​​​

Birch for beginning, and rowan to keep;
ivy holds on, though the wall be steep.

A First Book of Tree Letters · Obscurus Books, 1962

The woman who brought the stew was called Margery Crisp. Theo had known her the first time she came stooping down the passage with her lantern and her pot, although he kept it to himself until he was sure. He had last seen her from behind a vestry curtain in Carkitt Market, lighting a candle under the photograph of a young man in Auror's robes and telling him it wouldn't be long now. Her eyes slid away from all of them. Her stew was grey and lumpy and tasted chiefly of the pot.

Goyle ate it without a word of complaint for as long as he was too weak to do anything else. The first evening he could sit up on his own, he lifted the lid, and smelt it, and put the lid back on, and looked at her through the roots.

"It's catching," he said. "On the bottom." He looked at the pot rather than at her. "You've got it too near the fire. It wants salt. And an onion. And you want to brown the meat first, not just put it in." He thought about whether to go on, and did. "Bit of thyme. If you've got any. Not much."

Margery Crisp stared at him. Then she picked up the pot and fled.

The next evening the meat had been browned, and the stew had salt in it, and an onion, and a suspicion of thyme. Margery stood on the far side of the roots with her hands wrapped in her apron and watched Goyle eat it. When he'd finished, he said, "That's much better, that," and she went pink, and for the first time she lingered. Theo, after some deliberation, upgraded it from a breach of the International Statute of Secrecy to one star.

Blaise did the rest. He had grown up at his mother's weddings, where everybody had a secret and meant to keep it, and he did it the way he did everything, lightly, as though the answer were neither here nor there. He asked after her family. He asked about the chapel, and the photograph, and her son. Before long Margery Crisp was sitting on an upturned bucket on the far side of the roots every evening while they ate, and talking.

She told them the door only ever opened at Samhain. It always had; it was the oldest rule there was. Until then the hill was shut tight on both sides, and the only people who went in or out were the ones it knew, by the water stair on the west side, where the spring came out. The hill kept every bargain it was ever offered, she said, to the letter. But the only exchange it had ever honoured was somebody going through that door on their own, because they wanted to.

She called the place the Isle, as though they ought to know which, and when Blaise asked her, very gently, which isle that might be, she looked at him in surprise. "The Isle, dear," she said. "The old one. The Isle of Glass." Then she looked frightened, and picked up her pot, and went.

And one evening, when Blaise asked after her grandson, she told them that Jonah was a good boy, and a clever one, and that just for now he'd been lent to the Minister.

"Lent," said Blaise softly, when the lantern had gone.

Every night after that, in the hour after the hounds went quiet, Theo cut a little more into the wall beside the roots with Goyle's flint, very small and very fast. Draco wrote each message out on his chart first, to count the letters, and Blaise read it back to him, and Goyle sat by the roots with his back to the room and watched the passage for Margery's lantern.

The drafting was the hard part. Every message had to fit into a hand's width of uncarved wall, so every word was fought over like a peace treaty. Blaise wanted to add BRING CLEAN SHIRTS. Theo wanted to sign each one, with a flourish, on the grounds that he was an artist and it was his wall. Draco vetoed both. The Isle of Glass went in as YNYS WYDRIN, because that was what Theo's mother used to call it, and because it was a letter shorter. Then Draco spent the best part of an evening deciding whether it needed a full stop, until Blaise offered to cut the full stop into Draco personally. On the third night Goyle hissed from the roots that the lantern was coming, and the four of them threw Theo's coat over the chart and arranged themselves against the walls, looking as much like hostages as they could manage. Margery Crisp held up her lantern and considered them, sitting there in a perfectly innocent row. "Well," she said, "you've been up to something," and gave them extra bread.

​

Hermione had been told that she mustn't do magic, mustn't get out of bed and mustn't, on any account, laugh, because of what it did to her chest; with Ron in a hairnet in the same house, that was the hardest of the three. Nobody had said anything about reading.

She sent Luna to Knockturn Alley with the list.

Harry went with her, the two of them under the Cloak, because these days everybody went everywhere in pairs. He got as far as the doorstep of Nott & Co. The door opened for Luna with a cheerful jangle of bells. When Harry tried to follow her in, it swung shut in his invisible face, firmly and without any fuss, and the gilt lettering above it glowed for a moment: No refunds. No exceptions. No Potters. "You can't even see me," Harry told the door.

"Theo said he had it done specially," said Luna through the letterbox. "I think it's been looking forward to that."

She came out ten minutes later with an armful of books, and patted the door on her way past, and it jangled at her. Most of the books were useful only to people who could already read Ogham. One of them was for people who couldn't. It was a small, shabby, cloth-bound primer for children, with a tree on the cover and its corners worn soft, and on every page, under the rows of printed letters, somebody had practised copying them out in a round, wobbling, determined hand. In the margin of the first page, in a different hand, small and slanting and faded to brown, someone had written: Theodore — neater.

It was a while before Hermione turned the page.

Parvati, it turned out, knew the first five. "Trelawney did a term on tree divination in sixth year," she said, sitting on the end of the bed with her Healer's bag at her feet. "You'd long walked out by then." She drew them in the air with one finger, one stroke, two, three, four, five, all hanging off the same side of an invisible stem. "Birch, rowan, alder, willow, ash. Beith, luis, fearn, saille, nion. She said the trees could tell you who you were going to marry. Lavender spent the whole term trying to make them say Ron Weasley." Parvati smiled a little. "They never would."

Hermione learnt the rest from the primer, a handful at a time, with Theodore — neater looking up at her out of the margin. Within days she had all twenty on index cards, and could read the children's rhymes at the back, slowly, which was more than she had managed in two years of French. The line of marks on the slate was another matter entirely.

​

♫ Listen along

The Order of the Phoenix returned to the wizarding world over the course of a single week in the middle of October, by a great many different routes.

Lee Jordan went first.

He went on the air at eleven o'clock on Tuesday night, from the back room of the Hog's Head, on a frequency nobody at the Wizarding Wireless Network had used since 1998. The password was Fred.

And for the first time in ten years, all over Britain, in kitchens and bedrooms and the back rooms of pubs, wizards and witches who had kept their old wireless sets tuned to that frequency out of habit, or sentiment, or something they couldn't have named, heard a familiar voice come crackling out of the static.

​

​

​​

"Good evening, and welcome back to Potterwatch," said Lee Jordan. "Yes, I know. We thought we'd retired too. But it's October, and everything else is climbing out of its grave, so why not us?"

He talked for an hour. He talked about the Restitution Act, and the vote that had passed it by one, and Aldric Fawley's left-handed signature. He talked about a man walking across the Black Lake in October, and a Minister who had changed his tea. And he talked about the people asleep somewhere in the dark, four of them at first and dozens now, and four more who'd been dragged out of Malfoy Manor in the middle of the night, and what they had in common, and why nobody at the Ministry had looked for any of them.

"And if you're sitting there thinking," said Lee, "well, Lee, they're Death Eaters' kids, why should I care — then I'd just ask you to think about who decided that. And what else they might decide. And whose name might be on the next list."

He signed off with a short announcement on behalf of S.P.A.W.N., the Society for the Protection of Accused Wizards' Next-of-kin, which was now accepting members by owl. "Badges available," said Lee. "I've been asked by the founder not to make any jokes about the name, so I won't. I'll just leave that with you."

​

Xenophilius Lovegood went second. The Quibbler came out with Percy Weasley's Exhibits A to E printed in full across eleven pages. Every handwriting sample, every signature, every leave form and every refreshment requisition was there, sandwiched between a feature on the migratory habits of the Crumple-Horned Snorkack and a four-page pull-out map of known Nargle infestations in the Home Counties. For the second time in its entire history, The Quibbler sold out by lunchtime.

It was Dean Thomas who had arranged it. He had stayed away from the Manor since the morning at the gates, but on Tuesday night he had turned up on Percy's doorstep with an empty satchel, said, "Lee says you've got paperwork," and held it open. "Kindly knock over the hatstand on your way out," said Percy, filling it. "It ought to look like a burglary." Dean took the lot round to Xenophilius himself. On the back page, unsigned, though everybody at the Manor knew the hand, there was a cartoon of the Minister for Magic, enormous and glowering, drinking out of a dainty china teacup with his little finger crooked. The caption said MILK, TWO SUGARS.

And the Daily Prophet went third, though not voluntarily.

​

"You mustn't move," said Parvati. "You mustn't do magic. You mustn't get out of bed, Hermione, or I'll Stun you —"

"I'm not going to do any magic," said Hermione.

"You're getting out of bed!"

"I'm not getting out of bed. I'm getting into a chair." Hermione let Pansy help her into the Bath chair and settled the blankets over her knees. "And I'm not going to do any magic at all, Parvati. I give you my word." She took a small glass jar out of the pocket of her dressing gown, and held it up to the light, and looked at it. It was an ordinary jam jar with a screw-top lid. There were several small holes punched in the lid.

"I shan't need to," said Hermione.

​

Rita Skeeter drank at the Leaky Cauldron on Thursday afternoons, in the snug at the back, with a large gin and a small notebook and a Quick-Quotes Quill. She had done so since before the war. The Leaky Cauldron was run these days by Hannah Longbottom. Hannah Longbottom had never much liked Rita Skeeter. She liked her even less after what she had done to Gregory Goyle on page four.

So when Pansy Parkinson wheeled a Bath chair in through the back door of the Leaky Cauldron at five past four on Thursday, Hannah simply showed them through to the snug, and closed the door behind them, and locked it.

Rita Skeeter looked up from her gin.

She had not changed very much since the Triwizard Tournament. The hair was still set in rigid curls, the spectacles were still jewelled, the nails were still long and scarlet. She looked at Pansy, standing behind the chair, and her eyes narrowed. Then she looked at the young woman in the chair, grey-faced and thin under a heap of blankets, and her eyes went very wide indeed.

"Hello, Rita," said Hermione.

She put the jam jar on the table.

Rita Skeeter looked at the jar. Her Quick-Quotes Quill, which had been scribbling busily on the notepad beside her, stopped dead.

"Now," said Rita, "now, now, Miss Granger —"

"You're still unregistered," said Hermione pleasantly. "I checked. I checked every year, actually. Every September. I've got a folder." She smiled. "Thirteen years of not registering as an Animagus, Rita. That's thirteen separate offences. Do you know what the Wizengamot does to thirteen separate offences?" She glanced up at Pansy. "Pansy, what's the sentence?"

"Five years each," said Pansy. "Consecutive. Unless they're feeling generous, which since the Act, nobody is."

"Sixty-five years," said Hermione. "Goodness."

Rita had gone a shade of grey that her make-up had never been designed to cover.

"How much?"

"Page four," said Hermione. "The fourth of October. The photograph of Gregory Goyle holding up the Fountain of Remembrance. You cropped it." Her voice stayed light and even. "You cut out the children. You cut out the twenty-odd witches and wizards running to help. You made it look as though he was pulling it down. You knew exactly what you were doing, and you did it because it sold."

"That's editorial, that's not my —"

Pansy leaned down across the table and murmured something in Rita's ear, too low to carry. Rita went white under the grey, and stopped arguing.

"You're going to print the whole photograph," said Hermione. "Uncropped. On the front page. With a caption that says exactly what he did, and his name spelled correctly. And next to it you are going to print everything that's in The Quibbler, in your own words, under your own byline, with the evidence. Every page of it. And a front-page retraction of every word you've written about Harry Potter, and Dumbledore's Army, and Draco Malfoy and his associates, and me, since the Atrium."

"They'll sack me," whispered Rita.

"Then write it well enough," said Hermione, "that they can't."

Rita stared at her.

"And if I refuse?"

Hermione let her wait.

"You've heard the rumours about Dolores Umbridge," she said. "And the centaurs."

Something happened to Rita's face that had nothing to do with fear. Her eyes narrowed. The Quick-Quotes Quill, which had been lying limp beside her notepad, sat up. She leaned across the table, a fraction, the way she had been leaning towards a story for the whole of her working life, and the Bath chair creaked as Pansy, behind it, leaned in too.

"Everybody's heard the rumours," said Rita. "Nobody's ever got the story."

"Do you want it?"

"Desperately," breathed Rita.

"She learnt what happens to people who tell lies," said Hermione. "I simply showed her the way."

The quill lay down again, all on its own.

Then Hermione reached out, very slowly, and tapped one finger on the lid of the jam jar.

"I kept you for a week last time, Rita," she said softly. "I was fifteen, and it was a very small jar." She smiled again. "I've got a much bigger one now."

​

"Granger," said Pansy, as she wheeled the Bath chair back out through the Leaky Cauldron's back door into the damp October afternoon. "Did the Hat offer you Slytherin? Be honest."

Hermione took her time answering. She was looking straight ahead, with her hands folded on the blanket in her lap. They went a little way down the alley in silence.

"How did you know," said Hermione eventually, "that she's been stealing her best lines from Mandragora for three years?"

The Bath chair stopped.

"It's a very small snug." Hermione kept her eyes on the alley. "You said you knew exactly which three columns she'd lifted, because you'd written them."

Behind the chair, Pansy appeared to have stopped breathing.

"Say that again," said Pansy Parkinson, very softly, "and I'll put you in a jar."

Hermione smiled at the alley ahead.

"I wouldn't dream of it," she said.

​

Nothing had come back.

Nothing could. Draco knew that. The slate could show them a wall, but nobody could carve one from the other end, and there was no way on earth for anybody at the Manor to answer, even supposing anybody there could read a word of it. He had known that when he cut the first line. He had said so, out loud, and Theo had said that of course he knew, and gone on cutting.

It was only that every night, after the hounds went quiet and Theo had cut the next line, there was a long stretch of dark with nothing to do in it but wonder whether anybody had read the last one.

Blaise had started counting down the days left on his bet. He did it every evening at supper, cheerfully, and Margery Crisp had begun to count along with him from her bucket. Tonight he didn't.

"She could be dead, you know," he said instead.

He said it to the ceiling, lying on his back with his arm over his eyes, the way he said most things. But he said it quietly, and he didn't add anything, which was how Draco knew he had been wanting to say it for days.

"She isn't," said Draco.

"You don't know that. None of us knows anything. We're cutting letters for a slate that could be at the bottom of Ginevra's handbag, for a woman who might not —" Blaise stopped. "I'm only saying it. Somebody had to, and it was never going to be Theo."

By the roots, Goyle shifted his weight. Theo turned the flint over in his fingers and kept his eyes on it.

Draco looked at his chart. Eight days of soot. The meals, and the hours of the hounds, and three hundred and eighty steps, all in neat columns, because when you wrote a thing down it held still and you could see what it was. He had tried, in his head, to write down what Blaise had just said. It wouldn't hold still at all.

"Theo," he said, at last.

"Mm."

"Which one's G?"

Blaise took his arm off his eyes. Then Theo got up and came across the chamber, and crouched beside him, and drew it with one fingertip in the soot at the edge of the chart: a long line, with two short strokes cutting across it on the slant.

"Gort," he said quietly. "The ivy. It holds on to things."

Then he went back to his own side of the chamber and lay down, and held his tongue, which was the kindest thing Draco had ever known him do.

When the others were asleep, Draco took the flint to the wall beside the roots. It took him a long time. The flint skidded, and his hand shook more than he would have liked, and the strokes came out crooked. When it was done he sat back and looked at it. Then, before he could think better of it, he cut one more mark after it: a small hook with a dot underneath, which was not Ogham at all.

"The hill will have that off by morning, you know," said Theo, out of the dark. He was awake too, then.

"I know," said Draco.

​

Harry brought her tea in the small hours, because he couldn't sleep either, and because the light under her door had been on every night that week.

She was sitting up against the pillows with the primer open on her knees and her index cards spread across the counterpane in a fan. She had all twenty. She could have drawn any of them with her eyes shut. And the little line of marks on the slate still wouldn't come out as anything at all.

"It's the flint," she said, before he could ask. "It's blunt, and the marks are tiny, and half the strokes could be three or four depending on how you look at them. It never comes out the same twice." She took the tea. "And every time, it's nonsense."

Harry sat down in the chair by the bed and looked at the slate with her for a while. He couldn't read a stroke of it either, but it seemed rude not to.

"I should have listened to Pansy," said Hermione.

He looked at her.

"At breakfast. She told us, and I told her it was shock. Then I tested him with a Malfoy horseshoe, and never once thought to scratch it." She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. "And then Pansy went down there on her own with a poker, and Draco —" She stopped.

"I gave Ron the Stone," said Harry.

"I know."

"I put it in his hand and said thanks."

"I know, Harry."

"Neither of us knew," said Harry. "Nobody ever does, until it's done."

They sat with that for a while. It didn't get any lighter. Neither of them had expected it to.

"Ron would say we were both idiots," said Harry at last.

"Ron's wearing a hairnet," said Hermione, and they both laughed, a little, and it helped more than either of them would have admitted.

He fell asleep in the chair with his glasses crooked and the empty cup in his lap. Hermione didn't wake him. She turned the lamp down, and turned back to the slate.

Draco's wand was on the bedside table too, between the slate and the primer. She had picked it up off the landing floor before anybody else thought to, and it had stayed with her ever since. It was hawthorn, worn pale at the grip where his thumb went. She wasn't allowed to do magic, and it wasn't hers to do it with. But some nights, when the grain in the corner of the slate wouldn't lie still, she found she had fallen asleep with her hand on it.

She was still awake when a new mark began to appear on the wall of the chamber.

She watched it come under the magnifying glass, stroke by stroke: a long line, cut unsteadily, and then, after a long pause, a short stroke across it on the slant, and then another. It was much clumsier than the rest, as though it had been cut by somebody who had only just learnt how. In the corner of the chamber, the one grain of rice that never lay still had gone across to the wall, and stayed there, for the whole of the time it took.

She knew this one without the cards.

Gort. The ivy. G.

After it, a stroke at a time, came a small hook with a dot underneath that wasn't Ogham at all.

Hermione sat in the lamplight with her hand on his wand and looked at it until the lamp guttered.

By the morning the hook was gone, tidied away by the hill in the night. The G was still there.

​

On Saturday morning the Daily Prophet came out with a photograph on the front page that covered half of it.

It was the whole photograph. The one from the Atrium. Gregory Goyle, soaked to the skin, standing in the basin of the Fountain of Remembrance with the whole black slab above his head and his arms shaking. And round him, this time, at the edges of the frame, a crocodile of white-faced first-years in Hogwarts robes being pulled back to safety, and a crowd of wizards and witches running towards him from every side.

HELD, said the headline. One word. And underneath, in smaller type: Death Eater's son saves schoolchildren as Ministry cover-up unravels — by Rita Skeeter.

It sold out by nine.

​

At twenty past nine, two people came through the gates of Malfoy Manor on foot, and stopped at the bottom of the front steps, and stood there looking up at the house like men who half expected to be turned away.

Harry went down to meet them.

"I've been on at him all week," said Dean, with a nod at Seamus. "And then this morning." He held up the Prophet. Seamus looked tired, and older than he had at the gates, and his eyes kept sliding away from Harry's.

"They took Goyle," said Harry.

"Yeah." Seamus's voice was rough. "Yeah, we heard." He looked down at the photograph in Dean's hand. "I was there, Harry. I was stood ten feet off him with a tape measure, measuring up the floor for a form, and the big lad sat on the edge of the basin in a blanket with his arms still shaking, and I never said one word to him. Not one." He swallowed, and looked up at Harry at last. "And then I went and walked out on him as well."

Harry let him get there on his own.

"I was raging," said Seamus. "About Parkinson, and Colin, and the whole lot of it. And I stood at that gate and let yer man put a price on my friend, and I listened to him. I'm sorry, Harry. I am."

"It's not me you need to say it to," said Harry.

He stepped aside. At the top of the steps, in the open doorway of the house, with her arms folded and her chin up, stood Pansy Parkinson.

Seamus looked at her. Pansy looked straight back, and made it no easier for him whatsoever.

Then Seamus went up the steps, and stopped in front of her, and held out his hand.

Pansy looked at it. She looked at it the way Harry had once seen Draco look at his own hand in a lift: as though it might go off. Then she took it.

"Wipe your feet," said Pansy.

​

The Ministry's answer came that evening, in the middle of dinner, in the shape of a badger.

It came through the wall of the small dining room at a dead run, the way it had come across the kitchen at Grimmauld Place, scrambled up onto the table between the gravy and the salt, and sat down heavily on Narcissa Malfoy's tablecloth. It looked more tired than it had the last time. When it spoke, it spoke in Gawain Robards's voice.

"Potter. The Minister has read the Prophet. He has instructed the Auror Office to take possession of Malfoy Manor under the Act, and to bring in every person found on the premises, and he would like it done by the end of the week." The badger paused, and scratched behind one ear with a hind foot. "I have told him that it is a very large house, and that I shall need twenty men, and that I will send them as soon as I can spare them. I am sending them one at a time. Don't hex them. They'll have their lunch with them." Another pause. "My wrist is no better."

It went out like a lamp.

"Is he —" said Ron.

"Yes," said Harry.

Narcissa Malfoy put down her fork. "Kreacher," she said. "The west wing. We shall need beds for twenty."

Across the table, in his borrowed tattoo, the Minister for Magic had put his face in his hands, and his shoulders were shaking, and it was a moment before anybody realised that he was laughing.

​

It came at first light.

She had been through the line so many times by then that she could have drawn it from memory, and every time she had got something different. She had fallen asleep with the magnifying glass in her hand and dreamt about ladders. When she woke, with the grey coming in at the window and her eyes stinging, she went through it once more, letter by letter, and wrote down exactly what she got, without stopping to argue with it.

TELL BOTTER IT UAS HIS TURN.

She looked at it. It was very nearly English, which was worse than nonsense. She was reaching for the primer to start again when it came to her, and she sat up against the pillows so fast that the cold spot under her collarbone flared.

There was no P in the tree alphabet. Not in the twenty letters of Theo's mother's primer, and not in any of the rhymes at the back. There was no W either. If you only had the twenty, and you needed a P, you would use the nearest thing you had. And if you needed a W —

She crossed it out and wrote it again underneath. Then she shouted for Harry.

He came at a run, still in his pyjamas, with Ginny behind him. Hermione held out the paper.

"It says TELL POTTER IT WAS HIS TURN," she said. "More or less. There isn't a W, so they've used a U. And there isn't a P, so you're a B."

Harry took the paper, and then the magnifying glass, and bent over the slate, as though he might be able to read it himself if he looked hard enough.

"It was not," Harry said, before he could stop himself. "I brought it on Tuesday."

Ginny was looking at the one grain in the corner of the chamber that wouldn't lie still.

"The carving's Theo's," said Hermione. She put her finger lightly on the glass, over the restless grain. "The words are Draco's."

​

Once she had the key, the rest came quickly. They had been on the slate all along, one for every night since the first, cut small and fast beside the roots, and all week the whole house had been looking straight at them without knowing it. Hermione read them out that afternoon, putting back the letters the trees didn't have, with everybody who could fit crowded into the room round the bed.

The first of them said ALIVE. YNYS WYDRIN.

"Cassia," said Pansy, from the doorway, half to herself.

"It's Welsh," said Hermione. She had gone rather pale. "It means the Isle of Glass. It's the old name for Glastonbury."

Harry thought of a churchyard on the Levels in the September sun, and an empty grave, and a single steep hill standing up out of all that flatness on the far horizon, with a tower on top like a finger raised for silence. He was on his feet before he knew he'd moved.

The second said SHUT TILL SAMHAIN. DON'T LET HIM TRY.

"Him," said Ginny, and looked at Harry, who told the slate that it could mean anyone.

"It means you," said Ginny. "And for once in his life Malfoy and I agree about something, so you can hear it from both of us. You tell me first."

There was one more mark on the wall, a little apart from the others and cut far more clumsily. Hermione didn't read that one out.

The third said 380 STEPS. WATER STAIR, WEST. And the last, cut smaller and more carefully than any of the others, said: YEW BREAKS IT. NEEDS SILVER. LUNA HAS IT.

Luna was sitting on the end of Hermione's bed with Bolorma in her lap. She put her hand into the pocket of her cardigan and kept it there, and smiled at the slate as if it had said good morning.

Harry went to the Tor that night anyway.

The only person he told was Ginny, who told him he was an idiot and came with him. Nobody told Luna. She was waiting by the gates in her coat when they got there, and said she'd always wanted to see it. They Apparated to the foot of the hill. It was a clear, sharp night with a hard white moon and frost already on the grass, and the Tor stood up black against it with the tower on top, exactly as he remembered it from the churchyard, and nothing at all about it to say that anything was inside.

They walked all the way round the bottom of it. They climbed the spiral path to the top, and stood in the roofless tower with the wind going through it, and came down again. Harry tried every spell he knew on every stretch of turf that looked as though it might be a door. Ginny tried several he didn't, one of which was mostly swearing. The hill took no notice of any of them.

On the west side, near the bottom, they found a low stone arch half buried in ivy, with a thin icy stream running out from under it, and behind the arch a wall of old rough stone with no door in it. Luna went up to the wall and put both hands flat against it, and leaned her forehead on the stone, and stood there with her eyes shut, the way she stood when she was listening.

"Well?" said Harry at last.

"It says not yet." Luna took her hands away and opened her eyes. "It was very polite about it." She patted the stone kindly, the way she'd patted the door in Knockturn Alley. "I don't think it's allowed to say anything else."

"Nice of it," said Harry. They went home. In the morning Ron sat down at the long table in the small dining room with a quill and the back of a map of Somerset, and started to draw.

​

♫ Listen along

The rest came by whatever road they had.

Charlie Weasley came first, on a dragon.

It was a Welsh Green, sleek and emerald and the size of a small barn, and it came down out of a grey sky over the woods and landed on the south lawn of Malfoy Manor with a thump that shook every window in the house. Every peacock in the grounds went up into the trees at once in a great shrieking white cloud and stayed there for two days. Charlie slid down off its neck in a leather jacket covered in burn marks, grinning, and waved at the house. From an upstairs window Ginny yelled, "Show-off!" and he waved at her as well.

Narcissa Malfoy came out onto the front steps, and looked at the dragon on her south lawn, and at the long black gouges its claws had torn in the turf.

"Is that," she said, "a dragon?"

"Two, actually," said Charlie. "The other one's shy. She's round the back, eating one of your hedges. Sorry about that." He looked at Narcissa's face and his grin faded slightly. "I'll — er — replace the hedge."

"It was planted under Queen Anne," said Narcissa, and went back inside.

That evening Charlie found Bolorma asleep in the kitchen range, curled up among the hot coals, where she had taken to sleeping since the raid. She had grown. He crouched in front of the range and looked at her the way he looked at dragons, and then the way he looked at things that were not dragons, and then went and asked Luna, very carefully, where exactly she had got her. Luna said Mongolia. It did not seem to be the answer he had wanted.

The next morning there was a new line on the slate, cut small and quick beside the others, and Hermione read it out when Harry brought the tea, without looking up from the primer.

I SAID DON'T.

"How can he possibly know?" said Harry.

​

McGonagall came next, with Neville, her left arm still in a tartan sling and a battered hatbox under the other, which she would not let anybody carry, though Neville had asked three times. She looked round the wrecked great hall, and at the young man with the shaved head and the dragon tattoo who was standing by the fireplace, and she stopped dead.

"Kingsley," she said. "You look dreadful."

"Thank you, Minerva," said Kingsley gravely. "You look wonderful."

McGonagall's eyes moved on, to the elderly witch in the lavender cardigan sitting by the fire, and narrowed.

"Mr Weasley," she said. "I shared a classroom with Philippa Thistlewood for seven years and she never once in her life sat with her knees apart."

Ron closed his knees. Over by the window, Ginny turned a laugh into a cough and fooled nobody.

It barely slowed him down. A witch of Madam Thistlewood's years is not expected to carry anything, wash anything up or get off a sofa once she is on it, and Ron had worked this out on his first morning at the Manor and never looked back. He got the best chair by the fire by clutching his chest in the doorway, the way Auntie Muriel had taught him. It worked on everybody but McGonagall, who stepped over him, took the chair and thanked him for it. He got out of the washing-up by announcing that his hands weren't what they used to be, which Hermione, when she heard, agreed was technically true. Within days Madam Thistlewood had acquired a late husband called Reginald, a feud of long standing with the Bulgarian ambassador, and a famous seed cake. Kreacher, broken arm and all, asked for the recipe more than once. Ron told him solemnly that it had gone to the grave with Reginald, and Kreacher went away to grieve for it.

"My Reginald," Ron was telling Bill one evening, with his feet up, "was lost at sea."

"Yesterday," said Pansy, from behind Witch Weekly, "he was lost at a Quidditch World Cup."

"It was a very wet match," said Ron.

"My condolences," said Bill, "on both occasions."

The first of the Aurors came on foot, up the drive in the rain, with his wand held out in front of him handle first and his lunch in a paper bag. It was Proudfoot. He stood at the bottom of the steps and looked up at the dragon on the lawn, and at Pansy Parkinson in the doorway with the poker, and said that he had been sent by the Minister to take possession of the premises, and might he come in. Pansy looked at the wand, and at the paper bag, and took the paper bag. After that they came one at a time, all day and every day, sheepish, with their lunches, until the west wing was full of the Auror Office, and since Kreacher had not been told whether they were guests or prisoners, he treated them as both.

Aberforth Dumbledore came the morning after the Ministry put a padlock on the Hog's Head. He came with a goat. Nobody asked about the goat, and he didn't explain it, and it took up residence in the rose garden and ate everything Narcissa had left. "To be fair to the goat," Neville told her, "they had blackspot." Lee Jordan came with him, with the wireless set under his arm, and that night Potterwatch went out from the long gallery at Malfoy Manor.

George had sent a note to Verity at the shop, telling her to put a sign in the window that said CLOSED FOR STOCKTAKING and to turn the back room into an armoury. Verity, who had never known the shop shut for anything, wrote back to ask if he'd been cursed. Every evening after that, a crate came through the Manor fireplace with his handwriting on the lid. The first one said IRON NAILS: CHANGELING DETERRENTʷ, NOW IN FAMILY SIZE. Ron picked one up without thinking and dropped it with a yelp. Narcissa had them stacked in the ballroom.

And then Molly and Arthur Weasley came through the fireplace in the small dining room.

​

Ron saw his mother before she was even properly out of the grate.

He was standing by the dining table in his lavender cardigan and his hairnet, with his spectacles on the end of his nose and his arms folded across the front of his lace-collared blouse. He'd been standing there since the owl had come to say she was on her way. He'd tried to take the hairnet off again. He'd failed.

Molly came out of the green flames, brushing soot off her coat, and looked round the room, and her eyes passed over the old woman by the table and moved on, and stopped, and came slowly back.

She looked at Ron. He saw her take in the white curls, and the pearls, and the cardigan, and the sensible shoes. He saw something move in her face.

"Ronald Bilius Weasley," said Molly. "What on earth have you done to yourself?"

Ron's borrowed mouth fell open.

"How," he said, "how did you —"

"I'm your mother," said Molly, and crossed the room in three strides and threw both arms round him, cardigan, hairnet and all, and held on. "Oh, you stupid, stupid boy. You stupid boy. I'd know you anywhere. I'd know you in a teapot." She was crying into his hairnet. "Look at the state of you. Where are your knees?"

"Mum," said Ron, muffled, into her shoulder. "Mum, it's all right. Mum. Mum, mind the hips —"

​

Narcissa Malfoy was waiting for them in the great hall.

She was standing at the foot of the stairs when the Weasleys came out of the dining room, with Arthur holding Molly's arm and Molly still wiping her eyes with a handkerchief. Narcissa was very straight and very pale, in grey silk, with her hands folded in front of her. She looked at Molly.

Molly looked at her.

Everybody in the hall had stopped moving. Harry, in the library doorway, found that he was holding his breath.

The last time these two women had been in the same room, Harry knew, it had been the Great Hall at Hogwarts, ten years ago, on the morning after the Battle. Molly Weasley had killed Bellatrix Lestrange in front of the whole school not six hours before, and Narcissa Malfoy had sat on a bench at the far end of the hall with her husband and her son, not looking at anyone.

"Mrs Weasley," said Narcissa.

"Mrs Malfoy," said Molly.

Somewhere above them, a portrait cleared its throat and thought better of it.

"You killed my sister," said Narcissa.

"I did," said Molly. "She'd just tried to kill my daughter." She said it quite simply, without apology and without triumph, and she held Narcissa's gaze.

Narcissa looked at her a moment longer. Then something in her face changed, very slightly, at the edges.

"Would you like some tea?" she said.

Molly stared at her. Then she blew her nose, very loudly, into her handkerchief, and put it away.

"Yes," she said. "Yes, I think I would, actually."

​

Pansy still sat on the half-landing at night.

There was no need to any more. Narcissa had had every ward in the house cast again, and there were Weasleys asleep all down the east wing and the Auror Office in the west, and dragons on the south lawn. But Pansy had sat there on the night the gates opened, and she found that she couldn't sleep anywhere else now. So she sat there, with the poker across her knees, and the house left her to it.

Ron came up the great staircase late, from the kitchens, where his mother and Narcissa Malfoy had been feeding him in shifts all evening.

He came up it very slowly. Madam Thistlewood's knees did not like stairs, and the great staircase of Malfoy Manor had a great many of them. Pansy listened to him take each one: a step, and a breath, and a small creak that she was fairly sure was not the staircase. Halfway up he stopped, with one lilac-nailed hand on the banister, and said something under his breath that no witch from a good family ought to have known.

Pansy got up and held out her arm.

He looked at it.

"I'm fine," he said. "I'm just full."

"You're on step eleven, Weasley. There are thirty-four."

"I can count."

"Then you'll know that at this rate you'll reach the top by morning." She kept the arm out. "Your mother's asleep. Nobody's watching. I won't tell a soul."

He looked at her arm a moment longer. Then he took it.

They went up the rest of the way together, a step and a breath at a time, in silence. He weighed nothing at all. That surprised her. In the Forest he had thrown her up onto a thestral she couldn't see with one arm; now his hand on her sleeve was lighter than a bird.

At the top he let go, and stood on the landing in his cardigan with his spectacles crooked, getting his breath back. He was a good head shorter than she was now. It seemed to bother both of them.

"Harry told me," he said. "About breakfast. The sandwich, and the car, and you down at the gates with that thing." He nodded at the poker. "You were —"

"Don't," said Pansy.

He stopped.

"Not in that voice," she said. "If you're going to say it, Weasley, you can say it in your own."

He looked up at her for a moment: an old woman's face under a hairnet, with something entirely Ron Weasley looking out of it.

"Fair enough," he said. "It was the bigger bit, though. For the record."

He went off down the corridor to his room, a little bent, with one hand on the wall, without a backward glance. Pansy sat down on the half-landing again with the poker across her knees, and found, after a while, that she was smiling at it.

​

Andromeda Tonks came last.

She came in the evening, alone, through the gates, walking up the long drive in the dusk in a dark coat, with the white peacocks watching her from the trees. Harry saw her from the window and went down. He was halfway across the great hall when he saw that someone else had got there first.

Narcissa was standing in the open front door.

The two sisters looked at each other across the threshold. Harry stopped in the middle of the hall and kept well out of it.

They were very alike and not alike at all. Andromeda was taller, and darker, with her hair going grey, and a face lined by every year of the life her family had disowned her for. Narcissa was fair and pale, with not a hair out of place. They hadn't spoken, Harry knew, since Andromeda had walked out of the House of Black to marry a Muggle-born named Ted Tonks.

"Andromeda," said Narcissa.

"Cissy," said Andromeda.

That was all: two names, and everything since. But then Narcissa stepped aside, out of the doorway, and Andromeda came in.

​

He found her later that night in the glasshouse.

She was sitting on the low brick edge of the dittany bed, where Harry had sat with Draco, looking up through the glass roof at the stars. She heard him come in, and went on watching the stars. He sat down beside her, and for a while they looked at the stars together.

"Teddy sends his love," said Andromeda eventually. "He wanted to come. I told him it was grown-up business." She smiled faintly. "He said he was very nearly eleven and it was practically the same thing."

Harry smiled too. Then it went away.

"Grieve came to the gates," he said. "He stood there and went through them, one at a time. Fred. Colin. Lavender. My mum and dad." He looked down at his hands. "Remus, and Tonks. He said Teddy's got his mother's hair and his father's nose, and he's never once heard either of them laugh."

Andromeda's hand tightened on the brick edge.

"And I didn't —" Harry stopped. Started again. "Draco asked me. Afterwards. On the steps. Whether I'd do it, if it was the other way round. And I didn't answer him. I couldn't." He swallowed. "So I'm asking you. Because you've got more right to it than anybody. Should I — if I could — for Teddy —"

"Harry," said Andromeda.

He stopped.

She turned her head and looked at him, and he saw Tonks in her face, very suddenly and very clearly, the way you sometimes see a word you've been looking for all day.

"One of the names on that list," she said, "is my nephew."

Harry stared at her.

"I've never met him," said Andromeda. "Not properly. I saw him once, in Diagon Alley, when he was about six, holding his mother's hand. My sister's hand. He was a pale little thing, all eyes. He looked at me as if he'd been told I was a monster. And that man is asking you whether you'd trade my sister's boy for my daughter."

The lemon trees stirred in their pots, in the breeze that came from nowhere.

"I had a sister," said Andromeda, "who believed that some people's lives were worth less than others because of whose children they were. Bella believed that with her whole heart. She'd have put a hundred Muggle-borns on a scale for one pure-blood without blinking. And I walked out of that house when I was nineteen, with nothing, so that I would never, ever have to think the way she did." She looked back up at the stars through the glass. "I'm not starting now, Harry. Not at my age. Not for anybody."

"Even for Tonks?"

"Especially for her." Andromeda's voice cracked. "Dora died fighting people who thought like Bella. If you traded some frightened boy for her, or the Parkinson girl's cousin, or any of them, she'd come back through that door and look at what it had cost, and she'd know. She'd know she'd died for nothing." She pressed her lips together hard. "And then she'd go straight back through again, and she'd never forgive either of us. And she'd be right."

"Teddy has a grandmother who loves him," said Andromeda, more quietly. "And a godfather who's been to every single one of his birthdays, and teaches him to fly, and sends him Chocolate Frogs by owl every Friday, and doesn't think Teddy knows it's him." She reached out, without looking, and put her hand over his. "That's not nothing, Harry."

"What do I tell him?" said Harry. "When he's older. When he asks why I didn't."

"The truth," said Andromeda. "That his mother and father died so he'd grow up in a world where nobody gets sold for their surname." She squeezed his hand. "And that his godfather didn't sell anyone."

​

Hermione woke before it was light, the way she had every morning since the primer, with her hand on the wand and the slate on the pillow beside her, where she could see it without sitting up.

The corner of the slate where the hill was had gone white.

She knew what it was before she touched it. It was the same fine white fur that had grown across her chest on the landing, and had been on the backs of Grieve's hands at the gates: the hill's own cold, come up through its own window in the night. It had closed over the roots, and the carved wall, and the grains of rice, and the one in the corner that never lay still. She breathed on it. It didn't melt. She tried her fingernail, and the corner of the sheet, and then, carefully, because Parvati need never know, the smallest warming charm she had, with his wand. The frost stayed exactly where it was.

She sat with the slate in her lap until the window had gone grey, and did the sum she had been putting off all week. Then she called for Kreacher, and asked him to wake Mr Weasley, and to bring the map.

​

♫ Listen along

Edmund Grieve came to see Draco when there was a week left.

He came alone, down the long dark passage beyond the roots, with a lantern in one hand and his walking stick in the other, and a newspaper folded under his arm. He walked slowly. He was, Draco thought, watching him come through the roots, very much older than he'd looked at the Manor gates. There was frost in his beard. There was frost on the backs of his hands.

The roots across the doorway drew back for him, creaking, like a curtain. He stepped into the round chamber and they grew closed again behind him.

Theo was sitting against the far wall with his eyes closed and his hands folded, looking serene. Blaise had his arm over his face and gave no sign of being awake. Goyle was sitting up, watching.

Grieve set the lantern down on the stone floor, and lowered himself onto a ledge of rock opposite Draco with a small grunt, the way old men sit.

"Mr Malfoy," he said. "I hope you're being looked after."

"The stew's improved," said Draco.

Grieve smiled faintly. "So Margery tells me. She says Mr Goyle has been giving her lessons."

He took the newspaper from under his arm, and unfolded it, and laid it on the stone between them with the front page up. It was the Prophet, with Goyle on the front of it, holding up the Fountain of Remembrance, and one word over him.

"Your friends have been busy, Mr Malfoy."

Goyle looked at it from the roots. He went on looking at it, and the backs of his ears went red.

Grieve looked round the chamber, at the green light and the carved walls and the four people sleeping in the room beyond the roots. "Seven days. Then All Hallows. I thought you should know. I thought you should have the chance to prepare yourself."

"For what?"

"For the door." Grieve's voice was gentle. "When it opens, at midnight, and your name is the last in the book, it will be you who pays for my daughter. You, and not some cousin of some cousin. I wanted you to know that. I wanted you to understand why."

"Because my aunt killed her."

"Because your aunt killed her," said Grieve, "and your father let the Dark Lord into his house, and you let his Death Eaters into her school. Because every single thing your family has ever done has made the world a little smaller and colder and crueller for people like her, and none of you has ever paid a penny for it." He was quite calm. "You'll understand what's owed better than any of them, I think. You were raised on debts."

Draco let that sit.

He sat against the damp, carved wall of the chamber, in the drowned green light, and looked at the old man across from him: at the frost in his beard, and the poppy on his lapel, and his tired, gentle, terribly certain eyes. He thought about a corridor at Hogwarts in the small hours of the Battle, and a girl standing in it on her own, and the two children behind her who were alive because she was. He thought about where he'd been at the time. He thought about a coin with a message burned into it, and the last line of the message.

Don't let him bring me back.

"Your daughter and I were in the same battle," said Draco.

Grieve's face gave nothing away.

"I was on the seventh floor. In the Room of Requirement. With my two friends, trying to catch Harry Potter and hand him over to the Dark Lord, so that I could go home." Draco's voice was quite steady. "I didn't fight for anybody that night. Not for my side, and not for yours. I hid, and I ran, and when the Room caught fire, I let Potter drag me out of it on the back of his broom. I was a coward, Mr Grieve. I've been one for most of my life."

He leaned forward.

"She wasn't. She stood in that corridor with two children behind her, and she didn't run, and she didn't hide, and she didn't hand anybody over to anybody. That's who your daughter was. That's the only thing about her anyone needed to know. You put it on her headstone yourself." He held Grieve's eyes. "She sent a message, you know. On her coin. To all of them. Don't let him bring me back."

For the first time, the certainty went out of the old man's face.

"She was the bravest person in that castle," said Draco quietly. "Don't make her into a debt."

Even the hounds, far away in the tunnels, had gone quiet.

Edmund Grieve sat on his ledge of rock while the lantern flame shrank and steadied. His hands, folded on the top of his walking stick, were white with frost to the wrists. Then, slowly, he got to his feet, and picked up his lantern, and turned towards the roots.

They drew back for him. He stopped in the gap, with his back to the chamber.

"Seven days, Mr Malfoy," he said, without turning round. His voice was not quite steady.

The roots grew closed behind him. The lantern light went away down the passage and was gone.

​

Long after the roots had closed, the only sound in the chamber was Goyle, very quietly, blowing his nose.

Then, from the far side of the chamber, Theo Nott let out a long, slow breath.

"Draco," he said. "That was magnificent. I would applaud, only I'm afraid I'd cry, and there's nothing down here to cry into but the bucket, and Margery sits on that."

"I'm applauding," said Blaise, without moving.

"It was the bravest thing I've ever seen you do. By a mile."

"Theo."

"Genuinely. I'm moved. Gregory's moved. Look at him. He's welling up."

"I'm not," said Goyle, who was.

Draco put his head back against the wall and closed his eyes.

"Don't," he said, "tell Potter."

Theo smiled serenely at the ceiling of the hollow hill.

"Oh, darling," he said. "I'm telling everyone."

♫ Listen along