A Long, Slow Breath

Tom woke Harry the next morning with his usual toothless grin and a cup of tea.

Harry got dressed and was just persuading a disgruntled Hedwig to get back into her cage when Ron banged his way into the room, pulling a sweatshirt over his head and looking irritable.

'The sooner we get on the train, the better,' he said. 'At least I can get away from Percy at Hogwarts. Now he's accusing me of dripping tea on his photo of Penelope Clearwater. You know,' Ron grimaced, 'his girlfriend. She's hidden her face under the frame because her nose has gone all blotchy...'

He stopped in the middle of the room with the sweatshirt half on and looked at Harry, who was standing by the window in his shirt with his arms up, trying to get Hedwig to go through the cage door. Ron's eyes went down and up, quickly, and his face did something and undid it.

'What?' said Harry.

'Nothing. Put a jumper on, it's freezing in here.'

'It's not. It's the first of September.'

'Put one on anyway.' Ron finished pulling the sweatshirt down. 'You can count your ribs through that shirt, mate. Mum saw it last night. Said too thin twice and then went quiet, and when Mum goes quiet, that's when you want to worry.' He went over and shoved Hedwig into the cage with the flat of his hand, which she permitted from him in a way she never would from Harry, and shut the door on her. 'Three weeks of ice cream and you still look like that. Bloody brilliant, that was, sending you back there. Really well thought out. Really wise.'

'Ron...'

'I'm not saying anything. I'm not.' Ron's ears had gone red. 'I'm just saying Mum sat down. That's all. In the kitchen. When Dad told her. She had to sit down.'

'I've got something to tell you,' Harry began, but they were interrupted by Fred and George, who had looked in to congratulate Ron on infuriating Percy again.

They headed down to breakfast, where Mr Weasley was reading the front page of the Daily Prophet with a furrowed brow and Mrs Weasley was telling Hermione and Ginny about a love potion she'd made as a young girl. All three of them were rather giggly.

'...and he followed me round the whole of the Easter holidays with that look on his face,' Mrs Weasley was saying, wiping her eyes, 'like a spaniel, and my mother said Molly, what have you done to that boy, and I said nothing, Mum, and I had to keep topping him up or he'd have come round. Three drops in his pumpkin juice, every morning, for a fortnight.'

'Did it wear off?' said Ginny.

'Eventually.' Mrs Weasley looked down the table at Mr Weasley, who was still frowning at the paper, and something went across her face that Harry couldn't read. 'Or he decided he didn't need it. One of the two.'

Hermione had laughed with the others. But Harry noticed, pulling out his chair, that she'd stopped laughing a second before they had, and that she was looking at Mrs Weasley with a small line between her eyebrows, the one she got in Potions when a recipe said stir seven times and she wanted to know why seven, and that her hand had gone, quite unconsciously, to the bag at her feet where she kept her new books.

'What were you saying?' Ron asked Harry as they sat down.

'Later,' Harry muttered, as Percy stormed in.

Mr Weasley lowered the paper. He looked at Harry's plate, which Harry had not yet touched, and then at Harry, and then he reached across without a word and moved the rack of toast six inches nearer, and went back to the Prophet. Harry took a piece. Mr Weasley turned a page.

Harry had no chance to speak to Ron or Hermione in the chaos of leaving; they were too busy heaving all their trunks down the Leaky Cauldron's narrow staircase and piling them up near the door, with Hedwig and Hermes, Percy's screech owl, perched on top in their cages. A small wickerwork basket stood beside the heap of trunks, spitting loudly.

'It's all right, Crookshanks,' Hermione cooed through the wickerwork. 'I'll let you out on the train.'

'You won't,' snapped Ron. 'What about poor Scabbers, eh?'

He pointed at his chest, where a large lump indicated that Scabbers was curled up in his pocket.

Mr Weasley, who had been outside waiting for the Ministry cars, stuck his head inside.

'They're here,' he said. 'Harry, come on.'

Mr Weasley marched Harry across the short stretch of pavement towards the first of two old-fashioned dark green cars, each of which was driven by a furtive-looking wizard wearing a suit of emerald velvet.

'In you get, Harry,' said Mr Weasley, glancing up and down the crowded street.

Harry got into the back of the car and was shortly joined by Hermione, Ron and, to Ron's disgust, Percy.

The journey to King's Cross was very uneventful compared with Harry's trip on the Knight Bus. The Ministry of Magic cars seemed almost ordinary, though Harry noticed that they could slide through gaps that Uncle Vernon's new company car certainly couldn't have managed. They reached King's Cross with twenty minutes to spare; the Ministry drivers found them trolleys, unloaded their trunks, touched their hats in salute to Mr Weasley, and drove away, somehow managing to jump to the head of an unmoving queue at the traffic lights.

Mr Weasley kept close to Harry's elbow all the way into the station.

'Right then,' he said, glancing round them. 'Let's do this in pairs, as there are so many of us. I'll go through first with Harry.'

Mr Weasley strolled towards the barrier between platforms nine and ten, pushing Harry's trolley and apparently very interested in the InterCity 125 that had just arrived at platform nine. With a meaningful look at Harry, he leaned casually against the barrier. Harry imitated him.

In a moment, they had fallen sideways through the solid metal onto platform nine and three-quarters and looked up to see the Hogwarts Express, a scarlet steam engine, puffing smoke over a platform packed with witches and wizards seeing their children onto the train.

Percy and Ginny suddenly appeared behind Harry. They were panting and had apparently taken the barrier at a run.

'Ah, there's Penelope!' said Percy, smoothing his hair and going pink again. Ginny caught Harry's eye, and they both turned away to hide their laughter as Percy strode over to a girl with long, curly hair, walking with his chest thrown out so that she couldn't miss his shiny badge.

Once the remaining Weasleys and Hermione had joined them, Harry and Ron led the way to the end of the train, past packed compartments, to a carriage that looked quite empty. They loaded the trunks onto it, Ron taking the heavy end of Harry's without being asked and without comment, stowed Hedwig and Crookshanks in the luggage rack, then went back outside to say goodbye to Mr and Mrs Weasley.

Mrs Weasley kissed all her children, then Hermione, and finally, Harry. Unlike Ron he wasn't embarrassed, but really quite pleased, when she gave him an extra hug. Harry wished he could get more.

'Do take care, won't you, Harry?' she said as she straightened up, her eyes oddly bright. Then she opened her enormous handbag and said, 'I've made you all sandwiches... Here you are, Ron... no, they're not corned beef... Fred? Where's Fred? Here you are, dear...'

Harry's packet was the thickest. He noticed that. He noticed, too, that it had been wrapped separately from the others, in greaseproof paper rather than newspaper, and that there was a second, smaller packet taped to the bottom of it, which proved later to be fudge, and a bit of card in Mrs Weasley's round hand that said only For the train. Eat ALL of it. M.W.

'Harry,' said Mr Weasley quietly, 'come over here a moment.'

He jerked his head towards a pillar, and Harry followed him behind it, leaving the others crowded round Mrs Weasley.

'There's something I've got to tell you before you leave...' said Mr Weasley, in a tense voice.

'It's all right, Mr Weasley,' said Harry. 'I already know.'

'You know? How could you know?'

'I... er... I heard you and Mrs Weasley talking last night. I couldn't help hearing,' Harry added quickly. 'Sorry...'

'That's not the way I'd have chosen for you to find out,' said Mr Weasley, looking anxious.

'No... honestly, it's OK. This way, you haven't broken your word to Fudge and I know what's going on.'

'Harry, you must be very scared...'

'I'm not,' said Harry sincerely. 'Really,' he added, because Mr Weasley was looking disbelieving. 'I'm not trying to be a hero, but seriously, Sirius Black can't be worse than Voldemort, can he?'

Mr Weasley flinched at the sound of the name but overlooked it.

'Harry, I knew you were, well, made of stronger stuff than Fudge seems to think, and I'm obviously pleased that you're not scared, but...'

'Arthur!' called Mrs Weasley, who was now shepherding the rest onto the train. 'Arthur, what are you doing? It's about to go!'

'He's coming, Molly!' said Mr Weasley, but he turned back to Harry and kept talking in a lower and more hurried voice. 'Listen, I want you to give me your word...'

'...that I'll be a good boy and stay in the castle?' said Harry gloomily.

'Not entirely,' said Mr Weasley, who looked more serious than Harry had ever seen him. 'Harry, swear to me you won't go looking for Black.'

Harry stared.

'What?'

There was a loud whistle. Guards were walking along the train, slamming all the doors shut.

'Promise me, Harry,' said Mr Weasley, talking more quickly still, 'that whatever happens...'

'Why would I go looking for someone I know wants to kill me?' said Harry blankly.

'Swear to me that whatever you might hear...'

'Arthur, quickly!' cried Mrs Weasley.

Steam was billowing from the train; it had started to move. Harry ran to the compartment door and Ron threw it open and stood back to let him on, and then, when Harry was in, put himself in the doorway behind him and looked up and down the platform once, hard, before he pulled the door to. They leaned out of the window and waved at Mr and Mrs Weasley until the train turned a corner and blocked them from view.

Mr Weasley had his hand up. He kept it up, Harry saw, after Mrs Weasley had lowered hers, standing on the emptying platform in his shabby cloak with his arm in the air, and he was not waving. He was simply holding it there, as if he could keep it on Harry's shoulder all the way to Scotland.

'I need to talk to you in private,' Harry muttered to Ron and Hermione as the train picked up speed.

'Go away, Ginny,' said Ron.

'Oh, that's nice,' said Ginny huffily, and she stalked off.

Harry, Ron and Hermione set off down the corridor, looking for an empty compartment, but all were full except for the one at the very end of the train.

This had only one occupant, a man sitting fast asleep next to the window. Harry, Ron and Hermione checked on the threshold. The Hogwarts Express was usually reserved for students and they had never seen an adult there before, except for the witch who pushed the food trolley.

The stranger was wearing an extremely shabby set of wizard's robes that had been darned in several places. He looked ill and exhausted. Though quite young, his light brown hair was flecked with grey. There was a smell in the compartment, faint, under the ordinary train smells of soot and old upholstery, that Harry couldn't place at first and then it came to him: it was the smell of the Forbidden Forest at night, of wet bark and bracken and cold earth, the smell that had been on his robes for a day after the night with the unicorn. It didn't seem to be coming from anywhere. It was simply in the air round the sleeping man, the way warmth is in the air round a fire.

'Who d'you reckon he is?' Ron hissed as they sat down and slid the door shut, taking the seats farthest away from the window.

'Professor R. J. Lupin,' whispered Hermione at once.

'How d'you know that?'

'It's on his case,' she replied, pointing at the luggage rack over the man's head, where there was a small, battered case held together with a large quantity of neatly knotted string. The name Professor R. J. Lupin was stamped across one corner in peeling letters. Beside the name, somebody had scratched a mark into the leather with the point of a knife, a long time ago by the look of it: a rough shape like a crescent lying on its back, with three short strokes beneath it. It didn't look like any rune Harry had seen in Hermione's new books. It looked older than that, and less tidy, as if it had been put there by somebody who'd needed it there rather than wanted it.

'Wonder what he teaches?' said Ron, frowning at Professor Lupin's pallid profile.

'That's obvious,' whispered Hermione. 'There's only one vacancy, isn't there? Defence Against the Dark Arts.'

Harry, Ron and Hermione had already had two Defence Against the Dark Arts teachers, both of whom had lasted only one year. There were rumours that the job was jinxed.

'Well, I hope he's up to it,' said Ron doubtfully. 'He looks like one good hex would finish him off, doesn't he? Anyway...' He turned to Harry. 'What were you going to tell us?'

Harry explained all about Mr and Mrs Weasley's argument and the warning Mr Weasley had just given him. When he'd finished, Ron looked thunderstruck, and Hermione had her hands over her mouth. She finally lowered them to say, 'Sirius Black escaped to come after you? Oh, Harry... you'll have to be really, really careful. Don't go looking for trouble, Harry...'

'I don't go looking for trouble,' said Harry, nettled. 'Trouble usually finds me.'

'How thick would Harry have to be, to go looking for a nutter who wants to kill him?' said Ron shakily.

They were taking the news worse than Harry had expected. Both Ron and Hermione seemed to be much more frightened of Black than he was.

'No one knows how he got out of Azkaban,' said Ron uncomfortably. 'No one's ever done it before. And he was a top-security prisoner too.'

'But they'll catch him, won't they?' said Hermione earnestly. 'I mean, they've got all the Muggles looking out for him too...'

She had moved, while she talked, without seeming to know she'd done it, from the seat opposite Harry to the seat beside him, and her knee was against his, and she was looking at the door.

'What's that noise?' said Ron suddenly.

A faint, tinny sort of whistle was coming from somewhere. They looked all round the compartment.

'It's coming from your trunk, Harry,' said Ron, standing up and reaching into the luggage rack. A moment later he had pulled the Pocket Sneakoscope out from between Harry's robes. It was spinning very fast in the palm of Ron's hand and glowing brilliantly.

'Is that a Sneakoscope?' said Hermione interestedly, standing up for a better look.

'Yeah... mind you, it's a very cheap one,' Ron said. 'It went haywire just as I was tying it to Errol's leg to send it to Harry.'

'Were you doing anything untrustworthy at the time?' said Hermione shrewdly.

'No! Well... I wasn't supposed to be using Errol. You know he's not really up to long journeys... but how else was I supposed to get Harry's present to him?'

'Stick it back in the trunk,' Harry advised as the Sneakoscope whistled piercingly, 'or it'll wake him up.'

He nodded towards Professor Lupin. Ron stuffed the Sneakoscope into a particularly horrible pair of Uncle Vernon's old socks, which deadened the sound, then closed the lid of the trunk on it.

Professor Lupin had not woken. But Harry, who happened to be looking at him when the whistle was at its worst, saw his nostrils flare, once, wide, the way a dog's do when it catches something on the wind, and then go still.

'We could get it checked in Hogsmeade,' said Ron, sitting back down. 'They sell that sort of thing in Dervish and Banges, magical instruments and stuff. Fred and George told me.'

'Do you know much about Hogsmeade?' asked Hermione keenly. 'I've read it's the only entirely non-Muggle settlement in Britain...'

'Yeah, I think it is,' said Ron in an offhand sort of way, 'but that's not why I want to go. I just want to get inside Honeydukes!'

'What's that?' said Hermione.

'It's this sweetshop,' said Ron, a dreamy look coming over his face, 'where they've got everything... Pepper Imps, they make you smoke at the mouth, and great fat Chocoballs full of strawberry mousse and clotted cream, and really excellent sugar quills, which you can suck in class and just look like you're thinking what to write next...'

'But Hogsmeade's a very interesting place, isn't it?' Hermione pressed on eagerly. 'In Sites of Historical Sorcery it says the inn was the headquarters for the 1612 goblin rebellion, and the Shrieking Shack's supposed to be the most severely haunted building in Britain...'

'...and massive sherbet balls that make you levitate a few inches off the ground while you're sucking them,' said Ron, who was plainly not listening to a word Hermione was saying.

Hermione looked round at Harry.

'Won't it be nice to get out of school for a bit and explore Hogsmeade?'

''Spect it will,' said Harry heavily. 'You'll have to tell me when you've found out.'

'What d'you mean?' said Ron.

'I can't go. The Dursleys didn't sign my permission form, and Fudge wouldn't either.'

Ron looked horrified.

'You're not allowed to come? But... no way... McGonagall or someone will give you permission...'

Harry gave a hollow laugh. Professor McGonagall, Head of Gryffindor House, was very strict.

'...or we can ask Fred and George, they know every secret passage out of the castle...'

'Ron!' said Hermione sharply. 'I don't think Harry should be sneaking out of school with Black on the loose...'

'Yeah, I expect that's what McGonagall will say when I ask for permission,' said Harry bitterly.

'But if we're with him,' said Ron spiritedly to Hermione, 'Black wouldn't dare...'

'Oh, Ron, don't talk rubbish,' snapped Hermione. 'Black's already murdered a whole bunch of people in the middle of a crowded street. Do you really think he's going to worry about attacking Harry just because we're there?'

She was fumbling with the straps of Crookshanks's basket as she spoke.

'Don't let that thing out!' Ron said, but too late; Crookshanks leapt lightly from the basket, stretched, yawned, and sprang onto Ron's knees; the lump in Ron's pocket trembled and he shoved Crookshanks angrily away.

'Get out of here!'

'Ron, don't!' said Hermione angrily.

Crookshanks had landed on the floor between the seats, and had stopped there. He was not looking at Ron, or at Ron's pocket. He was looking at Professor Lupin. His squashed face had gone perfectly still, and the fur along his spine had lifted, and he was holding himself low, the way cats do when they have met something much larger than themselves and are deciding, very carefully, whether it has noticed them.

Ron was about to answer back when Professor Lupin stirred.

They watched him apprehensively, but he simply turned his head the other way, mouth slightly open, and slept on. Crookshanks, after a long moment, sat down. He kept one eye on the sleeping man for the rest of the afternoon.

The Hogwarts Express moved steadily north and the scenery outside the window became wilder and darker while the clouds overhead thickened. People were chasing backwards and forwards past the door of their compartment. Crookshanks had now settled in an empty seat, his squashed face turned towards Ron, his yellow eyes on Ron's top pocket, though they went, every so often, to the corner by the window, and came back.

At one o'clock, the plump witch with the food trolley arrived at the compartment door.

'D'you think we should wake him up?' Ron asked awkwardly, nodding towards Professor Lupin. 'He looks like he could do with some food.'

Hermione approached Professor Lupin cautiously.

'Er... Professor?' she said. 'Excuse me... Professor?'

He didn't move. He was, Harry thought, the stillest sleeper he'd ever seen; he didn't shift or mutter or twitch as people did, but lay against the window with his hands loose in his lap and his breathing so slow you had to watch for it. Only once, as Hermione bent towards him, something happened under the lids of his eyes, a quick sideways flicker, as of something turning over in a den to look, and then it was gone.

'Don't worry, dear,' said the witch as she handed Harry a large stack of Cauldron Cakes. 'If he's hungry when he wakes, I'll be up front with the driver.'

'I suppose he is asleep?' said Ron quietly, as the witch slid the compartment door closed. 'I mean... he hasn't died, has he?'

'No, no, he's breathing,' whispered Hermione, taking the Cauldron Cake Harry passed her.

He might not be very good company, but Professor Lupin's presence in their compartment had its uses. Mid-afternoon, just as it had started to rain, blurring the rolling hills outside the window, they heard footsteps in the corridor again, and a head of silver-blonde hair appeared at the door: Dracina Malfoy, flanked by her cronies, Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle.

Her actual friends, Daphne Greengrass and Pansy Parkinson, were nowhere to be seen. That was the first thing Harry noticed. The second was that she'd been looking. He knew the look of somebody who'd been working their way down a train one compartment at a time; her colour was up and her hair had come loose at one side and she had the slightly breathless air of a person who has found the thing they were after and is now pretending they weren't after anything. Her eyes went to Harry first, before anything else in the compartment. Then to Ron. Then to Hermione, who was sitting with her knee against Harry's, and stayed there, and went flat.

Harry's hopes that he was going to see a kinder Dracina this year got a good deal smaller.

'Well, look who it is,' said Malfoy in her usual lazy drawl, pulling open the compartment door. 'Potty and the Weasel.'

Crabbe and Goyle chuckled trollishly.

'I heard your father finally got his hands on some gold this summer, Weasley,' said Malfoy. 'Did your mother die of shock?'

'Dra... Malfoy, remember what we talked about in regards to my friends?' Harry said.

Dracina's eyes came back to him.

And she gave him a look. It was quick and it was small and it was meant for him alone, a sly, sidelong, downward flick of the lashes that Crabbe and Goyle, standing behind her, could not have seen, and that said, as plainly as if she'd written it on the glass: yes. I remember. This is for them. Play along. He'd seen that effort before. He'd seen it in the hospital wing when she'd stopped herself saying Mudblood and said Granger instead, and found it cost her something. It was a signal, and he knew it was a signal, and he found, slightly to his own alarm, that he knew how to answer it: he let his face go stiff and bored and put-upon, the face of a boy who has heard it all before, and gave her the smallest possible nod.

Her mouth twitched. It wasn't a smile. It was the place a smile would have been.

Ron stood up so quickly he knocked Crookshanks's basket to the floor. Professor Lupin gave a snort.

'Who's that?' said Malfoy, taking an automatic step backwards as she spotted Lupin.

'New teacher,' said Harry, who got to his feet too, in case he needed to hold Ron back. 'What were you saying, Malfoy?'

Dracina opened her mouth. Harry saw the next thing lining up behind her teeth, saw her weigh it and get ready to throw it, something about the Weasleys and the Burrow and gold. And then he saw it not come. Something changed in her face. Their conversation in the hospital wing, months ago, sitting on the end of her bed at one in the morning, seemed to have had some effect after all, because instead of delivering her cruel remark Malfoy looked at Harry with an expression somewhere between disappointment and annoyance, the look of a person who has been handed the perfect line and told she isn't allowed to say it, and hates that the person who told her was right.

'C'mon,' she muttered resentfully to Crabbe and Goyle, and they disappeared.

Harry and Ron sat down again, Ron massaging his knuckles.

'What the hell was up with her this time?' Ron asked, looking at Harry.

'We talked in the hospital wing, after the Chamber.'

'Talked about what, exactly?'

It was Hermione. She had risen very slightly out of her seat, and the tone could have frozen the Hogwarts lake solid from one shore to the other, and Ron, who had known Hermione for two years and had an instinct for weather, edged closer to Harry along the seat.

'I think... look, there's a lot I don't like about Dracina...' Harry was straining for words. He had a great many feelings about the girl who'd just gone and most of them didn't fit into the vocabulary of a thirteen-year-old boy, and he was trying to find the ones that did and coming up with nothing, and he did not notice, because he was looking at the floor, that beside him Hermione Granger had gone very still and very quiet, in the way the sea goes still and quiet before something very large comes up out of it.

'Dracina, not just Malfoy?' Ron asked.

There was a strange, knowing note in his voice. He had seen this coming. He'd seen it coming for the best part of two years, if he was honest, since Malfoy had made Harry hold her hand in the Forbidden Forest; the Valentine on the staircase had only made it official. But he hadn't thought it would come this fast, and he looked at his best mate, and at the mess that was Dracina Malfoy that his best mate was walking straight into with his eyes shut, and he sighed. It was an extremely loud sigh.

'Ron,' hissed Hermione, pointing at Professor Lupin, 'be careful...'

She said it to Ron. Harry had the distinct impression it had been meant for somebody else, somebody with silver-blonde hair who had gone back up the train, and that Ron had simply been nearest.

But Professor Lupin was still fast asleep.

Three compartments up, Dracina Malfoy sat down in her seat by the window, arranged her robes, and said, 'Well, that was tedious,' to nobody in particular, in a voice designed to be overheard.

'Did you find them?' said Pansy, without looking up from Witch Weekly.

'I wasn't looking for them. I was looking for Goyle's toad, which he's lost again, and I happened to pass them.' Dracina took out a nail file. 'Potty and the Weasel and the Mudblood, all in a heap at the back of the train with some tramp asleep in the corner. Honestly. You'd think they'd have a bit of pride.'

'You were gone twenty minutes,' said Daphne mildly.

'It's a long train.'

Pansy turned a page. Daphne looked at Dracina for a moment over the top of her own book, and then went back to it, and said nothing, which was what Daphne usually did, and why Dracina liked her.

Crabbe and Goyle had gone off to find food. Good. They'd report to Father, of course; they always reported to Father, they'd been reporting to Father since they were six, because their fathers reported to Father, and it had taken Dracina until about the age of nine to work out that this was what Crabbe and Goyle were for. So she'd given them something to report. Potty and the Weasel. Did your mother die of shock. She'd heard herself say it and watched Weasley's ears go red and felt nothing much, because none of it was the point. The point had been the two seconds in the middle, when he'd said Dra and stopped, and looked at her, and she'd given him the look, and he had understood it.

That, and the other thing, which she'd seen in the first half-second in the doorway before anything else and had been not thinking about ever since. He was thin. Thinner than June. The collar of his shirt stood away from his neck and his wrists came out of his sleeves like a younger boy's, and she had told him, in writing, that he was to look well, and he did not look well, and so she knew why. She had a name and an address. She had a very good memory. It would keep.

The box was in her trunk, wrapped in a jumper. It wasn't the present. The present was something else, and would come later, when the moment was right, and she'd know the moment. The box was only to make sure that whatever else he was thinking about tonight, in that tower, with that girl somewhere under the same roof, he'd be thinking about her as well.

He'd understood it. He'd played his part. He'd put on that stiff bored face, the Potter face, and nodded, a quarter of an inch, and nobody in that compartment had known what had passed between them except her and him.

She filed her nails and looked out at the rain and felt the thing in her chest turn over, warm and heavy, like a cat in the sun.

It was better like this. She'd thought about it all summer and she'd decided, and she was right. Father had forbidden it, and Father had his reasons, which were stupid, and Mother had her reasons for helping, which were not, and in between the two of them there was a space exactly the right size for a secret, and Dracina Malfoy found that she liked living in it very much indeed. A friendship nobody was allowed to know about. A look across a compartment that meant I remember and I know you do. A letter she wasn't supposed to send and a gift she wasn't supposed to give and a boy who'd pretend, in public, to be bored by her, without her ever having had to ask. It was like something out of one of Mother's old books. It was, she thought, with her chin on her hand and her eyes on the grey window, romantic. Far more romantic than if they'd simply been friends out loud, like Weasley, like anybody.

He didn't know that yet. That was all right. There was a great deal Harry Potter didn't know yet, about what he wanted and what was good for him, and she'd made her peace with that over the summer too. He'd grown up in a cupboard. He'd had nobody to teach him. He thought friend was the most a person could be to another person, because it was the most anybody had ever been to him, and he'd go on thinking that, left to himself, for years, like a boy who'd never seen the sea deciding the lake was as big as water got.

He wouldn't be left to himself. She knew what he wanted better than he did. She'd known since Madam Malkin's. She would simply have to arrange things, carefully, one at a time, in the right order, until he looked up one day and found that the thing he wanted had been standing next to him the whole time and he'd never had to make the first move at all, because she'd made every single one of them for him, and he'd never know.

He'd never have to win. That was the beauty of it. She'd see to it that he didn't have to.

The only thing that had spoiled it, the only thing, had been her. Granger. Sitting there with her knee against his. Dracina's nail file went still.

Three inches of brown knee against three inches of black trouser, in a compartment at the back of a train, and the Mudblood hadn't even known she was doing it, it was intolerable; she'd been looking at the door, talking about Black, and her body had simply drifted over to him like a plant to a window. As if she had a right. As if she were the one who'd sat up with him at one in the morning with dust in her hair. Dracina had looked at that knee for perhaps a second and a half and had felt the warm heavy cat-in-the-sun thing, open one yellow eye.

The thing standing in his light, she thought. Still.

'You've gone a funny colour,' said Daphne.

'It's the rain,' said Dracina, and went back to her nails, and smiled.

The rain thickened as the train sped yet farther north; the windows were now a solid, shimmering grey, which gradually darkened until lanterns flickered into life all along the corridors and over the luggage racks. The train rattled, the rain hammered, the wind roared, but still, Professor Lupin slept.

'We must be nearly there,' said Ron, leaning forward to look past Professor Lupin at the now completely black window.

The words had hardly left him when the train started to slow down.

'Great,' said Ron, getting up and walking carefully past Professor Lupin to try and see outside. 'I'm starving. I want to get to the feast...'

'We can't be there yet,' said Hermione, checking her watch.

'So why're we stopping?'

The train was getting slower and slower. As the noise of the pistons fell away, the wind and rain sounded louder than ever against the windows.

Harry, who was nearest the door, got up to look into the corridor. All along the carriage, heads were sticking curiously out of their compartments.

The train came to a stop with a jolt, and distant thuds and bangs told them that luggage had fallen out of the racks. Then, without warning, all the lamps went out and they were plunged into total darkness.

'What's going on?' said Ron's voice from behind Harry.

'Ouch!' gasped Hermione. 'Ron, that was my foot!'

Harry felt his way back to his seat.

'D'you think we've broken down?'

'Dunno...'

There was a squeaking sound, and Harry saw the dim black outline of Ron, wiping a patch clean on the window and peering out.

'There's something moving out there,' Ron said. 'I think people are coming aboard...'

The compartment door suddenly opened and someone fell painfully over Harry's legs.

'Sorry... d'you know what's going on?... Ouch... sorry...'

'Hullo, Neville,' said Harry, feeling around in the dark and pulling Neville up by his cloak.

'Harry? Is that you? What's happening?'

'No idea... sit down...'

There was a loud hissing and a yelp of pain; Neville had tried to sit on Crookshanks.

'I'm going to go and ask the driver what's going on,' came Hermione's voice. Harry felt her pass him, heard the door slide open again, and then a thud and two loud squeals of pain.

'Who's that?'

'Who's that?'

'Ginny?'

'Hermione?'

'What are you doing?'

'I was looking for Ron...'

'Come in and sit down...'

'Not here!' said Harry hurriedly. 'I'm here!'

'Ouch!' said Neville.

'Quiet!' said a hoarse voice suddenly.

Professor Lupin appeared to have woken up at last.

Harry could hear movements in his corner. None of them spoke. And in the dark, in the silence, Harry heard something else, so low that he wasn't sure afterwards whether he'd heard it or felt it through the seat: a sound from the corner by the window like a long breath drawn in through the teeth and held, and under that, for one second, a sound that was not a breath at all. A sound like a very large dog, a long way off, warning something not to come any nearer.

Then it stopped, as if a hand had been put over it.

There was a soft, crackling noise, and a shivering light filled the compartment. Professor Lupin appeared to be holding a handful of flames. They illuminated his tired, grey face, but his eyes looked alert and wary. For a moment, in the first flare, before the light settled, Harry thought the eyes had caught it the way a cat's do, two flat discs of amber, and then it was gone and they were only a man's eyes, grey-brown and bloodshot and very tired. He was sweating. There was a shine on his forehead and his upper lip, and the hand that wasn't holding the fire was closed in a fist at his side so tight that the knuckles had gone white, and he was breathing through his nose, slowly, carefully, the way Harry breathed when he was trying not to be sick.

'Stay where you are,' he said in the same hoarse voice, and he got slowly to his feet with his handful of fire held out in front of him.

But the door slid slowly open before Lupin could reach it.

Standing in the doorway, illuminated by the shivering flames in Lupin's hand, was a cloaked figure that towered to the ceiling. Its face was completely hidden beneath its hood. Harry's eyes darted downwards, and what he saw made his stomach contract. There was a hand protruding from the cloak and it was glistening, greyish, slimy-looking and scabbed, like something dead that had decayed in water...

But it was visible only for a split second. As though the creature beneath the cloak sensed Harry's gaze, the hand was suddenly withdrawn into the folds of its black cloak.

And then the thing beneath the hood, whatever it was, drew a long, slow, rattling breath, as though it were trying to suck something more than air from its surroundings.

Harry knew that sound. He'd read it a week or so ago, in bed, with the candle going: a hooded shape on a black horse at the edge of a field, head bent, sniffing, drawing in the night as if it could smell the thing it hunted on the air. He'd thought it was the most frightening thing in the book. He'd been wrong. This was.

An intense cold swept over them all. Harry felt his own breath catch in his chest. The cold went deeper than his skin. It was inside his chest, it was inside his very heart...

Harry's eyes rolled up into his head. He couldn't see. He was drowning in cold. There was a rushing in his ears as though of water. He was being dragged downwards, the roaring growing louder...

And then, from far away, he heard screaming, terrible, terrified, pleading screams. He wanted to help whoever it was, he tried to move his arms, but couldn't... a thick white fog was swirling around him, inside him...

'Harry! Harry! Are you all right?'

Someone was slapping his face.

Harry came up out of it screaming.

He didn't know he was doing it. He heard it before he understood it was him: a raw, cracked, boy's voice shouting no and not him and please, and the words were coming out of his own mouth and he had no idea what they meant, because the thing they belonged to was already going, sliding away from him like water off glass, a green light and a door and a woman's voice saying something, saying his name, saying Harry, and then nothing. Gone. Only the shape of where it had been, and his own throat hurting.

Harry opened his eyes; there were lanterns above him, and the floor was shaking. The Hogwarts Express was moving again and the lights had come back on. He seemed to have slid out of his seat onto the floor.

Ron was kneeling next to him. Hermione had him. She had his head and shoulders in her lap and both arms round him and her face bent right down over his, so that her hair was falling on his cheeks, and she was holding him with a strength that didn't seem to belong to her, so hard that for a second he couldn't quite get his breath, and she was saying his name, over and over, very low, in a voice he'd never heard her use. Harry. Harry. Harry. I've got you. I've got you. Nobody's... I've got you. Her hand was on the side of his face. It wasn't shaking. Everything else about her was shaking and her hand on his face was perfectly steady, as if that hand, at least, had known exactly what it meant to do.

And above them he could see Neville and Professor Lupin watching.

Harry felt very sick; when he put up his hand to push his glasses back on, he felt cold sweat on his face.

Ron and Hermione heaved him back onto his seat. Hermione let go last. He noticed that. He noticed that her arms stayed where they'd been for a second after he was out of them, as if they hadn't been told yet.

'Are you OK?' Ron asked nervously.

'Yeah,' said Harry, looking quickly towards the door. The hooded creature had vanished. 'What happened? Where's that... that thing? Who screamed?'

'No one screamed,' said Ron, more nervously still. 'Only... only you.'

Harry looked round the bright compartment. Ginny and Neville looked back at him, both very pale.

'But I heard screaming...'

A loud snap made them all jump. Professor Lupin was breaking an enormous slab of chocolate into pieces.

'Here,' he said to Harry, handing him a particularly large piece. 'Eat it. It'll help.'

Harry took the chocolate but didn't eat it.

'What was that thing?' he asked Lupin.

'A Dementor,' said Lupin, who was now giving chocolate to everyone else. 'One of the Dementors of Azkaban.'

Everyone stared at him.

'They're... unnatural.'

Lupin growled it out. That was the only word for it. It came up from low in his chest with a disgust so raw that it didn't sound like a teacher's voice at all, and his lip had lifted off his teeth on one side, and Harry noted that he was sweating again, worse than before, with his hair dark at the temples and a drop running down beside his ear. For a moment he stood quite still in the middle of the compartment with the chocolate in his hand and his eyes on the door, and he looked, Harry thought, like a man holding a very heavy door shut against something on the other side that wanted very badly to come through.

Then he composed himself. It was like watching a sheet being smoothed. The lip came down. The shoulders came down. He was shabby and tired and kind again.

Professor Lupin crumpled up the empty chocolate wrapper and put it in his pocket.

'Eat,' he repeated. 'It'll help. I need to speak to the driver, excuse me...'

He strolled past Harry and disappeared into the corridor.

'Are you sure you're OK, Harry?' said Hermione, watching Harry anxiously.

'I don't get it... what happened?' said Harry, wiping more sweat off his face.

'Well... that thing... the Dementor... stood there and looked around (I mean, I think it did, I couldn't see its face)... and you... you...'

'I thought you were having a fit or something,' said Ron, who still looked scared. 'You went sort of rigid and fell out of your seat and started twitching...'

'And Professor Lupin stepped over you, and walked towards the Dementor, and pulled out his wand,' said Hermione, 'and he said, "None of us is hiding Sirius Black under our cloaks. Go." But the Dementor didn't move, so Lupin muttered something, and a silvery thing shot out of his wand at it, and it turned around and sort of glided away...'

'It was horrible,' said Neville, in a higher voice than usual. 'Did you feel how cold it got when it came in?'

'I felt weird,' said Ron, shifting his shoulders uncomfortably. 'Like I'd never be cheerful again...'

Ginny, who was huddled in her corner looking nearly as bad as Harry felt, gave a small sob; Hermione went over and put a comforting arm round her.

'But didn't any of you... fall off your seats?' said Harry awkwardly.

'No,' said Ron, looking anxiously at Harry again. 'Ginny was shaking like mad, though...'

Harry didn't understand. He felt weak and shivery, as though he were recovering from a bad bout of flu; he also felt the beginnings of shame. Why had he gone to pieces like that, when no one else had? And what had he been shouting? He could feel the shape of it still, at the back of his throat, the way you can feel the shape of a word you've forgotten. Not him. Not who?

Professor Lupin had come back. He paused as he entered, looked round, and said, with a small smile, 'I haven't poisoned that chocolate, you know...'

Harry took a bite and to his great surprise felt warmth spread suddenly to the tips of his fingers and toes.

'We'll be at Hogwarts in ten minutes,' said Professor Lupin. 'Are you all right, Harry?'

Harry didn't ask how Professor Lupin knew his name.

'Fine,' he muttered, embarrassed.

They didn't talk much during the remainder of the journey. At long last, the train stopped at Hogsmeade station, and there was a great scramble to get outside; owls hooted, cats miaowed, and Neville's pet toad croaked loudly from under his hat. It was freezing on the tiny platform; rain was driving down in icy sheets.

'Firs' years this way!' called a familiar voice. Harry, Ron and Hermione turned and saw the gigantic outline of Hagrid at the other end of the platform, beckoning the terrified-looking new students forward for their traditional journey across the lake.

'All righ', you three?' Hagrid yelled over the heads of the crowd. They waved at him, but had no chance to speak to him because the mass of people around them was shunting them away along the platform. Harry, Ron and Hermione followed the rest of the school along the platform and out onto a rough mud track, where at least a hundred stagecoaches awaited the remaining students, each pulled, Harry could only assume, by an invisible horse, because when they climbed inside and shut the door, the coach set off all by itself, bumping and swaying in procession.

The coach smelled faintly of mould and straw. Harry felt better since the chocolate, but still weak. Ron and Hermione kept looking at him sideways, as though frightened he might collapse again.

As the carriage trundled towards a pair of magnificent wrought-iron gates, flanked with stone columns topped with winged boars, Harry saw two more towering, hooded Dementors, standing guard on either side. A wave of cold sickness threatened to engulf him again; he leaned back into the lumpy seat and closed his eyes until they had passed the gates.

The carriage picked up speed on the long, sloping drive up to the castle; Hermione was leaning out of the tiny window, watching the many turrets and towers draw nearer. At last, the carriage swayed to a halt, and Hermione and Ron got out.

As Harry stepped down, a drawling, conspiratorial voice sounded in his ear.

'Don't tell a soul.'

It was Dracina Malfoy. She was beside him and then she wasn't, the way a cat is on a wall and then isn't; she'd come up out of the dark and the rain on his blind side, between the carriages, with her hood up, and she pressed, rather forcefully, a thin box into Harry's hands, tied with simple string. The smell came off it even in the wet. Cold flowers. The same as the ribbon, the same as the letter, as strong as if she'd had it against her for hours.

'I made them myself,' she said, very low, with her mouth near his ear. 'And there'll be no ambiguity that I gave them to you.'

Then she walked off as if nothing had happened, her nose in the air, and spotted Pansy and Daphne by the steps, and went to them, and the three of them put their heads together and began chortling the way those upper-class Slytherins always did with each other, over nothing, with their eyes going everywhere.

Harry looked at the package in his hands. Then he saw Hermione coming over with Ron and shoved it under his robes.

His smile was much less well hidden. Ron saw it. Ron saw the box go under the robes and saw the smile that didn't, and looked at Harry, and looked at the three Slytherin heads by the steps, and said nothing at all, with some effort.

Hermione had seen something too. Not the box, Harry thought; she'd been too far off for the box. But she'd seen where Dracina Malfoy had come from and where she'd gone, and she was looking after her now across the wet dark drive with an expression that Harry could only have called venomous, a look that went into the back of that silver-blonde head like a dart and stayed there, and then, mercifully, Hermione glanced round, and saw Harry smiling, and seemed to decide that the smile was for her. She went pink to the ears. She looked at the ground, and then back at him through her hair, and smiled too.

Ron looked at the floor, and rubbed the back of his neck, and said, very quietly, 'Oh, blimey.'

'Is there a problem with that girl?'

Professor Lupin had come down from the carriage behind theirs. He was looking at Malfoy, by the steps, with his head a little on one side and his eyes narrowed, and there was something in the look that wasn't quite suspicion and wasn't quite anything else Harry had a word for. It was the look of a man who had just caught a scent he knew from somewhere, and was trying to remember where.

'What girl?' Harry asked, trying to hide his panic.

Lupin chuckled.

Harry realised that their new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher had just teased him.

Lupin took out a cloth and wiped his face, which was still sweating, in the rain, in September, and Harry noticed that he looked a little off colour under it, greyish, with the skin tight over his cheekbones, and that his eyes went up once, quickly, as he wiped, to the two black shapes by the gates far down the drive, and came back, and that his jaw set as if he'd bitten down on something.

'A great many of them,' he said, very quietly, to himself, and put the cloth away.

Hermione prodded Ron in the back to make him hurry, and the three of them joined the crowd swarming up the steps, through the giant oak front doors, into the cavernous Entrance Hall, which was lit with flaming torches, and housed a magnificent marble staircase that led to the upper floors.

The door into the Great Hall stood open at the right; Harry followed the crowd towards it, but had barely glimpsed the enchanted ceiling, which was black and cloudy tonight, when a voice called, 'Potter! Granger! I want to see you both!'

Harry and Hermione turned round, surprised. Professor McGonagall, Transfiguration teacher and Head of Gryffindor House, was calling over the heads of the crowd. She was a stern-looking witch who wore her hair in a tight bun; her sharp eyes were framed with square spectacles. Harry fought his way over to her with a feeling of foreboding: Professor McGonagall had a way of making him feel he must have done something wrong.

'There's no need to look so worried... I just want a word in my office,' she told them. 'Move along there, Weasley.'

Ron stared as Professor McGonagall ushered Harry and Hermione away from the chattering crowd; they accompanied her across the Entrance Hall, up the marble staircase, and along a corridor.

Her office was a small room with a large, welcoming fire, and Harry had been in it before, past midnight with dust on his robes and a sword across his knees, and had not, that night, had any attention to spare for the furniture. He had some now. Above the fire, where another teacher might have hung a painting or a clock, there was a long glass case on a bracket, lit from inside, and in the case there was a thing.

It was perhaps the length of his forearm. It had been dead for a long time and somebody had stuffed it with great care. It was a sort of grey-white, segmented, like a very large worm or a very thin eel, with a fringe of fins or fronds running down its back, and at one end its body opened into a mouth that was all four ways at once, four hinged flaps lined with needle teeth, held wide as if it had been caught in the act of screaming. It had no eyes that Harry could see. It was, without any question, the most horrible object he had ever seen in a teacher's office, and that included Lockhart's portraits.

He stared at it. He couldn't help it.

Professor McGonagall saw him stare. She didn't say anything. She simply looked at him, over her square spectacles, with an expression Harry had seen on her face perhaps three times in two years: on the morning she'd said Nephilim in Transfiguration and then winced, and in the window alcove when she'd told him what a Tzimisce did when you hit it, and once, in the hospital wing, when she'd thought nobody was looking at her at all. It was a knowing look. It was a look that said yes, Potter, that was alive once, and no, you may not ask. And then it was gone, and she was pulling out her chair.

Harry filed it, with everything else, under Professor McGonagall had a very eventful life before she came here, and one day somebody is going to tell me about it.

Professor McGonagall motioned Harry and Hermione to sit down. She settled herself behind her desk and said abruptly, 'Professor Lupin sent an owl ahead to say that you were taken ill on the train, Potter.'

Before Harry could reply, there was a soft knock on the door and Madam Pomfrey, the nurse, came bustling in.

Harry felt himself going red in the face. It was bad enough that he'd passed out, or whatever he had done, without everyone making all this fuss.

'I'm fine,' he said. 'Honestly. I'm absolutely fine. A seven-foot monster in a dressing gown breathed on me and I had a bit of a lie-down on the floor, that's all, it's nothing, people do it all the time. Lovely things. Very friendly. Great idea putting them on the gates, I'm sure the first-years loved it.' He could hear himself and couldn't stop, and the words were coming out dry and quick and clever and he knew exactly why, because underneath them, where nobody could see, there was a cold spot in his chest that hadn't gone away since the compartment and he was not, he was not, going to let anybody in this room look at it. 'I don't need anything...'

'Oh, it's you, is it?' said Madam Pomfrey, ignoring this and bending down to stare closely at him. 'I suppose you've been doing something dangerous again?'

'Me? I never do anything dangerous. I've had two calm years of getting on with my school work.'

Madam Pomfrey sniggered. She actually sniggered, through her nose, and rolled her eyes to the ceiling.

'Your humour, Potter,' she said, 'is going to be the death of me. I shall put it on the certificate. Cause of death: Harry Potter being clever at me.'

'It was a Dementor, Poppy,' said Professor McGonagall.

They exchanged a dark look, and Madam Pomfrey clucked disapprovingly.

'Setting Dementors around a school,' she muttered, pushing back Harry's hair and feeling his forehead. 'He won't be the last one who collapses. Yes, he's all clammy. Terrible things, they are, and the effect they have on people who are already delicate...'

'I'm not delicate!' said Harry crossly.

'Of course you're not,' said Madam Pomfrey absent-mindedly, now taking his pulse.

'What does he need?' said Professor McGonagall crisply. 'Bed rest? Should he perhaps spend tonight in the hospital wing?'

'I'm fine!' said Harry, jumping up.

The hospital wing. He had a sudden, vivid, horribly detailed picture of what Dracina Malfoy would say if she heard he'd been put to bed in the hospital wing on the first night of term because a Dementor had looked at him. And then, worse, a picture of what she might do, which involved the hospital wing, and the middle of the night, and a chair pulled up to his bed, and a box that smelt of cold flowers, and he found that the back of his neck had gone hot in a way that had nothing to do with Dementors at all.

'Well, he should have some chocolate, at the very least,' said Madam Pomfrey, who was now trying to peer into Harry's eyes.

'I've already had some,' said Harry. 'Professor Lupin gave me some. He gave it to all of us.'

'Did he, now?' said Madam Pomfrey approvingly. 'So we've finally got a Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher who knows his remedies?'

'Are you sure you feel all right, Potter?' Professor McGonagall said sharply.

'Yes,' said Harry.

'Very well. Kindly wait outside while I have a quick word with Miss Granger about her course schedule, then we can go down to the feast together.'

Harry went back into the corridor with Madam Pomfrey, who left for the hospital wing, muttering to herself. He had to wait only a few minutes; then Hermione emerged looking very happy about something, with one hand pressed flat against the front of her robes as though she had something underneath them she wanted to be sure of, followed by Professor McGonagall, and the three of them made their way back down the marble staircase to the Great Hall.

It was a sea of pointed black hats; each of the long House tables was lined with students, their faces glimmering by the light of thousands of candles, which were floating over the tables in mid-air. Professor Flitwick, who was a tiny little wizard with a shock of white hair, was carrying an ancient hat and a three-legged stool out of the Hall.

'Oh,' said Hermione softly, 'we've missed the Sorting!'

New students at Hogwarts were sorted into Houses by trying on the Sorting Hat, which shouted out the House they were best suited to (Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff or Slytherin). Professor McGonagall strode off towards her empty seat at the staff table, and Harry and Hermione set off in the other direction, as quietly as possible, towards the Gryffindor table. People looked round at them as they passed along the back of the Hall, and a few of them pointed at Harry. Had the story of his collapsing in front of the Dementor travelled that fast?

He and Hermione sat down on either side of Ron, who had saved them seats.

'What was all that about?' he muttered to Harry.

Harry started to explain in a whisper, but at that moment the Headmaster stood up to speak, and he broke off.

Professor Dumbledore, though very old, always gave an impression of great energy. He had several feet of long silver hair and beard, half-moon spectacles and an extremely crooked nose. He was often described as the greatest wizard of the age, but that wasn't why Harry respected him. You couldn't help trusting Albus Dumbledore, and as Harry watched him beaming round at the students, he felt really calm for the first time since the Dementor had entered the train compartment.

'Dumbledore is so wise,' Harry said to Ron, in awe.

Ron didn't say anything. He put his hand on Harry's shoulder, and left it there, and Harry, looking up at the staff table, didn't see that Ron was not looking at Dumbledore with awe at all. Ron was looking at him with his jaw set and his ears red, the way he'd looked at the plate of toast that morning, and at the shirt you could count ribs through, and he was thinking about a boy who'd been handed back to a cupboard with a cat flap by the wisest man in the world, and had come back three weeks later in a stranger's pub needing to be told to eat, and who still, still, sat here and said so wise, because if he stopped saying it he'd have nothing at the top of the steps at all. Ron understood that. He understood it the way you understand a bad tooth, by not touching it. So he kept his hand where it was, and his mouth shut, and let Harry have his Dumbledore.

'Welcome!' said Dumbledore, the candlelight shimmering on his beard. 'Welcome to another year at Hogwarts! I have a few things to say to you all, and as one of them is very serious, I think it best to get it out of the way before you become befuddled by our excellent feast...'

Dumbledore cleared his throat and continued, 'As you will all be aware after their search of the Hogwarts Express, our school is presently playing host to some of the Dementors of Azkaban, who are here on Ministry of Magic business.'

He paused, and Harry remembered what Mr Weasley had said about Dumbledore not being happy with the Dementors guarding the school.

'They are stationed at every entrance to the grounds,' Dumbledore continued, 'and while they are with us, I must make it plain that nobody is to leave school without permission. Dementors are not to be fooled by tricks or disguises... or even Invisibility Cloaks,' he added blandly, and Harry and Ron glanced at each other. 'It is not in the nature of a Dementor to understand pleading or excuses. I therefore warn each and every one of you to give them no reason to harm you. I look to the Prefects, and our new Head Boy and Girl, to make sure that no student runs afoul of the Dementors,' he said.

Percy, who was sitting a few seats down from Harry, puffed out his chest again and stared round impressively. Dumbledore paused again; he looked very seriously round the Hall, and nobody moved or made a sound.

'On a happier note,' he continued, 'I am pleased to welcome two new teachers to our ranks this year.

'First, Professor Lupin, who has kindly consented to fill the post of Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher.'

There was some scattered, rather unenthusiastic applause. Only those who had been in the compartment on the train with Professor Lupin clapped hard, Harry among them. Professor Lupin looked particularly shabby next to all the other teachers in their best robes. He still seemed a bit off colour, and he didn't like the attention; he nodded once, quickly, at the Hall, and then his eyes went away from it, to the high black windows, as though whatever was outside them in the rain mattered more to him than three hundred children clapping, and one of his hands, on the table, had closed on his napkin and was slowly twisting it.

'Look at Snape!' Ron hissed in Harry's ear.

Professor Snape, the Potions master, was staring along the staff table at Professor Lupin. It was common knowledge that Snape wanted the Defence Against the Dark Arts job, but even Harry, who hated Snape, was startled at the expression twisting his thin, sallow face. It was beyond anger: it was loathing. Harry knew that expression only too well; it was the look Snape wore every time he set eyes on Harry.

'As to our second new appointment,' Dumbledore continued, as the lukewarm applause for Professor Lupin died away. 'Well, I am sorry to tell you that Professor Kettleburn, our Care of Magical Creatures teacher, retired at the end of last year in order to enjoy more time with his remaining limbs. However, I am delighted to say that his place will be filled by none other than Rubeus Hagrid, who has agreed to take on this teaching job in addition to his gamekeeping duties.'

Harry, Ron and Hermione stared at one another, stunned. Then they joined in with the applause, which was tumultuous at the Gryffindor table in particular. Harry leaned forward to see Hagrid, who was ruby-red in the face and staring down at his enormous hands, his wide grin hidden in the tangle of his black beard.

'We should've known!' Ron roared, pounding the table. 'Who else would have assigned us a bloody biting book?'

Harry, Ron and Hermione were the last to stop clapping, and as Professor Dumbledore started speaking again, they saw that Hagrid was wiping his eyes on the tablecloth.

'Well, I think that's everything of importance,' said Dumbledore. 'Let the feast begin!'

The golden plates and goblets before them filled suddenly with food and drink. Harry, suddenly ravenous, helped himself to everything he could reach and began to eat.

It was a delicious feast; the Hall echoed with talk, laughter, and the clatter of knives and forks. Harry, Ron and Hermione, however, were eager for it to finish so that they could talk to Hagrid. They knew how much being made a teacher would mean to him. Hagrid wasn't a fully qualified wizard; he had been expelled from Hogwarts in his third year for a crime he had not committed. It had been Harry, Ron and Hermione who had cleared Hagrid's name last year.

Harry looked, once, during the pudding, down the length of the Hall to the Slytherin table.

He hadn't meant to. His eyes did it. And they found her at once, because she was sitting exactly where he'd have looked if he'd been looking, halfway down with her back very straight and Pansy on one side and Daphne on the other, and she was not looking at him. She was laughing at something Pansy had said, with her head back and her hand over her mouth in that way she had, and she did not look at him, and did not look at him, and did not look at him, so steadily and so thoroughly that Harry, who had spent two years being glared at across that Hall, understood for the first time that not looking could be a thing a person did on purpose, with effort, and that it could be louder than a stare.

Then, as he was turning away, she reached for her goblet, and her eyes came up over the rim of it for exactly as long as it took to swallow, and went to him, and went to the Gryffindor table beside him, where Hermione was helping herself to treacle tart, and went down again.

Beside him, Hermione said, 'Harry, you've got custard on your sleeve,' and dabbed at it with her napkin, and went on dabbing rather longer than the custard needed.

At long last, when the last morsels of pumpkin tart had melted from the golden platters, Dumbledore gave the word that it was time for them all to go to bed, and they got their chance.

'Congratulations, Hagrid!' Hermione squealed as they reached the teachers' table.

'All down ter you three,' said Hagrid, wiping his shining face on his napkin as he looked up at them. 'Can' believe it... great man, Dumbledore... came straight down to me hut after Professor Kettleburn said he'd had enough... It's what I always wanted...'

Overcome with emotion, he buried his face in his napkin, and Professor McGonagall shooed them away.

Harry, Ron and Hermione joined the Gryffindors streaming up the marble staircase and, very tired now, along more corridors, up more and more stairs, to the hidden entrance to Gryffindor Tower. A large portrait of a fat lady in a pink dress asked them, 'Password?'

'Coming through, coming through!' Percy called from behind the crowd. 'The new password's "Fortuna Major"!'

'Oh no,' said Neville Longbottom sadly. He always had trouble remembering the passwords.

Through the portrait hole and across the common room, the girls and boys divided towards their separate staircases. Harry climbed the spiral stair with no thought in his head except how glad he was to be back. They reached their familiar, circular dormitory with its five four-poster beds, and Harry, looking round, felt he was home at last.

He waited until the others were asleep.

It didn't take long. Neville went first, as he always did, with a sort of sigh; then Seamus, then Dean, and Ron last, lying on his back with one arm flung over the edge of the bed towards Harry's as if he'd meant to say something and had gone under before he could. When the breathing in the room had all gone slow, Harry drew the hangings round his bed, and lit his wand under the blankets, and took the box out from under his pillow, where he'd slid it while the others were undressing.

It was a plain, thin, white card box, the sort you got from a confectioner's, and the string round it was ordinary brown string, tied in a bow that had been done by somebody who knew how. He untied it. He lifted the lid.

Violets. Two neat rows of them, a dozen, on a square of white paper, and the smell came up out of the box so strong that for a moment he was back in a hospital bed with a sore arm and a small white box on the cabinet and Madam Pomfrey saying a young lady.

But these weren't the ones from the shop. He saw that at once, even by wandlight. Each violet had been dipped in dark chocolate, right up to the frosted edge of the petals, so that the purple showed through at the tips like something looking out from under a cloak, and each one had been finished. Separately. By hand. One had a single line of silver piped round the rim. The next had a dot of white sugar at its heart, no bigger than a pinhead. The next, a tiny H, so small and so exactly made that he had to bring the wand right down to the box to be sure of it, and then he went along the row and found that every one of them was different, and every one of them had taken somebody a very long time. These had been done by somebody who did not do things by halves and had decided, this time, that halves would not do at all.

There was a card. One line, in the small spiky hand that pressed through the paper.

I made them myself. Not from Ginny. D.

Harry looked at it for a long time, in the wandlight, with the rain going on the window.

Not from Ginny.

He'd never told her. He'd never told anybody. He'd lain in that bed last year and eaten a whole box of sugared violets and thought Ginny, and never said a word about it to a living soul, and here it was on a card in his hand, in her writing, as if she'd been there. He'd worked it out himself, in the end, months later, from a card with silver eyes behind it, but she couldn't know that. As far as she knew he'd gone on thinking Ginny all year. And she'd let him. And she'd been waiting all this time to say so.

He didn't know whether to be alarmed by that. He decided, with the box warm in his hands and the smell of cold flowers filling the dark behind his hangings, that he'd be alarmed tomorrow. He ate one. The chocolate was very dark and the violet inside it was very sweet and the two of them together were, he thought, the best thing he had ever put in his mouth, and he sat for a moment with his eyes shut and didn't think about anything. He put the lid back on, and the card inside his pillowcase, and pulled the hangings back, and lay down, and the last thing he saw before he slept was the thin green ribbon, lying on his bedside cabinet where he'd put it out of the book, catching the light from the window.