The Lady Who Wasn't There

Within a fortnight, Defence Against the Dark Arts had become almost everybody's favourite lesson, and Harry, to his own surprise, was getting good at it.

He'd never been bad at it, exactly. But he'd never had much chance to be good, either, with one teacher who'd had Voldemort living in the back of his turban and another who'd hidden under his desk from a cage of pixies. Professor Lupin was different. Professor Lupin noticed things. He noticed when you'd got a spell nearly right and told you which half was wrong, instead of telling you the whole thing was wrong and taking five points. He noticed when Neville was about to drop his wand and caught it, somehow, before it hit the floor, and handed it back without a word. He noticed when Harry's hand went up, which it did, more and more, and he called on him, and when Harry got it right he said good in a quiet, pleased way that made Harry want to get the next one right too. It was a strange feeling, being taught by somebody who seemed to want you to do well. Harry wasn't used to it. He found he liked it a great deal.

He also found, once or twice, that Lupin was still watching him when there was no particular reason to. In a corridor between lessons. At the far end of the Great Hall at dinner. Once, in the dusk, from a window high up on the west side of the castle, as the Quidditch team came trudging in off the pitch; Harry looked up, and there was a figure at the glass with its hands in its pockets, quite still, and then there wasn't. He didn't say anything about it. He'd said enough about it to Ron already.

The only people with a bad word for Professor Lupin were Dracina Malfoy and her friends.

'Have you seen his robes?' Malfoy would say to Daphne Greengrass, in a whisper pitched to reach the back row, as Lupin went past. 'They're held together with darning. He looks like our old house-elf.'

But she only ever said it when Harry was out of earshot, or when she thought he was. The moment she saw him, or heard his voice, she'd stop. Once, in the queue for the classroom, Harry came round the corner just as she was getting going on Lupin's shoes, and she broke off in the middle of the word, and turned, and smiled at him, and said, 'Professor Lupin's lessons are so interesting, aren't they, Potter,' and Daphne, beside her, choked.

Nobody else minded in the least about Professor Lupin's patches. His lessons after the boggart were every bit as good as the boggart. They did Red Caps next, squat little goblin-ish things that hid in any place where blood had once been spilt, in the cellars of old castles and the shell holes of forgotten battlefields, and waited with clubs for travellers who'd lost their way. Lupin had one in a cage for them to look at. It flung itself at the bars every time anybody moved, and snarled, and slavered, and for some reason it took one look at Professor Lupin and went to the very back of its cage and stayed there for the rest of the lesson, flat on its belly, perfectly quiet.

'They can smell old blood,' Lupin told them, watching it. 'It's what they live on. Anything that's carried a great deal of it, they keep well away from.'

Nobody quite knew what he meant by that. He didn't explain.

From Red Caps they went on to kappas, horrible scaly water creatures like monkeys with webbed hands, that sat at the bottom of ponds and waited for somebody to paddle within reach so that they could drown them. And then, in the second week of October, Professor Lupin came into the classroom, put his briefcase down, looked round at them all with an odd, half-reluctant expression, and said, 'Vampires.'

The whole room sat up. Lavender actually squeaked.

Hermione's hand went into her bag, and came out holding a folded square of paper, and Harry knew without looking which one. She smoothed it out flat on the desk in front of her, beside her quill, so that the brooding face on it was looking up at the ceiling, and she didn't even seem to realise she'd done it.

'General defences, today,' said Professor Lupin. 'Nothing specific. I want to give you the ground rules first. Later in the year, if there's time, we'll do the families one at a time, because they're very different, and what saves your life with one of them will get you killed with another.' He leaned against the front of his desk. 'First question. What do you know?'

A forest of hands. Lupin took them one by one. Garlic (mostly folklore, I'm afraid, though some of them dislike the smell), running water (true of some, not of others), mirrors (a few, yes, depending on the blood), invitations (now that one's real, and you'd do well to remember it), crosses...

'Crosses,' said Lupin, and his eyes went, very briefly, to Harry. 'That's an interesting one. A cross in a coward's hand is a stick of wood. In the hand of somebody who believes in Jesus Christ, it's a different thing altogether. They don't like that at all. Nobody's ever really explained why.'

Harry felt his ears go warm, he looked down at his desk, and didn't look up again for a while. He didn't want to humiliate himself like he did in Divination.

'Stakes,' said Dean.

'Stakes don't kill them,' said Lupin. 'Not most of them. A stake through the heart pins them. Paralyses them. They lie there quite still, and quite aware, until somebody pulls it out. Which is a thing to remember if you ever find one lying in a cellar with a bit of wood in it and think about being helpful.' A shiver went round the room. 'What kills them is fire. And the sun. Those two things, they all fear. Some of the very old ones can stand the sun for a few seconds, I'm told. None of them can stand it for long.'

He pushed himself off the desk and began to walk up and down.

'The first thing to understand,' he said, 'is that they hide. Just as we do. Long before there was a Statute of Secrecy, before there was a Ministry, before there was a Hogwarts, some say our own statute of secrecy was inspired by vampires' own similar law. They call it the Masquerade. Ours was properly recognized by the wizarding world in 1692. The Masquerade came into force for vampires from 1435 Any one of them who lets a Muggle see what they are, the others will hunt down and destroy, and they're far less gentle about it than the Obliviators. So the vampire you meet won't look like a vampire. It'll look like a lawyer. Or a nurse. Or a nice young man at a party who's very interested in where you live.' He paused. 'That's where the danger lies. Not in the thing in the cellar. The nice young man.'

'Do they... do they know about us?' said Seamus.

'Yes, they do.' Lupin stopped by the window. 'About ninety years ago, give or take, the Ministry and their... well, the closest thing they have to a governing body, came to an arrangement. They call themselves the Camarilla. Most of the clans belong to it, or say they do. The arrangement was this: our wards, our Muggle-Repelling Charms, the enchantments that keep Diagon Alley and this castle and every wizarding house in Britain out of Muggle sight, would be lent to the Camarilla to help keep their Masquerade. In return, no vampire who answers to the Camarilla would ever hunt, or harm, or feed on a witch or wizard.' He let that settle. 'It's an old agreement. It's a fragile one. It's held, more or less, for most of this century, mainly because both sides have rather more to lose than to gain by breaking it.'

'So they're... on our side?' said Parvati.

'No,' growled Lupin. 'They're on their side, and for the moment their side and the wizarding world happen to want the same thing. That isn't the same as friendship, Parvati, and you'd do well never to mistake it for one. Also there are others who never signed anything at all.' His voice had gone flat. 'There's another society. The Sabbat. They think the Masquerade is cowardice and the agreement is worse. They've tried to break it more than once this century, and they don't care who gets hurt while they try. A Camarilla vampire will very probably leave you alone, because it has promised to. A Sabbat vampire will not. And you won't know which is which until it's far too late to ask.'

He looked round at them.

'Which is why,' he said, more lightly, 'most sensible witches and wizards simply keep well away from the lot of them. And why I'd like you all to do the same.'

'Do they really have... families?' said Parvati. 'Like Houses?'

'Clans, they call them. Thirteen, by the old count, though the count changes, and some of them would tell you there are fewer and some would tell you there are more, and all of them would be lying about something. They're descended, every one of them, from somebody very old indeed. So old that many vampires can't agree on who the first Vampire was anymore. The older the blood, the stronger it is, and the less of a person is left in it. Every clan has its gift, and every clan has its curse.' He stopped by the window. 'The Ventrue, for instance. They think of themselves as the kings. Old money. Old manners. They run things, or they think they do; you'll find them on the boards of Muggle banks and in Muggle parliaments, pulling strings, and very occasionally sitting across a table from somebody at our Ministry, being polite about the agreement. And they're terribly particular about what they drink. Each one of them can feed from only one kind of person. One I heard of could only take blood from priests. Another, from left-handed men with red hair. They'd starve sooner than drink from anybody else.'

'That's ever so snobbish,' said Lavender.

'It's a family failing,' said Lupin gravely, and somebody at the back laughed, and Harry looked round, and found that it was Dracina Malfoy, of all people, and that she was looking at him to see if he'd laughed too.

He had. She looked pleased.

'Professor,' said Hermione. Her hand was up so high it was nearly off her shoulder. 'Professor, are all of them like that? Or are some of them... I mean, is it possible for one of them to... to be good?'

Her eyes had dropped, while she was speaking, to the folded picture on her desk.

Professor Lupin followed the look. Something passed over his face that might, on another man, have been a wince.

'To answer you properly: I've never met one I'd turn my back on. Never. Vampirism destroys the soul. They've all got something else inside them, something that wants and wants and doesn't stop wanting, and whatever they were before, however good, however kind, they spend every night of their lives holding it down. Most of them lose. In the end.' He was looking out of the window. 'They call it the Beast.'

The room had gone quiet. Lupin seemed to hear the quiet, and turned round, and smiled, and was ordinary again.

'Then there are the Malkavians,' he said briskly. 'I want you to remember this one, because it's the one most likely to catch you out. Every Malkavian is mad. All of them. The blood makes them so. Some of them are mad the way Peeves is mad, and some of them are mad the way a very clever man is mad who has seen something he shouldn't, and you won't be able to tell which is which by looking. And the madness spreads. If you talk with one for long enough, really talk, let them get into your head, you'll start to see what they see. People have come out of a conversation with a Malkavian and never been quite right again.' He looked round at them. 'So. If you ever meet a beautiful, charming, slightly odd person at a party who seems to know things about you that they can't possibly know... make your excuses. Early.'

Neville raised a trembling hand.

'Sir? Professor Trelawney says she knows things about us she can't possibly know.'

There was a howl of laughter. Professor Lupin's mouth twitched, and he said, 'I'm quite sure Professor Trelawney has a perfectly good pulse, Neville,' which only made it worse.

They spent the second half of the lesson on practical things: a Fire-Making Charm you could do without a match, so you'd never be caught without fire in the dark; a way of making a patch of sunlight with your wand, weak and brief but real, that Lupin said would make most of them flinch and buy you a second, and a second was sometimes enough; and the single most important thing, which Lupin made them say back to him three times, out loud, all together: Never ask one in. Never, ever ask one in.

'And if one of them gets close,' said Lupin, 'and looks you in the eye, and you suddenly find that you want, very much, to do whatever it's asking... that isn't you wanting it. That's them. Look away. Look at their chin, their shoulder, anything. Some of them can take hold of a mind just by looking into it. And some of them,' he added, 'you only need to drink from three times, a few drops, and you'll love them for the rest of your life, whether you want to or not, and you'll never know the difference. They call it the blood bond. It's the cruellest thing they do.' He looked round at the class, and his eyes rested, for a moment, on the back of the room, and then on Hermione, and then on Harry, and he seemed to be about to say something more, and didn't. 'Right. Homework. A foot on vampire defences, and I want the sunlight charm practised. Off you go.'

Dracina Malfoy had partnered Neville for the practical.

Harry still didn't know how it had happened. One minute Lupin had been saying pairs, please, and the next she'd simply been there, at Neville's elbow, while Neville looked round wildly at the rest of the class as though somebody had sat a tiger down next to him. She'd been very kind to him. Harry had seen it. She'd stood beside him through the whole practical, patient and pleasant, adjusting the angle of his wand with one finger, saying no, Longbottom, from the wrist, like this, there, that's lovely, and when Neville finally got a feeble yellow glow out of the end of it she'd said 'Well done,' in a warm, clear voice that carried right across the room. And she'd looked up, as she said it, and her eyes had gone straight past Neville to Harry, to see if he'd been watching.

He had. He'd grinned at her. She'd gone pink, and looked away.

'Did you see that?' he said to Ron, on the way out. 'She was helping Neville.'

'I saw,' said Ron.

'She's been like it all week. Did you see her with Fred and George at breakfast? She told them their homemade fireworks were very inventive. Fred nearly choked on his toast.'

'Yeah,' said Ron. 'He told me. He checked his toast afterwards. For poison.'

'She's trying, Ron.'

Ron didn't say anything for a moment. They were going down the stairs, and Malfoy was ahead of them, a flight below, walking with Daphne and Pansy; and as Harry watched, Neville came hurrying past her on the landing with his arms full of books, and dropped one, as Neville always did, and Malfoy stopped, and bent, and picked it up, and handed it to him, with a smile.

Neville took it as though it might bite.

And then Neville went on down the stairs, and Malfoy straightened up, and turned back to Daphne, and the smile went out of her face like a lamp being turned down. Harry didn't see the look that replaced it, because she'd turned her back. But he saw Daphne look at whatever it was, and look away, quickly.

'She's trying something,' said Ron. 'I'll give you that.'

'You're just...'

'Mate.' Ron stopped on the stair. 'I'm not going to row with you about her. I'm not. If you reckon she's turned over a new leaf, fine. I hope she has. Honest, I do. I just reckon,' and he started walking again, 'it's a funny sort of new leaf that only turns over when you're looking.'

Harry opened his mouth, and shut it again, and didn't have an answer, and was annoyed with Ron for the rest of the afternoon for not giving him one.

*

He only wished the rest of his lessons were going half as well.

Potions was the worst. Snape was in a mood of cold, steady, simmering spite that had lasted since the boggart, and everybody knew exactly why. The story of the boggart Snape, and the vulture hat, and the green lace dress, and the big red handbag, had gone through the castle in about a day and a half, and had got bigger as it went, so that by the second week of October there were first-years telling each other that Neville Longbottom had turned Professor Snape himself into Mrs Longbottom in front of the whole school, and that Snape had had to go to the hospital wing to be turned back. Snape had heard it. Snape had very evidently heard all of it. His black eyes went flat and dangerous at the mention of Lupin's name, and he'd started on Neville with a new energy, picking at him, hovering over him, taking points from him for breathing too loudly, until Neville went into the dungeon every Thursday morning looking as though he were walking into the sea.

Divination wasn't much better. Harry had come to dread the hours in that hot, scented, crowded little room at the top of North Tower, squinting at shapeless brown splodges in the bottom of teacups and trying not to notice how Professor Trelawney's enormous swimming eyes filled up every time they landed on him. He couldn't bring himself to like her, though half the class seemed to think she was some kind of saint. Parvati Patil and Lavender Brown had started going up to her tower at lunchtimes, and they came back down with smug, knowing expressions, as if they'd been told secrets the rest of them weren't fit to hear. They'd also started talking to Harry in soft, careful voices, the way people talk at a bedside.

'Are you eating properly, Harry?' Lavender asked him one morning, very gently, laying her hand on his arm.

'I had an absolutely demonic Bacon and egg sandwich for Breakfast,' said Harry with a burp. 'I think it was haunted.'

Care of Magical Creatures, after the bang of the first lesson, had gone flat as a pancake. Hagrid had lost his nerve. They'd been doing flobberworms for three weeks running. Flobberworms were thick brown worms about ten inches long that didn't do anything at all, at either end, and had to be kept alive by having lettuce poked down them.

'What is the point of them?' Ron demanded, after one more hour of shoving lettuce into the slimy mouths. 'Who'd want to keep one alive? What does it do?'

'It doesn't do anything,' said Harry. 'That's why they're safe.'

He looked up the paddock, to where Hagrid was standing alone by the fence with his huge hands hanging, watching them feed the flobberworms with the expression of a man who has been told he may only ever play the piano with one finger. Buckbeak wasn't in the paddock. Buckbeak hadn't been in the paddock since the first lesson. When Harry had asked, Hagrid had only said he's resting, and changed the subject, and his beard had trembled.

Harry didn't like that. He didn't know why.

*

And then there was Malfoy.

Harry had told her, in the dungeon, with the cauldrons boiling over, that they couldn't be friends while she kept slagging off his friends. He'd meant it. He hadn't, if he was honest, expected her to listen.

She had listened. She'd listened so hard it was a bit alarming.

She was being nice. Not just to him, though she was certainly being nice to him; she said good morning to him in the Entrance Hall, and asked how practice had gone, and once, in Charms, passed him a spare quill without being asked when his own split, and didn't say anything nasty about it at all. She was being nice to everybody. She was being nice to Neville. She'd been nice to Fred and George. She'd stopped Crabbe and Goyle in the corridor, in front of Harry, when they'd started on a second-year Hufflepuff, and said leave him alone, he's not worth the bother, which wasn't exactly kind, but which was a great deal kinder than Crabbe and Goyle had ever been told to be. She'd nodded to Ron. Nodded to him, on the stairs, and said Weasley, quite civilly, as if he were somebody she'd been introduced to at a party, and Ron had walked into a suit of armour.

She was even being nice to Hermione.

That was the part Harry couldn't work out. Because the nicer Malfoy was to Hermione, the less Hermione seemed to like it.

'Good morning, Granger,' Malfoy said, at breakfast one day, passing the end of the Gryffindor table. 'That's a lovely hair ribbon.'

Hermione wasn't wearing a ribbon. Hermione had never in her life worn a ribbon. Hermione looked at Malfoy over the top of her Daily Prophet with an expression that could have stripped paint, and said nothing.

Malfoy sighed. She looked at Harry, a quick, small, rueful look, with her eyebrows a little raised, as if to say, well, I tried. Then she went on to the Slytherin table, and sat down, and didn't look back.

'You could've said thank you,' said Harry.

'For what?' said Hermione. 'I'm not wearing a ribbon, Harry.'

'Well, she was being friendly...'

'She was being something.' Hermione folded the Prophet very neatly into quarters. 'Harry, on the very first morning of lessons she sat at the Slytherin table and did an impression of me as a thief. A thief, Harry, with my hand up, and everybody laughing. She's called me a Mudblood to my face more times than I can count. She spent all of last year...' She stopped. She pressed her lips together. 'And now she wants to tell me I've got a lovely ribbon. I don't want her to tell me I've got a lovely ribbon. I want her to say she's sorry, and mean it, and then leave me alone.'

'She said sorry to me,' said Harry. 'In Potions. About Hagrid.'

'To you,' said Hermione. 'Yes. I noticed that.'

She picked up her toast. She put it down again. Harry saw her hand, on the table, close up for a moment, tight, and then open again, very deliberately, one finger at a time, the way you'd make yourself let go of a banister.

'I'm sorry,' she said, in a much smaller voice. 'I'm not cross with you. Honestly, I'm not. I just... I don't think people change because somebody tells them to in a Potions lesson. I think they change because they want to. And I don't think she wants to. I think she wants...'

She didn't finish. She went pink, and looked at her toast, and didn't say what Malfoy wanted.

Harry didn't push her. He thought, privately, that Hermione was being a bit unfair. It wasn't like her to hold a grudge. Malfoy was trying; you could see her trying, all the time, everywhere, practically creaking with it. And it seemed to Harry, more and more, as the weeks went by, that every time she tried, Hermione was there to slap it down. It made him uncomfortable. It wasn't like Hermione at all.

Malfoy seemed to have noticed it too.

'I don't think Granger likes me very much,' she said to Harry, quite quietly, one afternoon outside Charms, when Hermione had walked straight past her good afternoon without turning her head. She said it without any spite at all. She said it looking at the floor, with her good hand fiddling with the edge of the black silk sling she had somehow, six weeks on, still not found it possible to give up. 'I don't blame her, really. I was awful to her. I know I was.' She gave a small, brave, crooked smile. 'It's just a bit hard, that's all. When one's trying.'

'She'll come round,' said Harry, and felt disloyal saying it, and felt worse because he half believed it.

'Do you think so?' Malfoy looked up at him through her lashes. 'I hope so. For your sake, I mean. I know she's your friend.' And she went into Charms, and sat at the front, and didn't look round once, and Harry stood in the doorway with the strangest feeling that something had just been done to him, and no idea what.

He'd have liked to talk to somebody about it. But Ron just went quiet whenever Malfoy came up, and Hermione went pink, and so in the end Harry didn't talk about it, and went on noticing.

At the beginning of October, though, Harry was given something else to think about, something so good it very nearly made up for everything else. The Quidditch season was coming, and Oliver Wood called a team meeting one Thursday night to talk tactics.

A Quidditch team had seven players. Three were Chasers, who passed the Quaffle, a big red leather ball, between them and tried to throw it through one of the three tall golden hoops at the other end of the pitch. Two were Beaters, armed with clubs, whose job was to bash the Bludgers, two heavy iron balls with a nasty habit of trying to knock people off their brooms, away from their own side and into the other. One was the Keeper, who guarded the hoops. And one was the Seeker, who had the hardest job and the best one: to find and catch the Golden Snitch, a tiny winged golden ball no bigger than a walnut, which ended the match the moment it was caught, and was worth a hundred and fifty points to whoever caught it.

Oliver Wood was seventeen, built like a wardrobe, and in his seventh and last year. He addressed his six team-mates in the cold changing rooms at the edge of the darkening pitch, and there was something in his voice that Harry hadn't heard there before, something tight and raw, like a man running out of road.

'This is it,' he said, walking up and down in front of them. 'This is our last chance. My last chance. To win the Quidditch Cup. I leave in June. After that I never get another go at it. Never. So you'd better win it for my sake. And for yours because if we don't I'll chase you all down with a Beater Bat.'

Fred and George sniggered.

Wood stopped pacing. He looked at them. Then he came over, smiling, looking as friendly as you please, with one of the Beaters' bats swinging loose in his hand, and whacked Fred across the knees with it, and then George, quite hard, crack, crack, like a man knocking in two tent pegs.

Fred and George folded up on the floor, clutching their legs, making noises like a pair of stepped-on cats.

'Seven years,' Wood went on, resuming his pacing as though nothing had happened, while Fred and George writhed. 'Seven years since Gryffindor won it. Seven. And I know we've been unlucky. I know. Harry in the hospital wing for the final, first year. And last year the whole tournament cancelled...' He swallowed, as if something had got stuck. 'But we've got the best. We have got. The best. Team. In this school.' He punched one fist into the palm of the other hand on every word, and the old wild light was back in his eyes. 'Chasers. Three of the best I've ever seen.' He jabbed a finger at Angelina Johnson, Alicia Spinnet and Katie Bell. 'Beaters. Two that nobody, nobody, gets past.' He swung round on Fred and George, who were just about managing to haul themselves upright by the bench.

'Oh, Oliver,' said Fred and George together, in high, fluttering voices, holding their knees. 'Stop it. You'll make us blush.'

'A Seeker,' Wood rumbled, rounding on Harry with a sort of furious pride, 'who has never once lost a match he's actually got to the end of!'

There was a pause.

'And me,' he added, as an afterthought.

'You're very good too, Oliver,' said George kindly.

'Top-hole Keeper,' said Fred.

'The point is,' said Wood, beginning to pace again, 'that Cup should have had our name on it two years running. The day Harry got on the team I thought, that's it. That's it, it's in the bag. And we haven't got it. And this year's the last year we'll ever have to get it, and...' He trailed off. He stood there in the middle of the changing room with his shoulders down and his hands hanging, and looked, suddenly, a great deal younger than seventeen.

Even Fred and George looked sorry for him.

'This is the year, Oliver,' said Fred.

'We'll do it,' said Angelina.

'Course we will,' said Harry.

And they meant it. They began training three nights a week. The weather was turning cold and wet and the evenings were drawing in, but there wasn't enough mud or wind or rain in Scotland to wash away the picture that had settled in Harry's head and wouldn't go: the great silver Quidditch Cup, at last, held up over the heads of the Gryffindor team in a roar of scarlet and gold.

Ron came and watched, most evenings, sitting at the top of the stands in the dark with his scarf over his nose, and walked back up to the castle with Harry afterwards through the wet grass, carrying his broom for him when his hands were too cold to grip it, and talking about tactics he'd made up himself, most of which would have got Harry killed. Harry didn't mind. He liked having him there. It was a good thing to come down out of the sky soaked and frozen and see one red-haired shape still waiting in the empty stands, waving.

Once, coming down, he thought he saw a second shape, further along, on its own at the very end of the top row, in a long shabby coat. He looked again and it had gone. Ron hadn't seen it.

*

He came back to the common room after one of those sessions, chilled to the bone but pleased with how they'd flown, and found the whole place humming.

'What's going on?' he asked Ron and Hermione, who had got two of the best armchairs by the fire and were filling in star charts for Astronomy.

'Hogsmeade,' said Ron, nodding at a new notice pinned to the board by the portrait hole. 'First visit. End of the month. Halloween.'

'Brilliant,' said Fred, who'd come in behind Harry. 'Zonko's. I'm right down to my last Stink Pellet.'

Harry dropped into the chair next to Ron. The good feeling from the pitch drained out of him all at once, like water out of a bath.

Hermione seemed to see it go.

'You'll get to go next time, Harry,' she said, quickly. 'I'm sure you will. They'll have caught Black long before then. Somebody's already seen him once.'

'Black's not stupid enough to try anything in Hogsmeade,' said Ron. 'Go and ask McGonagall, Harry. Ask if you can come this time. Next one might not be till after Christmas...'

'Ron!' said Hermione. 'Harry's meant to stay inside...'

'He can't be the only third-year left behind,' said Ron. 'It's not fair. Go on, Harry, ask her.'

'Yeah,' said Harry slowly. 'I reckon I will.'

Hermione opened her mouth to argue. But before she could, Crookshanks dropped neatly onto her lap from the back of the chair. He had a large dead spider in his mouth, legs dangling.

'Does he have to eat that in front of us?' said Ron, with a shudder.

'Oh, clever boy, did you catch that all on your own?' said Hermione, stroking him.

Crookshanks chewed the spider very slowly, with his flat yellow eyes fixed on Ron the whole time.

'Just keep him your side, that's all,' said Ron irritably, going back to his star chart. 'I've got Scabbers asleep in my bag.'

Harry yawned. He'd have given anything to go to bed, but his own star chart was blank. He dragged his bag over and got out his ink and parchment and quill and made a start.

'Copy mine if you want,' said Ron, finishing his last star with a flourish and pushing the chart across.

Hermione, who didn't hold with copying, pressed her lips together, but didn't say anything.

Crookshanks hadn't stopped looking at Ron. The tip of his thick ginger tail was going, slowly, side to side. And then, without the least warning, he sprang.

'OI!' Ron roared, grabbing for his bag as Crookshanks sank all four sets of claws into it and started ripping. 'GET OFF IT, YOU MAD CAT!'

He tried to wrench it away. Crookshanks hung on, spitting and raking. 'Ron, don't hurt him!' Hermione shrieked. The whole common room had turned round to watch. Ron swung the bag round in a wide circle with Crookshanks still attached to it and Scabbers came shooting out of the top...

'CATCH THAT CAT!' Ron bellowed, as Crookshanks let go of what was left of the bag, bounded over the table and went after Scabbers like a ginger rocket.

Harry went after them. 'Hermione, grab him, can't you, he's your cat!' George made a dive at Crookshanks and missed. Scabbers shot between twenty pairs of feet and vanished under an old chest of drawers by the wall, and Crookshanks skidded to a stop and flattened himself on his bandy legs and started raking about under it with one paw.

Ron and Hermione got there together. Hermione scooped Crookshanks up round the middle and hauled him off. Ron threw himself flat on the carpet and, after a lot of grunting and cursing, dragged Scabbers out by the tail.

'Look at him!' He held Scabbers up in front of Hermione's face, dangling. The rat was trembling, and his eyes were bulging, and he was thinner than ever. 'He's nothing but bones! You keep that thing away from him!'

'Crookshanks doesn't know it's wrong!' said Hermione, and her voice was shaking. 'Cats chase rats, Ron! That's what they do!'

'There's something funny about that cat!' Ron was trying to stuff Scabbers back into his pocket, and Scabbers was trying to climb up his arm. 'It heard me say Scabbers was in my bag!'

'Oh, what rubbish,' said Hermione. 'He could smell him, Ron, of course he could, how else d'you think...'

'That cat's out to get Scabbers!' said Ron, ignoring the people round them, who had started to giggle. 'And Scabbers was here first, and he's ill!'

And he snatched his star chart off the table and stamped off across the common room and up the stairs to the boys' dormitories without another word.

Hermione stood there with Crookshanks in her arms and her face scarlet.

'He's being completely ridiculous,' she said, to nobody in particular.

'Hermione,' said Harry. He said it carefully. He'd been thinking about it while Ron was on his stomach under the drawers. 'It's not really about the bag, you know.'

'It's a bag, Harry...'

'It's Scabbers. Ron's had him since he was eleven. He was Percy's before that. He's about the only thing Ron's ever had that was his and nobody else's. Everything else he's got, somebody had it first. And now he's ill, and he won't eat, and he thinks your cat's trying to kill him.' Harry shrugged. 'I'd be upset. If it was Hedwig.'

'Hedwig's an owl. Crookshanks wouldn't...'

'He would if she was little enough.'

'Harry, it's nature. It's what cats do.' Hermione had her chin up now. 'I can't stop him being a cat. I'm not going to shut him up in a box because Ron can't keep his rat in a proper cage like a sensible person. Scabbers was ill before Crookshanks, you heard what that witch said, he's old, he's...'

'I know. I'm not saying...'

'Then what are you saying?'

Harry looked at her. She was holding her cat very tightly and her eyes were very bright and she wasn't listening; he could see her not listening, the way she didn't listen in Divination when Trelawney said something she'd decided was wrong. She'd decided. That was the end of it.

'Nothing,' he said. 'I'm saying I've got a star chart to copy, and Ron's taken his up to bed with him. So I'm going to go and do it in the dormitory, by the light of Neville's snoring.' He picked up his bag. 'Night, Hermione.'

'Harry...'

He went.

He felt bad about it about halfway up the stairs. Not bad enough to go back down.

*

Ron was still not speaking to Hermione the next day. He hardly said a word to her all through Herbology, even though the three of them were working on the same Puffapod.

'How's Scabbers?' Hermione asked, in a small voice, as they split the fat pink pods and tipped the shining beans into a wooden bucket.

'Hiding at the bottom of my bed,' said Ron savagely. 'Shaking.' He missed the bucket. Beans went everywhere.

'Careful, Mr Weasley, careful!' cried Professor Sprout, as the beans hit the warm floor and burst, at once, into a mass of pale, nodding flowers.

Hermione didn't say anything else. Harry saw her look at Ron's back, while Ron was crawling about under the bench picking flowers out of the drain; saw her open her mouth, as if she had something ready; saw her shut it again. She looked tired. She'd been up past eleven again last night, Harry was fairly sure; she had the look, and she was carrying her bag held together with string where the seam had gone, and her hands were stained to the wrist with three different colours of ink. For a moment, watching her, he forgot to be annoyed with her. She looked like somebody holding up something heavy all by herself and not wanting anyone to see.

Then she caught him watching, and her chin came up, and she went back to her pods.

Transfiguration was next. Harry had made up his mind to ask Professor McGonagall about Hogsmeade at the end of the lesson, and as he joined the queue outside the classroom he was busy rehearsing it in his head. He didn't get far. There was some sort of commotion at the front of the queue. Lavender Brown was crying. Parvati had an arm round her and was explaining something, in a hushed, important voice, to Seamus and Dean, who were looking very grave.

'What's the matter, Lavender?' said Hermione, anxiously, as the three of them came up.

'She had a letter from home this morning,' whispered Parvati. 'It's Binky. Her rabbit. A fox got him.'

'Oh,' said Hermione. 'Oh, Lavender, I'm so sorry.'

'I knew!' Lavender wailed. 'I should've known! Do you know what the date is?'

'Er...'

'It's the sixteenth of October! "That thing you're dreading, it will come on the sixteenth of October"! She said! She said, and it did!'

The whole class had gathered round. Seamus was shaking his head slowly. Hermione hesitated. Harry saw her hesitate. Saw her think about it, and decide not to, and then saw something in her that couldn't leave a thing alone once it had started to look at it, the thing that made her check her homework five times, get the better of her.

'You... you'd been dreading Binky being eaten by a fox?' she said.

'Well, not a fox, not especially,' said Lavender, gazing up at her through streaming eyes, 'but I was dreading him dying, wasn't I? Obviously.'

'Oh,' said Hermione. She stopped again. Then, 'Was Binky an old rabbit?'

'N... no!' Lavender sobbed. 'He was only a baby!'

Parvati's arm tightened round her.

'Then why would you have been dreading him dying?' said Hermione.

Parvati gave her a look like a slap.

'Well, but, think about it logically,' said Hermione, turning to the others, and her voice had gone quick and earnest, the way it did when something didn't add up and it was driving her mad. 'I mean, Binky didn't even die today, did he? Lavender only heard about it today...'

Lavender howled.

'...and she can't have been dreading it, because it was obviously a terrible shock...'

'Don't take any notice of Hermione, Lavender,' said Ron, very loudly. 'She doesn't reckon anybody's pets matter except hers.'

Professor McGonagall opened the classroom door just then, which was probably lucky. Ron and Hermione were looking at each other as if each of them would happily have fed the other to a fox. They went into class and sat down on either side of Harry, and didn't say a word to each other for the whole of the lesson.

Harry didn't say much either. He was looking at Lavender, two rows in front, with her head down on her arms and Parvati stroking her hair; and then at Hermione, beside him, very upright, writing notes with a fast, cross, scratchy quill, as if nothing had happened at all.

He thought, for the first time, without wanting to: Malfoy's right. She can be really nasty.

He didn't like thinking it. He couldn't stop.

The lesson was on the limits of Transfiguration, which was more interesting than it sounded. Professor McGonagall had been teaching them, all term, how to turn one thing into another; today she was teaching them what you couldn't do, and why, and she did it with the air of somebody who had found out most of the answers the hard way.

'You cannot transfigure food out of nothing,' she said, writing it on the board in her sharp, slanting hand. 'You cannot transfigure a living creature into a person, nor a person permanently into a creature against their will, without the most serious consequences. And you cannot,' she turned round, 'whatever you may have read in the more lurid sort of novel, transfigure a creature out of a person once it has taken up residence inside them.'

Neville's hand went up, slowly, as though it were frightened of being seen.

'Please, Professor... can things do that? Get inside people?'

'Some can, Longbottom.' Professor McGonagall set down her chalk. 'Some kinds of possession are a matter of spirit, and those are for another lesson, and another teacher. But there are creatures that do it the plain, physical way. They go in through the flesh. Usually at the back of the neck.' Several people put their hands to the backs of their necks. 'They wrap themselves round the spine and lie along it and speak with their host's mouth. The host is still in there, quite awake, watching. He simply has no say in anything any more.' She said it as calmly as if she were describing the correct way to hold a wand. 'You can always tell. When they are angry, or proud, which in my experience is most of the time, the eyes shine. Quite brightly. Like lamps. And the voice comes out doubled, as though two people were speaking at once, and one of them very much further down.'

The room had gone silent. Even Lavender had stopped sniffing.

'No Transfiguration will separate the two,' Professor McGonagall went on. 'I know, because I once tried. It was a long time ago and a very long way from here. In the end the only thing that answered was a knife, and a steady hand, and a good deal of help from a man I shall not name, who was considerably better with the knife than I was. The host died though.' She paused. 'The creature did too. I kept it. As a reminder that there are some problems one cannot solve with a wand.'

She picked up her chalk again.

'Page forty-three. Exceptions to Gamp's Law. Quietly, please.'

Harry stared at her. He was thinking about a long glass case over a fire, lit from inside, and a thing in it as long as his forearm, grey-white and segmented, with fins down its back and a mouth that opened four ways at once.

I kept it.

He looked at Ron. Ron was looking at him, with his mouth slightly open. Ron had been in that office too, the night of the Chamber, but he'd had his mum crying all over him and hadn't looked at the furniture; he'd never noticed the case. But Ron had seen Harry's face, and he raised his eyebrows, and Harry mouthed later, and spent the rest of the lesson not reading page forty-three and wondering where, exactly, a very long way from here had been, and who the man with the knife was, and whether he'd had one eye and a metal arm.

*

When the bell went at the end of the lesson he still hadn't decided how to put it to Professor McGonagall. As it turned out, she brought Hogsmeade up herself.

'One moment, please!' she called, as they started to pack up. 'You're all in my House, so your permission forms for Hogsmeade come to me, and I want them before Halloween. No form, no visit. Don't forget.'

Neville's hand went up.

'Professor, I... I think I might've lost...'

'Your grandmother sent yours straight to me, Longbottom,' said Professor McGonagall. 'She appears to have thought that would be wiser. Very well, that's all, off you go.'

'Ask her,' Ron hissed. 'Now.'

'Oh, but...' Hermione started.

'Go on, Harry,' said Ron, stubbornly.

Harry waited for the room to empty.

He saw Hermione, on her way out, stop at the door. Lavender was still at her desk, slowly packing her bag, with Parvati waiting for her; and Hermione hovered, and then went back, and bent down beside Lavender and said something Harry couldn't hear. Lavender looked up at her, red-eyed and suspicious. Hermione said something else. She was holding out a handkerchief, a clean one, folded. Lavender looked at it for a long moment. Then she took it, and blew her nose on it, very loudly, and said, 'Thanks,' in a thick voice; and Hermione nodded, quickly, and went out, and didn't look back at Harry at all.

Harry looked after her. He didn't know what to make of it. He decided to think about it later, and went up to the desk.

'Yes, Potter?'

He took a deep breath.

'Professor, my aunt and uncle... er... they didn't sign my form.'

Professor McGonagall looked at him over her square glasses, and said nothing at all.

'So... er... would it be all right... I mean, would you mind if I... if I went to Hogsmeade anyway?'

Professor McGonagall looked down, and began squaring up the papers on her desk.

'I'm afraid not, Potter,' she said. 'You heard me. No form, no village. That's the rule.'

'But, Professor... my aunt and uncle... they're Muggles, you know, they don't understand about... about Hogwarts forms and things,' said Harry, while Ron, in the doorway, nodded at him encouragingly as if his head were on a spring. 'If you said I could go...'

'But I don't say so,' said Professor McGonagall, getting up and putting her papers away in a drawer.

'Of course not,' Harry said, mournfully and a little drily.

'The form states quite clearly that a parent or guardian must sign it.' She turned and looked at him, and there was something in her face, something odd. 'I'm sorry, Potter. That's my last word on it. You'd better hurry, or you'll miss your lunch.'

Harry went. He went fast, with his face hot, and Ron fell in beside him, and he didn't look back, so he didn't see what was in Professor McGonagall's face as she watched him go. If he had, he might have recognised it. It was pity.

There was nothing to be done.

Ron called Professor McGonagall several things all the way to the Great Hall that made Hermione's eyebrows go up into her hair. Hermione put on an it's-probably-for-the-best face that made Ron want to throw something. And Harry had to sit through a whole lunch of people talking loudly and happily about what they were going to do first in Hogsmeade.

'There's always the feast,' said Ron, trying. 'The Halloween feast. In the evening.'

'Yeah,' said Harry gloomily, 'watching everyone talk about all the sweets they got from Hogsmeade will be great fun, mate. Truly.'

He knew the feast would be good. The Halloween feast was always good. It just would have tasted a lot better on the end of a day in Hogsmeade with everybody else.

Nothing anybody said helped. Dean Thomas, who could draw anything, offered to forge Uncle Vernon's signature for him, but Harry had already told McGonagall it hadn't been signed, so that was no use. Ron suggested the Invisibility Cloak, not very hopefully, and Hermione came down on that like a ton of bricks and reminded him what Dumbledore had said about Dementors and cloaks.

'I'll stay, then,' said Ron.

'You what?'

'I'll stay. With you.' Ron shrugged, as if it were nothing, and didn't look at him. 'Honeydukes'll still be there next time. It's been there about five hundred years. We'll do something. Play chess. Get Fred and George to show us a passage.'

'Ron,' said Hermione, but quite softly.

Harry looked at him. Ron had been talking about Honeydukes since August. Ron had a list.

'Don't be thick,' said Harry. His throat had gone tight. 'You're going. Both of you. Bring me something back.'

'You sure?'

'I'm sure.'

Ron looked at him a moment longer, and then nodded, and went back to his shepherd's pie, and his ears were red.

Percy's attempt at comfort was probably the least comforting of the lot.

'They make a terrible fuss about Hogsmeade, Harry, but I promise you, it's quite overrated,' he said earnestly, stopping by their end of the table. 'Oh, the sweetshop's all right, I grant you, and Zonko's is frankly a menace, and naturally one ought to see the Shrieking Shack. But beyond that, really, Harry, you're missing nothing at all.'

*

On Halloween morning Harry got up with everyone else and went down to breakfast feeling as flat as a flobberworm, and doing his best not to show it.

'We'll bring you loads from Honeydukes,' said Hermione. She was looking at him as though he were going off to war instead of staying behind, and she'd saved him the seat between her and Ron, and she put the toast rack in front of him before he could reach for it. 'Honestly, Harry. Whatever you want. Just say.'

'Yeah, loads,' said Ron. He and Hermione had finally made it up over Crookshanks, more or less, in the face of Harry's problems; they weren't talking about it, but they were passing each other the marmalade.

'Don't worry about me,' said Harry, in a voice he hoped sounded careless. 'I'll see you at the feast. Have a good time.'

He went with them to the Entrance Hall. Filch was standing just inside the great front doors with a long list, checking off names, glaring into every face that went past him as though each one of them was a Dungbomb with legs.

Ron and Hermione went out into the bright cold morning, looking back at him. Harry raised a hand. Then he turned to go, and nearly walked into Dracina Malfoy.

She was coming down the marble staircase with Pansy on one side of her and Daphne on the other, all three of them in their warmest cloaks, Malfoy's trimmed with something soft and silver that had probably been an animal quite recently. She saw him and stopped on the bottom step.

'Potter,' said Pansy, and her pug face lit up. 'What's this? Not coming? Not allowed? Did your Muggles forget to sign your little form? Or can't they write?'

Daphne smirked. 'Perhaps he's scared. All those Dementors. He might faint into the butterbeer...'

'Oh, stop it, both of you,' said Malfoy sharply.

Pansy and Daphne stopped. Pansy's mouth actually fell open.

'Go and wait by the door,' said Malfoy, without looking at them. 'I'll be there in a minute.'

They went. Pansy looked back twice.

Malfoy came down the last step and stood in front of Harry with her chin up and her cloak pulled round her, and looked at him, and he braced himself for whatever she was going to say, because in his experience Malfoy got rid of her friends only when she wanted to say something particularly vicious without witnesses.

'Is it true?' she said. 'Your relatives wouldn't sign?'

'No.'

'Why not?'

'Uncle Vernon was going to. Then I blew his sister up to the ceiling.' Harry shrugged. 'Sort of went off the idea after that. Can't think why.'

Something went over her face.

It was quick, and it was hot, and it was so fierce that for a second Harry thought it was meant for him and took a step back. It wasn't. She wasn't looking at him at all. She was looking past him, through the doors, at the bright grey sky over the lawns, as though Privet Drive were somewhere just out there beyond the gates, and she could see it, and would very much have liked to set fire to it.

'Those people,' she said. Her voice had gone thin and tight. 'Those horrible, stupid, fat...' She stopped. She shut her mouth on it. She seemed to remember something, and Harry watched her remember it, and watched her face change, and smooth out, and become gentle.

'That's very unfair,' she said, more quietly. 'You'd have liked it, I think. Hogsmeade. It's not much. It's a village. But there's a little shop at the end that sells nothing but quills, hundreds of them, eagle and peacock and phoenix, and the old wizard who runs it lets you try them all, and never minds if you don't buy anything. I thought you'd like that one.' She looked at her gloves. 'I was going to show you. Next time, perhaps.'

'Yeah,' said Harry. 'Next time. When Black's caught. In about fifty years. I'll have a beard. I'll need a quill to sign my pension.'

He hadn't meant to be quite so sour about it. It came out anyway, flat and gloomy and sarcastic, and he expected her to sneer.

Malfoy giggled.

It surprised both of them. It came out of her all at once, high and helpless, a real giggle, the one from the hospital wing in June, and she put her gloved hand over her mouth to stop it and it came out round the glove. She went pink to the ears.

'You are ridiculous,' she said, through her fingers.

'You're laughing.'

'I am not.' She was. 'It's the beard. I was imagining the beard.'

Harry found he was grinning.

Behind her, by the doors, Pansy Parkinson had turned round to watch, and her face was doing something Harry had seen before. It was a sort of long-suffering droop, eyebrows up, mouth pulled down at one corner, the whole face of somebody watching a friend do something they've seen coming for miles and can do absolutely nothing about. And Harry knew at once where he'd seen it. He'd seen it on Ron. He'd seen it on Ron about twice a week since September.

He couldn't think why Pansy Parkinson should be making Ron's face. It was very odd.

'Dracina,' Pansy called. 'We'll miss the start. We said.'

'Coming.' Malfoy took her hand from her mouth. She looked at Harry once more, and the look was soft and pleased and a little bit triumphant, as though she'd won something, and he couldn't for the life of him see what. 'Well,' she said. 'Bye, Potter.'

She waved. A little wave, just her fingers, close to her chest, where Pansy and Daphne couldn't see it.

Harry waved back. He couldn't help smiling. And he saw her see him smile, and something in her face lit right up, like a candle being put into a pumpkin, and then she turned and went across the Hall to the doors with her silver-trimmed cloak swinging.

Pansy was still watching him. The Ron face had gone. In its place was something sour and narrow and not at all friendly, a look that said, as plainly as words, you have no idea, have you. You have no idea at all.

The smile went off Harry's face as if it had been wiped.

He turned away, and went up the marble staircase on his own.

'Password?' said the Fat Lady, waking up with a start.

'Fortuna Major,' said Harry, without enthusiasm.

The portrait swung forward and he climbed in through the hole. The common room was full of first- and second-years, chattering, and a handful of older students who'd been to Hogsmeade so many times it had stopped being exciting.

'Harry! Harry! Hi, Harry!'

It was Colin Creevey. Colin was a second-year who thought Harry Potter was the most important person who had ever lived, and he never let a chance go by of telling him so. He'd been even worse since the Chamber. He and Ginny Weasley had come out of the hospital wing the best of friends, from what Harry could make out, bonded for life by the Basilisk and by a shared and passionate belief in Harry, and the two of them were hardly ever apart now.

Harry didn't really mind. He never had. Colin was, he sometimes thought, a bit like what he thought having a little brother might be like: noisy, and eager, and always underfoot, and impossible to stay cross with. Harry had taken to giving him tips on his second-year homework when Colin got stuck, and to teasing him, gently, about Ginny, which made Colin go the colour of a beetroot and protest far too much.

'Aren't you going to Hogsmeade, Harry? Why not? Hey...' Colin turned and beamed round at the group by the fire behind him. There were eight or nine of them, all younger, and Ginny was among them, and every single one of them was wearing a round red badge with HP on it in gold letters. They were all looking at Harry. Several of them had gone pink. 'You can come and sit with us, if you want, Harry!'

Harry looked at the badges. He looked at Ginny, who had gone scarlet and was trying to hide hers behind her hand. He realised what he was looking at. It was, as far as he could tell, a fan club.

He sighed.

'Um... honestly I'd love to, lad. But you know what I told you about Snape? I got some homework to do, and I need to go to the library. But thanks anyway.'

The truth was he wasn't in the mood for nine people staring at the scar on his forehead all afternoon. But Colin's face fell, all at once, like a soufflé, and he said 'Oh,' in a small voice, and went back towards the fire, and Harry felt like a rat.

'Look, Colin.'

Colin turned round.

'You know I couldn't have sorted out the Basilisk without you, mate.'

He heard himself say it and thought he sounded exactly like Lockhart. It didn't seem to matter. Colin sat bolt upright as if somebody had stuck a pin in him.

'Really?'

'Oh yes. Ginny over there can tell you all about it.'

And Harry got out through the portrait hole as fast as he could, leaving behind him a whole fan club turning round as one to stare at Ginny, and Ginny going from scarlet to crimson and looking, under it all, not entirely sorry.

'What was the point of waking me up, then?' the Fat Lady said crossly after him.

He wandered off towards the library without much heart for it, and halfway there changed his mind; he didn't want to work. He turned round, and found himself nose to nose with Filch, who had evidently just finished seeing off the last of the Hogsmeade party.

'And what,' said Filch, with deep suspicion, 'are you up to?'

'Usual bit of mischief, Filch. I thought I might stand around and haunt the corridors. Pretend I'm Peeves for a bit.'

Harry was drier than Aunt Petunia's roast chicken.

Filch's lip curled.

'I'm not doing a thing, Filch. I'm doing nothing,' said Harry irritably.

'Nothing!' Filch's jowls shook. 'A likely tale! Skulking about on your own... why aren't you down in that village with the rest of your horrible little friends, buying Belch Powder and Stink Pellets and Whizzing Worms?'

'I'm a bit skint, Filch. And I'd only get the premium Stink Pellets anyway if I had some Galleons.'

'Back to your common room! Now!' snapped Filch, and stood glaring after him until he'd turned the corner.

Harry didn't go back to the common room. He went up a staircase instead, with some vague idea of going up to the Owlery to see Hedwig, and he was halfway along the next corridor when a voice from one of the doors he'd just passed said, 'Harry?'

He went back. Professor Lupin was looking out of his office.

'What are you up to?' said Lupin. It was the same question Filch had asked, and it sounded completely different. 'Where are Ron and Hermione?'

'Hogsmeade,' said Harry, trying to sound as if he didn't care.

'Ah,' said Lupin.

He looked at Harry for a moment, quite steadily. It was the look again, the one from the corridors and the Hall and the window over the pitch, and Harry, meeting it close to for the first time, found it wasn't what he'd thought. It wasn't suspicious. It was the look of somebody checking that something was still where they'd left it.

'Come in,' said Lupin. 'I've just had a grindylow delivered for next lesson.'

'A what?'

Harry followed him in. There was a big tank of water in the corner of the office, and in it, pressed against the glass, was a sickly green creature with little pointed horns, making faces at him and flexing a pair of long, thin, spidery hands.

'Water demon,' said Lupin, considering it. 'He shouldn't give us much trouble. Not after the kappas. The thing is to break his grip. See those fingers? Very strong. And very brittle.'

The grindylow showed its green teeth, and then went and buried itself in a clump of weed in the corner.

'Tea?' said Lupin, looking round for his kettle. 'I was about to make some.'

'All right,' said Harry awkwardly.

Lupin tapped the kettle with his wand, and a jet of steam shot out of the spout at once.

'Sit down,' said Lupin, prising the lid off a dusty tin. 'It's only teabags, I'm afraid. Though I expect you've had enough of tea leaves to be going on with?'

Harry looked at him. Lupin's eyes were creased at the corners.

'How did you know about that?'

'Professor McGonagall told me,' said Lupin, and handed Harry a chipped mug. 'You're not worried, are you?'

'No,' said Harry.

He thought for a second about telling him about the dog in Magnolia Crescent, and didn't. He didn't want Lupin to think he was a coward, not when Lupin already seemed to think he couldn't handle a boggart.

Some of that must have shown, because Lupin said, 'Something on your mind, Harry?'

'No,' said Harry.

He drank some of his tea and watched the grindylow shaking a little green fist at him through the weeds.

'Yes,' he said suddenly, and put the mug down on the desk. 'That boggart. The day we did the boggart.'

'Yes?' said Lupin slowly.

'Why didn't you let me have a go at it?'

Lupin's eyebrows went up.

'I'd have thought that was obvious, Harry,' he said, sounding surprised.

Harry had expected him to say he hadn't done any such thing. It took him aback.

'Why?' he said again.

'Well,' said Lupin, frowning a little, 'I thought that if the boggart came face to face with you, it would turn itself into Lord Voldemort.'

'If it was, I would've had an excellent Riddikulus bit for him. I could've made him a screaming baby. He screamed like one when Quirrell tried to kill me in my first year.'

Lupin stared at him.

He went on staring, for quite a long time, with his tea halfway to his mouth, as though Harry had said something in a language he only half spoke and he was working out the grammar. Harry was beginning to notice that Lupin did that. He didn't stammer, like Quirrell, and he didn't show off, like Lockhart. When you said something that surprised him, he simply sat, and looked at you, and turned it over, for as long as it took. And then he said something.

'I was wrong, clearly,' said Lupin at last, still frowning at Harry. 'But I didn't think it was a very good idea to have Lord Voldemort appear in the middle of the staffroom. I thought people might panic.'

'I didn't think of Voldemort, really,' said Harry honestly. 'Well, okay. I did at first. But then... I... I remembered the Dementors.'

'I see,' said Lupin thoughtfully. 'Well, well...' He smiled, a little, at Harry's face. 'I'm impressed, Harry. That suggests that the thing you fear most of all is fear itself. That's very wise.'

'Yeah, but fear doesn't stop the danger, Professor. I could've sorted the Boggart out if you let me.'

He said it quite matter-of-factly. It was simply true, as far as he could see.

Lupin put his mug down.

He didn't say anything for a moment. He looked at Harry across the desk with an expression Harry couldn't read at all, something that was partly a smile and partly not, and partly something a long way off, like a man looking at an old photograph. Harry had the oddest impression that he was being compared with somebody, and that he'd come out of the comparison rather well.

'So you've been thinking that I didn't believe you could deal with the boggart,' said Lupin shrewdly.

'Well... yeah,' said Harry.

He felt suddenly a good deal happier.

'Professor Lupin, you know the Dementors-'

There was a knock at the door.

'Come in,' called Lupin.

The door opened, and Snape came in. He was carrying a goblet with a thin trail of smoke coming off it, and he stopped dead at the sight of Harry, and his black eyes narrowed.

And Harry, who happened to be looking at Lupin, saw something happen to him.

It was very quick. It was gone almost before it had come. But when the door opened and Snape stepped through it, every hair on Lupin's forearms, where his frayed sleeves had ridden up, stood straight on end, and his nostrils flared, once, wide, and his lip came up off his teeth on one side by about a quarter of an inch. Then it was gone, and he was smiling.

'Ah. Severus,' said Lupin. 'Thank you very much. Would you mind leaving it there on the desk?'

Snape put down the smoking goblet. His eyes went from Harry to Lupin and back again.

'I was just showing Harry my grindylow,' said Lupin pleasantly, nodding at the tank.

'Riveting,' said Snape, without turning his head. 'You should drink that at once, Lupin.'

'Yes. Yes, I will.'

'I've brewed a whole cauldron,' Snape went on. 'Should you require more.'

'I'll probably need some again tomorrow, I should think. Thank you, Severus.'

'Not at all,' said Snape. But there was something in his eye that Harry didn't like at all. He backed out of the room, watchful and unsmiling, and shut the door.

Harry looked at the goblet. Lupin smiled.

'Professor Snape has very kindly made up a potion for me,' he said. 'I've never been much of a hand at potions, and this one's particularly fiddly.' He picked the goblet up and sniffed it. 'Pity you can't put sugar in it,' he added. 'Sugar stops it working.' He took a mouthful and shuddered all over.

'Why...?' Harry began.

Lupin looked at him and answered the question he hadn't finished.

'I've been a bit under the weather,' he said. 'This is the only thing that helps. I'm very lucky to be working with Professor Snape; there aren't many wizards who could brew it.'

Harry thought about the train. He thought about the grey face in the light of his handful of fire and the shine of sweat and the fist clenched white at Lupin's side, and the carriages, and the cloth wiping his forehead in the rain, and the first breakfast, and the hand on the teacup that hadn't been quite steady. And then he thought about the boggart lesson, and how well he'd looked that day, as if he'd slept for a week, and how ill he'd looked again since. It came and went. It came and went on a sort of rhythm, now he thought about it, like weather. Harry had never heard of a wizarding illness that did that. He supposed there were a great many he'd never heard of.

Professor Lupin took another mouthful, and Harry had a sudden, mad urge to knock the goblet out of his hand.

'Professor Snape's really interested in the Dark Arts,' he blurted out.

'Yes,' said Lupin. 'He reeks of it.'

It came out as a growl. Low and rough and harsh, from somewhere in Lupin's chest, and it was so unlike his ordinary voice that Harry nearly jumped. But Lupin's face was perfectly mild, and he was looking into his goblet, and Harry, after a moment, ploughed on.

'Some people reckon...' He hesitated, and then plunged. 'Some people reckon he'd do anything to get the Defence Against the Dark Arts job.'

Lupin drained the goblet and pulled a face.

'Revolting,' he said. He seemed to mean something more than the potion. He set the empty goblet down and looked at it, and then, for a moment, at the door Snape had gone out of, and then at the window, where the grey afternoon was beginning to go down over the Forest, and his face had a closed, tight, inward look, like a man listening to something a long way off. 'Well. Harry. I'd better get on with some work. I'll see you at the feast.'

'Right,' said Harry, putting down his mug.

The empty goblet was still smoking.

*

'There you go,' said Ron. 'We got as much as we could carry.'

A shower of brightly coloured sweets landed in Harry's lap. It was dusk. Ron and Hermione had just come in through the portrait hole, pink-cheeked from the wind and looking as though they'd had the best day of their lives.

'Thanks,' said Harry, picking up a packet of tiny black Pepper Imps. 'So? What's it like? Where'd you go?'

Everywhere, it sounded like. Dervish and Banges, where they sold wizarding instruments; Zonko's Joke Shop; the Three Broomsticks, for great foaming mugs of hot Butterbeer; and a dozen places besides.

'The post office, Harry! There must be two hundred owls, all on shelves, and they're all colour-coded for how fast you want your letter to go...'

'Honeydukes has got this new fudge, they were handing out samples, I saved you a bit, look...'

'We think we saw an ogre, honestly, all sorts go in the Three Broomsticks...'

'Wish we could've brought you some Butterbeer, it warms you right up...'

'Hermione bought you the biggest bar of Honeydukes Best they had,' said Ron. 'She made the man go and get it from the back. She said the ones on the front were too small.'

'Ron,' said Hermione, going pink.

'She did, though.' Ron dropped into the chair next to Harry. 'Eight Sickles. I saw.'

'Ron.'

Harry found the chocolate. It was the size of a roof slate. He looked at Hermione, and Hermione looked at the fire.

'Thanks, Hermione,' he said.

'It's nothing,' said Hermione. 'You had a horrible day. Did you? Have a horrible day? Did you get any work done?'

'No,' said Harry. 'Lupin made me a cup of tea in his office. And then Snape came in...'

He told them about the goblet. Ron's mouth fell open.

'Lupin drank it?' he said. 'Is he mad?'

'Mad? Maybe at Snape.' Harry frowned. 'He seemed kind of wary around Snape. He was polite one moment when he saw him. But when he was gone it was like he was holding himself back from something. He said Snape reeks of the Dark Arts. That seemed to really anger him.'

Hermione opened her mouth to say something, and then looked at her watch.

'We'd better go down. The feast'll be starting in five minutes...'

They went out through the portrait hole into the crowd, still talking about Snape.

'But if he... you know...' Hermione lowered her voice and looked round. 'If he was trying to... to poison Lupin... he wouldn't have done it in front of Harry. Would he?'

'Yeah, maybe,' said Harry, as they crossed the Entrance Hall and went into the Great Hall.

It had been done up with hundreds upon hundreds of pumpkins, every one with a candle burning inside it, and a cloud of live bats flittering about under the ceiling, and long streamers of flame-orange that swam slowly through the air across the stormy enchanted sky like bright sea-snakes. The food was wonderful. Even Ron and Hermione, who were stuffed to bursting with Honeydukes, managed second helpings of everything.

Harry kept looking up at the staff table. Professor Lupin seemed cheerful, and as well as he ever looked; he was talking away to little Professor Flitwick. Harry let his eyes drift along the table to where Snape was sitting. Was it his imagination, or did Snape's eyes keep sliding to Lupin, rather more often than they needed to?

And there was something else. Harry wasn't sure what made him notice it. Lupin was laughing at something Flitwick had said; and as he laughed, his eyes went up, briefly, to the enchanted ceiling, where the clouds were breaking up for a moment over the stormy dark, and something pale and round and full, or as near full as made no difference, was showing between them. And Lupin stopped laughing. Only for a second. He looked at the round pale thing in the enchanted sky the way Harry looked at Snape coming down the dungeon steps. Then he looked away, and picked up his goblet, and went on talking to Flitwick, and his hand round the goblet was white at the knuckles.

The feast ended with entertainment from the Hogwarts ghosts. They came gliding out of the walls and the tables and did some formation flying, and Nearly Headless Nick had a great success with a re-enactment of his own bungled beheading.

Malfoy mostly kept her distance.

She'd been keeping her distance all evening. Every time she came anywhere near the Gryffindor end of the table, Hermione went stiff, and her eyes followed her, and once, when Malfoy stopped beside the end of their bench to say something to Harry about the ghosts, Hermione said, not loudly but quite distinctly, 'Go away, Malfoy,' in a voice like something hissing in a pan.

Malfoy went away. She went at once, without a word, and without a sneer. She only looked at Harry, as she went: a small, rueful, patient look over her shoulder, with her eyebrows a little raised. You see, it said. You see what I mean. I was only being nice.

Harry saw.

'Hermione,' he said. 'Pack it in.'

'Pack what in?'

'That. With Malfoy. She wasn't doing anything. She came over to say the ghosts were good, and you hissed at her. Like a cat.'

'She wasn't just saying the ghosts were good, Harry, she was...'

'She was. I heard her.'

'You heard what she said.' Hermione had gone pink. 'That's not the same thing. That's not anywhere near the same thing. You don't...' She stopped, and pressed her lips together, and the stubborn look came down over her face like a portcullis, the same look she'd had over Crookshanks and Scabbers, and the same look she'd had for Lavender and the rabbit. 'I don't want to talk about it. Honestly. It doesn't matter.'

It did matter. Harry could see it mattered. But she'd decided, and when Hermione had decided there was no point.

It was a lovely evening, all the same. Even Crabbe and Goyle, pretending to be Dementors at him on the way out, swooping and moaning with their hands up their sleeves, couldn't spoil it.

They went up the marble staircase with the rest of the Gryffindors in a slow, full, happy crowd. Ron was ahead, arguing with Seamus about Zonko's. Hermione was beside Harry, quiet, with her arms folded.

'Harry,' she said, on the second landing.

'Mm?'

'Do you think I'm horrible?'

He looked at her. She wasn't looking at him. She was looking at the stairs in front of her feet, and her face in the torchlight was very serious, and her arms were folded so tight it looked as though they were holding something in.

'No,' he said. Then, because it was Hermione, and she'd always told him the truth even when he hadn't wanted it: 'I think you've been a bit horrible to her.'

Hermione was quiet for a few steps.

'I know,' she said. 'I know I have. I've been thinking about it.' She took a breath. 'I didn't used to be like this, Harry. I don't like it. I lie awake thinking about Lavender's face, and Ron's, and I think, that wasn't me, I don't do that, and then the next day she walks past and says something lovely to you in that voice and looks at me while she's saying it, and I...' She stopped. 'She's being horrible to me, Harry. And to you, I think. Just quietly. Just in a way you can't see. And I know you can't see it, and I know that makes me look awful, and I know you think she's trying. But I'm not wrong. I'm being horrible about it. I'm not wrong.'

Harry didn't know what to say to that. He didn't believe it, exactly. He didn't not believe it. He thought of Malfoy holding out a book to Neville on the stairs, and smiling, and then turning away to Daphne with her face going out like a lamp. And he thought of Malfoy giggling in the Entrance Hall behind her gloved hand, and that had been real, he was nearly sure that had been real. He didn't know how both of those could be the same girl.

'I'll try,' said Hermione, before he could answer. 'All right? I'll try and be nicer. To her. For you.' She unfolded her arms, and pushed her hair back, and gave him a small, determined, slightly wobbly smile. 'But I'm not going to like it.'

'Fair enough,' said Harry.

They'd caught up with the others. Ron looked back at them over his shoulder, and at Hermione's face, and at Harry's, and opened his mouth, and shut it again, and very sensibly didn't say anything at all.

They followed the rest of Gryffindor along the usual way to the Tower. But when they came round into the corridor that ended at the Fat Lady's portrait, they found it packed solid, wall to wall, with students who weren't going anywhere.

'What's the hold-up?' said Ron. 'Why's nobody going in?'

Harry looked over the heads in front of him. The portrait seemed to be shut.

'Let me through, please,' came Percy's voice, and he came shouldering importantly through the crowd. 'What's all this? You can't all have forgotten the password... excuse me... Head Boy, excuse me...'

And then a silence came back down the corridor from the front, row by row, like cold air from an opened door, until it reached them; and they heard Percy say, in a voice gone suddenly sharp and thin, 'Somebody get Professor Dumbledore. Now.'

Heads turned. People at the back stood on their toes.

'What's going on?' said Ginny, who'd just come up behind them.

A moment later Professor Dumbledore was there, coming fast through the crowd, which squeezed back against the walls to let him by, and Harry, Ron and Hermione edged forward behind him to see what was wrong.

'Oh... oh, no...' Hermione's hand closed on Harry's arm.

The Fat Lady was gone.

Her frame was there, gilt and heavy, where it always was. But the painting in it had been slashed to ribbons. Something had gone at it again and again, savagely, in long ripping strokes, so that strips of torn canvas hung down out of the frame like flayed skin and lay in curls all over the floor, and in places whole pieces had been wrenched out and the stone wall showed through behind. Of the Fat Lady herself, there was nothing left at all. Not a fold of her pink dress. Not a hair.

Dumbledore looked at the ruined painting once, quickly, and turned, and his face was grave, as Professors McGonagall, Lupin and Snape came hurrying up behind him.

'We must find her,' said Dumbledore. 'Professor McGonagall, would you go to Mr Filch at once, please, and ask him to search every painting in the castle for the Fat Lady.'

'Fat chance!'

The voice came cackling from overhead. It was Peeves, turning slow, delighted somersaults above the crowd, beaming the way he always beamed at a disaster.

'What do you mean, Peeves?' said Dumbledore quietly.

The grin slipped a fraction. Even Peeves didn't dare cheek Dumbledore. He put on instead a sort of greasy, sorrowful voice that was worse than his cackle.

'She's ashamed, Headmastership, sir. Won't let nobody see her. Torn to bits, she is. Seen her running through that big landscape up on the fourth floor, I did, sir, ducking and diving behind the trees. Sobbing her heart out,' he said, with relish. 'Poor old dear,' he added, not even trying to sound as if he meant it.

'Did she say who had done it?' said Dumbledore.

'Oh, yes, Professorship,' said Peeves, with the air of somebody about to drop something very heavy from a very great height. 'Wanted in, he did, and she wouldn't have it, and he didn't like that one bit.' He rolled over in the air and grinned down at Dumbledore upside down, from between his own knees.

'Shocking temper on him,' said Peeves. 'That Sirius Black.'

Harry didn't move.

Beside him, he felt Hermione's hand tighten on his arm until it hurt. And on his other side, Ron had stepped, without a word, half in front of him.

And across the corridor, by the wall, among the professors, Harry saw Professor Lupin. He wasn't looking at the portrait. He wasn't looking at Peeves. His head was up, and his nostrils were wide, and he was breathing in, slowly, deeply, the way you'd breathe in a smell you hadn't come across for a very long time and were trying to remember; and his face, in the torchlight, had gone completely white.