mass murderer appears to have let himself out. Perhaps he simply asked nicely.’

Hermione didn’t answer. She had gone over to the desk. Harry saw her stop dead in front of it.

There was a book on the desk.

It lay by itself in the middle of the blotter, in the candlelight, closed, as though somebody had put it there on purpose to be seen. It was much bigger than the little book in Harry’s pocket: tall, thick and heavy, bound in old brown leather that had cracked with age. The corners were rubbed pale. Across the front, in tarnished gold, was a single word.

MYST.

There were fingermarks on the leather. Harry could see them quite clearly in the candlelight: grubby grey smudges round the edge of the cover, the same filthy grey that had been under Sirius’s broken nails.

Harry stared at it. He had seen somebody hold a book like that before. A night on the Knight Bus, last summer. A man in a raincoat on the bed across the aisle, who had nearly lit a cigarette, with one hand flat on a carrier bag that had something square and heavy in it. A faint greenish flicker through the plastic, like a television left on in another room.

What sort of book do you hold on to like that?

‘Hermione,’ he said slowly. ‘What is that?’

Hermione didn’t answer. She was staring at the book with her lips moving, like she did when she was trying to remember a page reference.

Harry gave it up. He went round the room instead, looking for anything else, any sign of where Sirius might have gone. He looked behind the curtains. He looked under the desk. He checked the window ledge for scratches, in case Sirius had climbed out, though it was seven floors up. Dracina followed him round with her arms folded, getting in the way.

‘He’s not under the desk, Potter,’ she said. ‘He’s a grown man. He’s not a sock.’

‘Thanks, Malfoy. Really helpful. Maybe he’s behind the books. You’d fit behind the books, if you breathed in.’

‘Are you implying something about my size?’

‘You’re the one who said I wasn’t taller than you.’

‘You’re standing on the rug. It’s a very thick rug.’

‘It’s about a quarter of an inch thick.’

‘Then it’s a very effective rug.’

Harry looked at her. She looked back at him with enormous haughtiness. Then the corner of her mouth twitched. She put a hand over it, and she began, helplessly, to giggle.

‘I hate you,’ she said, through her fingers. ‘I hate how funny you are. It’s completely unacceptable, Potter. It’s vulgar.’

She went on giggling. It was the real giggle, Harry thought, the small, surprised one he had heard by a hospital bed last June, not the polished little titter she used in the dungeons. He liked it very much indeed.

Then they heard voices in the passage outside.

They were men’s voices, low and urgent. They were coming closer. Harry crept to the door and put his ear against it.

‘...the dementors are waiting down on the lawn. Fudge wants him brought down now...’

‘He’s gone very quiet in there.’

‘What if he’s got out? He got out of Azkaban, didn’t he? What’s a locked door to him?’

‘Don’t be daft. You can’t Disapparate inside Hogwarts. Get the door open, Dawlish...’

‘Hang on. Shh. Did you hear that? Something moved in there.’

Harry backed away from the door fast. Aurors. They were Ministry Aurors. They were just outside, and in about five seconds they were going to come in.

‘Harry!’ Hermione was beckoning frantically from the desk. ‘Both of you! Over here, quickly!’

They went. Hermione had her hand flat on the cover of the big book. Her face was white, and her eyes were blazing.

‘I know what this is,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve read about it. I’ve read about them, in at least three books, there was a footnote in Lost Civilisations of the Ancient World... It’s D’ni. It’s a linking book. There isn’t time to explain.’ She looked straight at Harry. ‘Do you trust me?’

‘Yes,’ said Harry at once.

‘Oh, this is lovely,’ hissed Dracina. ‘This is all perfectly lovely, Granger, and I’m sure it’s a fascinating footnote, but in about three seconds there are going to be Aurors in this room. Then my father is going to hear about every single thing I have done tonight.’

Her voice wobbled very slightly on the word father. Harry looked at her. She was biting her lip to stop it shaking.

There was a rattle at the door handle.

Hermione opened the book.

Harry caught a glimpse of thick, creamy pages. The left page was blank. On the right page was a dark oblong, like a little window set into the paper.

Inside the window, a picture was moving.

It was an island. Harry was looking down at it from high up, the way a bird might, and the view was sweeping in towards it over a greenish grey sea. There were dark pine trees, and a wooden dock running out into the water. Beside the dock, the mast of a sunken ship stuck up out of the waves. On the hill above stood an enormous stone gear, half buried in the ground. A little way off the shore, a squat stone tower with a great clock face stood up out of the water. The picture kept sweeping lower and closer, over the water, towards the dock.

‘Stop talking,’ said Hermione. ‘Both of you. Touch the picture. Now.’

The door handle turned.

There was nothing else to do. Harry put out his hand. So did Dracina. So did Hermione. Three hands came down on the moving picture together.

The picture rushed up to meet them. It swelled until it filled Harry’s whole sight, until there was nothing in the world but grey sea, dark trees and the dock. Flitwick’s study simply wasn’t there any more. For an instant there was only blackness, and a soft rushing, like wind down a chimney.

And then they were gone. Just as the Aurors opened the door.