A Soft Answer

Professor Dumbledore sent all the Gryffindors back to the Great Hall, where they were joined ten minutes later by the rest of the school, every house of it, Hufflepuffs in dressing gowns and Ravenclaws clutching books they had no intention of reading and Slytherins looking around themselves as though the whole business were a personal inconvenience arranged by somebody common. The teachers were shutting the great doors. The enchanted ceiling was black and starless.

'The teachers and I must make a thorough search of the castle,' Dumbledore told them, as Professors McGonagall and Flitwick sealed every entrance to the Hall behind him. 'I'm afraid that, for everyone's safety, you will all spend the night here. The ghosts will carry word between us.' He paused at the doors. 'Should anything disturb you... anything at all... send for me at once.' He looked, as he said it, not at the crowd in general but along it, and for half a heartbeat Harry was quite sure the look stopped on him. 'I leave you in the capable hands of your Head Boy and Girl.'

He went out. The doors boomed shut behind him.

'You heard Professor Dumbledore!' Percy had come striding up the Hall before the echo died, and there was a new sheen on him, a sort of lacquer of importance, and Harry, watching him clap his hands at a knot of second-years, thought suddenly and irresistibly of Cornelius Fudge in the Leaky Cauldron: the same chin-up bustle, the same voice pitched to carry, the same air of a man whose deepest belief was that a crisis was chiefly an opportunity to be seen handling one. All Percy wanted was the lime-green bowler. 'Into your sleeping bags! No talking above a whisper! Lights out in ten minutes! Come along, come along!'

With a wave of Percy's wand, a wave he performed twice more than necessary, for the benefit of anyone who had missed it, the house tables went drifting to the walls, and several hundred squashy purple sleeping bags came tumbling out of nowhere across the floor.

'Over here,' Ron muttered, and the three of them dragged sleeping bags into the corner by the west wall, a little apart from everybody, where they could whisper.

'Do you think Black's still in the castle?' Hermione whispered, pulling her bag up to her chin.

'Dumbledore obviously thinks he might be,' said Ron.

'It's very lucky he picked tonight, you know,' said Hermione, sitting up on her elbow. 'The one night we weren't in the Tower...'

'I reckon he's lost track of time, being on the run,' said Ron. 'Didn't realise it was Halloween. Otherwise he'd have come bursting in here.'

Hermione shuddered.

All around them, under the whisper-hiss of three hundred voices, the same question was going up like midges: how had he got in?

'Maybe he knows how to Apparate,' a Ravenclaw was saying, a few feet off. 'Just appear out of thin air, you know.'

'Disguised himself, probably,' said a Hufflepuff.

'He could've flown in,' suggested Dean Thomas.

'Honestly, am I the only person who's ever bothered to read Hogwarts: A History?' said Hermione crossly, to Harry and Ron.

'Probably,' said Ron. 'Why?'

'Because the castle's protected by more than walls, you know. There are all sorts of enchantments on it, to stop people entering by stealth. You can't just Apparate in here. And I'd like to see the disguise that could fool those Dementors. They're guarding every single entrance to the grounds. They'd have seen him fly in, too. And Filch knows all the secret passages, they'll have them covered...'

'The lights are going out now!' Percy called, from the middle of the Hall. 'I want everyone in their sleeping bags and no more talking!'

The candles went out all at once. The only light now came from the silvery ghosts, drifting about the Hall talking seriously to the prefects, and from the enchanted ceiling, which, like the sky outside, was scattered tonight with ragged cloud and a handful of cold stars. Between that, and the whispering that still filled the Hall, Harry felt as though he were sleeping outdoors in a low wind.

He lay on his back, looking at the stars, and tried not to think about the slashed canvas where the Fat Lady should have been, and found that what came instead was worse: a man outside a dark church, a raw-boned dog the size of a bear, a voice through a bedroom wall at the Leaky Cauldron, he's at Hogwarts, he's at Hogwarts, and underneath all of it, steady as a drum, the thought that would not lie down: he got in. Past the Dementors, past the walls, past all of it. He got in, and if the Fat Lady had opened the door, he'd have been waiting in the common room when we came up from the feast.

Something rustled.

Harry turned his head, and found Dracina Malfoy six feet away and approaching.

She was doing it without getting up. She had got herself into her sleeping bag over by the Slytherin side, where Pansy and Daphne were, and she was now moving across the floor of the Great Hall inside it, in a series of slow, deliberate, wriggling heaves, like a caterpillar: hunch, stretch, pause, look around innocently at the ceiling; hunch, stretch, pause. Her plaits were coming down out of their pins. It was, Harry thought, watching in fascination, possibly the least dignified thing he had ever seen a Malfoy do, and she was doing it with her chin up, as though it were a procession.

She came to rest in the gap between Harry and Ron, hunched once more to straighten herself, and settled, facing the ceiling, with her hands folded on her chest like a stone queen on a tomb.

Ron raised his head and stared at her across her own sleeping bag.

'What,' he said, with awful restraint, 'are you doing?'

'Sleeping,' said Malfoy. 'It's night. One sleeps.'

'You were over there.'

'And now I'm over here.' She didn't look at him. 'I've given it careful thought, Weasley, and I've concluded that if a mass murderer's going to be wandering about the castle, the safest place to sleep is with the boy who saved my life from a basilisk. That's simply strategy. You may stay if you like.'

'May I? Thanks very much. Seeing as I was here first.' Ron propped himself up on one elbow. 'And you've got some nerve bringing up the basilisk, considering you're the one who unleashed the bloody thing.'

Malfoy's head came round. Her eyes went narrow, and her mouth opened, and Harry, who had been on the receiving end, braced for it.

It didn't come. He watched her catch it. He watched her take whatever it was and swallow it whole, the way you'd swallow medicine, and compose her face, and fold her hands again.

'That,' she said, with dignity, 'is a fair point, Weasley, and I shan't pretend it isn't. I behaved very badly last year, and you all behaved very well. You were brave, and Granger was clever, and Potter was...' She paused. The pause went on slightly too long. 'Potter was Potter,' she finished, in a voice that had gone somewhat quieter, 'and that's the highest mark I award. Goodnight.'

Ron lay back down. He looked at the ceiling with the expression of a man who has been handed a hatbox and told it is ticking but probably fine.

There was another rustle, much softer, on Harry's left.

Hermione had moved too. She'd done it the sensible way, standing up and carrying her sleeping bag the four steps over, and she laid it down beside Harry's with great precision, as though parking, and got into it, and said nothing at all. Her face was perfectly calm. There was a muscle going in her jaw.

Harry lay in the middle and felt, suddenly and acutely, like the filling in a sandwich.

The whispering of the Hall washed over them. On his right, Malfoy lay gazing at the enchanted stars with her hands folded, radiating serenity the way a stove radiates heat. On his left, Hermione had taken out her wand and was checking it, and putting it away, and checking it again. Past her, Ron had sat up and was silently and laboriously dragging his own sleeping bag through a quarter-turn, so that he lay crossways above all their heads like the lid of a box, where, Harry realised, he could see both girls at once.

'Did you want something, Granger?' Malfoy asked the ceiling, pleasantly.

'No,' said Hermione, also to the ceiling, also pleasantly. 'I always sleep next to my friends. One does, you know. Friends.'

'Mm,' said Malfoy. 'How cosy.'

'Isn't it.'

The temperature in their corner of the Great Hall dropped by several degrees, in defiance of three hundred warm bodies. Somewhere above his head Harry heard Ron exhale through his nose, slowly, like a man letting himself down a rope.

'You know,' said Harry, to no one and everyone, 'if Black does turn up, all he's going to have to do is stand there. You two'll kill each other first and save him the bother.'

'Harry,' said Hermione, stung.

'Well, honestly...' And it went through him, out of nowhere, the hot-water surge of it, up from somewhere under his ribs, the Fat Lady in ribbons, Black inside the walls, the whole school packed in one room like tinned fish, and his friends, his own friends, sniping at each other over the top of him as though none of it were happening, and he heard his own voice come out of him flat and hard and ugly. 'A man came here to kill me tonight, Hermione. Actually here. Actually tonight. Sorry if I can't get worked up about the seating plan.'

Silence. A real one.

He was sorry before it had finished leaving his mouth. Hermione had gone very still in her sleeping bag, and in the ghost-light he could see her blinking hard at the ceiling, and he thought of her hand on his arm by the ruined portrait, gripping until it hurt, and the way she'd gone white to the lips, and he thought: she heard Peeves too. She's as scared as I am. She's scared for me, you idiot, that's why she's lying here with her wand out.

'Hermione.' He got his arm out of the sleeping bag and reached over and put his hand on her shoulder, awkwardly, the way she'd done for him on the night of a hundred bad nights. 'Sorry. I didn't mean it. I'm glad you're there. Honest.'

Hermione put her own hand up and held on to his fingers, briefly, hard.

'You're allowed to be horrible,' she whispered. 'Tonight. A bit.'

'Cheers.'

'I'll make a note of the date,' came Ron's voice, very low, from above their heads. 'Mark it on the calendar. "Harry Was Horrible Day." Annual feast.'

Harry grinned in the dark, and heard Hermione give a wet little laugh, and felt her let go.

He did not see, because he had turned his head to Hermione, and because it was dark, and because Dracina Malfoy had an excellent view of his turned back, the way the girl on his right came up, in one silent movement, onto her elbow. He did not see her look down across him at Hermione's hand on his, nor the thing that happened to her face while she looked, which was not temper, and had nothing hot in it at all. Temper would have been better. This was a long, flat, thoughtful stillness, the stillness of somebody standing in a bright warm room making a list, and if Harry had seen it he would not have slept. He didn't see it.

Ron did. Ron, lying crossways in the dark, saw the whole thing over the top of his sleeping bag, and lay there afterwards with his heart going, thinking, with great clarity: I am thirteen years old. I should not have to be doing this.

By midnight, the Hall had mostly gone under. The whispering had died to a hiss, then to breathing. The ghosts came and went, silver over the sleeping-bag rows like moonlight over furrows. Percy stalked the aisles with his wand lit, pausing occasionally to deduct imaginary points from the unconscious.

Harry couldn't sleep. He lay watching the clouds cross the enchanted ceiling and listening to his own heart, and the anger kept ticking over in him, low and steady, like a car left running: the Dursleys, who had signed nothing; the bars that had been on his window; Black, who had slashed an old painted lady to rags for the crime of being in his way...

'Potter.'

It was barely a breath. Malfoy had turned on her side to face him, her cheek on her folded hands, her grey eyes a gleam in the dark.

'You're not asleep,' she whispered.

'Can't think why not. Lovely evening.'

'Don't be flippant. It doesn't suit you.' A pause. 'It does suit you. That's beside the point. I wanted to say something, and the others are asleep, so I'm saying it now. I've been thinking about your Muggles.'

'Dracina-'

'I've been thinking about them,' she went on, over him, in a whisper with iron in it, 'because everyone in this room's frightened tonight, and I watched you when Peeves said the name, and you weren't frightened, you were tired, and I've worked out why. This' - a small movement of her chin took in the whole dark Hall, the huddled bags, the sealed doors, the teachers walking the corridors overhead - 'isn't strange to you. Sleeping somewhere wrong, because somewhere out there's a person who means you harm, and the grown-ups say stay there and be quiet and nobody tells you anything. You've done all this before. You did it for years, in that house, in that cupboard, and nobody conjured you a sleeping bag or set a single teacher at the door.' Her whisper had gone slightly ragged. She stopped, and steadied it. 'And every person in this castle sleeps better tonight because Dumbledore's awake, and I find I can't stop thinking about the fact that nobody was ever awake for you. That's all. That's what I wanted to say. I'm not being kind, I'm being accurate.'

Harry lay looking at her. There was a feeling in his chest he couldn't name, warm and sore at once, like the ache after Quidditch.

'You're very strange,' he whispered. 'You know that?'

'I'm a Malfoy. We're not strange. Everyone else is common.' But the gleam of her eyes had softened, and for a while neither of them said anything, and the Hall breathed around them.

'Can I ask you something?' Harry said at last. 'Your father.'

She went still.

'What about him?'

'Is it like that for you?' He didn't know how to put it, so he put it badly. 'At home. You said nobody was ever awake for me. Is anybody... I mean-' He gave up on grammar. 'That day in the staffroom. The boggart. That's what I'm asking about, and you can tell me to shut up.'

For a long moment he thought she would. Her face in the darkness had shut like a door; and then, slowly, it did something he'd never seen it do, which was open again.

'No,' she said quietly. 'It isn't like that for me. That's the strange thing, Potter. I've been lying here composing a speech about how alike we are, you in your cupboard and I in my great cold house, and it would have been a very good speech, and it isn't true.' She said the last word as though it tasted odd. 'My father's never raised his hand to me. My mother sent our owl across three counties because she worked out when your birthday was and I was too proud to ask. I've a room the size of your Gryffindor common room and a broom that cost more than Weasley's house and when I was eight and afraid of the peacocks, my father went out on the lawn and moved the peacocks. They spoil me. I'm lying in a sleeping bag on a stone floor, which I'm given to understand is what having friends is like, and I'm discovering, in the middle of the night, that the only thing wrong with my childhood is that at the end of every corridor of it is him, with that face, saying second again. And I used to think that was everything in the world. And after the staffroom... after what you all saw...' She took a breath. Her whisper dropped so low he had to read half of it off her lips. 'Potter. There's something I've been wanting to tell you since June, and it's about the diary, and I think, actually, that if I don't say it now I never shall-'

'Lights OUT,' hissed Percy, materialising over them like a long pyjama-clad hawk, wand glaring. 'That is the THIRD time I have passed this corner. One more word, any of you, and it's detention... I don't care whose team you're on or whose daughter you are... some of us have a crisis to administrate!'

And he swept away down the rows, robe billowing, deducting points from the dark.

Malfoy lay back down.

'Tomorrow,' Harry breathed.

But she had closed her eyes, and her face was a closed door again, with the key turned; and whatever had stood on the step of being said went back inside, and Harry fell asleep without knowing what it was, and dreamed, not of Black, as he'd expected, but of a bright warm morning at the Burrow that kept trying to turn into a church.

He surfaced once, hours later, out of the black shallows of the night, to the sound of grown-up voices.

The Hall was dark and still. The stars had wheeled over on the ceiling. By the doors, a single lamp: Percy, and with him, tall in a nightcap the sight of which would ordinarily have kept Fred and George in material for a year, Professor Dumbledore. Harry kept his eyes almost shut and lay like stone. Around him, three hundred sleepers breathed.

'Any sign of him, Professor?' Percy was whispering.

'None. All's quiet here?'

'Everything under control, sir. I have the situation well in hand.'

'Good. There's little point moving them all now; they're better asleep.' Dumbledore glanced down the dark rows, and his voice, though it did not change its level, changed its weight. 'We've found no trace of him in the castle.'

A door creaked, somewhere behind the staff table, and quick steps came across the stone. Snape.

'Headmaster.' His voice was pitched for Dumbledore alone; Harry, thirty feet away in the dark, had to stop breathing to hear it. 'The whole of the third floor's been searched. He's not there. Filch has done the dungeons; nothing.'

'What about the Astronomy tower? Professor Trelawney's room? The Owlery?'

'All searched.'

'Very well, Severus. I didn't really expect Black to linger.'

'Have you a theory as to how he got in, Professor?' asked Snape.

'Many, Severus. Each of them as unlikely as the last.'

Harry opened his eyes a fraction. Snape stood half in and half out of the lamplight, and his face was turned towards Dumbledore, and there was something in it that Harry had never seen there before: something urgent, and pressing, and almost, if the word could be used of Snape, afraid.

'You remember the conversation we had, Headmaster, just before... ah... the start of term?' He was barely moving his lips; he looked, Harry thought, like a man trying to speak without waking a patient.

'I do, Severus,' said Dumbledore, and there was something like warning in his voice.

'It seems... almost impossible... that Black could have entered the school without inside help. I did express my concerns when you appointed-'

'I do not believe a single person inside this castle would have helped Black enter it,' said Dumbledore, and his tone made it so clear that the subject was closed that Snape didn't reply. 'I must go down to the Dementors,' Dumbledore went on. 'I said I would inform them when our search was complete.'

'Didn't they want to help, sir?' said Percy.

'Oh yes,' said Dumbledore coldly. 'But I'm afraid no Dementor will cross the threshold of this castle while I am Headmaster.'

He went. Snape stood a moment where he was, looking after him, and on his face was a look of deep resentment; and then he too was gone, and the lamp with them, and the Hall sank back into the dark.

Harry lay with his eyes shut and his mind going like a Snitch. Inside help. I did express my concerns when you appointed- Appointed whom? The sentence had been cut off like a thread, and the end of it had gone wherever Dracina's sentence had gone, into the great hall of things people did not finish saying to him; but there was only one of Dumbledore's new appointments that Snape could have been objecting to, and Harry had drunk his tea.

He turned the thought over, and over, and hated it, and couldn't put it down; and somewhere between one turning and the next, sleep took him anyway.

He never knew, being asleep, that in the greyest hour of the night, when even Percy had propped himself against the doors and begun to nod, the sleeping bag on his right rustled once; and a hand came out of it, small and white in the starlight, and crossed the cold stone between them, and came to rest on his right shoulder, which was the shoulder she had hidden her face against in the staffroom; and stayed there, lightly, all the rest of the night, the way you'd keep one hand on a thing in a crowded place, so that nobody could take it from you while you slept.

Harry didn't see it.

But Ron did.

Ron, waking cold and cramped in the smallest hours, lifted his head out of his sleeping bag and saw it: Malfoy fast asleep with her arm stretched out across the gap, her hand on Harry's shoulder, her face, in sleep, with all the Malfoy gone out of it; and on Harry's other side Hermione, also fast asleep, curled towards him like a bracket, her wand still in her fist; and Harry between them, dead to the world, guarded like a relic.

Ron looked at this arrangement for a long time.

He thought about the Chamber, and a sword that had come out of a hat because somebody had to hold it, and he found himself wondering, not for the first time since June, whether Somebody up there was looking after Harry Potter, and then he looked again at the two sleeping girls, one of whom had unleashed a basilisk at the school and the other of whom had a collection of vampire pictures, and decided that if Somebody up there was running Harry's protection detail, He had a very funny way of choosing staff.

'Nah,' Ron said, to the enchanted ceiling.

The stars said nothing. Ron pulled his sleeping bag up over his ears, moved himself an inch nearer Harry on general principles, and went back to sleep on watch, the way dogs do, with one ear up.

*

There was no sign of Sirius Black anywhere in the castle, and by Sunday evening the school had settled back into its towers and dormitories, all except Gryffindor House, who couldn't get into theirs until the staff had found somebody willing to take the Fat Lady's job.

It proved harder than it sounded. The Fat Lady herself had been found at last, Filch reported, two floors up in a painting of some Tuscan hills, wedged behind a cypress tree and refusing to come out; and the news of what had happened to her had gone round every frame in the castle by breakfast. Painted people, it turned out, could be frightened just like real ones. Portraits all over Hogwarts were standing-room only, their inhabitants having crowded in with friends for safety, and when Professor McGonagall went down the gallery on the third floor asking for a volunteer, an entire painted dinner party got up and left through the back of its own canvas rather than answer her.

Only one picture in the whole school offered.

'That's because he's a nutter,' said Seamus Finnigan, with feeling, two days later, as Sir Cadogan challenged the entire queue for the common room to single combat, fell over his own sword, and came up through the grass of his painting shouting that it was a flesh wound.

Sir Cadogan spent half his time challenging people to duels and the rest of it inventing passwords of fiendish complexity, which he changed at least twice a day, apparently from tactical principles. 'Scurvy braggart' got you in on Monday morning but not by Monday lunchtime; by Wednesday the whole of Gryffindor House was going about with lists.

'He's barking,' said Ron. 'Can't we get him sacked?'

'Nobody else would take the job,' said Hermione, scanning her list. 'Oddsbodikins. And honestly, I don't blame them. The Fat Lady only had to deal with people who'd forgotten the password. This one knows he might have to deal with Black.' She said the name briskly, the way she said everything now, and didn't look at Harry as she said it.

That was the other thing. Everybody was looking at Harry, and everybody was pretending not to, and nobody was any good at it.

The news that Sirius Black was after him, him particularly, him by name, had gone through the school like ink through water. Harry never found out how it got loose; he only knew that by Tuesday, conversations were stopping when he came round corners, and starting again, lower, when he'd passed, and that people had taken to walking behind him in the corridors in a sort of accidental-on-purpose convoy. The teachers were worse. They had clearly been given instructions. Professor Flitwick developed a sudden passionate interest in Harry's route to Charms and accompanied him there twice, chatting brightly, barely up to Harry's elbow; Professor Sprout, who taught in a greenhouse at the bottom of the grounds, somehow kept being on the front steps whenever Harry crossed the Entrance Hall; and Percy, Percy was beyond anything.

Percy tailed him. Percy had appointed himself, or possibly been appointed by his mother, whose latest letter he had been seen reading at breakfast with the set face of a soldier receiving orders, and he now shadowed Harry about the castle at a distance of exactly four paces, like an extremely pompous sheepdog. He did it during break. He did it between lessons. He stood outside the door when Harry went to the toilet, and once, when Harry stopped dead in the middle of an empty corridor just to see what would happen, Percy stopped dead too, four paces back, and examined a tapestry of trolls in tutus with the frowning attention of a man at a gallery.

'I can see you, Percy.'

'I've no idea what you mean,' said Percy, to the trolls. 'I happen to be patrolling. Head Boy duties. The route is confidential.'

It all made Harry feel as though the walls had grown eyes, kind eyes, worried eyes, but eyes, hundreds of them, everywhere, always, and the anger, which had been ticking over in him since the summer like a car left running, began, very quietly, to rev.

He was angry at odd times now, and at odd things. He was angry at the whispering, and angry at Percy's footsteps, and angry, with a hot, useless, ridiculous anger, at a letter that arrived on Wednesday from Aunt Petunia, the first in his life, which said, in six lines, that they had been contacted by the authorities of your school, that they had been assured the matter is being handled, that it was no more than they had always expected of that world, and that under no circumstances was he to think of coming here for Christmas as they would be away. He read it twice and burned it on a candle at the Gryffindor table, and was savagely pleased when it flared, and then sat looking at the little heap of ash with his heart going and no idea what he had wanted the letter to say instead.

A man is coming to kill your nephew. Noted, with thanks. We shall be away.

'Harry?' said Hermione.

'Fine,' said Harry.

He got up and went to Transfiguration the long way, alone, which he was not supposed to do, through the disused corridor on the fourth floor where the suits of armour had been taken away for cleaning and never brought back. Percy's footsteps had been left behind at the stairs. The quiet was wonderful.

Halfway along it, he slowed.

He had come this way perhaps twice in three years, and he had never once looked at the paintings, which were old and brown and unpopular, the castle's attic, Fred called this corridor, where they hung the pictures nobody wanted. And he didn't know what made him look now, except that one of them had a fire in it, and the fire was moving.

It was a big, dark canvas, cracked all over like a dry riverbed, and it showed two men in rough clothes on a bare hillside, each standing over a little altar of piled stones. They had their backs to each other. On the first altar something was burning cleanly, the painted smoke going up in a straight white feather to the top of the frame. On the second altar the fire had gone to sullen embers, and its smoke crawled away sideways along the ground like a grass snake, and the man who stood over it was looking not at his own altar but over his shoulder at his brother's (Harry was suddenly sure they were brothers.), with his fists at his sides and his face half lost in brown varnish, and what there was of the face was not good to look at.

Harry stood in front of it, late for Transfiguration, unable to say why he'd stopped.

'His burned and mine didn't,' said the man with the fists.

His voice was like the corridor: dusty, unused. He didn't turn round. Painted smoke crawled past his feet.

'Every day the same.' The man's fists worked. 'His goes up and mine goes along the ground, and no one will tell me why. Is that fair, boy? You tell me. Is that fair?'

'No,' said Harry, honestly, thinking of signed forms, and Christmases, and a motorbike he could only hear. 'Doesn't sound like it.'

'No,' said the man, with hungry satisfaction, and his head began to come round, and Harry found he did not want to see the face when it arrived, and that it was too late. The eyes were only paint, cracked paint in a brown shadow, and they fixed on Harry all the same. 'That's what I say. That's what I tell him, boy, every day, lying there at my door.'

Harry's skin crawled. 'What does? Lying where?'

'At the door.' The painted man's voice dropped; he said it the way you'd mention a dog asleep on the step, something of the household, something fed. 'It came the first day the smoke went wrong, and it's lain at my door-sill ever since, waiting on me. It's a patient thing, boy, I'll say that for it. It wants me.' The cracked eyes didn't blink; paint can't. 'And the voice says I'm to be master over it. That's all the help I get, from Him that likes my brother's smoke better. Rule over it, He says. No word of how.'

The embers on the second altar shifted and settled. Along at the end of the corridor a bell rang, muffled, in another world where Harry was now very late indeed.

'And did you?' Harry asked. His own voice came out strange. 'Rule over it?'

The man looked at him for a long time. Beyond him, at the other altar, the brother stood with his back turned, in the straight white light of his accepted fire, and it occurred to Harry, with a crawling up his spine, that the painter had given the brother no face at all, that there was a reason. That the reason was in the fists of the man in front of him, and had already happened, somewhere out beyond the edge of the frame, in the part of the story the picture was only the beginning of.

'You're angry, boy,' said the painted man softly. 'I can always tell. It's a smell in your blood, like rain coming. Mind the door-sill.'

And he turned back to his sullen altar, and wouldn't say another word; and Harry walked the rest of the empty corridor rather fast, and was eight minutes late for Transfiguration, and couldn't have told anybody, that day or afterwards, why he minded so much that he hadn't been able to see the brother's face. The story was in something, he thought. Something he'd half heard, somewhere, long ago, through a cupboard door while a television prattled about sheep and altars; or in the church smell of candle smoke; he couldn't place it. It itched at him all through Switching Spells.

Professor McGonagall kept him back after the lesson.

'I shan't keep you long, Potter.' She waited until the last of the class had gone, then sat on the edge of her desk, which was not a thing Professor McGonagall did, and looked at him over her square spectacles. 'There's no kind way to say this, so I'll say it plainly. The staff have been informed, and I think you have a right to know it too, whatever the Headmaster-' she stopped herself. 'Black's purpose in entering the castle on Saturday night is not thought to be a mystery. We believe you are his object, Potter. You specifically.'

'Yes, Professor. I'd worked that out.'

'I rather thought you might.' Her mouth went thin, but her eyes behind the spectacles were not thin at all. 'Then you'll understand what I'm about to say next. Until further notice, you're not to go about the castle alone after dark, you're not to leave the building unaccompanied at any hour, and I am suspending your evening Quidditch practices-'

'Suspending?' The word came out of him like a Bludger. 'Professor, the match is Saturday! I've got to train!'

'-suspending them,' said Professor McGonagall, with the ghost of a raised eyebrow, 'unless they are supervised by a member of staff. Which they will be. I've spoken to Madam Hooch; she'll oversee every session. Wood has the schedule.' She paused. 'I was on the house team myself, Potter. I have no intention of losing to Hufflepuff because our Seeker couldn't train. I do have every intention of our Seeker being alive to play.'

Harry breathed again. 'Yes, Professor. Thanks.'

'Don't thank me. Keep to the rules I've just set.' She looked at him a moment longer, and something in her face suggested the next question cost her an effort. 'Well? Most boys your age would be arguing by now. Have you nothing to say about being watched over like the Crown Jewels?'

'No, Professor. I've learnt the best thing to do when a wizard is trying to kill me is to go off and get a teacher,' said Harry. 'I may even make it in time before Sirius Black strangles me.'

Professor McGonagall's mouth did something sudden and complicated and was immediately brought under control, though not quite fast enough, and she had to take her spectacles off and polish them.

'Out, Potter,' she said, to the lenses.

Harry went. And if he had looked back at the door (he didn't) he would have seen the strictest teacher at Hogwarts shaking her head slowly, with her hand over her mouth; and on her face, between the amusement and the exasperation, something older and sadder that had known another boy who joked exactly like that, in exactly that flat offhand voice, about exactly the people who wanted him dead.

The strange thing, all that week, back in the restored safety of Gryffindor Tower with Sir Cadogan audibly challenging the night itself to combat somewhere below, was Hermione.

Hermione was keeping her promise.

He'd watched her do it all week, and it was like watching somebody learn to swim in cold water: deliberate, dogged, one gasping stroke at a time. On Monday, outside Potions, Malfoy had said

'Good morning, Granger,' in the bright scripted voice she used for it.

She was clearly expecting the usual stony nothing. Yet Hermione had taken a visible breath and said 'Good morning' back, and Malfoy had been so surprised she'd walked into the door jamb. On Wednesday, when Malfoy's inkwell cracked in Charms and bled blue all over her notes, Hermione's hand had gone up before anyone else's with a neat Scourgify, and she'd passed her own spare quill across the aisle, and said, 'Keep it. I've lots.' And on Thursday, at lunch, in front of the whole Gryffindor table, she had looked up from the Prophet and said, conversationally, as though it were nothing, 'That plait's nice, Malfoy. The way you've done it round. It suits you.'

It wasn't warm, exactly. It was courteous, and careful, and it had the slightly stiff perfection of a thing practised in front of a mirror. But she was doing it, every day, stroke after stroke, and Harry, who knew exactly what the water was like, because she'd told him on the stairs with her arms folded tight, thought he had never liked her more.

The trouble was that Malfoy kept raising the stakes.

Every courtesy of Hermione's was returned the next day with interest, publicly, at volume. The quill came back wrapped in ribbon, with a note in small spiky handwriting conveying the compliments of Miss D. Malfoy. The remark about the plait earned Hermione, at breakfast the following morning, in front of three tables, a loud and gracious 'Granger, I've been meaning to say... that essay Flitwick read out was the cleverest thing anyone's produced in this school all term, and I've told my entire house so.' By Friday, Malfoy had taken to greeting Hermione with the particular radiant esteem that duchesses in paintings reserved for other duchesses they were poisoning, and Hermione was returning it with the same, and the pair of them were escalating one courtesy at a time towards something that had no name but had a definite smell, like a storm coming in off the sea.

'It's good, though,' Harry said to Ron, watching Malfoy sweep past the Gryffindor table with a queenly nod, watching Hermione incline her head back like a visiting ambassador. 'Isn't it? They're getting on. Sort of. Aren't they?'

Ron looked at him.

Ron put down his fork, and looked at him, for a long moment, with the expression of a man standing on a beach watching his friend admire the lovely way the water was all going out at once.

'Yeah,' he said. 'Sort of.'

And one evening that week, when Harry was most of the way up the boys' staircase and out of sight, Ron stood at the bottom of it with the firelight on his face, and the portrait hole behind him, the memory upon him, plainly, visibly upon him, for anyone who'd been there to look, of a hand coming out of a sleeping bag in the dark; and he was heard, by Neville coming down with his toad, to say, quietly and with great finality, to nobody at all:

'I swear it. Before Merlin, and maybe even God. Somebody's got to look after him, and the womenfolk are not to be trusted.'

'All right, Ron?' said Neville nervously.

'No,' said Ron, and went up to bed.

*

Oliver Wood came looking for Harry on Wednesday, and found him in the common room, and the look on his face emptied the armchairs around the fire faster than a dungbomb.

'What?' said Harry. 'What's happened?'

Wood sat down. He put his head in his hands. He was a big, square, weatherproof sort of person, and watching him fold up like that was like watching a shed fall over.

'We're not playing Slytherin!' he said. 'Flint's just been to see me. We're playing Hufflepuff.'

A ring of Gryffindors had gathered. Fred and George came over the back of a sofa.

'Why?' said half a dozen voices at once.

'Flint's excuse is their Seeker's arm,' said Wood, through his teeth. 'Says she's still not fit. Says they can't risk her in this weather, with the injury, and the match'll have to wait till Slytherin can field their proper side.'

He raised his head, and his eyes were slightly mad.

'It's been two months. Two months! There is nothing wrong with that arm... I've seen her at their practices, I've watched her, she took a rampaging Bludger on it a fortnight ago, caught herself one-handed off the roll and never so much as blinked... and the moment the forecast says storm, out comes the sling and the brave little face! It's obvious why they're doing it, isn't it? Play us in this weather and their chances go down; sit it out, and we have to open the season in a hurricane against a side we've not trained for. They think we're mugs.'

There was an angry mutter all round the fire. And then, Harry felt it happen, felt it travel round the circle like a draught: one by one, everybody looked at him.

It had got about, of course. Everything got about at Hogwarts. Nobody on the team had ever said anything to his face beyond the occasional remark of Fred's, but they all knew whose arms Malfoy had fallen into in Hagrid's paddock back in September, and who she said good morning to in the Entrance Hall, and whose name she'd been heard to award top marks to in the Great Hall in the middle of the night, because forty people had been lying awake listening; and now the whole of Gryffindor's Quidditch team was looking at Harry Potter with an air of polite scientific enquiry, as the acknowledged leading expert in the field of Dracina Malfoy's arm.

'What?' said Harry.

'Are you sure of that, Harry?' said Wood.

'Am I... me? How would I know?'

Nobody answered. Angelina examined the ceiling. George examined Harry, with his head on one side, like a blackbird listening to a lawn.

'Y-yeah,' said Harry, going red and hating himself for the stammer, 'she's being a wind up on purpose, I suppose. The arm's fine. It's been fine for ages. She just... she likes the drama of it,' he finished, wretchedly, aware of how it sounded, aware of Fred's slowly spreading grin, aware that somewhere in the castle Dracina Malfoy was probably rubbing that exact silk sling and cackling. 'It's a prop. She's milking it.'

Wood sighed.

It was a long sigh, a deep one, the sigh of a captain who has just had his star Seeker confirm that the opposing Seeker's medical condition is best described as theatre, and that the fixture list of the entire season has been rearranged by means of a costume.

'Right,' he said. 'Well. There it is. Thanks, Harry.'

'There's nothing wrong with her arm,' said Fred, to the room at large. 'I can back Harry up on this, as it happens, from direct observation. Tuesday dinner. I watched her pass a full salt shaker the length of the Slytherin table with it. The injured arm. Full shaker, mind... this was no empty-shaker pass... and then she catches me watching, right, and she winces, and puts it back in the sling.' He shook his head, with real admiration. 'The nerve of it. You've got to hand it to her.'

'You've got to hand everything to her,' said George. 'That's what the sling's for.'

'The POINT IS,' bellowed Wood, standing up so fast his chair went over, and the whole common room snapped round, 'that it changes everything! We've trained a month for Slytherin... Slytherin tactics, Slytherin tricks, marking their Chasers... and now it's Hufflepuff, in three days, in weather you wouldn't send an owl out in! We are on thin bloody ice, the lot of us, and nobody in this house seems to grasp it!' He righted the chair, breathing hard, and sat back down on the very edge of it. 'And don't any of you dare think Hufflepuff's the soft option. They've got a new captain who plays Seeker... Cedric Diggory-'

The reaction from the girls' end of the circle was immediate and dreadful. Angelina, Alicia and Katie all made the same small sound at the same time, like three kettles coming on.

'Oh, Cedric Diggory,' said Katie. 'He's that tall one. Fifth year.'

'The quiet one,' said Alicia. 'Strong and quiet.'

'He's quiet,' said Fred, 'because his head's solid oak all through, like a sideboard. Knock on it and you can hear the echo in Hogsmeade.'

'He's a fine flier, is what he is,' said Wood grimly, 'and he's built like the side of a barn, and in a headwind that matters... he'll sit steady in gusts that'll throw Harry halfway to the Forest. I'm not having complacency. Gryffindor against Hufflepuff, everyone thinks it's a walkover, and that thinking is how walkovers go the other way. We flatten them. Flatten them. Nothing less. Practice tonight, seven o'clock, full kit, and I don't care,' he finished, glaring round at the streaming black windows, 'if it's coming down frogs.'

It very nearly was.

The fine spell had broken in the night, and the weather had come down off the mountains with its sleeves rolled up. For three days the castle stood in a grey roar of rain; the lake rose and chopped at its banks, the Forest bent and thrashed, and the Quidditch pitch turned to a brown soup through which the Gryffindor team splashed, evening after evening, under orders, while the wind tried to take them off their brooms and Madam Hooch, true to Professor McGonagall's word, stood wrapped in oilskins in the stands with her lit wand and her whistle, overseeing, like the last lighthouse keeper in the world.

It was the hardest flying Harry had ever done. The rain blinded him, the cold got into the bones of his hands, and the wind was a living thing with opinions; twice it simply picked him up, Nimbus and all, and put him down thirty feet from where he'd been going. The Snitch, on the one occasion Wood released it, was lost inside a minute and recovered only when it blundered, half drowned, into Katie's hood.

And still, nearly every evening, through all of it, one red-haired shape sat alone at the top of the stands under an umbrella that had blown inside out on the first night and never been repaired, watching.

'You don't have to, mate,' Harry told him, wringing out his gloves after the Wednesday session, while Ron stood steaming gently by the changing-room stove. 'It's foul out there. Watch from the Tower.'

'Can't see the whole pitch from the Tower,' said Ron, as if that settled something, and wouldn't be budged, and walked him back up to the castle through the streaming dark with his wand lit, four paces closer than Percy and worth forty of him.

It was on the Thursday that Harry met the Slytherin team.

He'd been sent to return the tactics slate to Madam Hooch's office by the pitch, with Dean for company under the McGonagall rules, and the Slytherins were coming up the path from their own training session as he came down it: seven large damp shapes in green, Flint in front, and at the back, escorted on either side like visiting royalty and dressed in a hooded cloak of deep green with the famous arm arranged in its black silk sling upon her breast, Dracina Malfoy.

She saw him. Harry watched her see him, and watched the whole production company swing into action.

Her step faltered. Her good hand came up and crossed to the slung arm, and touched it, tenderly, as one touches an old wound when rain is coming. Her chin lifted, bravely. A strand of pale hair was permitted to escape the hood and blow across her face, tragically. By the time the two parties drew level on the path she had become every wounded maiden on every book cover in Flourish and Blotts, right down to the faint sweet sorrowing smile, and she said, in a carrying voice, 'No... don't trouble about me, Potter... I do so hope the weather clears for your match,' and swayed very slightly, so that Montague, the Slytherin Chaser, had to put out a hand.

Harry laughed.

He hadn't meant to. It came up out of him like a cork out of water, the sheer barefaced craft of it, the salt shaker, the fortnight-old Bludger, the whole two-month theatrical run of that sling, and he stood there on the streaming path and laughed, and shook his head, and said, 'How is the arm, Malfoy? Only Madam Pomfrey says bones knit in a night, and that's the longest night I've ever heard of.'

For a second, half a second, the maiden wavered, and underneath her was a girl of thirteen fighting a grin and losing. The grin got one corner of her mouth. She turned it, with great professionalism, into a wince.

'There's nerve damage,' she said, with dignity, 'which is invisible. I shouldn't expect a Gryffindor to understand the subtler sorts of pain.'

'Course not. Pass the salt, would you?'

She did laugh then, it escaped her in one high disgraceful snort before she got the hand of the wounded arm up over her mouth, which rather gave the game away in itself, and behind her, to a man, the Slytherin team hissed.

It was a low, collective, carrying sound, like a leak in something, and it had words in it here and there, traitor was one, and something shorter and uglier was another, and it was aimed not at Harry at all. It was aimed at her back.

Malfoy stopped laughing. She turned round.

Harry had seen her turn that look on people before, on Pansy once or twice, on a second-year who'd jostled her, but never on seven of them at once, and never in the open, in the rain, outnumbered sixty stone to eight. She swept the hood back off her head so they could all see her face, and she looked along the line of them slowly, one at a time, wet and small and bare-headed, and she said, in a voice of silver and arsenic:

'Did somebody hiss?'

Nobody said anything. Rain rattled on seven sets of shoulder pads.

'Because I'm trying to imagine,' she went on, pleasantly, 'the member of this team who believes he may hiss at me, on this pitch or anywhere else in the wide world, and I confess the picture won't come. Flint. You at least know my father. Help them. Describe to them, in small words, what my father does when somebody is uncivil to his daughter. Tell them what happened to the last governors who crossed my father over Dumbledore. Take your time. I shall write to him tonight, in any case' - the slung hand rose, delicately, and indicated the whole team with one slow ruinous sweep, like a curse in a fairy tale - 'and I've an excellent memory for exactly who was standing where.'

The Slytherin team looked at the mud.

'Good,' said Malfoy. She put her hood back up, unhurried, in the pouring rain, as though deciding for herself when the weather was permitted to resume. Then she turned back to Harry, and the arsenic went out of her voice entirely, and what was left was so plain and so unadorned that it caught him completely off guard.

'Be safe on Saturday,' she said. 'I mean it, Potter. It's filthy weather, and those things are at the edge of the grounds, and you fly like you don't believe in dying. I should know. I watched you do it over a lake, on a half-wild hippogriff.' Her chin went up; her voice wobbled exactly once, and was mastered. 'So you'll kindly catch your ridiculous Snitch quickly, and come down in one piece, because if you fall off that broom, Harry Potter, I swear on my mother I'll walk onto the pitch and kill you myself.'

And she walked on up the path to the castle, seven cowed Slytherins trailing after her like a defeated weather front, and left Harry standing in the rain with Dean, who had watched the whole thing with his mouth open.

'Mate,' said Dean at last, with deep respect, as they walked on down to Madam Hooch's office. 'What is she?'

'No idea,' said Harry.

But the rain didn't feel cold the rest of the way, and that evening's practice was the best he'd ever flown, Wood actually whooped, twice, which Fred said afterwards had frightened him more than the wind, and Harry came down out of the howling dark soaked to the skin and grinning like an idiot, with be safe on Saturday going round in him somewhere under the breastbone, warmer than the changing-room stove; and he slept that night deep and dreamless while the storm walked the battlements, and never once thought to wonder, as Ron, lying awake listening to it, wondered, what it meant that the thought of a boy falling off a broom could put a wobble in the voice of a girl who had seven large team-mates entirely convinced she would enjoy watching them die.

*

By the time Harry got back to the common room that night, Dean had already told Seamus, and Seamus had told everybody, and Hermione had heard the whole story of the path to the pitch three times over, with embellishments.

She was sitting bolt upright at their table in the corner with the great borrowed vampire book open in front of her, and she was being nice about it. Harry could see her being nice from right across the room. She had the look of a kettle holding its breath.

'I hear Malfoy was very... spirited,' she said, as Harry sat down. Each word came out individually wrapped. 'Threatening to walk onto a Quidditch pitch and kill you. How... fond.'

'It was a figure of speech,' said Harry.

'Mm,' said Hermione. 'With her, I'm never entirely sure.' Then she pressed her lips together, hard, having evidently reached the frontier of what niceness could survive, and stared down at her essay, and her quill gouged a full stop into the parchment like a chisel.

Ron, folded sideways in the armchair opposite with One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi unopened on his chest, surveyed her over his knees for a moment, and Harry watched him do the thing that Ron had started doing lately, which was to look at a situation the way he looked at a chessboard, and then move a piece nobody was expecting.

'Here,' said Ron. 'You know your foot on vampire defences. You done the bit about the famous ones? Because my mum would never let the twins tell me the Angelus stories when I was little, and I've always wanted to know. You must've looked him up, you had that picture.'

It was, Harry thought, watching the kettle come abruptly off the boil, a masterstroke. Hermione's spine unlocked. The chisel became a quill again. For a second she visibly wrestled (the folded picture had not been mentioned by anyone since the lesson, by unspoken treaty), and curiosity won by a street.

'It's not a picture, it's an engraving, from a serious book,' she said, with dignity, already digging in her bag. 'Blood Nobility: The Great Kindred Lineages, Madam Pince had it behind the desk, you have to sign for it. And he's not one of the famous ones, Ronald, he's the famous one. There's a whole chapter.' She found the page. Her voice took on the particular hushed relish she normally saved for banned books and restricted sections. 'They called him the Scourge of Europe. A hundred and forty-five years, and the book says no one of his kind, in all their history, was ever crueller. It says that, in a footnote, like it's agreed.'

'Go on, then,' said Ron, settling deeper into the chair and getting a Chocolate Frog out. 'From the start.'

And so, with the storm leaning on the windows and the fire burning low, Hermione told them, in the loud whisper of a girl who has read something dreadful in a serious book and has been dying for weeks to be made to repeat it.

He'd been Irish, to begin with. A linen merchant's son in Galway, handsome and idle and always in drink, until the night in 1753 when a pale lady from the colonies beckoned him into an alley and he was never alive again.

'And the first thing he did,' Hermione whispered, 'the very first... he went home. He killed the whole household, the servants, everyone. His father he saved for last, so he'd have seen all the rest. And his little sister...' Hermione's voice faltered slightly; she pressed on. 'His little sister let him in. He stood at the window, and she saw her brother who'd died, come back standing in the moonlight... and she thought he was an angel. That's where the name comes from. She opened the door to an angel. He didn't leave anyone alive to bury them.'

The Chocolate Frog had stopped halfway to Ron's mouth.

'Then Europe,' Hermione went on. 'Decades of blood. Him and the pale lady, and the book just... it stops being a list of names and starts being a list of places. There was a thing he did so people would know him, it was in all the broadsheets of the day... he cut a cross into their cheeks. His own little joke, you see. An angel, leaving crosses.' She turned the page. 'And it says the worst thing he ever did wasn't even a killing. There was a girl in London, about 1860. Very devout, very gentle; She was a witch and she had the Sight, a bit of it, and he found out, and he decided... the book says for sport... that killing her would be a waste. So he didn't touch her. He took everyone else. Her family, one by one, slowly, in order, and he'd let her find them; and every door she ran to, he'd been through first; and she fled to a convent in the end, and on the day she took her holy orders he came through the chapel like a wolf through a fold. And when there was nothing left of her mind but pieces, then he turned her... so she'd be like that forever. She's still... I mean, presumably she's still...' Hermione shut the book on her finger, as though it had got too hot. 'The book says: he did not make her mad. He made her mad eternal.'

The fire popped. Somewhere above, the storm worked at the roof of the tower like something trying the lid of a box.

'Blimey,' said Ron, at last, in a small voice. 'And the twins used to get told this at bedtime. No wonder they're like that.'

'What happened to him?' said Harry. He found he had to know. 'They catch him?'

'That's the strangest part. Nobody caught him. Nothing could.' Hermione reopened the book. 'And then, 1898, Romania. There was a Romani clan travelling the Carpathians, very old, very learned in curse-work... the book's quite respectful about it, it says their elders knew bindings the Ministry's never reconstructed... and he killed a girl of theirs. Their favourite daughter, it says. Just one girl. After a century of what he'd done, one girl too many.' She looked up. 'And they didn't hunt him, and they didn't stake him. The elders sat down around a fire and they cursed him. And whatever the curse was... the book doesn't know, nobody knows... it worked. He was never seen again. A hundred and forty-five years of horrors, and then nothing, overnight,. No body. No grave. The chapter just ends.' She closed the book and sat back. 'Vanished from the face of public life, it says. The most feared creature in Europe, just gone.

There was a long pause.

'Good for them,' said Ron, with feeling, and bit the head off his Frog.

Hermione hugged the book to her chest, eyes shining with the terrible happiness of the thoroughly informed; and Harry noticed that the subject of Dracina Malfoy did not come up again all evening, and that Ron, behind his Herbology book, wore the deeply restful expression of a chess player whose exchange has been accepted.

Though as it turned out, Ron would have cause to regret the whole manoeuvre by morning. Because Hermione dreamed about convents all night, she told them at breakfast, and because the next day's Defence Against the Dark Arts brought them a different sort of monster, and a lesson none of them ever forgot.

When they got to Lupin's classroom on Friday afternoon, Lupin wasn't in it.

Snape was.

He was standing at the front with his back to them, drawing the shutters against the storm-grey light with flicks of his wand, and the happiness drained out of the class as though a plug had been pulled. Lupin's grindylow tank had been covered with a cloth. Lupin's clutter of maps and specimens had been squared into a cold stack at the desk's edge, as though impounded.

'Sit down,' said Snape, without turning.

They sat. Harry's hand found the edge of his desk and gripped it.

'Professor Lupin,' said Snape, turning at last, savouring it, 'finds himself incapable of teaching today.' He let the silence sit. 'He is... indisposed. He has... absented himself.' A thin, private smile. 'Nothing that need concern you. I am taking this lesson, and before anyone' - his eyes came to rest on Hermione, whose hand was already up - 'wastes my time: I neither know nor care what disorderly scraps of the syllabus you have been fed thus far. Red Caps. Grindylows.' He said the words as a duchess might say whelks. 'First-year matter. Today you will learn something worth fearing. Open your books to the final chapter. Werewolves.'

'But sir,' said Hermione, her hand still up, unable to help herself, 'we're not supposed to do werewolves yet, we're due to start hinkypunks-'

'I was not aware,' said Snape icily, 'that Miss Granger had been appointed to the staff. Page three hundred and ninety-four.'

There was a sullen rustle of pages. Outside, the storm boomed against the shutters.

And then, Harry had to admit it afterwards, bitterly, because it made everything worse, Snape taught.

He didn't teach the way Lupin taught, walking about, asking, drawing you out. He stood quite still at the front in the half-dark with his wand making cold diagrams of light in the air, and he lectured, in that low voice that never needed raising, and the diagrams were horribly good, and he knew it all. He knew more than the book. He kept the book open on the desk the way you'd keep a dog on a lead you had no intention of using.

'The textbook,' he said, 'will tell you how to distinguish the werewolf from the true wolf. The snout. The pupils. The tufted tail. It will tell you that a bitten man turns at the full moon, loses his reason for the one night, and is the rest of the month a wretch to be pitied, registered and found employment. The textbook is written for the Ministry, and the Ministry classifies what it can bear to think about. So.' The wand moved; wolf-shapes of light turned slowly above their heads. 'Nearly all of it is wrong. Not incomplete. Wrong. There is no such creature as your textbook's werewolf. There never has been. There is one kind, there has only ever been one kind, and it does not call itself a werewolf at all.'

He let that sit in the half-dark.

'They call themselves the Garou.'

Nobody wrote it down. Nobody was sure how.

'And before I go on, I shall tell you why four centuries of our scholarship amounts to a tale for frightening children, since not one of you has thought to ask.' Snape's voice had gone almost pleasant. 'Because you cannot remember them. A man who sees one of these things in its full shape does not carry the memory out of the room with him. The mind will not hold the sight; it closes over the place the way water closes over a stone, and what grows back in the gap is a lie that the man believes to the end of his life. He will tell you he was set upon by a bear. He will tell you his neighbour went mad at the full moon and had to be shot. He will tell you anything in the world except what stood in front of him, and he will swear to it on his mother, and he will swear it to the clerk who writes your textbook.' The thin smile came and went. 'There are a few on whom it has no hold. The mad. The dying. And those with a certain... grounding. You may draw what conclusions you like about which of those applies to the man presently teaching you.'

'They are not made by any curse. They are born. Or bitten. The blood runs in certain lines, wizard and Muggle and neither, and it runs quiet for generations at a time, and then a child comes who has it, and nothing shows until that child is grown and something wakes it. Some of them are born to human mothers. Some of them are born to wolves, and are wolves first, and learn the shape of a man afterwards the way you learned Latin. And when two of them breed together they get a third sort of child, born wrong in the body and barren all its life; their own law forbids that, which should tell you that these are a people who make laws, and keep them, and punish.' He turned. 'And they can be made by the bite. Any one of them, upon anyone, at any hour it pleases. Their law frowns upon that as well. Those who do it regardless, and there are such, serve something I shall come to presently, and I assure you they are not careless about whom they choose.'

'Two shapes, says your book. Man, and wolf.' The wand moved. 'There are five.'

They came up one after another in the cold light above the desks, slowly, and the class watched them arrive, and not one quill moved.

'The man. You have walked past one in Diagon Alley and thought nothing. The second is the man gone wrong: a hand taller, half again as heavy, a brow and a jaw and a quantity of hair that make strangers cross the road without ever knowing why they crossed it. The third...'

Snape's wand turned, and the shape it drew now was not a wolf and was not a man, and was nine feet from heel to crown, and several people made a noise and pretended they hadn't.

'This is the war-form, and it is the one your grandmothers could not remember seeing. In this shape they take a troll apart like bread. Silver burns them, and silver wounds do not close; very little else troubles them at all, and what does, they heal while you stand watching. The fourth shape is a wolf the size of a pony, built for running a man down over distance. The fifth is a wolf. An ordinary wolf. It will sit at the edge of a field and watch you count your sheep, and you will think, what a handsome dog.'

'And they wear whichever of the five they choose. At will. Moon or no moon... mark that, Thomas, write it down: moon or no moon.'

A quill stopped. 'But sir,' said Dean, 'the full moon, though. Everyone knows about the full moon.'

'Everyone knows a filing system, Thomas. The moon is not their cage. It is their birth sign.' Snape let the great shape above them fade. 'The phase under which one of them is whelped settles what it shall be for the whole of its life, and they hold to it as gravely as we hold to Houses. There are those born to the new moon, who lie and steal and mock their own chieftains, and are permitted to. Those born to the crescent, who deal with spirits, and go where you and I cannot follow. Those born to the half moon, who judge. Those born to the gibbous, who keep every history their people have, and keep it in song, because they commit nothing to paper that a Ministry might one day read. And those born under the full moon are warriors and nothing else whatever, and are the ones you had better pray you never meet on a lane after dark.' The cold eyes travelled the front row. 'The moon makes a wolf of nobody. What the moon does is raise the tide in them. On the nights about the full, every one of them, whatever its birth sign, is harder to hold. That is the whole grain of truth in your textbook, and the Ministry has built a Registry upon it, and sleeps soundly.'

'And they carry, every one of them, from birth, a rage.' He let the word stand alone a moment. 'Not temper. Rage as a substance. The accounts that were not written for the Ministry say it sits in them like fire in a lamp, and that their whole life is the keeping of that lamp, and that when it spills... and it spills... what is left standing afterwards is a matter of chance.

'They run in packs,' Snape went on, softly, into the silence. 'The packs hold to tribes, and there are thirteen of those, and the tribes are old... older than this castle, older than wands... and they keep their own law, and bow to no Ministry of ours, and regard wizards, where they regard us at all, as children playing with matches in a dry wood. Because the Garou believe... and have believed since before writing... that they are soldiers. Born enlisted. Every one of them whelped into the middle of a war that the rest of us cannot see, against a corruption that eats at the world from underneath, that wears a thousand shapes and has servants everywhere; and everything in creation, they hold, is either sound timber or rot. They have a name for the rot. They can smell it, they claim... in a place, in an object.' The cold eyes travelled, quite slowly, along the front row and came to rest on no one. 'In a man.'

'There were fourteen tribes,' said Snape, into the quiet. 'One went over. Whole. Every man, woman and whelp of it, down into the dark, and the thing it serves now is the very thing the other thirteen were whelped to fight. They dance a spiral, I am given to understand. Their get are still abroad, still making others by the bite, still extremely particular in their choosing.' He squared the textbook he had not once opened. 'And a pack does not leave one of its own to itself for long. You may wish to bear that in mind, should you ever find yourself wondering where a particular one of them has got to, and whose company it is keeping while it is gone.'

The shutters rattled. Harry realised he had not breathed for some time. He reeks of it, said Lupin's voice, in his memory, low and rough, from somewhere in the chest.

'Sir,' said Hermione.

Harry closed his eyes briefly. Her hand was up again. It had been up, he suspected, since silver.

'Sir, if they can change whenever they choose, then the whole Registry is pointless, isn't it, because the Ministry only ever watches them on the full moon, and that would mean every precaution in this book is written for the three nights a month when it matters least, and the book doesn't even mention-'

'Did I ask a question, Miss Granger?'

'No, sir, but the book's wrong, or at least incomplete, and I thought-'

'That is the second time you have spoken without being invited to.' Snape came round the desk, unhurried, and the light-drawn monster above them dissolved, and the room got darker. 'Five points from Gryffindor. Tell me, are you incapable of restraining yourself, or do you take pride in being an insufferable know-it-all?'

The word went through the room like the crack of a whip. Hermione went scarlet, and her hand came down, slowly, and she stared at her desk with her eyes brimming, Hermione, who had answered more of this school's questions than the rest of the class put together, who kept the whole three of them alive every year with the things she knew.

It was so quiet that everybody heard what happened next, which was that somewhere behind Harry, on the Slytherin side, a giggle began.

Harry turned round.

He knew the giggle. He'd heard it in June by a hospital bed, high and helpless, the real one; and he'd heard its evil twin for two years before that, the polished little titter that went with Mudblood and with impressions done across the dungeon, and this was the twin. Dracina Malfoy had her hand halfway to her mouth, and her eyes were bright, fixed on Hermione's scarlet face, on Hermione's brimming eyes, with the old pure delight of the front row at an execution; and she was one breath from laughing out loud, and the Slytherins around her were already sniggering, and then she saw Harry looking.

He watched it happen. It was very quick, much quicker than it had been with Pansy and Daphne on the Hogsmeade morning, and it was horribly skilful. The delight went out like a doused lamp; the hand finished its journey and became a hand pressed to the lips in distress; the bright eyes widened into soft reproachful sorrow, aimed first at Snape, how could you, and then, gently, at Hermione, with a small shake of the head, poor Granger, how dreadful; and she was, in the space of one second, the picture of a kind girl shocked by cruelty.

But Harry had seen the first half.

He turned back to the front and sat looking at his book without seeing it, and something in his middle felt as though it had been put down on a step and left there. She didn't laugh, he told himself. The rest of them laughed. She caught it. Everyone nearly laughs when somebody else cops it, that's just people. She stopped herself. All of which was true; and underneath it, in the part of him that had been raised by the Dursleys and knew the difference between a face and a mask the way other children knew hot from cold, something said, quite clearly: you saw her eyes. You saw what her eyes were doing. That was the real one, and the sorrow was the trick, and would not be argued with, however hard he argued.

He was still arguing when Ron went off like a rocket.

'You asked us a question and she knows the answer!' Ron was on his feet, chair over backwards, ears blazing. 'Why ask if you don't want to be told?'

The class knew instantly he had gone too far. Snape advanced on him a step at a time, and the room held its breath.

'Detention, Weasley,' Snape said silkily, his face very close to Ron's. 'Tomorrow night won't do... you have a match to watch, do you not? Tonight. My office, eight o'clock. And since you are so eager to be of service to others, you may spend the evening being of service in the hospital wing. The bedpans,' he said, with relish, 'want scouring. Without magic.'

Nobody dared move for the rest of the lesson. They sat and took notes on the five shapes of the Garou while the storm ran its nails down the shutters, and Snape moved along the rows looking at their work over their shoulders and finding it wanting; and at the end, as the bell went, he raised his voice just enough.

'You will each write an essay, to be handed in to me, on the ways you recognise one of them in each of its five shapes... and the ways you kill it. Two rolls of parchment, by Monday morning. Somebody ought to teach you the subject properly.'

'Sir, it's the match tomorrow,' said Dean.

'Then I suggest,' said Snape, 'an early start.'

Harry came out of that classroom with a roaring in his ears.

He was dimly aware of the corridor, of Hermione walking very fast and very upright with her face set, of Dean and Seamus raging about the essay, of Ron white-lipped about the detention, and all of it reached him from a distance, because the roaring was in the way. Two rolls of parchment on how you kill them. Set to a class with Remus Lupin's grindylow tank sitting covered at the front like a shrouded coffin, and Lupin's maps squared off at the edge of the desk like confiscated goods. Somebody ought to teach you the subject properly. Harry knew this entire lesson was Snape's way of humiliating and denigrating Lupin's teaching style. Snape had been waiting weeks for a day when that chair was empty, and he had walked in and had the shutters closed and the tank covered, and he had stood there in the dark enjoying himself out loud for an hour on the one day of the month its owner was too ill to stand up and answer back. That was the whole of it. That, and five points off Hermione for knowing things, and insufferable know-it-all said in front of thirty people in a voice like a man flicking ash off his sleeve. And the goblet, the smoking goblet Lupin had drunk to the dregs because there aren't many wizards who could brew it; Lupin had thanked him...

'Harry.' Hermione's voice, far off. 'Harry, you're going the wrong way-'

He was. He'd turned at the stairs without deciding to, and he was walking, fast, with no plan that he could have put into words, only a white heat and a direction, and the direction was the staffroom, where Snape would shortly be sitting among the other teachers as though nothing had happened; and what exactly Harry meant to do when he got there he never afterwards knew, because his wand was in his hand (he didn't remember it arriving there), and Ron had hold of one of his arms, and Hermione the other, and he heard himself saying things about Snape in a voice he didn't recognise, a flat scraped voice from the bottom of something, and what he was saying frightened all three of them.

'-and he's wanted that job for years, he's wanted him gone since September, he took his lesson off him and pulled it to pieces in front of us and smiled doing it, and somebody's got to-'

'Somebody will,' Hermione was saying, hanging on. 'Harry, listen to me. Dumbledore chose him. Dumbledore wanted him here, over Snape, and everybody in this castle knows it, and that's why Snape's behaving like this, and he can't undo it with an essay, don't you see Snape can't actually do anything-'

'He already did-'

'Begging your pardons,' said a voice overhead, 'but is this a private war, or may any man enlist?'

The Fat Friar was floating down through the ceiling.

He came through it the way he did everything, comfortably, like a man lowering himself into a bath, and settled a foot off the floor in front of them with his broad transparent face beaming and his rope girdle swinging gently, Hufflepuff's ghost, round and bald and endlessly pleased about something, whom Harry had never once exchanged a word with in three years. The portraits on either side, who had been watching Harry with alarm, looked relieved.

'Young Potter, isn't it. Yes. The Seeker.' The Friar looked him over, the wand, the grip of his friends on his arms, the heat still coming off him, and the beam settled into something milder and much older. 'And in a rare taking, too. There's a face I've seen before, in five hundred years of corridors. That's a face on its way to do a thing it's been wanting to do for a long while, and has just now given itself permission.'

'It's nothing,' said Harry, through his teeth. 'Sir.'

'Oh, it's never nothing.' The Friar drifted a little closer, hands folded on his belly. 'It's always something. It's generally even a just something... that's the devil of it. I'll wager a year's candles the man you're going to see has truly earned a measure of what you're carrying to him.' He looked at Harry with eyes like old windows. 'He has, hasn't he.'

'Yes,' said Harry.

'Mm. They always have.' The Friar nodded comfortably, and then appeared to change the subject entirely, which Harry would learn, too late, was how he did everything. 'I knew a king once... in a story, in a story, before even my time... a shepherd lad first, that was promised great things, and hunted all over the hills for years by a mad old king who feared him. A patient man, this shepherd. Twice he had the old king asleep at his mercy, and twice spared him. The soul of patience.' The Friar's voice had found a rhythm, the easy rolling rhythm of a man who had preached to crowds from hilltops and enjoyed it. 'And then one day... one ordinary day, mark... a rich fool of a farmer, a nobody, refused the shepherd's men bread, and insulted them to their faces, after the shepherd's men had guarded that fool's flocks all season without taking so much as a lamb. A small wrong. A nothing wrong, after years of great ones patiently borne. And our patient shepherd buckled on his sword and mounted up with four hundred men behind him and swore by everything holy that by morning there'd be no male thing left alive in that fool's house. The babes included, young Potter. That's what by morning meant, in those hills.'

Harry had stopped pulling against Ron's grip. The corridor had gone quiet around the Friar's voice the way corridors did around a story; even Hermione, who did not believe in anything the Friar was likely to believe in, was listening with her head on one side.

'And here's the wondrous thing,' said the Friar. 'Down the mountain to meet him... alone, against four hundred swords coming up it... rode the fool's wife. A clever woman married to a fool, which was commoner in those days than you'd think, and remains so. She brought bread, and wine, and two hundred fig cakes... the story is very particular about the fig cakes... and she got down off her donkey in the mouth of the ravine and knelt in the road in front of all that cavalry, and she talked to him. Softly. That was all. No sword was drawn and no charm was cast, for they had none in those days. A soft answer, in a ravine, from a kneeling woman. And the king that would be... he sat up there on his horse with his four hundred men at his back and his oath in his teeth, and he heard her.' The Friar spread his plump transparent hands. 'And he turned the whole company round.'

'And the fool?' said Ron.

'Dropped dead inside a fortnight with no help from anybody, as fools generally contrive to,' said the Friar comfortably. 'That's the other thing worth knowing: the reckoning came anyway, you see, to the man that had earned it. It only came without the shepherd's hand on it. And the shepherd blessed that woman all his days... blessed her advice, mind, which is a strange thing for a soldier to bless... because she'd kept him, he said, from carrying a morning's work the rest of his life. He knew what he'd been riding up to do. He was going to be a king. And kings, and shepherds, and seekers,' said the Fat Friar, beaming at Harry as though he'd said nothing in particular, 'carry what they do. Wrath pays its wages in the morning, young Potter, and it always pays in full.'

There was a pause.

'You'd have made a decent Hufflepuff,' the Friar added, drifting back up towards the ceiling. 'Loyal to a fault, I hear, and you work like a dog. Ah well. Sorted is sorted. We shall still trounce you tomorrow, of course... nothing personal, and do mind the weather on that corner by the south stands, the wind comes round the tower there like a bailiff.'

And he was gone, up through the stone, leaving the three of them alone in the corridor.

Harry discovered that his wand was away. He didn't remember putting it away.

'All right?' said Ron, warily, letting go of his arm.

'Yeah.' Harry flexed his hand. The white heat had banked itself down somewhere, not out, he could feel it in there, lying at its door-sill, patient, but down. 'Yeah. Snape's not worth bedpans. Speaking of which-'

'Don't,' said Ron, with feeling.

He went off to his detention at eight, pale but game, and came back at half past eleven walking like a man who had seen the underside of the hospital wing and would carry it with him always, and said only, 'I'm going to be sick if anyone talks to me,' and went to bed holding his hands away from his own body, as though they belonged to somebody else and he was minding them.

*

Harry was woken at half past four on Saturday morning by somebody blowing in his ear.

He came up out of sleep fighting, one hand scrabbling for his glasses and the other for his wand, and found the dormitory dark, the storm hammering at the window, and Peeves the poltergeist floating a foot above his pillow, cheeks puffed, taking aim at his other ear.

'Peeves!'

'Wakey wakey, Potty,' said Peeves, delighted, rolling backwards through the air out of swatting range. 'Match day! Up with the lark! There isn't a lark for a hundred miles, of course... all blown to Norway-'

'It's half four in the morning-'

But Peeves was already gone, zooming out through the closed door with a noise like a deflating balloon, his cackle dopplering away down the spiral stairs; and Harry lay back, heart slamming, wide awake, with hours to go yet and no hope at all.

The storm had got worse in the night. It wasn't weather any more; it was an argument. The wind came at the tower in running blows, so that the old stones themselves seemed to lean and settle, and the rain on the window wasn't drops but whole thrown bucketfuls, and beneath everything, down under the castle's roots, the thunder walked back and forth across the valley like something pacing.

Harry lay and listened, and the dread came and sat on his chest where it had been waiting all week.

He was going up into that. In four hours he was going to be five hundred feet over Scotland in the dark-grey morning, on a broom, in that, and everyone he knew would be sitting in it watching him, and a man who had murdered thirteen people with one curse was somewhere out there wanting him dead, and the things in hoods were at every gate, and he had a sudden savage useless certainty that none of it would be happening, not the bars, not the cupboard, not Black, not any of it, if his mum and dad had just been allowed to live; and the anger came up the way it did now, hot and fast and spoiling for somewhere to go.

And found nowhere, at half past four in the morning, in a bed. So it churned.

He lay there while it churned, listening to the wind hit the tower, is it in the wind, whatever's coming for me, and the thunder shake the glass, is it in that, and the rain flog the window like it wanted in; and then, somewhere towards five o'clock, the storm drew one of its long breaths.

It happened sometimes, between gusts: a lull, a gap, two heartbeats of enormous quiet while the weather turned round. The rain thinned. The wind stood still. And in the gap, in the small stillness after all that shouting, there was...

Harry never found the word for it, then or after. There was nothing in the stillness; that was the point of it; it was only still, the way St Michael's had been still, the way the Chamber had gone still at the very end, a quiet with a quality to it, like a held hand rather than an empty room. The dread didn't go. The anger didn't go. But something turned him over like a page, gently, and the churning stopped as though a hand had been laid flat on the water of him; and the last thing he thought, as sleep took him back under with the storm resuming overhead, was that it was very odd that the loudest night of the year should be the first one all week in which he'd felt, for a moment, that he was not alone in the dark, and that whatever was out there in the weather, it was not the weather he'd heard.

He rewoke at seven to Ron throwing a boot at him, and felt, inexplicably, ready.

The common room at half past seven was packed and buzzing despite the hour, and at the foot of the boys' staircase Harry nearly trod on Crookshanks, who was crouched at the bottom step like a hairy ginger gargoyle, yellow eyes fixed on the spiral above, waiting with terrible patience for Scabbers to come down to breakfast.

'Oi.' Harry moved him aside with his foot, gently; it was like trying to shift a pouffe full of wet sand. 'Go and chase the weather.'

Crookshanks gave him a look of profound professional disappointment and stalked off under a table, there to await his rat in ambush, in the manner of his people.

At breakfast the Great Hall roared like the inside of a drum. The ceiling was a boiling grey; the candles guttered in draughts that had found their way in through four feet of stone. The Gryffindor team sat together at the end of their table, and nobody was eating much, and Wood was not eating at all. He sat over an untouched plate going through the diagrams one more time in a low urgent mutter, and his toast went cold in front of him like a sacrifice nobody had accepted.

Harry found he couldn't face food either. His stomach had shut. He pushed his plate an inch away, and a bowl arrived in its place as though by Summoning Charm.

Porridge. A large bowl of it, with honey already stirred through, and Hermione's hand still on the rim.

'No, don't push it away. Eat.'

'Hermione, I can't-'

'You can, and you're going to, because I've been reading about exposure and cold and I'm not watching you go up into that' - she didn't look at the ceiling; her chin did something that indicated it - 'on an empty stomach for two hours. Come on. Get up and eat. You've a long way to go today, and you'll not manage it on nothing.'

There was no arguing with her in this mood; it would have been like arguing with a nesting swan. Harry picked up the spoon. And oddly, after the first mouthful, he found he was hungry after all, deeply, suddenly hungry, as though his body had been waiting for permission, and he ate the whole bowl while Hermione watched with her arms folded, and felt the warmth of it go down into him and stay there, banked, like coals; and twice more before they left the table she refilled it without being asked, standing over him in the manner of some small fierce ministering sergeant, and the strange thought crossed Harry's mind, between the second bowl and the third, that he'd read of somebody once who'd been fed like this before a journey too hard for him, fed, and made to sleep, and fed again, touched awake by someone who would not take no, and he couldn't remember where, and then the bell went, and the thought blew away with everything else.

The walk down to the pitch was a running battle. The wind took the umbrellas of the crowd one by one, with a sound each time like a cough, and sent them bowling end over end towards the Forest; the school streamed down the lawns bent double, holding on to each other, shrieking with laughter and terror. In the changing room nobody spoke. Wood stood up twice to address the team, opened his mouth twice, and sat down twice. The rain on the roof was a sea.

'Right,' he said at last, as the stands above them began to drum with feet. 'Well.' He swallowed. 'Yes.'

'Inspirational,' said Fred.

'We know, Oliver,' said George, not unkindly, strapping on his arm-guards. 'Flatten them. Come on.'

They went up the tunnel into a wall of weather and noise.

Harry heard the crowd before he could see it, a vast soaked animal bellow from both sides of the pitch, and then he heard, cutting through the roar, organised and unmistakable and getting louder, singing. Gryffindor's end had broken into a chant.

It was Dean's work. Everyone knew it was Dean's work; he'd been drilling the lower years in the common room all Friday evening, conducting with a rolled-up essay, having explained to a baffled pure-blood audience that where he came from, in the ordinary leagues of South London, this was simply how support was done, and that Gryffindor's had frankly been amateur for years. And now the whole scarlet end of the stadium was swaying in the rain and roaring it in time, to a tune Dean swore blind everybody in Muggle Britain knew:

Oh the badgers dig their burrows nice and deep...

nice and DEEP...

and that's where Hufflepuff should go to sleep...

GO TO SLEEP...

they're very good at finding, so they say...

but the only thing they'll find out here's the way to lose today!

It went round twice more, with stamping. Lee Jordan, at the commentary podium, abandoned all pretence of neutrality and could be heard conducting the far section with his wand.

And then, from the other end of the stadium, out of the yellow-and-black mass of Hufflepuff, who were supposed to be the nice ones, the kind ones, the house that apologised when you trod on them, came the answer, deeper and louder and in better time, five hundred voices strong, to the same tune:

We don't care about your lions or your cups...

OR YOUR CUPS...

you can keep your fancy Seeker and shut up...

AND SHUT UP...

you think you're very clever, very fit...

but everybody this side knows you're just a bunch of HAIRY GITS!

The Gryffindor end answered with a roar of delighted outrage. Fred and George, walking out onto the pitch, turned as one man and bowed to the Hufflepuff stand, deeply, hands on hearts, and the whole stadium, both ends, all four houses, in the lashing rain, laughed as one animal; and for a moment, bending into the wind with his Nimbus over his shoulder, Harry forgot Black, and Snape, and the hooded things at the gates, and loved the whole roaring soaked ridiculous world of it with all his heart.

That was when he saw her.

The Slytherin block was a thin crowd today, most of them had decided a Gryffindor--Hufflepuff fixture in a hurricane was beneath their attendance, but in the front row of it, alone in the sense that mattered, stood Dracina Malfoy: hood back, silver-fair hair already soaked flat and darkened with rain, both hands (both, Harry noticed; sling nowhere in evidence) gripping the rail. And as the teams spread out along the centre line she leaned out over it, into the full wind, and screamed something at him that the storm took away entire; but he saw the shape of it on her mouth, and the shape of it was his own first name, which he had heard from her only once before, in a whisper by a hospital bed in June; and next to her Pansy Parkinson stood holding an umbrella that had died, staring at her friend with the stony face of a bodyguard who has given up advising.

Madam Hooch's whistle was a thread of sound in the gale. Fifteen brooms went up.

The game, from the first minute, was half Quidditch and half survival. The rain came sideways; the Quaffle, soaked, handled like a cannonball; the Bludgers wore tails of spray. Harry climbed above the worst of the scrum and could barely see it, the players below were blurred shapes trailing rooster-tails of water, and the stands were two long smears of colour, scarlet and gold on his left, yellow and black on his right, and one cold green point of it behind the Slytherin rail that he found himself checking on every circuit, the way you check a compass.

Within twenty minutes he was flying blind in the gusts, soaked through, aching with cold, and had nearly been unseated twice, once by a Bludger he heard rather than saw, once by the wind itself, which came round the corner of the south stand exactly as the Fat Friar had promised, like a bailiff, and tried to repossess his broom. Of the Snitch there was no sign at all. Somewhere below, Lee Jordan was shouting a score that the wind shredded; Harry caught '-fifty-' and nothing else, not even whose.

And, he could never afterwards explain it, except that she was there, at the rail, in the rain, and had used his name, he began to show off.

It was lunacy, in that weather, and it was wonderful. Coming down the length of the pitch with the gale behind him he rolled the Nimbus, lazily, once, right in front of the Slytherin stand, upside down with the rain falling up at him; he took the bailiff-wind at the south corner on purpose the next circuit and rode it round like a wall of death, flat along the stand faces with the crowd's roar bending after him; and pulling out of the dive he allowed himself one look, and Dracina Malfoy was hanging over the rail with both fists in the air, shrieking like a banshee with no breeding whatsoever, and even through the rain he could see that she was laughing, really laughing, the June laugh, the one that got out past the glove; and Pansy had her face in her hands.

'POTTER!' Wood's bellow reached him in rags as they crossed. 'STOP... BLOODY... GRINNING... AND FIND... THE SNITCH!'

A whistle; a blur of scarlet gathering below. Wood had called time out. Harry dropped down into the huddle of the team under a hovering canopy of umbrella charms that Flitwick had sent up over both benches, and found Hermione there uninvited, already reaching for his face.

'Hold still... honestly, how have you seen anything-' She tapped his glasses with her wand. 'Impervius!' And the world sprang clean: the rain still hit the lenses but ran off them now like water off a duck, leaving them clear. Harry stared at her.

'You're brilliant.'

'I know,' said Hermione, white-faced, wet through, entirely failing to look pleased. 'Harry... be careful. Please. The wind on that south corner-'

'Everyone's a tactician,' said Wood. 'GO!'

Up again, higher this time, into the grey. With the glasses clear the match sharpened: he could see Diggory now, a big steady shape quartering the far end low down, riding the gusts the way Wood had said he would, sensible, patient, hunting the same invisible fleck of gold. The thunder had come back and was overhead now; lightning stood for an instant on the rim of the hills like a crack in a plate. The afternoon was getting darker, though it was barely one o'clock, as if the day itself were being wound down.

It was on the next circuit, riding high over the top of the north stand, that Harry looked down at the topmost tier, the weather-side seats, empty all match, slick and abandoned in the rain, and saw the dog.

It stood quite still in the highest row, enormous, gaunt, black as a hole in the day, and it was not sheltering and not cowering and not doing any of the things an animal does in a storm. It was watching him. Even at that distance, even through the rain, there was no doubt in Harry at all about what it was watching; and the cold that went through him then had nothing to do with the weather: the gap between the garage and the fence, the dark where the thing had stood and watched, the great phantom hound that walks in churchyards, the darkest portent of them all, and his hands must have pulled the broom up without him, because the Nimbus checked and wallowed in the wind, and when he dashed the water from his eyes and looked again the row was empty, rain standing on the seats, nothing there at all.

'Harry!' Wood's voice, thin and desperate from the Gryffindor goals. 'Harry, behind you!'

He turned. The Snitch, there at last, a mad glitter of gold fleeing down the middle of the pitch into the murk, and Diggory already after it, low and fast, cape of spray behind him. Harry flattened himself to the handle and dived.

The wind screamed on his glasses. The Nimbus closed the gap a foot at a time, rain hammering his back like gravel, Diggory's tail-twigs nearer, the Snitch skittering upward now, both of them rising after it into the cloud-dark, and the crowd's roar fell away below, and Harry climbed, gaining, half a length behind, an arm's reach, the gold fleck jinking above and the grey folding round them...

And the world went quiet.

Not quieter. Quiet. The roar of the stadium shut off below him as though a door had been closed on it; the wind, impossibly, still shoved and hauled at him, but it made no sound doing it; and the cold came. It was not November's cold. It was the cold of the train, the cold that came up through the floor of the world, the cold that put the lights out; and the rain on his hands was turning to something that crawled; and Harry looked down.

They were coming out onto the pitch below him like spilled ink. A hundred at least, more, hooded, faceless, unhurried, flowing out of the storm-dark at every entrance at once with their rags streaming up into the wind, and every face in the stands turning, and the screaming starting far away like a kettle three rooms off; and the dementors lifted their hidden heads together, all of them, the way a field of dead flowers would all turn at once towards a black sun, towards the warmest thing above them.

Towards him.

The cold came up his spine like water up a wick, and the grey world began to slide, and from very far down inside him, or very far back; it was both, somehow, it had always been both, the sound rose to meet him: a woman's voice, young, breaking, past terror and out the other side into something that wasn't fear at all and was worse, because it was bargaining, pleading with somebody, pleading for not-her, offering the only thing she had left to offer, herself, her own life for the life in the cot behind her, over and over, the same three-word trade pushed across the table at a thing that was laughing...

Mum, Harry thought, with the last clear piece of himself. That's my mum. That's how it-

The white fog ate the world from the edges in.

His hands were no longer on anything. There was no longer any up. Somewhere a high cold laugh went through the fog like a skewer, and the woman screamed one syllable, a name, his name, the first word he had ever heard and the last she had ever said...

Then nothing: no stadium, no storm, no cold.

Nothing at all.

*

'Lucky the ground was so soft.'

'I thought he was dead for sure.'

'But he never even broke his glasses.'

The voices arrived before the light did. They were whispering, several of them, somewhere above him, and none of it made any sense, and Harry lay in the warm dark trying to assemble the world out of the pieces he had: the smell of clean linen and potions; rain on high windows; the fact that every separate part of him ached as though he'd been taken apart and reassembled by someone working from memory.

He opened his eyes.

Hospital wing. Lamplight. And around the bed, still in full kit, still dripping, so plastered in mud from boots to eyebrows that they looked like seven figures sculpted out of the pitch itself, stood the Gryffindor Quidditch team, with Ron and Hermione wedged in among them, Hermione's eyes red, Ron's face the colour of cheese.

'Harry!' Fred's voice cracked with relief under the mud. 'How're you feeling?'

It came back all at once, the climb, Diggory, the quiet, the cold, the hooded things turning their faces up as one; and the voice. The voice came back last and stayed longest.

'What happened?' he said. His own voice came out in a croak. 'The Snitch. Did anyone-'

The team looked at each other. Nobody wanted to be the one.

'Diggory got it,' said George at last. 'Right after you... right after. He didn't see you fall, he was watching the Snitch like you ought. When he landed and looked back and saw you on the ground, he tried to call it off. Wanted a rematch. Offered it straight out, in front of everyone, decent of him, really-'

'But Wood wouldn't have it,' said Fred. 'Told him he'd caught it fair and the match was his. Fairest thing I've ever seen Wood do, and it's killing him. He's still down there now. Walking in the rain. We think he's drying out his feelings.'

'So we lost,' said Harry.

Nobody said anything. The rain filled it in.

'We're not out, though,' said Fred, rallying, and Harry could hear him doing the thing Fred always did, which was arithmetic in the face of disaster. 'Nobody's out in November. Look... they only beat us by a hundred. So if Hufflepuff lose to Ravenclaw, and we flatten Ravenclaw and Slytherin-'

'-by big enough margins-' said George.

'-by enormous margins... then it all comes down to points difference, and we're right back in it. It's happened before. Dad saw Chudley come back from worse, and Chudley are Chudley.'

'Fifty feet,' said Hermione.

She said it quite suddenly, out of turn, in a high flat voice, as though the conversation about points had been happening in some other, frivolous room. 'That's how far you fell, Harry. Professor Flitwick measured... people were asking, afterwards, because nobody could understand... you fell fifty feet onto mud and you've bruises and nothing else, and the reason is that Dumbledore-' Her voice wobbled and she mastered it. 'Dumbledore was running onto the pitch before anyone else had even moved. I've never seen him like that. I've never seen a grown wizard that angry. He slowed you down somehow, in the air, wandwork I've never read about anywhere, and then he... there was something silver, enormous, it came out of his wand like a charge of cavalry, and those... those things -' she would not say the word - 'went back over the stands like smoke in a wind. All of them. A hundred of them. One old man.' She took a breath. 'And then he put you on a stretcher and walked you up to the castle himself, and the whole school just... watched. Nobody even whispered.'

There was a silence of its own kind around the bed now. Angelina had her arms folded tight. Even Fred had nothing to add to it.

'Yeah, he finally did something for once,' said Ron bitterly.

Heads turned. Ron stood at the foot of the bed with his jaw set, mud to the knees from the pitch though he hadn't played on it, and Harry knew (the whole of Gryffindor knew by now; it had got about like everything got about) exactly how long Ron had been carrying that one, and from which floor of the castle, and past which stone wall with a basilisk behind it; and whatever anyone else around the bed made of it, not one of them had been there in June when that bitterness was earned, and so not one of them said anything at all.

Madam Pomfrey arrived then like weather, and the team was expelled in a body, shedding mud, calling back promises about Ravenclaw and enormous margins. Ron and Hermione, by some negotiation conducted entirely in looks, were permitted to remain.

And that was when Harry noticed the way they were being with each other, the glances, the shared freight of something not yet delivered, and worked out that there was more.

'Go on,' he said. 'Whatever it is.'

'Harry-' Hermione began.

'Somebody died. Who died.'

'Nobody died-'

'When you fell,' said Ron, in the gentle, terrible voice of a friend who has drawn the short straw, 'the wind took your broom. We watched it go. It went up over the stands like a crisp packet and it... mate, there's no good way... it came down on the Whomping Willow.'

Silence.

'And you know what the Willow's like,' Ron went on miserably. 'It doesn't... it took it personal. Hermione went down after the match and asked Professor Flitwick to bring back what-' He stopped, and simply lifted, from beside the bed, a small drawstring bag, and put it into Harry's hands.

It was very light. It shifted when he tilted it, with a dry wooden whisper, like kindling.

Harry undid the string and looked in at what was left of his Nimbus Two Thousand: a dozen splinters of varnished ash, a strip of the handle with half the serial number on it, a fistful of birch twigs. His first broom. The first thing he had ever been given for being good at something, not passed down, not grudged, not second-hand: his, the parcel on the breakfast table in first year, McGonagall's unprecedented half-smile, the whole sky over Hogwarts opening up to him in one Charms lesson, every match, every escape, the car rescue, the whole of London glittering below. In the bag it fitted in his two hands.

He did up the string with great care.

'Could've been you,' said Ron quietly. 'That's all I keep thinking, mate. The Willow got the broom, and you fell into the mud, I know which way round I'd have it.'

Madam Pomfrey kept him in over the weekend. The school came in instalments: Colin Creevey, vibrating, with a get-well card signed by the entire fan club, each HP badge-holder individually, some twice; Neville, with sweets; Seamus and Dean, the latter still hoarse from conducting; Percy, officially, with a message of commiseration from the Head Boy's office that sounded as though it had been drafted for release to the press, and Ron and Hermione simply stayed, until Madam Pomfrey threw them out at eight, and were back when the doors opened; and by the Sunday she had given up the fight entirely, made up the bed next to Harry's, and let Ron sleep there, on the stern condition that neither of them say a word after lights-out.

The visit nobody saw happened on the Sunday evening.

Visiting hours were over. Madam Pomfrey had turned the lamps down; rain was coming on again, soft now, the storm's long exhausted aftermath, and Harry was lying watching it bead the dark windows when the ward door opened without any sound that reached him, and when he turned his head she was standing at the foot of the bed.

She was perfectly turned out, hair done, sling restored to position, every inch of her pressed and correct, as though to make absolutely clear that this was a formal call, and she stood there with her chin up and both eyes blazing, and before he could say a word she said, in a furious undertone:

'You let go.'

'Hello to you too.'

'Fifty feet. They're saying fifty feet, up at the castle, as though it were a Quidditch statistic. I watched it.' Her voice didn't rise; it did the other thing, the thing he'd heard on the path in the rain, going thin and over-controlled, like ice bearing weight. 'I watched you go up into that cloud chasing the snitch, and I watched those things come out onto the grass, and I watched you come out of the cloud. Falling. Not holding on to anything. I made you a promise on Thursday about what I'd do if you fell off that broom, Potter, and I wish it noted that I was halfway over the rail before Pansy got hold of my cloak, and I shan't ever forgive her, and you're welcome.'

Harry looked at her, soaked Thursday hair recalled, both fists on the rail recalled, the shape of his own name in the storm recalled, and said, with perfect sincerity, 'Thanks.'

Whatever she had been braced for, it wasn't that. She went faintly pink, recovered, and pressed on.

'I've written to my father, as well.' The blaze in her eyes changed quality, cooled, and Harry caught, just for a moment, before he could tell himself otherwise, a glimpse of the thing that lived in her, the thing from the night in the Great Hall, flat and patient and making lists. 'Those creatures were to stand at the gates. The Headmaster told the whole school so at the start of term, and a hundred of them came onto a pitch with every pupil in the place sitting round it anyway... because one of them decided the rules were for other people.' Her voice dropped to something silken that he'd only ever heard her use on Slytherins. 'My father doesn't sit on their Board any more, Potter, but half the governors on it still go pale when his owl comes in, and he cares a very great deal for precedent, so I've written him a letter about precedent that he'll find quite impossible to put down. They'll wish,' she said, with a small exact smile, 'they'd stayed at their gates.'

'Dracina-'

'And furthermore-' She stopped. She appeared to review the agenda of the meeting and find it concluded, and for a moment she simply stood there at the foot of the bed in the lamplight with her good hand resting on the rail of it; and then, as though it cost her nothing, as though it were not the single most scandalous act a Malfoy could commit in a public ward, she reached out and twitched his blanket a quarter-inch straighter, smoothing it flat with two fingers, proprietary as a queen adjusting a map of somewhere she owned.

'Nobody's permitted to kill you,' she said. 'Nobody. Black, those creatures, Hufflepuffs, the weather. You, Potter, least of all. See that it's understood.'

And she was gone, down the dark ward and out, with the door making no sound behind her; and from the next bed along, where Madam Pomfrey believed him to be asleep, Ron's voice said, into the quiet, 'One of these days you're going to work out what that is, mate, and I want to be there when you do. No I don't. I take it back. I'll be in Egypt.'

'Go to sleep, Ron.'

But sleep was long coming, that night.

Harry lay in the dim ward with the bag of splinters on the table beside him and listened to the soft rain, and let the weekend file past him one thing at a time, the way you'd go through a trunk. The lost match, which should have hurt worst and somehow didn't. The broom, which did. Ron at the foot of the bed with his jaw set; Hermione's Impervius and her three bowls of porridge; a blanket smoothed flat by two fingers. The hooded things lifting their faces all together, and the cold, and his mother's voice, because it had been hers; he knew it now past any arguing, the way you know a smell from a house you lived in before you could walk, his mother's voice spending its last breath trying to buy him at the price of herself.

Everyone kept telling him he was lucky. Fifty feet, they said, and bruises. Lucky Dumbledore was quick. Lucky the ground was soft.

Harry lay looking at the dark window and thought about luck; and thought, not quite on purpose, of a warm voice in a cold Chamber, many months ago, saying that his work was not yet done; and of a stillness inside a storm at five o'clock in the morning, like a hand laid flat on water; and about how very strange it was, when you put it all in one place, the number of times something had caught Harry Potter when he fell.

The dog had been real. He was sure of that too, now, in the dark, in the way you're sure of things at night that you'll argue yourself out of by breakfast. Enormous, black, patient, in the highest row of an empty stand, watching him in the rain; and every time it appeared, something tried to kill him. The worst omen of death we have. Perhaps it was. Perhaps everything was exactly as grim as it looked, and the omen was for him, and Black would come again, and the hooded things would get past one old man eventually.

But his hand, under the blanket, where nobody could see, moving awkwardly, self-consciously, still not quite sure it had the right, went up, and across, and side to side, the way he'd seen it done through the window of St Michael's a long time ago; and he thought, falling at last towards sleep with the rain soft on the glass: take me instead, she said. And it took her. And I'm still here, and it's still not done with me, whatever it is.

So somebody had better keep catching me.