Rule one: tell no one.

Rule two: see rule one.

Rule three: Zacharias, I mean it.

pinned to the wall of the Room of Requirement, autumn 1995, in Hermione Granger's handwriting

Hermione Granger lived in a tall, narrow Georgian terrace in Islington with a blue front door, a brass knocker shaped like an owl that had bitten the postman twice, and more books than Harry had ever seen outside a library. She also lived, as far as anyone could tell, on coffee, which was why the owl that tapped on Harry's bedroom window at an ungodly hour the next morning smelt faintly of it.

Come at seven, said the note. Bring Malfoy. Don't bring anything with a Ministry seal on it. Don't bring Ron, he'll only ask what's in my fridge. — H.

Draco was already on the doorstep when Harry arrived, in a grey coat that had probably cost more than Harry's first broomstick, collar turned up against the drizzle. He looked immaculate. He also looked as if he hadn't slept, though you'd have had to spend five years sitting next to him to be able to tell.

"You look terrible," said Harry.

"I look immaculate."

"You look immaculately terrible."

"That," said Draco, "is the nicest thing you've ever said to me." He lifted a gloved hand towards the knocker and paused. "Why does she want me here?"

"No idea."

"Has she ever wanted me anywhere?"

"Not that I know of."

"Marvellous," said Draco, and knocked. The brass owl lunged for his fingers and missed by a quarter of an inch.

The door opened. Hermione stood in the hall in jeans and an enormous jumper, her hair doing something architectural, a mug of coffee in each hand. She gave one to Harry. Then she looked at Draco.

"Malfoy."

"Granger."

The temperature in the hallway dropped by several degrees. Harry, who had spent five years carefully arranging his life so that he was never in a room with both of them at once, found himself suddenly and intensely interested in his coffee.

The last time Hermione and Draco had spoken to one another, as far as Harry knew, had been in the summer of 1998, in Courtroom Ten. Hermione had stood up in front of the full Wizengamot and told them, in a clear and steady voice, that at Malfoy Manor, with his aunt's wand at his back and his father's hand on his shoulder, Draco Malfoy had looked at three captured teenagers and said he couldn't be sure who they were. She had said it was the bravest thing she'd seen anyone do in that house. She had asked for leniency, and she had got it, more or less: a suspended sentence instead of Azkaban, and his wand in a bag for a year. He'd sat his NEWTs privately the following summer and spent the next few years doing very little in a very large house, until Kingsley Shacklebolt turned up at the Manor one morning with an offer nobody else in the Ministry had wanted him to make: the Auror programme, on five years' probation.

Draco had never thanked her. Harry knew this because Hermione had mentioned it exactly once, in 2002, after two glasses of wine, and then never again. With Hermione, that meant it mattered enormously.

"Well, come in, then," Hermione said, after a pause that went on slightly too long. "Mind the stairs. Mind the books on the stairs. And mind the cat."

The cat was lying across the kitchen doorway like a draught excluder. Crookshanks was ancient now, his flat face grizzled round the muzzle, one ear permanently folded from some long-ago dispute with an alley cat two streets over. He opened one yellow eye as they came in, looked at Harry, and closed it again. Then he opened both eyes, looked at Draco for a long, considering moment, got up, stretched, walked across the kitchen, and climbed into Draco's lap the instant Draco sat down.

Draco went rigid. He held his coffee up and away from himself, like a man who has just discovered a snake in his bed and doesn't want to startle it.

"Granger," he said. "Your animal is on me."

"He doesn't do that."

"He is doing it now."

"He doesn't do that," said Hermione, staring. "He doesn't sit on anyone. He sat on Ron once in fifth year, and that was to be sick."

Crookshanks turned round twice, settled across Draco's knees like a large orange loaf, and began, with enormous satisfaction, to purr.

"Traitor," Hermione told him. Crookshanks closed his eyes.

Harry drank his coffee and said nothing. He'd known Crookshanks for fifteen years. In that time the cat had been right about Scabbers, right about Sirius, and, as far as Harry could tell, right about everyone else he had ever met. He had never once been wrong about a person.

Harry kept that to himself. Hermione was quite likely to hex him if he said it aloud.

The kitchen table had disappeared under the wreckage of an all-night research session. There were books, loose parchment, three empty coffee cups, a stone basin full of something that looked like liquid silver, and, open in the middle of it all, a small, battered notebook with a cover that said, in a fifteen-year-old's careful capitals, D.A. — PROTEAN COIN REGISTRY — PRIVATE.

Draco peered at it. "You kept a registry."

"Of course I kept a registry."

"In 1995."

"I was fifteen, Malfoy. I wasn't stupid." Hermione sat down opposite them and pulled the notebook towards her. "Every copy of a Protean-charmed object is linked to the original, but no two copies are ever quite identical. When one of the coins carries a message, it leaves a trace in every other coin on the network, like a return address, if you know how to read it. Nobody's ever bothered to read it, because until last night the only people who ever sent anything were Harry, Neville and me." She tapped the notebook. "I sat up all night reading it."

"And?" said Harry.

"And the message didn't come from any of the original coins." She turned the notebook round so that they could see. "I made forty, you see."

"There were only twenty-eight of us."

"I made spares."

"Why did you make spares?"

"In case we needed spares, Harry. That's what spares are for." She turned a page. "I sent the twelve spares to Neville in the summer of 1997, before we left. Just in case."

"You never told me that."

"You'd have told me not to."

That was true, so Harry let it go.

"The message came from coin number thirty-one," said Hermione. "One of Neville's spares." She reached across the table, took Harry's coin from his pocket without asking, and dropped it into the stone basin. The silver liquid closed over it without a ripple. "This is the original. If I ask it to find thirty-one, it should point the way, like a compass needle."

She touched the surface of the basin with her wand and murmured something. A thread of fine gold light rose out of the silver, wavered, bent — and then, very slowly, turned and pointed straight down, through the table, towards the kitchen floor.

Hermione lifted the basin and carried it to the other side of the room. The gold thread went with it, still pointing straight down, into the floorboards.

"I did that all night," she said quietly. "In every room of the house. On the roof. In the garden. It doesn't point anywhere. It just points down."

"Down where?" said Harry.

"I don't know," said Hermione. "Just down."

Nobody said anything for a moment. Crookshanks purred on, oblivious.

Neville answered the Floo on the second try, with his hair in his eyes and a mug of tea in his hand that said WORLD'S OKAYEST PROFESSOR. He listened while Hermione explained. Then he vanished from the fire for a minute and came back with a fat, dog-eared copy of One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi, and flipped it open at the back.

"I wrote everyone's number in here," he said. "Couldn't risk writing it anywhere the Carrows might look, and they'd never have opened a Herbology book in a million years." He ran a finger down a column of cramped handwriting. "Twenty-nine was Michael Corner's little brother. Thirty was Romilda Vane, but she only came twice. Thirty-one —"

He stopped.

Harry watched his face change. He'd seen Neville's face do a lot of things over the years, but he'd never seen it do quite this: a kind of slow, quiet collapse, like a building settling on its foundations.

"Immy Grieve," said Neville.

The kitchen was very quiet.

"We buried her with it," Neville said. "Her dad asked if there was anything she'd want. I said the coin. She loved that coin. She used to check it every morning at breakfast, even when there wasn't anything on it." He swallowed. "I put it in her hand myself."

​

Hermione poured more coffee for everybody, though nobody had asked for it and nobody drank it. Then she sat down, wrapped both hands round her mug, and said, "There's something else."

Harry waited.

"I can't tell you what it is," Hermione said. "I'm an Unspeakable, and it isn't a figure of speech. The Oath is binding. If I try to tell you anything about the Department, my tongue goes to lead and I start talking about the weather." She took a breath. "Fortunately, whoever drafted the Oath was very precise. I have spent a great many weekends with the wording of that Oath."

"Of course you have," said Draco.

"It forbids me from disclosing. It doesn't forbid me from failing to correct anyone." She folded her hands on the table. "So. If you were to guess, and your guess was right, I'd simply be unable to say anything at all. And if you were wrong, I'd be perfectly free to tell you so."

Draco regarded her over the top of Crookshanks's head. "At length, I imagine."

"I've been waiting to tell you you're wrong since 1991, Malfoy. Don't spoil it for me."

Harry cleared his throat. "Right. Something happened in the Department last night."

Hermione said nothing.

"When the coins went off."

Nothing.

"Is it the brains?"

"No."

"The room with all the clocks —"

"No. And please stop, you're embarrassing both of us."

Draco was stroking Crookshanks absently, his eyes half-closed, the way they went when he was taking a problem apart. "Something that makes a sound," he said slowly.

Nothing.

"Something you'd hear from a corridor away."

Nothing.

"Something that's been making sounds for a while. But last night it made a new one."

Hermione's mug did not move a single millimetre. Harry looked at her face and thought, suddenly and coldly, of an archway on a stone dais, and a tattered black curtain stirring in a breeze that wasn't there. He'd been fifteen. He had watched Sirius fall through it.

"The Veil," he said.

Hermione said nothing at all. But she looked at him, and there was something very gentle in it.

"It whispers," Harry said. His voice sounded odd to him. "It always did. I heard it. Luna heard it. So what's new about —"

"Words," said Draco. "Not whispering. Words."

Nothing.

Draco's hand had stopped moving on the cat. "Names," he said.

Hermione's knuckles had gone white around her mug. She said nothing.

"Cassia Selwyn," said Draco.

Nothing.

"Tobias Rowle."

Nothing.

"Hector Mulciber."

Nothing.

"Since when?" said Harry. "A week?"

"No."

"A month?"

"No."

"Six weeks," said Draco quietly. "Since the night Cassia went missing."

Hermione said nothing, and her silence filled the whole kitchen.

"It said each of their names," Harry said slowly, "on the night they disappeared."

And this time, very faintly, Hermione closed her eyes.

"And last night," said Draco, in a light, pleasant voice that Harry had learned to distrust more than any other voice Draco owned, "it said another one."

Hermione opened her eyes. "I haven't said anything," she said.

"Whose name?" said Harry.

"I can't —" She stopped, and tried again, and Harry watched her choose each word as though the wrong one might close a trap. "I don't know. That isn't a disclosure; it's a fact about me. I was too far away. I didn't hear it."

"Was it mine?" said Draco, conversationally, the way you might ask whether it was likely to rain.

Harry and Hermione both turned to look at him.

"I don't know," said Hermione, and for the first time that morning there was no frost in her voice at all. "I didn't hear it, Malfoy. I'm sorry."

"Why," said Harry, "would it be yours?"

"No reason," said Draco. "Idle curiosity." He looked down at his lap. "Granger, will your cat let me stand up, or do I live here now?"

​

Hermione saw them to the door. On the step she folded her arms, looked out at the drizzle, and said, "I'm coming with you. Wherever you're going with this."

"You'll lose your job," said Harry.

"Almost certainly. But someone's been into the sealed archives, Harry, and someone's been —" She stopped. Her jaw worked. "— and it really has been an unusually mild September, hasn't it? Lovely for the time of year." She shut her eyes. "Oh, for heaven's sake."

Harry went down the steps. Behind him Draco paused on the top one, and for a moment Harry thought he was going to say something else.

"Your cat," said Draco at last, "has excellent taste."

"My cat," said Hermione, "is twenty years old and eats his own whiskers."

The door closed. Through the frosted glass Harry could just make out a blurred orange shape sitting in the hall and staring at the door where Draco had gone, with an air of deep and personal betrayal.

​

They walked down Upper Street in the drizzle, past the stalls going up on Chapel market, because neither of them felt like Apparating anywhere just yet.

"Why would it be yours?" Harry said again.

Draco didn't answer for a while. Then he told him about the dogs.

He told it well, as he told everything: precisely, economically, in the right order, without a single wasted word. The baying across fields that weren't there. The frost creeping in from the corners of the window. The way the whole pack had come closer and closer and then stopped dead, all at once, directly outside his window, in the middle of Holland Park.

"The way hounds stop," Draco said, "when they've found the scent they were sent for." He was looking straight ahead. "I grew up with hunting dogs, Potter. My grandfather kept a pack. I know what it sounds like when they stop."

Harry stopped walking. After a moment, so did Draco.

"And you didn't tell me."

"I'm telling you now."

"Eight hours later —"

"Because I knew you'd do exactly this." Draco turned to face him. "The face. The saving face. The one you do. The I'll-carry-you-out-of-the-burning-room-Malfoy face. It's very noble, and it gives me indigestion."

"You're staying at mine."

"Absolutely not."

"Why not?"

"Because your house-elf is a lunatic, your wife calls me your other wife to my face, and your house used to belong to my mad great-aunt's portrait, and I would honestly rather be eaten." Draco pulled his collar higher. "I'll have the flat warded."

"By who? The Ministry warding team reports to —"

"Not the Ministry. By someone who's better at it than anybody in the Ministry."

"Who?"

Draco sighed, like a man about to admit to a small but embarrassing ailment. "Theo Nott."

​

He told Ginny first, because that was the deal.

She sent an owl to Gwenog Jones saying that she had dragon pox. Gwenog sent one back saying that she didn't believe a word of it, that Ginny was fined fifty Galleons, and that if she wasn't at practice on Monday she'd be playing Keeper for the reserves until she was ninety. Ginny read it, laughed, dropped it in the fire, and came anyway.

​

St Aldhelm's stood at the edge of a village called Ashcombe, where the last grey stone houses gave way to the wide green flatness of the Somerset Levels. It was a small church with a square tower, very old and slightly crooked, and its churchyard ran right down to a line of pollarded willows and the still brown water of a drainage ditch. The afternoon had turned bright and warm. Bees were working the ivy on the churchyard wall. It was, Harry thought, about as peaceful a place as he had ever stood in.

Except for the grave.

They saw it from the lychgate. You couldn't miss it. In the middle of all that green, in the full warmth of the September sun, one rectangle of grass was white with frost: stiff, glittering and perfect, as neatly edged as if it had been cut with a knife.

Neville made a small sound and walked towards it. The rest of them followed.

IMOGEN ROSE GRIEVE, said the headstone. 1981 – 1998. And underneath, in smaller letters: Those who stand for others do not fall alone.

"Her dad chose that," Ginny said quietly. "I remember. He said it was the only thing about her that anyone needed to know."

Neville knelt down on the frosted grass. He didn't seem to notice the cold.

Hermione drew her wand, glanced round to make sure the churchyard was empty, and pointed it at the grave. She muttered an incantation Harry didn't recognise. A soft pulse of blue light sank into the ground and spread out beneath the grass like ink in water, and Hermione's face, watching it, went very still.

"It's empty," she said.

"It can't be." Neville's voice was hoarse. "Look at the grass. Nobody's dug here. You'd see it, you'd see —"

"Nobody dug from above," said Hermione.

It was the quietest thing she had said all day, and it was the worst.

"There's no coffin," she went on. "There's nothing at all. Six feet of earth, and then — nothing. It's as if something took her from underneath." She lowered her wand. "And then went back down."

Draco had crouched beside the headstone. He was looking at the lichen along its top edge, and after a moment he reached out with a pair of tweezers from his inside pocket and plucked something from it. He held it up to the light. It was a single coarse white hair, three inches long, red at the tip.

"Two," he said, and slid it into a fresh vial. "I'm starting a collection."

Harry turned away from the grave and looked out across the Levels, because it was easier than looking at Neville. The land ran away from the churchyard wall, flat and green and glittering with water, for miles in every direction. It was so flat that the one thing that wasn't seemed almost impossible.

It rose out of the land on the far horizon: a single steep, conical hill, strangely regular, standing up out of all that flatness as if it had been placed there by hand. At its very top stood a roofless stone tower, dark against the bright sky, like a finger raised for silence.

"What's that?" said Draco. He'd straightened up and followed Harry's gaze.

"Glastonbury Tor," said Hermione, not looking up from the grave. "Muggles think it's King Arthur's burial place. Or Avalon. Or the entrance to fairyland. Depends which Muggle you ask."

"And what do wizards think?"

Hermione opened her mouth, then closed it again, and frowned.

"Nothing," she said slowly. "Wizards don't think about it at all." She looked up at the distant hill with the tower on it. "Which is odd, now I say it out loud."

Neville was still kneeling on the frost. Ginny crouched beside him and put a hand on his back, and after a moment he started to talk, without looking up, in a flat, careful voice.

"She asked me if she could stay," he said. "In the Room, before the Battle. When McGonagall was evacuating everyone underage. Immy'd turned seventeen in March, so she was allowed, technically. And she came and found me and asked me if she could stay and fight." He pressed his palm flat against the frozen grass. "And I said yes. I said yes, Harry. I was so proud of her."

Harry opened his mouth, and found he didn't have anything in it worth saying. He knew that voice. He had spent a good part of 1998 talking in it.

"You didn't cast the curse, Nev," said Ginny.

"No." Neville got to his feet at last. There were two dark, wet patches on the knees of his trousers where the frost had melted, the only frost in the whole churchyard that had. "But somebody's taken her out of the ground," he said, "and I want to know who. And then I want to do something about it."

For a moment, standing there against the bright sky with his jaw set, he looked very much like the boy who had pulled a burning sword out of the Sorting Hat.

​

"We have to tell him," Harry said in the lift.

It was early evening, and the Ministry was emptying. They were going up.

"Do we?" said Draco.

"It's his daughter, Malfoy."

"Yes. And somebody took her out of the ground. And the man who told us to stop looking is her father, and the man who signed off on closing a missing persons case three days early is her father, and the man who has spent ten years building a wall of the dead in his office is also, if I'm not mistaken, her father." Draco watched the floor numbers climbing. "I'm saying that's an extraordinary amount of coincidence for one man."

"He buried her. You heard Ginny. He stood at that funeral and didn't cry."

"I heard." Draco was quiet for a moment, then worked his jaw. "Fine."

The Office of Remembrance was dim, the lamps turned low. Edmund Grieve was sitting alone at his desk with a single candle burning, surrounded on every side by the silent, waving dead. He looked up as they came in and smiled, a tired, genuine smile, and started to rise, and then he saw their faces and sat down again.

Harry told him.

He had delivered bad news before; every Auror had. He'd stood in doorways and in hospital corridors and once, memorably, on a Quidditch pitch in the pouring rain. He had never learned how to do it well, because as far as he could tell there wasn't a way. So he told Grieve plainly, and quickly, and as gently as he could, and then he stood there and watched.

It was terrible. Grieve didn't shout, and he didn't weep, not at first. He simply seemed to fall inward, the way Neville's face had done in the fire that morning, but slower and deeper, until he was an old man at a desk with his hands flat on the blotter, staring at nothing. Then a sound came out of him that Harry would remember for a long time afterwards: a thin, cracked, breathless sound, like something tearing a very long way down.

"Ten years," Grieve whispered. "Ten years in that ground. Who would —" He looked up at Harry, and his eyes were wet and wild. "Who would?"

"We don't know yet, sir."

Grieve came round the desk. He took both of Harry's hands in his and held them hard. His hands were as cold as they had been the day before, cold as river stones.

"Find them," he said. "Whoever did this. Whatever it costs, whatever you need. Find them." His grip tightened. "And please, Harry, I'm begging you, not the Prophet. I couldn't bear it. Her name in their mouths, her photograph on page five next to some advertisement for broom polish —" His voice broke. "Promise me you'll keep it quiet."

"I promise," said Harry.

He meant it. He was still holding Grieve's cold hands, trying to think of anything else he could possibly say, when his eyes went past the old man's shoulder to the photograph on the desk.

Imogen Grieve was no longer laughing.

She was standing quite still in the frame, in her yellow-and-black scarf, with the wind still whipping at her hair. She was looking straight out of the photograph, directly at Harry. As he watched, she lifted one hand and pressed her palm flat against the inside of the glass, the way a child presses a hand against a car window.

Harry stared at her. Grieve, bent over his hands, didn't notice.

Then Imogen stepped sideways, out of the frame, and was gone. The photograph showed only a stretch of empty, windswept grass beneath a grey sky.

​

"Nobody fakes that," said Draco on the way back down. He'd been silent since they left. "Nobody can fake that. I've been in the same room as professionals, Potter. My mother is a professional. That wasn't acting."

"No," said Harry.

"So he didn't know she was gone."

"Looks like it."
Harry was still looking at his own hands. "The photograph on his desk. The daughter. She was looking at me."

"Photographs look at people, Potter. That's the whole point of them."

"Not like that. She put her hand on the glass. And then she left."

Draco didn't say anything to that. The lift clanked on downwards, past floor after floor of empty, darkened corridors, and neither of them looked at the other.

"We're going to need help," said Harry finally.

"Yes."

"Not Ministry help."

"No." Draco sighed. "I suppose you want your little club."

​

They made the lists in the back room of the Leaky Cauldron, where Hannah brought them two pints and a plate of chips without being asked, then kissed the top of Neville's head on the way past, for Neville had come too and was sitting in the corner, not drinking his.

Harry's list was on a napkin. It ran over onto a second napkin.

Draco's list was on a sheet of Ministry parchment. It had four names on it, ruled columns, and a key.

"That's thirty-eight people," said Draco, reading the napkins from across.

"It's the DA."

"It is a wedding, Potter. You can't bring thirty-eight people to a conspiracy. That's not a conspiracy, that's a liability. Half of them have sold their life stories to Witch Weekly."

"Nobody's sold their —"

"Zacharias Smith has a book, Potter."

Harry paused. "Zacharias Smith isn't on the list."

"Good."

"What's the key for?"

"Column one is loyalty," said Draco. "Column two is discretion. Column three is magical ability. Column four is likelihood of starting a fight with Pansy Parkinson within the first ten minutes." He tapped the last column, which had a very small number next to each of his own names and a note at the bottom reading See napkin for the rest. "Your side scores extremely poorly in column four."

They argued. They argued for an hour, and for most of a second pint, while Neville watched them over the top of his glass like a man at a tennis match. In the end Harry crossed out twenty-seven names and Draco crossed out one, and they sat back and looked at what was left.

"You're really bringing Parkinson," said Harry.

"Pansy has spent six weeks looking for her cousin with no help from anybody, and I'd put money on her knowing more about it than the entire Auror Office," said Draco. "Yes. I'm really bringing Parkinson."

"Seamus is going to go spare."

"Then Seamus can sit at the other end of the table." Draco picked up a chip and considered it. "If you're bringing your club, I'm bringing mine."

"You don't have a club."

"I have associates."

♫ Listen along

​

Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes was having a busy Wednesday. A queue of second-years' parents snaked out of the door, and somewhere near the back of the shop something was going off at regular intervals with a noise like a startled goose. Harry found George behind the counter in a magenta waistcoat, pouring a customer a sample from a small, innocent-looking china teapot.

Ron came out of nowhere and knocked the cup out of Harry's hand before it had got anywhere near his mouth. His copper hair had grown considerably since Harry had last bothered to notice, curling untidily round his ears, and there was a biro mark across one freckled cheek.

"Don't drink that."

"Why not?"

"It's Tattle-Tea."

"What's Tattle-Tea?"

"The Beverage That Tells," said George, with enormous pride. "One sip, and out pops the one thing you'd least like anyone to know. We tested it on Percy." A shadow passed across his face. "We now know a great deal too much about Percy."

"There's a scarf," said Ron darkly. "That's all I'm saying. There's a scarf."

"Launching in time for Christmas," said George. "Office parties will never recover."

Harry took them both into the back room, between towering crates of Skiving Snackboxes and a cage of Pygmy Puffs having what looked like a very small revolution, and told them everything. Ron listened with his arms folded and his ears slowly turning red. At the end of it, he said:

"Is Malfoy in it?"

"Yes."

"Then no."

"Ron —"

"No. Harry. No."

"He's my partner."

"He's a git. He's been a git since we were eleven and you can't —" Ron stopped. He looked at Harry's face for a long moment. Harry didn't say anything; he'd found over the years that with Ron that usually worked better. "Oh, fine," said Ron. "Fine. But I'm not sitting next to him."

He went to find his coat. George stayed where he was, absently polishing a cauldron that didn't need polishing.

"The message," said George, without looking up. "Don't let him bring me back."

"Yeah."

"Back from where, Harry?"

Harry didn't answer. He didn't have to. George's hands kept moving on the copper, round and round.

"Only somebody out there doesn't want to come back," George said. "Which means somebody out there thinks they can bring them." He put the cauldron down. "I was up all night thinking about that."

"George —"

"I'm not saying anything. I'm not." George smiled, and it was nearly his old smile, the one there used to be two of. "I'd just want to ask him, that's all. Whether he'd want to." He picked the cauldron back up. "I'm in, obviously. Somebody's got to keep you supplied. I'm not having you lot go into this with whatever Hermione's got left in that handbag."

​

Harry met Draco in front of a little shop at the bottom of Knockturn Alley. There was a sign above the door. NOTT & CO., it said, in neat gilt capitals. Wards, Runes & Curse-Breaking. Est. 2002. And underneath, in smaller, fresher lettering: No refunds. No exceptions. No Potters.

"That's new," said Draco.

"I had it done this morning," said a voice from inside, "when you owled to say you were bringing him."

The door swung open with a jangle of bells. Theodore Nott was leaning in the doorway like a portrait that had got bored of its frame. He was thin and tall and ink-stained to the wrists, in a waistcoat of plum-coloured velvet with his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow and a silver ring on every other finger. A pair of wire spectacles was pushed up into his hair, and he had the permanently amused expression of someone who has read the ending of the book and isn't going to tell you. Somewhere behind him a gramophone was playing opera, loudly and slightly flat.

Harry remembered him only vaguely from school: a quiet boy at the edge of the Slytherin table, always reading, never quite part of anything. Whatever had happened to Theodore Nott in the last ten years, the quiet hadn't survived it.

Theo looked Harry up and down, slowly, from his hair to his boots, with frank and delighted interest.

"Harry Potter," he said. "On my doorstep. In daylight." He pressed a ringed hand to his chest. "I'll have to have the threshold re-warded. Draco's told me so much about you."

"I have not," said Draco.

"Not recently, darling," said Theo, and swept back inside to fetch his coat.

It took him four minutes. When he came back, the coat was a long charcoal thing with a silk lining the colour of a bruise, and he swirled it on in the doorway as though for an audience. There wasn't one, unless you counted the man selling suspicious toenails from a barrow across the alley, and he didn't look up.

​

They went to Draco's flat in Holland Park. Harry had never been inside it before; in five years it had simply never come up, and it occurred to him, standing in the hall, that he couldn't remember Draco ever having mentioned anyone else coming round either. It was a beautiful flat, all tall windows and pale floors and an enormous bookcase, and it was so tidy it looked as though nobody lived there at all.

Theo stopped dead on the threshold of the sitting room.

"Draco," he said. "Darling. It looks as though nobody has ever been happy in here."

"It's minimalist."

"It's a cry for help."

Then he saw the window, went still at once.

The frost was still there on the inside of the glass, though the evening outside was mild. It had spread overnight in feathery white whorls to cover nearly half the pane. Theo looked at it for a long time without touching it. Then he took his spectacles down out of his hair, put them on, and looked at it some more.

"It's not a curse," he said at last.

"Then what is it?" said Harry.

"It's weather." Theo tilted his head. "From somewhere that isn't here." He pulled a slim silver stylus from his waistcoat and began, very carefully, to carve small straight marks into the wooden window frame, a vertical line crossed by shorter strokes, over and over. "Ogham," he said, before Harry could ask. "Not runes. Runes are Norse and, frankly, a bit vulgar, and whatever's out there is a great deal older than the Norse and a great deal more local. You match the ward to the thing you're keeping out." He paused in his carving. "Draco, there is something outside your window that has your scent, and you've asked me to build you a fence."

"Can you?"

"I can build you a gorgeous fence." Theo went back to his carving. "Whether it's the right kind is another question entirely."

Harry wandered over to the bookcase while Theo worked. It was alphabetised. It was also, he noticed, immaculate in every respect except one: along the top shelf, far above head height, sat a row of slim, old-looking volumes turned with their spines to the wall.

Theo saw him looking, then glanced across at Draco with an expression of such pure, unholy delight that Harry actually took a step back.

"Oh," Theo breathed, one ringed hand drifting to his heart. "Oh, Draco. You kept them."

"Don't," said Draco.

"I didn't say anything."

"Kept what?" said Harry again.

"Nothing," said Draco.

"Nothing at all, Potter," said Theo serenely, and dabbed at an imaginary tear beneath his spectacles. "Old school books. Sentimental value." He finished the last stroke on the window frame and stepped back to look at it. The carved marks glowed briefly silver and faded. The frost on the glass didn't melt, but it stopped spreading. "That'll hold. For a while."

"How long's a while?"

"Longer than a short while. Shorter than a long one." Theo tucked the stylus away and took off his spectacles. "I'm in, by the way. For whatever it is you're about to ask me to be in. Before you make a speech."

"I wasn't going to make a speech."

"You were building up to one. Your chin was doing a thing." Theo looked at Draco. "Besides, I owe him."

"You don't," said Draco.

"I do. And we're not discussing it."

It was, Harry would learn later, the only subject on which Draco Malfoy and Theo Nott had ever been known to agree.

​

♫ Listen along

Pansy Parkinson's flat in Chelsea looked, Draco thought, like the inside of a Muggle detective's head.

Every wall was covered. Newspaper clippings, maps, sketches, photographs, lists in Pansy's elegant, spiky handwriting, all of it pinned up and connected with lengths of red string that criss-crossed the room in a scarlet web. Rain was running down the tall windows, and although it was only four in the afternoon, every candle in the room was lit.

In the middle of it all, in silk pyjamas, a feather-trimmed dressing gown and full make-up, sat Pansy herself, with arms crossed and a quill behind each ear.

"You've gone mad," said Draco.

"Somebody had to," said Pansy.

It had been ten years since the Great Hall. The papers had eaten her alive, and then gone back for seconds. No respectable wizarding employer would touch a Parkinson; no one invited her anywhere; for two years she had barely left this flat. Then, in 2001, an anonymous columnist calling herself Mandragora had appeared in the back pages of Witch Weekly, and within six months her column was the most feared piece of writing in wizarding Britain. Mandragora knew everything. Mandragora knew who was sleeping with whom, who owed what to which goblin, which Wizengamot member had a drinking problem and which one had a secret second family in Tunbridge Wells. Nobody knew who Mandragora was.

Draco knew. Pansy had told him a few years ago on a very drunk New Year's Eve, and then made him swear on his mother's roses never to breathe a word of it.

"The Aurors have three pages on Cassia," said Pansy. "I've got sixty-three." She stood and went to the nearest wall, running a finger along a strand of red string. "Three disappearances. Three different parts of the country. Three different kinds of life. Nothing in common except their surnames, and the fact that nobody in your precious office could be bothered to look for them for longer than an afternoon." She tapped a clipping. "And this."

It was a letter on heavy cream parchment. Draco recognised the violet wax seal before he'd read a word of it.

The Office of Remembrance and Restitution requests the pleasure of your attendance at a preliminary Restitution interview...

"Cassia got one," said Pansy. "A week before she went. So did Tobias. So did Hector — his mum found it in the bread bin." She turned round. "So did I. So did everyone on the Register, as far as I can tell. So did you, probably, if you ever opened your post."

Draco thought of the small, neglected pile of letters on the side table in his hall, the ones he never opened because they were always from the Ministry and never good. He thought there might be a cream-coloured one in it.

"The Act passed yesterday."

"Quite."

He looked again at the violet seal.

"It's not proof of anything."

"No. It's a pattern. Proof is what you lot are supposed to be for." Pansy pulled one of the quills from behind her ear and pointed it at him. "I'll come. I'll bring everything. But I have conditions."

"Of course you do."

"One. Nobody finds out who I am. Nobody. If Mandragora is unmasked, I lose the only income I've got and the only thing I've built in ten years that anyone was actually afraid of." Her mouth twisted. "Two. If Weasley's there, I'm not sitting next to him."

"What have you got against Weasley?"

"Mandragora once described his dating history as a public health concern," said Pansy. "He wrote to the magazine. Four times. The fourth letter had diagrams." She crossed her arms. "And three: we find her. Cassia's twenty-four. She sends me dreadful poetry every birthday. Genuinely, historically dreadful. I'd like her to keep doing it."

​

Blaise Zabini received Draco in the drawing room of his mother's house in Belgravia, lying full length on a chaise longue at eleven in the morning with a glass of champagne balanced on his chest. He was dressed almost entirely in black, which against his deep brown skin made the fine gold chain at his throat and the small stud in one ear look positively ostentatious.

"Draco," he said warmly, without getting up. "You look ghastly. Is it Potter? It's always Potter."

"It's not always Potter."

"It's been Potter since 1991. Sit down, have a drink, tell me everything and leave nothing out." He waved a languid hand towards a decanter. "I'm in mourning."

"I'm sorry. Who died?"

"My seventy Galleons." Blaise sighed at the ceiling. "Mother got engaged in July. Aldric Fawley, Wizengamot, very old family, very old man. I opened a book on how long he'd last. I had March."

"Blaise —"

"And then last Thursday," said Blaise, and for a moment the languor left his voice entirely, "Aldric sent her a note breaking it off. He'd been besotted, Draco. He wrote her sonnets. Dreadful ones, but sonnets. And then overnight he writes her a note calling it off, and the note is polite. Aldric Fawley has never been polite in his life. He once sent a Christmas gift back to the Minister because the card addressed him as Aldric." He took a sip of champagne. "And he signed it with his left hand."

Draco frowned. "He's left-handed?"

"He was right-handed for a hundred and six years, as far as I know." Blaise swung his legs off the chaise longue and sat up. "Nobody leaves my mother, Draco. Men only ever leave my mother one way, and it involves a very nice funeral." He set the glass down. "Mother is furious. And when Mother's furious, people have a nasty habit of dying. So I'd very much like to find out what's going on before she does something unfortunate about it."

Draco looked at him for a moment.

Then he told him about Selwyn, Rowle and Mulciber. About Throop's ledger, the frost, the hair in the doorframe and the grave in Somerset with nobody in it.

Blaise listened without interrupting, which was how Draco knew he was worried.

When he finished, Blaise reached for his champagne again.

"Well," he said. "That seems inconveniently related."

"That was my thought."

He stood up and straightened his cuffs. "I'm in. Obviously. Is there a dress code?"

​

The rest came in by owl, by Floo and, in one case, by Howler.

Seamus Finnigan had found, at long last, a career in which blowing things up was considered a qualification; he worked in controlled demolitions for the Department of Magical Maintenance. He sent back a note that said Obviously, and then, ten minutes later, a Howler, which exploded over the kitchen table and bellowed WAIT, IS MALFOY IN THIS? at a volume that woke every portrait in the house.

Dean, who drew cartoons for the Quibbler and lived two doors down from Seamus, wrote back to say that he'd be there, and that he'd bring Seamus personally, even if he had to carry him. Parvati Patil, who was a Healer now on the spell-damage ward at St Mungo's and still read tea leaves on her lunch break, sent back a note: Tell me when and where. I'll bring the kit. And underneath, in smaller writing: The leaves say Friday. They also say something about dogs, which I don't like at all. Lee Jordan, who presented a late-night programme on the Wizarding Wireless Network called Jordan After Dark, wrote back to ask whether this was going to be the sort of thing that needed a codename, and if so, could he pick it.

And on Thursday morning a small, bedraggled owl arrived at Grimmauld Place, having apparently flown all the way from Mongolia, and collapsed in Harry's porridge.

Coming home, said the letter tied to its leg, in Luna's looping, cheerful hand. Bringing something. It's all right. It mostly doesn't bite.

Someone said hello to me.

​

The first person to arrive at Grimmauld Place on Friday evening was Gregory Goyle, who had not been invited.

Harry opened the door at twenty past six to find him filling the whole of the top step: vast, slow and shy, in a flour-dusted jacket, holding a large white cardboard box in both hands like an offering. Harry hadn't seen him since the trials. Goyle had got a two-year suspended sentence, Harry remembered — he'd been judged to have been more or less swept along by Crabbe for most of his life, and nobody had quite been able to argue — and after that he'd simply vanished from the wizarding world altogether.

"You're looking for Hector," said Goyle.

It wasn't a question. Harry stared at him. "How did you —"

"Mrs Mulciber buys her bread from me." Goyle shifted his weight. "I've got a bakery. In Hackney. Muggle one. They don't know who I am." He looked down at the box. "Hector used to follow me and Vince about, at school. Nobody ever let him carry anything." A pause. "I'd have let him carry something."

Harry looked past him into the square. "Goyle, this house is under the Fidelius Charm. How did you even find it?"

"Mrs Mulciber said you'd been round. You and Malfoy." Goyle shrugged. "So I went to Parkinson. Everyone knows she's looking for her cousin. She told me about tonight, and she showed me your note." A pause. "Eventually."

Harry thought of the note, with the address on it in his own handwriting, which was all a Fidelius Charm needed, and made a mental note to have a word with Pansy Parkinson.

Goyle held the box out. Harry took it automatically. It was still warm.

"Lemon drizzle," said Goyle. And then, as if that settled everything, he stepped past Harry into the hall, ducked under the doorframe into the kitchen and sat down on the end of the bench in the corner.

​

♫ Listen along

Draco arrived at a quarter to seven. He stood on the doorstep of Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, looking up at the house with an expression of the deepest suspicion, and then stepped into the hall and said, "Well. It's very yellow."

There was a crash from the kitchen stairs.

Kreacher was standing at the bottom of them, amid the shattered remains of a tea tray. He was staring at Draco. His mouth was open. His enormous watery eyes had gone, if possible, even larger and even more watery, and his whole ancient body had begun, very slightly, to tremble.

"Oh," said Harry. "Oh, no."

Kreacher took three tottering steps forward and threw himself face down on the floorboards at Draco's feet.

"Young Master," he croaked into the floor. "Young Master has come home."

Draco looked down at the house-elf prostrate across his shoes. Then he looked up at Harry.

"Potter," he said, "what is happening?"

"Mistress Narcissa's son," Kreacher was sobbing. "Of the Most Ancient and Noble House. Black blood, come home at last. Kreacher has waited — Kreacher has waited so long for Young Master to come home —"

"He thinks you're the heir to the House of Black," said Harry.

"I'm the heir to the House of Black?"

"No. I am. Technically. Sirius left it to me."

Kreacher lifted his face from the floorboards and fixed Harry with a look of immense, trembling dignity.

"Master Harry owns the House of Black," he said. "Master Draco is the House of Black."

And from somewhere up the stairs, where she had apparently been watching the whole thing from the landing, came the sound of Ginny laughing so hard she had to sit down.

It went on like that for the rest of the evening. Within ten minutes, Kreacher had excavated a tea service from some forgotten cupboard that Harry had never even known existed: black-and-silver porcelain, every piece bearing the Black family crest, so old and so fine it was almost translucent. He served Draco tea in it on a silver tray, with a linen napkin folded into the shape of a swan. He polished Draco's shoes while Draco was still wearing them. When Ron arrived and asked, reasonably, whether there was any more of that tea going, Kreacher looked straight through him as though he were a draught and said to Draco, "Is there anything else Young Master requires?"

"This," said Draco, cradling his teacup with an expression of entirely unbecoming satisfaction, "is the finest thing that has ever happened to me."

"It's my house," said Harry.

"It's your house the way the Ministry's your office, Potter. You work in it. You don't belong to it." Draco sipped his tea. "I've changed my mind about your house, by the way. I was hasty. I take it all back."

​

It was, in the end, a very full kitchen.

Harry had been in this room for Order meetings at fifteen, huddled at the end of the table while the adults talked over his head, and he had thought then that it was the most crowded room he had ever seen. He'd been wrong. Tonight there were sixteen of them. And they sat, without anybody saying a word about it, exactly the way they had sat in the Great Hall for seven years: Gryffindors and Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs down one side of the long scrubbed table, and Slytherins down the other, with a gap in the middle wide enough to drive a Knight Bus through.

Draco, Theo and Blaise sat together. Goyle was still on his bench in the corner, with the air of someone who had been there for years and fully intended to stay. Ron had made very sure to sit as far from Draco as it was possible to get, and had succeeded. Seamus, beside him, had his arms folded and was glaring across the table at the Slytherins with the expression of a man working out exactly how much blasting powder it would take.

Pansy arrived last.

She came down the kitchen stairs in a black leather coat with a pink case of files under one arm, took one look round the room, and stopped. There was exactly one empty chair left at the table. It was next to Ron.

"Absolutely not," said Pansy.

"Suits me," said Ron.

"Kreacher," said Harry, "could you bring another chair?"

Kreacher, who was stationed behind Draco's shoulder with a teapot like a sentry, did not appear to hear.

"Kreacher."

"Kreacher only fetches chairs for the family, Master Harry."

"I'm the family!"

"Master Harry is the owner," Kreacher said patiently, as if to a very young child.

In the end Pansy sat down next to Ron, because the alternative was standing up for two hours in heels. She arranged herself on the extreme far edge of the chair, as far from him as it was physically possible to get without actually sitting on Parvati. Ron shifted to the extreme far edge of his. Between them lay a space of about a foot and a half that seemed, somehow, to be crackling.

"Weasley," said Pansy.

"Parkinson."

"I've read your letters," said Pansy. "To Witch Weekly. They printed one. Your diagrams were wonderful."

Ron's ears went slowly, magnificently scarlet. Across the table, Draco made a small noise into his Black-crested teacup.

"Right, we better get started, then—" Harry began.

There was an almighty crash from the hall.

Everyone reached for their wands.

"I'm all right!" called Luna Lovegood cheerfully.

A moment later she appeared in the kitchen doorway, fresh from a Portkey from Ulaanbaatar, carrying a wooden crate the size of a small suitcase. She had a sunburnt nose and a necklace of what appeared to be dried yak cheese, and she beamed round the room at everyone as though she had just walked into a birthday party.

"Luna!" Ginny nearly knocked her chair over getting up.

Luna set the crate down on the table, very carefully, just in time. Ginny reached her and threw both arms round her neck, and Luna hugged her back the way she did everything, completely and without the slightest embarrassment, her cheek pressed against Ginny's hair.

"You smell of horses," said Ginny, muffled.

"Mostly yak," said Luna. "Some horse." She leaned back and studied Ginny's face. "You've been worrying. It's gone into your eyebrows."

After that it was a free-for-all. Neville got there next and lifted her clean off her feet. Hermione hugged her with the slightly frantic thoroughness of someone checking for injuries. Parvati kissed her on both cheeks and told her she was dreadfully sunburnt. Seamus and Dean arrived together and turned it into a scrum, and Ron, who had been planning to be dignified about the whole thing, gave up and flung his arms round all of them at once. Harry was last. By the time he got there, there was barely any Luna left to hug, so he settled for patting the top of her head.

"This is lovely," said Luna, from somewhere in the middle. "Mind Bolorma."

Over the top of Luna's head, Harry caught sight of the other end of the kitchen. The Slytherins hadn't moved. Pansy was examining her nails with great concentration, and Blaise had lifted his glass a fraction, the way you might acknowledge a toast at a wedding you'd rather not have come to. Draco was looking very hard at the fire. Only Goyle, on his bench in the corner, was smiling a little, at nobody in particular.

Theo Nott had looked up at the kettle noise from the crate. He was still looking, Harry noticed, when Luna turned round.

"Hello," she said. "Sorry I'm late, there was a very long queue at the Mongolian Ministry and one of the officials wanted to marry me. This is Bolorma." She put the crate down on the table. It rocked. Something inside it made a sound like a small kettle coming to the boil. "Don't put your fingers near the slats. She's still a baby, and she's shy."

"What is it?" said Seamus.

"Nobody's quite sure," said Luna happily. "That's rather the point."

Something shot out between two of the slats of the crate, very fast, and bit Ron on the hand.

Ron yelped. The something was already back inside the crate. It hadn't gone anywhere near anyone else.

"Oh," said Luna, delighted. "She likes you. She only bites people she finds interesting."

"Then it has appalling taste," said Pansy.

​

♫ Listen along

Harry stood up. He had never been good at this part. He'd done it a hundred times — in the Hog's Head at fifteen, in the Room of Requirement, in briefing rooms and in freezing tents on stakeouts — and he had never once enjoyed it. He didn't like speeches. So, he just told them.

He told them about Throop, and the ledger, and the names that weren't in it. He told them about Robards's face, and the closure form dated three days early, and Kingsley's bare ear. He told them about a small, freezing room above a launderette in Bethnal Green, with a wand lying on the table and a letter that stopped in the middle of a sentence. He told them about the coins, and the thread of gold light pointing straight down into the floor. He told them about the Veil, very carefully, without ever quite saying that Hermione had told him anything, while Hermione watched him without blinking. And he told them about a grave in Somerset, white with frost in the sunshine, with nothing in it at all.

"Imogen Grieve," he said. "Coin thirty-one. That's who sent the message."

Nobody spoke.

Then Luna said, in a pleased, interested voice, "Oh. So that's who it was."

Everybody turned to look at her.

"She said hello," Luna explained. "Afterwards. When I was reading the coin. The wind went all quiet and somebody said hello, and I said hello back, and then the wind took her away again." She considered for a moment. "She sounded very tired."

The silence after that was of a different kind entirely.

It was Seamus who broke it, and Harry saw it coming about half a second before it happened, the way you see a Bludger coming from the corner of your eye.

"Right," said Seamus. His voice was tight. "Grand, so. Somebody's digging up our dead, and somebody's lifting Death Eaters' kids off the street, and it's her we're to be sitting round a table holding hands with, is it?" He jabbed a finger across the table at Pansy.

"Seamus," said Harry.

"No. No, Harry, I'm sorry, so I am. I'll sit with Malfoy, sure. You're after vouching for him, and that's good enough for me. I'll even sit with Goyle." In the corner, Goyle blinked. "But I was there, Harry. In the Great Hall. Weeks we'd been hiding in that Room, half of us black and blue off the Carrows, and him in all our heads, hand over Harry Potter and nobody else gets hurt, and up she gets." His voice cracked. "Up she gets, in front of the whole school, and points straight at you, and says somebody grab him. I'll not forget that. I'll not ever forget it."

The kitchen was absolutely silent. Even Bolorma, in her crate, had stopped making her kettle noise.

Pansy didn't look away. She sat very straight on the edge of her chair with her hands folded on her files, and when she spoke her voice was completely level.

"Yes," she said. "I did say that."

Seamus stared at her.

"I was seventeen," Pansy said. "He was inside my head. He was inside everyone's head, you remember, you just said so. And I was more frightened than I had ever been in my life, and I wanted to live, and I wanted every single person I'd grown up with to live, and I thought — I actually thought — that if we gave him Potter, he'd stop." She drew a breath. "I was wrong. I was a coward. I've had ten years to be sorry about it, Finnigan, and I promise you I've used every single one of them. I don't expect you to forgive me. I'm not here to be forgiven. I'm here because my cousin is missing and nobody else is looking for her."

"Sorry doesn't fix it —"

"No," said Pansy. "It doesn't."

Seamus was on his feet. Harry never saw him draw his wand; it was simply in his hand. And across the table, faster than Harry would have believed, so was Pansy's, and so was Blaise's, with a small weary sigh; and Ron was up, and Dean was up, and in the corner Goyle had risen slowly to his full, enormous height; and Theo hadn't moved at all, but his right hand had gone very quietly into his left sleeve. And behind Draco's chair, Kreacher had silently produced from somewhere a carving knife very nearly as long as he was, and was holding it in front of him with both hands, trembling with devotion.

Ginny was on her feet between them with her own wand out, saying, "Enough —"

And Luna Lovegood, who was still sitting down, said in her clear, dreamy, carrying voice:

"Everyone in this room has buried someone."

It wasn't loud. It didn't need to be.

"Shall we start there?" said Luna.

Nobody moved.

"My mother," said Luna. "When I was nine. A spell went wrong in her workroom. I was there."

There was a long pause. Then, from the other side of the table, very quietly, Theo Nott said, "Mine too." All the theatre had gone out of his voice. It was the first time Harry had heard him sound his age. "When I was seven. She was ill for a long time, and then she wasn't." He was looking at his hands, turning one of the silver rings slowly round and round on his finger. "I wasn't allowed to be there."

Luna turned and looked at him. She looked at him for a long moment, with her head a little on one side, the way you might look at someone who had just said something in a language you'd been waiting years to hear anyone else speak.

"Imogen Grieve," said Neville.

"Fred," said George.

"Fred," said Ron and Ginny together, and Ron sat down slowly, and after a moment so did Dean.

"Lavender," said Parvati, very softly. Across the table, Ron looked down at his hands.

"My dad," said Dean. "Never knew him. Death Eaters, 1981. Still counts."

"Colin Creevey," said Seamus. His wand was still in his hand, but it had drifted down towards the floor. "Followed me round with that camera of his, so he did. Drove me demented." He was quiet for a moment. "He'd a photo of me in third year with no eyebrows on me. Swore blind he'd burnt it." A breath. "I hope to God he didn't."

Hermione was quiet for so long that Harry thought she might not say anything at all.

"Nobody's dead," she said at last. "Not mine anyway. But I've got two parents in Perth who don't know my name. I tried to put it back, after the war. I tried for so long." She pressed her lips together. "They're very happy. They're called Wendell and Monica, and they keep bees. I think that counts."

Across the table, Draco Malfoy was looking at her with an expression Harry had never seen on his face before, and had no name for.

Blaise cleared his throat. "Seven stepfathers," he offered. "Although in fairness, I only attended the funerals. Mother did all the burying. She's very good at it."

There was a beat of stunned silence, and then someone laughed — Harry thought it was George — and then Parvati did, helplessly, into her hands, and even Seamus's mouth twitched. It broke something, that laugh. Not all the way. But something.

"Vince," said Goyle, from the corner.

Everyone went still again.

"Vincent Crabbe," said Draco, very quietly, and his voice didn't waver at all. He was looking straight across the table at Seamus.

Seamus looked back at him for a long time. Then, finally, he nodded.

"Yeah," he said. "Alright." And he put his wand away and sat down.

Across the table, Pansy slid her own wand back into her sleeve. "Nobody," she said. "Not yet." She looked straight at Harry. "I'd like to keep it that way."

That left Harry.

He had known it would. He stood at the head of the table in the kitchen of Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, where he had once been fifteen and furious and shut out of every conversation that mattered, and he said them. All of them. He'd never said them out loud in a row before. He found he didn't have to think about the order; they came out the way they lived in him, one after another, like the names running down the wet black stone in the Atrium.

"My mum and dad," Harry said. "Cedric. Sirius. Dumbledore. Hedwig. Mad-Eye. Dobby. Fred. Remus. Tonks. Colin." He took a breath. "Snape."

Nobody said a word. There was only the sound of the fire, and of Bolorma breathing in her crate, and then, from somewhere behind Draco's chair, the small wet sound of an elderly house-elf trying very hard not to cry.

"Master Regulus," whispered Kreacher.

Harry looked round the table at all of them: at the Gryffindors and the Slytherins, the gap between them that no longer looked quite so wide, the Black-crested teacup and the lemon drizzle cake and the crate from Mongolia, at sixteen people who had each, at one time or another, tried very hard to kill at least one of the others.

"Right," he said. "Let's go and find the ones who aren't dead yet."

♫ Listen along