The fire in the Gryffindor common room had burned down to a steady, comfortable red, and the evening had the particular midwinter quiet that came when most of the house had already drifted toward homework, or cards, or bed, and the portrait hole had stopped swinging every two minutes with someone coming in from the cold. Fred and George Weasley came down the boys' staircase together, as they almost always did, and stopped on the last step, because the first thing they saw was the empty armchair by the window, the one their little sister had been curling up in for weeks, and the second thing they saw was Percy.
He was at the far table, the one under the best of the lamps, with a stack of books arranged around him in a kind of fortified square, and his quill moving at a dutiful, unrelenting pace, and his prefect's badge catching the light every time he leaned forward. He had not looked up. He did not look as if he had looked up for some time. There was a cold cup of tea at his elbow and a plate with a single uneaten biscuit on it, and his hair, which had been neatly smoothed down at dinner, had begun, very slightly, to rise again at the back, in the old familiar way it did when he had been at something too long.
Fred looked at George. George looked at Fred. They came off the step and crossed the rug, not quite as jauntily as usual, and stopped in front of the table, and for a moment Percy went on writing as if two of his brothers had not just arrived in his light.
"Percy," said Fred.
Percy held up one finger, finished the sentence, dotted the last i with the air of a man completing a treaty, and then looked up. His expression, as it travelled from the parchment to their faces, went from concentration to the particular weary patience he reserved for the two of them, and had been reserving for as long as either of them could remember.
"What is it? I'm in the middle of something. If this is about the toilets on the second floor, I have already spoken to Filch, and if it's about the toilets on the second floor because you were the reason Filch had to be spoken to, I don't want to know."
"It isn't about the toilets," said George.
"For once," said Fred.
"It's about Ginny."
That, at least, got Percy's full attention. He set the quill down in the groove of the inkwell and sat back, and his face did a brief, complicated rearrangement, as if he were trying to find the correct official expression for a conversation he had not scheduled. "What about her? She was at dinner."
"She was at dinner for about four minutes," Fred said. "She pushed some potatoes around, didn't eat them, and went upstairs. That's the third time this week."
"And she was like it last week," George added. "And the week before. You must've noticed, Perce. She's been off since the autumn. She's tired all the time. She jumps when people come up behind her. She looks as if she's been sitting exams in her sleep."
"She's a first-year," Percy said, in the tone of a boy reciting a known fact. "It's a long year, and there's a great deal going on. The attacks. The rumours. Anyone would be strained. She'll settle."
"She hasn't settled," said Fred. "That's the point."
"We think we ought to write home," said George. "To Mum and Dad. Tell them she's not herself. Mum would want to know. You know she would. She'd have an owl in the air before she'd finished reading the letter."
Percy frowned, and the frown was the one he used on younger students in corridors, the prefect frown, the I have considered this and you have not frown. He reached for the cup of tea, found it cold, and set it down again with a little click of disapproval, as if the tea had failed him personally. "There's no need for that. There's no need to worry Mum and Dad when they're already worried enough, with everything in the Prophet, and Dad's fine, and the rest of it. Ginny is perfectly all right. She's in Gryffindor. She's got us. She's got Ron. What she needs to do is keep her head down, concentrate on her work, and stay out of the corridors after dark, which is what all of the first-years have been told, repeatedly, by me, and which she is perfectly capable of doing. Writing home will only get Mum up here on the Knight Bus with a tin of toffees and a look in her eye, and I don't think the school needs that at present."
Fred and George stood and looked at him.
It was a particular look. It was the look they had been giving him, in one form or another, since they were all small enough to share a room, and it had always meant, more or less, you are being Percy again, and it had never, in all those years, done as much good as they would have liked. Tonight it had a little more weight in it than usual. The fire popped. Somewhere on the girls' staircase, a door closed.
"That's it, then," Fred said, slowly. "Keep her head down. Concentrate on her work. Stay out of the corridors. That's all you've got."
"That's all anybody's got," Percy said. "We're not aurors, Fred. We're students. The staff are handling the attacks. Our job is to keep this house in order and not add to the problem. Ginny will be fine."
"You haven't even asked her," said George. "Have you? You haven't gone upstairs and knocked and said, Ginny, you all right, you look like death, what's going on? You've just sat here with your books and assumed that because she hasn't actually fallen over, there's nothing to concern yourself with."
Percy's ears had begun to go pink. "I have a great deal of work at present. I am a prefect. I have responsibilities that you two have never, in your lives, made the smallest effort to understand. I can't be expected to—"
"To notice your own sister," Fred said.
The pink spread. Percy's hand had closed around the edge of the table. "That is not fair."
"Isn't it?" George leaned his hip against the table, careful not to disturb the fortified square of books, which was a courtesy Percy did not appear to appreciate. "Because from where we're standing, Perce, it looks as if the only person you have been noticing this year is you. You and the Ministry, and whether somebody important is going to look over here and think, there's a useful boy, let's give him a job. And lately, if we're being honest, you and the Bloodthorne kid."
Percy went very still.
"Don't," he said.
"We're only saying," Fred went on, in the helpful tone of a boy who was not, in fact, only saying, "that you spend a lot of time standing up a little straighter when he walks past. You do. We've watched you. You get this look, as if you're hoping he'll stop and ask you something official, so you can give him an official answer, and he can go away thinking, that Percy Weasley, what a credit to the school, I must mention him to somebody at the Department of Magical Doors, or whatever it is you're aiming at this week."
"It is not the Department of Magical Doors," Percy said, with dignity that was fraying at the edges. "And I do not—"
"And the joke of it," said George, as if Percy had not spoken, "is that he's the exact opposite of what you're trying to be. You've seen him. We all have. He wears those Muggle clothes, and he turns up to dinner late, and he looks as if the whole castle is a mildly interesting problem he hasn't decided whether to solve, and I would bet you a week's pocket money, Perce, I would bet you both of ours, that he would not, under any circumstances, offer you a job."
Percy had come to his feet. The chair scraped back over the floor and one of the books at the edge of the square slipped and had to be caught, which he did, automatically, and then stood there holding it as if he weren't sure what it was for. His face had gone from pink to a patchy, rising red, and his voice, when it came, had the tight, incredulous quality of a person who has been insulted in a language he is still translating.
"How would you know?" he said. "How would either of you know the first thing about what a Bloodthorne would or would not do? You don't know him. You don't know anything about him. You don't know anything about the way families like that work, or the standards they keep, or what they look for in the people around them, and you will not stand there and tell me—"
"We've been watching him," Fred said, simply.
Percy stopped.
"Here and there," George added. "Not in a creepy way, before you start. In a professional way. We like to know how people in this castle react to things. It's useful. And he, as it turns out, is a lot more interesting than most."
"He's walked into more of our pranks than almost anyone in the school," Fred said, and there was, in spite of everything, a thread of real admiration in it. "Properly walked into them. Not around them, not over them, into them. You remember the seventh-floor corridor, in November, when we polished the flags."
"I remember having to explain the seventh-floor corridor to Professor McGonagall," Percy said through his teeth.
"Yes, well, she hasn't got his sense of humour. He came round the corner with his hands in his pockets, went down the whole length of it as if he'd meant to go sliding that afternoon, landed on his feet at the bottom, and called back up that we ought to steepen the last six feet or it was going to dump people on their backs. Then he walked off. Didn't report us. Didn't even look annoyed." Fred's mouth crooked. "We steepened it the next day, just to see. It did dump people on their backs. He was right."
"And the armour on the fourth floor," said George. "The one we charmed to deliver a short inspirational address whenever anyone passed. We may have used one of your old prefect speeches for the text, which we thought you'd take as a compliment."
Percy made a noise that did not have any words in it.
"He stopped," George said. "He stood there and listened to the whole thing, all the way through the part about moral fibre and the proper use of a badge, and when it was finished he applauded, once, very politely, and told the armour the ending needed work. Then he looked over down the hall, which was where we were at the time, and he grinned. He actually grinned. Like he'd enjoyed it. Like being on the receiving end of it was part of the fun." George shrugged, as if this were a simple observation and not a small grenade rolled across Percy's table. "That's the sort of person he is, Perce. He isn't going to give you a job for standing up straight and calling him sir. He isn't even going to notice you doing it. He'd rather be laughed at by a suit of armour than impressed by a prefect, and I can't, if I'm honest, say I blame him."
For a moment there was no sound in their corner of the room except the fire, and the faint scratch of someone else's quill at a distant table, and Percy's breathing, which had gone shallow and quick. He set the book down. He set it down very carefully, as if the carefulness might keep him from doing something else with his hands, and then he came around the end of the table, and the red in his face had gone all the way to his hair, and when he spoke it was not in his prefect voice, and it was not quiet.
"You pranked him," he said. "You pranked a royal. A royal. Do you have any idea — do you have the smallest, faintest idea what you have been doing? He is a Bloodthorne. He is — you heard what I told this house in September, you sat there and you heard it, and you have been polishing floors under him and stuffing my speeches into suits of armour and grinning at him from corridors as if he were one of your little first-year projectiles. He could have you expelled. He could have you worse than expelled. There are families that have been ruined for less than a joke in a corridor, and you two have been treating him like a test subject, and you have the nerve to stand here and tell me he wouldn't offer me a job, as if that were the point, as if that were what mattered, when the point is that you have been playing gobstones with a name this castle bowed to, and if it ever comes back on this family, if it ever comes back on Dad, I will not, I will not—"
"Percy," Fred said, and for once there was no joke in it. "He laughed."
"I don't care if he laughed! I care that you thought it was acceptable! I care that you are still thinking it is acceptable, and that you came over here, supposedly about Ginny, and turned it into a lecture about my character, and his character, and who would offer whom a job, as if I have not been trying, all year, to keep this house from coming apart at the seams while the two of you treat the entire castle like a toy shop. You will leave him alone. You will leave him strictly, completely alone, and you will not speak to me about jobs, or about standing up straighter, or about anything else, until you have learned the first thing about the way the world actually works."
George looked at Fred. Fred looked at George. They both looked at Percy, who was breathing hard, and whose carefully arranged books had ceased to look like a fortress and started to look like a pile of things a boy was hiding behind, and whose badge was crooked, just slightly, from the way he had come around the table.
"Right," said George, after a moment. "Well. That's us told."
"Bugger off, Percy," Fred said, not unkindly, and not very loudly, and with the weary finality of a conversation that had gone exactly where they had been afraid it would go. "Really. Just... bugger off. We'll write to Mum ourselves, if you're not going to. Somebody in this family ought to."
They turned, together, and went back across the rug, and up the boys' staircase, and they did not look at the empty armchair by the window as they passed it, because they had already looked at it once, and it was still empty, and there was nothing more to be done about that tonight. The portrait hole stayed still. The fire went on burning. And Percy Weasley stood beside his table with his hands at his sides and his ears scarlet and his mouth slightly open, as if there were a great deal more he had meant to say and no one left to say it to, and then he sat down, very suddenly, and pulled the nearest book toward him, and stared at a page he did not read, and the quill lay where he had left it, and did not move, for a long time.
~~~
The year moved, as years at Hogwarts always did, in a series of small, ordinary steps that did not feel like much until you looked back and found that winter had gone. The rain eased. The lake took on a colder, clearer blue. The Forbidden Forest, which had been a dark smudge at the edge of every window, began, very slowly, to look like a living thing again, the first raw green pushing up along the inner track that only Hagrid and one particular second-year used with any regularity. The hospital wing stayed as it was. Colin Creevey and Justin Finch-Fletchley and Nearly Headless Nick remained where they had been since the autumn and the winter, still and staring, and the castle went on stepping carefully around them, and around the writing on the walls, and around the rumour of a monster no one had seen and everyone had an opinion about. Classes continued. The second-years went to their Defence study groups in unused classrooms and empty greenhouses and the corner of a dungeon common room, and Gilderoy Lockhart went on talking, and Lucian Bloodthorne went on not always being there to hear him.
By the last week of April the grounds were in that half-finished state spring always left them in, wet and hopeful and not quite reliable, and on a Thursday afternoon, when the last of the day's lessons had been dismissed, the staff of Hogwarts filed into the staff room for the end-of-month conference, as they had every month since September, with their notes and their tea and their various ideas of how a school ought to be run.
The staff room was a long, low, comfortable chamber on the second floor, with a fire lit against a chill the calendar no longer officially recognised, and a set of squashy, mismatched chairs arranged in a loose horseshoe around a low table already crowded with a teapot, a slightly chipped milk jug, a plate of biscuits Professor Sprout had brought up from the kitchens, and a stack of parchment that had the look of having been straightened by Professor McGonagall and then immediately disordered by everybody else. The windows stood open a crack, and the air that came in smelled of wet grass and new leaves and, faintly, of the greenhouses. Beyond the glass, at the far edge of the grounds, the forest waited in its usual dark, patient line.
Albus Dumbledore was already there when the others began to arrive, in his usual chair at the head of the horseshoe, in robes of a deep, thoughtful plum, filling his teacup with the unhurried care of a man who had learned that meetings went more easily if one was not thirsty at the start of them. Minerva McGonagall came in with a neat sheaf of notes and took the chair at his right, sitting very straight and immediately squaring the already-squared edges of her parchment. Severus Snape came next, in black, and took a chair a little apart from the main curve, and sat back with his fingers steepled and his dark eyes half-lidded, as if he were already tired of what had not yet been said. Filius Flitwick climbed into a chair that had been discreetly provided with an extra cushion and beamed around the room. Pomona Sprout followed, still in her gardening hat, which she removed, a little guiltily, when she saw McGonagall's look, and set on the floor beside her chair. Aurora Sinistra came in quietly, tall and composed, and took a seat near the window, where the fading afternoon light fell across her notes in a clean, astronomical line. Sybill Trelawney arrived in a rustle of shawls, paused on the threshold as if the room's aura would need a moment to receive her, and then drifted to a chair near the fire. Silvanus Kettleburn stumped in last but one, his wooden lower leg ticking against the floor, and dropped into a chair with a grateful grunt, accepting from Sprout a biscuit he had to put in his mouth because he had no second hand free to hold it. Gilderoy Lockhart came last, in robes of a springlike, optimistic robin's-egg blue, and took the remaining chair with a smile that travelled the room like a visiting dignitary, and found rather fewer answering smiles than it had found in September.
Dumbledore set his cup back in its saucer, and the small sound of it was enough. The room settled.
"Thank you all for coming," he said, in the mild, carrying voice that had opened a great many rooms like this one. "I know it is the end of a long week, and a long month, and, indeed, a long year, and I will try not to keep you from your dinners any longer than is necessary. As usual, we will begin with the Houses, and then I will ask for any other concerns before we turn to particular students. Minerva, would you care to start us off?"
McGonagall did not need to consult her notes, though she had them open. "Gryffindor is, on the whole, working well, given the circumstances." She did not need to name the circumstances. No one in the room had spent a month not thinking about them. "Miss Granger remains at the top of the second year and, I may say, at the top of rather more years than that. Miss Potter is solid and improving, particularly in practical work, though she has a tendency, which I have mentioned to her, to act first and consider the theory afterward. Mr Weasley — Ronald, that is — is erratic. Capable when he applies himself, which he does not always do. Mr Longbottom has struggled, as he does, but he has been trying, this term, harder than I have seen him try before, and I would like that effort noted. Mr Finnigan will, I am fairly sure, blow something up before June, but his written work has improved, which I attribute less to me than to Miss Granger's habit of organising other people's lives." A very faint dryness moved through her mouth, and was gone. "Of the older years I have no serious academic concerns. I do have, as we all have, a pastoral one. The first-years are frightened. Some of them are concealing it better than others. Miss Weasley, in particular, has looked unwell for some time, though Madam Pomfrey has found nothing obviously wrong, and I have asked her brothers to keep an eye. I would like us all to be more watchful in the corridors. I do not think that is too much to ask, at this point in the year."
There was a small murmur of agreement. Sprout nodded, firmly. Flitwick made a distressed little sound and reached for his tea.
"Thank you, Minerva," Dumbledore said. "Severus?"
Snape did not sit forward. He regarded the room over his steepled fingers and spoke as if he were doing it a moderate favour. "Slytherin is adequate." He let the word hang, which was, from him, almost a compliment. "There are the usual disappointments in the lower years, which I will not waste this room's time by naming. Miss Parkinson is sharp and lazy in equal measure. Mr Zabini could do better if he were at all interested in doing better. Miss Malfoy — Miss Draca Malfoy — has ability she prefers to spend on commentary. Her sister, in the fourth year, is another matter. Miss Vivienne Malfoy is precise, controlled, and among the better students in her year, in my classroom and, I am told, in others. If the rest of the house conducted themselves with her degree of discipline, I should have considerably less to do." He paused, and his gaze flicked, very briefly, toward Lockhart, and then away. "I will have more to say about one other student when I am asked. I assume I will be asked."
Dumbledore's eyes twinkled, just a little, behind his half-moon spectacles. "You assume correctly, Severus, but we will come to it in a moment. Filius?"
Flitwick sat up as far as the cushion would allow. "Charms is in a very good state, generally speaking. I have had some lovely work this month from all four Houses. The fifth-years are coming along nicely toward their O.W.L.s. The second-years are a particularly interesting group this year. Very keen. Very keen indeed. Some of them have been practising in their own time, I believe, which I cannot but approve, even if the circumstances that have made it necessary are..." He trailed off, politely, and his eyes, which missed very little, did not quite go to Lockhart. "Well. I am glad they are practising. That is the main thing."
Sprout took this up almost before Dumbledore had turned to her. "Herbology's much the same, Albus. The third-years nearly lost a bed of Venomous Tentacula last Tuesday, but they didn't, which I call a victory, and the Hufflepuffs are, as ever, doing their best, which is often rather better than people expect. I will say, though, that the younger ones are tired. Frightened, as Minerva says, and tired with it. It isn't only the first-years. I've had second-years in the greenhouses who jump when a leaf moves, and I don't blame them. Justin was one of mine." She stopped, and her kind, weathered face tightened. "I go up to the hospital wing, some evenings. I sit with him a little. It doesn't do anything, I know that. I still go. I do wish we had more to tell them. I do wish we had anything to tell them, if I'm honest."
"As do I, Pomona," Dumbledore said, and for a moment the twinkle was not there at all. Then he inclined his head to Sinistra.
"Astronomy proceeds as it always does," Sinistra said, in her low, even voice. "The skies have been mostly cooperative, which is more than I can say for some of the fourth-years' charts. I have no one in serious difficulty this month, and no one of unusual brilliance. I would only add that the tower is very exposed, and that I have been bringing the younger students down earlier than I used to, after the attacks. I hope that will not be taken as a lack of rigour. I consider it a lack of foolhardiness."
"Very wise, Aurora," Dumbledore said. "Sybill?"
Trelawney, who had been gazing into the fire as if it had been speaking to her personally, gave a small start and pressed a hand to her chest, among the beads. "The Inner Eye has been somewhat clouded of late. The vapours are unsettled. I have had, in my third-year classes, a most persistent feeling of something approaching, something large, though I would not, of course, dream of alarming anyone with the particulars." She adjusted a shawl. "As to the younger students, I do not receive them until the third year, but I have felt, in the corridors, a most peculiar presence, a kind of shadows-and-beasts energy, if I may put it that way, which I have not felt in this castle before, and which I thought it my duty to mention, even if I cannot, as yet, attach a name to it."
Kettleburn, who had finished his biscuit, gave a short, cheerful grunt. "If it's beasts you're feeling, Sybill, I can save you a bit of the Inner Eye. There's been more movement in the forest this spring than I've seen in years, and some of it is Hagrid's, and some of it isn't, and some of it, if I'm any judge, is that boy of ours going through the trees like he was born in them. But that's me getting ahead of Albus, isn't it? Sorry. My lot are well enough. A couple of third-years who still think a Bowtruckle wants to be picked up, and one fifth-year who will, I regret to say, probably lose a finger before the end of term if he doesn't start listening. I shall be sorry to go next year. I shall. But if the rumours about my replacement are true, you'll be in good hands, and if they're not, well, I've left you all my notes, and most of my limbs, and that's as much as any department can ask." He laughed, a dry, rattling laugh, and Sprout reached over and patted the arm he still had.
Dumbledore smiled, and the smile was genuine. "We shall be very sorry to lose you, Silvanus. Gilderoy? Any concerns from Defence?"
Lockhart sat forward with a gleam of pale blue silk and a smile that had been kept warm since he sat down. "Well, I like to think Defence is in a very healthy state, Headmaster, I do, I do. The children are wonderfully attentive. Quite absorbed. I have been taking them through some of the more instructive episodes from my own career, which I find is often the most effective way of bringing the subject to life, and I have had some charming essays in return, charming. I have no real concerns. No real concerns at all. Other than the obvious, of course, which I am sure we will come to, about regular attendance, and the importance of a student actually being in the room if he is to benefit from the instruction, but I wouldn't want to labour the point. I know how busy we all are."
He sat back, still smiling, and the silence that followed was the sort of silence in which several people, at once, decided not to say the first thing that had come into their heads. McGonagall's mouth had gone very thin. Flitwick was examining his teacup with sudden and profound interest. Snape's expression had not changed, which, in Snape, was not the same thing as nothing having happened behind it.
Dumbledore set his hands together, loosely, and looked down the horseshoe of chairs, and when he spoke again his voice was as mild as it had been at the start, and a little more particular.
"Then let us come to it," he said. "Severus. How is Mr Bloodthorne coming along?"
Something happened to Snape's face.
It was not, in any ordinary sense, a smile. Severus Snape did not smile at staff meetings, and he did not smile when he was asked about students, and he had not, in the memory of anyone sitting in that room, ever looked pleased to be discussing a second-year. What happened was smaller than that, and stranger. A tightness that usually lived around his mouth eased, very slightly, and something that might, in a kinder light, have been called pride moved through the dark of his eyes and stayed there, as if it had as much right to be there as anything else, and when he spoke, his voice had a quality in it that McGonagall, who had known him since he was a boy in this castle, had not heard from him in a very long time, and had never heard from him about a child.
"The boy," Snape said, "is extremely fond of magical creatures." He let that stand for a second, as if even he were slightly surprised to find himself beginning there. "That will not be news to anyone in this room who has walked past the grounds in the last six months and seen him going into the forest with Hagrid, or coming out of it, usually in some state of disrepair, usually talking. I made it a condition of those excursions, as you will recall, that he write a report on every creature he encountered. I had expected, I will admit, the sort of work a second-year produces when he has been told to write a report. A page. A page and a half. A dutiful list of limbs and habits, copied out of a textbook and misspelled." He paused. "That is not what I have received. What I have received, since October, would not disgrace a published reference. His paper on the common forest troll ran to the length of a short monograph and contained observations I have not seen in any of the standard works. His work on Bowtruckles is, I think, the most complete description of their social habits currently sitting on a desk in this castle. The Acromantula essay he submitted after Christmas ought, in my professional opinion, to be bound and placed in the library, and I say that as a man who does not make a habit of recommending that the library acquire the homework of twelve-year-olds. He writes as if he has lived among the things he is describing, which, I am beginning to believe, he has." Snape's fingers had loosened, very slightly, from their steeple. "I have no concerns about his Potions. He is precise, he is clean, and he does not waste my ingredients, which already places him ahead of most of his year. I have no concerns about his mind. I have, if I am to be honest in a room that has asked me to be honest, a degree of interest in how far that mind will go, if it is left alone and allowed to work. That is all I have to say."
He sat back. The tightness returned to his mouth, as if he had said rather more than he had intended and was not going to add a single word to it, and the staff room, which had heard Severus Snape speak about students for more than a decade, sat for a moment in a silence that was quite different from the last one.
Kettleburn let out a short, delighted breath, almost a laugh, and leaned forward so abruptly that his wooden leg knocked against the table and set the milk jug rattling. "That's what I wanted to hear. That's exactly what I wanted to hear. I've been waiting all year to get my hands on that boy, officially, I mean. I've seen him in the grounds, I've spoken to Hagrid, Hagrid can't go three sentences without mentioning him. Next year, when he takes my class, I shall be a very happy man, and if I weren't already going I might have put the retirement off a year just to have him. A student who can write like that about Acromantulas at twelve? Do you know how many adults I have met who can write like that about Acromantulas? I can count them on one hand, and as you can see I am already at a disadvantage there." He held up the hand, and the hook that served for the other, and grinned. "I want him, Albus. I want him in my classroom, or in Hagrid's, and I want him left to get on with it."
"I am very glad to hear it, Silvanus," Dumbledore said. "I had hoped the arrangement would prove fruitful, and it is a relief to be told, so plainly, that it has. Gilderoy, I believe you had a concern about the arrangement, if you would like to put it now."
Lockhart, who had been sitting through Snape's speech with a smile that had grown, by degrees, rather fixed, sat up and spread his hands in a gesture of the most reasonable, most pained good will. "Well, I wouldn't call it a concern, exactly, Headmaster, I wouldn't want to be difficult, but I do feel I ought to say, in a room like this, among colleagues, that it has been... challenging, shall we say, to deliver a complete Defence education to a student who is not, in point of fact, always there to receive it. Mr Bloodthorne has been absent from my class every other week since the arrangement began, and while I am sure the forest is very educational, in its own rustic way, I do worry, I do, that he is missing a great deal of essential instruction. I have tried, of course, to be understanding. I know the circumstances are unusual. I know his... background is unusual. But Defence Against the Dark Arts is not a subject one can simply pick up among the trees, and I would be failing in my duty as his professor if I did not say so."
Dumbledore nodded, as if this were a point he had been expecting and was glad to have in the open. "The accommodation was a small one," he said, "and I will admit that I agreed to it for a rather simple reason. It seemed, in September, the only way for Mr Bloodthorne to really stay at Hogwarts at all." He looked around the horseshoe, and his voice remained mild, and the mildness, as it sometimes did, made the room lean in rather than away. "He did not come here because he wished to. I was given to understand, very early, that the forest, and the work with Hagrid, and the chance to be among creatures rather than only among portraits and timetables, was the thing that might make the staying possible. I considered that a price well worth paying, to keep a student of his particular situation inside these walls, and under our care, rather than out of them. I believe most of you have come, over the year, to think it a very good idea. I would not like us to lose sight of that."
There was a general, if somewhat uneven, murmur. Sprout was nodding. Kettleburn was nodding with some vigour. Flitwick said, "Oh, a very good idea, a very good idea indeed," and then, as if the mention of the boy had unlocked a cupboard he had been meaning to open, he went on, with gathering enthusiasm. "And his Charms, Albus, I should have said earlier, his Charms are a delight. A delight. He has a way of handling a wand that I have not often seen in a student so young, as if the movement were something he had learned in a different school entirely, which I suppose, in a sense, he must have. I have had to reach for older exercises to keep him occupied. He does not show off, which I also appreciate. He simply does the work, and does it extremely well, and then sits there looking as if he would rather be somewhere with more trees in it, which I try not to take personally."
McGonagall allowed herself a very small, very dry breath that might, in a less official room, have been a laugh. "His Transfiguration is of the same quality. Precise. Unshowy. Occasionally slightly irritating, in that he will complete an exercise I had intended to take the hour and then ask, quite politely, whether there is anything else. I have been giving him else. I have not yet run out, but I will admit I have begun to plan for the possibility." She glanced down at her notes, and then, more quietly, added, "I will also say, since we are speaking plainly, that I have never, in thirty years in this castle, taught a child about whom I know so little, and about whose people I know even less. We were not told he was coming. We were not told, in any useful sense, who he was, only what his name would do when it was spoken. I have made my feelings on that subject clear, Albus, and I will not labour them now. I will only say that it is a very strange thing, to watch a boy like that work, and to have no more idea of the home that produced him than I did on the first night of term. No letters that I have seen. No family at Christmas. No one at the gates. A name the rest of the country cannot stop discussing, and a child who writes with a Muggle pen and walks down to a gamekeeper's hut as if that were the most obvious place in the world for him to be. I do not dislike him. I want that understood. I think him extraordinary, and I think the forest the making of him, this year, and I think Hagrid has done more for that boy's willingness to remain here than any of us have, including, I am sorry to say, myself. I only wish I understood him better. I wish any of us did."
Sprout, who had been turning her teacup slowly in her hands, looked up. "Hagrid adores him, you know. Properly adores him. I had it from him at Christmas, after that odd storm, the one that came in off the grounds and went west as if it had somewhere to be. Hagrid came up to the greenhouses the next morning looking as if he had been given a present he didn't know how to hold, and he wouldn't tell me the whole of it, which is unlike him, but he did say the boy had been kind to him. Kind, that was the word he used, and he said it twice. I don't know how many Slytherins I've taught who would have had a kind word for Hagrid, let alone made a habit of his company. I think that tells you as much about Lucian Bloodthorne as any name does, and I think we would be fools to forget it."
Sinistra, from her place by the window, said, very quietly, "He is competent in Astronomy. More than competent. He asked me, in October, a question about the autumn sky as it appears much farther west than Britain, a set of positions I would not have expected a child educated here to know, and when I asked him where he had seen it, he said, 'At home,' and then he smiled, as if that were not, in itself, an answer that raised a dozen others. I did not press him. I found I did not quite know how."
Trelawney, who had been listening with her head slightly tilted, murmured, "A peculiar presence. I said as much. Shadows and beasts. I did not like to attach a name, but I will say now that I have felt it most strongly when he has been in the castle, and most strongly of all on the night of that storm, though I would not, of course, claim to know what it meant. The Inner Eye does not deal in meanings so much as in warnings, and I have been, I confess, a little uneasy, though not, I think, of him. For him, perhaps. Or around him. It is difficult to say."
Dumbledore had listened to all of this with the particular stillness he used when a room was telling him more than the sum of its reports. The fire ticked. Somewhere out on the grounds a bird called, once, and was still. Then he said, "He is a great many things we have not yet found the right words for, and I suspect he will go on being so. I am content, for the present, that he is here, and that he is working, and that he has found, in Hagrid and in the forest, a reason to remain. Which brings us, I think, to the one subject in which he is not working, and about which I would welcome a little more clarity. Gilderoy, I am told that Defence is at present the only class Mr Bloodthorne is failing. Is that correct?"
The room turned, as one, toward Lockhart.
It was not a dramatic turning. It was only the small, inevitable adjustment of a dozen faces toward a single chair, but Lockhart felt it, and his smile, which had been preparing itself to be gracious, wavered, and then came back a little too wide. He gave a light, astonished laugh, as if the idea were a curiosity he had not quite been introduced to.
"Failing is rather a strong word, Headmaster. A strong word. I would say, perhaps, that his performance in Defence has been... inconsistent. He is not always there, as I have said, and when he is there he does not always seem to feel that the work applies to him, and his written answers have been, I must say, a little disappointing, given his reputation in other subjects. I have asked very reasonable questions, the sort of questions that tell a professor whether a student has been following, and Mr Bloodthorne has a tendency either not to answer them or to answer them in a spirit I can only call unhelpful. I don't like to use the word failing. I would not want it written down and made to look more serious than it is. But if one were keeping a strict account, then yes, I suppose, strictly, he is not at present meeting the standard of the class."
McGonagall had reached into the sheaf of notes on her lap. She drew out a single sheet of parchment, which she had, it was now obvious, been keeping for this precise point in the afternoon, and she looked at it over her spectacles, and then she looked at Lockhart, and her voice, when she used it, had the particular calm she reserved for situations in which she was about to be extremely unkind, and extremely precise.
"I have here," she said, "a test paper from your class, Gilderoy, which was given to the second-years in January, and which Miss Granger, who does not like to leave a document unexplained, brought to me when she could not determine, from the questions, what area of Defence she was being examined in. I will read, if I may, from the paper. Question one. What is Professor Lockhart's favourite colour. Question two. What, according to chapter three of Magical Me, is Professor Lockhart's secret ambition. Question three. In what year did Professor Lockhart win Witch Weekly's Most Charming Smile Award for the third time." She lowered the parchment. "There are ten questions. They are all of this kind. Not one of them asks the student to identify a curse, or a counter-curse, or a creature, or a single practical method by which a child in this castle might defend herself if she met something in a corridor after dark. Mr Bloodthorne, I am told, left six of the ten blank, and answered the question about the favourite colour with the words, I have no idea, and it would not help me if I did. You gave him no marks. Miss Granger, who had, of course, memorised the book, received full marks, and then came to my office in some distress because she could not see how the paper would help her protect anyone, including herself." She folded the sheet, once, and laid it on the table beside the biscuits, as if it were evidence, which it was. "If that is the standard of the class, Gilderoy, then I am not surprised the boy is failing it. I am surprised anyone is passing it, except the children who have started teaching themselves in empty classrooms, which Filius has already been kind enough to mention, and which I have also, I will add, been aware of for some time. They should not have had to. That is what we are employed for."
Lockhart's smile had become a very small, very stiff thing. A patch of colour had appeared high on each of his cheeks, and his hands, in his lap, had found each other and were holding on. "Minerva, I think that's a little unfair. A little unfair, I must say. Those questions are designed to establish whether a student has done the reading, whether they have taken the subject — and the professor — seriously, and I have always found that a class which understands its teacher is a class which is prepared to learn. As for empty classrooms, I had no idea, no idea at all, that anything of the kind was going on, and if I had been informed, of course I would have—"
"The boy excels," Snape said, cutting across him without any particular urgency, which somehow made it worse, "in every subject that is being taught. He writes work that ought to be bound. He completes Minerva's exercises with time to spare. He handles Filius's wandwork as if he had been born with a wand in his hand. He identifies plants for Pomona she has not yet introduced. He fails, uniquely, in a class whose examinations inquire after a man's favourite colour. I will leave the room to draw its own conclusions. I will only say that if the rest of us taught as you appear to teach, Gilderoy, we would have a castle full of children who could recite our biographies and could not save their own lives, and I do not, at present, consider that an acceptable standard, particularly not in a year when something in this school is already leaving children in the hospital wing."
Flitwick, who disliked an open quarrel almost as much as he disliked badly performed Charms, wrung his small hands once, and then said, very bravely for a man of his size, "I do think, Gilderoy, that if a student of Mr Bloodthorne's quality is failing a subject, the first place one ought to look is not at the student. That is all. I mean it kindly. I do. But it is a very striking thing, a very striking thing indeed, and I cannot quite see my way around it."
Lockhart looked from McGonagall to Snape to Flitwick, and then at Dumbledore, as if hoping the Headmaster might yet remember that he, Gilderoy Lockhart, was a five-time winner of a perfectly respectable award, and the colour in his face had gone blotchy, and his voice, when he found it, had a bright, improvising quality, the quality of a man reaching for a door he had not noticed until he needed it.
"Well," he said. "Well, perhaps, if that is how we all feel, perhaps the solution is a simpler one than we are making it. If Mr Bloodthorne's absences are the root of the problem — and they are, I think we can agree, a significant part of it, whatever else may be said about my, ah, methods — then the obvious remedy is to bring him back into the classroom. Regularly. Reliably. I do think, I do, that if we were to revoke the forest privileges, just for a time, just until he has found his feet again in Defence, he would benefit enormously. Back in the groove, so to speak. No more missing every other week. I would be more than happy to give him a little extra time, if that would help, to catch him up. I am sure, once he is present, and applying himself, the rest will follow. It seems to me a very reasonable idea. A very helpful idea, really, for the boy."
The idea landed in the room the way a plate lands on a stone floor.
Snape said, at once, and without raising his voice, "That is a terrible idea."
"A terrible idea," Flitwick agreed, almost tumbling over the end of Snape's sentence, his hands up as if he could physically push the suggestion back into Lockhart's chair. "Oh, no, no, no. I have rarely been so sure of a terrible idea, Gilderoy, I am sorry, but no."
"It is out of the question," McGonagall said, and her back, which had already been straight, found an additional inch. "Albus has just told us that the forest is the reason the boy is still in this school. Severus has just told us that the work he does there is some of the best student work he has seen in his career. Silvanus is leaving us a post that boy is already more prepared for than half the adults in the country. Hagrid has given him a place he is willing to stay for. And your answer, in the face of all of that, is to take it away from him so that he can sit in your classroom twice as often and fail a paper about your smile. No, Gilderoy. No. I will not support it, and I am frankly astonished you would suggest it, in this room, after what has just been said."
Lockhart's mouth opened, and closed, and opened again. "I was only thinking of his Defence. I was only trying to be helpful. I don't think there's any need to—"
"There is every need," Snape said, very softly. "You will not touch the arrangement. You will not go near it. If the boy is failing your class, you will consider, privately, why that might be, and you will not make it the forest's problem, or Hagrid's, or his. I think we have been more than clear."
Dumbledore had not interrupted any of this. He sat with his fingers lightly together and his blue eyes moving from face to face, and when the voices had died, and Lockhart had sat back in his robin's-egg robes as if the chair had become a rather less comfortable place than it had been an hour ago, Dumbledore nodded, once, in a way that closed the matter without quite slamming it.
"I think we have," he said. "Thank you, Minerva, Filius, Severus. Gilderoy, I appreciate that the absences have been a difficulty for you, and I do not dismiss the importance of Defence, particularly not this year. I will not, however, be revoking Mr Bloodthorne's privilege to go into the forest, or his work with Hagrid, which I continue to regard as one of the more successful arrangements this school has made. I will discuss the Defence marks with Mr Bloodthorne myself, and I will see whether there is a way for him to meet a standard we can all recognise as a standard, without asking him to give up the thing that has made his year here possible. I think that will do, for now." He looked around the room, and the twinkle, very gently, returned, though it did not quite reach the place where the long year was still sitting. "Unless there is anything else, I suggest we adjourn, and go to our dinners, and continue to be watchful in the corridors, as Minerva has asked, which I second, and which I would ask you all to take to heart. We still have work to do. We still have students who are not, at present, able to do theirs. I would like us to remember them, when we leave this room, as clearly as we have remembered the ones who are writing excellent papers."
Chairs began to push back. Sprout put her hat back on, at a slightly defiant angle, and Kettleburn stumped to his feet and was already, as he reached the door, telling her something enthusiastic about next year's creatures class. Sinistra gathered her notes and went out by the window side, as quietly as she had come in. Trelawney rose in a complicated movement of shawls and announced, to no one in particular, that the vapours would be clearer in May, and drifted after her. Flitwick climbed down from his cushion and paused to say, very kindly, to no one in particular, or perhaps to Lockhart, that he was sure it would all come right, and then he too was gone. McGonagall took the January test paper back off the table, folded it into her notes, and gave Dumbledore a look that said, quite plainly, that she would be speaking to him again, later, and not only about Defence. Snape stood, smoothed the front of his robes, and went out without glancing at Lockhart at all, which was, in its way, a final comment, and a thorough one. Lockhart remained seated for a second or two after the others had begun to move, his smile still on, his hands still clasped, and then he got up, and straightened a curl, and went out with his chin high and his robin's-egg robes very bright in the doorway, and if the brightness was a little hard, a little brittle, the portraits of old headmasters along the staff room wall were too faded, by then, to remark on it.
Dumbledore stayed where he was. He looked, for a long moment, at the empty chairs, and at the plate of biscuits, which had gone largely uneaten, and at the crack of open window, through which the late April air was still coming in, smelling of grass and leaves and, faintly, of the forest at the edge of the grounds, where, if the light lasted, a boy with a scar and a long dark coat would already be walking, or would be walking soon, with a half-giant at his side and the trees opening in front of them the way they always did, as if they had been expecting him. Dumbledore picked up his cup, and found it cold, and set it down again, and then he stood, and closed the window, gently, and went out after the others, and the staff room settled behind him into its old, familiar quiet, which was not, tonight, quite as comfortable as it had been, and which would not, until the year was done, be comfortable again.