​St Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries

Spattergroit

Patient Information Leaflet No. 12

Spattergroit is highly contagious. Patients should remain at home, receive no visitors, and refrain from speaking once the pustules have reached the uvula.

Ron and Pansy came in from the hedge at ten o'clock on Sunday night with leaves in their hair. Ron had a scratch across one freckled cheek and Pansy's black fringe had acquired a twig which neither of them appeared to have noticed. They were still arguing, as they came down the kitchen stairs, about whether the Morgana card belonged to the person who had bought the Chocolate Frog or the person who had opened it, and they stopped the moment they reached the bottom.

Harry saw them both take in the room, the lamps and the teapot and the faces round the table, and he saw something pass between them that he couldn't read: a quick sideways glance, the kind you give someone you've been in quite close quarters with.

"Good hedge?" said Harry. Ron gave him a withering look, sat down, and took three biscuits at once.
Fawley hadn't eaten, Ron said, not once in two days. His great-niece let herself in twice a day with a basket, and the basket went in full and came out full, and she looked a little more frightened every time. The old man spent most of the weekend walking up and down his drawing room. And the family crup had taken one sniff at the back step on the first morning and refused to go back into the house.

"It sat in the hedge with us," said Pansy. "All weekend."

"Ate half my sandwiches," said Ron.

"You gave it half your sandwiches."

Ron ignored this.

At seven minutes past three in the morning, he said, the back door had opened. The old man had walked out onto the lawn in his bare feet and turned to face west, as if somebody had called him, and stood there without moving while the frost came out from under him and spread across the grass.

"And then dogs," said Ron. "Miles off. And something that might have been a horn."

"It went on for seven minutes," said Pansy, looking down at her notes. "We timed it."

At the end of the table, Draco had put down his chalk. "Just past three," he said, quite lightly. "That's when they came to my window, too."

The room was quiet.

"His housekeeper's niece does my nails," said Pansy into the silence. "According to her, he's resigned from his club, stopped answering his post and seen his lawyer once. He's written exactly one letter since the eleventh, and we all know who that went to."

Blaise examined the ceiling.

"And he's turned down every invitation he's had," Pansy went on. "Every single one."

"Then we send him one he can't turn down," said Draco.

Blaise closed his eyes. "Mother."

"Your mother has wanted him to dinner since the day that letter arrived. She'd give a great deal to watch his face while he answers her questions." Draco turned to the chart. "Saturday. Write to her tonight."

"If it's answers you're after," said George, "I've got a pot of Tattle-Tea. One cup and you can't tell a lie for an hour. Can't stop telling the truth, either. That's the bit we're still working on."

"That's unlicensed Veritaserum," Harry, with his eyes closed, "and I'm an Auror. I'm going to count to ten, and when I open my eyes, it's going to be a pot of PG Tips."

"It's in a PG Tips box," said George. "If that helps."

It didn't. Harry had got as far as seven, with his eyes still shut, when the fire flared green and Neville and Ginny came through it, muddy to the knees, with a piece of moss caught in Neville's cardigan.

"It's a very old tree," said Neville, before anybody could ask. He pulled the moss out of his cardigan and looked at it. "Old trees don't tell you anything on the first weekend. I'll need a few evenings."

"He'll also need the churchwarden to stop following us round with a lantern," said Ginny. "He thinks we're from the council."

"Why does he think that?" said Harry.

"Because I told him," said Ginny. "He asked."

Draco drew a small question mark beside CHURCHYARD on the chalkboard. Then he turned back to the rest of them.

"Theo. Lovegood. The Society doesn't meet on a Saturday. While Fawley is eating Mrs Zabini's best roast, nobody will be watching that chapel."

"A chapel break-in on a Saturday night," said Theo, looking pleased for the first time all evening. "How very devout."

"Blaise," said Draco. "Progress?"

"Two parties since yesterday, and a christening this afternoon," said Blaise. "Nothing useful yet, except that half the people I most wanted to talk to have gone inexplicably dull. I've got six more invitations before Saturday." He took a long, consoling sip from his hip flask. "My liver would like it noted that it objects."

"Noted." Draco tapped the chart. "The rest of us are going to dinner. In couples."

"Why couples?" said Ron.

"Because Mrs Zabini doesn't seat single guests. She says they flirt with the host." Draco ticked them off. "And because a table full of Aurors is an ambush, Weasley, and a table full of couples is a dinner party. Fawley mustn't smell a trap until he's already drunk the tea." He turned back to the chalkboard and began writing names in pairs. "Potter and his wife, obviously."

"Obviously," said Ginny. "Try not to look so heartbroken about it, Malfoy."

"Granger, you're with me."

Hermione, who had been writing, stopped writing. "I beg your pardon?"

"You're going to spend all week reading about what could make a man change his handwriting overnight," said Draco. "On Saturday I'd like you to meet one."

Harry watched Hermione open her mouth to argue, then watched her see the sense of it and hate it, all in the space of about a second.

"Fine," she said.

"Wear something green," Ginny murmured to her, and got a look that could have stripped paint.

Which left two people at the table without a partner, and everybody looked at them at once.

"No," said Pansy.

"Absolutely not," said Ron.

"Mrs Zabini adores Pansy," said Draco, unmoved. "She's the one guest Fawley won't think twice about. And Weasley has spent two days watching that man through a hedge. If Fawley does one thing at that table he didn't do in that house, Weasley is the one who'll see it."

"So did I," said Pansy. "It was the same hedge."

"Then you'll both see it." Draco turned back to the chalkboard. "You're going together. As a couple. You'll hold hands if you have to."

"We already —" Ron began.

Pansy's heel came down on his foot.

"OW! Bloody hell, Parkinson!"

Every head at the table turned, slowly, to look at them.

"Cramp," said Pansy serenely. "Two days in a hedge. It comes and goes."

"I haven't got any dress robes," said Ron, going down for the third time.

There was a pause. Ron looked around the table, hopeful.

Blaise sat up. "You can borrow my second-best," he said, a little too quickly.

Ron's face, which had begun to brighten, stopped halfway. Harry had known Blaise properly for about a week, which was long enough to learn that he was never generous by accident.

"What's wrong with them?" said Ron.

"Absolutely nothing," said Blaise, and took out his little black notebook.

​

Hermione put in for a week's leave by owl that night, citing five years of holiday she had never once taken. Nobody in the Department of Mysteries asked why. Nobody in the Department of Mysteries ever asked anybody anything; it was, she had once told Harry, the only thing she really liked about the culture of the place.

On Monday morning, Harry went to work.

He sat at his desk in full view of the entire Auror Office with a stack of counterfeit Sickles at his elbow, and looked sulky about it, which took no effort at all. At a quarter past nine, Gawain Robards came out of his office, stopped beside the empty desk opposite Harry's, and frowned at it.

In five years, Draco Malfoy had never once been late. He had never been ill, either. He had come to work through a dragon-pox scare, two Splinchings and the morning after the Ministry Christmas party, and he had filed his reports on time after all of them.

"Where's Malfoy?" said Robards.

Harry had been preparing for this since Saturday. He had considered and rejected dragon pox (St Mungo's would want him), a Splinching (Robards would want the paperwork) and food poisoning (Draco had never in his life admitted to eating anything capable of poisoning him).

"Spattergroit," said Harry.

Robards stared at him. "Spattergroit."

"His neighbour's little boy had it. Malfoy was —" Harry searched for something plausible "— being neighbourly."

Robards's expression suggested that he had known Draco Malfoy for five years and found this the least plausible part of the story so far.

"It's a bad case," said Harry, pressing on. "Purple pustules. Everywhere." He made a vague gesture that took in most of his own body and, after a moment's thought, his face. "Highly contagious. Nobody's to go near him for at least a week."

"I'll send someone from St Mungo's."

"No need. His mother's sent her own Healer."

This was exactly the sort of thing Narcissa Malfoy would do, and Harry saw Robards think so too.

"He was perfectly well on Friday."

"It comes on very fast," said Harry. "That's the thing about spattergroit."

"And he can't Floo in and tell me this himself?"

"It's spread to his uvula," said Harry. "He can't talk."

There was a long silence.

Harry watched Robards consider, for perhaps the first time in five years, the prospect of an entire week in which Draco Malfoy could not talk. Something that was very nearly peace passed slowly across his face.

"Tell him," said Robards, "to take as long as he needs."

In his inside pocket Harry had a sick note on St Mungo's paper, signed P. Patil, Healer, which diagnosed uvular spattergroit in a hand so illegible it could only have been genuine. He decided to save it for an emergency.

By eleven o'clock the whole department knew. By lunchtime Proudfoot had organised a collection. At four o'clock a large card arrived on Harry's desk to be forwarded, signed by every Auror on the floor, with a drawing on the front of a very sad ferret covered in purple spots. Nobody would admit to having drawn it.

GET WELL SOON, MRS POTTER, it said inside.

Harry took it home that evening and propped it on the kitchen mantelpiece at Grimmauld Place, where Draco found it the next morning and did not speak to him until Thursday, which, as Harry pointed out, was medically consistent.

​

The library of the Most Ancient and Noble House of Black was behind a tapestry on the second-floor landing: a faded, moth-eaten thing showing a lot of haughty-looking people in ruffs hunting a white hart, which Hermione had walked past perhaps five hundred times in the course of her life without ever giving it a second glance.

Kreacher led them to it on Monday morning with enormous ceremony, having spent most of Sunday dusting the landing outside it in preparation. He bowed to the tapestry. Then he bowed to Draco, even lower, and said, "Young Master must place his hand upon the hart."

Draco hesitated, frowning at the tapestry.

"A hart," said Hermione. "It's an old word for a stag. In heraldry, a white one usually means —"

"I know what a hart is, Granger. I was looking for it."

Hermione, who had found it while she was talking, pointed: a small stag half-hidden in a thicket at the edge of the hunt, where the moths had nearly finished it. Draco put his palm flat against it.

The tapestry rolled itself up like a blind, with a dry whisper of old wool. Behind it, where Hermione would have sworn on anything you liked that there was only a wall, was a narrow door of black oak with a silver handle shaped like a serpent eating its own tail. It swung open without anybody touching it.

The room beyond was long and low and dark, and it smelt of old leather, and dust, and something faintly metallic, like the air before a thunderstorm. Shelves ran from floor to ceiling on every wall. Green glass lamps flickered into life along them one by one as Draco stepped over the threshold, as if the room were waking up and was pleased to see him. Many of the books were chained to their shelves. Some of them were rattling their chains very slightly. One of them, on a high shelf near the door, sighed.

At the far end of the room was a fireplace, and in front of it a single worn leather armchair, and on the armchair a faded green cushion with an R embroidered on it in silver thread.

Kreacher went and stood beside the chair, with his head bowed.

"Master Regulus sat in that chair," Kreacher croaked. "Every summer, and every Christmas, and he read and read until his candle burnt down, and Kreacher brought him his tea. Master Regulus always said thank you." His ears trembled. "Kreacher has dusted this room every day since. Every day, for twenty-nine years, and nobody opens the door, and nobody says thank you to Kreacher." This last was muttered at the carpet, plainly meant to carry. Then he drew himself up, and his great wet eyes went to Draco. "But Kreacher knew. Kreacher always knew one of the family would come home."

Hermione looked at Draco. For once, Draco didn't have anything to say at all.

​

♫ Listen along

They worked all week, from straight after breakfast until long after dark.

It took Hermione about ten minutes to realise they were going to drive each other mad. She worked the way she always had: methodically, from one end of a shelf to the other, making a neat index card for every book she opened, with its title, author, date, subject and any relevant page numbers written on it in small, clear handwriting. By Tuesday evening she had a stack of index cards four inches high, sorted into seven categories.

Draco didn't make index cards. He sat cross-legged in the middle of the floor like a child, surrounded by great teetering towers of books, and he read three or four of them at once, flicking from one to another in a way that made Hermione's eye twitch, and he never wrote a single thing down.

"How can you possibly remember all that?" she said, on the Wednesday, round about nine.

"I don't need to remember it. I know where it is."

"That's the same thing."

"It isn't. You remember things, Granger. I find them." He reached for another book. "It's why you were always top of the class, and I was always second, and it's why I'll find what we need before you do."

"That," said Hermione, "is the most arrogant thing I have ever heard anybody say."

"You've met Potter."

"Harry isn't arrogant."

"Potter once tried to fly a car to Scotland."

Hermione opened her mouth to object, and found she had nothing to object with. She shut it and went back to her index cards.

Some time later, Draco leaned over, plucked the top card off her stack and read it.

"Granger," he said. "This is an index card about your other index cards."

"It's a cross-reference."

"It's a cry for help."

"Give it back," said Hermione, and snatched it. "Honestly."

​

Kreacher brought them tea and sandwiches every day at one o'clock, with Draco's cut into precise triangles and the crusts removed, and Hermione's in two uneven halves with the crusts very much still on. Hermione ate them anyway. She had picked a fight with house-elves once before, at fifteen, armed with a badge and a great deal of knitting, and she had lost.

On Thursday, Draco reached across without looking up from his book, swapped their plates, and ate both of her uneven halves, crusts first, while Kreacher watched from the doorway with his ears sinking lower and lower. After that, both plates came without crusts. It was, Hermione told herself firmly, entirely about the elf.

Later that evening, Kreacher appeared in the library doorway to announce, in tones of the deepest mourning, that Master Longbottom had come through the kitchen fire, and was dripping on it.

He was. So was Ginny. By the time Hermione and Draco got downstairs, the pair of them were standing on the hearthrug, muddy to the thighs this time, while Harry fetched towels and Theo watched over his spectacles from the far end of the table, where he had spread out his notes for Saturday. Neville didn't take a towel. He had a long bundle wrapped in sacking under one arm, and he laid it on the kitchen table and unwrapped it.

It was a length of root as thick as Hermione's wrist, dark red under the bark and pale at the heart, and it had been cut clean through at both ends.

"Old trees take their time," said Neville. "I said they would." He put one muddy finger on the root. "They go straight down under her, deeper than any yew's got any business going, and every one that runs under Immy has had a knife taken to it." He turned it so that the lamplight fell across the end. "And somebody's written on them."

Notched into the pale cut face, small and neat and repeated all the way round the rim like the hours on a clock, was the same mark over and over again: a single long line, with five short strokes cut squarely across it.

Hermione looked at it, and for one long moment she couldn't read it. It was an unpleasant feeling, and she didn't have it often.

"Ioho," said Theo.

He didn't get up, and he didn't make a performance of it, which was so unlike him that Hermione looked at him properly. He simply drew the root towards him across the table and ran his thumb along the strokes, one after another, the way you might tell a rosary.

"It's the letter for the yew," he said. "My mother used to call it the death-letter, which I thought was terribly glamorous when I was six." He turned the root over in his hands. "She was overstating it, as mothers do. The yew keeps the door between one thing and the next, and death is merely the busiest one." He laid it down again, very gently. "Somebody's been using these roots as a road. And they've paid the toll at every one of them."

Ginny pulled out a chair and sat down in it, still in her muddy boots, which Kreacher saw, and visibly decided to remember.

"That's not all," she said. "I got the churchwarden talking. It took three evenings and most of a packet of Hobnobs, and he wants to know when the council's coming back about the bins." She pushed her wet hair off her face with the back of her wrist and left a smear of mud behind. "Grieve came every Sunday for ten years, with daffodils in the spring and holly at Christmas, and never missed one. And then in August, he stopped. The churchwarden asked him about it after a few weeks, because he was worried about him. And Grieve said there wasn't any point any more." She looked at Neville. "He said she wasn't there."

Hermione felt it go into her like cold water. Beside the dresser, Harry had stopped, with the towels still in his arms.

"In August," said Draco, from the end of the table. "Before anybody knew the grave was empty." He had his arms folded tightly, as if against a draught. "I watched his face when Potter told him. I'd have bet my wand he was grieving, and he was." Draco's mouth twisted. "The best lies are the ones that are mostly true. He just left out the part where he already knew."

Hermione looked at the five small strokes cut into the wood, in an alphabet she couldn't read, and found that she had made up her mind before she'd quite finished thinking about it.

"Theo," she said. "Teach me."

Theo looked up at her, and something moved in his face that she couldn't read either.

"It took me eleven years, darling," he said, quite gently. "And a mother who had nothing else to do with her afternoons." He began to wrap the root back up in its sacking, carefully, as though it might feel the cold. "You haven't got eleven years. Not with four people missing."

Hermione watched the sacking fold over the little cut marks until there was nothing left to see.

Later, when everyone else had gone to bed, she went back up to the library. She took a fresh index card from the box, wrote OGHAM across the top of it in small, clear capitals, and underneath, from memory, copied out the mark from the root: one long line, and five short strokes across it.

Then she started an eighth category.

​

It was nearly midnight on the Friday. Draco had been on the same page of a book about Welsh water-spirits for the best part of an hour, and Hermione, who had noticed, had been on the same index card for nearly as long. In the end, it was Draco who looked up first.

"Wendell and Monica," he said.

Hermione's quill stopped. "That's none of your business, Malfoy."

"I wasn't going to be kind about it, if that's what you're worried about." He turned a page. "I was going to ask whether you'd tried the Selkirk reversal."

She stared at him. The Selkirk reversal was a memory-restoration technique so obscure and so fiddly that she had found it only after four months of searching, at the bottom of a box of unpublished papers at St Mungo's. She had never met anybody else who'd even heard of it.

"Twice," she said.

"And the Abernathy variation, with the counter-charm reversed —"

"Yes."

"And did you try it at a threshold? A doorway? Some of the older memory work only really takes if you do it standing at the boundary between two places —"

"Yes, Malfoy." It came out louder than she'd meant it to. "I tried all of it. I tried everything. I tried for years. I stood in the doorway of a house in Perth in forty-degree heat with the counter-charm reversed, and my mother opened the door and asked if I was lost, and offered me a glass of lemonade, and I said yes, because I didn't know what else to say." She put her quill down, because her hand was shaking. "It was very nice lemonade."

Somewhere along the shelves, a chained book rattled.

"I'm sorry," said Draco.

"That's the first time," said Hermione, not looking at him, "you've ever apologised to me."

"That wasn't an apology. That was condolence. They're different things."

"Are they?"

"An apology is when something's your fault." He turned another page, though she didn't think he was reading it. "Your parents aren't my fault, Granger. Some things are, but not that one."

She looked at him then. He was sitting in the middle of the floor with his shirt-sleeves rolled up and ink on his fingers and his hair falling in his eyes, surrounded by the Black family's darkest books, looking very resolutely at a page about Welsh water-spirits. There was a long white scar on the inside of his left forearm, cutting straight through the faded ghost of the Mark. She hadn't known that was there. She wondered who had put it there, and then, with a small cold shock, realised that she could probably guess.

The lamps burned lower. Along the shelves, one by one, the chained books stopped rattling and went quiet.

It was Draco who found it, of course. It was very late by then, and she would have found it herself within the hour, she was almost sure, if she hadn't spent half the night on her eighth category.

"Granger," he said, in an odd voice.

She was beside him in a second. He was holding a thin, black-bound book, very old, its pages brown and spotted, and its title picked out on the spine in flaking silver.

Of the Hollow Folk, and Their Bargains. Being an Account of Certain Rites Practised Beneath the Hills of Britain. By Phineas Nigellus Black, 1851.

He opened it at the page he'd marked with his finger, and they read it together, kneeling side by side on the library floor in a circle of lamplight, their heads almost touching.

It was written in the cramped, elegant, faintly contemptuous hand of a man who had never once doubted his own brilliance. It talked about the folk who lived beneath the hollow hills of Britain, and about the bargains they made with men. It talked about the children they took from their cradles, and the things they left in their places: things that looked exactly like the stolen children, and ate like them, and cried like them, but were not them. Changelings, the Muggles called them. The Muggles, Phineas Nigellus observed acidly, had got the name right and absolutely everything else wrong.

The thing itself, he wrote, was a Rite. An exchange. Two souls, and two bodies, and a threshold between them. The soul of one person put into the body of another, and the soul of the second put into the body of the first. Undetectable by any ordinary means, for there was no potion to wear off and no enchantment to break; the body was simply the body, and the soul inside it simply was not the soul that belonged there. A price was required, he noted, for the Hollow Folk did nothing for free, and the price was always paid at a threshold. And there was only one sure sign, the one the Muggle grandmothers had always known about:

The borrowed soul cannot abide cold iron. Touch the changeling with a nail, a horseshoe, a poker from the hearth; it will burn where the true soul would not.

And then, at the very bottom of the page, in a different hand, a later hand, in a note written in faded ink:

Rite taken into the keeping of the Department of Mysteries, 1874, and sealed. See Folio 14.

Hermione went very white.

Draco looked at her face. Then he looked back at the note.

"Granger," he said slowly, "you don't have to say anything."

"I wasn't going to."

"I know." He closed the book very gently. "That's rather what worries me."

Before they left, while she was gathering up her index cards, he took an envelope from his inside pocket and dropped it on top of the pile. It was heavy cream parchment. The violet wax seal had been broken.

"I opened my post," he said. "This morning. Pansy thought I should."

The Office of Remembrance and Restitution requests the pleasure of your attendance at a preliminary Restitution interview, Hermione read, at ten o'clock in the evening on the thirty-first of October.

She read it twice.

"Hallowe'en," she said.

"At ten o'clock at night," said Draco. "I don't imagine it's a very long interview."

​

The Remembrance Society met every evening except Saturday in a disused chapel at the top of Carkitt Market, which was why Theo Nott was kneeling in its porch at half past eight on Saturday night, on a silk handkerchief he had spread out first for the purpose, in the green velvet waistcoat he considered appropriate for burglary, with a silver stylus in his hand and a small bead of sweat running down the back of his neck. Across London, at roughly the same moment, Aldric Fawley was sitting down to dinner in Belgravia.

The wards on the chapel door were good. They were very good. They were layered like pastry, charm on charm on charm, and some of them were so old that the magic in them had started to go soft and strange, like fruit left too long in a bowl. He had been working on them for half an hour. He thought he might need another.

"Come on, darling," he murmured to the lock, coaxing a thread of silver out of the third layer with the tip of the stylus. "Don't be like that. I've been so patient with you."

"Theo," said Luna.

"Not now."

"Theo, this one's open."

He looked round. Luna was standing about ten feet away, beside a small, narrow side door half hidden behind a buttress. She had her hand on the handle. The door was ajar.

"That door," said Theo, "is warded."

"It was," said Luna. "I think it wanted company." She smiled at him. "Most doors do, if you ask them nicely."

Theo looked at the side door. Then he looked at the thirty minutes of intricate, frankly beautiful work he had done on the main one.

"I was being exquisite," he said, to nobody in particular. Then he put his stylus away, with enormous dignity, and followed her in.

♫ Listen along

The chapel was cold and dark and smelt of candle-wax. When Theo lit his wand, very low, the first thing he saw was the faces.

They were everywhere. Photographs, like the ones Draco had described in Grieve's office, framed and hung in rows all the way round the walls, on the pillars, along the backs of the pews. Hundreds of the dead, smiling and waving and turning away from the camera, each with a name on a small card tucked into the corner of the frame. Somebody had placed small candles beneath many of them. Some of the candles were still warm.

In the middle of the nave, where the pews had been pushed back, stood a circle of about thirty chairs. In front of the altar was a lectern. On the lectern was a large leather-bound book.

Theo went to it. It was a membership roll: names, addresses, the dates people had joined, and beside every name, in a different column, a second name. It took him a moment to understand. Then he did, and something in his chest went tight.

It was the name of the person they had lost.

Hundreds of them. He turned the pages slowly. And then he stopped, because beside twelve of the names, in fresh ink, somebody had written the same words:

Owen Pritchard was one of them.

"All Hallows," Theo murmured. "Hallowe'en."

"Samhain," said Luna, from somewhere behind him in the dark. She said it the old way, sow-in. "When the doors are open."

There was a tin box on a shelf under the lectern. Theo opened it carefully. Inside were letters, dozens of them, on the same heavy cream parchment as the Restitution letters, each one addressed to a member of the Society by hand. Every one was sealed with a small circle of red wax stamped with a poppy.

"Poppies," said Theo. "Of course. It's a remembrance society. Everyone uses poppies."

He heard the thinness in his own voice as he said it. He took the top letter from the box and slipped it into his waistcoat pocket, unopened, before he could think better of it. Then he drew his wand, touched it to the roll with a small flourish he couldn't quite help, and whispered "Geminio," and a second copy of the heavy book slid out from beneath the first. He was reaching for it when Luna's hand closed on his wrist.

"Someone's coming," she whispered.

He heard it too, then: a key turning in the lock of the main door, and behind it, layer after layer, the soft, sliding click of the wards folding themselves back to let it through. The door he'd been working on for thirty minutes, opening for somebody else in about three seconds.

They got behind the curtain of the vestry with about a second to spare. It was very small in there, and very dark, and it smelt of mothballs and old hymnbooks, and Luna was pressed so close against him that he could feel her breathing.

He could also feel something wriggling in the canvas bag on her shoulder.

"Luna," he breathed. "Is that —"

"Bolorma. She didn't want to be left behind."

"Luna, I am wearing velvet —"

From inside the bag came a very small sound, like a kettle about to think about boiling.

Luna began, very softly, to hum. It was a strange, low, wandering tune that Theo didn't know. The kettle noise faltered, then stopped.

Through the gap between the curtain and the vestry wall, Theo watched a woman come slowly up the nave. She was old and small and bent, in a shabby coat and a knitted hat, and she walked with a stick. She went to one of the photographs on the wall near the altar, a young man in a Magical Law Enforcement uniform, laughing, and she lit the candle beneath it. Then she stood there with her hand resting on the frame.

"Not long now, love," she said. Her voice carried in the empty chapel. It was gentle and tired and absolutely certain. "Not long now. He's promised. All Hallows, he says. All Hallows, and you'll come home." She touched the glass. "I've kept your room nice."

She stood there a long time. Then she blew out the candle, turned, and went slowly back down the nave the way she had come. The door closed behind her. The key turned in the lock.

Theo realised that he had been holding his breath. Beside him, Luna had gone on breathing quite normally the whole time.

"Thomas Crisp," said Luna quietly, in the dark. "It was on his card." She was quiet a moment. "She's going to be so disappointed."

"You don't know that."

"I do, though." Luna's voice was very calm. "Immy doesn't want to come back. I shouldn't think any of them do. My mother wouldn't. She'd be terribly cross with me if I tried. She'd say she was in the middle of something."

Theo talked a great deal; everybody knew that. He could talk for an hour about wards, or waistcoats, or precisely why the sign on his shop door said NO POTTERS, and never once say anything that mattered. So it came as a surprise to him, in the vestry, to find that he was saying something that mattered, and that he couldn't seem to stop. He had started, he realised, turning one of his rings round and round on his finger.

"Mine used to teach me the tree alphabet," he said. "Ogham. Before I could read English. She was half Welsh, on her mother's side. She used to say the trees had been writing things down for a thousand years before anybody bothered to learn to read them." He could feel Luna listening. "She played the piano. Badly. She couldn't keep time. She grew peonies, and she talked to them, and my father used to shout at her for it." He stopped. "They wouldn't have her photograph up in a place like this. She married a Death Eater. That makes her the wrong kind of dead."

"I've got a ceiling," said Luna.

Theo turned his head in the dark. "A what?"

"A ceiling. In my bedroom. At home. I paint the people I love on it." He heard her smile. "There's room. She could go on it, if you liked. If you told me more about her. I could write her name in the tree alphabet, and she could play the piano badly, and nobody would shout at her about the peonies."

Theo Nott, who had not cried since he was seven years old, stood in the dark of a vestry that smelt of mothballs, with a Mongolian creature of unknown species wriggling against his hip and Luna Lovegood breathing quietly beside him, and had to swallow, twice, before he could trust his voice.

"I'd like that," he said at last.

"Good," said Luna. "Now let's go, before Bolorma eats the hymnbooks."

​

"Every one of them," said Blaise, lounging against the mantelpiece in his mother's drawing room in Belgravia on Saturday evening with a glass of something amber in his hand, "went to the Remembrance Society's summer conference in Somerset."

He said it low. Without anybody quite deciding to, Harry, Ginny, Hermione and Draco had drawn in round the mantelpiece to hear him, heads together, in a tight, furtive huddle, like schoolchildren plotting behind the bike sheds. Ron and Pansy had got no further than the doorway, where they were standing as far apart as the doorframe allowed.

And there was a witch Harry had never seen before sitting on the sofa.

She was very pretty, in black silk robes, and was listening to all of this with mild, polite interest, as though she had come for dinner and found herself at a Ministry briefing.

Harry looked at her, and then at Blaise.

"A conference?" said Harry.

"A dreadful conference. At some country house near Wells, the last weekend of July. Three days of lectures on the reconciliation process and the healing power of restitution, with, I'm told, a vegetarian buffet." Blaise shuddered. "This week I have been to three parties, five dinners, a christening and the opening of an exhibition of paintings that were entirely beige, and I can tell you that everyone who went to that conference has gone boring since. Octavia Mallory used to be the life and soul of the Ministry Christmas party. Now she talks about sustainable cauldron-bottom recycling."

Harry looked at the witch again. She smiled at him, and he smiled back, because it seemed rude not to.

The smile lasted precisely as far as Blaise.

Blaise took a sip of his drink. "Every one of your twelve was on the guest list. And each of them, at some point that weekend, went for a walk after dark, and came back very late, and very quiet."

"Somerset again," said Draco, at Harry's shoulder.

Harry thought about a churchyard on the Levels, and an empty grave.

Then he thought about the sofa.

"Blaise," he said, in what he hoped was an undertone, "who is she?"

"Lucinda."

"I know her name. You introduced us. Why is she here?"

"Dinner."

"Blaise."

"There are nine of us, Potter."

"So?"

"Nine is an odd number."

"I know what nine is."

"Then you'll appreciate the difficulty."

"Couples, Potter," said Draco, without looking round. "You were there."

"You've just discussed twelve compromised Ministry officials in front of her," hissed Harry.

Blaise glanced towards the sofa for the first time. "Lucinda, darling, have you been listening?"

"Not particularly," said Lucinda. "Something about Somerset?"

"See?" said Blaise.

Harry turned helplessly towards Hermione, who was close enough that he nearly trod on her foot.

"I'll deal with it," she said.

For reasons Harry could not immediately explain, this was considerably less reassuring.

On the sofa, Lucinda had gone back to examining her nails.

The drawing room door opened, and Blaise's mother came in.

Harry had heard about Mrs Zabini for years, mostly in the context of her husbands, and had assumed that the stories were exaggerated. He now saw that, if anything, they had been understated. She was tall and dark and ageless, in a long gold silk dress, with gold rings on her fingers and a pair of eyes that went round the room once, very slowly, and took inventory of absolutely everything in it. Harry felt himself being assessed, weighed and filed.

Her gaze passed over the sofa without slowing. "Lucinda," she said. "Again."

Lucinda wiggled her fingers at her.

Then Mrs Zabini crossed the room to the fireplace, and the huddle broke apart guiltily in front of her.

"Mr Potter," said Mrs Zabini. Her voice was low and warm, with an accent he couldn't place. "My son tells me that you are a good man." She held out her hand. "I have married several good men. None of them lasted."

"Just as well I'm married, then," said Harry, and shook it.

"Draco, darling." She kissed Draco on both cheeks, and he kissed her hand with an elegance Harry had never once seen him use at the Ministry. Then she held him at arm's length and looked him over, frowning. "You've got thin. Blaise, he's got thin." She let him go with a little push towards the dining room. "Somebody feed him."

Then her eyes moved past him to Hermione, and stopped. "And you have brought Miss Granger," said Mrs Zabini. Harry watched her do a great many sums very quickly. "Draco has never once brought a guest to my table."

"Well," said Draco, "it was only a matter of time."

There was a small silence. Mrs Zabini looked at Hermione. Then at Draco.

"Was it?" she said.

Draco frowned, apparently unable to see what was interesting about this. Beside him, Hermione found something absorbing on the floor. Mrs Zabini smiled and patted his cheek. Then she turned to Ginny with a gleam of genuine appreciation. "And you are the Chaser. I saw you play Puddlemere in May. You broke their Keeper's nose."

"It was an accident," said Ginny. "Mostly."

"It was magnificent," said Mrs Zabini. At last she turned to the remaining two guests, who were still standing near the door as though proximity to the exit might yet prove useful. "And who have you brought with you, Pansy, darling?"

♫ Listen along

Pansy Parkinson was wearing midnight-blue silk. Ron Weasley was wearing Blaise's second-best dress robes. They were a stiff, shiny brocade the colour of English mustard, with a ruff, and a small repeating pattern of embroidered pheasants, and they were four inches too long in the leg and three inches too narrow in the shoulder.

Ron had stood in front of the hall mirror at Grimmauld Place for one long, silent minute before they left. Then he had said, with great dignity, "These are the second-worst dress robes I have ever worn in my life," and nobody had asked him about the worst. Harry and Hermione had both been at the Yule Ball. Harry still occasionally dreamt about the lace.

"My date," said Pansy, through her teeth.

"Her date," said Ron, through his.

Mrs Zabini looked from one to the other of them for a long, thoughtful moment. Then she looked round the whole room, at every couple in it, one by one. Then she smiled, very slowly, like a spider who has felt every thread of her web twitch at once.

"How lovely," she said.

​

Aldric Fawley arrived at eight o'clock precisely.

He was very tall and very old, with a great beak of a nose and thick white hair swept straight back from his forehead, and he held himself as upright as a man half his age. He bowed over Mrs Zabini's hand. He greeted Blaise civilly. He was introduced to Harry and to Draco and to the rest of them, and to each of them he said something perfectly pleasant, and perfectly ordinary, and perfectly forgettable. He held his glass in his left hand.

Under the table, Ginny kicked Harry in the ankle. Hard.

He glanced at her. She wasn't looking at him. She was looking at Fawley, and all the colour had gone out of her face.

"That's not him," she breathed, so quietly he barely heard it. "Harry. I don't know how I know. But that's not him."

He found her hand under the tablecloth, and held it. It was cold.

Dinner was long and slow and lavish. Fawley ate almost nothing but the lamb.

Lucinda Vale, who was something in hats, was having a wonderful evening. This was largely because, every time the conversation strayed anywhere near the incriminating, Hermione made a tiny movement beneath the tablecloth and Lucinda's expression became pleasantly vague.

Mrs Zabini was a dazzling hostess. She talked to everyone and laughed at everything, and at intervals she turned to Fawley with a gleam in her eye.

"Aldric, darling," she said, over the soup. "Do you remember the bouillabaisse at the French Ambassador's?"

Fawley said that he did, and smiled pleasantly.

Lucinda blinked. "Beautiful weather we've been having," she said.

"Yes," said Hermione quickly. "Lovely."

Harry looked at her. Hermione went on eating.

Over the lamb, Mrs Zabini tried again. "Aldric, you always hated lamb. You said it gave you indigestion."

"Did I?" said Fawley, and smiled blandly, and Mrs Zabini's gleam grew very slightly brighter.

Lucinda brightened too. "I've always thought peonies were terribly underrated."

"Quite," said Draco, without missing a beat.

Blaise looked at Hermione. Hermione took a sip of wine.

"And she had the nerve," Ron muttered to his plate, "to tell me off about the driving examiner."

At last the plates were cleared, and a house-elf in a spotless white pinafore brought in a silver tray with a great silver teapot and a set of delicate porcelain cups.

Blaise stood up to pour. In the Zabini household, this was apparently a sacrament.

Harry watched him closely. The plan was very simple. George had supplied a single pot of Tattle-Teaʷ. Blaise had decanted it into his mother's best silver teapot and had a second, identical teapot of ordinary tea for everybody else. Fawley's cup was the one with a small gold chip on the rim of the saucer. Blaise would pour from the right teapot into the right cup and hand it to Fawley, and Fawley would drink it, and then they would all find out exactly who and what they were dealing with.

Blaise poured. He handed round the cups. He set the cup with the chipped saucer down at Fawley's elbow with a flourish.

And the house-elf, whose name was Pippa and who had been with the Zabinis for sixty years and had never once in all that time allowed a chipped saucer to be placed in front of a guest, whisked it away with an apologetic squeak, replaced it with a perfect one, and set the chipped one down in front of the nearest person who wasn't a guest, but a date.

Ron picked up the cup and drank.

"Ron —" said Harry.

It was too late. Ron put the cup down. He blinked. He looked round the table at all of them in dawning, absolute horror. His mouth opened entirely without his permission.

"I read Mandragora," said Ron Weasley. "Every week. Every single week. I've got a scrapbook. I've got them all. I've got every column she's ever written, cut out and stuck in with Spellotape, going back to 2001." He clapped both hands over his mouth, far too late. "Even the one about me," he said, muffled, through his fingers.

There was a silence of the kind that happens very rarely in a lifetime and is remembered, quoted and weaponised at family gatherings for decades.

Pansy Parkinson, who had just taken a mouthful of wine, choked on it so violently that Blaise had to thump her on the back.

Ginny made a strangled noise, turning a very peculiar shade of purple.

Draco, to his considerable credit as a trained Auror, managed not to laugh. He merely bit down on his lower lip hard enough to draw blood and refused to make eye contact with anyone.

Next to him, Hermione put her face in her hands and made a small, high noise of pure relief. She had known about the scrapbook since 2004. Ron had made her swear on Crookshanks's life never to tell a living soul, and it had been four very long years.

Harry looked at Ron.

The horror lasted perhaps two seconds.

Then, very slowly, Ron's oldest and most loyal friend began to grin. He had just been handed enough blackmail material to see him comfortably through retirement.

Across the table, Aldric Fawley looked round at all of them with polite, bland puzzlement. And then, because he was a guest in the house, and because nobody had yet thought to stop him, and because it was simply the done thing, he picked up the fresh cup the elf had poured him in the middle of all that — from the nearest teapot, which happened to be the right one — and drank.

♫ Listen along

He put it down.

His face changed. The features stayed exactly as they were, the great nose and the swept-back hair and the fierce old eyes, but the expression behind them slid, and for a moment Harry saw something else looking out through them — someone gentler, and sadder, and very much afraid.

"My name is Owen Pritchard," said Aldric Fawley's mouth, in a soft Welsh voice that wasn't Aldric Fawley's at all. "And this is not my body."

For a single second the only thing moving at the table was the steam off the teapot.

Lucinda looked up from her teacup. "Did somebody mention peonies?"

Hermione flicked her wand beneath the table.

"No," said everyone at once.

Then the old man was on his feet, faster than any hundred-and-six-year-old had any business moving, knocking his chair over backwards, and there was a wand in his left hand — and Harry was already moving too, and so was Draco, but neither of them was fast enough.

Mrs Zabini didn't stand up. She didn't even put down her teacup. She simply lifted one ringed pinkie finger from its handle, the way you might lift a finger to call a waiter, and a rope of shimmering silver light leapt from the tip of it across the table and wrapped itself three times round the old man from shoulder to knee. He toppled back into his chair with a thud. His wand fell out of his hand and rolled across the tablecloth into the butter.

"Nobody leaves my table," said Mrs Zabini, "before pudding."

Harry stared at her. So did everyone else. Harry had seen Aurors with twenty years' experience who couldn't cast a Binding Charm that fast, or that silently, or that well.

"Mother," said Blaise faintly, "where did you learn that?"

"Your third stepfather, darling. He was a very jealous man." Mrs Zabini took a sip of her tea and looked at the bound figure in the chair with interest. "You might have told me he wasn't Aldric, Blaise. I would have been so much less offended by the letter."

​

By the time Pippa had put Lucinda Vale to bed in the blue guest room, with a hot-water bottle and the firm conviction that she'd had a lovely evening, the old man still hadn't stirred. He had struck his head on the back of the chair when he fell.

Ron hadn't moved either. He was sitting exactly where he had been when it all began, with both hands still clamped over his mouth. George's tea had most of an hour left to run, and he wasn't taking any chances.

Mrs Zabini looked down the length of her table, at the wand in the butter and the bound man slumped at the end of it, and sighed. "I do apologise," she said. "It's usually such a pleasant room."

"It's the nicest room I've ever been in," said Ron, through his fingers, and shut his eyes.

"Thank you, Mr Weasley," said Mrs Zabini graciously.

Harry, who had been waiting since he was eleven for an evening like this, leaned back in his chair. "Anything else, Ron?"

"I never read Hogwarts: A History," said Ron, muffled but perfectly distinct. "Not even the bits Hermione made me read out loud. I just said the words and thought about Quidditch."

Hermione had gone round the table to look at the old man, and was feeling gently for the lump on the back of his head. She straightened up and pointed at Ron across the table.

"I knew it," she said.

Ron opened his mouth again, and the whole table leaned in.

"And I think Mandragora's the funniest person in Britain," he said, and put his head down on the tablecloth.

Across the table, Pansy Parkinson reached for her wine, thought better of it, and set the glass very carefully back down.

Hermione bent over the old man again, touched the tip of her wand to his temple and murmured, "Rennervate." His eyes flew open. For a moment he stared wildly round the table at all of them, then down at the silver ropes wound round his chest, and strained against them. Then all the fight seemed to go out of him at once. He sagged back in the chair and closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, he began to talk.

His name was Owen Pritchard. He was sixty-eight years old. He had been a clerk at Gringotts all his working life, in the department that handled Muggle currency exchange, and in March 1998 his only son, Gareth, nineteen years old and newly qualified as a Healer, had died holding the door of a Muggle-born family's house in Abergavenny against three Death Eaters while the family escaped out the back.

He told them all this in the soft Welsh voice that came so strangely out of Aldric Fawley's mouth, sitting bound in the chair at the end of Mrs Zabini's dining table with a glass of water that Ginny held for him because his hands were tied. He didn't try to lie. The Tattle-Teaʷ was still working, Harry thought, but that wasn't all of it. It was as if he had been carrying something very heavy for a very long time, and was almost glad to put it down.

"Where's Aldric Fawley?" Harry said.

"Asleep," said Pritchard. "In my body. Somewhere safe. They're all asleep. It's kinder." He looked round the table at them with Fawley's fierce old eyes, which were filling with tears. "It's only till All Hallows. That's all. Then they'll wake up, and we'll go back, and everything will be as it was." A tear ran down the old man's cheek. "Only better."

"Better how?" said Hermione.

"He's going to bring them back," said Pritchard. His voice shook with something that sounded, horribly, like joy. "All of them. All the ones we lost. My Gareth." He turned his head, and his eyes found Ron, sitting there at the table in his ridiculous borrowed robes with his face gone white. "Your brother. You're a Weasley, aren't you? Your brother Fred. He'd bring back your brother."

Ron didn't move. Harry saw his hand close slowly round the edge of the table.

"I'd want him back," said Ron. It came out of him quite quietly, and this time he didn't put his hand over his mouth. "Every day. I'd want him back every single day."

Beside the old man, the glass of water in Ginny's hand had begun, very slightly, to shake.

"I know, bach," said Owen Pritchard gently, out of Aldric Fawley's face. "I know you would."

"Who?" said Harry. "Who's going to bring them back, Mr Pritchard? Who is he?"

Pritchard opened his mouth to answer.

Frost came out of it.

It came like breath on a winter morning, a thin white vapour, and it settled on his lips and crept across them in fine white feathers, sealing them shut, stitching them together like thread. The old man's eyes went wide with terror. He made a muffled sound behind the frost. His whole body strained against the silver ropes.

"Stop!" Hermione was on her feet. "Stop asking him! Harry, stop, don't ask him —"

"I've stopped! I've stopped —"

Slowly, very slowly, the frost on Pritchard's lips began to fade. He sagged in the chair, gasping, shaking all over.

"It's part of the Rite," Hermione said. She was breathing hard. "It must be. Some kind of seal. They can't say who. They physically can't."

"The Rite," said Harry.

Draco got up without a word. He crossed to the fireplace, took a long black iron poker from the stand beside the hearth, and came back round the table. He looked at Pritchard for a moment, and for once there was nothing clever in his face at all.

"I'm sorry," Draco said. "This will hurt."

He touched the tip of the poker, very lightly, to the back of the old man's left hand.

There was a hiss, like water on a hot pan. Pritchard cried out. When Draco lifted the poker away, there was a raw red weal across the old man's pale skin, in the exact shape of the iron tip.

"The borrowed soul cannot abide cold iron," said Draco quietly, and put the poker back.

"So we could just have handed him a poker," said Ron. His voice was hoarse. "Instead of all that. We could have just handed him a poker."

"Last night it was one line in a very old book," said Hermione. "Now it's a test."

Harry looked at the burn on the old man's hand, and at the old man's face, and at Fawley's fierce eyes with Owen Pritchard's grief swimming in them.

"Changelings," said Draco.

"The Changeling Rite," said Hermione.

​

They left Owen Pritchard in the Zabinis' cellar.

"It's very comfortable," said Mrs Zabini. "There's a bed, and a bathroom, and a wine rack. Blaise, darling, tell everyone that poor Aldric has gone to my villa on Lake Como to nurse his broken heart. They'll believe it. Everyone always does."

"Mother's cellar," Blaise told Harry quietly at the door, "is where husbands go to —"

"Blaise."

"— to rest, Mother, I was going to say rest —"

​

It was past one in the morning when they got back to Grimmauld Place. Theo and Luna were there already, with a copy of the Society's roll spread across the kitchen table and Bolorma asleep in the bread bin. And Percy was still in the kitchen.

He had been there, Kreacher reported with enormous disapproval, all evening. He had reorganised Exhibits A, B and C twice, created an Exhibit D, and made four pots of tea without once being offered any. The thin folder was still tucked under his arm.

He listened to all of it in silence: the hedge, the frost on the lawn, the Society and the roll and the poppy seals, the dinner, Owen Pritchard. When they got to the Tattle-Teaʷ, Harry said, "Ron, d'you want to do this bit?" Ron went scarlet and hurried the story along, and Percy's eyebrows went up very slightly and stayed there.

Theo let them get all the way to the end. Then he reached into his waistcoat pocket and laid a letter on the table, in the lamplight, between the teapot and the roll.

"I took one from the box," he said. "I haven't opened it." He nudged it with one finger until it sat square to the edge of the table. "It seemed rude, somehow, under the circumstances."

It was heavy cream parchment, sealed with a small red poppy and addressed by hand in brown ink: Mrs M. Crisp, Ottery St Catchpole. Harry hadn't been in that chapel, but he could see her all the same from Theo and Luna's telling: a small bent woman in a knitted hat, lighting a candle under a photograph. I've kept your room nice.

Ginny leaned across the table to look at it, and went still.

"I know that hand," she said.

Everybody looked at her. Across the table, Ron had gone very quiet, and so had Percy.

"Mum's got a drawer full of them." Ginny didn't take her eyes off the envelope. "One every second of May, on that paper, in that hand. She keeps them with Fred's things." She swallowed. "She says they're the only post she gets that day that doesn't make it worse."

Harry thought of a small red enamel poppy on a grey cardigan, six weeks too early for poppies. He had never once seen Grieve without it.

"It puts him in the chapel," said Hermione at last, "and that's as far as it goes."

"Not yet," said Draco.

Hermione took a breath. "And if somebody has been using the Changeling Rite," she said, in a very careful voice, "then it would have had to come out of —"

She stopped. Her jaw worked.

"— and the leaves really are turning very early this year, aren't they?" she said, in a tone of deep despair, and put her face in her hands.

"Out of the sealed archive in the Department of Mysteries," said Percy calmly. "Yes. I assumed that's what you were trying to say." He pulled Exhibit D towards him. "Every access to a sealed folio in the Department of Mysteries has had to be reported to the Wizengamot for oversight since 1953, following an unfortunate incident with a Time-Turner and a Minister's mother-in-law. The Department sends the report to the Wizengamot. The Wizengamot sends it to me. I file it." He flicked through the box without looking and drew out a single sheet. "I've been filing them for six years. Nobody has ever once asked to see one."

He laid the sheet on the table.

SEALED ARCHIVE — ACCESS REPORT, it said. 19 August 2008. Folios withdrawn: 14, 22. Authority: Minister for Magic (seal affixed). Collected by: L. Stroud, Private Secretary to the Minister.

"Lionel Stroud," said Harry slowly. "He's one of the twelve."

"The first of the twelve," said Percy. "His tea order changed on the eleventh of August. Eight days before he collected these."

"And what are they?" said Draco. "Folios fourteen and twenty-two."

Everyone looked at Hermione. Hermione worked her jaw, trying very hard to find the right words.

"The titles of all sealed folios are listed in the Wizengamot's public index," said Percy. "It's a matter of public record. Anyone can read it. Nobody ever does." He took a second sheet from the box and read aloud from it, in his clear, precise, faintly nasal voice. "Folio Fourteen: On the Changeling Rite, being the Exchange of Souls between Living Vessels. Folio Twenty-Two: On the Veil, its Provenance, and the Door to Annwn."

Hermione blinked at him. She had spent years talking about the weather.

"Hang on," said Ron. "If Stroud was changed on the eleventh, and they didn't take the Rite out till the nineteenth —"

"— then they already knew how to do it," said Hermione quietly. She turned her head. "They took the folio out so that nobody else could read it, Ron. So nobody could find out how to undo it." She pressed her fingers to her temples. "And they took the other one so that nobody could find out where they're going."

"Stroud used the Minister's seal," said Harry. "The changed Stroud. He had access, he was changed, he took the seal. That's how they got in."

"That," said Percy, "is the charitable interpretation."

Ron, who had been working steadily through a plate of Kreacher's biscuits, stopped chewing.

Percy looked down at the thin folder under his arm. He looked at it for a long time. Then, very slowly, as though it cost him something to do it, he took it out and laid it on the table in front of him, and opened it.

It held a single sheet of parchment. It was a page from a large, leather-bound appointments diary, copied in Percy's neat hand. It covered one week in early September. Every day of that week was packed with appointments, meetings, audiences and receptions, crammed into every margin and running over onto the backs of pages: every day except one.

The third of September was completely blank.

"The Minister's diary," said Percy. "I keep a copy for the Wizengamot's scheduling office. It has not had a single blank day in it since the tenth of May 1998. Not one. Not even the day his mother died. He spent that afternoon chairing a sub-committee on goblin wages. He said she'd have wanted him to." Percy's voice was perfectly level, but his hands on the table were not quite still. "On the third of September, he wasn't there. Nobody knows where he was. Nobody was told. And on the fourth of September he came back to work, and on the fifth he put the Restitution Act down for its final reading to the Wizengamot."

Percy let that sit for a moment, the way he might have let a point of order sit in the Wizengamot.

"And on the fourth," said Percy, "the Minister's refreshment order changed. For fifteen years, it's been black coffee, no sugar, thrice a day. Since the fourth of September, it's been tea. Milk, two sugars."

He closed the folder.

"He hates tea," said Percy Weasley, and for the first time that night his voice cracked. "He told me so. At my wedding."

Harry sat at the kitchen table in Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, with the lamps burning low and Ginny's cold hand in his and Draco's eyes on his face, and thought of a crowded Atrium, and a long, blank, considering look, and a man he'd known since he was fifteen years old walking past him as if he were a stranger.

He thought of a small gold hoop in Kingsley Shacklebolt's left ear, and a slow, deep laugh over a very late drink after a very bad day.

It was my grandmother's, Kingsley had said. I'll take it out when I'm dead.

​

♫ Listen along