Two Parts of Himself

It took Harry several days to get used to his strange new freedom.

He'd never had any before. Not like this. At Privet Drive he'd got up when he was shouted at and eaten what he was given. At Hogwarts there were bells and timetables and Percy; but at the Leaky Cauldron nobody shouted and nobody rang anything, and on the first morning he lay in the big soft bed until the sun had climbed right across the ceiling, simply because he could, and nobody came. He could eat whatever he fancied. He could go wherever he pleased, as long as it was in Diagon Alley, and since the long cobbled street was packed from end to end with the most fascinating shops in the world, Harry felt no desire whatever to break his word to Fudge and go back out through the pub's front door into the Muggle world.

He didn't want to go anywhere near the Muggle world. He knew it, and he didn't like knowing it.

Every time he thought about it, and he found he thought about it more than he wanted to, the anger came up. It came up out of nowhere, like the hot water in the Hogwarts baths, and it brought things with it: Dudley's fist in the small of his back on the stairs; the teacher at St Grogory's who'd held up his school jumper in front of the whole class to show them what neglect looked like, and then let Dudley off for breaking his glasses because boys will be boys; the cupboard; the cat flap; Aunt Marge with wine on her chins saying the bitch. He'd be sitting in the sun with an ice cream and it would all be there, suddenly, in a hot tight knot under his ribs. His hand would have gone to his wand without his telling it to.

Harry didn't want to be angry about Muggles. He'd made his choice about that in the Chamber, with Tom Riddle's smile six inches from his face, and he'd thought at the time that it was made for good. But a choice, he was discovering, wasn't a thing you made once and put away. It was a thing that came back and asked you again, every day, in the sun, with an ice cream, and he couldn't help it. He'd been hurt by Muggles. Muggles had failed him, every one of them who'd ever had the chance to help and hadn't. And when he looked back over his whole life for something happy, anything, every single bit of it came from this side of the wall: from the Weasleys, or from Hogwarts, or from this one crooked street. The other side was pain, and anger, and being small, and nothing else.

And sometimes, beyond the anger, he'd catch himself wondering whether he could do something about it. Not revenge, exactly. He'd tell himself it wasn't that. Just... something. He had power now. He'd blown a woman up to the ceiling without lifting a finger. There were a great many people who deserved a great deal worse than that. And he'd feel the bitterness and pain in him start to gather, the hard cold steady resolve that had walked him through a wall of fire, down a pipe into the dark, and start to point itself.

Then he'd chase it away. Because it wasn't right. He'd known that in the Chamber and he knew it on the cobbles with the ice cream melting, and he'd had it confirmed, if confirmed was the word, by...

He still felt silly, thinking about it. Every time. But it was in his mind like a splinter, and he couldn't get it out. He had seen a man in white by a broken pillar, and that man had looked at him with pride, and Harry was nine-tenths sure who he'd been. And that man, as far as Harry understood anything about him, which wasn't far, was supposed to be the whole idea of good. Of standing between the people who could hurt and the people who could be hurt. Which was, if Harry was honest, the only thing he'd ever actually tried to be. He'd stood in front of the Stone with Quirrell's hands on his face. He'd stood in front of Ginny and Dracina with a sword older than Harry could ever know. He hadn't done it for anyone's approval. But he'd got it anyway, from someone, and it had looked exactly like a father's.

So there were two of him. He worked that out on about the third day, sitting on a wall by Gringotts watching the goblins come and go. There was the angry one, who'd been in the cupboard and wanted to hurt them back. And there was the other one, who'd been in the Chamber and wanted to help, and right wrongs, stand in front of good things and against evil things. They lived in the same chest. And they did not get on.

He went about his days with the two of them arguing, and didn't tell anyone.

He ate breakfast each morning in the Leaky Cauldron, where he liked watching the other guests. There were funny little witches from the country, up for a day's shopping, who ordered their porridge in pairs and whispered about prices. There were venerable-looking wizards arguing over the latest article in Transfiguration Today, one of them so cross about it that he turned his toast into a hedgehog and had to be helped. There was a party of wild-looking warlocks in bearskins who sat at one table and a party of raucous dwarfs who sat at the next, and the two parties had been feuding, as far as Harry could make out from the shouting, since the year nine hundred and something, over a ritual the dwarfs' ancestors had been promised would turn their beards to gold and which had merely made them itch.

'A thousand years,' Harry said to Tom, on the second morning, watching a dwarf throw a kipper.

'Eleven hundred, young sir, if you ask the dwarfs,' said Tom, wiping a glass. 'Nine-fifty if you ask the warlocks. They can't agree on that either.'

'Does anyone remember what the ritual was for?'

'Not a soul.' Tom held the glass up to the light. 'That's the thing about carrying a grudge, Mr Potter. You carry it. Not the other fellow. He's gone home and put his feet up. Heavy things, grudges.' He set the glass down. 'More toast?'

Harry said yes to the toast, and watched the warlocks throw the kipper back, and found that the sentence had stuck to him and wouldn't come off.

And once, on the fourth morning, something that looked very suspiciously like a hag sat down in the corner in a thick woollen balaclava and ordered a plate of raw liver, and ate it, and left a tip.

After breakfast Harry would go out into the back yard, take out his wand, tap the third brick from the left above the dustbin, and stand back as the archway into Diagon Alley opened in the wall.

He spent the long sunny days exploring the shops and eating under the brightly coloured umbrellas outside the cafés, where his fellow diners were showing one another their purchases ('it's a lunascope, old boy, no more messing around with moon charts, see?') or else discussing the case of Sirius Black ('personally, I won't let any of the children out alone until he's back in Azkaban'). He didn't have to do his homework with the door shut and one ear on the stairs any more; now he could sit in the bright sunshine outside Florean Fortescue's Ice Cream Parlour, finishing all his essays with occasional help from Florean Fortescue himself, who, apart from knowing a great deal about medieval witch-burnings, gave Harry free sundaes every half an hour.

'The thing people get wrong,' Florean said, on the second afternoon, leaning over Harry's shoulder with a knickerbocker glory in one hand and reading his Bagshot essay upside down, 'is that they think the burners were wicked. Write that. They weren't. Most of them.'

'They set fire to people,' said Harry.

'They did. And most of them went home afterwards and cried.' Florean put the glass down in front of him. 'They were frightened, Mr Potter. That's all. The crops had failed and the baby had died and a woman down the lane had said something odd. They were so frightened they'd have burned anything to make it stop. Frightened people do the most dreadful things in the world, and they're still only frightened people.' He straightened up. 'Doesn't excuse it. But if you want to understand it, start there. Nobody was ever wicked for its own sake. Not even the ones you'd think.'

Harry looked at the knickerbocker glory for some time before he picked up the spoon.

Not even the ones you'd think. He thought about Aunt Petunia's hand twitching over a plate. He thought about Uncle Vernon's eyes going wide and wet in the hall, looking at something that wasn't there. He didn't want to think about it. He thought about it anyway, and ate the ice cream, and wrote they were frightened in the margin of his essay in biro, and underlined it, and didn't know why.

Once Harry had refilled his money bag with gold Galleons, silver Sickles and bronze Knuts from his vault at Gringotts, he had to exercise a lot of self-control not to spend the whole lot at once. He had to keep reminding himself that he had five years to go at Hogwarts, and how it would feel to ask the Dursleys for money for spellbooks, to stop himself buying a handsome set of solid gold Gobstones (a wizarding game rather like marbles, in which the stones squirt a nasty-smelling liquid into the other player's face when they lose a point). He was sorely tempted, too, by the perfect, moving model of the galaxy in a large glass ball, which would have meant he never had to take another Astronomy lesson.

But the thing that tested Harry's resolution most appeared in his favourite shop, Quality Quidditch Supplies, a week after he'd arrived at the Leaky Cauldron.

Curious to know what the crowd in the shop was staring at, Harry edged his way inside and squeezed in among the excited witches and wizards until he glimpsed a newly erected podium, on which was mounted the most magnificent broom he had ever seen in his life.

'Just come out... prototype...' a square-jawed wizard was telling his companion.

'It's the fastest broom in the world, isn't it, Dad?' squeaked a boy younger than Harry, who was swinging off his father's arm.

'Irish International Side's just put in an order for seven of these beauties!' the proprietor of the shop told the crowd. 'And they're favourites for the World Cup!'

A large witch in front of Harry moved, and he was able to read the sign next to the broom.

THE FIREBOLT

This state-of-the-art racing broom sports a stream-lined, superfine handle of ash, treated with a diamond-hard polish and hand-numbered with its own registration number. Each individually selected birch twig in the broomtail has been honed to aerodynamic perfection, giving the Firebolt unsurpassable balance and pinpoint precision. The Firebolt has an acceleration of 150 miles an hour in ten seconds and incorporates an unbreakable Braking Charm. Price on request.

Price on request... Harry didn't like to think how much gold the Firebolt would cost. He had never wanted anything as much in his whole life. But he had never lost a Quidditch match on his Nimbus Two Thousand, and what was the point in emptying his Gringotts vault for the Firebolt, when he had a very good broom already?

He stood and looked at it for a long time all the same, with his hands in his pockets so they wouldn't do anything stupid, and he was aware, as he looked, that this was exactly the same feeling as the other one. The wanting. The I could just. It wasn't wrong to want a broom, and it wasn't the same as wanting to hurt someone, he knew that. But it came from the same place, and it had the same voice, and he found it oddly steadying to stand in front of the most beautiful object in Britain and tell that voice no, and watch it sulk, and walk out of the shop with his money bag exactly as heavy as it had been when he walked in.

Harry didn't ask for the price. But he returned, almost every day after that, just to look at the Firebolt.

There were, however, things that Harry needed to buy.

He went to the Apothecary to replenish his store of potions ingredients, and as his school robes were now several inches too short in the arm and leg, he visited Madam Malkin's Robes for All Occasions and bought new ones.

He hadn't been inside since he was eleven. The bell tinkled the same, and the shop smelt the same, of new cloth and warm irons, and Madam Malkin herself came bustling out with a mouthful of pins and said 'Hogwarts, dear?' in exactly the voice she'd used two years ago, and stood him on exactly the same footstool at the back, and Harry stood on it and looked at the empty footstool beside him and felt very odd indeed.

A girl had stood on that one. Pale, pointed, with hair to her waist that wouldn't have dared be anything but straight, and eyes like a new Sickle, and she'd held out her hand to him palm down and told him he was supposed to kiss it, with the weary patience of a person explaining soup to a baby. He'd thought she was the rudest girl he'd ever met, ruder than Dudley. He'd been right. He'd also, he thought now, with the pins going in at his ankle, been about eleven years old and in a very great hurry to decide.

'Arms out, dear,' said Madam Malkin. 'Goodness, you have shot up.'

'Have I?'

'Three inches since the spring, I'd say, by the state of these hems.' She tutted at his old robes, which were lying over a chair. 'Somebody's been feeding you at last.'

Harry thought about a plate banged down on a table, and said nothing.

Most important of all, he had to buy his new schoolbooks, which would include those for his two new subjects, Care of Magical Creatures and Divination.

Harry got a surprise as he looked in at the bookshop window. Instead of the usual display of gold-embossed spellbooks the size of paving slabs, there was a large iron cage behind the glass that held about a hundred copies of The Monster Book of Monsters. Torn pages were flying everywhere as the books grappled with each other, locked together in furious wrestling matches and snapping aggressively.

Harry pulled his booklist out of his pocket and consulted it properly for the first time. The Monster Book of Monsters was listed as the required book for Care of Magical Creatures. Now Harry understood why Hagrid had said it would come in useful. He felt relieved; he had been wondering whether Hagrid wanted help with some terrifying new pet.

As Harry entered Flourish and Blotts, the manager came hurrying towards him.

'Hogwarts?' he said abruptly. 'Come to get your new books?'

'Yes,' said Harry, 'I need...'

'Get out of the way,' said the manager impatiently, brushing Harry aside. He drew on a pair of very thick gloves, picked up a large, knobbly walking stick, and proceeded towards the door of the Monster Books' cage.

'Hang on,' said Harry quickly, 'I've already got one of those.'

'Have you?' A look of enormous relief spread over the manager's face. 'Thank heavens for that. I've been bitten five times already this morning...'

A loud ripping noise rent the air; two of the Monster Books had seized a third and were pulling it apart.

'Stop it! Stop it!' cried the manager, poking the walking stick through the bars and knocking the books apart. 'I'm never stocking them again, never! It's been bedlam! I thought we'd seen the worst when we bought two hundred copies of the Invisible Book of Invisibility... cost a fortune, and we never found them... Well... is there anything else I can help you with?'

'Yes,' said Harry, looking down his booklist, 'I need Unfogging the Future by Cassandra Vablatsky.'

'Ah, starting Divination, are you?' said the manager, stripping off his gloves and leading Harry into the back of the shop, where there was a corner devoted to fortune-telling. A small table was stacked with volumes such as Predicting the Unpredictable: Insulate Yourself Against Shocks and Broken Balls: When Fortunes Turn Foul.

'Here you are,' said the manager, who had climbed a set of steps to take down a thick, black-bound book. 'Unfogging the Future. Very good guide to all your basic fortune-telling methods... palmistry, crystal balls, bird entrails...'

But Harry wasn't listening. His eyes had fallen on another book, which was among a display on a small table: Death Omens: What to Do When You Know the Worst Is Coming.

'Oh, I wouldn't read that if I were you,' said the manager lightly, looking to see what Harry was staring at. 'You'll start seeing death omens everywhere. It's enough to frighten anyone to death.'

But Harry continued to stare at the front cover of the book. It showed a black dog, large as a bear, with gleaming eyes. It looked oddly familiar...

The cold went down his back exactly as it had on the wall in Magnolia Crescent, slow, from the neck down, and for a second the bright shop went very far away and he was looking into a four-foot slot of dark between a garage and a fence, at two flat pale discs that were paying attention.

The manager pressed Unfogging the Future into Harry's hands.

'Anything else?' he said.

'Yes,' said Harry, tearing his eyes away from the dog's and dazedly consulting his booklist. 'Er... I need Intermediate Transfiguration and The Standard Book of Spells, Grade Three.'

Harry emerged from Flourish and Blotts ten minutes later with his new books under his arms and made his way back to the Leaky Cauldron, hardly noticing where he was going and bumping into several people.

He tramped up the stairs to his room, went inside, and tipped his books onto his bed. Somebody had been in to tidy; the windows were open and sun was pouring inside. Harry could hear the buses rolling by in the unseen Muggle street behind him and the sound of the invisible crowd below in Diagon Alley. He caught sight of himself in the mirror over the basin.

'It can't have been a death omen,' he told his reflection defiantly. 'I was panicking when I saw that thing in Magnolia Crescent... It was probably just a stray dog...'

He raised his hand automatically and tried to make his hair lie flat.

'You're fighting a losing battle there, dear,' said his mirror in a wheezy voice.

'Oh, shut up,' said Harry.

He hadn't meant to say it. It came out of him sharp and hot and ugly, and the mirror went quiet in an offended sort of way, and Harry stood in the sunny room with his heart going and was suddenly so angry he couldn't stand still. Angry at a mirror. Angry at a picture on a book. Angry at a stray dog in Surrey that had looked at him funny. He didn't even know what he was angry at any more, except that he was, all the time, under everything, like a tap left running in another room, and he was tired of it, and being tired of it made him angrier.

He left the books on the bed and went out again.

He walked. He didn't go anywhere in particular. He went up the Alley past the cauldron shop and the Apothecary and Eeylops, where the owls blinked at him in the dark, past the second-hand robe shop and the place that sold nothing but quills, and the sun was hot on the cobbles and the crowd was thick and he kept his head down and let his feet do it. It helped, a bit. It always had. Walking was the thing he'd done at Privet Drive when the house got too small, round and round the streets until his legs ached and his head went quiet, and the Alley was better than Privet Drive because nobody here looked at his jumper.

He had got as far as the top end, where the shops thinned out and the street bent round towards Knockturn Alley and the crowd thinned with them, and was just thinking about turning back, when a voice behind him said, 'Mr Potter.'

He knew the voice before he turned.

Lucius Malfoy was standing in the shade of a doorway with his cane in one hand and a flat parcel in black paper under the other arm, and the hot bright street seemed to go a little cooler round him, the way it does round a stone. He was dressed exactly as he'd been in Hagrid's hut and on the Hogwarts stairs, in long dark robes that cost more than the Dursleys' car, with his pale hair falling over his shoulders and his face arranged into the expression of a man who has found a coin in the street and is deciding whether it is worth bending for.

'Mr Malfoy,' said Harry.

'You're a long way up the Alley for a boy on his own.' The grey eyes went over him, from the hair to the trainers, and took in, Harry felt sure, the exact price of everything in between. 'One hears the Minister has you on a leash. I had assumed a short one.'

'Diagon Alley,' said Harry. 'That's the leash. This is still Diagon Alley.'

'Barely.' Mr Malfoy inclined his head a quarter of an inch towards the bend in the street, where the shop fronts went dark and narrow. 'Another hundred yards and it is something else entirely, and I should not care to be the one explaining to Cornelius how you came to be found in it. Walk back with me.'

It wasn't a request. Harry found he didn't mind. He fell into step, and they went back down the Alley together, the tall man in black and the thin boy in jeans, and people got out of their way without appearing to notice they'd done it.

'How's Dracina?' Harry said.

He'd meant it to come out casual. He'd meant it to come out the way you'd ask after anybody, a classmate, somebody whose name you happened to know. He heard it come out instead about half a note too quick, and shut his mouth. He felt his ears go hot, and knew without looking that Mr Malfoy had heard it too, because the cane paused for one tick on the cobbles before it went on.

'My daughter,' said Mr Malfoy, in the tone of a man who has been asked after his gout, 'is well. Thank you for asking. She is at home. She is, as a matter of fact, at this moment, almost certainly talking about you.'

Harry's ears got hotter.

'She has been talking about you, Mr Potter, with very brief intervals for sleep, since the day she came home.' Mr Malfoy's voice was dry as parchment and had a long-suffering note in it that Harry had never heard there before. 'At breakfast. At dinner. To her mother, to the house-elves, to the portraits, who have begun to leave their frames when she comes into a room. I have heard the story of the Chamber of Secrets eleven times. In the most recent version the Basilisk was eighty feet long and you were the second coming of Saint George himself. I expect by Christmas the Basilisk will have had wings.'

Harry didn't know what to do with his face. He looked at the cobbles.

'I didn't... I mean, it was only fifty,' he said.

'I am aware.' Mr Malfoy did not smile. Something happened at the corner of his mouth that was related to a smile the way a cousin is related, and then it was gone. 'I have forbidden her to write to you. I am given to understand this was approximately as effective as forbidding the tide. My wife,' and the dryness went very dry indeed, 'has been of no assistance whatever.'

They walked a few steps in silence. Harry was aware that something was going on in the man beside him. He couldn't have said what. Mr Malfoy's face was as smooth as a pond, but his free hand had gone, quite unconsciously, to his own left forearm, and was gripping it through the sleeve, hard, and then letting go, as if it had remembered something and wished it hadn't.

'And you, Mr Potter,' he said abruptly. 'How have you been?'

'Fine.'

'Don't.' It wasn't unkind. It was simply flat. 'I sit on a number of committees. The Ministry is a very small place and the Minister has an exceedingly loud voice when he believes himself to be whispering. I know about your uncle's sister. I know about the inflation.' He looked down at Harry sideways, and for a moment the grey eyes weren't cold at all; they were measuring, the way a man measures a horse he has been told is no good and is beginning to suspect otherwise. 'I am told there was provocation.'

'She called my mum a bitch,' said Harry.

He hadn't meant to say that either. It was the first time he'd said it aloud to anybody.

Mr Malfoy stopped walking.

He stood quite still on the cobbles for a moment, with his cane planted and his parcel under his arm, and his face did nothing at all. Then he said, very quietly, 'Did she.' It wasn't a question. 'And this woman is still breathing.'

'The Ministry punctured her,' said Harry. 'And wiped her memory.'

'How merciful of them.' Mr Malfoy started walking again. 'Had she said it in my house, Mr Potter, she would have left it in a smaller box than she arrived in, and my wife would have chosen the box.' He let that sit. 'Your mother was a Mudblood and I never cared for her and I will not pretend to you that I did. But she was a witch. She was one of us. And no Muggle alive has the standing to use that word about a witch at a witch's table. You did nothing I would not have done. You did rather less.'

Harry didn't know what to say to that. He was horrified, and he was, at the very same time, in a part of himself he didn't want to look at directly, grateful, and the two things sat in him side by side and made him feel sick.

They had come down past Gringotts. The crowd was thick again. Harry cast about for something, anything, to say that would get them off his mother, and found, to his own surprise, that there was a thing he'd been wanting to ask a grown-up wizard for days.

'Mr Malfoy,' he said. 'Can I ask you something? Have you heard about the war?'

'Which war?'

'In India. And beyond, I guess. The Augment War, they're calling it. The man with the... the genetically augmented man. Khan. It's been on the Muggle news every day. He's taken Delhi. There's half a continent going red on the map and the Muggle armies can't stop him, and I just wondered what the Ministry thought about it. Whether anybody was going to...' He trailed off.

Mr Malfoy had turned his head and was looking at him with an expression Harry had never seen on his face before, which was simple, unguarded bewilderment.

'I have not the faintest idea what you are talking about,' he said.

'Khan,' said Harry. 'Noonien Singh. He's...'

'I heard you the first time. I don't know the name. I have never heard the name.' Mr Malfoy's eyebrows had drawn together. 'Some Muggle has invaded some other Muggles. Mr Potter, Muggles have been invading one another since before Hogwarts had a roof. It is practically all they do. Why on earth would the Ministry think anything about it?' He looked at Harry as if Harry had asked him for his opinion on the weather in Australia. 'Why on earth would you?'

Harry opened his mouth, and shut it again.

It wasn't that Mr Malfoy didn't care. He'd expected that. It was that he genuinely, honestly, didn't know. A man who sat on committees. A man who knew about the ceiling in Little Whinging. And he'd never heard of the thing that had been the first item on the news every single morning since Harry's birthday, the thing that had emptied Delhi, the thing Uncle Vernon shouted at. It simply wasn't there. The wizarding world had a wall round it that went both ways, and on this side of it there was nothing on the other side at all.

He thought, suddenly, of Fred. Fred, with his head out of the window of a flying car last summer, saying Who's Superman? with real interest, and Ron beside him not even blinking. Harry had thought at the time it was just the Weasleys. And then, while Harry had been at Hogwarts, Superman had died, in a fight with some grey monstrous thing out of nowhere that had torn up half an American city called Metropolis. Harry had come home in June to find the Muggle world still half in black for him, retrospectives on every channel and a commemorative mug on the Dursleys' shelf that Dudley had got free with something, and he'd never once, in two years, heard a wizard say the name.

'All right,' he said slowly. 'Different question. Spider-Man.'

'I beg your pardon?'

'He's a... there's a man in New York. In a red and blue suit. He climbs walls. He's been in the papers for years, he's been on the news here, everybody knows him, and about a month ago he said he was giving it up. Retiring. Nobody knows who he is under the mask, that's the whole point, but he's famous, Mr Malfoy, he's more famous than anybody, and I've been thinking, it must be a nightmare for the Statute of Secrecy. Somebody like that. Doing magic in front of cameras every day of the week and calling it something else.'

Mr Malfoy looked at him for a long moment.

'Mr Potter,' he said at last, with great care, 'if such a man existed, I promise you the Wizengamot would have heard of him. We have Obliviators for a great deal less than climbing walls.' His lip curled. 'It sounds to me like one of those Muggle entertainments. They have so very many of them. Men in costumes. It is a strange, loud, childish world, and they fill it with strange, loud, childish things, and I do not pretend to follow which of them they believe in from one week to the next.' He paused. 'Who told you this?'

'Nobody,' said Harry. 'It's on the news.'

'Then it is on their news,' said Mr Malfoy, 'and it is their business.'

And there it was again. Not a lie. Harry would have known a lie. Mr Malfoy had never heard of Spider-Man any more than he'd heard of Khan, and he'd have laughed at Superman, and Harry stood there in the crowd with the sun on his neck and understood, with a cold clear click, that for some reason he couldn't begin to guess at, the entire wizarding world did not know that there were people on the other side of the wall who could fly. Not didn't care. Didn't know. He filed it. It went in next to the dog and the Minister's crumpets and a man in a raincoat with a bag, in the drawer of things that didn't fit.

'You've spent a great deal of this summer among Muggles, I think,' said Mr Malfoy.

'I always do,' said Harry.

'Yes. The sister. The ceiling.' They were passing Madam Malkin's. Mr Malfoy's cane ticked on the cobbles. 'It is a waste, Mr Potter. I will say that to you plainly, since we have been plain so far. It is a waste of a boy like you. You know what they are. You of all people. You have had twelve years of experiencing what they are, close enough to smell it, and you have come out the other side with your wand in your hand, Yet you are standing in Diagon Alley asking after their wars.' He said the word the way Aunt Marge said foreigners. 'They are not your people. They never were. Blood is not a prejudice, whatever the Mudbloods' friends tell you at Hogwarts; it is a fact, like the colour of your eyes. The Potters go back a very long way. Further than you have been told. Potters have been kings before they were Potters. When there was a king worth the name, and that was not an accident either.' He looked down at Harry. 'You are not one of them. Stop living as though you were.'

And Harry, walking beside him in the sun, found that he was nodding.

He caught himself doing it. He'd been nodding for several seconds. Because it was true, wasn't it, every word of it, Mr Malfoy had the facts exactly right: twelve years, the cupboard, the bars, the dog biscuits, the woman at the primary school, drunk I expect. They weren't his people and he hated them. They'd never once behaved as if they cared about him. And there was a part of Harry, the cupboard part, that had been waiting twelve years for a grown-up to say so out loud, and here was one, in good robes, saying it, and it felt like being handed a coat in the cold.

They were frightened, said something in the back of his head, in Florean Fortescue's voice, with a knickerbocker glory in its hand.

Harry stopped nodding.

He thought of Hermione. He thought of Hermione's mum and dad, the dentists, who'd never done a thing to him, and who were, by the measure Mr Malfoy was using, exactly the same as Aunt Marge. He thought of Dean's family, who were Muggles too, just not English ones. He thought, for some reason, of the old woman in the church with her hand going forehead, chest, shoulder, shoulder, a long time ago.

And he thought of the men in the coloured helmets on Dudley's new television.

'What about the ones who help?' he said.

'I'm sorry?'

'There's a lot of them who help. I was thinking about this at the Dursleys'. There's a team, in California, Power Rangers, I think they're called. there's five of them in coloured suits, and they fight... things. Monsters. I saw one on the news in Birmingham, a starfish the size of a bus. It wouldn't have looked out of place in the Forbidden Forest. And they've got no magic, Mr Malfoy. Not a drop. They've got suits, and a sort of robot, and they go and stand in front of a thing like that, in a shopping centre, with people screaming, because somebody's got to and they can.' He heard his own voice get steadier as he went. 'It's dangerous. People must die doing it. And they do it anyway, because it's the right thing to do. They save people. That's all. Muggles. Saving people. And there's plenty of them out there, all trying to do good.'

He looked up at Mr Malfoy.

'Same as I went down the pipe for Dracina,' he said.

Something went across Lucius Malfoy's face.

It was quick, and it was hot, and Harry saw it: a flare of pure anger, the kind that goes white at the edges, there and gone in the time it took the cane to come down once on the cobbles. The knuckles on it went pale. For one second Harry thought, quite clearly, he's going to hit me.

He didn't. He breathed in through his nose, and the anger went back wherever it lived, and the pond was smooth again, and he nodded. Once. Stiffly. As a man nods when he has been scored off at chess by somebody he'd rather not have been.

'Good afternoon, Mr Potter,' he said.

And he turned, and went, with his cane and his parcel, up the Alley the way they'd come, and Harry heard him mutter as he went, low and irritable, to nobody, '...exceedingly hard to dislike... and Cissy is not helping matters...'

Then he glanced back.

Harry didn't think he was meant to see it. It lasted no time at all. But in the second before Lucius Malfoy's face remembered what it was supposed to be doing, there was something in it that Harry knew very well, because he'd seen it on Uncle Vernon in the hall at Privet Drive and on Fudge at the mention of Dumbledore, and it had no business at all being on the face of a man like that. It was fear. Plain, naked, private fear, looking out at Harry from under the pale hair as if Harry were a thing that had already happened to him and couldn't be undone.

And then Mr Malfoy saw him see it.

The fear went. In its place, instantly, came a grin, sly and lopsided, the sort of grin you'd give a boy who'd caught you out at cards, and Harry had seen that grin before too, on a girl in a dungeon corridor with her chin up, telling Percy Weasley what her father would think, and knew exactly where she'd got it. Then Mr Malfoy turned his back and walked away very fast, and was gone into the crowd by Gringotts, and Harry stood on the cobbles alone.

He stood there for some time.

Then he went back to the Leaky Cauldron, and up the stairs, slowly, with his hand on the banister.

The sun had got round. It was coming in low now through the open window of room eleven, long and gold and full of dust, and the day's heat was still in the room, and Harry sat down on the end of the bed among the new books and put his face in his hands.

He didn't know what to do.

He'd said the right thing. He knew he had. He'd stood in the street and said they save people to Lucius Malfoy's face and meant it, and that should have felt like something, and it didn't, because the thing he couldn't get past was how close it had been. He'd been nodding. He'd been nodding along to blood is a fact with his whole heart for five or six seconds before Florean's voice had happened to be in his head, and if it hadn't been, if he'd had a bad night, if the ice cream had been a different flavour, he'd have gone on nodding, and walked all the way down the Alley agreeing, and been glad. That wasn't bravery. That wasn't righteousness. That was luck. You couldn't build anything on luck. He'd been one knickerbocker glory away from being the boy Tom Riddle had wanted.

And who are you anyway, said the voice. It wasn't Riddle's. It was worse than Riddle's. It was Uncle Vernon's and Aunt Marge's and Aunt Petunia's run together, the voice that had lived in the walls of number four for twelve years and knew him better than anybody. Who do you think you are? Saint George? You're a scrawny speccy nobody who got lucky with a sword. You saw a man in a sewer when you were full of poison and you've decided it was Jesus. You'd decide anything, wouldn't you, if it meant somebody was proud of you. You sat on the floor in front of a mirror when you were eleven, three nights running, because it showed you a dad. That's all this is. You wanted a father so badly you've made one up out of Basilisk venom and a stained-glass window, and he looked at you like that because you needed him to, not because you earned it, because you've never earned anything in your life.

Harry sat with his face in his hands and listened to it and couldn't answer.

The worst of it was the mirror. The Mirror of Erised. He'd stood in front of it in an empty classroom in his first year and seen his mother and father smiling at him, and he'd gone back, and gone back, and Dumbledore had had to come and tell him, kindly, that it was a dream. Men had wasted away in front of that mirror, Dumbledore had said. It showed you the thing you wanted most, and the thing you wanted most was not the same as the thing that was true, and however sweet it was, however it looked at you, it was an illusion, and you had to walk away from it or it would eat you.

What if the man by the pillar had been the mirror, in a different frame?

'I don't know what to do,' Harry said, out loud, to the floor.

Nothing answered. Nothing was going to answer. The buses went by in the Muggle street behind the wall.

And the sun moved.

It was nothing. It was the ordinary thing the sun did at this time of day, going down behind the rooftops of the Alley, and the last long ray of it slid off the wardrobe door and across the floorboards and came to rest, warm and gold, on the lid of Harry's trunk at the foot of the bed.

The lid wasn't quite shut.

Harry looked at it. He could have sworn he'd closed it. He'd closed it that morning, and buckled the strap, he was almost certain, because he'd been thinking about the Monster Book getting out. But there it sat, a finger's width open, with the sunlight lying along the gap, and he got up with a sigh to shut it properly, and bent, and saw what the light was lying on.

It wasn't one of his spellbooks. It wasn't anything of his at all. It was a great fat brick of a paperback with a cracked spine and a tea stain on the cover, three stories bound into one, and a great-aunt's name on the flyleaf.

Dudley's Lord of the Rings.

Harry stared at it. He had no memory of packing it. None. He supposed he must have put it there himself, one of the evenings at Privet Drive when he'd gone down to the cupboard, which they'd stopped bothering to lock, for a spellbook with his arms full and shoved the lot back in together to keep it from Dudley. It was possible. It must have been. But he didn't remember. And yet here it was, on top of everything, exactly where the light fell, as though somebody had put it there to be found.

His first feeling was irritation. He very nearly shut the lid on it. He'd been at that book for a month at Privet Drive, on and off, skipping about in it, hunting for the sword and the drowned kingdom, and never once admitting to himself that he liked it. He was a wizard, for heaven's sake, he'd fought a Basilisk, he was sitting in a pub in a street that didn't exist, and he was going to sit here reading a made-up story about made-up magic like a boy in a cupboard with a torch? It was embarrassing. It was Dudley's doorstop. He put his hand on the lid.

The magic of Elves, Harry. And of Númenor.

He stopped.

He thought of Dumbledore on the steps, in the sun, with the lake blazing behind him, saying those words as if they were simply true. He thought of Aunt Marge. Your sister was a bad egg. Something wrong with the bitch. And he found that he wanted, very badly, more than he wanted to not be embarrassed, to know. Whatever it was. Whatever Dumbledore had meant. Where his mother had come from, if it wasn't from the same place as Aunt Petunia, and what she'd carried in her blood, and passed to him.

He reached in. He did it the way he'd stood on the pavement outside St Michael's, with his hand not quite steady and a feeling in his stomach like a held breath, as though he were about to go through a door he might not be able to come back out of. He felt foolish. He did it anyway.

He picked up the book, and sat down on the bed in the last of the light, and opened it at the first page, which he had never once done, and began to read.

As the days slipped by, Harry kept on reading.

He read in bed in the mornings, with the sun crossing the ceiling. He read at Florean's, with a sundae going soft at his elbow and Florean reading over his shoulder and saying things like ah, now, this is a good bit. He read on the wall by Gringotts and on the steps outside Eeylops and once, without quite noticing he'd done it, all the way through lunch, so that Tom had to come and take the plate away from under the book. He'd found, going through his trunk for something to keep his place, a thin green ribbon that smelt faintly of cold flowers, crumpled at the bottom of the pillowcase his birthday had travelled in, and he used that, and told himself it was because it was the right width.

He was engrossed. He hadn't expected to be. He saw now how badly he'd gone at it before, in the library with Dudley's gang going past the window, and at Privet Drive with the door shut: skipping about, hunting for the sword and the king and the drowned kingdom, reading the bits that might be about him and none of the bits in between. He'd never once started at the beginning and simply gone on. He did now, and, read in order, it was all new. The Shire and the Road and the Black Riders in the dark; and Harry read about the Riders at night, in bed, with the candle going, and found that he'd got up and shut the window without deciding to, because something about a hooded shape standing very still at the edge of a field, paying attention, had reminded him of a gap between a garage and a fence.

He hadn't worked out yet how any of it was supposed to be to do with him, or with his mother's blood. But he'd got to Rivendell. And he'd stopped there, for a day or two, and read it twice.

He'd never read anything like it. He'd known the facts of the Elves already, from the pages he'd skipped to in July: that they weren't Dobby, that they were tall and graceful and lived for ever. What he hadn't had was the feeling of them. Read properly, in order, with the Riders behind and the mountains ahead, there was a sort of light that came off the whole place when he read about it, as though the pages had been left in the sun. It moved him. He didn't tell anybody that. It was the first thing he'd read since the letter from Hogwarts that had made him feel there was somewhere, even in a book, where people were simply good, and were allowed to be, and didn't have to be ashamed of it.

He couldn't imagine himself in it. He'd look up from the page at the mirror over the basin, at the scar and the hair and the glasses held together with Spellotape, and try to see anything of that in him, any grace, any light, and couldn't. Dumbledore must have meant something else. Or been kind.

And Númenor, which he'd gone hunting for in July and found in half a page, hardly came into the story itself at all, so far. A name, in a song. A long time ago. Whatever that even was.

As more days passed, Harry would explore Diagon Alley and go back to reading, thoroughly engrossed. He started looking, wherever he went, for a sign of Ron or Hermione. Plenty of Hogwarts students were arriving in Diagon Alley now, with the start of term so near. Harry met Seamus Finnigan and Dean Thomas, his fellow Gryffindors, in Quality Quidditch Supplies, where they too were ogling the Firebolt; he also ran into the real Neville Longbottom, a round-faced, forgetful boy, outside Flourish and Blotts. Harry didn't stop to chat; Neville appeared to have mislaid his booklist and was being told off by his very formidable-looking grandmother. Harry hoped she never found out that he'd pretended to be Neville while on the run from the Ministry of Magic.

Harry woke on the last day of the holidays, thinking that he would at least meet Ron and Hermione tomorrow, on the Hogwarts Express. He got up, dressed, went for a last look at the Firebolt, and was just wondering where he'd have lunch, when someone yelled his name and he turned.

'Harry! HARRY!'

They were there, both of them, sitting outside Florean Fortescue's Ice Cream Parlour, Ron looking incredibly freckly, Hermione very brown, both waving frantically at him.

Harry didn't remember crossing the street. He was simply there, and Ron had got up and thumped him so hard between the shoulder blades that he staggered, and Hermione had got up too and then stopped, a foot away, with her hands half out, as if she'd been going to do something and had thought better of it, and was looking at him. Not at his face. At the rest of him. Up and down, quickly, the way Madam Pomfrey did.

'You're thin,' she said.

'Hello to you too.'

'You are, though.' Her eyes had stopped at his hand. There was still a pink mark across the palm where he'd come down in the gutter. 'What's that?'

'Fell over.'

'Harry...'

'He's fine, Hermione, look at him, he's been eating ice cream for three weeks,' said Ron, and pushed Harry into a chair, and sat down himself, and Harry noticed, without quite noticing, that Ron had taken the chair between him and the street.

'Finally!' said Ron, grinning at Harry. 'We went to the Leaky Cauldron, but they said you'd left, and we went to Flourish and Blotts, and Madam Malkin's, and...'

'I got all my school stuff last week,' Harry explained. 'And how come you knew I'm staying at the Leaky Cauldron?'

'Dad,' said Ron simply.

Mr Weasley, who worked at the Ministry of Magic, would of course have heard the whole story of what had happened to Aunt Marge.

'Did you really blow up your aunt, Harry?' said Hermione in a very serious voice.

'I didn't mean to,' said Harry, while Ron roared with laughter. 'I just... lost control.'

'It's not funny, Ronald,' said Hermione sharply. 'Honestly, I'm amazed Harry wasn't expelled.'

'So am I,' admitted Harry. 'Forget expelled, I thought I was going to be arrested.' He looked at Ron. 'Your dad doesn't know why Fudge let me off, does he?'

'Probably 'cause it's you, isn't it?' shrugged Ron, still chuckling. 'Famous Harry Potter and all that. I'd hate to see what the Ministry'd do to me if I blew up an aunt. Mind you, they'd have to dig me up first, because Mum would've killed me. Anyway, you can ask Dad yourself this evening. We're staying at the Leaky Cauldron tonight too! So you can come to King's Cross with us tomorrow! Hermione's there as well!'

Hermione nodded, beaming.

'Mum and Dad dropped me off this morning with all my Hogwarts things.'

'Excellent!' said Harry happily. 'So, have you got all your new books and stuff?'

'Hang on,' said Ron. He'd stopped laughing. He'd put his elbows on the table and was looking at Harry in a way Harry hadn't often seen him look, which was carefully. 'Before that. What did she say?'

'Who?'

'The aunt. Marge. Hermione said you'd never do it for nothing, and she's right, you wouldn't, you sat through a whole summer of them last year and never even sparked. So what did she say?'

Harry looked at the table.

'Stuff about my mum and dad,' he said. 'Car crash. Drunk. That sort of thing.'

There was a short silence.

'Right,' said Ron. His ears had gone red. 'Right. Well. She's lucky it was only the ceiling, then, isn't she. Mum said... when Dad came home and told her, Mum sat down. She doesn't sit down. She said if that woman ever... anyway.' He cleared his throat. 'Fred says you should've gone for the roof.'

Hermione hadn't said anything. She was looking at Harry with her face perfectly still, and her hand had closed round her spoon so that the knuckles stood out, and when Harry glanced at her she smiled at once, warmly, and said, 'Well, it's over now,' in a voice that didn't quite match the hand.

'Books,' said Harry. 'You were going to show me.'

'Look at this,' said Ron, pulling a long thin box out of a bag and opening it. 'Brand-new wand. Fourteen inches, willow, containing one unicorn tail-hair. And we've got all our books...' He pointed at a large bag under his chair. 'What about those Monster Books, eh? The assistant nearly cried when we said we wanted two.'

'What's all that, Hermione?' Harry asked, pointing at not one but three bulging bags in the chair next to her.

'Well, I'm taking more new subjects than you, aren't I?' said Hermione. 'Those are my books for Arithmancy, Care of Magical Creatures, Divination, Study of Ancient Runes, Muggle Studies...'

'What are you doing Muggle Studies for?' said Ron, rolling his eyes at Harry. 'You're Muggle-born! Your mum and dad are Muggles! You already know all about Muggles!'

'But it'll be fascinating to study them from the wizarding point of view,' said Hermione earnestly.

'Are you planning to eat or sleep at all this year, Hermione?' asked Harry, while Ron sniggered.

Hermione ignored them.

'I've still got ten Galleons,' she said, checking her purse. 'It's my birthday in September, and Mum and Dad gave me some money to get myself an early birthday present.'

'How about a nice book?' said Ron innocently.

'No, I don't think so,' said Hermione composedly. 'I really want an owl. I mean, Harry's got Hedwig and you've got Errol...'

'I haven't,' said Ron. 'Errol's a family owl. All I've got is Scabbers.' He pulled his pet rat out of his pocket. 'And I want to get him checked over,' he added, placing Scabbers on the table in front of them. 'I don't think Egypt agreed with him.'

Scabbers was looking thinner than usual, and there was a definite droop to his whiskers.

'There's a magical creature shop just over there,' said Harry, who knew Diagon Alley very well by now. 'You could see if they've got anything for Scabbers, and Hermione can get her owl.'

'What's that?' said Hermione.

She was looking at the book. Harry had put it down on the table when he sat, out of habit, the fat cracked paperback with its spine broken white in six places, and she'd leant over to read the cover and stopped, because the thin green ribbon marking his place had slid half out of the pages and was lying across the table towards her like a tongue.

'Dudley's,' said Harry. 'He was using it to prop up a table. I nicked it. It's good, actually, Hermione, you'd like it, there's a bit with...'

'I know what it is.' Hermione hadn't looked up from the ribbon. 'I've read it. Twice.' She reached out and touched the end of it with one finger, very lightly, and then sat back and folded her hands. 'That's a funny bookmark.'

'It's the right width,' said Harry.

'Mm,' said Hermione. She was smiling. 'Shall we go and see about Scabbers?'

So they paid for their ice cream and crossed the street to the Magical Menagerie.

There wasn't much room inside. Every inch of wall was hidden by cages. It was smelly and very noisy because the occupants of these cages were all squeaking, squawking, jabbering or hissing. The witch behind the counter was already advising a wizard on the care of double-ended newts, so Harry, Ron and Hermione waited, examining the cages. A pair of enormous purple toads sat gulping wetly and feasting on dead blowflies. A gigantic tortoise with a jewel-encrusted shell was glittering near the window. Poisonous orange snails were oozing slowly up the side of their glass tank, and a fat white rabbit kept changing into a silk top hat and back again with a loud popping noise. Then there were cats of every colour, a noisy cage of ravens, a basket of funny custard-coloured furballs that were humming loudly, and on the counter, a vast cage of sleek black rats that were playing some sort of skipping game using their long, bald tails.

The double-ended newt wizard left, and Ron approached the counter.

'It's my rat,' he told the witch. 'He's been a bit off-colour ever since I brought him back from Egypt.'

'Bang him on the counter,' said the witch, pulling a pair of heavy black spectacles out of her pocket.

Ron lifted Scabbers out of his inside pocket and placed him next to the cage of his fellow rats, who stopped their skipping tricks and scuffled to the wire for a better look.

Like nearly everything Ron owned, Scabbers the rat was second-hand (he had once belonged to Ron's brother Percy) and a bit battered. Next to the glossy rats in the cage, he looked especially woebegone.

'Hm,' said the witch, picking up Scabbers. 'How old is this rat?'

'Dunno,' said Ron. 'Quite old. He used to belong to my brother.'

'What powers does he have?' said the witch, examining Scabbers closely.

'Er...'

The truth was that Scabbers had never shown the faintest trace of interesting powers. The witch's eyes moved from Scabbers's tattered left ear to his front paw, which had a toe missing, and tutted loudly.

'He's been through the mill, this one,' she said.

'He was like that when Percy gave him to me,' said Ron defensively.

'An ordinary common or garden rat like this can't be expected to live longer than three years or so,' said the witch. 'Now, if you were looking for something a bit more hardwearing, you might like one of these...'

She indicated the black rats, who promptly started skipping again. Ron muttered, 'Show-offs.'

'Well, if you don't want a replacement, you can try this rat tonic,' said the witch, reaching under the counter and bringing out a small red bottle.

'OK,' said Ron. 'How much... OUCH!'

Ron buckled as something huge and orange came soaring from the top of the highest cage, landed on his head, and then propelled itself, spitting madly, at Scabbers.

'NO, CROOKSHANKS, NO!' cried the witch, but Scabbers shot from between her hands like a bar of soap, landed splay-legged on the floor, and then scampered for the door.

'Scabbers!' Ron shouted, racing out of the shop after him; Harry followed.

It took them nearly ten minutes to catch Scabbers, who had taken refuge under a wastepaper bin outside Quality Quidditch Supplies. Ron stuffed the trembling rat back into his pocket and straightened up, massaging his head.

'What was that?'

'It was either a very big cat or quite a small tiger,' said Harry. 'Where's Hermione?'

'Probably getting her owl...'

They made their way back up the crowded street to the Magical Menagerie. As they reached it, Hermione came out, but she wasn't carrying an owl. Her arms were clamped tightly round the enormous ginger cat.

'You bought that monster?' said Ron, his mouth hanging open.

'He's gorgeous, isn't he?' said Hermione, glowing.

That was a matter of opinion, thought Harry. The cat's ginger fur was thick and fluffy, but it was definitely a bit bow-legged and its face looked grumpy and oddly squashed, as though it had run headlong into a brick wall. Now that Scabbers was out of sight, however, the cat was purring contentedly in Hermione's arms.

'Hermione, that thing nearly scalped me!' said Ron.

'He didn't mean to, did you, Crookshanks?' said Hermione.

'And what about Scabbers?' said Ron, pointing at the lump in his chest pocket. 'He needs rest and relaxation! How's he going to get it with that thing around?'

'That reminds me, you forgot your rat tonic,' said Hermione, slapping the small red bottle into Ron's hand. 'And stop worrying, Crookshanks will be sleeping in my dormitory and Scabbers in yours, what's the problem? Poor Crookshanks, that witch said he'd been in there for ages; no one wanted him.'

She said it with her cheek against the top of the cat's squashed head, and her eyes shut, and Harry thought it was a nice thing to say. It was only afterwards, walking, that he found himself turning it over, because of the way she'd said no one. As if she'd taken it personally. As if she'd stood in that shop and looked at a thing nobody else would have and decided, on the spot, with her whole heart, that it was hers now, and that that was that, and anybody who thought otherwise could take it up with her.

'I wonder why,' said Ron sarcastically, as they set off towards the Leaky Cauldron.

They found Mr Weasley sitting in the bar, reading the Daily Prophet.

'Harry!' he said, smiling as he looked up. 'How are you?'

'Fine, thanks,' said Harry, as he, Ron and Hermione joined Mr Weasley with all their shopping.

Mr Weasley put down his paper. He didn't pick it up again. He looked at Harry, over the top of his glasses, for a good deal longer than fine, thanks needed, and Harry saw his eyes do what Hermione's had done, only slower, and without any attempt to hide it: the face, the shoulders, the hand with the pink mark, the trainers with the sole coming away, and back to the face.

'Stand up a second, Harry,' he said.

'What?'

'Humour me.'

Harry stood up. Mr Weasley stood up too, and put a hand on each of Harry's shoulders, and turned him a quarter towards the window, and looked at him in the light, frowning slightly, the way Harry had seen him look at a plug.

'Hm,' he said. 'Taller. Good. You've been eating?'

'Loads. Florean Fortescue keeps giving me sundaes.'

'Good. Good man, Florean.' Mr Weasley didn't let go. His thumbs pressed once, briefly, on Harry's collarbones, and his voice dropped so that it didn't carry past the table. 'Harry. Before the others get here. The sister. Did she... was it only words?'

'Only words,' said Harry.

'Right.' Mr Weasley looked at him a moment longer. 'And the other two. Since June. Molly will ask you and you'll tell her it was fine, because you always do, so I'm asking first. Did either of them lay a finger on you?'

'No,' said Harry, and then, because it was Mr Weasley, 'Honestly. Not once. Dumbledore did something to them. I don't know what. They twitch.'

Something moved in Mr Weasley's face, and was put away.

'Yes,' he said. 'Yes, I rather gathered he had.' He gave Harry's shoulders one small squeeze and let go, and sat down, and was Mr Weasley again, mild and rumpled, reaching for his tea. 'Sit down, sit down. Ron, don't put that rat on the table, your mother's coming.'

Harry sat, and saw the now familiar picture of Sirius Black staring up at him from the folded paper.

'They still haven't caught him, then?' he asked.

'No,' said Mr Weasley, looking extremely grave. 'They've pulled us all off our regular jobs at the Ministry to try and find him, but no luck so far.'

'Would we get a reward if we caught him?' asked Ron. 'It'd be good to get some more money...'

'Ron, mate, that's a bit j—' Harry began.

Mr Weasley's eyes went wide. Harry saw it happen, saw him see the word coming, and saw him move to head it off the way he'd move to head off a Bludger.

'Don't be ridiculous, Ron,' said Mr Weasley, loudly and at once, and on closer inspection he looked very strained. 'Black's not going to be caught by a thirteen-year-old wizard. It's the Azkaban guards who'll get him back, you mark my words.'

At that moment Mrs Weasley entered the bar, laden with shopping bags and followed by the twins, Fred and George, who were about to start their fifth year at Hogwarts; the newly elected Head Boy, Percy; and the Weasleys' youngest child and only girl, Ginny.

Ginny, who had always been very taken with Harry, seemed even more heartily embarrassed than usual when she saw him, perhaps because he had saved her life during their previous year at Hogwarts. She went very red and muttered 'hello' without looking at him.

Then Mrs Weasley saw Harry.

The shopping bags went down on the floor where she stood, all of them, in a heap, with a tinkle of something breakable, and she crossed the bar in four strides and pulled him up out of his chair and into a hug so tight he couldn't breathe. She smelt of the Burrow, of baking and washing and something herbal, and she had one hand flat on the back of his head and the other round his shoulders, and she rocked him, slightly, and said nothing at all for several seconds, which from Mrs Weasley was a very great deal.

'Oh, Harry,' she said, into his hair.

Some people would have said it was too tight. Some people would have said it went on too long, and that a boy of thirteen in a public bar ought to have been embarrassed by it, and Fred and George were certainly making faces over her shoulder. Harry didn't care. He stood with his face against Mrs Weasley's cardigan and his arms stuck out at his sides and his glasses knocked crooked, and he loved it. He would have stood there till the pub closed.

'Let me look at you.' She held him away at arm's length and looked, exactly as Mr Weasley had, exactly as Hermione had, only more so, with her mouth going thin. 'You've grown. You're too thin. Arthur, he's too thin. What's that on his hand? Have you been eating? Have you been sleeping? Tom said you'd been up till all hours with a book...'

'He's been eating ice cream for three weeks, Mum,' said Ron.

'That's not food, Ronald.' She pushed Harry's hair off his forehead, and looked at the scar, and smoothed the hair back over it, and patted it, as if it had done something clever. 'Well. You're here. That's the main thing. You're here and you're with us, and nobody's going to...' She stopped. 'We'll talk about the rest later.'

Percy had been standing by with his hand half out through all of this, waiting. He now stepped forward, and held it out solemnly, as though he and Harry had never met, and said, 'Harry. How nice to see you.'

'Hello, Percy,' said Harry, trying not to laugh.

'I hope you're well?' said Percy pompously, shaking hands. It was rather like being introduced to the mayor.

'Very well, thanks...'

'Harry!' said Fred, elbowing Percy out of the way and bowing deeply. 'Simply splendid to see you, old boy...'

'Marvellous,' said George, pushing Fred aside and seizing Harry's hand in turn. 'Absolutely spiffing.'

Percy scowled.

'That's enough, now,' said Mrs Weasley.

'Mum!' said Fred, as though he'd only just spotted her, and seizing her hand too. 'How really corking to see you...'

'I said, that's enough,' said Mrs Weasley. 'Harry, dear. I suppose you've heard our exciting news?' She pointed to the brand-new silver badge on Percy's chest. 'Second Head Boy in the family!' she said, swelling with pride.

'And last,' Fred muttered under his breath.

'I don't doubt that,' said Mrs Weasley, frowning suddenly. 'I notice they haven't made you two Prefects.'

'What do we want to be Prefects for?' said George, looking revolted at the very idea. 'It'd take all the fun out of life.'

Ginny giggled.

'You want to set a better example for your sister!' snapped Mrs Weasley.

'Ginny's got other brothers to set her an example, Mother,' said Percy loftily. 'I'm going up to change for dinner...'

He disappeared and George heaved a sigh.

'We tried to shut him in a pyramid,' he told Harry. 'But Mum spotted us.'

'Very nearly worked, too,' said Fred. 'Got him through the door and everything. Only there was this thing in there. All bandages. Sat up on its slab and started asking Percy whether he'd lived with a true heart and what he'd done with the years given him, and whether he was ready to have his heart weighed.'

'And Percy answered,' said George. 'For about ten minutes. With examples.'

'It lay back down,' said Fred. 'I think it'd rather have had the eternal dark.'

'Bill said it does that to everyone who goes in uninvited,' said George, 'and that we were lucky it was only asking questions, and that most people come out of there a lot quieter than they went in. Then Mum arrived.'

Harry laughed, and found Ginny looking at him, and found that she looked away.

Dinner that night was a very enjoyable affair. Tom the innkeeper put three tables together in the parlour, and the seven Weasleys, Harry and Hermione ate their way through five delicious courses.

Harry had been put between Mrs Weasley and Ron. He hadn't chosen the seat. He'd come in last, after going up to wash, and found that the only chair left was the one at Mrs Weasley's elbow, with Ron on its other side and Hermione across the table, and that Fred and George, who'd certainly been sitting there a moment ago, were now at the far end looking innocent. He sat down in it. Mrs Weasley put a hand on his arm, briefly, as he did, as though checking he was real, and then filled his plate before he'd touched a spoon, and went on filling it, course after course, without appearing to look at what she was doing, so that whenever Harry glanced down there was more on it than there had been.

'Mrs Weasley, I can't...'

'You can,' said Mrs Weasley. 'Eat.'

'Give it up, mate,' said Ron, with his mouth full. 'She did it to me all through Egypt. I've gone up a belt size. Bill reckons she's trying to fatten us for the tombs.'

'Did you have a good summer, Harry?' said Hermione, across the table. 'Apart from the obvious. Did you hear from anybody? Besides us, I mean. Did Hagrid write? Ron thought he might have.'

'Hagrid sent the book,' said Harry. 'And Hogwarts. And, er. A couple of others.'

'Who?' said Hermione lightly.

'Nobody. School people.'

'Of course,' said Hermione, and passed him the potatoes, and smiled, and Harry had the odd impression, which he put down to the candles, that for a second she hadn't been smiling at him at all but at something just behind his head.

'How're we getting to King's Cross tomorrow, Dad?' asked Fred, as they dug into a sumptuous chocolate pudding.

'The Ministry's providing a couple of cars,' said Mr Weasley.

Everyone looked up at him.

'Why?' said Percy curiously.

'It's because of you, Perce,' said George seriously. 'And there'll be little flags on the bonnets, with HB on them...'

'...for Humongous Bighead,' said Fred.

Everyone except Percy and Mrs Weasley snorted into their pudding.

'Why are the Ministry providing cars, Father?' Percy asked again, in a dignified voice.

'Well, as we haven't got one any more,' said Mr Weasley, 'and as I work there, they're doing me a favour...'

His voice was casual, but Harry couldn't help noticing that Mr Weasley's ears had gone red, just like Ron's did when he was under pressure.

'Good thing, too,' said Mrs Weasley briskly. 'Do you realise how much luggage you've all got between you? A nice sight you'd be on the Muggle Underground... You are all packed, aren't you?'

'Ron hasn't put all his new things in his trunk yet,' said Percy, in a long-suffering voice. 'He's dumped them on my bed.'

'You'd better go and pack properly, Ron, because we won't have much time in the morning,' said Mrs Weasley, leaning across Harry.

Ron scowled at Percy.

'Harry's on the list for the cars, by the way,' said Mr Weasley, to nobody in particular, scraping his bowl. 'I put him down with ours. Under Weasley. It was simpler.' He didn't look up. 'Nobody at the Ministry seemed to think it odd.'

Mrs Weasley put another spoonful of pudding on Harry's plate.

After dinner everyone felt very full and sleepy. One by one they made their way upstairs to their rooms to check their things for the next day. Ron and Percy were next door to Harry.

'Mum tried to get you moved in with us,' said Ron, on the landing, with his hand on his door. 'Three beds. Tom said there wasn't room and she said she'd see about that and Dad had to take her away.' He shrugged. 'Just so you know. It's not that we didn't try.'

'I'm fine on my own,' said Harry.

'Yeah,' said Ron. 'I know you are.' He looked at Harry's door, and then at Harry. 'That locks from the inside, that does, doesn't it?'

'Ron. It's a pub.'

'I'm just asking.' Ron went into his room. 'Night.'

Harry had just closed and locked his own trunk when he heard angry voices through the wall, and went to see what was going on. The door of number twelve was ajar and Percy was shouting.

'It was here, on the bedside table, I took it off for polishing...'

'I haven't touched it, all right?' Ron roared back.

'What's up?' said Harry.

'My Head Boy badge is gone,' said Percy, rounding on Harry.

'So's Scabbers's rat tonic,' said Ron, throwing things out of his trunk to look. 'I think I might've left it in the bar...'

'You're not going anywhere till you've found my badge!' yelled Percy.

'I'll get Scabbers's stuff, I'm packed,' Harry said to Ron, and he went downstairs.

Harry was halfway along the passage to the bar, which was now very dark, when he heard another pair of angry voices coming from the parlour. A second later, he recognised them as Mr and Mrs Weasley's. He hesitated, not wanting them to know he'd heard them arguing, when the sound of his own name made him stop, then move closer to the parlour door.

'...makes no sense not to tell him,' Mr Weasley was saying heatedly. 'Harry's got a right to know. I've tried to tell Fudge, but he insists on treating Harry like a child. He's thirteen years old and...'

'Arthur, the truth would terrify him!' said Mrs Weasley shrilly. 'Do you really want to send Harry back to school with that hanging over him? For heaven's sake, he's happy not knowing, he's suffered enough!'

'I don't want to make him miserable, I want to put him on his guard!' retorted Mr Weasley. 'You know what Harry and Ron are like, wandering off by themselves... they've even ended up in the Forbidden Forest! But Harry mustn't do that this year! When I think what could have happened to him that night he ran away from home! If the Knight Bus hadn't picked him up, I'm prepared to bet he would have been dead before the Ministry found him.'

'But he's not dead, he's fine, so what's the point...'

'Molly, they say Sirius Black's mad, and maybe he is, after the things I've heard of him ranting about, but he was clever enough to escape from Azkaban, and that's supposed to be impossible. It's been a month, and no one's seen hide nor hair of him, and I don't care what Fudge keeps telling the Daily Prophet, we're no nearer catching Black than inventing self-spelling wands. The only thing we know for sure is what Black's after...'

'But Harry will be perfectly safe at Hogwarts.'

'We thought Azkaban was perfectly safe. If Black can break out of Azkaban, he can break into Hogwarts.'

'But no one's really sure that Black's after Harry...'

There was a thud on wood, and Harry was sure Mr Weasley had banged his fist on the table.

'Molly, how many times do I have to tell you? They didn't report it in the press because Fudge wanted it kept quiet, but Fudge went out to Azkaban the night Black escaped. The guards told Fudge that Black's been talking in his sleep for a while now. Wrapped up in issues of that barmy magazine. Always the same words: "He's at Hogwarts... he's at Hogwarts." Black is deranged, Molly, and he wants Harry dead. If you ask me, he thinks murdering Harry will bring You-Know-Who back to power. Black lost everything the night Harry stopped You-Know-Who, and he's had twelve years alone in Azkaban to brood on that...'

There was a silence. Harry leaned still closer to the door, desperate to hear more.

'Well, Arthur, you must do what you think is right. But you're forgetting Albus Dumbledore. I don't think anything could hurt Harry at Hogwarts while Dumbledore's Headmaster. I suppose he knows about all this?'

'Of course he knows. We had to ask him if he minds the Azkaban guards stationing themselves around the entrances to the school grounds. He wasn't happy about it, but he agreed.'

'Not happy? Why shouldn't he be happy, if they're there to catch Black?'

'Dumbledore isn't fond of the Azkaban guards,' said Mr Weasley heavily. 'Nor am I, if it comes to that... but when you're dealing with a wizard like Black, you sometimes have to join forces with those you'd rather avoid.'

'If they save Harry...'

'...then I will never say another word against them,' said Mr Weasley wearily. 'It's late, Molly, we'd better go up...'

Harry heard chairs move. As quietly as he could, he hurried down the passage to the bar and out of sight. The parlour door opened, and a few seconds later footsteps told him that Mr and Mrs Weasley were climbing the stairs.

The bottle of rat tonic was lying under the table they had sat at earlier. Harry waited until he heard Mr and Mrs Weasley's bedroom door close, then headed back upstairs with the bottle.

Fred and George were crouching in the shadows on the landing, heaving with laughter as they listened to Percy dismantling his and Ron's room in search of his badge.

'We've got it,' Fred whispered to Harry. 'We've been improving it.'

The badge now read Bighead Boy.

Harry forced a laugh, went to give Ron the rat tonic, then shut himself in his room and lay down on his bed.

So Sirius Black was after him.

This explained everything. Fudge had been lenient with him because he was so relieved to find him alive. He'd made Harry promise to stay in Diagon Alley where there were plenty of wizards to keep an eye on him. And he was sending two Ministry cars to take them all to the station tomorrow, so that the Weasleys could look after Harry until he was on the train.

And Mr Weasley had put him down on the list under Weasley, because it was simpler.

Harry lay listening to the muffled shouting next door and wondered why he didn't feel more scared. Sirius Black had murdered thirteen people with one curse; Mr and Mrs Weasley obviously thought Harry would be panic-stricken if he knew the truth. But Harry happened to agree wholeheartedly with Mrs Weasley that the safest place on earth was wherever Albus Dumbledore happened to be. Didn't people always say that Dumbledore was the only person Lord Voldemort had ever been afraid of? Surely Black, as Voldemort's right-hand man, would be just as frightened of him?

And then there were these Azkaban guards everyone kept talking about. They seemed to scare most people senseless, and if they were stationed all around the school, Black's chances of getting inside seemed very remote.

No, all in all, the thing that bothered Harry most was the fact that his chances of visiting Hogsmeade now looked like zero. Nobody would want Harry to leave the safety of the castle until Black was caught; in fact, Harry suspected his every move would be carefully watched until the danger had passed.

He scowled at the dark ceiling. Did they think he couldn't look after himself? He'd beaten Lord Voldemort twice, and survived him once before he could walk; he wasn't completely useless...

Unbidden, the image of the beast in the shadows of Magnolia Crescent crossed his mind.

What to do when you know the worst is coming...

He lay with that for a while. It was strange. He'd have thought that a man who'd killed thirteen people wanting him dead would have been the worst thing in the room, and it wasn't; the worst thing in the room was two flat pale discs in a slot of dark, and a bear-sized dog on the cover of a book in Flourish and Blotts, and the way the manager had said it's enough to frighten anyone to death so lightly, as if it were a joke. Black was a man. Men could be stopped. Dumbledore could stop a man. But a thing that stood in the dark and simply knew you, and then wasn't there...

He thought, for no reason he could name, of a boy in a book who had gone out of his front door with a ring in his pocket, knowing perfectly well that something was hunting him, and had gone anyway, because the alternative was to sit in the Shire and wait for it to come up the lane. He'd read that bit three times. He hadn't known why at the time.

'I'm not going to be murdered,' Harry said out loud.

'That's the spirit, dear,' said his mirror sleepily.