[Part 11] "Harry Potter and Order of Phoenix" by Rowling J.K.

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CHAPTER XXI. THE EYE OF THE SNAKE

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Hermione plowed her way back to Hagrid’s cabin through two feet of snow on Sunday morning.

Harry and Ron wanted to go with her, but their mountain of homework had reached an alarming height again, so they grudgingly remained in the common room, trying to ignore the gleeful shouts drifting up from the grounds outside, where students were enjoying themselves skating on the frozen lake, tobogganing, and worst of all, bewitching snowballs to zoom up to Gryffindor Tower and rap hard on the windows.

“Oy!” bellowed Ron, finally losing patience and sticking his head out of the window, “I am a prefect and if one more snowball hits this window — OUCH!”

He withdrew his head sharply, his face covered in snow.

“It’s Fred and George,” he said bitterly, slamming the window behind him.

“Gits . . .”

Hermione returned from Hagrid’s just before lunch, shivering slightly, her robes damp to the knees.

“So?” said Ron, looking up when she entered.

“Got all his lessons planned for him?”

“Well, I tried,” she said dully, sinking into a chair beside Harry.

She pulled out her wand and gave it a complicated little wave so that hot air streamed out of the tip; she then pointed this at her robes, which began to steam as they dried out.

“He wasn’t even there when I arrived, I was knocking for at least half an hour.

And then he came stumping out of the forest —”

Harry groaned.

The Forbidden Forest was teeming with the kind of creatures most likely to get Hagrid the sack.

“What’s he keeping in there? Did he say?” asked Harry.

“No,” said Hermione miserably.

“He says he wants them to be a surprise.

I tried to explain about Umbridge, but he just doesn’t get it.

He kept saying nobody in their right mind would rather study knarls than chimaeras — oh I don’t think he’s got a chimaera,” she added at the appalled look on Harry and Ron’s faces, “but that’s not for lack of trying from what he said about how hard it is to get eggs. . . .

I don’t know how many times I told him he’d be better off following Grubbly-Plank’s plan, I honestly don’t think he listened to half of what I said.

He’s in a bit of a funny mood, you know.

He still won’t say how he got all those injuries . . .”

Hagrid’s reappearance at the staff table at breakfast next day was not greeted by enthusiasm from all students.

Some, like Fred, George, and Lee, roared with delight and sprinted up the aisle between the Gryffindor and Hufflepuff tables to wring Hagrid’s enormous hand; others, like Parvati and Lavender, exchanged gloomy looks and shook their heads.

Harry knew that many of them preferred Professor Grubbly-Plank’s lessons, and the worst of it was that a very small, unbiased part of him knew that they had good reason: Grubbly-Plank’s idea of an interesting class was not one where there was a risk that somebody might have their head ripped off.

It was with a certain amount of apprehension that Harry, Ron, and Hermione headed down to Hagrid’s on Tuesday, heavily muffled against the cold.

Harry was worried, not only about what Hagrid might have decided to teach them, but also about how the rest of the class, particularly Malfoy and his cronies, would behave if Umbridge was watching them.

However, the High Inquisitor was nowhere to be seen as they struggled through the snow toward Hagrid, who stood waiting for them on the edge of the forest.

He did not present a reassuring sight; the bruises that had been purple on Saturday night were now tinged with green and yellow and some of his cuts still seemed to be bleeding.

Harry could not understand this: Had Hagrid perhaps been attacked by some creature whose venom prevented the wounds it inflicted from healing?

As though to complete the ominous picture, Hagrid was carrying what looked like half a dead cow over his shoulder.

“We’re workin’ in here today!” Hagrid called happily to the approaching students, jerking his head back at the dark trees behind him.

“Bit more sheltered!

Anyway, they prefer the dark . . .”

“What prefers the dark?” Harry heard Malfoy say sharply to Crabbe and Goyle, a trace of panic in his voice.

“What did he say prefers the dark — did you hear?”

Harry remembered the only occasion on which Malfoy had entered the forest before now; he had not been very brave then either.

He smiled to himself; after the Quidditch match anything that caused Malfoy discomfort was all right with him.

“Ready?” said Hagrid happily, looking around at the class.

“Right, well, I’ve bin savin’ a trip inter the forest fer yer fifth year.

Thought we’d go an’ see these creatures in their natural habitat.

Now, what we’re studyin’ today is pretty rare, I reckon I’m probably the on’y person in Britain who’s managed ter train ’em —”

“And you’re sure they’re trained, are you?” said Malfoy, the panic in his voice even more pronounced now.

“Only it wouldn’t be the first time you’d brought wild stuff to class, would it?”

The Slytherins murmured agreement and a few Gryffindors looked as though they thought Malfoy had a fair point too.

“’Course they’re trained,” said Hagrid, scowling and hoisting the dead cow a little higher on his shoulder.

“So what happened to your face, then?” demanded Malfoy.

“Mind yer own business!” said Hagrid, angrily.

“Now if yeh’ve finished askin’ stupid questions, follow me!”

He turned and strode straight into the forest.

Nobody seemed much disposed to follow.

Harry glanced at Ron and Hermione, who sighed but nodded, and the three of them set off after Hagrid, leading the rest of the class.

They walked for about ten minutes until they reached a place where the trees stood so closely together that it was as dark as twilight and there was no snow on the ground at all.

Hagrid deposited his half a cow with a grunt on the ground, stepped back, and turned to face his class again, most of whom were creeping toward him from tree to tree, peering around nervously as though expecting to be set upon at any moment.

“Gather roun’, gather roun’,” said Hagrid encouragingly.

“Now, they’ll be attracted by the smell o’ the meat but I’m goin’ ter give ’em a call anyway, ’cause they’ll like ter know it’s me . . .”

He turned, shook his shaggy head to get the hair out of his face, and gave an odd, shrieking cry that echoed through the dark trees like the call of some monstrous bird.

Nobody laughed; most of them looked too scared to make a sound.

Hagrid gave the shrieking cry again.

A minute passed in which the class continued to peer nervously over their shoulders and around trees for a first glimpse of whatever it was that was coming.

And then, as Hagrid shook his hair back for a third time and expanded his enormous chest, Harry nudged Ron and pointed into the black space between two gnarled yew trees.

A pair of blank, white, shining eyes were growing larger through the gloom and a moment later the dragonish face, neck, and then skeletal body of a great, black, winged horse emerged from the darkness.

It looked around at the class for a few seconds, swishing its long black tail, then bowed its head and began to tear flesh from the dead cow with its pointed fangs.

A great wave of relief broke over Harry.

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Here at last was proof that he had not imagined these creatures, that they were real: Hagrid knew about them too.

He looked eagerly at Ron, but Ron was still staring around into the trees and after a few seconds he whispered, “Why doesn’t Hagrid call again?”

Most of the rest of the class were wearing expressions as confused and nervously expectant as Ron’s and were still gazing everywhere but at the horse standing feet from them.

There were only two other people who seemed to be able to see them: a stringy Slytherin boy standing just behind Goyle was watching the horse eating with an expression of great distaste on his face, and Neville, whose eyes were following the swishing progress of the long black tail.

“Oh, an’ here comes another one!” said Hagrid proudly, as a second black horse appeared out of the dark trees, folded its leathery wings closer to its body, and dipped its head to gorge on the meat.

“Now . . . put yer hands up, who can see ’em?”

Immensely pleased to feel that he was at last going to understand the mystery of these horses, Harry raised his hand.

Hagrid nodded at him.

“Yeah . . . yeah, I knew you’d be able ter, Harry,” he said seriously.

“An’ you too, Neville, eh?

An’ —”

“Excuse me,” said Malfoy in a sneering voice, “but what exactly are we supposed to be seeing?”

For answer, Hagrid pointed at the cow carcass on the ground.

The whole class stared at it for a few seconds, then several people gasped and Parvati squealed.

Harry understood why: Bits of flesh stripping themselves away from the bones and vanishing into thin air had to look very odd indeed.

“What’s doing it?” Parvati demanded in a terrified voice, retreating behind the nearest tree.

“What’s eating it?”

“Thestrals,” said Hagrid proudly and Hermione gave a soft “oh!” of comprehension at Harry’s shoulder.

“Hogwarts has got a whole herd of ’em in here.

Now, who knows — ?”

“But they’re really, really unlucky!” interrupted Parvati, looking alarmed.

“They’re supposed to bring all sorts of horrible misfortune on people who see them.

Professor Trelawney told me once —”

“No, no, no,” said Hagrid, chuckling, “tha’s jus’ superstition, that is, they aren’ unlucky, they’re dead clever an’ useful!

’Course, this lot don’ get a lot o’ work, it’s mainly jus’ pullin’ the school carriages unless Dumbledore’s takin’ a long journey an’ don’ want ter Apparate — an’ here’s another couple, look —”

Two more horses came quietly out of the trees, one of them passing very close to Parvati, who shivered and pressed herself closer to the tree, saying, “I think I felt something, I think it’s near me!”

“Don’ worry, it won’ hurt yeh,” said Hagrid patiently.

“Righ’, now, who can tell me why some o’ you can see them an’ some can’t?”

Hermione raised her hand.

“Go on then,” said Hagrid, beaming at her.

“The only people who can see thestrals,” she said, “are people who have seen death.”

“Tha’s exactly right,” said Hagrid solemnly, “ten points ter Gryffindor.”

“Now, thestrals —”

“Hem, hem.”

Professor Umbridge had arrived.

She was standing a few feet away from Harry, wearing her green hat and cloak again, her clipboard at the ready.

Hagrid, who had never heard Umbridge’s fake cough before, was gazing in some concern at the closest thestral, evidently under the impression that it had made the sound.

“Hem, hem.”

“Oh hello!” Hagrid said, smiling, having located the source of the noise.

“You received the note I sent to your cabin this morning?” said Umbridge, in the same loud, slow voice she had used with him earlier, as though she was addressing somebody both foreign and very slow.

“Telling you that I would be inspecting your lesson?”

“Oh yeah,” said Hagrid brightly.

“Glad yeh found the place all righ’!”

“Well, as you can see — or, I dunno — can you?”

“We’re doin’ thestrals today —”

“I’m sorry?” said Umbridge loudly, cupping her hand around her ear and frowning.

“What did you say?”

Hagrid looked a little confused.

“Er — thestrals!” he said loudly.

“Big — er — winged horses, yeh know!”

He flapped his gigantic arms hopefully.

Professor Umbridge raised her eyebrows at him and muttered as she made a note on her clipboard, “‘has . . . to . . . resort . . . to . . . crude . . . sign . . . language . . .’”

“Well . . . anyway . . .” said Hagrid, turning back to the class and looking slightly flustered.

“Erm . . . what was I sayin’?”

“‘Appears . . . to . . . have . . . poor . . . short . . . term . . . memory . . .’” muttered Umbridge, loudly enough for everyone to hear her.

Draco Malfoy looked as though Christmas had come a month early.

Hermione, on the other hand, had turned scarlet with suppressed rage.

“Oh yeah,” said Hagrid, throwing an uneasy glance at Umbridge’s clipboard, but plowing on valiantly.

“Yeah, I was gonna tell yeh how come we got a herd.”

“Yeah, so, we started off with a male an’ five females.”

“This one,” he patted the first horse to have appeared, “name o’ Tenebrus, he’s my special favorite, firs’ one born here in the forest —”

“Are you aware,” Umbridge said loudly, interrupting him, “that the Ministry of Magic has classified thestrals as ‘dangerous’?”

Harry’s heart sank like a stone, but Hagrid merely chuckled.

“Thestrals aren’ dangerous!”

“All righ’, they might take a bite outta you if yeh really annoy them —”

“‘Shows . . . signs . . . of . . . pleasure . . . at . . . idea . . . of . . . violence . . .’” muttered Umbridge, scribbling on her clipboard again.

“No — come on!” said Hagrid, looking a little anxious now.

“I mean, a dog’ll bite if yeh bait it, won’ it — but thestrals have jus’ got a bad reputation because o’ the death thing — people used ter think they were bad omens, didn’ they?”

“Jus’ didn’ understand, did they?”

Umbridge did not answer.

She finished writing her last note, then looked up at Hagrid and said, again very loudly and slowly, “Please continue teaching as usual.”

“I am going to walk” — she mimed walking — Malfoy and Pansy Parkinson were having silent fits of laughter — “among the students” — she pointed around at individual members of the class — “and ask them questions.”

She pointed at her mouth to indicate talking.

Hagrid stared at her, clearly at a complete loss to understand why she was acting as though he did not understand normal English.

Hermione had tears of fury in her eyes now.

“You hag, you evil hag!” she whispered, as Umbridge walked toward Pansy Parkinson.

“I know what you’re doing, you awful, twisted, vicious —”

“Erm . . . anyway,” said Hagrid, clearly struggling to regain the flow of his lesson.

“So — thestrals.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, there’s loads o’ good stuff abou’ them . . .”

“Do you find,” said Professor Umbridge in a ringing voice to Pansy Parkinson, “that you are able to understand Professor Hagrid when he talks?”

Just like Hermione, Pansy had tears in her eyes, but these were tears of laughter.

Indeed, her answer was almost incoherent because she was trying to suppress her giggles.

“No . . . because . . . well . . . it sounds . . . like grunting a lot of the time . . .”

Umbridge scribbled on her clipboard.

The few unbruised bits of Hagrid’s face flushed, but he tried to act as though he had not heard Pansy’s answer.

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“Er . . . yeah . . . good stuff abou’ thestrals.”

“Well, once they’re tamed, like this lot, yeh’ll never be lost again.”

“’Mazin’ senses o’ direction, jus’ tell ’em where yeh want ter go —”

“Assuming they can understand you, of course,” said Malfoy loudly, and Pansy Parkinson collapsed in a fit of renewed giggles.

Professor Umbridge smiled indulgently at them and then turned to Neville.

“You can see the thestrals, Longbottom, can you?” she said.

Neville nodded.

“Whom did you see die?” she asked, her tone indifferent.

“My . . . my grandad,” said Neville.

“And what do you think of them?” she said, waving her stubby hand at the horses, who by now had stripped a great deal of the carcass down to bone.

“Erm,” said Neville nervously, with a glance at Hagrid.

“Well, they’re . . . er . . . okay . . .”

“‘Students . . . are . . . too . . . intimidated . . . to . . . admit . . . they . . . are . . . frightened . . .’” muttered Umbridge, making another note on her clipboard.

“No!” said Neville, looking upset.

“No, I’m not scared of them — !”

“It’s quite all right,” said Umbridge, patting Neville on the shoulder with what she evidently intended to be an understanding smile, though it looked more like a leer to Harry.

“Well, Hagrid,” she turned to look up at him again, speaking once more in that loud, slow voice, “I think I’ve got enough to be getting along with. . . .”

“You will receive” — she mimed taking something from the air in front of her — “the results of your inspection” — she pointed at the clipboard — “in ten days’ time.”

She held up ten stubby little fingers.

Then, her smile wider and more toadlike than ever before beneath her green hat, she bustled from their midst, leaving Malfoy and Pansy Parkinson in fits of laughter, Hermione actually shaking with fury, and Neville looking confused and upset.

“That foul, lying, twisting old gargoyle!” stormed Hermione half an hour later, as they made their way back up to the castle through the channels they had made earlier in the snow.

“You see what she’s up to?”

“It’s her thing about half-breeds all over again — she’s trying to make out Hagrid’s some kind of dim-witted troll, just because he had a giantess for a mother — and oh, it’s not fair, that really wasn’t a bad lesson at all — I mean, all right, if it had been Blast-Ended Skrewts again, but thestrals are fine — in fact, for Hagrid, they’re really good!”

“Umbridge said they’re dangerous,” said Ron.

“Well, it’s like Hagrid said, they can look after themselves,” said Hermione impatiently, “and I suppose a teacher like Grubbly-Plank wouldn’t usually show them to us before N.E.W.T. level, but, well, they are very interesting, aren’t they?”

“The way some people can see them and some can’t!”

“I wish I could.”

“Do you?” Harry asked her quietly.

She looked horrorstruck.

“Oh Harry — I’m sorry — no, of course I don’t — that was a really stupid thing to say —”

“It’s okay,” he said quickly.

“Don’t worry . . .”

“I’m surprised so many people could see them,” said Ron.

“Three in a class —”

“Yeah, Weasley, we were just wondering,” said a malicious voice nearby.

Unheard by any of them in the muffling snow, Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle were walking along right behind them.

“D’you reckon if you saw someone snuff it you’d be able to see the Quaffle better?”

He, Crabbe, and Goyle roared with laughter as they pushed past on their way to the castle and then broke into a chorus of “Weasley Is Our King.”

Ron’s ears turned scarlet.

“Ignore them, just ignore them,” intoned Hermione, pulling out her wand and performing the charm to produce hot air again, so that she could melt them an easier path through the untouched snow between them and the greenhouses.

December arrived, bringing with it more snow and a positive avalanche of homework for the fifth years.

Ron and Hermione’s prefect duties also became more and more onerous as Christmas approached.

They were called upon to supervise the decoration of the castle.

“You try putting up tinsel when Peeves has got the other end and is trying to strangle you with it,” said Ron.

They had to watch over first and second years spending their break times inside because of the bitter cold.

“And they’re cheeky little snotrags, you know, we definitely weren’t that rude when we were in first year,” said Ron.

They were called to patrol the corridors in shifts with Argus Filch, who suspected that the holiday spirit might show itself in an outbreak of wizard duels.

“He’s got dung for brains, that one,” said Ron furiously.

They were so busy that Hermione had stopped knitting elf hats and was fretting that she was down to her last three.

“All those poor elves I haven’t set free yet, having to stay over during Christmas because there aren’t enough hats!”

Harry, who had not had the heart to tell her that Dobby was taking everything she made, bent lower over his History of Magic essay.

In any case, he did not want to think about Christmas.

For the first time in his school career, he very much wanted to spend the holidays away from Hogwarts.

Between his Quidditch ban and worry about whether or not Hagrid was going to be put on probation, he felt highly resentful toward the place at the moment.

The only thing he really looked forward to were the D.A. meetings, and they would have to stop over the holidays, as nearly everybody in the D.A. would be spending the time with their families.

Hermione was going skiing with her parents, something that greatly amused Ron, who had never before heard of Muggles strapping narrow strips of wood to their feet to slide down mountains.

Ron, meanwhile, was going home to the Burrow.

Harry endured several days of jealousy before Ron said, in response to Harry asking how Ron was going to get home for Christmas, “But you’re coming too! Didn’t I say? Mum wrote and told me to invite you weeks ago!”

Hermione rolled her eyes, but Harry’s spirits soared: The thought of Christmas at the Burrow was truly wonderful, only slightly marred by Harry’s guilty feeling that he would not be able to spend the holiday with Sirius.

He wondered whether he could possibly persuade Mrs. Weasley to invite his godfather for the festivities too, but apart from the fact that he doubted whether Dumbledore would permit Sirius to leave Grimmauld Place, he could not help but feel that Mrs. Weasley might not want him; they were so often at loggerheads.

Sirius had not contacted Harry at all since his last appearance in the fire, and although Harry knew that with Umbridge on the constant watch it would be unwise to attempt to contact him, he did not like to think of Sirius alone in his mother’s old house, perhaps pulling a lonely cracker with Kreacher.

Harry arrived early in the Room of Requirement for the last D.A. meeting before the holidays and was very glad he had, because when the lamps burst into light he saw that Dobby had taken it upon himself to decorate the place for Christmas.

He could tell the elf had done it, because nobody else would have strung a hundred golden baubles from the ceiling, each showing a picture of Harry’s face and bearing the legend HAVE A VERY HARRY CHRISTMAS!

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Harry had only just managed to get the last of them down before the door creaked open and Luna Lovegood entered, looking dreamy as always.

“Hello,” she said vaguely, looking around at what remained of the decorations. “These are nice, did you put them up?”

“No,” said Harry, “it was Dobby the house-elf.”

“Mistletoe,” said Luna dreamily, pointing at a large clump of white berries placed almost over Harry’s head.

He jumped out from under it.

“Good thinking,” said Luna very seriously. “It’s often infested with nargles.”

Harry was saved the necessity of asking what nargles were by the arrival of Angelina, Katie, and Alicia.

All three of them were breathless and looked very cold.

“Well,” said Angelina dully, pulling off her cloak and throwing it into a corner, “we’ve replaced you.”

“Replaced me?” said Harry blankly.

“You and Fred and George,” she said impatiently. “We’ve got another Seeker!”

“Who?” said Harry quickly.

“Ginny Weasley,” said Katie.

Harry gaped at her.

“Yeah, I know,” said Angelina, pulling out her wand and flexing her arm. “But she’s pretty good, actually. Nothing on you, of course,” she said, throwing him a very dirty look, “but as we can’t have you...”

Harry bit back the retort he was longing to utter: Did she imagine for a second that he did not regret his expulsion from the team a hundred times more than she did?

“And what about the Beaters?” he asked, trying to keep his voice even.

“Andrew Kirke,” said Alicia without enthusiasm, “and Jack Sloper. Neither of them are brilliant, but compared with the rest of the idiots who turned up...”

The arrival of Ron, Hermione, and Neville brought this depressing discussion to an end and within five minutes, the room was full enough to prevent him seeing Angelina’s burning, reproachful looks.

“Okay,” he said, calling them all to order. “I thought this evening we should just go over the things we’ve done so far, because it’s the last meeting before the holidays and there’s no point starting anything new right before a three-week break —”

“We’re not doing anything new?” said Zacharias Smith, in a disgruntled whisper loud enough to carry through the room. “If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have come...”

“We’re all really sorry Harry didn’t tell you, then,” said Fred loudly.

Several people sniggered.

Harry saw Cho laughing and felt the familiar swooping sensation in his stomach, as though he had missed a step going downstairs.

“We can practice in pairs,” said Harry. “We’ll start with the Impediment Jinx, just for ten minutes, then we can get out the cushions and try Stunning again.”

They all divided up obediently; Harry partnered Neville as usual.

The room was soon full of intermittent cries of “Impedimenta!”

People froze for a minute or so, during which their partners would stare aimlessly around the room watching other pairs at work, then would unfreeze and take their turn at the jinx.

Neville had improved beyond all recognition.

After a while, when Harry had unfrozen three times in a row, he had Neville join Ron and Hermione again so that he could walk around the room and watch the others.

When he passed Cho she beamed at him; he resisted the temptation to walk past her several more times.

After ten minutes on the Impediment Jinx, they laid out cushions all over the floor and started practicing Stunning again.

Space was really too confined to allow them all to work this spell at once; half the group observed the others for a while, then swapped over.

Harry felt himself positively swelling with pride as he watched them all.

True, Neville did Stun Padma Patil rather than Dean, at whom he had been aiming, but it was a much closer miss than usual, and everybody else had made enormous progress.

At the end of an hour, Harry called a halt.

“You’re getting really good,” he said, beaming around at them. “When we get back from the holidays we can start doing some of the big stuff — maybe even Patronuses.”

There was a murmur of excitement.

The room began to clear in the usual twos and threes; most people wished Harry a Happy Christmas as they went.

Feeling cheerful, he collected up the cushions with Ron and Hermione and stacked them neatly away.

Ron and Hermione left before he did; he hung back a little, because Cho was still there and he was hoping to receive a Merry Christmas from her.

“No, you go on,” he heard her say to her friend Marietta, and his heart gave a jolt that seemed to take it into the region of his Adam’s apple.

He pretended to be straightening the cushion pile.

He was quite sure they were alone now and waited for her to speak.

Instead, he heard a hearty sniff.

He turned and saw Cho standing in the middle of the room, tears pouring down her face.

“Wha — ?”

He didn’t know what to do.

She was simply standing there, crying silently.

“What’s up?” he said feebly.

She shook her head and wiped her eyes on her sleeve.

“I’m — sorry,” she said thickly. “I suppose... it’s just... learning all this stuff... it just makes me... wonder whether... if he’d known it all... he’d still be alive...”

Harry’s heart sank right back past its usual spot and settled somewhere around his navel.

He ought to have known.

She wanted to talk about Cedric.

“He did know this stuff,” Harry said heavily. “He was really good at it, or he could never have got to the middle of that maze. But if Voldemort really wants to kill you, you don’t stand a chance.”

She hiccuped at the sound of Voldemort’s name, but stared at Harry without flinching.

“You survived when you were just a baby,” she said quietly.

“Yeah, well,” said Harry wearily, moving toward the door, “I dunno why, nor does anyone else, so it’s nothing to be proud of.”

“Oh don’t go!” said Cho, sounding tearful again. “I’m really sorry to get all upset like this... I didn’t mean to...”

She hiccuped again.

She was very pretty even when her eyes were red and puffy.

Harry felt thoroughly miserable.

He’d have been so pleased just with a Merry Christmas...

“I know it must be horrible for you,” she said, mopping her eyes on her sleeve again. “Me mentioning Cedric, when you saw him die... I suppose you just want to forget about it...”

Harry did not say anything to this; it was quite true, but he felt heartless saying it.

“You’re a r-really good teacher, you know,” said Cho, with a watery smile. “I’ve never been able to Stun anything before.”

“Thanks,” said Harry awkwardly.

They looked at each other for a long moment.

Harry felt a burning desire to run from the room and, at the same time, a complete inability to move his feet.

“Mistletoe,” said Cho quietly, pointing at the ceiling over his head.

“Yeah,” said Harry.

His mouth was very dry.

“It’s probably full of nargles, though.”

“What are nargles?”

“No idea,” said Harry.

She had moved closer.

His brain seemed to have been Stunned.

“You’d have to ask Loony.

Luna, I mean.”

Cho made a funny noise halfway between a sob and a laugh.

She was even nearer him now.

He could have counted the freckles on her nose.

“I really like you, Harry.”

He could not think.

A tingling sensation was spreading throughout him, paralyzing his arms, legs, and brain.

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She was much too close.

He could see every tear clinging to her eyelashes. . . .

He returned to the common room half an hour later to find Hermione and Ron in the best seats by the fire; nearly everybody else had gone to bed.

Hermione was writing a very long letter; she had already filled half a roll of parchment, which was dangling from the edge of the table.

Ron was lying on the hearthrug, trying to finish his Transfiguration homework.

“What kept you?” he asked, as Harry sank into the armchair next to Hermione’s.

Harry did not answer.

He was in a state of shock.

Half of him wanted to tell Ron and Hermione what had just happened, but the other half wanted to take the secret with him to the grave.

“Are you all right, Harry?” Hermione asked, peering at him over the tip of her quill.

Harry gave a halfhearted shrug.

In truth, he didn’t know whether he was all right or not.

“What’s up?” said Ron, hoisting himself up on his elbow to get a clearer view of Harry.

“What’s happened?”

Harry didn’t quite know how to set about telling them, and still wasn’t sure whether he wanted to.

Just as he had decided not to say anything, Hermione took matters out of his hands.

“Is it Cho?” she asked in a businesslike way.

“Did she corner you after the meeting?”

Numbly surprised, Harry nodded.

Ron sniggered, breaking off when Hermione caught his eye.

“So — er — what did she want?” he asked in a mock casual voice.

“She —” Harry began, rather hoarsely; he cleared his throat and tried again.

“She — er —”

“Did you kiss?” asked Hermione briskly.

Ron sat up so fast that he sent his ink bottle flying all over the rug.

Disregarding this completely, he stared avidly at Harry.

“Well?” he demanded.

Harry looked from Ron’s expression of mingled curiosity and hilarity to Hermione’s slight frown, and nodded.

“HA!”

Ron made a triumphant gesture with his fist and went into a raucous peal of laughter that made several timid-looking second years over beside the window jump.

A reluctant grin spread over Harry’s face as he watched Ron rolling around on the hearthrug.

Hermione gave Ron a look of deep disgust and returned to her letter.

“Well?” Ron said finally, looking up at Harry.

“How was it?”

Harry considered for a moment.

“Wet,” he said truthfully.

Ron made a noise that might have indicated jubilation or disgust, it was hard to tell.

“Because she was crying,” Harry continued heavily.

“Oh,” said Ron, his smile fading slightly.

“Are you that bad at kissing?”

“Dunno,” said Harry, who hadn’t considered this, and immediately felt rather worried.

“Maybe I am.”

“Of course you’re not,” said Hermione absently, still scribbling away at her letter.

“How do you know?” said Ron in a sharp voice.

“Because Cho spends half her time crying these days,” said Hermione vaguely.

“She does it at mealtimes, in the loos, all over the place.”

“You’d think a bit of kissing would cheer her up,” said Ron, grinning.

“Ron,” said Hermione in a dignified voice, dipping the point of her quill into her ink pot, “you are the most insensitive wart I have ever had the misfortune to meet.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” said Ron indignantly.

“What sort of person cries while someone’s kissing them?”

“Yeah,” said Harry, slightly desperately, “who does?”

Hermione looked at the pair of them with an almost pitying expression on her face.

“Don’t you understand how Cho’s feeling at the moment?” she asked.

“No,” said Harry and Ron together.

Hermione sighed and laid down her quill.

“Well, obviously, she’s feeling very sad, because of Cedric dying.

Then I expect she’s feeling confused because she liked Cedric and now she likes Harry, and she can’t work out who she likes best.

Then she’ll be feeling guilty, thinking it’s an insult to Cedric’s memory to be kissing Harry at all, and she’ll be worrying about what everyone else might say about her if she starts going out with Harry.

And she probably can’t work out what her feelings toward Harry are anyway, because he was the one who was with Cedric when Cedric died, so that’s all very mixed up and painful.

Oh, and she’s afraid she’s going to be thrown off the Ravenclaw Quidditch team because she’s been flying so badly.”

A slightly stunned silence greeted the end of this speech.

Then Ron said, “One person can’t feel all that at once, they’d explode.”

“Just because you’ve got the emotional range of a teaspoon doesn’t mean we all have,” said Hermione nastily, picking up her quill again.

“She was the one who started it,” said Harry.

“I wouldn’t’ve — she just sort of came at me — and next thing she’s crying all over me — I didn’t know what to do —”

“Don’t blame you, mate,” said Ron, looking alarmed at the very thought.

“You just had to be nice to her,” said Hermione, looking up anxiously.

“You were, weren’t you?”

“Well,” said Harry, an unpleasant heat creeping up his face, “I sort of — patted her on the back a bit.”

Hermione looked as though she was restraining herself from rolling her eyes with extreme difficulty.

“Well, I suppose it could have been worse,” she said.

“Are you going to see her again?”

“I’ll have to, won’t I?” said Harry.

“We’ve got D.A. meetings, haven’t we?”

“You know what I mean,” said Hermione impatiently.

Harry said nothing.

Hermione’s words opened up a whole new vista of frightening possibilities.

He tried to imagine going somewhere with Cho — Hogsmeade, perhaps — and being alone with her for hours at a time.

Of course, she would have been expecting him to ask her out after what had just happened. . . .

The thought made his stomach clench painfully.

“Oh well,” said Hermione distantly, buried in her letter once more, “you’ll have plenty of opportunities to ask her . . .”

“What if he doesn’t want to ask her?” said Ron, who had been watching Harry with an unusually shrewd expression on his face.

“Don’t be silly,” said Hermione vaguely, “Harry’s liked her for ages, haven’t you, Harry?”

He did not answer.

Yes, he had liked Cho for ages, but whenever he had imagined a scene involving the two of them it had always featured a Cho who was enjoying herself, as opposed to a Cho who was sobbing uncontrollably into his shoulder.

“Who’re you writing the novel to anyway?” Ron asked Hermione, trying to read the bit of parchment now trailing on the floor.

Hermione hitched it up out of sight.

“Viktor.”

“Krum?”

“How many other Viktors do we know?”

Ron said nothing, but looked disgruntled.

They sat in silence for another twenty minutes, Ron finishing his Transfiguration essay with many snorts of impatience and crossings-out, Hermione writing steadily to the very end of the parchment, rolling it up carefully and sealing it, and Harry staring into the fire, wishing more than anything that Sirius’s head would appear there and give him some advice about girls.

But the fire merely crackled lower and lower, until the red-hot embers crumbled into ash and, looking around, Harry saw that they were, yet again, the last in the common room.

“Well, ’night,” said Hermione, yawning widely, and she set off up the girls’ staircase.

“What does she see in Krum?” Ron demanded as he and Harry climbed the boys’ stairs.

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“Well,” said Harry, considering the matter, “I s’pose he’s older, isn’t he . . . and he’s an international Quidditch player . . .”

“Yeah, but apart from that,” said Ron, sounding aggravated.

“I mean he’s a grouchy git, isn’t he?”

“Bit grouchy, yeah,” said Harry, whose thoughts were still on Cho.

They pulled off their robes and put on pajamas in silence.

Dean, Seamus, and Neville were already asleep.

Harry put his glasses on his bedside table and got into bed but did not pull the hangings closed around his four-poster.

Instead, he stared at the patch of starry sky visible through the window next to Neville’s bed.

If he had known, this time last night, that in twenty-four hours’ time he would have kissed Cho Chang . . .

“’Night,” grunted Ron, from somewhere to his right.

“’Night,” said Harry.

Maybe next time . . . if there was a next time . . . she’d be a bit happier.

He ought to have asked her out; she had probably been expecting it and was now really angry with him . . . or was she lying in bed, still crying about Cedric?

He did not know what to think.

Hermione’s explanation had made it all seem more complicated rather than easier to understand.

That’s what they should teach us here, he thought, turning over onto his side, how girls’ brains work . . . it’d be more useful than Divination anyway. . . .

Neville snuffled in his sleep.

An owl hooted somewhere out in the night.

Harry dreamed he was back in the D.A. room.

Cho was accusing him of luring her there under false pretenses; she said that he had promised her a hundred and fifty Chocolate Frog cards if she showed up.

Harry protested. . . .

Cho shouted, “Cedric gave me loads of Chocolate Frog cards, look!”

And she pulled out fistfuls of cards from inside her robes and threw them into the air, and then turned into Hermione, who said, “You did promise her, you know, Harry. . . .

I think you’d better give her something else instead. . . .

How about your Firebolt?”

And Harry was protesting that he could not give Cho his Firebolt because Umbridge had it, and anyway the whole thing was ridiculous, he’d only come to the D.A. room to put up some Christmas baubles shaped like Dobby’s head. . . .

The dream changed. . . .

His body felt smooth, powerful, and flexible.

He was gliding between shining metal bars, across dark, cold stone. . . .

He was flat against the floor, sliding along on his belly. . . .

It was dark, yet he could see objects around him shimmering in strange, vibrant colors. . . .

He was turning his head. . . .

At first glance, the corridor was empty . . . but no . . . a man was sitting on the floor ahead, his chin drooping onto his chest, his outline gleaming in the dark. . . .

Harry put out his tongue. . . .

He tasted the man’s scent on the air. . . .

He was alive but drowsing . . . sitting in front of a door at the end of the corridor. . . .

Harry longed to bite the man . . . but he must master the impulse. . . .

He had more important work to do. . . .

But the man was stirring. . . .

A silvery cloak fell from his legs as he jumped to his feet; and Harry saw his vibrant, blurred outline towering above him, saw a wand withdrawn from a belt. . . .

He had no choice. . . .

He reared high from the floor and struck once, twice, three times, plunging his fangs deeply into the man’s flesh, feeling his ribs splinter beneath his jaws, feeling the warm gush of blood. . . .

The man was yelling in pain. . . .

Then he fell silent. . . .

He slumped backward against the wall. . . .

Blood was splattering onto the floor. . . .

His forehead hurt terribly. . . .

It was aching fit to burst. . . .

“Harry! HARRY!”

He opened his eyes.

Every inch of his body was covered in icy sweat; his bedcovers were twisted all around him like a straitjacket; he felt as though a white-hot poker was being applied to his forehead.

“Harry!”

Ron was standing over him looking extremely frightened.

There were more figures at the foot of Harry’s bed.

He clutched his head in his hands; the pain was blinding him. . . .

He rolled right over and vomited over the edge of the mattress.

“He’s really ill,” said a scared voice.

“Should we call someone?”

“Harry! Harry!”

He had to tell Ron, it was very important that he tell him. . . .

Taking great gulps of air, Harry pushed himself up in bed, willing himself not to throw up again, the pain half-blinding him.

“Your dad,” he panted, his chest heaving.

“Your dad’s . . . been attacked. . . .”

“What?” said Ron uncomprehendingly.

“Your dad! He’s been bitten, it’s serious, there was blood everywhere. . . .”

“I’m going for help,” said the same scared voice, and Harry heard footsteps running out of the dormitory.

“Harry, mate,” said Ron uncertainly, “you . . . you were just dreaming. . . .”

“No!” said Harry furiously; it was crucial that Ron understand.

“It wasn’t a dream . . . not an ordinary dream. . . .

I was there, I saw it. . . .

I did it. . . .”

He could hear Seamus and Dean muttering but did not care.

The pain in his forehead was subsiding slightly, though he was still sweating and shivering feverishly.

He retched again and Ron leapt backward out of the way.

“Harry, you’re not well,” he said shakily.

“Neville’s gone for help. . . .”

“I’m fine!” Harry choked, wiping his mouth on his pajamas and shaking uncontrollably.

“There’s nothing wrong with me, it’s your dad you’ve got to worry about — we need to find out where he is — he’s bleeding like mad — I was — it was a huge snake. . . .”

He tried to get out of bed but Ron pushed him back into it.

Dean and Seamus were still whispering somewhere nearby.

Whether one minute passed or ten, Harry did not know; he simply sat there shaking, feeling the pain recede very slowly from his scar. . . .

Then there were hurried footsteps coming up the stairs, and he heard Neville’s voice again.

“Over here, Professor. . . .”

Professor McGonagall came hurrying into the dormitory in her tartan dressing gown, her glasses perched lopsidedly on the bridge of her bony nose.

“What is it, Potter? Where does it hurt?”

He had never been so pleased to see her; it was a member of the Order of the Phoenix he needed now, not someone fussing over him and prescribing useless potions.

“It’s Ron’s dad,” he said, sitting up again.

“He’s been attacked by a snake and it’s serious, I saw it happen.”

“What do you mean, you saw it happen?” said Professor McGonagall, her dark eyebrows contracting.

“I don’t know. . . .

I was asleep and then I was there. . . .”

“You mean you dreamed this?”

“No!” said Harry angrily.

Would none of them understand?

“I was having a dream at first about something completely different, something stupid. . . .

And then this interrupted it.

It was real, I didn’t imagine it, Mr. Weasley was asleep on the floor and he was attacked by a gigantic snake, there was a load of blood, he collapsed, someone’s got to find out where he is. . . .”

Professor McGonagall was gazing at him through her lopsided spectacles as though horrified at what she was seeing.

“I’m not lying, and I’m not mad!” Harry told her, his voice rising to a shout.

“I tell you, I saw it happen!”

“I believe you, Potter,” said Professor McGonagall curtly.

“Put on your dressing-gown — we’re going to see the headmaster.”

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CHAPTER XXII. ST. MUNGO’S HOSPITAL FOR MAGICAL MALADIES AND INJURIES

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Harry was so relieved that she was taking him seriously that he did not hesitate, but jumped out of bed at once, pulled on his dressing gown, and pushed his glasses back onto his nose.

“Weasley, you ought to come too,” said Professor McGonagall.

They followed Professor McGonagall past the silent figures of Neville, Dean, and Seamus, out of the dormitory, down the spiral stairs into the common room, through the portrait hole, and off along the Fat Lady’s moonlit corridor.

Harry felt as though the panic inside him might spill over at any moment; he wanted to run, to yell for Dumbledore.

Mr. Weasley was bleeding as they walked along so sedately, and what if those fangs (Harry tried hard not to think “my fangs”) had been poisonous?

They passed Mrs. Norris, who turned her lamplike eyes upon them and hissed faintly, but Professor McGonagall said, “Shoo!”

Mrs. Norris slunk away into the shadows, and in a few minutes they had reached the stone gargoyle guarding the entrance to Dumbledore’s office.

“Fizzing Whizbee,” said Professor McGonagall.

The gargoyle sprang to life and leapt aside; the wall behind it split in two to reveal a stone staircase that was moving continuously upward like a spiral escalator.

The three of them stepped onto the moving stairs; the wall closed behind them with a thud, and they were moving upward in tight circles until they reached the highly polished oak door with the brass knocker shaped like a griffin.

Though it was now well past midnight, there were voices coming from inside the room, a positive babble of them.

It sounded as though Dumbledore was entertaining at least a dozen people.

Professor McGonagall rapped three times with the griffin knocker, and the voices ceased abruptly as though someone had switched them all off.

The door opened of its own accord and Professor McGonagall led Harry and Ron inside.

The room was in half darkness; the strange silver instruments standing on tables were silent and still rather than whirring and emitting puffs of smoke as they usually did.

The portraits of old headmasters and headmistresses covering the walls were all snoozing in their frames.

Behind the door, a magnificent red-and-gold bird the size of a swan dozed on its perch with its head under its wing.

“Oh, it’s you, Professor McGonagall . . . and . . . ah.”

Dumbledore was sitting in a high-backed chair behind his desk; he leaned forward into the pool of candlelight illuminating the papers laid out before him.

He was wearing a magnificently embroidered purple-and-gold dressing gown over a snowy-white nightshirt, but seemed wide awake, his penetrating light-blue eyes fixed intently upon Professor McGonagall.

“Professor Dumbledore, Potter has had a . . . well, a nightmare,” said Professor McGonagall.

“He says . . .”

“It wasn’t a nightmare,” said Harry quickly.

Professor McGonagall looked around at Harry, frowning slightly.

“Very well, then, Potter, you tell the headmaster about it.”

“I . . . well, I was asleep . . .” said Harry and even in his terror and his desperation to make Dumbledore understand he felt slightly irritated that the headmaster was not looking at him, but examining his own interlocked fingers.

“But it wasn’t an ordinary dream . . . it was real. . . . I saw it happen . . .”

He took a deep breath, “Ron’s dad — Mr. Weasley — has been attacked by a giant snake.”

The words seemed to reverberate in the air after he had said them, slightly ridiculous, even comic.

There was a pause in which Dumbledore leaned back and stared meditatively at the ceiling.

Ron looked from Harry to Dumbledore, white-faced and shocked.

“How did you see this?” Dumbledore asked quietly, still not looking at Harry.

“Well . . . I don’t know,” said Harry, rather angrily — what did it matter?

“Inside my head, I suppose —”

“You misunderstand me,” said Dumbledore, still in the same calm tone.

“I mean . . . can you remember — er — where you were positioned as you watched this attack happen?

Were you perhaps standing beside the victim, or else looking down on the scene from above?”

This was such a curious question that Harry gaped at Dumbledore; it was almost as though he knew . . .

“I was the snake,” he said.

“I saw it all from the snake’s point of view . . .”

Nobody else spoke for a moment, then Dumbledore, now looking at Ron, who was still whey-faced, said in a new and sharper voice, “Is Arthur seriously injured?”

“Yes,” said Harry emphatically — why were they all so slow on the uptake, did they not realize how much a person bled when fangs that long pierced their side?

And why could Dumbledore not do him the courtesy of looking at him?

But Dumbledore stood up so quickly that Harry jumped, and addressed one of the old portraits hanging very near the ceiling.

“Everard?” he said sharply.

“And you too, Dilys!”

A sallow-faced wizard with short, black bangs and an elderly witch with long silver ringlets in the frame beside him, both of whom seemed to have been in the deepest of sleeps, opened their eyes immediately.

“You were listening?” said Dumbledore.

The wizard nodded, the witch said, “Naturally.”

“The man has red hair and glasses,” said Dumbledore.

“Everard, you will need to raise the alarm, make sure he is found by the right people —”

Both nodded and moved sideways out of their frames, but instead of emerging in neighboring pictures (as usually happened at Hogwarts), neither reappeared; one frame now contained nothing but a backdrop of dark curtain, the other a handsome leather armchair.

Harry noticed that many of the other headmasters and mistresses on the walls, though snoring and drooling most convincingly, kept sneaking peeks at him under their eyelids, and he suddenly understood who had been talking when they had knocked.

“Everard and Dilys were two of Hogwarts’s most celebrated Heads,” Dumbledore said, now sweeping around Harry, Ron, and Professor McGonagall and approaching the magnificent sleeping bird on his perch beside the door.

“Their renown is such that both have portraits hanging in other important Wizarding institutions.

As they are free to move between their own portraits they can tell us what may be happening elsewhere . . .”

“But Mr. Weasley could be anywhere!” said Harry.

“Please sit down, all three of you,” said Dumbledore, as though Harry had not spoken.

“Everard and Dilys may not be back for several minutes. . . .

Professor McGonagall, if you could draw up extra chairs . . .”

Professor McGonagall pulled her wand from the pocket of her dressing gown and waved it; three chairs appeared out of thin air, straight-backed and wooden, quite unlike the comfortable chintz armchairs that Dumbledore had conjured back at Harry’s hearing.

Harry sat down, watching Dumbledore over his shoulder.

Dumbledore was now stroking Fawkes’s plumed golden head with one finger.

The phoenix awoke immediately.

He stretched his beautiful head high and observed Dumbledore through bright, dark eyes.

“We will need,” said Dumbledore very quietly to the bird, “a warning.”

There was a flash of fire and the phoenix had gone.

Dumbledore now swooped down upon one of the fragile silver instruments whose function Harry had never known, carried it over to his desk, sat down facing them again, and tapped it gently with the tip of his wand.

The instrument tinkled into life at once with rhythmic clinking noises.

Tiny puffs of pale green smoke issued from the minuscule silver tube at the top.

Dumbledore watched the smoke closely, his brow furrowed, and after a few seconds, the tiny puffs became a steady stream of smoke that thickened and coiled in the air. . . .

A serpent’s head grew out of the end of it, opening its mouth wide.

Harry wondered whether the instrument was confirming his story: He looked eagerly at Dumbledore for a sign that he was right, but Dumbledore did not look up.

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“Naturally, naturally,” murmured Dumbledore apparently to himself, still observing the stream of smoke without the slightest sign of surprise.

“But in essence divided?”

Harry could make neither head nor tail of this question.

The smoke serpent, however, split itself instantly into two snakes, both coiling and undulating in the dark air.

With a look of grim satisfaction Dumbledore gave the instrument another gentle tap with his wand: The clinking noise slowed and died, and the smoke serpents grew faint, became a formless haze, and vanished.

Dumbledore replaced the instrument upon its spindly little table; Harry saw many of the old headmasters in the portraits follow him with their eyes, then, realizing that Harry was watching them, hastily pretend to be sleeping again.

Harry wanted to ask what the strange silver instrument was for, but before he could do so, there was a shout from the top of the wall to their right; the wizard called Everard had reappeared in his portrait, panting slightly.

“Dumbledore!”

“What news?” said Dumbledore at once.

“I yelled until someone came running,” said the wizard, who was mopping his brow on the curtain behind him.

“Said I’d heard something moving downstairs — they weren’t sure whether to believe me but went down to check — you know there are no portraits down there to watch from.

Anyway, they carried him up a few minutes later.

He doesn’t look good, he’s covered in blood.

I ran along to Elfrida Cragg’s portrait to get a good view as they left —”

“Good,” said Dumbledore as Ron made a convulsive movement, “I take it Dilys will have seen him arrive, then —”

And moments later, the silver-ringletted witch had reappeared in her picture too; she sank, coughing, into her armchair and said, “Yes, they’ve taken him to St. Mungo’s, Dumbledore. . . . They carried him past under my portrait. . . . He looks bad . . .”

“Thank you,” said Dumbledore.

He looked around at Professor McGonagall.

“Minerva, I need you to go and wake the other Weasley children.”

“Of course . . .”

Professor McGonagall got up and moved swiftly to the door.

Harry cast a sideways glance at Ron, who was now looking terrified.

“And Dumbledore — what about Molly?” said Professor McGonagall, pausing at the door.

“That will be a job for Fawkes when he has finished keeping a lookout for anybody approaching,” said Dumbledore.

“But she may already know . . . that excellent clock of hers . . .”

Harry knew Dumbledore was referring to the clock that told, not the time, but the whereabouts and conditions of the various Weasley family members, and with a pang he thought that Mr. Weasley’s hand must, even now, be pointing at “mortal peril.”

But it was very late. . . . Mrs. Weasley was probably asleep, not watching the clock. . . .

And he felt cold as he remembered Mrs. Weasley’s boggart turning into Mr. Weasley’s lifeless body, his glasses askew, blood running down his face. . . .

But Mr. Weasley wasn’t going to die. . . . He couldn’t. . . .

Dumbledore was now rummaging in a cupboard behind Harry and Ron.

He emerged from it carrying a blackened old kettle, which he placed carefully upon his desk.

He raised his wand and murmured “Portus”; for a moment the kettle trembled, glowing with an odd blue light, then it quivered to a rest, as solidly black as ever.

Dumbledore marched over to another portrait, this time of a clever-looking wizard with a pointed beard, who had been painted wearing the Slytherin colors of green and silver and was apparently sleeping so deeply that he could not hear Dumbledore’s voice when he attempted to rouse him.

“Phineas. Phineas.”

And now the subjects of the portraits lining the room were no longer pretending to be asleep; they were shifting around in their frames, the better to watch what was happening.

When the clever-looking wizard continued to feign sleep, some of them shouted his name too.

“Phineas! Phineas! PHINEAS!”

He could not pretend any longer; he gave a theatrical jerk and opened his eyes wide.

“Did someone call?”

“I need you to visit your other portrait again, Phineas,” said Dumbledore.

“I’ve got another message.”

“Visit my other portrait?” said Phineas in a reedy voice, giving a long, fake yawn (his eyes traveling around the room and focusing upon Harry).

“Oh no, Dumbledore, I am too tired tonight . . .”

Something about Phineas’s voice was familiar to Harry.

Where had he heard it before?

But before he could think, the portraits on the surrounding walls broke into a storm of protest.

“Insubordination, sir!” roared a corpulent, red-nosed wizard, brandishing his fists.

“Dereliction of duty!”

“We are honor-bound to give service to the present headmaster of Hogwarts!” cried a frail-looking old wizard whom Harry recognized as Dumbledore’s predecessor, Armando Dippet.

“Shame on you, Phineas!”

“Shall I persuade him, Dumbledore?” called a gimlet-eyed witch, raising an unusually thick wand that looked not unlike a birch rod.

“Oh, very well,” said the wizard called Phineas, eyeing this wand slightly apprehensively, “though he may well have destroyed my picture by now, he’s done most of the family —”

“Sirius knows not to destroy your portrait,” said Dumbledore, and Harry realized immediately where he had heard Phineas’s voice before: issuing from the apparently empty frame in his bedroom in Grimmauld Place.

“You are to give him the message that Arthur Weasley has been gravely injured and that his wife, children, and Harry Potter will be arriving at his house shortly. Do you understand?”

“Arthur Weasley, injured, wife and children and Harry Potter coming to stay,” recited Phineas in a bored voice.

“Yes, yes . . . very well . . .”

He sloped away into the frame of the portrait and disappeared from view at the very moment that the study door opened again.

Fred, George, and Ginny were ushered inside by Professor McGonagall, all three of them looking disheveled and shocked, still in their night things.

“Harry — what’s going on?” asked Ginny, who looked frightened.

“Professor McGonagall says you saw Dad hurt —”

“Your father has been injured in the course of his work for the Order of the Phoenix,” said Dumbledore before Harry could speak.

“He has been taken to St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries.

I am sending you back to Sirius’s house, which is much more convenient for the hospital than the Burrow.

You will meet your mother there.”

“How’re we going?” asked Fred, looking shaken.

“Floo powder?”

“No,” said Dumbledore, “Floo powder is not safe at the moment, the Network is being watched.

You will be taking a Portkey.”

He indicated the old kettle lying innocently on his desk.

“We are just waiting for Phineas Nigellus to report back. . . . I wish to be sure that the coast is clear before sending you —”

There was a flash of flame in the very middle of the office, leaving behind a single golden feather that floated gently to the floor.

“It is Fawkes’s warning,” said Dumbledore, catching the feather as it fell.

“She must know you’re out of your beds. . . .

Minerva, go and head her off — tell her any story —”

Professor McGonagall was gone in a swish of tartan.

“He says he’ll be delighted,” said a bored voice behind Dumbledore; the wizard called Phineas had reappeared in front of his Slytherin banner.

“My great-great-grandson has always had odd taste in houseguests . . .”

“Come here, then,” Dumbledore said to Harry and the Weasleys.

“And quickly, before anyone else joins us . . .”

Harry and the others gathered around Dumbledore’s desk.

“You have all used a Portkey before?” asked Dumbledore, and they nodded, each reaching out to touch some part of the blackened kettle.

“Good. On the count of three then . . . one . . . two . . .”

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It happened in a fraction of a second: In the infinitesimal pause before Dumbledore said “three,” Harry looked up at him — they were very close together — and Dumbledore’s clear blue gaze moved from the Portkey to Harry’s face.

At once, Harry’s scar burned white-hot, as though the old wound had burst open again — and unbidden, unwanted, but terrifyingly strong, there rose within Harry a hatred so powerful he felt, for that instant, that he would like nothing better than to strike — to bite — to sink his fangs into the man before him —

“. . . three.”

He felt a powerful jerk behind his navel, the ground vanished from beneath his feet, his hand was glued to the kettle; he was banging into the others as all sped forward in a swirl of colors and a rush of wind, the kettle pulling them onward and then —

His feet hit the ground so hard that his knees buckled, the kettle clattered to the ground and somewhere close at hand a voice said, “Back again, the blood traitor brats, is it true their father’s dying . . . ?”

“OUT!” roared a second voice.

Harry scrambled to his feet and looked around; they had arrived in the gloomy basement kitchen of number twelve, Grimmauld Place.

The only sources of light were the fire and one guttering candle, which illuminated the remains of a solitary supper.

Kreacher was disappearing through the door to the hall, looking back at them malevolently as he hitched up his loincloth; Sirius was hurrying toward them all, looking anxious.

He was unshaven and still in his day clothes; there was also a slightly Mundungus-like whiff of stale drink about him.

“What’s going on?” he said, stretching out a hand to help Ginny up.

“Phineas Nigellus said Arthur’s been badly injured —”

“Ask Harry,” said Fred.

“Yeah, I want to hear this for myself,” said George.

The twins and Ginny were staring at him.

Kreacher’s footsteps had stopped on the stairs outside.

“It was —” Harry began; this was even worse than telling McGonagall and Dumbledore.

“I had a — a kind of — vision . . .”

And he told them all that he had seen, though he altered the story so that it sounded as though he had watched from the sidelines as the snake attacked, rather than from behind the snake’s own eyes. . . .

Ron, who was still very white, gave him a fleeting look, but did not speak.

When Harry had finished, Fred, George, and Ginny continued to stare at him for a moment.

Harry did not know whether he was imagining it or not, but he fancied there was something accusatory in their looks.

Well, if they were going to blame him for just seeing the attack, he was glad he had not told them that he had been inside the snake at the time. . . .

“Is Mum here?” said Fred, turning to Sirius.

“She probably doesn’t even know what’s happened yet,” said Sirius.

“The important thing was to get you away before Umbridge could interfere.

I expect Dumbledore’s letting Molly know now.”

“We’ve got to go to St. Mungo’s,” said Ginny urgently.

She looked around at her brothers; they were of course still in their pajamas.

“Sirius, can you lend us cloaks or anything — ?”

“Hang on, you can’t go tearing off to St. Mungo’s!” said Sirius.

“’Course we can go to St. Mungo’s if we want,” said Fred, with a mulish expression, “he’s our dad!”

“And how are you going to explain how you knew Arthur was attacked before the hospital even let his wife know?”

“What does that matter?” said George hotly.

“It matters because we don’t want to draw attention to the fact that Harry is having visions of things that are happening hundreds of miles away!” said Sirius angrily.

“Have you any idea what the Ministry would make of that information?”

Fred and George looked as though they could not care less what the Ministry made of anything.

Ron was still white-faced and silent.

Ginny said, “Somebody else could have told us. . . . We could have heard it somewhere other than Harry . . .”

“Like who?” said Sirius impatiently.

“Listen, your dad’s been hurt while on duty for the Order and the circumstances are fishy enough without his children knowing about it seconds after it happened, you could seriously damage the Order’s —”

“We don’t care about the dumb Order!” shouted Fred.

“It’s our dad dying we’re talking about!” yelled George.

“Your father knew what he was getting into, and he won’t thank you for messing things up for the Order!” said Sirius angrily in his turn.

“This is how it is — this is why you’re not in the Order — you don’t understand — there are things worth dying for!”

“Easy for you to say, stuck here!” bellowed Fred.

“I don’t see you risking your neck!”

The little color remaining in Sirius’s face drained from it.

He looked for a moment as though he would quite like to hit Fred, but when he spoke, it was in a voice of determined calm.

“I know it’s hard, but we’ve all got to act as though we don’t know anything yet.

We’ve got to stay put, at least until we hear from your mother, all right?”

Fred and George still looked mutinous.

Ginny, however, took a few steps over to the nearest chair and sank into it.

Harry looked at Ron, who made a funny movement somewhere between a nod and shrug, and they sat down too.

The twins glared at Sirius for another minute, then took seats on either side of Ginny.

“That’s right,” said Sirius encouragingly, “come on, let’s all . . . let’s all have a drink while we’re waiting.

Accio Butterbeer!”

He raised his wand as he spoke and half a dozen bottles came flying toward them out of the pantry, skidded along the table, scattering the debris of Sirius’s meal, and stopped neatly in front of the six of them.

They all drank, and for a while the only sounds were those of the crackling of the kitchen fire and the soft thud of their bottles on the table.

Harry was only drinking to have something to do with his hands.

His stomach was full of horrible hot, bubbling guilt.

They would not be here if it were not for him; they would all still be asleep in bed.

And it was no good telling himself that by raising the alarm he had ensured that Mr. Weasley was found, because there was also the inescapable business of it being he who had attacked Mr. Weasley in the first place. . . .

Don’t be stupid, you haven’t got fangs, he told himself, trying to keep calm, though the hand on his butterbeer bottle was shaking.

You were lying in bed, you weren’t attacking anyone. . . .

But then, what just happened in Dumbledore’s office? he asked himself.

I felt like I wanted to attack Dumbledore too. . . .

He put the bottle down on the table a little harder than he meant to, so that it slopped over onto the table.

No one took any notice.

Then a burst of fire in midair illuminated the dirty plates in front of them and as they gave cries of shock, a scroll of parchment fell with a thud onto the table, accompanied by a single golden phoenix tail feather.

“Fawkes!” said Sirius at once, snatching up the parchment.

“That’s not Dumbledore’s writing — it must be a message from your mother — here —”

He thrust the letter into George’s hand, who ripped it open and read aloud, “Dad is still alive.

I am setting out for St. Mungo’s now.

Stay where you are.

I will send news as soon as I can.

Mum.”

George looked around the table.

“Still alive . . .” he said slowly.

“But that makes it sound . . .”

He did not need to finish the sentence.

It sounded to Harry too as though Mr. Weasley was hovering somewhere between life and death.

Still exceptionally pale, Ron stared at the back of his mother’s letter as though it might speak words of comfort to him.

Fred pulled the parchment out of George’s hands and read it for himself, then looked up at Harry, who felt his hand shaking on his butterbeer bottle again and clenched it more tightly to stop the trembling.

If Harry had ever sat through a longer night than this one he could not remember it.

Sirius suggested once that they all go to bed, but without any real conviction, and the Weasleys’ looks of disgust were answer enough.

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They mostly sat in silence around the table, watching the candle wick sinking lower and lower into liquid wax, now and then raising bottles to their lips, speaking only to check the time, to wonder aloud what was happening, and to reassure one another that if there was bad news, they would know straightaway, for Mrs. Weasley must long since have arrived at St. Mungo’s.

Fred fell into a doze, his head sagging sideways onto his shoulder.

Ginny was curled like a cat on her chair, but her eyes were open; Harry could see them reflecting the firelight.

Ron was sitting with his head in his hands, whether awake or asleep it was impossible to tell.

And he and Sirius looked at each other every so often, intruders upon the family grief, waiting . . . waiting . . .

And then, at ten past five in the morning by Ron’s watch, the door swung open and Mrs. Weasley entered the kitchen.

She was extremely pale, but when they all turned to look at her, Fred, Ron, and Harry half-rising from their chairs, she gave a wan smile.

“He’s going to be all right,” she said, her voice weak with tiredness.

“He’s sleeping.

We can all go and see him later.

Bill’s sitting with him now, he’s going to take the morning off work.”

Fred fell back into his chair with his hands over his face.

George and Ginny got up, walked swiftly over to their mother, and hugged her.

Ron gave a very shaky laugh and downed the rest of his butterbeer in one.

“Breakfast!” said Sirius loudly and joyfully, jumping to his feet.

“Where’s that accursed house-elf?

Kreacher!

KREACHER!”

But Kreacher did not answer the summons.

“Oh, forget it, then,” muttered Sirius, counting the people in front of him.

“So it’s breakfast for — let’s see — seven . . .

Bacon and eggs, I think, and some tea, and toast —”

Harry hurried over to the stove to help.

He did not want to intrude upon the Weasleys’ happiness, and he dreaded the moment when Mrs. Weasley would ask him to recount his vision.

However, he had barely taken plates from the dresser when Mrs. Weasley lifted them out of his hands and pulled him into a hug.

“I don’t know what would have happened if it hadn’t been for you, Harry,” she said in a muffled voice.

“They might not have found Arthur for hours, and then it would have been too late, but thanks to you he’s alive and Dumbledore’s been able to think up a good cover story for Arthur being where he was, you’ve no idea what trouble he would have been in otherwise, look at poor Sturgis . . .”

Harry could hardly stand her gratitude, but fortunately she soon released him to turn to Sirius and thank him for looking after her children through the night.

Sirius said that he was very pleased to have been able to help, and hoped they would all stay with him as long as Mr. Weasley was in hospital.

“Oh, Sirius, I’m so grateful. . . .

They think he’ll be there a little while and it would be wonderful to be nearer . . .

Of course, that might mean we’re here for Christmas . . .”

“The more the merrier!” said Sirius with such obvious sincerity that Mrs. Weasley beamed at him, threw on an apron, and began to help with breakfast.

“Sirius,” Harry muttered, unable to stand it a moment longer.

“Can I have a quick word?

Er — now?”

He walked into the dark pantry and Sirius followed.

Without preamble Harry told his godfather every detail of the vision he had had, including the fact that he himself had been the snake who had attacked Mr. Weasley.

When he paused for breath, Sirius said, “Did you tell Dumbledore this?”

“Yes,” said Harry impatiently, “but he didn’t tell me what it meant.

Well, he doesn’t tell me anything anymore . . .”

“I’m sure he would have told you if it was anything to worry about,” said Sirius steadily.

“But that’s not all,” said Harry in a voice only a little above a whisper.

“Sirius, I . . .

I think I’m going mad. . . .

Back in Dumbledore’s office, just before we took the Portkey . . .

for a couple of seconds there I thought I was a snake, I felt like one — my scar really hurt when I was looking at Dumbledore — Sirius, I wanted to attack him —”

He could only see a sliver of Sirius’s face; the rest was in darkness.

“It must have been the aftermath of the vision, that’s all,” said Sirius.

“You were still thinking of the dream or whatever it was and —”

“It wasn’t that,” said Harry, shaking his head.

“It was like something rose up inside me, like there’s a snake inside me —”

“You need to sleep,” said Sirius firmly.

“You’re going to have breakfast and then go upstairs to bed, and then you can go and see Arthur after lunch with the others.

You’re in shock, Harry; you’re blaming yourself for something you only witnessed, and it’s lucky you did witness it or Arthur might have died.

Just stop worrying . . .”

He clapped Harry on the shoulder and left the pantry, leaving Harry standing alone in the dark.

Everyone but Harry spent the rest of the morning sleeping.

He went up to the bedroom he had shared with Ron over the summer, but while Ron crawled into bed and was asleep within minutes, Harry sat fully clothed, hunched against the cold metal bars of the bedstead, keeping himself deliberately uncomfortable, determined not to fall into a doze, terrified that he might become the serpent again in his sleep and awake to find that he had attacked Ron, or else slithered through the house after one of the others.

When Ron woke up, Harry pretended to have enjoyed a refreshing nap too.

Their trunks arrived from Hogwarts while they were eating lunch, so that they could dress as Muggles for the trip to St. Mungo’s.

Everybody except Harry was riotously happy and talkative as they changed out of their robes into jeans and sweatshirts, and they greeted Tonks and Mad-Eye, who had turned up to escort them across London, gleefully laughing at the bowler hat Mad-Eye was wearing at an angle to conceal his magical eye and assuring him, truthfully, that Tonks, whose hair was short and bright pink again, would attract far less attention on the underground.

Tonks was very interested in Harry’s vision of the attack on Mr. Weasley, something he was not remotely interested in discussing.

“There isn’t any Seer blood in your family, is there?” she inquired curiously, as they sat side by side on a train rattling toward the heart of the city.

“No,” said Harry, thinking of Professor Trelawney and feeling insulted.

“No,” said Tonks musingly, “no, I suppose it’s not really prophecy you’re doing, is it?

I mean, you’re not seeing the future, you’re seeing the present.

It’s odd, isn’t it?

Useful, though.”

Harry did not answer; fortunately they got out at the next stop, a station in the very heart of London, and in the bustle of leaving the train he was able to allow Fred and George to get between himself and Tonks, who was leading the way.

They all followed her up the escalator, Moody clunking along at the back of the group, his bowler tilted low and one gnarled hand stuck in between the buttons of his coat, clutching his wand.

Harry thought he sensed the concealed eye staring hard at him; trying to deflect more questions about his dream he asked Mad-Eye where St. Mungo’s was hidden.

“Not far from here,” grunted Moody as they stepped out into the wintry air on a broad store-lined street packed with Christmas shoppers.

He pushed Harry a little ahead of him and stumped along just behind; Harry knew the eye was rolling in all directions under the tilted hat.

“Wasn’t easy to find a good location for a hospital.

Nowhere in Diagon Alley was big enough and we couldn’t have it underground like the Ministry — unhealthy.

In the end they managed to get hold of a building up here.

Theory was sick wizards could come and go and just blend in with the crowd . . .”

He seized Harry’s shoulder to prevent them being separated by a gaggle of shoppers plainly intent on nothing but making it into a nearby shop full of electrical gadgets.

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“Here we go,” said Moody a moment later.

They had arrived outside a large, old-fashioned, red brick department store called Purge and Dowse Ltd.

The place had a shabby, miserable air; the window displays consisted of a few chipped dummies with their wigs askew, standing at random and modeling fashions at least ten years out of date.

Large signs on all the dusty doors read CLOSED FOR REFURBISHMENT.

Harry distinctly heard a large woman laden with plastic shopping bags say to her friend as they passed, “It’s never open, that place . . .”

“Right,” said Tonks, beckoning them forward to a window displaying nothing but a particularly ugly female dummy whose false eyelashes were hanging off and who was modeling a green nylon pinafore dress.

“Everybody ready?”

They nodded, clustering around her; Moody gave Harry another shove between the shoulder blades to urge him forward and Tonks leaned close to the glass, looking up at the very ugly dummy and said, her breath steaming up the glass, “Wotcher . . . We’re here to see Arthur Weasley.”

For a split second, Harry thought how absurd it was for Tonks to expect the dummy to hear her talking that quietly through a sheet of glass, when there were buses rumbling along behind her and all the racket of a street full of shoppers.

Then he reminded himself that dummies could not hear anyway.

Next second his mouth opened in shock as the dummy gave a tiny nod, beckoned its jointed finger, and Tonks had seized Ginny and Mrs. Weasley by the elbows, stepped right through the glass and vanished.

Fred, George, and Ron stepped after them; Harry glanced around at the jostling crowd; not one of them seemed to have a glance to spare for window displays as ugly as Purge and Dowse Ltd.’s, nor did any of them seem to have noticed that six people had just melted into thin air in front of them.

“C’mon,” growled Moody, giving Harry yet another poke in the back and together they stepped forward through what felt like a sheet of cool water, emerging quite warm and dry on the other side.

There was no sign of the ugly dummy or the space where she had stood.

They had arrived in what seemed to be a crowded reception area where rows of witches and wizards sat upon rickety wooden chairs, some looking perfectly normal and perusing out-of-date copies of Witch Weekly, others sporting gruesome disfigurements such as elephant trunks or extra hands sticking out of their chests.

The room was scarcely less quiet than the street outside, for many of the patients were making very peculiar noises.

A sweaty-faced witch in the center of the front row, who was fanning herself vigorously with a copy of the Daily Prophet, kept letting off a high-pitched whistle as steam came pouring out of her mouth, and a grubby-looking warlock in the corner clanged like a bell every time he moved, and with each clang his head vibrated horribly, so that he had to seize himself by the ears and hold it steady.

Witches and wizards in lime-green robes were walking up and down the rows, asking questions and making notes on clipboards like Umbridge’s.

Harry noticed the emblem embroidered on their chests: a wand and bone, crossed.

“Are they doctors?” he asked Ron quietly.

“Doctors?” said Ron, looking startled.

“Those Muggle nutters that cut people up? Nah, they’re Healers.”

“Over here!” called Mrs. Weasley over the renewed clanging of the warlock in the corner, and they followed her to the queue in front of a plump blonde witch seated at a desk marked INQUIRIES.

The wall behind her was covered in notices and posters saying things like A CLEAN CAULDRON KEEPS POTIONS FROM BECOMING POISONS and ANTIDOTES ARE ANTI-DON’TS UNLESS APPROVED BY A QUALIFIED HEALER.

There was also a large portrait of a witch with long silver ringlets that was labelled DILYS DERWENT ST. MUNGO’S HEALER 1722–1741 HEADMISTRESS OF HOGWARTS SCHOOL OF WITCHCRAFT AND WIZARDRY, 1741–1768.

Dilys was eyeing the Weasley party as though counting them; when Harry caught her eye she gave a tiny wink, walked sideways out of her portrait, and vanished.

Meanwhile, at the front of the queue, a young wizard was performing an odd on-the-spot jig and trying, in between yelps of pain, to explain his predicament to the witch behind the desk.

“It’s these — ouch — shoes my brother gave me — ow — they’re eating my — OUCH — feet — look at them, there must be some kind of — AARGH — jinx on them and I can’t — AAAAARGH — get them off —”

He hopped from one foot to the other as though dancing on hot coals.

“The shoes don’t prevent you reading, do they?” said the blonde witch irritably, pointing at a large sign to the left of her desk.

“You want Spell Damage, fourth floor.

Just like it says on the floor guide.

Next!”

The wizard hobbled and pranced sideways out of the way, the Weasley party moved forward a few steps and Harry read the floor guide:

ARTIFACT ACCIDENTS … … … … … … . . Ground Floor

(Cauldron explosion, wand backfiring, broom crashes, etc.)

CREATURE-INDUCED INJURIES … … … … . . First Floor

(Bites, stings, burns, embedded spines, etc.)

MAGICAL BUGS … … … … … … … … . . Second Floor

(Contagious maladies, e.g., dragon pox, vanishing sickness, scrofungulus)

POTION AND PLANT POISONING … … … … Third Floor

(Rashes, regurgitation, uncontrollable giggling, etc.)

SPELL DAMAGE … … … … … … … … . . Fourth Floor

(Unliftable jinxes, hexes, and incorrectly applied charms, etc.)

VISITORS’ TEAROOM AND HOSPITAL SHOP … Fifth Floor

If you are unsure where to go, incapable of normal speech, or unable to remember why you are here, our Welcome Witch will be pleased to help.

A very old, stooped wizard with a hearing trumpet had shuffled to the front of the queue now.

“I’m here to see Broderick Bode!” he wheezed.

“Ward forty-nine, but I’m afraid you’re wasting your time,” said the witch dismissively.

“He’s completely addled, you know, still thinks he’s a teapot. . . . Next!”

A harassed-looking wizard was holding his small daughter tightly by the ankle while she flapped around his head using the immensely large, feathery wings that had sprouted right out the back of her romper suit.

“Fourth floor,” said the witch in a bored voice, without asking, and the man disappeared through the double doors beside the desk, holding his daughter like an oddly shaped balloon.

“Next!”

Mrs. Weasley moved forward to the desk.

“Hello,” she said.

“My husband, Arthur Weasley, was supposed to be moved to a different ward this morning, could you tell us — ?”

“Arthur Weasley?” said the witch, running her finger down a long list in front of her.

“Yes, first floor, second door on the right, Dai Llewellyn ward.”

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Weasley.

“Come on, you lot.”

They followed through the double doors and along the narrow corridor beyond, which was lined with more portraits of famous Healers and lit by crystal bubbles full of candles that floated up on the ceiling, looking like giant soapsuds.

More witches and wizards in lime-green robes walked in and out of the doors they passed; a foul-smelling yellow gas wafted into the passageway as they passed one door, and every now and then they heard distant wailing.

They climbed a flight of stairs and entered the “Creature-Induced Injuries” corridor, where the second door on the right bore the words “DANGEROUS” DAI LLEWELLYN WARD: SERIOUS BITES.

Underneath this was a card in a brass holder on which had been handwritten Healer-in-Charge: Hippocrates Smethwyck, Trainee Healer: Augustus Pye.

“We’ll wait outside, Molly,” Tonks said.

“Arthur won’t want too many visitors at once. . . . It ought to be just the family first.”

Mad-Eye growled his approval of this idea and set himself with his back against the corridor wall, his magical eye spinning in all directions.

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Harry drew back too, but Mrs. Weasley reached out a hand and pushed him through the door, saying, “Don’t be silly, Harry, Arthur wants to thank you . . .”

The ward was small and rather dingy as the only window was narrow and set high in the wall facing the door.

Most of the light came from more shining crystal bubbles clustered in the middle of the ceiling.

The walls were of panelled oak and there was a portrait of a rather vicious-looking wizard on the wall, captioned URQUHART RACKHARROW, 1612–1697, INVENTOR OF THE ENTRAILEXPELLING CURSE.

There were only three patients.

Mr. Weasley was occupying the bed at the far end of the ward beside the tiny window.

Harry was pleased and relieved to see that he was propped up on several pillows and reading the Daily Prophet by the solitary ray of sunlight falling onto his bed.

He looked around as they walked toward him and, seeing whom it was, beamed.

“Hello!” he called, throwing the Prophet aside.

“Bill just left, Molly, had to get back to work, but he says he’ll drop in on you later . . .”

“How are you, Arthur?” asked Mrs. Weasley, bending down to kiss his cheek and looking anxiously into his face.

“You’re still looking a bit peaky . . .”

“I feel absolutely fine,” said Mr. Weasley brightly, holding out his good arm to give Ginny a hug.

“If they could only take the bandages off, I’d be fit to go home.”

“Why can’t they take them off, Dad?” asked Fred.

“Well, I start bleeding like mad every time they try,” said Mr. Weasley cheerfully, reaching across for his wand, which lay on his bedside cabinet, and waving it so that six extra chairs appeared at his bedside to seat them all.

“It seems there was some rather unusual kind of poison in that snake’s fangs that keeps wounds open. . . .

They’re sure they’ll find an antidote, though, they say they’ve had much worse cases than mine, and in the meantime I just have to keep taking a Blood-Replenishing Potion every hour.

But that fellow over there,” he said, dropping his voice and nodding toward the bed opposite in which a man lay looking green and sickly and staring at the ceiling.

“Bitten by a werewolf, poor chap.

No cure at all.”

“A werewolf?” whispered Mrs. Weasley, looking alarmed.

“Is he safe in a public ward?

Shouldn’t he be in a private room?”

“It’s two weeks till full moon,” Mr. Weasley reminded her quietly.

“They’ve been talking to him this morning, the Healers, you know, trying to persuade him he’ll be able to lead an almost normal life.

I said to him — didn’t mention names, of course — but I said I knew a werewolf personally, very nice man, who finds the condition quite easy to manage . . .”

“What did he say?” asked George.

“Said he’d give me another bite if I didn’t shut up,” said Mr. Weasley sadly.

“And that woman over there,” he indicated the only other occupied bed, which was right beside the door, “won’t tell the Healers what bit her, which makes us all think it must have been something she was handling illegally.

Whatever it was took a real chunk out of her leg, very nasty smell when they take off the dressings.”

“So, you going to tell us what happened, Dad?” asked Fred, pulling his chair closer to the bed.

“Well, you already know, don’t you?” said Mr. Weasley, with a significant smile at Harry.

“It’s very simple — I’d had a very long day, dozed off, got sneaked up on, and bitten.”

“Is it in the Prophet, you being attacked?” asked Fred, indicating the newspaper Mr. Weasley had cast aside.

“No, of course not,” said Mr. Weasley, with a slightly bitter smile, “the Ministry wouldn’t want everyone to know a dirty great serpent got —”

“Arthur!” said Mrs. Weasley warningly.

“— got — er — me,” Mr. Weasley said hastily, though Harry was quite sure that was not what he had meant to say.

“So where were you when it happened, Dad?” asked George.

“That’s my business,” said Mr. Weasley, though with a small smile.

He snatched up the Daily Prophet, shook it open again and said, “I was just reading about Willy Widdershins’s arrest when you arrived.

You know Willy turned out to be behind those regurgitating toilets last summer?

One of his jinxes backfired, the toilet exploded, and they found him lying unconscious in the wreckage covered from head to foot in —”

“When you say you were ‘on duty,’” Fred interrupted in a low voice, “what were you doing?”

“You heard your father,” whispered Mrs. Weasley, “we are not discussing this here!

Go on about Willy Widdershins, Arthur —”

“Well, don’t ask me how, but he actually got off on the toilet charge,” said Mr. Weasley grimly.

“I can only suppose gold changed hands —”

“You were guarding it, weren’t you?” said George quietly.

“The weapon?

The thing You-Know-Who’s after?”

“George, be quiet!” snapped Mrs. Weasley.

“Anyway,” said Mr. Weasley in a raised voice, “this time Willy’s been caught selling biting doorknobs to Muggles, and I don’t think he’ll be able to worm his way out of it because according to this article, two Muggles have lost fingers and are now in St. Mungo’s for emergency bone regrowth and memory modification.

Just think of it, Muggles in St. Mungo’s!

I wonder which ward they’re in?”

And he looked eagerly around as though hoping to see a signpost.

“Didn’t you say You-Know-Who’s got a snake, Harry?” asked Fred, looking at his father for a reaction.

“A massive one?

You saw it the night he returned, didn’t you?”

“That’s enough,” said Mrs. Weasley crossly.

“Mad-Eye and Tonks are outside, Arthur, they want to come and see you.

And you lot can wait outside,” she added to her children and Harry.

“You can come and say goodbye afterward.

Go on . . .”

They trooped back into the corridor.

Mad-Eye and Tonks went in and closed the door of the ward behind them.

Fred raised his eyebrows.

“Fine,” he said coolly, rummaging in his pockets, “be like that.

Don’t tell us anything.”

“Looking for these?” said George, holding out what looked like a tangle of flesh-colored string.

“You read my mind,” said Fred, grinning.

“Let’s see if St. Mungo’s puts Imperturbable Charms on its ward doors, shall we?”

He and George disentangled the string and separated five Extendable Ears from each other.

Fred and George handed them around.

Harry hesitated to take one.

“Go on, Harry, take it!

You saved Dad’s life, if anyone’s got the right to eavesdrop on him it’s you . . .”

Grinning in spite of himself, Harry took the end of the string and inserted it into his ear as the twins had done.

“Okay, go!” Fred whispered.

The flesh-colored strings wriggled like long skinny worms, then snaked under the door.

For a few seconds Harry could hear nothing, then he heard Tonks whispering as clearly as though she were standing right beside him.

“. . . they searched the whole area but they couldn’t find the snake anywhere, it just seems to have vanished after it attacked you, Arthur. . . .

But You-Know-Who can’t have expected a snake to get in, can he?”

“I reckon he sent it as a lookout,” growled Moody, “’cause he’s not had any luck so far, has he?

No, I reckon he’s trying to get a clearer picture of what he’s facing and if Arthur hadn’t been there the beast would’ve had much more time to look around.

So Potter says he saw it all happen?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Weasley.

She sounded rather uneasy.

“You know, Dumbledore seems almost to have been waiting for Harry to see something like this . . .”

“Yeah, well,” said Moody, “there’s something funny about the Potter kid, we all know that.”

“Dumbledore seemed worried about Harry when I spoke to him this morning,” whispered Mrs. Weasley.

“’Course he’s worried,” growled Moody.

“The boy’s seeing things from inside You-Know-Who’s snake. . . .

Obviously, Potter doesn’t realize what that means, but if You-Know-Who’s possessing him —”

Harry pulled the Extendable Ear out of his own, his heart hammering very fast and heat rushing up his face.

He looked around at the others.

They were all staring at him, the strings still trailing from their ears, looking suddenly fearful.