The Knight and the Hippogriff

When Harry, Ron and Hermione entered the Great Hall for breakfast the next day, the first thing they saw was Dracina Malfoy, who seemed to be entertaining a large group of Slytherins with a very funny story.

As they passed, Malfoy did a ridiculous impression of a swooning fit and there was a roar of laughter.

She's doing it for them, Harry told himself, walking. Not you. Remember the train. Just remember.

'Don't,' said Hermione, close behind him, in the voice she kept for Fred and George's worst ideas. 'Don't look. Keep walking. She wants you to look...'

'Oi! Potter!' Pansy Parkinson had half risen off the bench, a Slytherin girl with a flat, snub-nosed face like a disappointed pug. 'Mind your back, Potter! Something cold's coming for you, Potter! Ooooooooh!'

But Harry had seen something Pansy hadn't. He'd seen the exact moment Malfoy had noticed him. She'd been in the middle of the swoon, with the back of her hand against her forehead and her eyes rolled up, and her eyes had come down and found him, and the swoon had gone out of her like air out of a tyre. She finished it. She had to finish it, with twenty Slytherins watching. But there was nothing in it any more. It was a girl going through the motions of a joke she'd stopped finding funny about two seconds ago, and when Pansy wailed ooooh beside her she didn't join in, and her hand, coming down from her forehead, closed on the edge of the table and stayed there.

Harry dropped into a seat at the Gryffindor table, next to George Weasley.

'Timetables,' said George, sliding a sheaf of them across. 'Third years. Fresh from McGonagall. What's that face for?'

'Malfoy,' said Ron, sitting down on George's other side and glaring over at the Slytherin table. He wasn't glaring at the Slytherins in general. He was glaring at Dracina in particular, and the glare said, quite clearly, pack it in, and whatever was going on between her and Harry, whatever had passed between them on the train that Ron had sighed about, as far as Ron was concerned the girl was utterly mad and that was the beginning and the end of it.

George glanced over just as Malfoy keeled sideways against Crabbe's shoulder in a second, longer swoon, with her tongue hanging out. It was aimed at Ron this time, and it was a good deal more convincing.

'That crazy girl,' he said calmly. 'Wasn't half so pleased with herself last night, was she, when those things were coming down the train our end. Burst in on us, didn't she, Fred?'

'Demanded we get Harry and nearly cried, didn't stop slagging you off the entire time, mind,' said Fred, with a contemptuous glance at Malfoy.

Harry put his fork down.

'She what?'

'Oh, yeah.' Fred buttered a piece of toast. 'Train stops, lights go, and about ten seconds later the door bangs open and there she is with her wand lit, white as a sheet, Crabbe and Goyle behind her looking like a pair of frightened wardrobes. Potter's at the end. One of you go and get him. There's something in the corridor. Then we said we weren't your keepers and she called us a pair of ginger thugs who'd be lucky to inherit a shed, and then it got cold and she grabbed George's arm.'

'Nearly had it off,' said George. 'I've got marks.'

'And when it was over,' said Fred, 'she let go of him as if he'd gone off, and said tell nobody about this, Weasley, and went. Charming girl. Very worried about you. Hates us.'

'Mind you, I wasn't exactly dancing myself,' George admitted. 'Foul things, those Dementors. Foulest things I've ever been near...'

It was then that Harry noticed Professor Lupin.

He was at the staff table, between Professor Flitwick and the empty chair where Hagrid usually sat, and he wasn't eating. He had a cup of tea in front of him that he hadn't touched. He was looking at Harry. Not glancing: looking, steadily, over the heads of the whole Gryffindor table, with his tired grey-brown eyes, and then his eyes went away from Harry to the high windows along the east wall, through which, if you knew where to look, you could just make out the gates, and the two black shapes standing by them in the morning mist, and then came back to Harry again. He did this three times while Harry watched. Harry to the windows to Harry. His expression was very strange. It wasn't the way a teacher looked at a pupil. It was the way a man looks between a sleeping child and an open door.

And he still looked off colour. Worse, if anything, than on the train. There was a greyness under his skin that the candlelight didn't help, and when he lifted the teacup at last Harry saw that his hand wasn't quite steady.

'Like being dropped in the lake in January,' said Fred. 'From the inside.'

'Neither of you keeled over, though,' Harry muttered.

'Doesn't mean anything, Harry,' said George firmly. 'Dad went out to Azkaban once, years back, on Ministry business. Remember, Fred? Came home grey. Wouldn't eat. Mum had to sit up with him. He said it was like being somewhere all the light had been sucked out of, and you couldn't remember what it had felt like when it was in. Half the prisoners go off their heads, he said. It's them that does it.'

'Anyway,' said Fred, cheering up, 'Malfoy'll be laughing on the other side of her face come November. Gryffindor against Slytherin. First match of the season. Remember?'

Harry had played against Malfoy once, and it had not ended well for her. He'd beaten her in the rain with one arm broken and his eyes full of water, snatching the Snitch out of the air above her head while she screamed at him. She'd said some very strange things that day, hanging in the air a dozen feet from him. You can't touch me. You can't afford to touch me. I'm the heir. He'd put it down to Malfoy being Malfoy at the time, and then he'd found out about the diary, and now he didn't know. How much of that had been her? How much had been the thing in the book, wearing her face? He'd never asked. He wasn't sure she knew.

Well, whichever it had been, he'd still beaten her. He'd do it again.

He was brought out of his thoughts by Ron, who had got up, come round George, taken Harry's plate, and started piling bacon, sausages and fried tomatoes onto it from the dishes in the middle of the table without a word.

'Ron.'

'Eat,' said Ron, and put the plate back in front of him, and went back to his seat.

Hermione had been very quiet. Harry glanced at her and found she wasn't looking at her schedule at all; she was looking across the Hall at Malfoy, with her mouth thin and taut, her right hand was inside the front of her robes, closed round something on a chain, working at it with her thumb the way other people worried a ring. She looked, Harry thought, as if she were doing a sum in her head and had just got the answer, and liked it.

Then she turned to her timetable.

'Oh, good,' she said, brightening at once. 'New subjects this morning.'

'Hang on,' said Ron, leaning over her shoulder and frowning. 'Somebody's made a right mess of yours. Look at it. That's about ten things a day. You'd need a day twice as long.'

'It's fine. Professor McGonagall and I have sorted it out.'

'Sorted it?' Ron laughed and put his finger on the page. 'Look at this morning. Nine o'clock, Divination. Right. And then under it, nine o'clock, Muggle Studies. And under that,' he bent closer, as if the parchment might be lying to him, 'nine o'clock, Arithmancy. Hermione, I know you're clever, but you can't be in three rooms at once. Nobody can.'

'Obviously I won't be in three rooms at once,' said Hermione crisply. 'Don't be ridiculous.'

'So how...'

'Marmalade, please,' said Hermione.

'But-'

'Ron, why on earth does it matter to you how full my timetable is?' Hermione snapped. 'It's sorted. I told you.'

Hagrid came in at that moment through the doors from the Entrance Hall, ducking under the lintel, in his enormous moleskin coat, with a dead polecat dangling by its tail from one hand as though he'd forgotten he was holding it.

'Mornin'!' He stopped by them on his way up, beaming, swinging the polecat. 'You lot're in my firs' class! After lunch! I've bin up since five gettin' it all ready... Hope I've done it righ'... a teacher... me...' He shook his great head as though he still couldn't quite believe it.

He beamed at them again and went on up to the staff table, polecat and all.

'What d'you reckon he's got ready?' said Ron. He didn't sound entirely happy about it.

The Hall was emptying round them. Ron squinted at his timetable.

'Divination's right at the top of North Tower,' he said. 'That's miles. We'd better shift...'

They gulped the rest of their breakfasts, waved to Fred and George, and set off back down the Hall.

As they passed the Slytherin table, Malfoy stopped her impression of Harry and started a new one.

It was Hermione. There was no mistaking it. Malfoy had shaken both hands round her plaits in a mime of frizz and shot one arm straight up in the air, ooh, ooh, me, Professor, and she was gabbling in a high, breathless, know-it-all voice, and the Slytherins were howling. And then she stopped gabbling, and put her hand down, and said in her own drawl, pitched to carry, 'Of course, it's not really hers, is it, the magic. They get it. From somewhere. Her people, the big nose ones. They like to steal things.' She looked round at her table. 'Stolen goods, in a Hogwarts uniform.'

Harry knew what that was. He didn't know the wizarding words for it, but he knew what she had meant, The same people Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia warned him about. And hearing it come out of Dracina's mouth made something go cold and heavy in him that had nothing to do with Dementors.

The shouts of laughter followed Harry into the Entrance Hall.

Hermione hadn't said anything. She was walking very fast with her chin down and her bag clutched against her chest, and Harry thought she looked upset, and felt terrible, and didn't know that upset was not the word at all. Hermione's face was perfectly white and perfectly calm. Her thumb was moving inside her robes, and she was not thinking about what Malfoy had said. She was thinking about what time it had been when Malfoy said it, and exactly where she herself had been standing, and whether a person could get from the Entrance Hall doors to the far end of the Slytherin table and back in under four minutes if she went along the wall.

'Hermione,' said Harry.

'I'm fine.'

'I know you are. I was going to say, she's got your hand wrong.' He put his own hand up, straight, the way Malfoy had. 'You don't do that. You do this.' He bent his elbow and leant forward and vibrated, slightly, as if the hand were trying to get out of the socket. 'And you sort of go up on your toes. She hasn't been watching. Very poor research.'

Hermione's mouth twitched.

'And the voice was all wrong,' said Ron, catching on. 'It's not high. It's fast. It's like a Quick-Quotes Quill on fire. Harry, do the voice.'

'I can't do the voice, nobody can do the voice. Binns tried once. It's why he died.'

Hermione giggled. It came out of her in spite of herself, a small, surprised, hiccuping noise, and she put her hand over her mouth, and then she took it down and said, 'You're both awful,' in a voice that had gone back to being her own.

But her other hand didn't come out of her robes until they were on the second staircase.

North Tower was a long way off. Two years in the castle had taught them a great deal of it, but not that corner, and none of them had ever been up it.

'There... must... be... a... quicker... way,' Ron gasped, as they came off the seventh staircase onto a landing none of them had ever seen, bare except for one large painting of an empty field.

'Right, I think,' said Hermione, looking along the passage that way.

'Can't be,' said Ron. 'That's south. Look, there's the lake...'

Harry was looking at the field. A fat grey pony with dapples on its rump had wandered into it from the edge of the frame and put its head down to graze. Harry had watched the people in Hogwarts paintings come and go plenty of times by now, but he had never quite got tired of it. A second later, after the pony, came its rider, on foot, clanking: a short, stout knight in full armour, with grass stains all over his knees, who had very evidently just come off.

'Ha!' He had seen them. 'Trespassers! Rogues! Come to jeer at a man in his misfortune, have you? Have at you, curs! Draw!'

And he wrenched at the hilt of his sword, which came out of its scabbard on the third heave, and began whirling it about his head and hopping from foot to foot in a fury. It was a great deal too long for him. One especially ambitious sweep carried him round in a full circle and dumped him on his face in the grass.

'Are you OK?' said Harry, going closer.

'Stand off, varlet! Stand off, you scurvy cur!'

He planted the point of the sword in the turf to lever himself up, and leaned his whole weight on it, and the blade went into the ground like a spade into wet sand, and stuck. He hauled on it. He hauled again, scarlet in the face, with both gauntlets. It didn't come. In the end he sat down heavily beside it, and pushed up his visor, and mopped his streaming face.

'Is it stuck?' said Harry.

'It is not stuck. It is resting.'

'It looks stuck.'

'A blade of this quality, villain, does not stick. It bides.' The knight gave it another heave. The grass held on. 'It is biding.'

'Right. Only, while it's biding, we're looking for the North Tower, and I wondered if you'd...'

'The North Tower!' The knight let go of the sword, which stayed where it was, quivering. 'A quest! At last! Had I my steed I should bear you thither myself, but the beast is a coward and a glutton and will not be caught. No matter. Sir Cadogan goes afoot!' He drew himself up to his full height, which brought the top of his helmet roughly level with the painted pony's knee. 'Follow me, good sirs, and lady! And should we meet the foe...'

'We'll let you know,' said Harry. 'You'll be the first. We'll hold them off while you get your sword back.'

'Insolent pup!'

'I'm only saying. You're not built for a long walk. If it turns into a running fight I'll have to carry you.' Harry looked him up and down. 'You could sit in my pocket. Be my midget knight.'

Ron made a noise like a kettle. Hermione said 'Harry,' but she said it with her shoulders shaking.

The knight had gone a deep, painted purple. For a moment he simply opened and shut his mouth. Then he threw back his head, and roared with laughter, so that his helmet rang, and clapped his tiny gauntlet against his tiny breastplate.

'Ha! A wit! A wit, by my beard! I had rather a wit at my side than ten dull swords. Come, then, pocket-bearer! It is this way, by the sinister passage, and up, and up, and up!'

And he was off, out of the side of his frame and into the next painting along, where two startled ladies on a swing dropped their fans, and Harry, Ron and Hermione went after him down the left-hand passage with their bags bouncing, while Sir Cadogan clanked ahead of them from frame to frame, shouting challenges at the furniture.

Harry, hurrying after him, found himself thinking about the sword.

He didn't know why. It was so silly. A little painted man in a rage, pulling at a blade that wouldn't come, and it had made him laugh. But it stayed with him up the next staircase, and the one after, the picture of it: a man so angry that his own sword had gone into the ground, and the harder he pulled at it in his rage the deeper it went, and he couldn't get up, and couldn't put it down, and was no use to anybody, least of all himself, until he stopped pulling and sat down in the grass and wiped his face. Harry had a feeling he'd seen that somewhere before. Not in a painting. He pushed the feeling away, because they were late, but it came back on the stairs, and it had a Bull Ring and a dining room and a woman on the ceiling in it, and he pushed it away again.

Gasping, they went up a stair so tight and twisting that they were dizzy by the top, and heard voices overhead, and knew they'd arrived.

'Fare you well!' bellowed the knight, sticking his head into a picture of some gloomy-looking monks, who recoiled. 'Fare you well, brothers-in-arms! Should you ever have need of a stout heart and a strong arm, you have only to call upon Sir Cadogan!'

'Right you are,' said Ron under his breath, as the knight vanished. 'Next time we need a lunatic.'

The stair came out onto a little landing crowded with most of the class. There was no door anywhere. Ron poked Harry and pointed up: there was a round trapdoor in the ceiling, with a brass plate screwed to it.

'"Professor S. Trelawney. Divination,"' Harry read. 'How do we get up?'

The trapdoor swung open as if it had heard him, and a silver ladder slid down and landed at his feet. The landing went quiet.

'Go on, then,' said Ron, with a grin, and Harry went up first.

He came up into a room that was nothing like any classroom he'd ever seen. It looked more like somebody's crowded attic that had been made over into a tea room by a person with a passion for fringes. There were round tables everywhere, twenty or more, jammed together, each one ringed with chintz armchairs and squashy poufs. The light was red and dim; every curtain was drawn, and every lamp had a dark red scarf thrown over it. It was so hot that Harry's glasses misted, and the fire under the cluttered mantelpiece was giving off a thick, sweet, cloying smell as it boiled a big copper kettle. All round the walls the shelves were crammed: feathers, candle-ends, greasy packs of cards, crystal balls by the dozen, and more teacups than Harry had ever seen in one place.

The rest of the class came up after him and stood about whispering. Ron appeared at his elbow.

'Where's the teacher?' Ron muttered.

A voice answered out of the dimness, soft and far away, like somebody speaking through fog.

'Welcome,' it said. 'How delightful to see you all upon this plane at last.'

Harry's first thought was of an enormous, glittering insect. Professor Trelawney drifted into the firelight. She was very thin, and she wore glasses so thick that her eyes swam behind them, huge as saucers; she was wrapped in a shawl stitched all over with sequins, and she had so many chains and strings of beads round her neck, and so many bangles and rings on her arms and fingers, that she jingled when she breathed.

'Be seated, my dears, be seated,' she said, and they lowered themselves awkwardly into armchairs or sank into poufs. Harry, Ron and Hermione took a table together.

'This is Divination,' said Professor Trelawney, settling into a high-backed armchair by the fire, 'and I am Professor Trelawney. I doubt you will have seen me about the castle. The noise and bustle of the school below are... injurious... to the Inner Eye.'

Nobody had anything to say to that. Professor Trelawney arranged her shawl about her and went on. 'You have chosen the most demanding of all the magical arts, my dears. I must be honest with you from the start. If you do not possess the Sight, I can teach you very little. Books will carry you only a short way along this road...'

Harry and Ron both looked at Hermione, grinning; Hermione looked as though somebody had just told her the library was closing for good.

'There are a great many witches and wizards,' Professor Trelawney went on, her magnified eyes travelling slowly from one anxious face to the next, 'very gifted at bangs and flashes and turning things into other things, who will never pierce the veil that hangs over what is to come. The Gift is rare. You, boy,' she said, quite suddenly, to Neville, who nearly fell off his pouf. 'How is your grandmother?'

'Fine,' said Neville in a small voice. 'I think.'

'I shouldn't count on it, dear,' said Professor Trelawney gently, with the firelight sliding on her long green earrings, and Neville swallowed. 'This year we shall cover the basic methods. This term, the leaves of the teacup. Next, the lines of the hand. Oh... and you, my dear,' she said abruptly to Parvati Patil, 'beware of a man with red hair.'

Parvati twisted round and stared at Ron, who was sitting just behind her, and quietly moved her chair a few inches away.

'Later in the year,' Professor Trelawney continued, 'the crystal ball... provided we have got through fire omens. I'm afraid lessons will be interrupted in February by a very unpleasant flu. I shall lose my voice entirely. And at around Easter, one of us will be parted from this circle for good.'

There was a very uncomfortable silence. Professor Trelawney did not seem to notice it.

'Professor?'

It was Harry. He hadn't known he was going to say it. His hand had gone up on its own, the way Hermione's did, and every face in the dim red room had turned to look at it, and he found he couldn't put it down again without looking a fool, so he went on.

'You said... signs. Omens. Things that mean something's coming.' His ears were hot. 'Does it... I mean, is it always tea? Or can it be... other things? Ordinary things. Something you see in the street, or a... a bit of light, on something. Somebody saying something to you that they didn't know was... important.' He was making a mess of it. He could hear himself making a mess of it. 'Like a message. From. From somewhere. From somebody who wanted you to...'

He stopped, because Seamus had snorted.

'Harry's getting messages,' said Seamus, not quite under his breath, and Dean elbowed him, and Lavender giggled, and the giggle went round the circle of poufs like a draught.

'A message,' repeated Professor Trelawney. She had turned her enormous eyes on him, and they had gone, if it was possible, even larger. 'From somebody, my dear?'

'I don't know. Yes. I mean. Muggles have...' Don't say God. Don't say God in this room. 'Muggles have this idea that there's... that somebody's watching, and sends you... that you can get a sign, from...'

'Ah.' Professor Trelawney's bangles clashed as she raised one hand, palm out, as if to ward something off. 'Ah, I see. I do see. My dear boy. You have been raised, I think, among Muggles?' She said Muggles the way Aunt Petunia said that school. 'Then I must gently disabuse you. The Sight is not a Muggle superstition. It is not rabbits' feet and black cats and little men in the sky. It is a discipline. The signs with which we concern ourselves in this room are real signs, in the leaves and the lines and the crystal, placed there by the great currents of Fate herself, and not,' she gave a small tinkling laugh, and half the room laughed with her, 'not the muddled wishful thinking of people who cannot perform so much as a Levitation Charm and so must comfort themselves with angels.'

The laugh got louder. Harry felt his whole face burn.

'I didn't mean...'

'Of course you didn't, dear. It is not your fault. One cannot help one's upbringing.' She patted the air in his direction. 'But you must learn to tell the true sign from the false, if you are to make any progress at all. A shaft of light upon a trunk, you say? A kind word in the street?' Another tinkle. 'My dear boy, that is not Fate. That is weather.'

Harry hadn't said anything about a trunk. He was almost sure he hadn't. He sat very still on his pouf, with the perfume going round and round his head and the whole class grinning at him through the red dark, and felt about as big as Sir Cadogan, and decided that he was never, ever going to open his mouth in this room again.

'I think it was a good question.'

Hermione. She hadn't put her hand up. She'd simply said it, clearly, into the laughter, and the laughter stopped.

'I think,' she went on, in her most precise voice, looking straight at Professor Trelawney with her chin up, 'that if you're going to teach a class that signs exist, then which signs count and who decides is the first thing anyone sensible would ask. Harry asked it. I don't see why it's funny.' She paused. 'And for the record, I don't believe in any of it. Tea or angels. But I'd rather sit next to somebody who wonders than somebody who laughs.'

There was a silence in which you could hear the kettle.

Professor Trelawney looked at Hermione for a long moment with an expression of the deepest sorrow, as at a hopeless case.

'We will progress,' she said, 'to the tea.'

Harry didn't look at Hermione. He couldn't, just then. But under the table, where nobody could see, he found her foot with his and pressed it, once, and felt her press back, and hold on rather longer than the pressing needed.

Weather, he thought. Fine. Maybe. And underneath, where he didn't want to look, the other thought, the one the laughter had planted: or maybe there's nothing there, and there never was, and you're a boy who got poisoned in a sewer and saw things, and everybody in this room can tell.

He didn't have an answer. He was starting to think he wasn't going to get one.

'Would you be so kind, dear,' Professor Trelawney said to Lavender Brown, who was closest, and who flinched, 'as to fetch me the big silver teapot?'

Lavender, plainly relieved it was only a teapot, got up and lifted a huge one down from the shelf and set it in front of her.

'Thank you, dear. Oh, and the thing you have been dreading? It will come on the sixteenth of October.'

Lavender went pale.

'Now. Pairs, please. Each of you take a cup from the shelf and bring it to me to be filled. Drink it all, down to the dregs. Then take the cup in your left hand and swirl what's left three times round, turn it upside down on its saucer, let it drain, and pass it to your partner. You will find the symbols on pages five and six of Unfogging the Future. I shall come round. Oh, and dear,' she caught Neville's sleeve as he got up, 'when you have broken your first cup, do take one of the blue ones next. I'm so fond of the pink.'

Neville had barely touched the shelf when there was a crash of china. Professor Trelawney glided over to him with a dustpan already in her hand. 'A blue one, dear, if you would... thank you...'

Harry and Ron got their cups filled and went back to their table and drank as fast as they could without scalding their tongues off, swirled, upturned, drained, and swapped.

'Go on, then,' said Ron, flattening the book open. 'What've I got?'

'Brown sludge, mate. I sense a mudslide in your future.' said Harry. The sweet heavy smoke was going to his head; he felt dozy and slow.

'Open your minds, my dears! Look beyond what is merely there!' cried Professor Trelawney from somewhere in the red murk.

Harry made an effort.

'OK... there's a cross, sort of bent...' He found it in Unfogging the Future. 'That's "trials and suffering". Sorry. But that bit might be a sun, and that's... "great happiness". So you're going to have an awful time and be really happy about it.'

He looked at the bent little cross at the bottom of Ron's cup a second longer than he needed to. Then he didn't.

'Get your Inner Eye seen to,' said Ron, and they both had to bite down on their laughter as Professor Trelawney's enormous eyes swung their way.

'Me now...' Ron squinted into Harry's cup with his whole face screwed up. 'There's a lump like a bowler hat. You're going to end up at the Ministry...'

'Good, I always wanted to be Minister of Magic. You seen Fudge's hat? I want it.'

Ron chuckled then turned the cup round.

'No, this way up it's an acorn. What's an acorn?' He flicked pages. '"Unexpected gold. A windfall." Brilliant, you can lend me some. And this... this bit's an animal... if that's its head, it's a hippo... no... a sheep...'

Harry snorted, and Professor Trelawney spun round.

'Allow me, my dear,' she said to Ron, with gentle reproach, and swept across and took Harry's cup out of his hands. The whole table went silent.

Professor Trelawney gazed into it, turning it slowly against the clock.

'The falcon... You have an enemy, my dear. A mortal one.'

'Well, obviously,' said Hermione, not nearly as quietly as she seemed to think. Professor Trelawney's eyes went to her.

'It's hardly news,' said Hermione. 'Everyone knows who wants Harry dead.'

Harry and Ron gaped at her, impressed; they had never heard her answer back to a teacher before. Professor Trelawney decided not to hear. She went back to the cup, and went on turning it.

'The club... violence. Oh dear. Oh dear, this is a sad cup...'

'I had that down as a bowler hat,' said Ron, embarrassed.

'The skull... peril upon your road...'

Nobody moved. Professor Trelawney gave the cup one last turn, caught her breath, and shrieked.

Somewhere behind them another cup hit the floor; Neville again. Professor Trelawney sank into an empty armchair with one ringed hand pressed to her chest and her eyes screwed shut.

'Oh, my poor boy... my poor dear boy... no... no, better not... it would not be kind... do not make me...'

'What? What is it, Professor?' said Dean straight away. They were all on their feet now, edging in round the table and Professor Trelawney's chair, craning to see into the cup.

'My dear,' and the great eyes opened, slowly, 'it is the Grim.'

'The what?' said Harry.

He wasn't the only one who didn't know; Dean shrugged at him, and Lavender looked blank. But most of the others had both hands over their mouths.

'The Grim, child!' Professor Trelawney seemed astonished that he needed telling. 'The great phantom hound that walks in churchyards! It is a portent, my dear... the darkest of them all... of death!'

Harry's insides turned over. The dog on the front of Death Omens. The dog in the dark between the garage and the fence... Lavender's hands went to her mouth as well. Every face in the room was turned on him except Hermione's. Hermione had got up and gone round behind Professor Trelawney's chair to look for herself.

'That doesn't look anything like a Grim,' she said, quite flatly.

Professor Trelawney regarded her with a dislike that was growing by the second.

'Forgive me, my dear, but there is so very little aura about you. So little openness to what is to come.'

Seamus had his head on one side, and then on the other.

'It's a Grim if you squint,' he said, squinting, 'but from over here it's a donkey,' and he leaned the other way.

'Do let me know when you've all made your minds up whether I'm dying!' said Harry, so loudly that it surprised him. After that, nobody seemed to want to meet his eye.

Churchyards, he thought, in the ringing quiet. It haunts churchyards. He thought of the lych-gate at St Michael's and the yew trees and the empty bench, and the way he'd stood on that pavement four times and never gone in, and he thought: so that's where it lives. Right outside the door I didn't open. He didn't know what to do with that. He put it with the rest.

'I think,' said Professor Trelawney faintly, 'that we shall stop there for today. Yes... put your things away...'

In silence the class handed back their cups and packed their bags. Even Ron wouldn't look at Harry.

'Until next time,' said Professor Trelawney, in a voice like a sigh. 'May the fates be kind. And you, dear,' to Neville, 'you will be late next lesson, so do try to make it up.'

Harry, Ron and Hermione climbed down the ladder and went down the twisting stair without a word.

On the second landing down, Harry glanced over the banister and saw a shabby figure standing quite still on the landing two flights below, looking up. By the time they reached it there was nobody there, and a door at the far end was just swinging shut.

It was Hermione who broke the silence, at the bottom, where the stair came out into an ordinary corridor with ordinary daylight in it and the perfume began to clear out of their heads.

'Harry.' She'd dropped her voice, though there was nobody about. 'That question you asked. Up there.'

'Forget it.'

'I'm not going to forget it, I'm going to be useful about it. There's the Fat Friar.'

'The Friar?' said Ron. 'What's he got to do with anything?'

'He was a monk, Ron. A real one, before he died, he was a friar, it's in Hogwarts: A History, he's about the only person in this entire castle who'd know the first thing about...' She glanced at Harry. 'About what Muggles mean by signs. From. From somebody. If you wanted to ask someone who wouldn't laugh.'

'Hang on,' said Ron. He had stopped walking. 'Hang on. What are we talking about? Since when has Harry been... what was all that? Messages? From who?' He looked from one to the other of them with the baffled, slightly injured face of a boy who has discovered that a conversation has been going on without him. 'Is this a Muggle thing? Is this a thing Muggles do?'

'Some of them,' said Hermione.

'Right. Right.' Ron ran a hand through his hair. 'And Harry's... and you want him to go and talk to a dead monk about it. In a corridor.'

'I want him to talk to somebody who'll take it seriously, since the teacher wouldn't,' said Hermione evenly. 'I'd take it seriously myself, but I don't know enough. I'm going to find out. That's all.'

Ron looked at Harry for a long moment. Harry looked at the floor.

'Fine,' said Ron at last. 'Fine. I don't get it. I'm not going to pretend I get it. But if you want to go and talk to the Friar, I'll come and stand outside and make sure nobody laughs at you, all right? That I can do.' He hitched his bag up. 'Where's Transfiguration? We're going to be late again.'

They set off for Transfiguration. It took them so long to find the classroom that, for all they'd left Divination early, they slid in just as the door was closing.

Professor Lupin was in the corridor outside it.

He was standing in a window embrasure halfway along, with his back to the wall and a book open in one hand that he wasn't reading, and as the three of them came hurrying round the corner his head came up, and he looked at Harry, and Harry had the strong and uncomfortable impression that he'd been standing there for some time, and that this was the thing he'd been waiting for. Their eyes met. Lupin nodded, once, pleasantly, as a teacher does, and went back to his book, and as they passed him Harry caught the Forest smell again, bark and bracken and cold earth, and under it something sharper, like the air before a storm.

'Did you see...?' Harry said, when the classroom door had shut behind them.

'See what?' said Ron.

'Lupin. In the corridor. He's... that's three times today. Breakfast, and then he was on the stairs when we came down from Divination, I saw him on the landing below, and now...' He lowered his voice. 'He's watching me.'

'He's new,' said Hermione. 'He's probably watching everybody.'

'He's not watching everybody. He's watching me.'

He said it lightly. He didn't feel it lightly. He'd had a teacher watch him before, in his first year, mildly and kindly and with a stammer, and that teacher had turned out to have Lord Voldemort living in the back of his head, and Harry had decided, somewhere in the course of that year, that he was never again going to assume that a tired, shabby, harmless-looking man in a Defence Against the Dark Arts post was any of those things. He gave me chocolate, Harry thought. Quirrell gave me a stammer and a turban. Everybody gives you something.

Harry took a seat in the back row and felt as though a lamp were trained on him; people kept glancing round at him sidelong, as if waiting for him to keel over. He barely took in what Professor McGonagall said about Animagi (witches and wizards who could turn themselves into animals at will), and he wasn't even looking when she became, right there in front of them, a tabby cat with the marks of spectacles round her eyes.

'Whatever is the matter with you all this morning?' said Professor McGonagall, coming back with a small pop and looking round at them. 'I am not fishing for compliments, but that has never before failed to get a round of applause.'

Every head swung towards Harry, and nobody said anything. Then Hermione's hand went up.

'Professor, we've just come from Divination, we were doing tea leaves, and...'

'Ah,' said Professor McGonagall, and her face darkened at once. 'Say no more, Miss Granger. Which of you is it to be this year?'

They all looked at her.

'Me,' said Harry, at last.

'Is that so,' said Professor McGonagall, and fixed him with a very sharp look indeed. 'Then you had better know, Potter, that Professor Trelawney has foreseen the death of one pupil every year since she joined the staff, and not one of them has yet had the courtesy to oblige her. It is her customary way of introducing herself. And were I the sort of person who criticised a colleague...'

She stopped. Her nostrils had gone white at the edges. When she went on, her voice was perfectly level. 'Divination is among the least exact of the magical disciplines. I will not pretend I have much time for it. A true Seer is a very rare thing, and Professor Trelawney...'

She stopped again. 'You look entirely healthy to me, Potter,' she said briskly, 'and I am therefore not excusing you from this evening's homework. Should you die before it is due, I shall not expect it.'

Hermione laughed out loud. Harry felt better. It was much harder to be frightened of some wet tea leaves out here, in plain daylight, without the red lamps and the perfume. Not everyone had been talked round, though. Ron still looked anxious, and Lavender was whispering, 'Yes, but what about Neville's cup?'

When the lesson ended they went down with the stampede to lunch.

'Ron, cheer up,' said Hermione, shoving the stew at him. 'You heard McGonagall.'

Ron ladled stew onto his plate and picked up his fork and then just sat holding it.

'Harry,' he said, very low. 'You've not seen... you haven't seen a big black dog anywhere. Have you?'

'Yes,' said Harry. 'The night I left the Dursleys'.'

He didn't say anything about the ray of sunshine on the trunk, or the book. He'd decided that on the stairs. One thing at a time.

Ron's fork hit the plate.

'A stray, probably,' said Hermione, unruffled.

Ron stared at her as if she'd lost her mind.

'Hermione, if Harry's seen a Grim, that's... that's really bad. My uncle Bilius saw one and... and he was dead the next day!'

'Coincidence,' said Hermione lightly, and poured herself some pumpkin juice.

'You don't know anything about it!' Ron was getting angry now. 'Wizards are terrified of Grims! Really bloody terrified!'

'Well, there you are,' said Hermione, in her most reasonable voice. 'They see one, and they're so frightened they drop dead. It's not a warning, Ron, it's a cause. And Harry's alive because he had the sense not to see a dog and lie down and wait to die!'

Ron opened and shut his mouth at her. Hermione took her new Arithmancy book out of her bag and stood it up against the jug.

'Divination's very shaky, if you ask me,' she said, turning pages. 'It's mostly guessing.'

'There wasn't anything vague about that Grim!' said Ron, going red.

'You were quite sure it was a sheep a minute before,' said Hermione.

'She said you haven't got the aura for it! You just can't stand not being top at something for once!'

That one went in. Hermione brought the Arithmancy book down on the table so hard that a lump of carrot jumped off Ron's plate.

'If being top at Divination means staring at a cup of sludge and pretending I can see people dying in it, I don't think I'll be bothering with it much longer! That was pathetic compared to Arithmancy!'

She grabbed her bag and swept off.

Ron watched her go, frowning.

'Arithmancy?' he said to Harry. 'She hasn't had Arithmancy yet.'

'I'll tell you what I reckon,' said Seamus, leaning across from further down the bench, where he'd plainly been listening to all of it. 'I reckon I'll believe in Grims when I see one. And not even then. I'd want to go right up and put me hand on it. Get a good fistful of its fur. Then I'd believe it.'

'You'd be dead,' said Dean.

'I'd be dead and sure,' said Seamus. 'That's more than most people get.'

Harry looked at his stew. He thought about a man by a broken pillar in a plain white robe. He hadn't touched him. He hadn't got near enough. Dracina had seen him too, but she hadn't touched him either. And he thought, if I had, if I'd got up off that floor and gone over and put my hand on his sleeve, would I know now? Would that have done it? Or would I be sitting here saying maybe it was the venom with my hand still warm? He didn't know. He had a feeling, which he didn't like, that it wouldn't have made any difference at all, and that the not-knowing was in him and not in the man.

Harry was glad to be out of the castle after lunch. Yesterday's rain had gone; the sky was high and pale and clean, and the grass gave softly underfoot as they started down towards their first ever Care of Magical Creatures lesson.

Ron and Hermione weren't speaking. Harry walked between them without a word as they went down the long slope of lawn to Hagrid's hut at the edge of the Forest. It wasn't until he saw three backs he knew far too well, walking ahead of them, that he realised they'd be sharing this subject with the Slytherins. Malfoy was talking to Crabbe and Goyle with her hands going, and they were sniggering. Harry had a fairly good idea what about.

There was something different about her. It took him a moment to see what. Her hair was plaited, as it had been at breakfast, with thin ribbons woven through it; and at breakfast, he was nearly sure, the ribbons had been green. They weren't now. They were scarlet and gold. Gryffindor scarlet and gold, bright as a banner, plaited neatly in from the crown of her head to the ends, and every Slytherin walking behind her had clearly seen it and was carefully not saying a word.

Hermione had seen it already. Harry saw her looking. She looked at the back of Malfoy's head for a long moment, and then down at her own shoes, and her mouth went small and pleased, and when Ron, who had just spotted it, opened his own mouth to crow, Hermione said 'Don't,' quite sharply, 'don't, Ron, it's not kind,' and walked on, and Ron shut his mouth and stared at her.

And then Malfoy glanced back over her shoulder, and saw who was behind her, and the animation went out of her the way it had at breakfast. She went on talking. But she'd dropped her voice, and her hands came down to her sides. Crabbe said something and laughed and she didn't laugh with him. It was the second time Harry had watched it happen in a day, and he still had no idea what to call it.

Hagrid was at his door in his moleskin coat with Fang at his heel, practically bouncing. Something new had grown up over the door, a great fat gourd vine with leaves the size of umbrellas, that threw a pool of cool green shade over the step; Hagrid was standing in it, beaming.

'Come on, come on, get a move on!' he shouted, as they came down. 'Got a real treat fer yeh! Yeh're goin' ter love this! All here? Righ', this way!'

For one horrible second Harry thought they were heading into the Forest, where he'd already had enough nasty experiences for one lifetime. But Hagrid turned along the edge of the trees, and five minutes' walk brought them to a sort of paddock, fenced and empty.

'Everyone up ter the fence!' Hagrid called. 'Tha's it, so yeh can all see... now, firs' thing, get yer books open...'

'And how,' drawled Dracina Malfoy, 'are we supposed to do that?'

'Eh?'

'Open them. How do we open them?' She held up her copy of The Monster Book of Monsters, which was tied shut with a length of rope. Others were taking theirs out too: Harry's was belted; some people's were stuffed into bags; some were clamped shut with bulldog clips.

'Hasn'... hasn' anyone got theirs open?' said Hagrid, looking stricken.

Everyone shook their heads.

'Yeh stroke 'em,' said Hagrid, as though it were the plainest thing in the world. 'Look here...'

He took Hermione's book and peeled off the Spellotape. The book snapped at him; Hagrid ran one huge finger down its spine, and it shuddered, and fell open, and lay meekly in his palm.

'Oh, of course!' said Malfoy. 'Stroke them! How stupid of us all!'

'I... I thought they was funny,' Hagrid said to Hermione, uncertainly.

'Oh, hilarious!' said Malfoy. 'What a joke, handing out books that try to take our fingers off! I always said you were a dangerous savage but now you're putting us in danger, you can't even give us a book that isn't dangerous, my father will-'

'Shut up, Malfoy,' said Harry quietly.

Hagrid was looking downcast and Harry wanted Hagrid's first lesson to be a success.

Malfoy gave him a severe look. Then she pouted, crossed her arms, and turned her shoulder to him, and Harry had the distinct and unwelcome feeling that he'd been put in a corner.

'Righ',' said Hagrid, who seemed to have lost his place, 'so... so yeh've got yer books... an'... an' now yeh need yer creatures. Yeah. I'll go an' fetch 'em. Won't be a tick...'

And off he went into the trees.

'Merlin, this place is going to the dogs,' said Malfoy loudly. 'That great lump teaching. Father will be beside himself when he hears-'

'Shut up, Malfoy,' Harry repeated.

That did it. Her chin came up and her eyes went bright and hard, and whatever had been softening in her all day went out like a light, so she lashed out at the nearest thing, which was him.

'Watch your back, Potter. There's a Dementor behind you!'

'Ooooh!' Lavender Brown shrieked, pointing across the paddock.

Harry didn't turn round. He stood with his hands in his pockets and looked at Dracina Malfoy, and she looked back, with her arms folded and her colour up and her mouth set, and he thought: no. Whatever I told myself on the train. Whatever she put in that box. I'm not getting a kinder Dracina Malfoy this year. And it surprised him, a little, how much that hurt.

Coming towards them at a trot were a dozen of the strangest beasts Harry had ever laid eyes on. Behind, they were horses: haunches, hind legs, swishing tails. In front, they were birds, enormous ones, eagles by the look of them, with great hooked beaks the colour of gunmetal and round, blazing orange eyes. Their forelegs ended in talons as long as Harry's hand. Each wore a heavy leather collar on a long chain, and all the chains ran back into Hagrid's fists as he came jogging along after them.

'Gee up there!' he bellowed, rattling the chains and driving them up to the fence. The whole class took a step back as he tied them up.

'Hippogriffs!' Hagrid announced, delighted. 'Aren' they lovely?'

Harry could more or less see it. Once you'd got over the shock of something that was a horse at one end and a bird at the other, there was something fine about them: the way the feathers ran into hair without a seam, and the colours, each one different, storm-grey and bronze and strawberry roan and shining chestnut and a black so deep it was nearly blue.

'So,' said Hagrid, rubbing his hands, 'if yeh'd like ter come up a bit closer...'

Nobody did. Except Harry, Ron and Hermione, who edged up to the fence.

'Firs' thing ter know abou' hippogriffs,' said Hagrid, 'they're proud. Proud as anythin'. Take offence at nothin'. Yeh insult a hippogriff, an' it could be the las' thing yeh ever do.'

Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle weren't listening. They had their heads together, and Harry had an unpleasant feeling about what they were planning to do to the lesson.

'Yeh let them go firs',' Hagrid went on. 'Manners, see. Yeh walk up, yeh bow, an' yeh wait. If he bows back, yeh can touch him. If he don', yeh get out o' there quick, 'cause them claws are sharp.

'Righ'. Who's firs'?'

Most people took another step back. Even Harry, Ron and Hermione weren't sure. The hippogriffs were jerking their heads about and half-opening their wings, and plainly didn't think much of being chained to a fence.

'Nobody?' said Hagrid. His voice had gone small.

Harry looked at him. Hagrid, who'd been up since five. Hagrid, who'd wiped his eyes on the tablecloth. Hagrid, standing in his paddock with his hands empty and his whole enormous face beginning, very slowly, to fall. Harry knew that face. He'd worn it himself, in a hundred PE lessons, waiting for somebody, anybody, to pick him for their side.

Hagrid needed a win. Harry stepped forward.

'I'll have a go,' said Harry.

Somebody gasped behind him, and Lavender and Parvati both hissed, 'Harry, no, the tea leaves!'

'I've been told I'm going to die three times since breakfast,' said Harry, swinging his leg over the fence, 'and I've had a go at a mountain troll and a fifty-foot snake and a bloke with two faces, and I'm still here, so either the tea leaves are wrong or they can get in the queue.'

He'd meant it to come out dry. It had. But Lavender said 'Ooh,' in a quite different voice from before, and Parvati put her hand on her chest, and somewhere behind him there was the sound of two people, at opposite ends of the fence, being displeased at exactly the same moment. Hermione made a short sharp noise through her nose and folded her arms. Malfoy made a short sharp noise through hers and unfolded hers, and then put her hands on her hips, and the two of them, without looking at each other, turned the same glare on Lavender and Parvati from either side, so that the two girls stood for a second between them like a tennis ball.

Harry ignored all of it. He dropped down inside.

'Good lad, Harry!' Hagrid boomed. 'Righ'... let's try yeh with Buckbeak.'

He unchained the grey one, led it out from the others, and slipped its collar off. On the far side of the fence the whole class had gone quiet. Malfoy's eyes had narrowed to slits.

'Steady, Harry,' said Hagrid softly. 'Keep lookin' at him... don' blink, now... hippogriffs don' like a blinker...'

Harry's eyes started stinging at once, but he kept them open. Buckbeak had turned his great hooked head sideways and was fixing Harry with one fierce orange eye.

'Good,' said Hagrid. 'Good... now bow...'

Harry wasn't keen on offering the back of his neck to that beak, but he did it. He bowed, briefly, and straightened up.

Buckbeak went on looking at him, proud and cold. He didn't move.

'Ah,' said Hagrid, worried. 'Righ'... back off, Harry, nice an' slow...'

And then, to Harry's astonishment, the hippogriff folded his scaly forelegs and lowered himself, unmistakably, into a bow.

'Yes, Harry!' Hagrid cried. 'Go on, then, yeh can touch him! Pat his beak!'

Thinking that the real reward would have been permission to leave, Harry went forward slowly and put out his hand. He patted the hard beak, once, twice, and Buckbeak's eyes drooped shut, as though he rather liked it.

Everyone clapped except Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle. Crabbe and Goyle looked thoroughly let down. Malfoy's face had gone perfectly blank, like stone, and Harry, who had seen her father's face do exactly that on a cobbled street a few weeks ago, knew that there was a great deal going on underneath it and could not have guessed any of it. He'd have been very surprised. Dracina Malfoy was looking at a thin black-haired boy standing beside a great grey beast with its head bowed to him, with the Forest behind them and the pale sky above, and she was thinking, with her whole chest, a steed. He's got a steed now. And immediately after that, so hard it hurt her teeth, mine.

Across the paddock, Hermione's head turned. She didn't know why. She looked at Malfoy's blank face, and her own went hard, and her hand went to her robes.

'Righ', Harry,' said Hagrid, 'I reckon he'd let yeh ride him!'

That was a good deal more than Harry had bargained for. He knew broomsticks. He had no idea whether a hippogriff worked anything like one.

'Up yeh go, jus' behind where the wings come out,' said Hagrid, 'an' don' go pullin' his feathers, he won' thank yeh fer it...'

Harry put a foot on the top of the wing and swung himself up. Buckbeak rose. Harry had no idea what to hold; there was nothing in front of him but feathers.

'Off yeh go!' bellowed Hagrid, and slapped Buckbeak on the rump.

Without any warning a pair of wings twelve feet across cracked open on either side of him; Harry had barely got his arms round the neck before they were going up.

It was nothing at all like a broom, and Harry knew at once which he'd rather have. The wings beat on either side of him, thumping the backs of his legs so that he was sure he'd be knocked off; the sleek feathers slid under his fingers and he didn't dare grip harder; and instead of the Nimbus's smooth rush there was a heaving, rocking motion, forwards and back, as the great hindquarters rose and fell with every stroke.

And then Buckbeak found the air.

Harry felt it happen. One moment the wings were labouring, every beat a shove that jarred up through the great body under him and nearly had him off, and the next, somewhere above the tops of the trees, the hippogriff gave one long hard downstroke and caught, the way a kite catches, and the labouring stopped. The wings went out flat and stayed there. The rocking stopped. There was a rush and a hiss of wind past Harry's ears and the paddock dropped away beneath him like a stone down a well, and they were up.

He looked down. He couldn't help it.

The paddock was a brown square with ants in it. The Forest was a dark green sea with the wind running over it in long silver waves. The lake lay flat and grey and enormous, with the sky in it, and the castle, as Buckbeak banked, came swinging up on his left with every turret and tower and window of it lit by the pale light, the way it had looked the first time, from a boat, when he was eleven and hadn't believed a building could be that shape. He could see the Quidditch pitch, tiny, with its three gold hoops at each end. He could see Hagrid's hut, and the smoke from its chimney going straight up. He could see the gates, and the two black specks beside them, and from up here they were nothing, they were two bits of soot on a white page, and Buckbeak's wings beat once and they were behind him.

He let go of the neck.

His hands simply opened, the way they had on his very first broomstick, when he'd found out that the thing he was afraid of was the thing he was good at, and he sat up straight between the great grey wings with the wind in his face and his robes cracking out behind him and nothing at all in front of him but sky.

And it all went.

The Dursleys went. Aunt Marge on the ceiling went, and drunk I expect, and the plate banged down on the table, and the cupboard, and the cat flap. Sirius Black went, whoever he was, and the Dementors, and the hand like something drowned. The Grim went, the dog in the alley and the dog on the book and the dog in the teacup, the lot of them, and Trelawney's tinkling laugh and Seamus's snort and the whole red room full of faces, and under that, deepest of all, the thing that had sat in his chest since a sewer in June. The doubt. The two-of-him. The voice in the walls of number four. Up here there wasn't room for it. Up here there was wind and light and a beast beneath him that had bowed to him of its own free will and was carrying him, and he was simply, for the length of one turn about a castle, free. He hadn't known he could still feel that. He laughed out loud, into the wind, and the wind took it.

Buckbeak turned over the lake. The water went by under them like beaten metal. Harry leaned, and the hippogriff leaned with him, and for a few seconds they were so low that he could see their reflection going across it, a boy and a bird and a horse in one, flying over the sky.

And then, over the far bank, with the castle coming round again, he looked down at the water rushing past, and thought, for the first time, quite clearly, there's nothing holding me on.

He'd been fine until he thought it. The moment he thought it he wasn't. His hands came off his knees and grabbed for the neck, and he grabbed wrong, and got a fistful of feathers, and Buckbeak screamed and lurched, and the whole beautiful level flight went sideways in one sick heave, and Harry was looking straight down a hundred feet at grey water with the wind tearing at him, sliding, and the only thing in the world was the smooth hot neck under his arms and his own breath and a voice in his head that wasn't anybody's saying you were fine. You were fine until you looked down. Why did you look down?

He hung on. Buckbeak righted himself with a shrug that nearly finished the job. The castle came round. The paddock came up.

Then the part he'd been dreading: the neck went down as they came in, and he leaned back, sure he was about to go straight over the beak, and then there was a bone-jarring thud as four mismatched feet met the ground. He just kept his seat, and sat up.

'Brilliant, Harry!' Hagrid roared, and everyone cheered except Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle. 'Righ', who's next?'

Harry sat for a second on the hippogriff's back with his heart going, and the wind still in his ears, and the picture of the lake under him, and the picture of the lake under him going wrong, and he thought: I had it. I had the whole thing and I let it go because I looked at the drop. Is that what I do? He didn't know. He got down.

Encouraged, the others climbed into the paddock. Hagrid let the hippogriffs loose one at a time, and soon there were nervous people bowing all over the place. Neville kept backing away from his, which wouldn't bend its knees. Ron and Hermione tried the chestnut while Harry watched.

Malfoy, Crabbe and Goyle had taken over Buckbeak. He had bowed to Malfoy, who was now patting his beak.

She was looking at Harry while she did it. Not at the hippogriff. At him. She'd got the beak under her hand and the bird's orange eye half shut and she was standing very straight with her chin up and her hair back, in the attitude of a girl who has done a difficult thing without the least trouble and wishes a particular person to notice that she has, and she was trying with every muscle in her face to look as though she didn't care whether he noticed or not, and failing, and knowing she was failing, and trying harder.

'Well, this is easy,' Malfoy drawled, quite loudly enough for Harry to hear. 'I thought it must be, if Potter managed it...' She turned to the hippogriff. 'You're not dangerous at all, are you?' she cooed at it. 'Are you, you big ugly lump of a thing?'

It happened in a second. Harry was already moving, he'd started moving at ugly, he'd seen the orange eye come open and the great head go back, and he was halfway across the paddock with his hand out and Hagrid's bellow in his ears when the steel talons came down in a flash and Dracina Malfoy screamed and went over backwards.

He caught her. she fell into his arms, all of her, warm and heavy and shaking, with blood running down her sleeve and over his hands, and she was screaming, not at him, at the hippogriff and Hagrid and the sky, a stream of the worst words Harry had ever heard a girl use, and at the very same time, with her face against his chest and her good hand clutching a fistful of his robes, she had pushed her head in under his chin and was nuzzling. There was no other word for it. She was sobbing and swearing and bleeding and she had got as close in against him as it was possible to get, with the blood soaking through her robes and through his, and she showed no sign whatever of wanting to be anywhere else.

Hagrid was wrestling Buckbeak back into his collar as he strained to get at Malfoy, who was crying and wailing in Harry's arms.

'It's taken my arm off!' Malfoy shrieked, as the class panicked. 'I'm bleeding to death, look at it, look! Avenge me, Harry! Kill that horrible creature!'

'Yer not dyin'! Harry will do no such thing!' said Hagrid, who had gone very white. 'Someone help me... gotta get her outta here...'

Harry's hand had gone to his pocket. He didn't know when. It was simply there, on his wand, with her blood on his fingers and her voice in his ear saying avenge me, and the hot rage in his chest that had blown Aunt Marge up to the ceiling sitting up and looking round for something to do. He'd half drawn it. The orange eye was six feet away.

'Put tha' away, Harry,' said Hagrid quietly, not looking at him, with both arms locked round the hippogriff's straining neck. 'Put it away. He on'y did what he is.'

Harry looked down at his own hand as though it belonged to somebody else. He put it away.

Hermione ran to hold open the gate as Hagrid lifted Malfoy easily out of Harry's arms. She came out of them with a sound, a small, cheated sound, like a child being lifted off a lap, and her good hand kept hold of Harry's robes for a second after the rest of her had gone and he had to open her fingers himself. As they passed, Harry saw that there was a long, deep gash on Malfoy's right arm; blood splattered the grass and Hagrid ran with her, up the slope towards the castle.

Harry stood in the paddock with her blood all down his front and her fingerprints on his sleeve and watched them go.

Badly shaken, the class straggled up the slope after them. The Slytherins were all shouting about Hagrid.

'He ought to be sacked! Today!' sobbed Pansy Parkinson.

'She asked for it!' Dean shot back.

Crabbe and Goyle cracked their knuckles at him.

They trailed up the stone steps into the empty Entrance Hall.

'I'm going to see if she's OK!' said Pansy, and they all watched her run up the marble staircase. Then she turned on the landing and shouted, 'This is all your fault, Potter!' pointing at him accusingly, and ran off.

Harry stood at the bottom of the stairs with his mouth open.

'My fault?' he said. 'What did I do?'

'Dunno,' said Ron. 'Existed, I think.'

The Slytherins went off towards the dungeons, still grumbling about Hagrid; Harry, Ron and Hermione went up towards Gryffindor Tower.

'Will she be OK, do you think?' said Hermione anxiously.

''Course. Madam Pomfrey'll have that closed up in a second,' said Harry, who'd had far worse put right by the nurse. He said it quickly. He said it a bit too quickly, and he knew it, and so did Ron, who glanced at him sideways and at the dark stiffening patch on the front of his robes and said nothing. Harry could still feel the exact shape of her against him. He could still feel her fingers in his sleeve. He told himself it was shock, and that anybody would have caught her, and that the sick, hollow feeling under his ribs was about Hagrid and nothing else, and he nearly believed it.

'Rotten luck, though, wasn't it,' said Ron unhappily, 'in his first lesson. Leave it to Malfoy to wreck it for him...'

They were among the first down to dinner, hoping to find Hagrid. He wasn't there.

'They won't sack him?' said Hermione, pushing her steak-and-kidney pudding about. 'They can't.'

'Better not,' said Ron. He hadn't eaten anything either.

Harry was watching the Slytherin table, where a knot of them, Crabbe and Goyle among them, had their heads together. Harry had no doubt they were getting their story straight about how Malfoy had come to be hurt.

He was also, without meaning to, watching the staff table, because Professor Lupin was at it, and Professor Lupin was watching him.

It was becoming almost funny. Every time Harry looked up, there he was: the grey, tired face turned down the length of the Hall towards the Gryffindor table, and the eyes on Harry, and then away to the windows, and then back. He wasn't eating. He had a plate in front of him with a chop on it going cold, and his hand was on the table beside it, and every so often, Harry saw, it closed, and opened, and closed, like a dog's paw does in its sleep. And when Snape, two seats down, said something to Professor Sinistra, Lupin's head turned towards the sound an instant before anyone else's would have, as though he'd heard it coming.

'He's doing it again,' Harry said.

'Who?' said Ron, through nothing, because he still hadn't eaten anything.

'Lupin.'

Ron looked up the Hall.

'He's just looking at the Gryffindor table, Harry. There's seventy of us.'

'He's looking at me. Ron, I'm telling you. He knew my name on the train and nobody had told him. He's been in every corridor I've walked down today. He's...' Harry pushed his pudding about. 'What if he's like Quirrell?'

Ron put his fork down.

'Then he's picked a bad year for it,' he said, 'because the last bloke who tried it died, and so did the one after that, and this time you've got me and a mad cat.' He picked the fork up again. 'And Hermione. Eat your pudding. I'm not telling you again.'

Hermione, Harry noticed, hadn't said anything. She was looking at Professor Lupin too, with her head a little on one side and the Potions-recipe line between her eyebrows, and when she caught Harry looking at her she said, 'I don't think he's like Quirrell,' in a thoughtful voice, 'I think he's like something else,' and wouldn't say what.

'Well,' said Ron gloomily, 'nobody could say it was a dull first day.'

They went up to the packed common room after dinner and got out McGonagall's homework, and none of the three of them could stop looking out of the window.

Hermione had gone up to the girls' dormitory for a book, at a quarter past seven, and had come down again, by the common room clock, at sixteen minutes past, which was quick even for Hermione, and when she sat down Harry noticed, without thinking anything of it, that she was slightly out of breath, and that there was a smear of something green on the heel of her hand that she rubbed off on her robes.

'Harry,' she said. 'Can I ask you something? About this morning.'

Ron groaned and put his head down on his Transfiguration essay.

'Not you,' said Hermione. 'You can do your dates. Harry. The question you asked Trelawney. I've been thinking about it all day, and I want to say something, and I want you to let me say the whole thing before you tell me to forget it, all right?'

'All right,' said Harry warily.

Hermione put her quill down and folded her hands on the table, which was what she did before she gave you something she'd learnt.

'You wanted to know why nobody here takes it seriously,' she said. 'Why Trelawney laughed, and why Seamus laughed, and why there's no chapel and nobody says grace and the only time anybody says God in this whole castle is you. I've been thinking about it since the train, actually, since you went pale when the Dementor came in, but this morning made it urgent. So I went and looked.'

'In the library.'

'Where else?' She didn't smile. 'Harry, it's not that wizards don't care about Christianity. It's that they hate it. Right down in the bone where they don't even notice it's there any more. And they've got reasons. Bathilda Bagshot's polite about it, compared to what's in the older books.'

'The burnings.'

'The burnings. And before the burnings, and after. Harry, the wizarding world and the Church have been at each other's throats for about fifteen hundred years. The old magic in Britain was all mixed up with the old religion, the pre-Christian one, druids and standing stones and all of that. Then the missionaries came. And for a while it was all right, actually, a lot of the early monks were wizards, that's where half the healing charms come from, and there were monasteries that were basically magical schools with a cross on the roof. The Fat Friar's one of those. He's from the fourteenth century. But the Church got frightened, the way Muggles do, and decided magic was the Devil's, and then it wasn't monks any more, it was Inquisitors, and witch-finders, and everybody who'd ever been seen talking to a cat.' She took a breath. 'And wizards remember. Muggles forget, Muggles forget everything in about two generations, but wizards live to a hundred and fifty and keep portraits that talk and ghosts that were there. There are people in this castle who personally watched their friends burn, whatever Bagshot says; not everybody had their wand on them when they came for them. Nearly Headless Nick's older than the Reformation. So when the Statute of Secrecy came in, in 1692, the wizarding world didn't just hide from Muggles, it hid from the Church, specifically, on purpose, and it threw the whole thing out as it went. All of it. God and angels and the lot. Not because they'd decided it wasn't true. Because it belonged to the people who'd set fire to their grandmothers. Even if the fires didn't burn.'

Harry sat with his quill in his hand and didn't write anything.

'So that's why,' Hermione said, more gently. 'That's why there's no chapel. That's why Trelawney said angels like it was a dirty word, and that's why Ron doesn't know what a monk is.'

'I know what a monk is,' said Ron, into his essay.

'You thought the Fat Friar was called that because of his cooking.'

'He might be.'

'And for what it's worth,' Hermione said to Harry, 'I don't believe in any of it. I'm an atheist. My parents are. I think the universe runs on rules, and I think magic is one of the rules we haven't written down properly yet, and I think when people die they stop, and I think the burnings happened because frightened people with power are the most dangerous thing in the world, not because of any devil.' She looked at him very steadily. 'But I don't think you're stupid. And I don't think you're seeing things. Something happened to you in that Chamber that you haven't told me about, I know it did, Ron's noticed, you go a funny colour whenever anybody says the pillar. And whatever it was, it's bothering you, Harry, it's been bothering you since June, and I'd rather you worked out what it was, even if the answer's one I think is wrong, than carried it about like that for another year and got laughed at by a woman in a shawl.'

She picked her quill back up.

'So. Go and see the Friar. I'll come if you want. I'll stand outside with Ron. And if you want books, I've found four, and three of them are rubbish, but the fourth is quite good.' She bent over her Arithmancy. 'That's all. You can tell me to forget it now.'

Harry looked at her for a long moment. He looked at the top of her bushy head, bent over her book, and the green smear on her sleeve, and her hand, which had gone, while she talked, back to the chain inside her robes, and he thought that she had just said the kindest thing anybody had said to him since a hospital wing in June, and that she'd said it without once looking as if it had cost her anything, and he had no idea at all what to do with that.

'Thanks,' he said. It came out rough.

'Don't thank me. Read the fourth book.'

'Hagrid's got his lamp on,' Harry said suddenly.

He'd been looking out of the window to have somewhere to look. But there it was: a single square of yellow at the bottom of the dark lawns, on the edge of the trees.

Ron checked his watch.

'If we're quick, we could nip down. It's not that late...'

'I'm not sure,' said Hermione slowly, with a glance at Harry.

'I'm allowed in the grounds,' said Harry, rather sharply. 'Black hasn't got past the Dementors, has he?'

So they packed up and slipped out through the portrait hole, and were glad not to meet anybody between there and the front doors, since none of them was entirely sure they were allowed.

The vine over Hagrid's door had died.

Harry saw it as they came up the path. That afternoon it had been the greenest thing in the grounds; now it hung off the porch in black, slimy rags, and the gourds had gone soft and sunk in on themselves, and there was a fat white grub the size of Harry's thumb sitting on the doorstep, quite still, as if it were having a rest after a long day's work.

It made Harry, for no reason he could name, absolutely furious. He'd have trodden on it if Hermione hadn't been in the way.

The lawn was wet and nearly black in the dusk. They knocked, and a voice grunted, 'C'm in.'

Hagrid was at his table in his shirtsleeves with Fang's head in his lap, and one look was enough to tell them he'd been drinking for a while; there was a pewter tankard the size of a bucket in front of him, and he was having trouble making them out.

'Mus' be a record,' he said thickly, once he'd worked out who they were. 'One day. Reckon nobody's ever bin a teacher fer on'y one day before.'

'They haven't sacked you, Hagrid!' said Hermione.

'Not yet,' said Hagrid wretchedly, and took a long pull at the tankard. 'Jus' a matter o' time, though, innit. After Malfoy...'

'How's she doing?' said Ron, as they sat down. 'It wasn't bad, was it?'

'Madam Pomfrey done what she could,' said Hagrid heavily, 'but she's sayin' it still hurts somethin' terrible... all bandaged up... cryin' with it...'

'She's just being dramatic,' said Harry at once. 'Madam Pomfrey can mend anything. She regrew half my bones last year. Trust Malfoy to milk it for all it's worth.'

He heard himself say it and was ashamed of how much he wanted it to be true.

Hagrid wasn't listening. He'd seen Harry glance at the door, and the black rags hanging past the window, and his great face crumpled.

'Me vine's gone,' he said. 'Did yeh see? Grew it las' night. Fer a bit o' shade on the step, fer the class. Come up in a night an' gone in a night. Some grub.'

'I'd have squashed it,' said Harry.

'Wha' for?' Hagrid looked at him, bleary and puzzled. 'It's a grub, Harry. Can' be cross with a grub fer bein' a grub.' He turned the tankard round in his huge hands. 'Funny, though. Sat here half an hour feelin' sorry fer that vine. Never even planted it proper. Never watered it. An' there's twelve hippogriffs out there in the dark, an' a whole castle o' kids up the hill, an' I'd be sorrier fer any one o' them than fer a hundred vines.' He blew his nose on something the size of a tablecloth. 'Even her. Even Malfoy. Didn' want her hurt. Never wanted that. Yeh don' get ter pick which ones yeh're sorry for.'

Harry didn't say anything. He found he was thinking, without wanting to, about a woman on a ceiling, and a houseful of people he'd sat in the sun in Diagon Alley and thought deserved a great deal worse than a ceiling, and about how angry he'd been, a minute ago, at a grub on a step.

'Gov'nors know, o' course,' said Hagrid miserably. 'They're sayin' I went in too big. Shoulda started small. Flobberworms or summat... I jus' thought hippogriffs'd make a good start... 'S my own fault...'

'It's Malfoy's fault, Hagrid, not yours!' said Hermione earnestly.

She said it very earnestly. Harry thought, with a shade more energy than it strictly needed, and with a quick look at him as she said it, as if she wanted to be seen saying it; as if Malfoy were a word she'd been waiting all evening to put down on the table in front of him with Hagrid's hut for a witness.

'We saw it,' said Harry. 'You told her. You said they go for you if you insult them.' He said it confidently. Then he went on, and the confidence went out of it. 'Dra... uh, Malfoy just... uh, thought she knew better.' He was looking for something. He knew he was. He was looking for a way to say it that made her less than she'd been, that turned you big ugly lump of a thing into a mistake instead of a choice, and he couldn't find one, and he knew Ron could hear him not finding it. 'We'll tell Dumbledore exactly what happened,' he finished.

'Yeah, we'll stick up for you, Hagrid,' said Ron. 'Don't worry.'

Tears trickled out of the creased corners of Hagrid's black eyes. He reached out and hauled Harry and Ron into a hug that made their ribs creak.

'That's enough to drink, Hagrid,' said Hermione, in her firmest voice, and took the tankard off the table and carried it outside to tip it away.

'Ar. Maybe she's righ',' said Hagrid, letting them go; they staggered off, holding their sides. He heaved himself up out of his chair and lurched out after her. There was a great splash.

'What's he doing?' said Harry, alarmed, as Hermione came back in with the empty tankard.

'Put his head in the water butt,' said Hermione, hanging the tankard back on its hook.

Hagrid came back in streaming, hair and beard plastered flat, wiping the water out of his eyes.

'Tha's better,' he said, and shook his head like a wet dog, soaking all three of them. 'Look, it was good o' yeh ter come down, I mean it...'

He stopped, and stared at Harry as though he'd only just noticed him.

'AN' WHA' D'YEH THINK YOU'RE DOIN' DOWN HERE?' he bellowed, so suddenly that they all jumped. 'OUT IN THE DARK, HARRY! WITH BLACK ON THE LOOSE! AN' YOU TWO LETTIN' HIM!'

He crossed the hut in two strides, took Harry by the arm and towed him to the door.

'It's all right, Hagrid, I've been told I'm going to die tomorrow,' said Harry, being towed. 'It's in the tea. Black'll have to hurry if he wants to beat the leaves.'

'DON' YOU JOKE ABOUT THAT!' Hagrid's grip tightened till it hurt. 'Don' you dare joke about that ter me, Harry, not tonight, I've 'ad about all I can...' He stopped. He breathed. 'Come on!' he said furiously. 'Back up ter the castle, the lot o' yeh, an' if I catch yeh comin' down here after dark again... nobody's worth that, Harry. Least of all me!'

He marched them up the lawn in the dark, with Fang at their heels and his great hand clamped on Harry's shoulder the whole way, and he didn't say another word until the castle doors, and then all he said was 'In,' and stood at the bottom of the steps with his arms folded and watched them go up.

There was somebody at the top.

Harry saw him as they reached the doors, standing in the shadow just inside, where the torchlight didn't quite go, with his hands in the pockets of his shabby robes and his face turned towards the dark lawns. Professor Lupin. He'd been there, Harry was quite sure, for some time. He looked at the three of them as they came in out of the night, and at Hagrid below, and nodded to Hagrid, and Hagrid nodded back, and something passed between the two men over Harry's head that Harry couldn't read and didn't like.

'Good evening,' said Lupin mildly. 'Rather late for a walk.'

'We were visiting Hagrid,' said Hermione.

'So I see.' His eyes went over Harry once, from the hair to the dried blood on his robes, and rested on the blood. 'Straight up to the Tower, I think. All of you.'

They went. On the first landing Harry looked back, and Lupin hadn't moved; he was still standing in the doorway, looking out at the grounds, with his head up and perfectly still, and the torchlight behind him made his shadow very long and, for a moment, as the flame guttered, very oddly shaped.

Harry waited.

He sat in the common room with his Transfiguration essay in front of him and wrote nothing on it, and watched Ron get drawn into a game of Exploding Snap with Seamus and Dean that went off in Seamus's face twice, and watched Hermione go back to her Arithmancy with her hair falling over the page, and when Ron was shouting at Seamus about a card and Hermione had her head right down, he put his quill in his bag and said, 'Going to bed,' to nobody, and went up the boys' staircase, and waited on it, out of sight, until Seamus's cards went off a third time and the whole room was laughing, and came down again and across and out through the portrait hole without anybody turning round.

He told himself he was going to see how she was. For Hagrid's sake. So he'd know what to tell Dumbledore.

The hospital wing was dim, and smelt of Dittany, and had one bed with the lamp lit beside it, at the far end, with its curtains half drawn, and he knew which one it was before he saw her. He could smell the violets from the door.

She was sitting up. Her hair was down and her arm was bandaged from wrist to shoulder, thick and white and expertly done, and she had been arranged, by somebody or by herself, against a great bank of pillows in an attitude of exquisite suffering, with her good hand lying limp on the coverlet and her face turned to the wall. There was a vase of flowers on the cabinet that Harry suspected were Pansy's. There was a box of Chocolate Frogs beside it that he suspected were Daphne's. There was also, he saw, a Potions essay, lying on the floor where it had been thrown, and the whole of the top half of it was a lake of green ink.

She heard him. He saw her hear him. Her head came round, and for one unguarded second her face did something that Harry would think about for a long time afterwards, something quick and lit and glad, and then it shut, like a book.

'Oh,' she said. 'You.'

'Hello.'

'Come to see the damage, have you? Come to see what your great friend's pet did to me?' She lifted the bandaged arm an inch off the pillow and let it fall with a wince that was perhaps a third real. 'Go on, then. Look. It went in to the bone, Potter. Madam Pomfrey said she's never seen anything like it. I may never hold a quill again.'

'Hagrid said she'd fixed it.'

'Hagrid says a great many things. Hagrid said those animals were beautiful.' She turned her face back to the wall. 'I don't know why you're here. I don't want you here. I'm in agony. Go away.'

He didn't go away. He pulled up the chair, the one by the bed, the one somebody had left there, and sat down in it, and after a moment her eyes came back round to him again, sideways, and stayed.

'I'm not going to be long,' he said. 'I just wanted to say something.'

'Well?'

'You were horrible today.'

She went very still.

'To Ron, at breakfast. To Hermione, with the... with all that. At the table.' He kept his voice down. The lamp hissed. 'And to Hagrid. Dracina, it was his first lesson. He'd been up since five. He told you how to do it, he told everyone, he said don't insult one, and you walked up to Buckbeak and called it a big ugly lump to its face. In front of everybody. Because you wanted me to...' He stopped. He hadn't meant to go there. 'You could've just done what he said. That's all. You could've been a bit more... you could have cooperated. And then you'd have an arm, and he'd have a job.'

For a second he thought it had gone in. Her face had changed; something in it had loosened, the chin had come down, and her good hand had moved on the coverlet, towards him, half an inch. She looked, for that second, exactly as she had in a hospital bed in June, with her knees drawn up and her hair full of dust, before she'd said Granger instead of the other word, and found it cost her something.

Then it hardened again, all at once, like water going to ice.

'Your friends,' she said.

'What?'

'That's what you came for. Your friends. Weasley and Granger and the gamekeeper.' Her voice had started to climb. 'I've been lying here since this afternoon with my arm cut open and you walk in and sit down and the first thing out of your mouth, the very first thing, is a list of people I was rude to. You didn't ask how I was. You didn't ask if it hurt. You stood in that paddock and you caught me, Potter, I know you did, I felt you, and then you let that oaf carry me off like a sack and you went and had your dinner, and now you're sitting there telling me I should have been nicer to Granger.' She was sitting bolt upright now. The pillows had gone over. 'They're more important to you than I am. Aren't they? Say it. Weasley and Granger and the savage and the bird. All of them. Every one of them matters to you more than I do, when I should be, when I ought to be the most...'

She stopped herself. Her mouth shut on it. Her face had gone scarlet to the hair.

'The most what?' said Harry. He was lost. He was completely lost; he'd come in to talk about Hagrid and had somehow walked into something enormous with no walls to it. 'Dracina, what do you mean?'

That was the wrong thing to say. He saw it be the wrong thing. It was as if he'd struck a match in a room full of gas.

'WHAT DO I MEAN?' She was screaming. The lamp shook. 'What do I MEAN? I came up and down that whole TRAIN for you! I came into those two red-headed apes' compartment and I asked them for you! I walked up to that stupid bird today because I wanted you to SEE me do it, and you weren't even LOOKING, you were looking at Granger! I made you... I spent four days on those, Potter, four days, with a brush, and did you say thank you? Did you say ONE WORD? And then you come in here and you ask me to be nicer to that girl, who's always there, she's always right there, she's got her knee on you in a train and everybody says she had her hands all over you when you fell over and she LOOKS at me, she looks at me like she's got a right, and somebody did something to my ribbons at lunch and half of Slytherin laughed behind my back all the way down to the paddock and I know who, I know it was her, and you ask what I MEAN? WHAT DO YOU THINK I MEAN?'

'Dracina...'

'DON'T! Don't you Dracina me! Don't you dare sit there with your stupid face and your stupid hair and not UNDERSTAND! You're supposed to... a person like you is supposed to...' She couldn't get it out. Whatever it was. It was too big for her mouth and she stood on the edge of it with her chest heaving and her bandaged arm clutched to her and her eyes streaming and then she threw her head back and simply howled at him, wordless, a sound of pure outraged fury that went up into the rafters and came back down.

The office door banged open.

'What in the name of Merlin...'

Madam Pomfrey came down the ward at a run in her dressing gown, with her wand lit and her hair in a net, and took in the overturned pillows and the screaming girl and Harry Potter in the visitor's chair with his mouth open, and her face did several things at once.

'Potter,' she said. 'Out.'

'I was only...'

'I don't care what you were only. I have one patient in this ward and she was resting and you've got her screaming the roof off at half past ten at night with a wound that needs quiet.' She had Harry by the arm and up out of the chair and halfway down the ward before he'd found his feet. 'I'm sure you meant well. You always mean well. Out. Go to bed. If you come back tomorrow you'll knock, and you'll ask, and if I say no it means no.'

'Madam Pomfrey, she's...'

'She'll be perfectly fine. Won't you, Miss Malfoy.'

Dracina didn't answer. She had thrown herself face down into what was left of the pillows and was crying into them, with her whole back going, in great heaving sobs that Harry could hear all the way to the door, and he stood in it for a second with Madam Pomfrey's hand between his shoulder blades, and looked back at her, and had no idea in the world what had just happened.

'Bed, Potter.'

The door shut on him.

He stood in the dark corridor and found that his hands were shaking.

A person like you is supposed to. Supposed to what? He went over it and over it, walking back, all the way up to the Fat Lady, and he couldn't make it come out. She'd looked for him on the train. She'd gone into Fred and George's compartment. She'd said four days with a brush, and he thought of the tiny silver line round one violet, and the pinhead of white sugar, and the H, and his stomach did something. And she'd said that girl, about Hermione, in a voice he'd only ever heard her use about one other thing, which was Mudbloods, and it hadn't been the same voice at all. It had been worse. It had been frightened.

And she'd said something about her ribbons. I know it was her. He thought of the scarlet and gold in her hair on the lawn, and of Hermione saying don't, Ron, it's not kind, and then he thought, don't be stupid. Hermione was with you all day.

Nearly all day.

He didn't understand any of it. He'd stood in front of a Basilisk and he didn't understand a girl in a bed. He gave the Fat Lady the password and went up and lay down in the dark with his clothes on, with her blood still stiff on the front of them, and stared at the hangings, and did not sleep for a long time.

Far below, in the hospital wing, Dracina Malfoy had stopped crying.

She lay on her back in the dark with her bandaged arm across her chest and her face wet and set, and looked at the ceiling, and the thing in her chest that had been a cat in the sun on the train had got up, and was pacing.

He'd come. That was the first thing. He'd sneaked out of his tower in the middle of the night and come to her, alone, without Weasley, without her, and he'd pulled up the chair, and for one moment when she'd heard his feet on the ward floor the whole day had turned over and come right. He'd come. Knights came. That was what they were for. He'd caught her in the paddock, she'd felt his arms go round her before she'd even hit the ground, and he'd come to her bed in the night like the stories, and if he'd sat down and taken her good hand and said I was so frightened she would have let him. She would have let him do anything.

And instead he'd sat down and said Hagrid.

Hagrid, and Weasley, and Granger. He'd come all that way to speak for them. As if she were a problem of theirs that he'd been sent to sort out. As if she were the thing standing in his light, and not the other way about.

She pressed her good hand over her eyes.

She knew what it was. She wasn't stupid, whatever he thought. It was the Mudblood. It was that girl with her books and her hands and her knee, and her kabalistic sorcery who'd been there first, who'd had two years of him in corridors and classrooms and common rooms while Dracina had had Madam Malkin's and a hospital bed and a train. Two years. The girl had two years' start and she knew it, she'd sat in that compartment with her knee on him like somebody holding a thing she'd already paid for, and never even looked up. And he didn't see it. He didn't see any of it. He'd sat there with his stupid green eyes and said what do you mean as if she'd been speaking Gobbledegook, and that was the worst of all of it, worse than the arm, worse than Granger: that he didn't know. That she could scream it at him and he still wouldn't know.

Well. He'd know. She'd see to it. One thing at a time, in the right order, the way she'd decided, and she'd have to go faster now, that was all, because the girl was faster than she'd thought.

But first there was the bird.

And the oaf. She turned her head on the pillow and looked at the long white shape of her arm in the dark, and felt the ache go down it to the bone, and thought about the look on Hagrid's face when the talons came down, the great stupid white horror of it, and about Potter's voice saying he'd been up since five as if that were anything, as if that excused anything, and the thing in her chest stopped pacing and sat down, very still, the way it had in the compartment when she'd looked at Granger's knee.

She would write to Father in the morning. First thing. Before Pomfrey was up. She'd use the left hand and she'd make it look worse than it was and she'd say bone and she'd say scar and she'd say permanent, and Father would do what Father did, which was make things happen to people, and the oaf would be gone by Christmas and the bird would be dead by Easter, and Potter would see, then, what it meant to be hers. What she could do. What happened to things that hurt her.

He'd thank her. In the end. When he understood.

It did not occur to her, lying there in the dark with her arm aching and her eyes dry and her mind made up, that there was a single thing in that plan that Harry Potter might not thank her for. She was far too angry to think of it, far too sure, and the night was long, and by morning the letter was written.