Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes

Stubborn Floo PowderW

Keeps your fire open for ten minutes* after the Ministry has ordered it shut.

Add a fistful every thirty seconds. It will try to go out. Don't let it.

*ish

label on a paper bag, in George Weasley's handwriting

♫ Listen along

Pansy Parkinson had been sitting on a bench by the last fireplace in the Atrium for twenty-six minutes, with a copy of Witch Weekly open on her knee, and in that time she had spotted two affairs, a junior Wizengamot clerk in a wig that wasn't fooling anyone, and an Auror with his robes buttoned wrong who had quite clearly not been home last night, and whom nobody had had the heart to tell. Ron Weasley, beside her, had eaten four sandwiches.

"You brought a packed lunch," she said, without looking up, "to a felony."

"Last time I broke in here, I missed dinner." He held out the last one. It was egg. She looked at it until he put it away again.

Ron read Witch Weekly over her shoulder instead. "Is that this week's? What's Mandragora say?"

"Nothing you'd like," said Pansy, and tilted it out of his reach.

In the end Ron ate it himself, one small bite at a time, to make it last. Somewhere under their feet, the others would be at the door by now. Neither of them looked at the lifts. Pansy was not looking at them so hard that her neck had begun to ache.

Then the alarm went off. It came up through the floor before it came through the air: a deep, sick wail out of the stone somewhere far below, and every head in the Atrium turned towards the lifts. Ron stopped chewing. Pansy turned a page.

Inside two minutes there were Aurors everywhere. They came out of the lifts and the corridors in twos and threes, wands already drawn, and spread out across the golden floor between the lifts and the fireplaces in a wide half-circle, every one of them facing the doors. Not one of them looked behind them at the two people sitting on a bench at the end. Pansy had spent the years since the war making sure that nobody in the Ministry ever looked at her twice. It was nice to see it paying off.

Then the Minister came. He walked out of the crowd as though it had been waiting for him, took his place at the centre of the half-circle, and stood looking at the doors of Lift Four with his hands clasped behind his back, like a man with all the time in the world.

"He knows which lift," said Ron, very quietly.

"Of course he knows which lift. Eat your sandwich."

Ron didn't. His other hand had gone into his jacket pocket and stayed there, closed round something that rustled, and clinked when he moved.

"If that's another sandwich," said Pansy, "I'm leaving you for the Auror with the buttons."

"It's insurance," said Ron, and kept his hand exactly where it was.

At the far end of the security desk, Lee Jordan thanked the press officer very much, put his recorder in his pocket, and strolled off down the length of the fireplaces towards the exit, whistling. He didn't so much as glance at the bench on his way past.

"That's our minute," said Ron. "Needle's moving."

Without turning round, the Minister lifted one hand. "Seal the Floo," he said.

At the far end of the row, the first fireplace went out. Its emerald flames shrank and sank to an ordinary orange, and then the one beside it did the same, and the one beside that, one after another all the way along the wall, coming towards them like a row of candles being snuffed. Pansy put down Witch Weekly, took the paper bag off the bench beside her and stepped up to the grate with a fistful ready, like a woman about to feed some ducks she had never liked.

The fire next to theirs died. Then theirs began to go. The green drained out of it from the bottom up, and Pansy flung the powder in with everything she had, and the flames gave a great affronted hiss, shrank to almost nothing, and then, sullenly, came back green.

"Send the spark," said Pansy.

"Not yet." He had another fistful ready. "Send it now and all those Aurors turn round to see who's still got a fire. We wait till they've got something better to look at."

"Like what?"

"Dunno, Parkinson. Somebody'll do something stupid. Somebody always does." He threw. The fire hissed at him. "Usually Harry. Count."

Across the hall, the doors of Lift Four slid open.

​

Gawain Robards had run the Auror Office for twelve years on the principle that most things, left alone, explained themselves.

Dawlish, for instance. Dawlish came in late, with his robes buttoned wrong and a programme from last night's Puddlemere fixture folded in his top pocket, and explained that Lift Four was still out of order and he had waited an age for another one. Robards looked at the programme, and at the buttons, said, "Sit down, Dawlish," and left it alone. Lift Four had been out since Wednesday. He had passed it twice a day since, and it had not made a sound.

It was a Friday, and the office had the loose, pleased feel of a Friday. A Howler had gone off in the post tray before nine and was still smouldering gently in a saucer. The tea trolley was doing its rounds, stopping at every desk but the three by the door, as it had stopped at every desk but those three since September. Nobody had been able to make it go near them. After the first week nobody had tried.

The two desks under the window were empty. Potter's had its stack of counterfeit Sickles, which had been there so long that the office had begun to think of them as his. Malfoy's had its spider plant, which Shafiq was still watering.

"Marriage guidance," said Proudfoot, following his eye. "I give it a month."

The office enjoyed that. Robards went back into his room and shut the door. Mid-morning the trolley came and he had his tea and his digestive and read the Prophet, in which nothing whatsoever had happened.

In five years, neither of them had ever taken a Friday.

​

Most things, left alone, explained themselves.

By a quarter to three the lift had not, so he went down and looked at it himself.

He shared Lift Two with a witch from Magical Maintenance and her mop, who told him between the upper fourth floor and the third that it was always the same with Four, that the Ministry didn't care, that her Stan had said as much and he'd been dead six years, and did Robards know this one stopped at every floor whether you wanted it or not. He said that he did.

It took him a minute to work out what was wrong with Lift Four, which was that there was nothing wrong with it. The barriers were up and the signs were hung and the little wizard in the corner of the notice was directing traffic with some energy, and behind the grille the carriage sat where a carriage should, level, quiet and, as far as he could tell without laying a hand on it, in perfect working order.

He laid a hand on it. It was humming, very faintly, like something that had been told to wait and was finding it difficult.

Then he walked the room, which he did most Fridays, the way other men walked a dog.

The Welcome Witch wished him a good weekend. A wizard from Magical Games and Sports fell in beside him for the length of the fireplaces, wanting to know whether he'd seen Puddlemere last night, and Robards said that he hadn't, but that Dawlish had, and the wizard went off to find Dawlish.

At the security desk, Blaise Zabini was leaning on the counter with a visitor's pass clipped to a coat that had cost more than the desk, telling the Restitution Wardens about his mother's fourth husband and a Hungarian Horntail. Robards had interviewed him once, at twelve, after the seventh husband, and had come away an hour later with the distinct impression that he was the one who had been interviewed. He had read the file on Mrs Zabini's husbands, all of it, and could have corrected him on three points, but did not, because both Wardens had their backs to the lifts, and Wardens never did. Further along, Lee Jordan was asking a junior press officer how many of four thousand people had asked what their wands were being weighed for, and writing down the answer, which was a look. Robards had listened to every episode of Potterwatch in 1998 with the volume turned down low and a Muffliato on the kitchen door, and still thought it was the best thing anybody had ever put on the wireless. He had asked the same question himself, the week the Act was passed, and got the same look.

The fireplaces at the far end flared green, and the Head of the Department of Mysteries came across the floor towards him, small and grey and walking as though she meant to confiscate the Atrium, with Hermione Granger at her side. A young wizard with ink on his cuffs ran at them with a sheaf of parchment and was denied, Robards heard, in advance. And behind the two of them, at about the height of a man's shoulder, there was a ripple in the air, as though somebody had folded the light there and not quite smoothed it out.

Robards had spent a year of his life, a long time ago, learning to see those.

He went and stood by the Fountain of Remembrance, which was where he stood when he wanted to see the whole room.

He had got as far as wondering what a man was supposed to do with a Friday like this one when a very large man came in through the visitors' entrance with flour on his sleeve, and stopped, and began to turn slowly round on the spot.

Robards knew him before he had finished turning. Gregory Goyle. Potter's year, Malfoy's dormitory, a two-year suspended sentence, and not one line on file since.

After that it went quickly: the crocodile of first-years, the bang, the purple smoke, and the slab of the Fountain coming forward off its plinth with the names streaming down it, and Goyle underneath it with his feet in the basin before anybody else in the hall had moved. Robards had his wand out, and the slab held before he had finished the spell, which was not his doing.

"Levitation team to the Atrium," he said to the nearest Auror. "Six of you round those children."

Everybody moved towards the Fountain, which was where people moved when something fell. Two people moved the other way.

The Head of the Department of Mysteries and Hermione Granger walked away from the Fountain of Remembrance, through a crowd that was all running towards it, without hurrying and without once looking round. Behind them the crowd parted round a space about the width of two people walking close together, and closed again after it, and nobody who did it noticed. The ripple went with them. They walked to Lift Four, and the barriers let them past, and the doors, which had been out of service since Wednesday, opened exclusively for them. There was a man already inside, in a bottle-green velvet coat, dabbing at his forehead with a silk handkerchief: Theodore Nott, who kept a shop in Knockturn Alley that the Auror Office visited about once a year, politely, and never found anything in.

The doors closed. Above them, the brass needle went down without stopping.

"And nobody," said Robards, to the Auror beside him, "goes near the lifts."

Seamus Finnigan of Magical Maintenance had arrived from nowhere in his overalls and was telling anyone who would stand still, at a volume that reached the ceiling, that he had said this would happen. He looked delighted.

Robards went back up by Lift Two. It stopped at every floor.

​

The alarm came up through the floor while he was still taking his coat off.

A moment later a memo came through the door at head height, red-hot and smoking at the folds, and landed on his desk, where it set fire to the two leave forms. He put them out with his hand. ALL ACTIVE AURORS TO THE ATRIUM, said the memo. BY ORDER OF THE MINISTER FOR MAGIC.

"I told them," said Robards, to the memo, "to leave it alone."

​

It was as though the whole Ministry had turned out to watch.

The Fountain of Remembrance stood propped on a conjured scaffold, still running with water, the names still gleaming, while a Levitation team stood round it deciding whose fault it was. Goyle sat on the edge of the basin, soaked to the skin and wrapped in somebody's blanket, with the first-years in a ring round him and a photographer from the Prophet still going. Blaise was still leaning on the security desk, looking like a man who would happily have paid for an encore.

And every Auror in the building was standing in that half-circle, with every wand in it pointed at Lift Four.

"Auror Potter," said Kingsley Shacklebolt's voice.

Harry stepped out of the lift. The others came out behind him. He heard the Atrium go quiet.

"Unspeakable Granger," said the Minister, and his dark eyes moved over Hermione without warmth. "The door of the inner chamber has recorded your presence at four minutes past three this afternoon, together with the Head of your Department. The Head of your Department was, at four minutes past three this afternoon, under a drier at Coiffure and Charms in Diagon Alley. Your Oath is forfeit. You're dismissed from your post, with immediate effect."

"It isn't forfeit, actually," said Hermione. "Clause one. 'The Unspeakable shall not speak of the work of the Department.' Speak." She lifted her chin. "It says nothing at all about walking in and out of it. Honestly, does nobody read these things?"

Somewhere among the Aurors, somebody laughed and turned it hastily into a cough.

"Minister," said Harry. His throat was very tight. "Where's your earring?"

The Minister's hand went to his left ear.

It was the smallest movement. It was over in half a second. But Harry had known Kingsley Shacklebolt since he was fifteen years old, and he had never once in all that time seen him do anything without meaning to, and he saw the hand move, and he saw it hesitate, and he saw the Minister's face set like stone.

Ginny's hand found his sleeve and closed on it, hard.

The thing in Kingsley's body ignored him. It turned instead to the Aurors ranged across the Atrium behind it, and when it spoke, it spoke in Kingsley's slow, deep, carrying voice: the voice half of them had followed through a war.

"This afternoon," it said, "these people broke the seal on the Death Chamber. Nobody has done that since the You-Know-Who's Death Eaters did it in 1996. You all know what's behind that seal. You all know what could come through it." It let that settle. Then its dark eyes moved, without any hurry at all, to Draco: to his too-short robes and his pale, set face, and the left forearm that every Auror in the building knew had a mark on it. "And I'd ask you to look at who Auror Potter has brought with him. I don't know what Mr Malfoy has promised him, or what's been done to him. But that is not the Harry Potter any of us fought beside."

Harry watched it land. He saw it go across the faces behind the Minister one by one, like wind across a field. Hesitation. Proudfoot, who had organised the collection for the spattergroit card, looked at Draco, and then at the floor. Somebody near the back moved their wand from one hand to the other and back again. These were people who had called Draco Mrs Potter for three years and signed his card without a second thought, and not one of them, Harry knew, had ever asked him to the pub after work. They liked him well enough. They had just never quite decided whether to trust him.

And now the Minister for Magic was standing in front of them, deciding it for them.

One by one, they fell into line.

"Funny," said Harry. "I was just about to say the same thing about you."

"Take them," said the thing in Kingsley's body.

Fifty wands came up.

​

Afterwards, Harry could only ever remember it in pieces.

The first spell came straight from the Minister's wand at his chest: a Stunner so powerful it would have put an Erumpent to sleep. His Shield Charm caught it, just, and the force of it shoved him two feet backwards across the golden floor, and he thought, with a strange, calm clarity: He's strong. But he doesn't fight like Kingsley.

The real Kingsley fought the way he talked, slow and even, and the spell that finished it was never the one you had been watching. This thing fought like somebody who had been handed a sledgehammer and told to hit things with it. Every spell was huge, and every spell was obvious. Harry could see the next one coming a full second before it came. He simply didn't dare hit back. The body in front of him was Kingsley's, and he had no idea what he'd be hurting if he did.

At the edge of the half-circle, Gawain Robards raised his wand at the Minister's order and cast a Stunning Spell that went nowhere near anybody at all. It shot straight up into the gilded ceiling and blew a hole in it the size of a cartwheel, and gold leaf came showering down over everyone like confetti.

"Sorry, Minister," Robards shouted. "Old wrist."

That was when Harry understood that most of the Auror Office was not trying very hard to hit him. Williamson was Stunning the wall as though it had personally insulted him. Two Aurors had become extremely busy evacuating a party of visiting goblins who did not need evacuating, and were saying so, loudly. Dawlish reached for his wand, drew a folded Quidditch programme instead, looked at it, and started going through his pockets. He had a great many pockets. Somebody tripped over nothing at all, twice.

But three of them meant it. They were the three from the desks by the door, the ones the tea trolley wouldn't go near, and their curses came out the colour of a bruise and were aimed to finish things. All three had the same flat, faraway look he had last seen across Mrs Zabini's dinner table, on Aldric Fawley's face, as though they were listening to something a very long way off.

Then Hermione, with her Unspeakable's badge still pinned to her chest, lifted her wand.

Out of the pigeonholes along the Atrium walls, out of the lift shafts, out of every office on every floor above them, came the memos. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Violet paper aeroplanes poured down into the Atrium in a great roaring, flapping storm, round and round the Aurors' heads, until nobody on either side could see a thing.

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Through it, at the far end of the hall, a single green spark went up. A moment later, from the end of the row of fireplaces, came Ron's signal: Ka-caw! Ka-caaaaaw!, each one higher than the last, and then, as though he'd been carried away by the acoustics, a long, soaring, yodelling Riiiii-cooo-laaaaaaaaa! that rang off every golden surface in the Atrium.

Nobody needed telling. Under cover of the paper, they ran for it.

♫ Listen along

They got perhaps a third of the way. Then a curse came out of the storm straight at Hermione, one she didn't see, and Draco stepped in front of it.

The shield he threw up was one Harry had never seen him use: black and smoky, edged with a sullen red, nothing like the clean silver of an ordinary Shield Charm, and instead of turning the curse aside it swallowed it whole. Harry had seen spells like it before, in the Auror training manuals, in the chapter headed Restricted. Draco held it there, wand arm steady, and said to no one in particular:

"There goes my spotless record."

Hermione stared at him.

"Move," said Draco, not looking round.

She moved. She stepped out from behind the black shield with her chin up, and the pencil shot out of her hair and went skittering away across the golden floor. Her hair tumbled down over her shoulders, crackling like the air before lightning. She conducted the paper storm with her left hand and Stunned Aurors with her right: five of them, one after another, each exactly between the eyes, in about the time it took Harry to draw breath. The sixth got his curse off first. She went under it, flat and fast, like somebody who had dodged curses in this building before, and Stunned him on the way back up. Draco watched her do it over his shoulder for perhaps half a second longer than was strictly safe.

Ginny ran backwards across the Atrium, shot the wand out of a man's hand without breaking stride, caught it and lobbed it into the Fountain, all in one movement, like a Chaser who had never once in her life dropped a pass. A curse came at her head. She dropped under it into a long low slide, one knee down, the other leg out straight, one hand flat on the marble, and Stunned the man who had cast it from somewhere about the level of his knees. Then she came up out of it onto her feet like somebody stepping off a bus. One of the three went down on his knees with a cloud of bats pouring out of his nose, and Harry knew without looking whose hex that was.

Luna was perfectly gentle with every Auror who was only going through the motions, and saved all her imagination for the three who weren't; one of them discovered that his boots had become two very small and extremely bad-tempered hedgehogs. At one point she borrowed a corner of Hermione's storm and taught it to hunt, and a whole flock of memos went after an Auror like starlings mobbing a hawk.

Theo had come out of Lift Four rolling up his sleeves, with his wand already between his fingers and the bright, dangerous look of a man who had spent all morning carving runes into a lift shaft and would very much like to carve some into a person. He got perhaps three steps. Then he stopped, looked round at all of this, and did a very quick and extremely sensible sum. He tucked his wand away, stepped into the exact centre of the group, clasped his hands behind his back, and crossed the Atrium like a visiting dignitary with a very expensive security detail, nodding pleasantly at each Auror who tried to get at him as they were hexed into the middle of next week.

Shafiq had stopped doing anything at all and was simply standing by the Fountain with his wand at his side and his mouth open, looking at Draco. Theo closed it for him on the way past, quite gently, with one finger under the chin.

​

The crowd didn't scatter. It parted, the way a crowd parts for a bride, or a hearse. A tea trolley rolled, entirely of its own accord, into the path of the Auror nearest the fireplaces. The witch from Magical Maintenance dropped her mop in front of another, and was still apologising to him as he lay flat on his back on the floor. The Welcome Witch wished a third a very good weekend, and held on to his sleeve until he had said it back.

Proudfoot had taken personal charge of the first-years, and was walking them to safety in a crocodile, one hand up like a lollipop man, by a route that went very slowly across the line of fire and finished at the Fountain, where it had started. He counted them at both ends. Robards, favouring his wrist, was bellowing orders that nobody could possibly hear over the memos, and watching the fight the way the Harpies' scouts had once watched Ginny from the stands.

And somewhere in the middle of it Harry found Draco's back against his own, and didn't need to look round. "Living the dream, Malfoy?" he said over his shoulder, and Draco, relieving a wizard twice his size of his wand, said, "It's lost something in the adaptation."

They turned together across the Atrium like that, disarming whoever came at them, the way you walk down a staircase you've known all your life, in the dark. Every wand Harry took, he flung behind him towards the foot of Lift Four, until there was a heap of them there like kindling.

It was very nearly enough. They were halfway across. Ron and Pansy were feeding the last green fire by the fistful, and through a gap in the paper Harry could see it at the end of the row, shrinking to almost nothing, hissing, and coming back.

So could the thing in Kingsley's body. It stopped holding back. Harry felt it before he saw it: a spell like a falling wall, which took one of the great golden pillars clean in half and threw every one of them off their feet. His glasses went one way and his wand very nearly went the other. They came up the way you only learn to after being knocked flat by spells a few times: rolling, already moving, nobody where they had landed. Draco was up first, pulling out of it like a Seeker out of a dive, and had the black shield back over Hermione before she had found her feet. He hauled her the rest of the way up by the waist. Through the paper, the three who meant it closed in from the left, working together now, driving them back and away from the fireplaces. Something hot and red went past Ginny's shoulder and opened her sleeve from elbow to wrist. She swore, switched her wand to her other hand and kept going.

♫ Listen along

Harry didn't remember deciding anything. There was only a before and an after. Before, the Auror who had cast it was ten feet away, with his wand still raised and something like satisfaction on his face. After, he was thirty feet up, flat against the gilded ceiling beside the hole Robards had blown in it, pinned there by the hem of his own robes, and his wand was lying in two pieces at Harry's feet. All the careful, polite disarming had gone clean out of Harry. What had taken its place was very cold and very simple.

"Potter," said Draco beside him, carefully, the way you might speak to an animal you weren't quite sure of.

"I'm fine!" said Ginny, without looking round. "Harry, keep moving!"

Behind them, Luna said quite kindly as she handed Harry his glasses, "Oh, he'll want something to look at up there," and when Harry glanced up a moment later, the man on the ceiling had a small, beautifully clipped ornamental hedge growing out of each ear.

The other two gave Harry a great deal more room after that. The Minister did not. Its next spell hit Draco's black shield as it went up over all of them, and Harry heard it crack, actually crack, like ice on a pond, and saw Draco's face go white with the effort of holding it.

That was when Theo stopped being a dignitary. He stepped out from the middle of the group, dropped, and slid the last few feet on one knee through the gold leaf, with his wand in his right hand and his silver stylus in his left, and as he brought them together the silver ran up into the wood like quicksilver, until he was holding neither one nor the other but a single wand with a bright silver point. For a fraction of a second he looked as surprised as anyone. Then he laid his left hand flat on the marble and drove the point into the floor beside it: one long stroke, and a scatter of short ones across it, as quickly and neatly as a man signing a cheque.

The floor of the Atrium heaved.

A ridge of marble tore itself up out of the floor between them and the whole left side of the hall, and went on rising, grinding and splitting and throwing up peaks, until a small and perfectly formed mountain range ran across the Atrium of the Ministry of Magic at about the height of a man, with gold leaf drifting down onto its summits like snow. The Aurors on the far side of it disappeared from view, and so did their curses.

Theo took his hand off the marble and got to his feet. He had gone very white, and a thin line of blood was running from the corner of his eye. He wiped at it with his thumb, smeared it down his cheek, and considered the result with mild distaste. Then he saw his waistcoat. Gold leaf from the ruined ceiling had settled thickly into the nap of the velvet. "They've got gold leaf," he said, with a great deal more feeling, "on my new waistcoat." Bolorma, on his shoulder, gazed at him with eyes that were almost sparkling.

The new mountain range had cut them off from the Aurors, but Kingsley's body was on this side of it, and it came on through the falling gold, alone and unhurried. The one green fire at the far end of the hall might as well have been on the moon. Draco's shield cracked again, and then again. Crouched behind it, with his ears ringing and Ginny's blood on his sleeve, Harry worked out, quite calmly, that they had about ten seconds left.

Then the Minister's wand came round the edge of the shield, close enough that Harry could see the knuckles whiten, and levelled itself at Draco's chest —

And something small and dark came whirling out of the storm of memos, from the far, far end of the Atrium, and struck the Minister on the back of his wand hand.

It was a handful of iron nails.

Where the nails touched the skin it hissed like water on a hot pan, and the thing in Kingsley's body cried out and dropped its wand.

It looked at its hand. At the small red burns. For just a moment, as its eyes came up, Harry saw straight through Kingsley's face into whatever was behind it. It looked frightened, and grieving, and furious, and underneath it all there was something almost pleading.

"You of all people," it said. Its voice was Kingsley's, but the words were not. "You of all people, Potter. Don't you want them back?"

Harry didn't answer. He found that he couldn't.

Then Draco had him by the back of his robes, and they were running.

​

All along the far wall of the Atrium the great fireplaces stood dark, every one of them but the very last in the row, which was still burning a stubborn green. In front of it stood Ron and Pansy. Ron was just lowering his throwing arm, looking enormously pleased with himself, and Pansy was looking at him as though she couldn't decide whether to kiss him or push him into the fire. The empty paper bag in his other hand said, in George's handwriting, IRON NAILS: CHANGELING DETERRENTʷ (prototype, one day old, use sparingly).

"Eighty feet," she said. "Through that. You could have hit anyone."

"Didn't, though," said Ron. "Keeper."

Each of them had a fistful of George's Stubborn Floo Powderʷ, and they were flinging it into the flames in turns while the fire sputtered and hissed and tried very hard to go out.

"Ten minutes-ish," Pansy was shouting at Ron. "He said ish!"

"It's been four!"

"Then it's a very generous ish!"

They went through in twos. Harry shoved Luna and Theo in first, and Bolorma went with them, squeaking. Then Hermione, with Draco right behind her, still in his short robes, still holding the black shield up over both of them until the very last second. Then Harry and Ginny together, and the last thing Harry saw before the green flames took him was Ron and Pansy, standing alone in front of the only fire in the Atrium still burning, looking at each other.

"It's a one-person fireplace," said Pansy.

"Then breathe in," said Ron, and grabbed her round the waist, and jumped.

​

Gregory Goyle, who did not fit in any fireplace ever built, stood up from the edge of the Fountain, patted a weeping first-year gently on the head, handed his blanket back to the witch with the banner, and walked calmly out of the visitors' entrance. That was a red telephone box, designed to hold, at a push, two people. When he got into it, it made a noise like a biscuit tin being sat on.

Nobody tried to stop him.

​

Blaise Zabini was still leaning on the security desk in his dove-grey coat. Lee had left on cue, recorder in pocket, and Blaise's part of the plan had ended with Lee's. He had told Weasley he would have gone. He surveyed the wreckage like a man pricing it.

Violet memos were coming down all over the hall, drifting out of the air in their thousands and settling over everything like a late, bureaucratic snow. The Fountain of Remembrance leaned at a slight angle where Goyle had set it down. A scorched black circle had been burnt into the floor where Draco had stood, as if somebody had set a cauldron down on the marble straight off the fire, and Blaise would not have given odds on Mrs Skower's shifting it. A range of small marble mountains ran across the middle of the hall, and a violet memo had come to rest on the highest peak like a little flag. The hedgehogs had retreated under the security desk, where Blaise could hear them grumbling. And Seamus Finnigan was already walking the length of the mountain range with a tape measure and a clipboard, and had begun, with visible pleasure, to fill out a form.

In the middle of it all, Gawain Robards had climbed up onto the rim of the Fountain, gold leaf from head to foot, and was giving the Auror Office the dressing-down of its life.

"Fifty Aurors!" he roared. "Fifty fully trained, fully qualified, fully salaried Aurors! Against Potter and Malfoy — who are supposed to be at a conference — six civilians and a baker!"

"A baker," echoed Proudfoot beside him, as though this were the part he would never get over. Proudfoot had a good deal of the ceiling in his hair.

"He was a very big baker, sir," offered somebody near the back.

"I don't care if he was the size of a Ukrainian Ironbelly, Dawlish! I have seen better wandwork at a children's party!" Robards drew breath. "Somebody get Hargreaves off the ceiling. Somebody tell me what a mountain range is doing in my Atrium. Somebody find out who let a goose in. And will someone do something about those blasted hedgehogs!"

He jabbed his wand at the row of Aurors by the grilles. "Look at that. An Unspeakable who'd been sacked for all of ten minutes put five of you on the floor, every one of them between the eyes. That is grouping. I have never seen grouping like that in this office, and I have looked. Who trained the people who did this? I want a name."

"Potter, sir," said Proudfoot. "Fifth year."

"Then why," said Robards, "are none of them on my payroll?" He rounded on the rest of them. "A runesmith from Knockturn raised a mountain range out of my floor. Freehand. Nobody in this office has ever raised so much as a kerb! A Harpies Chaser took wands off this office without breaking stride!" He pointed down into the basin, at the wand. "And Potter and Malfoy went through you back to back and took every wand on this side of the hall without once looking round at each other, and I've signed a form sending them on a conference to learn to communicate!"

"Sir," said Shafiq, from behind Dawlish, "you hit the ceiling. Sir."

The Aurors on either side of Shafiq took a small step away from him.

"My wrist," said Robards, "is a matter of medical record."

He said all of this, Blaise noticed, remarkably loudly, and not once did he take his eyes off the Minister for Magic, who was standing by the dead fireplaces nursing a burnt hand and looking at nobody. And when Robards finally ran out of breath and climbed down, Blaise could have sworn, though he would never have put money on it, that the corner of his mouth was twitching.

Blaise had been running a book on more or less everything since he was eleven. That morning he had offered quite generous odds against any of them getting out at all. He took the small black notebook out of his breast pocket now, found the page, and, very quietly, crossed the whole entry out.

Then he put it away, turned to the nearer of the two Restitution Wardens, who was staring at the wreckage with her mouth open, and said, "I'm so sorry, you were in the middle of telling me about your sister's wedding. Do go on."

​

♫ Listen along

They came out of the kitchen fireplace at Grimmauld Place in a heap, in soot and memo-confetti and gold leaf, one pair after another.

Theo had come out first and got no further than the hearthrug. He lay flat on his back with his arms flung out, as though he'd been dropped there from a height, and the blood from his eye had dried in a long brown line down his cheek. Luna lay beside him, looking up at the ceiling and humming, with Bolorma asleep on her chest. Hermione had landed face down and stayed that way. Her hair was still crackling faintly against the stone, and every so often a small blue spark jumped from it to the leg of the nearest chair. Draco had made it as far as the wall. He sat against it with his knees up and his wand arm resting across them, and Harry could see it shaking, a fine, steady tremor from the shoulder down, as if the black shield were still hanging off the end of it.

Harry's ears were ringing. He lay where he'd fallen, with one lens of his glasses cracked, and listened to Ginny breathing beside him, quick and ragged, her good hand clamped over the cut on her arm.

Ron and Pansy came last. They came out of the grate still wrapped round each other and rolled across the floor and fetched up against the leg of the table. They stayed like that until they both seemed to notice at once, and separated with great speed, and sat up on opposite sides of the kitchen, and very carefully looked anywhere but at one another. Pansy's hands were green to the wrist with Floo powder. Ron lay back down on the flagstones with his throwing arm cradled against his chest, wincing, and grinning at the ceiling.

For a while the only sounds in the kitchen were breathing, and the tick of the clock, and Hermione's hair.

"The first two caws were derivative," said Theo, from the hearthrug. "But the yodel, Weasley. The yodel was a choice."

"Oi," said Ron, over the top of everybody laughing. "That was a tawny owl, that was."

"Oh, I should never have let you near a Muggle television," said Hermione.

"Three years I've been practising that in the bath."

"How long did it hold?"

Harry turned his head. George was sitting at the kitchen table with a notebook open in front of him, and beside him, bolt upright, sat Percy, who had slipped out of the Ministry by a different route halfway through the skirmish, and looked profoundly distressed about it.

"Four minutes," said Pansy, from the floor. "And it was still going."

"Four's within the ish," said George happily, and wrote it down.

"You were not in the building," said Percy. "Any of you. I have minuted it."

He turned the parchment round so that they could all see. At the bottom, in his best copperplate, it said: None of the persons named above was present at the Ministry this afternoon.

"Percy," said Ron, "the entire Ministry watched us do it mate."

"The Ministry," said Percy, "is not the record."

"Kreacher," said Theo, without opening his eyes. "Is there anyone in this house who understands velvet?"

"Kreacher understands velvet," said Kreacher, from the stove, without turning round. "Kreacher does not understand wearing it down a lift shaft."

Theo opened one eye and considered the ceiling. "He's right, you know," he said. "Next time, tweed."

​

It was perhaps twenty minutes later, when the shaking had mostly stopped and Kreacher had made three pots of tea, that Parvati came through the door in her lime-green robes, took one look round the kitchen, and had the dittany out for the long cut down Ginny's forearm before anybody had offered her a chair. Ginny began pretending it didn't sting, and Harry hovered at her elbow with a bottle of Murtlap Essence that nobody had asked for, until Parvati took it off him. Then Pansy Parkinson came and stood at the end of the table with her arms folded.

"Ginevra."

Ginny looked up. "Nobody calls me that."

"I know," said Pansy. "The thing with the bats."

"What about it?"

"Teach me."

Every head round the kitchen table came up. Ginny looked at Pansy with her head on one side, the way she looked at an opposing Keeper before a penalty.

"Why?"

"I have a list," said Pansy.

Ginny considered this. Then, slowly, she began to grin.

"Wand arm up," she said. "Elbow in. Flick from the wrist, not the shoulder. And you have to mean it."

"Oh," said Pansy, pulling out the chair beside her, "I'll mean it."

Harry watched them, heads together over Ginny's wand hand. When he looked up, Draco was watching him from across the kitchen.

Draco lifted the long ivory pointer and aimed it, with great precision, at the corner of the wall.

Somebody had Spellotaped the lists there at some point during the week: Harry's two napkins from the Leaky Cauldron and Draco's sheet of ruled Ministry parchment, side by side. Draco had also charmed column four to keep its own score. It had been glowing faintly ever since, ticking itself off, name by name, as each of them in turn had started a fight with Pansy Parkinson. Seamus's had ticked itself before the first meeting was half over. Ron's had gone somewhere in a hedge on Hampstead Heath.

Every name in column four had its tick. Every name but one.

Beside Ginny's name, the little square sat empty, still glowing.

Harry went over. "I had her at ten," said Draco. "Out of ten."

"Bad luck."

"I'm never wrong about column four, Potter."

Behind them, Ginny said, "No, from the wrist," and Pansy said, "I am doing it from the wrist," and the two of them burst out laughing at exactly the same moment. On the wall, very quietly, the glow beside Ginny's name went out, and the empty square crossed itself through.

​

It was nearly an hour before Ginny found him. He was sitting on the floor outside Sirius's old room, with his back against the doorframe and the door open behind him, and he hadn't put the light on. By the glow from the stairwell he could just make out the faded Gryffindor banners, and the motorbikes, and the four Muggle girls in bikinis that Sirius had stuck to the wall at sixteen with a Permanent Sticking Charm, purely to annoy his mother, and that nobody had ever managed to get down.

She sat down beside him. Her sleeve was rolled up over a long stripe of new pink skin where the dittany had been.

"Kreacher's worried about you," she said. "He's started polishing things in your direction."

"I broke his wand."

"Mmm, you did."

"He cut you, and I didn't even —" Harry stopped. "I didn't decide to do it, Gin. One second he was in front of me and the next he was up there, and his wand was in two, and I didn't feel anything about it at all. I still don't."

Ginny turned her arm to the light and looked at it for a moment.

"Well," she said, "he shouldn't have cut me, then." And then, more gently: "You put him on the ceiling, Harry. You didn't put him through it. I know the difference, and so do you. You can buy Hargreaves a new wand once he's back in his own body."

He leaned his head back against the doorframe. Downstairs somebody laughed, and somebody else told them to shut up.

"It used his voice," he said at last. "In the Death Chamber. And then the thing in Kingsley asked me if I wanted them back, and I couldn't say no." He looked into the dark room, at the banners. "I wanted to walk through it. I knew it wasn't him, and I wanted to go anyway."

"I was eleven," she said, "and a diary told me it was my friend, and I believed it for a whole year. You lasted about four seconds." She leaned her head against his shoulder. "I'd call that progress."

Harry laughed, and was surprised by it.

"So here's what's going to happen," said Ginny. "Next time something dead calls your name, you let me answer it."

"And what will you say?"

"That you're busy. That you're spoken for. And that if it wants you, it can come up here and get past me first." She lifted her head and looked into the room, at the four Muggle girls smiling on the wall in the dark. "And we are taking those down."

"Nobody can. It's a Permanent Sticking Charm."

"Watch me," said Ginny.

​

Goyle arrived by bus. He had a copy of the Evening Prophet folded under his arm, and his own face was on the front of it, staring up out of the photograph with water running down it and two tons of black stone above his head. He put it on the table without a word, went to his bench in the corner, and sat down.

Percy studied the photograph. Then he looked down at his minutes. Then he uncapped his quill and, in very small, very neat letters, added a single line underneath: Except Mr Goyle.

Kreacher brought Goyle a towel without being asked, and the whole kitchen was very careful to look the other way.

​

Hermione sat on the back step of Grimmauld Place in the October dark, with her Unspeakable's badge in her hand, turning it over and over.

After a while the door opened behind her, and Draco came out and sat down on the step as well, a careful foot away. He'd changed into a pair of Harry's trousers. They were too short too. He was rising above it.

"Well," he said. "You're unemployed."

"Yes."

"And I'm a common criminal, with a very uncommon number of spells in my ledger for a man who was a month off a spotless record." He looked out at the small, dark, overgrown garden. "They'll never let you back in there, you know. Not after this."

"I know."

"They'll let you back into somewhere, though." He said it offhandedly, the way he said the things he meant most. "Somewhere bigger. With your name on the door. They'll have to. You'll probably end up running the whole blasted place, and I'll have to call you Minister and pretend I'm not furious about it."

Hermione turned the badge over again.

"You didn't have to do that," she said at last. "In the Atrium. The shield. A month, Malfoy. You were a month off."

"I'm aware."

"Was it worth it?"

He took his time about answering. Somewhere in the house behind them, Ron was explaining the yodel to somebody who hadn't asked.

"Ask me in a month," said Draco, and got up and went back inside.

​

It was late into the evening when Ginny took the copied slate out of her bag and laid it in the middle of the kitchen table, and all of them came round to look.

The four grains of rice lay in their row in the largest chamber, exactly as they had on the table in the Death Chamber. While Harry watched, the one on the end stirred and settled again.

"That's a copy," said George. He sounded almost offended. "I've made a lot of copies of a lot of things in my time. They don't do that."

"Good ones do," said Luna. "Daddy copied a map of the Altai for me before I went out, and the yaks on it still move about. One of them had a calf in June." She leaned over the slate with interest. "So this one will keep showing us what's there, for as long as we've got it."

Theo had taken his spectacles off and was holding them over the border like a magnifying glass, following the band of carving round the edge of the slate with one finger. He went all the way round once. Then he went round again, more slowly, and his frown deepened.

"Well?" said Draco.

"I can't read it." Theo sounded more surprised than anyone for the third time that day. "There are about a hundred and fifty ways of writing Ogham, and the bards who invented them spent most of their careers being rude about each other's. This is one of the rude ones." He put his spectacles back on and sat back, looking personally insulted. "Whoever carved that didn't want it read by anybody who learned their Ogham from their mother."

Across the table, Hermione had already taken a fresh index card out of her pocket, and was copying the border onto it, stroke by stroke.

They spread the copied ledger out beside the slate, and read it properly.

It took a long time. There were a hundred names, and most of them meant something to somebody at the table, and every one of them made the kitchen a little quieter. Theo found his own name without any visible reaction at all; he simply put down his teacup, very quietly, and abandoned it. Pansy found hers, and her mouth went thin, and under the table, Harry was almost certain, Ron kicked her ankle, quite gently, and she kicked him back, and seemed to feel better for it. Blaise, who had come round from the Ministry much later than the rest of them, with what looked suspiciously like lipstick on his collar, found his and said, "Well, I'm flattered," but his hand wasn't quite steady on his glass. Goyle found his, and went on looking at it.

And Draco, at the end, found the last name on the last page, which he already knew was there, and read it anyway.

100. Malfoy, Draco. Reserved. All Hallows.

Pansy reached across and took the teacup out of Draco's hand, because it had begun, very faintly, to rattle against its saucer.

It was Hermione who turned the page.

She did it absently, the way you turn a page when you think you've reached the end of a book and just want to be sure. And there, on the back of the last page of the ledger, where there should have been nothing at all, was one more line. It was in the same clear clerkly hand and the same red ink, but it was set apart from the rest. It wasn't numbered, and it wasn't ticked.

Beneath it, in the same red ink, somebody had drawn a small, neat symbol: a triangle, with a circle inside it, and a single straight line running down through the middle of both.

Hermione went white.

Ron put down his mug.

The two of them looked across the table, together and in the same instant, at Harry. They looked at him the way they had looked at him once before, a very long time ago, in the ruins of a castle, on the morning after a war, when he had told them what he'd done with a wand, and a stone, and a cloak.

Draco saw them do it. His eyes went from Ron to Hermione to Harry, and back, and Harry watched him put it together, quick and bright and horribly sure, the way he put everything together.

"Potter," said Draco. "Why are they looking at you like that?"

♫ Listen along