1st September 1995, the Hogwarts Express, late morning
The scarlet engine had barely cleared the smoke of King's Cross before Ron and Hermione were summoned away to the prefects' carriage, departing with two very different airs — Hermione brisk and bright with purpose, Ron tugging at his new badge as though it might bite him.
The rest of them found a compartment soon enough, and it was already half-claimed: Astoria and Daphne Greengrass were installed by the window, and the moment Luna appeared in the doorway, Astoria let out a small shriek of delight and hauled her bodily down into the seat beside her.
"You are not sitting all the way over there," Astoria declared, and the two of them plunged at once into full and rapid summer-debrief, heads together — but not before Astoria shot Harry a look of such pure, gleeful, matchmaking menace over the top of Luna's head that it could have curdled cream.
Harry, who had survived a graveyard and a fortnight of Atid Stella golems, did not flinch. He simply sat down on Luna's other side and leaned, with great deliberation and no expression whatsoever, just slightly into her shoulder.
Astoria's mouth fell open in scandalised glee. Luna, serene, reached over and patted Harry's knee as though rewarding a clever pet.
Ginny dropped in next and fell into easy conversation with Daphne — leaving Draco to his book and Neville to the small potted plant he'd produced from his bag and was tenderly misting, and the compartment settled into the particular contented hum of people who had spent a whole summer together and were glad to be doing it again.
Ron and Hermione reappeared an hour on, full of intelligence from the prefects' carriage.
"New prefects," Hermione reported, dropping into a seat. "For our year. Ernie and Hannah for Hufflepuff, Anthony and Padma for Ravenclaw — and for Slytherin—" a small pause "—Theodore Nott. And Pansy Parkinson."
Every eye in the compartment turned, as one, to the three Slytherins in it.
Astoria gave a cold little snort and went back to the window. "Hardly a surprise."
"It isn't," Draco agreed, setting his book down, his face gone serious. "Think about what's happened. The Dark Lord's back. So the families who always wanted him back — the pure-blood-supremacy lot — they're walking taller now. Lifting their heads. And the rest of us—" his jaw tightened "—the ones who don't want any part of it, we're the ones expected to keep quiet and keep down."
He looked round at them, and there was iron under the weariness. "But it isn't the end of it. I promise you that. We are not letting that rotted, out-of-date filth crawl back up into the light and call itself the future. Not without a fight."
"Hear, hear," said Ron warmly.
"And if it's any comfort," Hermione added, with a sweetness that had teeth in it, "the entire ideology rests on the premise that pure-bloods are cleverer — which is a difficult position to defend when their flagship intellect is Pansy Parkinson."
Even Daphne — usually the picture of poised, disciplined elegance — laughed at that.
The good humour lasted precisely until the compartment door slid open and Theodore Nott appeared in it, two heavyset cronies filling the corridor behind him, the new prefect badge gleaming on his chest.
"Potter." His gaze travelled lazily round the compartment. "And the blood-traitor zoo in full session, I see." His eyes found Ron's badge, and his mouth curled. "A prefect, Weasley? Over Potter? They must have been truly desperate." A soft, nasty laugh. "Though I suppose it suits... Ah.. And here are the leaders of the blood-traitors themselves — Malfoy, and the Greengrass girls. How far the old families have fallen."
Draco's face went cold and still. Daphne's elegance acquired a distinctly glacial edge — but before either could speak, Ron was on his feet.
"Desperate, were they?" Ron said cheerfully. "Funny — I'd have said it was your lot looking desperate, Nott, what with your dad's hero rising from the dead and the entire planet posting a bounty on him. Must be hard, picking out new dress robes for the victory party when there might not be a victory. Or a party. Or a Nott left standing to attend it."
Theodore's smirk slipped.
"And do mind the 'blood-traitor' talk," Hermione added pleasantly, examining her nails. "It's such a tired line, Nott. You'd think a freshly minted prefect could manage an original insult. But then originality rather requires imagination, and imagination requires—" she looked up, bright-eyed "—well. We covered that, didn't we, about the Parkinson appointment."
Theodore's throat worked, but nothing came out of it.
And Astoria, without even turning from the window, delivered the coup de grâce in a voice of bored, aristocratic frost: "Do shut the door on your way out, Theodore. You're letting the common in."
The cronies actually winced. Theodore went a blotchy red, found he had no exit line equal to the room, and removed himself with as much dignity as he could carry — which was not much.
Harry let out a long breath as the door banged shut. 'Another year of Nott.' He could already feel the shape of it.
"He gets so cross," Luna observed mildly, to no one in particular, "for someone whose entire personality is being rude about other people's families. I think he might be unhappy." She considered. "Or possibly he's just full of Wrackspurts. They cluster in people who can't stop sneering. It clouds the brain."
The compartment dissolved into laughter, and the shadow Nott had brought went out with it.
...
Hogsmeade station, when they reached it in the blue dusk, was missing something.
"That's not Hagrid," Harry said, scanning the platform. Where the great familiar bulk should have been booming firs'-years, this way, there stood instead the brisk, grey-haired figure of Professor Grubbly-Plank, lantern raised, marshalling the smallest students toward the boats exactly as she had done during Hagrid's absences last year.
Harry's stomach gave a small uneasy turn, but the crowd swept them on toward the carriages — and there, at the carriages, he stopped dead.
They were being pulled by horses.
Not the empty, self-drawn carriages others remembered. Great gaunt winged things stood in the traces — skeletal, leathery, black as a hole in the night, with white reptilian eyes and vast dragonish wings folded against their flanks. Beautiful, in a stark and dreadful way.
"Threstrals?" he said, half to himself. Then, to Ron and Hermione: " So they were used as the horses... "
Ron followed his pointing finger and frowned. "What horses, mate?"
"The ones pulling the — they're right there, Ron, big black—"
"Harry." Hermione's voice had gone careful. "There's — nothing pulling the carriages. There's never been anything pulling the carriages."
A flicker of unease crossed Ron's face. Harry looked from one of them to the other, and back to the very solid, very visible creatures in the traces, and a small cold doubt opened in him as he suddenly remember a quite dreadful characteristic about them but before he could raise his voice—
"Thestrals," said Draco quietly.
They all looked at him.
"They're called Thestrals." Draco's voice was even, almost gentle. "They've always pulled the carriages. Most people just can't see them." He met Harry's eyes, then Luna's, and something passed between the three of them, unspoken. "You can only see a Thestral once you've seen someone die. Properly seen it. Understood it... That's all."
The compartment went quiet. Hermione's hand flew to her mouth — "oh," she breathed, the memory surfacing all at once, the reading clicking into place — and she shot Harry and Luna a stricken, sorry look.
They returned it with two small, gentle, identical smiles. It's all right. We know. It's all right.
Ron, opening his mouth on what was visibly about to be a profoundly ill-timed question — so what did you two SEE, then — was detained before the first word fully formed: Daphne's hand closed on one of his arms and Astoria's on the other, and the two Greengrass sisters steered him bodily up into the carriage with the smooth efficiency of people defusing an unexploded Weasley.
The carriage swayed up the dark road toward the castle, its lit windows glittering ahead through the trees.
"I keep wondering where Hagrid is," Harry said, watching the lights. "He'd never miss the start of term. Not Hagrid."
"His mission," Hermione said quietly. "Remember? At the end of last year — he told you he had something secret to do for Dumbledore. With Madame Maxime."
The group exchanged a look. They'd all heard enough, by now, sitting at the edges of the Order's quiet — knew enough of the shape of things — to put it together: a half-giant, a fellow half-giant, a secret errand at the dawn of a war.
"The giants," Draco said, very low. No one disagreed. And no one said anything more, because some guesses are better left sitting quietly in the dark.
The mood was rescued, as it so often was, by Ron — who launched, with total commitment, into a defence of treacle tart as the supreme glory of the welcome feast, drawing Astoria into furious opposition, she held, with aristocratic conviction, for the roast pheasant, and the argument carried them merrily the rest of the way up, neither side yielding an inch.
Near the top of the road, Harry noticed Hermione reading a letter, her face lit from within.
"Good news?" he asked.
"From Viktor." She tucked it away, glowing. "He's got a — a surprise for me, he says. And that he'll be 'with me soon.'" She bit her lip on a smile. "I think he means he's coming to visit. A Hogsmeade weekend, maybe. I can't wait — I've been counting—" She caught herself, and laughed. "Anyway. Soon."
Harry, who had a certain amount of inside information about how the adults in his life arranged surprises, said only, "That's brilliant, Hermione," and kept his face entirely innocent.
...
The Great Hall blazed with its thousand floating candles, the four long tables filling, the enchanted ceiling deep and starry overhead.
The Sorting Hat, when the first-years had been led in and it was set upon the stool, did not sing the song they expected. This year its verses carried a warning — of a castle that must not divide against itself, of four houses that must stand together or fall apart, of dark days that called for unity over old rivalry. The Hall listened, and a faint unsettled murmur ran through it as the last line died away.
The feast came and went in its golden plenty. And then Dumbledore rose for the start-of-term notices.
He got through perhaps two of them.
"Hem, hem."
The sound landed on Harry like a dropped stone. He went rigid.
A squat figure in cardigan-pink had risen at the staff table and was clearing her throat with that horrible girlish little cough, beaming round at the Hall as though it were a roomful of slightly slow children she had decided to be patient with. Dolores Umbridge.
Up and down the staff table, the professors' faces had set. And down at Gryffindor, Ron and Hermione turned to each other with matching disbelief — her, here, surely Dumbledore knows what she is — while Harry simply watched the pink witch with eyes gone flat and cold.
She had, it transpired, been appointed the new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher. Grubbly-Plank, Dumbledore added smoothly when he reclaimed the floor, would be continuing to cover Hagrid's Care of Magical Creatures classes — which only deepened the bewildered glances passing between Harry's friends.
But first they had to endure her speech.
It was long, and it was dull, a syrupy meander of progress and preservation and pruning practices that ought to be prohibited, delivered in that simpering coo — and most of the Hall had glazed over inside a minute. But Harry saw Hermione's eyes narrow, then sharpen, then go cold, as she listened through the syrup to the thing underneath it.
"She's not making a speech," Hermione whispered. "She's making a threat. Listen to it — 'the Ministry has always considered the education of young witches and wizards to be of vital importance' — the Ministry. They're coming into Hogwarts. They're putting their hand on the school." Her jaw set. "That's what she's for."
Umbridge sat to a smattering of bewildered, dutiful applause, looking enormously pleased with herself.
And then Dumbledore reclaimed the evening — and the night turned.
"Thank you, Professor Umbridge, that was most illuminating," he said, with a courtesy so perfectly weighted that her smile flickered. "Now — to happier announcements."
His eyes warmed, and swept the Hall. "This year, Hogwarts is honoured to take part in something new. An exchange — of friendship, and of learning — with two of our sister schools across the seas. Uagadou, and Ilvermorny."
A ripple of astonished interest ran the length of the Hall.
"Eight of our own students — two from each house, of fifth year and above — have travelled this term to study at those great schools. Among them—" and here a number of Ravenclaws sat up "—Miss Selene Goshawk, to Ilvermorny."
Harry's eyes narrowed in pure private amusement. 'Ilvermorny. Where a certain Horned Serpent champion happens to be.' Down the table, Neville caught his eye, plainly thinking of Robert Thornwood too, and the two of them shared a grin that needed no words.
"And in return," Dumbledore went on, "Hogwarts welcomes four guests of her own."
Every head turned toward the great doors, where four figures had appeared, walking up the Hall as their names were read.
Two from Uagadou. Two from Ilvermorny. They were Sorted, one by one, into their houses — and as the last name was called, Rolf Scamander, of Ilvermorny, to Ravenclaw, Harry felt something pass through him that he could not name. Not danger, exactly. Not a threat to his life. But something — a strange, prickling, half-recognised attention, like the danger-sense his gaze-perception gave him, gone almost before he could grasp it.
He blinked, and it was gone, and the boy — sandy-haired, open-faced, gazing round at the enchanted ceiling with frank wonder — looked about as menacing as a Niffler.
'Paranoia,' Harry told himself. 'You've spent the whole summer training for a war. Of course you're jumping at shadows.' He let it go.
"And one announcement more," said Dumbledore, and there was a twinkle in it now. He gestured to a side door near the staff table.
A figure stepped out.
A ripple — and then a roar — went up from one end of the Hall as the Quidditch-mad among the students recognised him: the famous surly profile, the slightly duck-footed walk, unmistakable even out of his playing robes.
Hermione, who had been quietly rehearsing her first night's prefect duties, felt Ron's elbow drive into her side. She looked up — and her spoon hit her plate with a clatter.
"It is my very great pleasure," Dumbledore said, over the rising clamour, "to introduce Mr Viktor Krum — who joins us this term as a teaching assistant. Mr Krum wishes to gain experience of the castle and the classroom, with a view, he tells me, to one day teaching himself." His eyes twinkled outrageously. "I trust you will all make him most welcome."
Across the Hall, Viktor Krum found Hermione's stunned face in the crowd, and — with the faint, careful, dignified solemnity of a man who had practised this and was still terrified of it — sent her a small, subtle blown kiss.
Hermione, scarlet, subtle and disbelieving and radiant all at once, caught it.
"A SURPRISE," Ron bellowed, loud enough to turn heads three tables over. "That's the surprise — he's — Hermione, he's come to teach — he's going to be here, all term—"
Harry was laughing too hard to be of any use. And Lavender, beside Ron, admiring the whole tableau of Hermione and her Bulgarian with shining romantic eyes, reached over and pinched Ron sharply to bring his volume — and his appalling timing — back under control.
...
The Gryffindor common room welcomed them back with its red-gold warmth, and Neville, who'd had the new password from a fellow prefect's notice, led Harry up. But the dormitory, when they reached it, was not all warmth.
"—because it's rubbish, that's why," Seamus Finnigan was saying, his voice raised, a copy of the Daily Prophet balled in one fist. "My mam nearly didn't let me come back this year, you know that? Reckons it's all gone mad — Dumbledore losing his marbles, Potter flaring it up for attention — it's in the paper, isn't it, every day, You-Know-Who hunted across the whole world like some — some common crook, and we're meant to believe he's going to bring down the sky—"
Harry stopped in the doorway. And before he could say a single word, Neville — quiet, gentle Neville — rounded on Seamus with a heat Harry had never once seen in him.
"Then your mam's a fool for believing a word of that rag," Neville snapped, "and so are you."
The room froze. Seamus's face went dark. "Don't you talk about my—"
"Oi—" Ron shouldered in through the door just in time, getting himself between the two of them, hands up. "All right, all right — that's enough, both of you. Neville. Easy." He looked, frankly, astonished — they all did — that it was Neville who'd had to be pulled off, and not the other way round.
Neville stood breathing hard a moment, then turned away, jaw still tight. 'He's changed,' Harry thought, with something between alarm and a strange fierce pride. 'He's not the boy who lost his toad on the train.'
Dean Thomas, sitting on his bed, broke the silence carefully. "My mum never even saw the Prophet," he offered. "She's a Muggle. Far as she knows it's a quiet year at a nice boarding school." A small wry shrug. "Sometimes I think she's got the right idea."
And from across the room, the Creevey brothers — and small Nigel, hovering loyally near them — chimed in together that their families had cancelled the Prophet outright. "We don't read lies about Harry," Colin said stoutly, and Dennis nodded so hard his hair flopped, and Nigel went pink with the courage of the declaration.
Harry felt something ease in his chest at that — at the four of them, and Dean, and furious loyal Neville. Not everyone, then. Not everyone had buried their head.
But as he lay in the familiar dark of his four-poster a while later, listening to Ron's snores start up across the room, his thoughts circled back to the squat pink figure at the staff table, and the cold settled in him again. Umbridge. Here. The Ministry's hand laid right on the school. He thought of Fudge, ostrich-headed in the sand; of Seamus's frightened mother; of a whole world reading itself a comfortable lie every morning over breakfast while, somewhere out in the dark, Voldemort gathered his strength and bided his time and waited for exactly this — for them to look away.
'How does it help anyone,' he thought, 'pretending it isn't real — right up until the morning it kicks the door in?'
He breathed out slowly, and found the blue-moon stillness, and let the cold ebb.
'Another year,' he thought, as sleep came up to meet him. 'Just — please. No more life-or-death surprises. Not this one. Let it be a quiet one.'
It was, even as he thought it, a very great deal to ask.