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Harry Potter
The Great Hall had gone mad for Halloween.
A thousand carved pumpkins floated in slow orbits beneath the enchanted ceiling, their grins guttering and leaping in the draft. Live bats poured between them in black ribbons, breaking and reforming like smoke. Above it all, the ceiling showed a bruised purple sky scudding with fast-moving clouds, the occasional flicker of lightning. The four house tables groaned under platters that somehow kept refilling themselves, roasted pumpkin, blood-dark puddings, whole boars with apples wedged in their jaws, treacle tart stacked high enough, one would think they were trying to make a building made of treacle tart.
The Slytherin table was the loudest it had been all term, and Harry Potter sat at the center of it.
"Eat," Goyle said, pushing a plate of roast potatoes at him for the third time in as many minutes. "You're too skinny. Pucey said Seekers need reflexes, and reflexes need food."
"That's not, Greg, that's not a real thing."
"Pucey said it."
"Pucey says a lot of things."
"He said it today."
Goyle pushed the potatoes another inch closer. Harry took one to make him stop.
Across the table, Marcus Flint slammed a goblet down hard enough to make the cutlery jump. "Oi. Potter. Eyes up."
Harry looked up.
Flint was grinning. An expression one rarely sees on him. He leaned across the table, close enough that Harry could smell the pumpkin juice on his breath.
"Say it again."
"Say what again?"
"What you said after. About Bletchley."
"I didn't say anything about Bletchley."
"You said, and I quote," Flint jabbed a finger at him. "You said, 'I tend to make my own luck.'"
"That was before the match."
"It's a good line. Say it again."
"No."
"Potter."
"Marcus." Adrian Pucey dropped into the seat beside the captain. "Leave the kid alone. He's had a day."
"He's had a legendary day, Ade, which is why he should say the line."
"The line is not that good."
"The line is excellent. The line is going on my gravestone."
"Your gravestone is going to say Here lies Marcus Flint, killed by his own Quaffle."
"That would be a noble death..."
Further down the bench, Lucinda Talbot snorted into her goblet. "Honestly, Flint, you've been like this since we landed. Let the boy eat his potatoes."
"He's not eating them. He's holding one."
Harry, trapped, ate the potato.
Goyle beamed at him like he'd just passed an exam.
A hand came down on Harry's shoulder hard enough to rattle his teeth. Flint had somehow got around the table without Harry noticing. The man moved like a troll in a hurry, and now he was leaning down to bellow directly into Harry's ear.
"Youngest Seeker in a century, Potter. A century. Do you know what that means?"
"That I'm going to have bruises on my shoulder for a century?"
Flint laughed. He clapped Harry's shoulder again, harder.
"I told you he was funny," Pucey said to Talbot. "I told you."
"You told me he was clever, Adrian. Clever and funny are different things."
"He's both."
"He's bruised, is what he is. Flint, you great oaf, stop hitting him."
"I'm not hitting him, I'm congratulating him..."
"Congratulate him with words, Flint, you are literally enormous..."
Draco, from Harry's other side, had the expression of a boy whose face was going to ache in the morning from smiling too much. He had not stopped talking since they'd sat down.
"—and I told Father, I told him, in my last letter, I said Professor Snape would come around on this because Father always says that even stubborn men recognise talent eventually, and you see? You see? Here we are." Draco gestured expansively at the entire Great Hall, as though the Halloween Feast itself were proof of Lucius Malfoy's wisdom. "Father is going to be so pleased. I might write to him tonight, actually. Before bed. Just a short one, just to say—"
"Draco."
"—just to say that the Slytherin team has its new Seeker and that it is me, I mean it's Potter, but it's my friend Potter, which is functionally the same thing in terms of—"
"Draco."
Draco paused. Blinked. "What?"
"You've said this," Blaise Zabini observed from across the table, neatly separating a roast parsnip with the edge of his knife. "Three times. Since pudding arrived."
"Have I?"
"Yes."
"Oh." Draco considered this. "Well. It bears repeating."
"Does it?"
"I think it does."
"He's going to write a book about today," Tracey Davis said, appearing at Draco's other shoulder with a treacle tart in each hand. "My Day With The Team, by Draco L. Malfoy. Chapter One: I Was There. Chapter Two: I Was Still There. Chapter Three—"
"Oh, very funny, Davis—"
"—Chapter Three, My Father Is Going To Be So Pleased—"
"Davis, I swear on Merlin's—"
Tracey ate one of the tarts in a single defiant bite and slid the other in front of Harry without looking at him. She had been doing this for an hour, small offerings, delivered without comment, as though Harry were a temple she was hedging her bets with. Harry was beginning to find it funny.
Further down the bench, Crabbe was holding court.
"A hundred feet," Vincent Crabbe said solemnly, to a second-year who had clearly not asked. "Straight down."
"Wow," the second-year said, with the glazed expression of someone who had already heard this.
"My ribs." Crabbe touched his side with reverence. "Madam Pomfrey said it was a near thing. A near thing."
"Vincent," Goyle said mildly, past Harry, "you said fifty feet earlier."
"Did I?"
"At lunch."
"It was a hundred."
"It was seventy in the common room."
"The distance was revised upward after further consideration."
Goyle shrugged and went back to his plate.
Harry, to his own mild surprise, was enjoying himself.
He had come into the Great Hall braced for the slow social work of the evening, the managed smiles, the calibrated modesty, the careful redistribution of credit so that no one on the team felt eclipsed and no one outside the team felt excluded. He had been ready to work. Instead he had walked in and found the work already done, the mood carrying him along like a current, everyone too pleased with themselves and each other to require handling. The celebration was running itself.
"A toast," Blaise announced. "If I may."
"Oh, please," Talbot muttered, but she was smiling.
Blaise inclined his head toward her. "To Harry Potter." He waited until a dozen goblets lifted to match his. "Who somehow convinced Professor Snape to publicly contradict himself, in his own common room, in front of witnesses, and to call it mercy."
Laughter broke along the bench. Pucey actually clapped, and Flint was coughing.
"To Potter," Flint rasped, recovering.
"To Potter," a dozen voices chorused.
Harry raised his own goblet with the correct amount of ducked-head embarrassment. He had practiced the expression in Mrs Figg's bathroom mirror, years ago, for use with social workers. It still worked.
"It wasn't that clever," he said, which of course made everyone louder.
"Not that clever, he says—"
"Public contradiction, Potter, in his own common room—"
"I've known Severus Snape for six years, Potter, and I have never seen him retreat from anything—"
"He didn't retreat," Pucey said. "He was routed."
"He was outflanked," Flint corrected.
"He was beaten at chess by an eleven-year-old who was quoting his own speech—"
Harry felt, rather than saw, Theodore Nott look up.
Nott had been quiet all meal. He had his Transfiguration notebook open beside his plate.
Now he set his quill down.
"Chess players," Theodore said, soft, not to anyone in particular, "don't believe in luck."
It was not a loud remark. Most of the table didn't catch it. Flint was still laughing at his own joke; Pucey was recounting the corkscrew again, for what was possibly the fifth time, to a fourth-year who had clearly watched it herself.
Harry heard it.
He looked across the table.
Theodore met his eyes and then returned to his notebook.
That was all.
Harry's goblet was halfway to his lips. He completed the motion. Drank. Set it down.
Further along the bench, Daphne Greengrass had not joined the toast. She had lifted her goblet a polite inch, and let it drift down again. Now she was watching him over the rim of it, the way she had watched him the night he came back from the corridor with Sylvia wrapped around his shoulders.
Harry met her gaze.
Daphne tilted her head.
Then she looked away.
Two of them, Harry thought.
Only two.
Sylvia stirred against his throat. She had been dozing through the meal, full of a dungeon mouse and content in the heat of his skin. S
"You alright, Potter?" Flint had dropped back into his seat across the table. "You've gone quiet."
"Just full."
"He's always quiet after eating," Draco said, reaching across Harry for the gravy. "He does this thing. He just... goes still. Like a cat. It's unnerving."
Sylvia shifted.
"Speaker."
It came against his skin, quieter than breath. To anyone else at the bench it would not have registered as a sound at all.
Harry did not turn his head. He lifted his goblet. He took a slow, unhurried drink.
"Mm."
"A friend of mine in the pipes has brought word. There is a female hatchling crying in the washing-room on the first floor. The bushy-haired one. She has been there since the midday bell."
Harry's mouth was still against the goblet. The pumpkin juice had gone tasteless.
"Which one?" he breathed.
"The clever one. The one who speaks so much in the class of the tiny wizard. The one whose hand is always in the air."
He set the goblet down without looking at it.
He turned his head.
He did it the way he had taught himself to do such things, with no particular direction, as though some small sound down the Hall had attracted his notice. His eyes crossed the Hufflepuff table, the space between, and found Gryffindor.
Ron Weasley first. Impossible to miss: the red hair, the shoveling fork, a cheek bulged with potato, laughing at something Seamus Finnigan had said. A piece of the laugh escaped when he was halfway through chewing and sprayed crumbs across the table. Seamus laughed harder. Dean Thomas rolled his eyes.
Neville Longbottom sat beside them, quieter. He was pushing peas around a plate he had hardly touched. His shoulders were rounded the way they got in Potions. He did not look up.
And between Ron and Neville, where a person ought to have been...
Nothing.
Not an empty plate. Not an untouched goblet being saved. Not a place someone had risen from and would shortly return to. Only a gap.
The Halloween noise thinned around him. It went distant.
I never said I was better than anyone.
Her voice. The corridor outside Charms.
Just... leave me alone, alright? Go show off to someone who cares.
Harry had stood around the corner with Flitwick's advanced Charms book heavy under his arm, and he had listened to her feet carry her down the corridor, and he had known that she was running somewhere to be alone. He could have gone after her. He had considered it, briefly, and he had decided against.
Not his business.
Not his house.
Gryffindor drama. Bigger target. Another opportunity.
It was now past seven.
Six hours. Six hours in a bathroom. Six hours while her housemates missed nothing because nothing in the shape of her had ever been included to go missing, because the boy who ought to have been her friend was two feet away from her empty seat and had never once glanced at it.
He thought of the cupboard.
Of the way the door had sealed out the light. Of how the house went on around him, the television muttering through the wall, Petunia's voice pitched bright for a neighbour on the telephone, Dudley's feet thumping up and down the stairs, the whole of the Dursley evening proceeding as though the boy in the cupboard had never existed. He had learned, then, the specific loneliness of being forgotten in a building full of people. It was worse than being alone.
She had been hearing the feast begin. She would have heard it even from the first floor; the castle carried sound, and Halloween was loud. She would have heard the doors open and the benches fill. She would have heard the laughter, and known that her housemates were laughing, and known that none of them were asking where she was.
He brought himself back.
It took effort, more than he wanted to admit. He made himself look at his plate. He made himself pick up a fork.
She would stop crying eventually. That was what people did. She would come out. She would survive this. He had survived worse, at her age, at a younger age, and no one had come for him either, and here he sat, intact, eating treacle tart. He had learned the only lesson there was to learn from being left: that nobody was coming, and you had to be the one who came.
She was going to have to learn that too.
Everyone did.
It wasn't his job to teach her. It wasn't his job to spare her. He was a Slytherin, and first-years did not leave the Great Hall on Halloween without reasons, and he had no reason he could say aloud. Sylvia's whisper was not a reason he could say aloud. A girl he had never spoken to crying in a bathroom was not a reason he could say aloud. If he rose from the bench now, every person watching him would mark it.
He returned his attention to Draco.
"—and then, and then, this is the part I keep telling people about, this is the important part, the dodge, Potter, I know you were the one doing it but I need you to appreciate what it looked like from the ground, it looked like—"
"You've told him," Pucey said. "Draco. You've told him twice."
"I'm telling him again, because it bears—"
"Chapter Four," Tracey murmured into her goblet. "The Dodge: A Reflection."
Harry smiled.
He let Draco's voice wash over him.
He did not look at the Gryffindor table again.
The doors of the Great Hall slammed open hard enough to bang against the stone.
Heads turned. Every head. Five hundred students and the staff table all at once, and into that sudden silence came Professor Quirrell at a dead run. He looked as if he had run a marathon to get here.
He got the words out in one ragged breath.
"Troll —"
The hall had gone absolutely still.
"— in the dungeons —"
He lifted his head. His eyes rolled back.
"Thought you ought to know."
And he collapsed, straight down, a long disjointed fall that ended in a heap of purple turban and sprawled limbs at the foot of the staff table.
For a heartbeat, no one moved.
Then the hall broke.
A small girl at the Hufflepuff table screamed first. Her goblet went from her hand as she rose, and the pumpkin juice struck the white cloth and ran in a dark sheet the colour of blood. Someone else screamed in answer. A first-year near the Ravenclaw bench sat down hard and began, very quietly, to cry. Two benches over, an older boy shouted something Harry didn't catch and swore loud enough that Harry did. The Weasley twins were on their feet on the Gryffindor bench, actually on the bench, boots on the wood, craning for a better view of Quirrell's crumpled form as though this were a Quidditch match they had paid to attend.
At the Slytherin table Draco let out a scream like a little girl.
A clap.
At the staff table, Albus Dumbledore had risen to his feet, his wand in his hand, and a single spark the colour of a bruise dropped from its tip and was gone.
The Hall fell silent.
"Prefects," Dumbledore said.
"Prefects will lead their houses back to the dormitories immediately. Heads of House, please accompany them. The staff will deal with the troll."
That was all he said.
Snape had not waited.
The Potions Master was already off the dais by the time Dumbledore's sentence ended, robes snapping behind him as he moved toward the side door that led out into the entrance hall. He did not look at Quirrell crumpled on the floor. He did not look at the students. Harry noticed something as Snape left the hall, and the door was closing.
Not the stairs down.
The stairs up.
He was not going to the dungeons.
They turned out of the Great Hall. The torchlight pooled and pulled in the entrance hall as the houses sorted themselves into four long lines, Gryffindor peeling off toward the marble staircase, Ravenclaw for the west tower, Hufflepuff filing down toward the kitchens, and Slytherin toward the doorway that led into the dungeons.
Down.
Harry walked, but his mind was full.
A troll in the dungeons. That was Quirrell's word. Dungeons. The Slytherins were being walked into the dungeons. If there were actually a troll below, they were being walked toward it, which meant one of two things: the adults knew the troll was not in the dungeons, or the adults were deeply, spectacularly incompetent. Snape's direction of travel argued strongly for the first.
Hermione was not in the dungeons.
Hermione was on the first floor, two staircases above where his feet were carrying him. She was, by the simple arithmetic of geography, safer than he was.
The reasoning went neatly to its conclusion. Stay. Follow the prefects. Go to the common room.
And the reasoning was, Harry realised a half-second later, missing something.
Hermione, six hours ago, had gone into a bathroom and shut the door and cried. She did not know a troll was in the castle. She could not possibly know, she had been alone in a bathroom since midday. She was not reading the afternoon's newspapers. She was not at the feast to hear Quirrell.
If something heavy came along the corridor outside her door, if something heavy hit a wall, or knocked something over, she would come out.
Of course she would come out. She would come out to see what was happening and she would walk straight into it.
This is still not your problem, the neat cold part of his mind said. First-years do not leave the feast. You will be marked. You will be questioned. You will have no story to tell.
And then, without his permission, without anything resembling an invitation, the memory came.
He is six years old again. He is weak.
There is a star on the top of the page. A gold star, and she had said, in front of everyone, that Harry had done the addition better than anyone else, better even than Dudley, and she had smiled at him, and for the length of the walk home he had forgotten, genuinely forgotten, who he was and who he was going home to. He walks into the kitchen. He shows Petunia the page. He is smiling. He is actually smiling.
Then Vernon comes in from the front hall.
Dudley comes in behind him, red-faced, holding his own paper, the paper that has been reviewed in the car. Dudley is crying. Vernon's face is the colour of an old brick. Vernon looks at Dudley, and looks at Dudley's paper, and looks at Harry standing at the kitchen table with his gold star, and Vernon's face goes from brick to something darker.
Harry is off the ground.
He is off the ground because Vernon has him by the collar of his shirt, Dudley's old shirt, too big at the neck, and his feet are kicking empty air, and he is screaming.
The cupboard door.
His cheek against the floorboards.
The lock.
The television in the other room, muffled through the wall.
Nobody came.
Harry surfaced.
He was on the stairs down to the dungeons. The Slytherin line had strung out along the descent, Pucey at the front and Farley at the back, the torches flaring green-gold against the damp stone. Draco was still talking, very fast, about his father and about wards and about the absolute dereliction of security. Sylvia was warm against his throat.
He was near the back.
He thought of Hermione in a bathroom two floors up, sitting against a wall she had sat against for six hours, and of the sound a heavy door would make when something large pushed it open.
He thought: This is stupid.
He thought: I am going to do it anyway.
The trick to leaving a moving line was that you did not stop.
Goyle was an excellent wall.
Harry walked behind him down the dungeon stairs at a pace half a breath slower than the rest, close enough that Goyle's broad back blocked Pucey's view from the front. Farley, at the rear, was counting green ties, not heads, and Farley was also talking over her shoulder to a weepy second-year and had been for the length of the corridor. Draco, in the loop between, was still orating about wards. The stone was damp. The torches were the low green the dungeons used at night.
There was an alcove at the turn of the stair.
He slowed. One pace. Two.
Goyle's back filled the corridor in front of him. Crabbe's bandaged side was just visible past Goyle's shoulder. Draco's voice was receding: "—and the Governors will hear of this, I can promise you that much, the Governors will absolutely hear—"
The column turned the corner.
Harry did not turn with it.
He stepped sideways, one clean step, and was behind the armour. The joint of the shoulder scraped the stone as the plate shifted with him, a tiny noise that the torches and the distant chatter ate before it travelled. He pressed his back to the wall. He breathed through his mouth so his nose would not whistle.
Farley's voice went by, four feet from his ear.
"Keep up at the back, all of you, don't dawdle, the Common Room's thirty paces, let's have some pace please..."
Harry did not move until the last footstep had gone.
The green torchlight was still. The corridor was empty.
Sylvia adjusted beneath his collar, and then her head coming slowly up to rest at the hollow of his throat, where she preferred to listen from.
"Where are we going, speaker?"
"To do something foolish," Harry whispered back.
A pause.
"Good," Sylvia said. "Foolish things are often the most interesting."
Harry stepped out from behind the armour.
He went up.
He kept to the walls. He walked on the edges of his soles. He had done this before.
Up the dungeon stair. Through the short tunnel where the wall-torch had been guttering for a week. Out into the ground-floor corridor that ran past the Great Hall, and here he had to stop, flat against a pillar, as a last set of Ravenclaw stragglers hurried past in the far arcade. They did not look his way. They had their own direction to be going.
He moved again when they were gone.
He built the castle in his head as he climbed. He had been building it in his head for weeks. He had only mapped so much of it. The first floor he knew in pieces: the Charms corridor, the gallery of ugly portraits above the entrance hall, the long passage that led toward the abandoned classrooms at the east end and, halfway along, the low arched doorway marked with the small scratched figure that meant a girls' lavatory.
He did not know, exactly, which one she was in.
He knew there were at least two girls' lavatories on the first floor. He knew, from six hours of her crying unobserved, which one was likelier, the one further from the staircases, the one older students rarely used, the one where a person might reasonably expect not to be found.
He took the staircase up.
He was, by the top of the first flight, running.
The smell hit him on the half-landing.
His hand began to shake.
He stopped in the middle of the staircase and looked at his own hand, and watched the end of his wand tremble against the dimness.
He ran through every spell he knew. It took less time than he would have liked.
Lumos. Nox. Wingardium Leviosa. Geminio. A Silencing charm, badly. A Locking charm his books had been quite clear required more power than he had. The transfiguration of a match.
None of it. None of it was for this.
He was an eleven-year-old boy on a staircase with a holly wand and a full stomach and a snake around his neck.
Sylvia hissed, very soft, at the hollow of his throat.
"The smell is wrong, speaker. Whatever walks up there is bigger than me. Bigger than many of me."
"I know."
He was still not moving. His feet had taken him to the middle of the flight and his feet had stopped there, and his feet, the traitors, were perfectly willing to keep not moving.
"You could still turn around."
"I know."
He took the next step up.
He heard her before he saw her.
A scream, high and thin, cut off halfway into a sob. Then another, worse. Then the wet wood-splintering crack of something heavy hitting something heavy, and a bellow that was not a human sound at all.
Harry rounded the corner.
The bathroom door was gone. What was left of it lay in splinters across the corridor. The smell came out of the doorway in a wave so thick it was almost visible. He gagged. He swallowed the gag down.
He looked in.
The troll filled the room.
It had to be twelve feet. Its head was bent against the ceiling, pressed down against the stonework. Grey skin like wet leather. Warty growths the size of Harry's fist running down the line of its shoulders. The club it held was a torn length of tree trunk, roots still hanging off the fat end, and it was swinging lazily, trying to find the source of screaming.
The sinks along the left wall were rubble.
One of the stalls was kindling. The others were leaning.
Hermione was behind the last row of sinks, pressed into the corner where the wall met the tile, her arms wrapped around her knees and her knees pulled up to her chest. Blood ran down her forearms in thin bright lines where splinters had caught her. Her face was wet. Her wand lay ten feet from her hand, out on the open floor, between her and the troll.
She saw him.
Her eyes went enormous. She shook her head, hard, violently, both hands coming up to her mouth. No. Go. Go.
Harry did not go.
Something in him had gone cold and flat. The fear had not left, he was still afraid, but he would not let himself be frozen.
Spell list. What do I have.
Lumos. Useless.
Nox. Worse than useless.
Wingardium Leviosa. Not that thing. Not twelve feet of it.
Geminio. Silencing. The match charm.
Nothing.
The troll turned.
It had not seen him yet. It was turning toward Hermione's corner again, lifting the club for another swing, and Harry had perhaps two seconds, and no weapon and no plan, and the cold flat part of his mind said...
Wingardium Leviosa Interius.
Through glass. Through a barrier. Through...
Through skin?
He did not have time to decide if it was a good idea. He had time for it to arrive in his mouth.
He raised his wand. He did not aim at the head. The head was too far and the skull was too thick and he did not know what a skull did to a levitation charm. He aimed at the chest. Left side. Where a human heart would be, if a troll's heart was in the same place a human's was, and if it wasn't he was about to find out in some other way.
"Wingardium Leviosa Interius!"
The spell went out of him the way all his best spells went out of him.
The troll staggered.
Back a half-step, then a full one, the huge wart-knuckled hand flying up to clutch its own chest. It let out a wet surprised sound.
Dark blood welled up out of its tear ducts.
From inside. Two thick slow trails of it, down the grey skin under each eye, pooling in the creases beside its broad flat nose.
Harry held.
The magic was too much; he could feel himself getting exhausted from using such a powerful spell with so little magic in him. His hand began to tremble. The end of his wand described a small uncontrolled circle. His vision went narrow at the edges, the corners of the bathroom dimming first.
Hold.
The troll staggered again. The club dropped from its other hand and hit the tile with a crash that shook the floor.
Hold.
A thin line of blood appeared at the corner of its mouth.
Harry's knees buckled.
He caught himself against the doorframe. He did not remember putting his hand out. His hand was on the doorframe and his wand arm was up and the troll was coming at him now, three lurching floor-shaking steps, one hand still clutching its chest, the other swinging wide, snarling...
He let go.
The spell broke.
The troll stumbled, the invisible hand inside it had released whatever it had lifted, and for a confused half-second the creature seemed almost to rock back on its heels, the pressure inside its chest gone. Then it roared with rage.
The club was on the floor between them.
"HERMIONE, RUN!"
She did not move.
She was frozen in her corner, both hands pressed to her mouth, her eyes wide and blank with shock. The scream had gone out of her. She was looking at Harry and at the troll and at nothing, her body locked.
"HERMIONE!"
She flinched, and then she was moving, scrambling along the wall on her hands and knees, snatching her wand off the tile, stumbling upright. The troll was three paces from Harry. She ran past its legs. It turned.
It swung at her with his bare hand.
Missed. The hand caught empty air and the momentum pulled the thing half around, and it caught sight of Harry again, standing in the doorway with his wand up and his knees wobbling, and it reached for him instead.
Its hand came toward his face.
Harry did not think.
"Wingardium Leviosa!"
The club came off the floor.
It came up slowly. It was too heavy. His first-year Levitation Charm had been perfected on a feather and refined on a match, and now he was trying to haul up a weight that was three of him, possibly four, possibly more, and the spell went thick against his wand.
The troll's hand was still coming.
Lift. Lift. Lift it you useless —
Fury. Fury gave him the last foot of it. Something white and furious and completely unreasonable, and the club lurched up the remaining distance in a rush that tore at the inside of his chest, and now it was above the troll's head...
He flicked his wand down.
The club fell.
A wet deep fracturing crack echoed, then the softer collapsing impact of the wood finishing its travel through the bone and into the meat beneath. The troll folded. Straight down, knees giving out at the same moment the head went, and it hit the tile hard enough to crack four of them in a neat radiating line.
It twitched once.
It went still.
The bathroom was silent.
Harry's wand arm was still up. He could not seem to lower it. Somewhere far away he could hear a high thin whine in his own ears. His breathing was all wrong, too fast and too shallow, and his legs were shaking so badly he could feel it in his teeth.
He locked his knees.
He did not fall.
Hermione was in the doorway. He had not seen her come back but she was there now, one hand clamped across her mouth, the other white-knuckled around her wand, and she was shaking so hard he could hear it, a fine high rattle of teeth on teeth.
"You..." She tried again. "You came."
Harry nodded. Once. It was all he could manage.
She took a step toward him. She stopped. She started to cry, properly, and then her arms were around him, and Sylvia almost attacked her, but stopped, realizing she was not going to hurt them.
"Thank you," she said, when the breath came back. "Thank you thank you thank you —"
"Are you hurt?" Harry said.
She shook her head, and then looked at her own arms and seemed to remember. "Just, cuts. From the wood. I'm... I'll be alright." Her eyes came back to him. "Are... are you ..."
"I'm fine."
Something moved against his throat. Sylvia lifted her head. Her tongue tasted the air with quick careful flicks, and her dark eyes found Hermione, and Hermione saw her, and her eyes went wide again.
"Oh," Hermione said, very quietly. That was all.
Harry made his knees work.
He walked toward the troll.
Each step shook a little. He did not look at Hermione as he passed her and he stopped beside the troll's outflung arm, and he knelt.
He drew the knife from inside his robes.
It was a small folding blade, serviceable, with a silver handle. Draco had given it to him the week after Mulciber, wrapped in green silk, with a short ornate speech about practical purposes that Harry had understood at once and accepted without comment. He had carried it in his inner pocket since. He had never used it.
He used it now.
The troll's hide was tougher than he expected. It took him three passes to get the blade started through the thick leather of the arm, and then the skin parted in a long clean seam, and Harry worked a strip free, perhaps four inches across, perhaps eight long. He did not look at what was under it. He folded the strip, still warm, and slid it into the inside pocket of his robes.
He wiped the blade on the troll's hide. He closed it. He put it away.
"What... what are you doing?" Hermione's voice from behind him.
"Taking a justification," Harry said.
"A what?"
Before Harry could tell her to go back to the Gryffindor Common Room, they both heard noises coming towards them.
Harry knew he had some explaining to do.
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