The Forest forgets nothing. It only chooses what to give back.

centaur saying, as recorded by Firenze in Divination for Humans Who Insist

♫ Listen along

Minerva McGonagall had been Headmistress of Hogwarts for ten years, and she had never once regretted taking the job so much as she did at a quarter past two on Tuesday morning, standing on the shore of the Black Lake in her tartan dressing gown with her wand drawn, watching a man walk across the water towards her.

He was walking on it. She wanted to be quite clear with herself about that. He was walking, at a steady, unhurried pace, in a tweed coat and a grey cardigan, leaning on a stick, like a man on his way to post a letter. Every time his foot came down, a disc of white ice spread out from it across the black water, and held him, and then melted away behind him as he took the next step.

Twelve figures in dark robes were following in his footsteps, single file, very carefully, like children crossing a stream on stones.

For three days, since Neville Longbottom had come to her study with his hands shaking, Minerva had been preparing for this. She had tripled the watch on the white marble tomb that stood on the little rise above the shore. She had sealed the castle. She had put a curse on the lake that she had learned from her grandmother, which would drag any living foot that touched that water uninvited straight to the bottom and hold it there until she chose to let it go.

In all the long history of the castle the Black Lake had never frozen so early in the year.

The man reached the shallows and stepped onto the shingle, and the ice behind him cracked and sank with a soft sound. He stopped a little way from her and leaned on his stick. His breath smoked in the cold.

"Hello, Minerva," said Edmund Grieve.

She had stood beside him at his daughter's graveside. She had written him a letter afterwards, and he had written back, a long, kind, careful letter that she had kept in her desk for ten years. For a moment, looking at him now, she felt nothing at all but a tired and enormous sadness.

Then it passed, and she was simply angry.

"Edmund," she said. "You're trespassing."

"I've come for something that doesn't belong to you."

"Nor to you, I expect."

"Not yet," said Grieve gently. "We're both old, Minerva. Let's not make this —"

Minerva McGonagall had learned a great many things in seventy-three years, and one of the most useful was never to let a man finish explaining himself.

Her first spell took the stick out of his hand and sent it spinning into the lake. Her second went past him, into the dark water behind, where the last of his twelve followers were still picking their way across the ice, and turned the ice beneath the feet of the rearmost three into eels.

There was a great deal of screaming after that.

​

She fought for eleven minutes. Neville Longbottom, who was running flat out down the lawns from the castle with his wand in his hand and his pyjama top on inside out, saw most of it, and for the rest of his life he could never quite describe it to anyone who hadn't been there.

He saw the Headmistress of Hogwarts stand on the shingle with her feet planted and her tartan dressing gown whipping around her, and throw spells so fast that the air between her and the robed figures was a solid tangle of light. He saw her raise both arms, and heard the castle answer her. Every suit of armour in every corridor clanked to attention at once, and every stone statue on every plinth stepped down, and they came pouring out through the great front doors and down the lawns towards the lake in a clanking, grinding, glittering army, exactly as they had done ten years before.

And he saw Edmund Grieve breathe out, long and slow, the way you breathe on a cold window.

The frost went out from him across the grass in a wave. Where it touched the charging armour, the armour stopped, rimed white from helmet to boot, and stood rigid for a moment, and then cracked across and fell apart. The statues went the same way. Stone knights, gargoyles, a great winged boar from the gateposts, all of them froze, and split, and crumbled onto the lawn in heaps of white rubble. At the very end of its reach it caught Neville, halfway down the slope, and came up over his boots, and after that he could run no further; he could only stand there, frozen to the grass, and watch.

It wasn't wand magic. Neville knew that the moment he saw it. It was something older, and colder, and it didn't belong to Grieve at all; it came through him from somewhere else, the way water comes through a pipe.

Professor McGonagall kept coming. She turned the rubble of her own statues into a flock of stone birds and flung them at Grieve's head. She turned the shingle under his feet to quicksand and he froze it solid. She sent a torrent of fire at him and he met it with a wall of white that hissed and steamed and did not break. A spell of his caught her on the left arm, and Neville saw the frost race up her sleeve to the elbow and saw her lips go thin, and she didn't even look down at it.

And behind her, on the little rise, while every eye was on the shore, two of the robed figures had reached the tomb.

Neville shouted. McGonagall turned. It was too late.

The white marble lid split with a sound like a gunshot. One of the robed figures, thin and neat with rimless spectacles glinting in the dark, reached down into it with both hands. When he straightened up, he was holding a long, pale wand of knobbled wood.

He carried it down the slope to Grieve, holding it out in front of him as though it might bite.

Grieve took it. He turned it over slowly in his fingers. For just a moment, Neville thought, something crossed his face that looked like disappointment.

"Don't worry, Minerva," said Grieve. He tucked the Elder Wand into the inside pocket of his tweed coat, carefully, like a pen. "I'm not going to use it. I'm going to give it back to its Master. At the top of a hill."

He turned, and stepped out onto the black water, and the ice spread out under his foot to hold him.

McGonagall lifted her wand again. Her arm was shaking. The grass let go of Neville's boots, and he reached her just as the frost on her sleeve finished climbing to the shoulder and she went down, very suddenly, onto one knee on the frozen shingle.

"That will do, Longbottom," she said through her teeth, when he tried to help her up. "I am perfectly capable of standing. Go and fish those people out of my lake before the squid does."

​

The coin in Harry's pocket burned at twenty past four.

He was awake. He'd barely slept since the front steps. He sat up in the dark of the east wing with Ginny stirring beside him and read the words as they came, glowing, across the face of the fake Galleon.

TOMB OPENED. WAND GONE. MCG HURT. COME.

​

The Slytherins were still in the long gallery.

They had been there since Monday. Harry had gone up twice on Monday evening and come down again both times with nothing said, because he'd had no idea what to say. He still had none. He went up anyway, before it was light, with the Cloak over his arm, and found them exactly where he'd left them: Pansy curled on a window seat with her knees drawn up, Goyle on the floor with his back to the panelling, and Theo lying flat on a chaise longue with his eyes closed and one hand trailing on the floor, like a Victorian heroine who had just received bad news.

Draco was missing, and nobody seemed to know where he'd got to. Blaise had gone back to Belgravia the night before.

"Grieve's got the Wand," said Harry. "He took it out of Dumbledore's tomb three hours ago. That leaves the Stone. It's somewhere in the Forbidden Forest, and I'm going to get it before he does." He stopped. "I need you."

Pansy studied him from the window seat, with her chin on her knees.

"For the Forest, Potter?" she said. "Or for the other side of the scales?"

"For the Forest."

"And the other thing?"

"There isn't another thing," said Harry.

Pansy went on looking at him. He let her.

It was Goyle who got up first. He got up slowly, the way he did everything, and brushed down his trousers.

"I know the Forest a bit," he said. "Did detention in it in fourth year. With Hagrid. Got bitten by something."

Theo opened one eye.

"Well," he said, to the ceiling. "I suppose if we're going to be sacrificed on a hill, we might as well get some fresh air first."

​

He came down to the hall twenty minutes later in a long bottle-green velvet coat with silver frogging down the front and a silk scarf the colour of old claret. Nobody had ever seen either of them before.

Everybody stopped and stared.

"Where," said Pansy, "did you get that? I've seen your tailor's books."

"I've always had it," said Theo. "I've simply never had an occasion."

"It's the Forbidden Forest, Theo," said a voice from the stairs.

Draco was coming down, dressed for the woods in a plain dark coat and boots, pulling on his gloves. He looked as though he had spent the night staring at a ceiling. His eyes went everywhere except to Harry.

"Then the Forest," said Theo, winding his scarf one more time round his neck with a flourish, "will simply have to rise to the occasion."

"You look like a Christmas tree," said Ron.

"Thank you, Weasley." Theo inclined his head graciously. "That is quite genuinely the nicest thing a Weasley has ever said to a Nott."

George was already in the hall, ready, in a patched jacket with a bag of prototypes over his shoulder. His face was pale and set. He'd come in from the rose garden on Monday and had said perhaps six words to anyone since.

"George —" Ron began.

"I'm coming, Ronnie."

"You don't have to —"

"I know I don't." George hitched the bag higher on his shoulder. "I'm coming."

Ron looked at Harry. Harry shook his head, very slightly: leave it.

"There are Aurors on the Hogwarts gates," said Hermione, coming down the stairs behind Draco with her beaded bag and the Marauders Map in her hand. "The Ministry will have them there by breakfast." She patted the bag. "I've packed for a siege."

"We won't need one," said Harry. "We'll go in by the back door."

​

Aberforth Dumbledore was in the bar of the Hog's Head in his nightshirt when they came through his fireplace, and he greeted the ten people who tumbled out of it, one after another, as wearily as if it happened every night.

"Every time one of your lot comes through that grate, my goats go off their milk," he said.

"Sorry, Aberforth," said Harry. "It's only ten this time."

"Hmph." Aberforth looked them over. His eyes stopped on Draco. "You're the Malfoy boy."

"For my sins," said Draco.

Aberforth went on looking at him, with those sharp blue eyes that were so like his brother's and at the same time nothing like them at all.

"Albus thought you were worth saving," he said at last. "He was wrong about a great many things, my brother." He turned away and reached for the painting above the mantelpiece. "Not always, though."

Draco didn't say anything to that. Harry didn't think he could have.

The portrait above the mantelpiece was of a fair-haired girl in a blue dress, standing at the mouth of a long painted tunnel. At a word from Aberforth she smiled, turned, and walked away down the tunnel into the painted distance, and a moment later the whole frame swung forward from the wall like a door. Behind it was a dark stone passage leading down.

"Mind the steps," said Aberforth. "And if you see my brother's stick, you can tell whoever's got it they're welcome to it."

​

The passage went on for a long time, down and then up, and came out at last at a door. Harry remembered the door. He had come through it at seventeen, into a room full of hammocks and banners and his friends. He pushed it open.

It was grey.

That was his first thought, and it stayed with him. The Room of Requirement had been destroyed ten years ago by a fire that couldn't be put out, the whole great cathedral of hidden things burnt down to its bones in a single roaring hour. Neville had told him over the years that the Room was coming back. Slowly, the way a burnt forest comes back: first as a cupboard, then as a small bare room, then as something larger. It had never, Neville said, been quite what it was.

It was that now.

The vast, high, echoing space was all there, exactly as it had been, with its narrow aisles and its towering stacks. But everything was made of ash. Every tower of broken furniture, every mountain of lost books, every heap of old cloaks and cracked cauldrons and forgotten things was soft and grey and motionless, as though someone had built the Room of Hidden Things again out of cinders and then forgotten to breathe on it. Nothing moved. Nothing made a sound.

Behind Harry, Goyle had stopped dead in the doorway.

"This is where," he said.

Harry felt Ron go still beside him, and Hermione. They had all been here. Draco had been here. It had been, Harry thought, the last time any of them had seen Vincent Crabbe alive.

Goyle walked forward. He walked straight down the nearest grey aisle without hesitating, as though he knew the way, and perhaps he did; perhaps the Room was showing it to him. His feet left prints in the ash. After a moment Draco followed him. After another moment, so did Harry.

The aisle ended in a small open space among the grey towers. The floor there was blackened, not grey: a scorched, glassy black, in a rough circle a few yards across. Nothing grew back there. Nothing had.

Goyle knelt down at the edge of it.

He knelt there a long time in silence. Harry stood back among the ash with Ron and Hermione, and the others came quietly up the aisle behind them, and waited.

"Sorry, Vince," said Goyle eventually. His voice was very low. "I should've stopped you. You always did whatever you wanted. I should've stopped you anyway."

He reached into his coat and took out a small white cardboard box. Inside it was a chocolate cake, not much bigger than his fist, with a dusting of sugar on the top. He set it down at the very edge of the scorched black circle.

"He liked chocolate," Goyle said, to nobody. "We were both daft about cakes."

Harry thought, suddenly and without wanting to, of two chocolate cakes floating in mid-air in a corridor, in his second year, and of how easy it had been, and how funny it had seemed. He had to look away.

Draco came and stood beside Goyle. He stood with his hands in his coat pockets, looking down at the black circle, and when he spoke his voice was quite steady.

"Vincent Crabbe," he said. "He was scared of the dark until he was twelve. He slept with a candle every night of first year, and he made me swear on my life I'd never tell anyone." He looked down at Goyle's cake. "I don't think it matters now."

Goyle nodded slowly. After a while he looked up, past Draco, to where Harry was standing in the ash.

"You came back for us," he said. "In here. When it was all burning. You came back."

"Yeah," said Harry.

"Why?"

Harry thought about it. He'd been asked that question before, about other people, in other places, and he had never once had a good answer.

"Because you were in here," he said.

Goyle looked at him a moment longer. Then he nodded, as though that was a perfectly good reason, and got to his feet.

"I told him at the time," said Ron from behind Harry, "if we died for you two, I'd kill him."

"Fair," said Goyle.

And the Room, which had been grey and silent and utterly still, made a very small sound, like a breath let out. On the far side of the black circle, in the wall of ash, a plain wooden door appeared that had not been there before. It stood a little ajar. Through the gap, Harry could see the torchlit stone of a castle corridor.

​

Madam Pomfrey had put Minerva McGonagall in the bed nearest the window, and McGonagall had made it very clear that she would be getting out of it again as soon as anyone stopped watching.

Her left arm was bandaged from fingertip to shoulder. Where the bandages ended, the skin of her neck was white with a fine tracery of frost-burn, like a leaf skeleton. She was sitting bolt upright against three pillows with her spectacles on, and when Harry came in, she looked at him over the top of them exactly as she had when he was eleven and had just done something reckless.

Then she saw who had come in behind him.

"Goodness," she said. "The three of you were trouble enough as it was."

Harry looked at Ron and Hermione. Neville looked at Ginny and Luna.

"And now," said McGonagall, "you have brought guests."

The Slytherins shuffled.

"Potter."

"Professor."

"He's going to give the Wand back to its Master, he says. At the top of a hill." Her eyes were sharp. "I imagine you know which Master he means."

"It's a short list, Professor."

"And the Stone?"

"We're going for it now."

McGonagall studied him. Then she took her spectacles off, and folded them, and set them on the blanket beside her, and when she spoke again her voice was lower.

"Albus spent his whole life wanting that Stone," she said. "He wanted it more than the Wand, more than anything. You know why." She looked out of the window, at the grey morning over the lake. "Don't you start, Potter."

"I won't," said Harry.

She picked her spectacles back up and put them on.

"The three Mr Longbottom fished out of my lake have been collected by the Ministry," she said briskly, "with a great deal of paperwork and not one question. There are Aurors on my gates this morning, for my protection, I'm told. I haven't invited them in. Hagrid's waiting for you at his hut. I shall want him back in one piece. He has the third-years on Thursday. Now go away. Poppy's coming back and I'd like to be dressed before she does."

They were almost at the door when she spoke again.

"Ten points to Gryffindor," said McGonagall. "And ten points to Slytherin."

Goyle went red to the ears.

"Are you allowed to do that, Professor?" said Ron. "We don't go here any more."

McGonagall looked at him over the top of her spectacles.

"Out, Mr Weasley," she said, "before I give you a detention."

​

Hagrid was waiting outside his hut, among the pumpkins he was fattening up for the Hallowe'en feast, with a crossbow over his shoulder, a lantern in his hand, and an enormous black boarhound at his heels. It had a grey muzzle and a dribbling jaw and a face of profound, anxious devotion, and it was, Hagrid insisted, a completely different dog.

"Fang," he said. "Fang the Second. Nothin' like the first one. Much braver."

The dog put its nose to Draco's coat pocket, whimpered, and hid behind Hagrid's legs.

"Much braver," Harry agreed.

Hagrid hugged Harry so hard his ribs creaked, and then Hermione, and then Ron, and then Ginny and George and Neville and Luna. He looked at the rest of them for a moment over the top of Harry's head, one after another: at Draco, and Pansy, and Goyle, and Theo in his velvet coat. His great bearded face did something complicated.

"Right," he said at last, gruffly. "Professor McGonagall told me. 'Bout all of it." He cleared his throat. "Any friend o' Harry's." His eyes went back to Goyle. "How's the arm?"

"Itches when it rains," said Goyle.

"Hagrid," said Harry. "The Stone. I don't know exactly where I dropped it. It was dark, and I wasn't really thinking about —"

"I know where it is," said Hagrid.

Everyone stared at him.

"Leastways, I know who's got it." Hagrid shifted from foot to foot. "Grawp's got a collection. Shiny bits. Pebbles, buttons, bottle-tops, all sorts. Keeps 'em up in his cave. An' there's one he won' let nobody touch, not even me. Little black one. Found it the summer after the Battle, down near the clearin' where —"

He stopped. His beetle-black eyes had gone suddenly very bright.

"Down near where they had you laid out, Harry," he said, much more quietly. "When I carried you."

Fang the Second leaned his whole anxious weight against Harry's legs.

"Right, then," said Hagrid, and wiped his nose on his sleeve, and hoisted his crossbow. "Grawp's up in the mountains, far side o' the Forest. Long way. Through the centaurs, an' then past the spiders." He looked round at them all. "Anyone as doesn't like spiders, now's the time to say."

Ron put his hand up.

"You stick behind me, Ron," said Hagrid kindly.

"You can hold my hand if you like," Ginny told Ron.

"Piss off, Ginny."

​

The Forbidden Forest was darker than Harry remembered, even in daylight.

The trees closed in over their heads within the first hundred yards, great ancient oaks and beeches with trunks as thick as houses, and the light that came down through their leaves was green and dim and strange, like light at the bottom of a pond. The path was old and narrow and half grown over. Fang the Second went ahead with his nose to the ground, whining. Hagrid went after him with the lantern. The rest of them followed in a long, uneven line, not talking much.

Theo was walking beside Luna. Harry could hear them a little way behind him on the path, Luna pointing things out in her soft, interested voice and Theo answering, and he noticed that Theo was talking to her more easily than he had to anyone since Monday. At one point Harry heard him laugh out loud, a quick, surprised, delighted sound, as though it had escaped without permission.

"Nargles," Luna was saying. "In the mistletoe. You can tell by the way the berries droop."

"Are you quite sure it isn't just that mistletoe droops?"

"Oh, yes," said Luna. "Mistletoe is naturally very upright. It's the Nargles."

"Of course it is," said Theo warmly, and Harry heard in his voice that he didn't believe a word of it and didn't mind at all.

Further back, Pansy had fallen in beside Ginny. Harry couldn't see what they were up to, but every so often he heard a swish, and then Ginny saying, "Wrist."

Draco walked by himself.

He walked a little apart from everybody, near the back of the line, with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the path. He hadn't looked at Harry once all day. He'd spoken to Goyle, and to Theo, but not to Harry. Harry had thought about dropping back and walking with him, twice. Both times he'd found he had no idea what he'd say when he got there.

Hermione didn't wait for him to work it out. A little further on she dropped back, without any fuss, and after a while Harry heard her voice behind him on the path, low, and then Draco's, and then the two of them disagreeing, in increasingly technical terms, about whether hawthorn wands really did suit a conflicted nature or whether that was simply what Ollivander said about any wand he couldn't sell. It went on for the best part of a mile. At one point Theo put in, over his shoulder, that in the tree alphabet hawthorn was úath, and that the old bards had glossed it three ways: a meet of hounds, a blanching of faces, and most difficult at night. Draco said that was enormously helpful, thank you, Theo. Hermione wanted to know which bard. Harry kept his eyes on the path. It was more than anyone had got out of Draco since Grieve came to the gates.

​

The centaurs came out of the trees about an hour in.

They came silently, the way centaurs always did, so that one moment the path ahead was empty green gloom and the next it was full of them: a dozen at least, bows in their hands, standing in a loose half-circle across the way. At their head was a great black-haired centaur with a wild dark beard and a face like a thundercloud, and beside him, pale gold and quiet, a centaur whose blue eyes Harry would have known anywhere.

"Firenze," said Harry.

Firenze inclined his head. The black-haired centaur did not.

"Bane," said Hagrid warily.

"Hagrid." Bane's voice was deep and harsh. His eyes went over them, slow and contemptuous, one after another. "You bring humans into the Forest. A great many humans. And some of them," his gaze lingered on Draco, and on Pansy, and on Theo, "carry the marks of those who burned our trees ten years ago."

"They're with me," said Harry.

"That is not a recommendation."

Behind Harry, somebody moved. It was Theo. He stepped out of the line in his bottle-green coat, swept the claret scarf back over one shoulder, and bowed to the assembled herd, a long, deep, extraordinarily elaborate bow with one hand pressed flat against his heart, of a kind that Harry had previously only seen in paintings.

"Gentlemen," said Theo. And then, to a dappled grey centaur at the edge of the half-circle, with a second, slightly smaller bow: "Madam. Charmed, I'm sure."

Twelve centaurs regarded Theo in deep and incredulous silence.

"What," said Bane, "is that?"

"He's with me too," said Harry.

Bane's lip curled. He lifted his bow, not quite aiming it, but not quite not.

"The Forest is closed," he said. "The sky has been wrong for two months. The dead are restless under the hills, and the herd will not have humans tramping through its heart on some errand that will bring them down on us. Go back."

Harry stood his ground.

Later, Draco would tell him that the Forest went quiet. Not silent, exactly. But everything in it seemed to stop and listen: the birds in the high branches, the wind in the leaves, the small things moving in the undergrowth. Harry didn't notice. He was looking at Bane.

"I walked through this Forest once to die," he said. He didn't raise his voice. "You were there. You watched me do it. None of you stopped me, and none of you helped me, and I didn't ask you to." He took one step forward. "I'm not asking you for anything now, either. I'm telling you where I'm going. You can come with me, or you can get out of the way."

He left his wand in his pocket. He had no need of it.

Bane looked at him. Something moved behind his dark, furious eyes, and Harry couldn't have said what. Then, an inch at a time, the great bow came down.

"The herd will not follow you, Harry Potter," said Bane. "But it will not stop you."

He turned, and the herd turned with him, and in a moment they were gone into the green gloom, as silently as they had come. Only Firenze stayed. He looked at Harry with his calm blue eyes, and then past him, to the back of the line, where Draco was standing.

Harry kept his eyes on Firenze. He could feel it anyway.

"The stars are clearer beyond the spiders' hollow," said Firenze. "Go quickly. It will be dark early tonight. Earlier than it should. The Hunt has been riding in the east."

​

The thestrals found them an hour later, in a clearing full of silver birches.

There were perhaps a dozen of them: great, bony, black-winged horses with blank white eyes and dragonish heads, standing among the pale trees like shadows that had decided to stay. They lifted their heads as the line of people came into the clearing, and then one of them — a young one, not quite full-grown — walked straight across the clearing to Luna and put its nose into her outstretched hands.

"Hello," said Luna, delighted. "You've grown."

Most of them could see the thestrals now. Harry could see it on their faces: Ron, and George, and Hermione, who had watched people die in the Battle and had seen these creatures ever since, and Neville, who had seen them since he was a boy. Goyle could see them. So could Draco; Harry had known that for years, and had never asked.

Pansy couldn't. She was staring round the empty clearing, deeply uneasy, watching Luna stroke thin air.

"What's she doing?"

"Thestrals," said Ron quietly beside her. "There's a whole herd of them. Great ugly things, but they’re all right. We flew on them once. Couldn’t see what I was sitting on, which probably helped. You can't see them unless you've —" He stopped.

"Oh," said Pansy. She looked at the empty air in front of Luna. "I was in the dungeons. For the Battle. They sent all of Slytherin down to the dungeons, and we just — sat there. We heard it all. We didn't see any of it." Her mouth twisted. "I suppose that's rather the point."

For the first time that day, Theo was without a remark.

He was standing at the edge of the clearing in his velvet coat, and he was looking at the young thestral nosing at Luna's hands: straight into its blank white eyes, the way nobody looks at thin air.

Luna saw him looking. Harry saw her see it, and saw her face change, very slightly.

"You can see them," she said.

Theo's jaw tightened.

"You told me you weren't there," said Luna gently. "When your mother died. You said you weren't allowed."

"I said I wasn't allowed to be there." Theo's voice was quite light, quite steady. His eyes didn't leave the thestral. "I was behind the door. There was a crack by the hinge. I was seven." He smoothed the claret scarf flat against his coat, as though that mattered. "My father never knew."

Luna, who had never seen the point of saying sorry for things that weren't anybody's fault, simply walked the thestral over to him and took one of his hands in hers, very matter-of-factly. She drew it forward and laid his palm flat against the young thestral's neck, and held it there.

The thestral turned its head, and looked at Theo out of its white eyes, and blew a long warm breath over his fingers.

"There," said Luna. "She likes you."

"How can you possibly tell?" said Theo. His voice cracked in the middle.

"Because she hasn't eaten you," said Luna.

Theo laughed. It came out of him wet and broken and startled. His hand stayed on the thestral's neck.

​

They smelt the spiders' hollow before they saw it.

It was a dank, sweetish, rotten smell, like old meat left out in the rain, and it came drifting up through the trees as the path began to slope down into a long, dark, overgrown valley. The trees there were black and twisted. Great grey sheets of web hung between them like dirty washing. Hagrid stopped at the top of the slope, and lifted his lantern, and his face in its light was very grave.

"Aragog's lot," he said. "His grandchildren now, mostly. Great-grandchildren. They never much liked people, an' since he passed, they like 'em even less." He looked round at them. "We go quiet. We go quick. We don't stop for nothin'."

"What if they —" Ron's voice had gone high and thin. He cleared his throat and tried again. "What if they notice us?"

"Then we don't stop for nothin' faster," said Hagrid.

They went down into the valley in single file. It was very quiet. The webs hung all round them, grey and heavy, stirring slightly in no wind at all, and here and there among them Harry saw shapes wrapped in white silk that he didn't look at for long. Ron was walking directly in front of him, rigid from head to foot, his eyes fixed on the back of Hagrid's coat and his wand clenched so hard in his fist that his knuckles had gone white.

He was also, Harry realised after a while, talking. It was very quiet and very fast, and it seemed to be addressed to the valley in general: "— and I'll be nicer to Percy, and I'll write to Auntie Muriel on her birthday, and I'll read Hogwarts: A History, properly, all of it, the footnotes and everything, and I'll be nice to Malfoy —"

"I heard that," said Draco, from the back of the line.

"— within reason," said Ron.

Pansy was walking beside him. Harry saw her glance sideways at him, and then again, and then her eyebrows began to climb.

"Weasley," she whispered. "Are you actually frightened of spiders?"

"Shut up."

"You are. You're terrified. You're shaking."

"I said shut up, Parkinson —"

"You came anyway," said Pansy, in a very different voice.

Ron kept walking. Harry saw the back of his neck go red.

And then something moved in the webs above them, and every head turned at once.

It came down out of the black branches on a thread of silk, very fast, and it was the size of a carthorse. It had eight black hairy legs and eight glittering eyes and a pair of pincers as long as a man's arm, and they were clicking. Then there was another behind it. And another. And the whole grey valley was suddenly moving, the webs shaking and bulging and splitting as the things that lived in them came swarming down.

"RUN!" bellowed Hagrid. Nobody did. There was nowhere to run to.

Harry drew his wand. "Could've been butterflies," he told the back of Ron's head.

​

♫ Listen along

Harry had been in a great many fights with most of the people in that valley, one way or another, and on Friday he'd been in one with them on his side. But that had been a run for a fireplace. There was no fireplace here. It was, he thought afterwards, the first time he had seen what they could do when they stopped running, and it was worth seeing.

Ginny went first. She skipped both the hesitating and the warning; she simply stepped forward and put out a spell that took the front two legs clean off the first spider as it landed, and a second that took off two more, and the thing collapsed screaming in a heap of twitching black, and she was already turning to the next. Harry had seen Ginny fight before. He'd married her partly because of it. He had still, until this moment, forgotten quite how little mercy she could show when she decided not to show any.

Neville went second. He left his wand alone to begin with. He took a handful of something small and brown and wrinkled from his coat pocket and hurled it at the ground in front of the next wave of spiders, and where the seeds struck the earth, long pale tendrils burst up out of the soil, writhing, and wrapped themselves round the spiders' legs and bodies and pulled. They pulled the way Devil's Snare always pulled, slow and tight and without end, and the spiders shrieked and thrashed and could not get free.

"I teach Herbology," said Neville. He said it quite calmly, to the nearest spider, as the tendrils closed round its thorax. "Do you know how many things in this Forest eat acromantulas? Fourteen. I've got nine of them in Greenhouse Five."

Behind him, Theo Nott was blasting spiders out of the air with long, elegant, whip-crack curses, his green coat flaring out behind him like a cloak in a play. "Sorry, darling," he said to one, as he sent it tumbling end over end into a tree. "So sorry. Not personal. Lovely eyes." Beside him Luna was stunning them one after another, mildly absorbed, like someone picking blackberries.

Hermione and Draco had ended up back to back.

Harry didn't see how it happened. He glanced round and there they were in the middle of the valley, shoulder blade to shoulder blade, turning together as the spiders came at them from every side, neither of them saying a word. It was as though they had been doing it for years. Hermione's spells were fast and precise and absolutely ruthless. Draco's were fast and precise and elegant, which was somehow worse. When a spider came at Hermione's blind side, Draco's wand was already there. When one reared up over Draco's head, Hermione brought it down before he'd even turned.

Harry didn't have time to think about it. He was busy.

George had come down into the valley with his bag of prototypes over his shoulder, looking as if he'd been saving some of them for exactly this. He rummaged in the bag as he ran, came out with something small and brass and pointed, like a child's spinning top, gave it a sharp twist, and bowled it underarm along the ground beneath the nearest spider.

The top shot between the spider's legs and stopped dead under its belly. For a moment nothing happened. Then the spider began to turn.

It went slowly at first, round and round on the spot with its legs stuck out, like a record on a gramophone, and then faster, and then a great deal faster, until it was a black, whirring, faintly whistling blur in the middle of the valley floor, flinging off strands of web in every direction like a Catherine wheel. Then it left the ground altogether, still spinning, and corkscrewed away over the treetops with a long, thin, dwindling shriek.

"Dizzy Dervish!" George bellowed, punching the air. "Prototype! It's meant for garden gnomes!"

Goyle had watched all this with great interest. A moment later a spider dropped on him out of the branches, and he caught it by two of its legs before its pincers got anywhere near him, and swung it round his head. Once, twice, three times, slow and unhurried, the way he'd been hefting sacks of flour at the bakery, while the spider shrieked and half the valley stopped to watch. On the fourth time round he let go.

It cleared the far side of the valley and kept going.

"Oh, nice," said George reverently.

Goyle wiped his hands on his trousers. "My mum had gnomes," he said.

And in the middle of it all, Ron Weasley, who had been terrified of spiders since the age of three, when Fred and George had turned his teddy bear into one, stood rigid and white-faced in the heart of an acromantula nest and did not run.

He was shaking so hard Harry could see it from ten yards away. He was also fighting. He brought down one spider, and then another, with his teeth gritted and his eyes wide, and then a third came at Pansy from behind, dropping out of the branches on its silk, and Ron saw it and she didn't.

Harry saw Ron's face. He saw the pure animal terror in it. He saw Ron look at the thing, and at Pansy, and make a decision.

Ron hit the spider with his whole body. There wasn't time for anything else. He threw himself at it shoulder first, the way he'd have thrown himself across a goal hoop, and knocked it off its thread and sideways into the web beyond, and went down with it in a tangle of legs and silk. There was a horrible thrashing. Then there was a flash of red light, and another, and Ron came crawling out of the heap, grey-faced and covered in web, and the spider didn't.

Pansy was staring at him.

"You —" she said.

"Don't," said Ron. He was still on his hands and knees. He looked as though he might be sick. "Don't say anything. Please."

Pansy, for once in her life, did as she was asked. She reached down and hauled him to his feet by the collar of his jacket, and kept hold of it a moment longer than she needed to. Then she turned and blew the legs off the next spider that came at them, from the wrist, with a savagery Harry would never have expected from her.

And then Grawp arrived.

He came through the trees at the top of the valley with a noise like a landslide, sixteen feet tall and roaring. He waded straight down into the spiders' hollow, flinging acromantulas aside like a child flinging dolls, and the spiders took one look at him and fled, pouring away up the far slopes in a black, clicking, chittering tide, back into their webs and their dark places.

In the sudden silence, Grawp stood in the middle of the ruined valley, breathing hard, and looked down at them all with his small, muddy, puzzled eyes. Then his great boulder of a face split into an enormous, lopsided, delighted grin.

"HAGGER!" he boomed.

"All right, Grawpy," said Hagrid, beaming, with tears in his beard. "All right, there's my boy."

Grawp's eyes moved on across the little group of humans and stopped. His grin grew, if possible, even wider.

"HERMY!"

He reached down, picked Hermione up round the middle with one great hand as though she weighed nothing at all, lifted her twelve feet into the air, and held her up in front of his face to have a good look at her.

Draco made a sound that Harry filed away for later.

"It's fine," Hermione called down, a little breathlessly. "He's just saying hello." She looked Grawp in the eye. "Hermione, Grawp. We practised."

"Hello, Hermy," said Grawp happily, and set her down again, with tremendous care, exactly where he'd found her.

Draco was staring at her.

"You," he said. "Know. The giant."

"He's Hagrid's brother," said Hermione, straightening her jumper. "We taught him English."

"You taught a giant —"

"Mostly nouns," said Hermione.

​

Grawp's cave was high up in the mountains beyond the Forest, a great dark mouth in the rock with a view out across the treetops to the far grey gleam of the lake and the towers of the castle. It smelled powerfully of Grawp. And it was full, from floor to ceiling, of treasure.

It wasn't treasure, exactly. Not to anyone but Grawp. There were pebbles, thousands of them, sorted by colour into great heaps. There were bottle-tops and buttons and bits of broken glass. There were spoons, and saucepan lids, and a Muggle bicycle bell, and something that might once have been a car's hubcap. There was a whole corner devoted to things that had fallen off Quidditch brooms. Grawp led them round it all with the pride of a curator, pointing things out.

"Shiny," he said. "Shiny. Shiny. Shiny."

"That," said Draco, "is an adjective."

"Not the way he uses it," said Hermione.

Ron had stopped in front of the hubcap, halfway through a squashed sandwich. "That's off Dad's car," he said. He looked round at the heaps. "Where's the rest of Dad's car?"

"He's very organised," said Luna, impressed.

At the very back of the cave, on a ledge of rock above the rest, sat a single battered biscuit tin. Grawp stopped in front of it. He looked at Hagrid, and at Harry, and then, uncertainly, at Hermione.

"Hermy," he said. "Hermy's."

He lifted the lid of the tin with one enormous finger. Inside, on a bed of moss, lay a small, dull, black stone, rough and uneven, with a thin jagged crack running across it.

Grawp picked it up between his finger and thumb, with a care that was almost painful to watch, and held it out to Hermione.

"For Hermy," he said.

Hermione took it. She held it on her flat open palm with her fingers well clear, the way the Department of Mysteries had taught her to hold anything nobody understood. Then she turned and held it out to Harry.

He didn't want to take it. He found that he really, truly didn't. He looked at the small black stone in Hermione's hand, and felt the weight of it without touching it, and thought of a forest at night, and faces in the dark, and a voice saying you've been so brave.

He took it.

It was cold. It was exactly as cold as he remembered.

He closed his hand round it, and did not turn it, and put it in his pocket.

"Harry," said George.

​

♫ Listen along

George was standing in the mouth of the cave with the grey afternoon light behind him. He stayed where he was, with his hands hanging at his sides, and looked at Harry.

"Just once," he said. "Please."

Ron took a step towards him. "George —"

"I'm not going to do anything, Ronnie." George's eyes stayed on Harry. "I'm not going to go up any hill. I'm not going to trade anybody for anything. I know what it is. I know what he's offering, and I know what it costs, and I'm not going to pay it." His voice was perfectly steady. His hands weren't. "I just want to ask him. That's all. I've wanted to ask him for ten years."

Harry looked at him. Then he took the Stone out of his pocket, and crossed the cave, and put it into George's hand.

"Three times," he said quietly. "In your palm."

George closed his fingers round it. He turned it once, and twice, and a third time.

Nobody else in the cave could see anything. Harry knew that. He'd known it would be like this; he remembered the Forest, and the Death Eaters looking straight through the shapes walking beside him. So he watched George instead.

He watched George's face change.

He watched it go white, and then open, and crumple, all at once, like a child's. He watched George's eyes fix on a point in the empty air of the cave about a foot to Harry's left, and stay there, and fill. George's lips moved. For a second no sound came out at all. Then:

"Hello, you," said George Weasley, very quietly.

Behind Harry, Hagrid had put his great hand over his mouth.

"Yeah," George said. "Yeah, I know. I know. Ten years." He laughed, a wet, choked sound. "You look exactly the same. It's disgusting. I've gone grey at the sides, look." He pointed at his own temple, on the side that still had an ear. "Mum says it's distinguished. I think she's just being nice."

He was listening. His face was working.

"Did it hurt?" said George.

He listened. Harry watched something in his face come undone that had been done up tight for ten years.

"He says no," said George. "He says he was laughing. Percy had just made a joke." His mouth shook. "He says it was a good one, and somebody ought to tell Percy."

Ron had gone completely still.

"No. No, I'm not — I just wanted to ask you." George swallowed. "There's a bloke. He says he can bring you back. All of you. Properly. Walking about and eating and — and being a pain in the neck, and everything." His voice cracked. "He says all it costs is somebody else. Somebody who owes."

George's eyes were fixed on the empty air, and whatever he was hearing, it made the tears run down his face without him seeming to notice them at all.

Then, suddenly, horribly, he laughed.

It came out of him in a great helpless burst, half a sob and half a shout, and he doubled over with it, with one hand clutching the Stone and the other pressed against his eyes.

"He says no," George managed. He was laughing so hard he could barely speak, and crying just as hard. "He says absolutely not. He says he's finally got the top bunk, and he's not giving it up for anybody." He wiped his face on his sleeve. "And he says — he says if he comes back now, everyone'll finally be able to tell us apart, and he's not having that."

Ron made a noise that was half a laugh and half something else entirely, and put his face in the crook of his arm. Behind him, Harry heard Pansy draw a sharp breath and hold it.

George had stopped laughing. He was listening again, with his head a little on one side.

"He's kept the bottom one for me," said George. "He says there's no hurry."

"Yeah," he said, softly. "Yeah. I'll tell her."

He looked round at them all then, for the first time since he'd turned the Stone, and his eyes found Ron, and Ginny.

"He says tell Mum to stop keeping his chair," said George. "He says she's been keeping his chair at the table for ten years, and it's got his mug on it still, and he says tell her to give it to somebody who'll sit in it." He swallowed. "He says she'll know who."

Ginny was sobbing now, and Harry pulled her in against his chest, and found that he couldn't see George very clearly either.

"And he says you're to keep off brooms for a bit, Gin." George frowned over his shoulder at the empty air. "She's suspended, you —" He stopped, and listened, and shook his head. "He won't say why. He's laughing at me."

Against Harry's chest, Ginny had stopped crying. He felt her go quite still, and then he felt her fingers moving against his back, one after another, as if she were counting something. He held her a little tighter, and thought nothing of it.

"And he says Ron's still doing the window wrong." George laughed, wetly, and listened, and the laugh went out of his face. "He says the sign's still right, though. Weasleys'. Plural. He says that's you now."

Ron lifted his head out of the crook of his arm and looked hard at the empty air beside Harry, as if, with enough effort, he might see something there too.

George turned back to the empty air. He stood there a moment longer, looking at nothing, looking at his brother.

"Right," he said at last. "Right. Yeah. You too, you prat."

Then he waited, just for a second, as if for somebody to count him in, and one corner of his mouth went up.

"Mischief managed," said George.

It took him two goes to open his hand. He looked down at the small black Stone in his palm. Then he held it out to Harry, and his hand was quite steady now.

"Your turn?" said George.

Harry looked at the Stone.

He thought of two faces smiling at him out of a mirror in an empty classroom. He thought of a ten-year-old boy with turquoise hair. He thought of the front steps of Malfoy Manor in the dusk, and a question he hadn't answered, and a door closing quietly behind somebody who had stopped waiting for him to answer it.

"No," he said.

He took the Stone back from George and put it in his pocket without turning it, and when he looked up, Draco was watching him from the shadows at the back of the cave.

He made no attempt to hide it, or to look away. He was simply watching, his grey eyes steady on Harry's face, and there was something in his expression that Harry hadn't seen there since the night of the terrible tea. After a moment, very slightly, Draco nodded.

It wasn't much. But it was an answer to a question, and they both knew it.

​

It was dusk when they came down out of the mountains, and the Forest was already dark.

Firenze had been right. The sun had gone behind the hills far too early, sinking into a bank of heavy grey cloud in the west, and the light under the trees had gone from green to grey to nothing at all in the space of half an hour. They walked in a tight knot now, with Hagrid's lantern at the front and wands lit behind, and nobody talked. Grawp had come with them as far as the edge of the spiders' valley and then turned back, waving, to his cave. Fang the Second was pressed so close against Hagrid's legs that Hagrid kept tripping over him.

They were perhaps half a mile past the spiders' valley when the dog stopped dead and began to howl.

It wasn't a howl Harry had ever heard a dog make. It was high and thin and terrified, and it went on and on, and Fang the Second was shaking from nose to tail. Hagrid dropped to his knees beside him, and in the same moment Harry felt it: a cold that came up out of the ground and through the soles of his boots, and crept up his legs, and went into his bones.

Frost spread out across the path in front of them. It came from the trees on either side, white and glittering, and it met in the middle and crept towards their feet.

"Oh," said Luna softly. "Oh, they're early."

And from somewhere deep in the dark Forest behind them came the sound Harry had been told about twice and never heard with his own ears: a long, falling, belling cry, a whole pack giving tongue together, and underneath it a single low note that might have been a horn.

"Run," said Harry.

​

♫ Listen along

They ran.

They ran blind through the dark, crashing through bracken and over roots, with the lantern swinging wildly and wand-light flashing off the trunks of the trees, and behind them the baying rose and rose and came closer with every stride. Harry couldn't see what was chasing them. He could only hear it, and feel it, the chill of it rolling after them through the trees like a wave.

There were lights ahead of them now as well.

They were strung out through the trees between them and the castle, two dozen wand-lights at least, in a long, loose line that bobbed and swept as it came. Somewhere to the left, a long way off and at the top of his voice, Proudfoot was shouting. "POTTER! MALFOY! MINISTRY OF MAGIC! WE KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE! WE SAW THE FLYING SPIDER!"

"IT LANDED ON DAWLISH, POTTER! THEN IT LOOKED AT ME! WITH ALL ITS EYES! THERE WAS NOTHING ABOUT SPIDERS THE SIZE OF CARTHORSES IN THE MEMO!" His light, a long way off, was sweeping the branches over his own head. "SO NOBODY'S GOING DOWNHILL! SPIDERS LIVE DOWNHILL! WE'RE KEEPING TO THE PATH, WITH OUR LIGHTS ON! AND IF ANYBODY COMES AT YOU QUIETLY, MALFOY, IT ISN'T US! WE'RE SHOUTING!"

Three of the lights weren't sweeping. They were coming straight on through the trees, fast and low, and nobody under them was shouting anything at all. Harry knew which three they were without needing to see a face.

Hagrid swung his lantern hard left, off the path, and they went after it, downhill, between the Ministry and the hounds.

Then they came into the clearing with the silver birches, where the thestrals had been. And out of the trees on the far side, ahead of them, in a flood, came the hounds.

They were white. That was what Harry would remember afterwards: how white they were, as pure and blinding and bloodless as new snow, glowing faintly in the dark, and there were dozens of them. They poured out from between the birches like water, lean and long-legged and silent now, their baying stopped, running low and fast across the clearing. And every one of them had ears the deep, clotted red of the tips of the two hairs Draco kept in evidence vials in his pocket.

"The thestrals!" Luna's voice rang out over everything, high and clear and absolutely calm. "Everyone, they're here, they came back — get on!"

The thestrals were there. Harry hadn't seen them come. They were simply there among the birches, the whole herd, great black wings half-spread, stamping and snorting, their white eyes rolling at the hounds. Luna was already up on the young one. Ginny was scrambling onto another. Hagrid was heaving Neville up, and Goyle, and throwing a sobbing, frantic Fang the Second bodily over the back of the biggest thestral in the herd and climbing up after him. The thestral sagged in the middle, and bore it.

"What," bellowed Robards, from somewhere well back in the trees and at a sensible distance from the hounds, "in the bloomin' heck are they sitting on?"

"I can't see them!" Pansy was shouting. "Weasley, I can't see —"

"You don't have to see it, Parkinson," said Ron. "You have to sit on it." He seized her round the waist and heaved her up into the air, and she landed across a back she couldn't see with a yelp, and grabbed at nothing and found a mane.

Then the hounds reached them.

Harry lost sight of Ron. He lost sight of everything. There were white hounds all round him, snapping and snarling, and he was throwing spells as fast as he could move his wand, and beside him Draco was doing the same, and Hermione, and a wave of bitter frost went over all of them and Harry felt his fingers go numb on his wand. Somewhere behind him George was flinging iron nails out of a paper bag by the fistful; wherever they landed the hounds yelped and sheered away, but there were a great many more hounds than nails. Then the three Aurors came out of the trees behind them, and the curses started, long and ugly and the colour of a bruise, slicing across the clearing at head height. The hounds ran past the three of them as if they were trees. Harry shouted for Ron. No answer came. Between two birches at the edge of the clearing, just for a second, he thought he saw a small old woman in a lavender cardigan, standing quite still and watching, like somebody waiting for a bus. Then a hound went past, and she was gone, and Harry decided he hadn't.

"Harry!" Ginny was screaming at him from the back of a thestral. "Harry, come on —"

Draco was already astride a thestral that snorted and reared, reaching down for Hermione; Harry boosted her up behind him, and then he was up on another himself, and he looked round wildly at the clearing full of white hounds and the dark trees beyond, and Ron wasn't there.

"RON!"

Nothing. The hounds were circling now, weaving in and out among the birches, hackles up, red ears flat to their skulls. They weren't attacking any more. They were waiting.

"RON!"

And then Ron came out of the trees.

He came from the far edge of the clearing, from the darkest part of the Forest, at a flat run, with his wand held out in front of him and his red hair wild and his face white. He came straight through the circling hounds, and they let him pass. Harry had no time to wonder about that, or about anything else. Ron reached the nearest thestral and threw himself up onto its back behind Pansy, and grabbed her round the waist with one arm, and shouted, "GO! Harry, go, go!"

The thestrals went.

They rose out of the clearing in a great rush of black wings, up through the silver birches and above the dark canopy of the Forest, into the grey evening sky. The trees fell away beneath them. The cold fell away. Far ahead, the lights of the castle were coming on, one by one, in the towers above the lake.

Harry looked back.

Below them, at the edge of the dark trees, the white hounds had stopped. They were sitting down. All of them, in a long, neat, patient row along the treeline, glowing faintly in the dusk, with their red ears pricked and their pale heads lifted, watching the thestrals go.

They didn't bay. They didn't follow. They sat quite still, the way Draco had once told him hounds stop when they've found the scent they were sent for.

The three Aurors didn't stop.

They came up out of the birches on brooms, fast, with no light about them anywhere, and the first curse went past Harry's ear close enough to stir his hair. The second caught a thestral two along from him in the wing. The great animal screamed and lurched and kept on flying, with Neville clinging on round its neck.

The thestrals were faster in a straight line. The brooms were faster everywhere else. They swung in under the herd and round its flanks, and they didn't shout, or give warning, or call on anybody to stop in the name of the Ministry. They just aimed. Behind Draco, Hermione had twisted round with one hand fisted in the back of his coat, and was firing back over their thestral's tail, spell after spell.

Then Ginny put her thestral's head down, and the whole herd followed her.

They dropped out over the Black Lake in one long, rushing dive, and came level so low over the water that Harry could have trailed his fingers in it, if he'd wanted to lose them. Ginny was out in front, flat to her thestral's neck, flying the way she flew for the Harpies, and Harry saw what she was doing a second before the brooms did.

The first of the three came down after her so fast and so low that his broom was throwing up spray. He was lifting his wand when the toes of his boots touched the water.

The lake took him.

It didn't make any fuss about it. It simply closed round his feet, the way a hand closes, and pulled, and he went in to the knees and then to the waist, and his broom went skimming on across the lake without him. The other two dropped after him, grabbing for his collar, and their boots touched the water too.

Neville told them that McGonagall let them go in the end. After she'd spent some time looking for her spectacles.

"You came back for me," Harry heard Pansy say, over the rush of the wind. Her voice was shaking. "Weasley. You pushed me up and then you went back —"

"Course I did, Pansy," said Ron.

He had his arm round her waist. His wand was in his hand.

He was smiling.

♫ Listen along