“I don’t know how to thank you. You’ve saved our lives twice.”
“Look after ’em, then,” said Aberforth gruffly. “I might not be able to save ’em a third time.”
Harry clambered up onto the mantelpiece and through the hole behind Ariana’s portrait. There were smooth stone steps on the other side: It looked as though the passageway had been there for years. Brass lamps hung from the walls and the earthy floor was worn and smooth; as they walked, their shadows rippled, fanlike, across the wall.
“How long’s this been here?” Ron asked as they set off. “It isn’t on the Marauder’s Map, is it, Harry? I thought there were only seven passages in and out of school?”
“They sealed off all of those before the start of the year,” said Neville. “There’s no chance of getting through any of them now, not with the curses over the entrances and Death Eaters and Dementors waiting at the exits.” He started walking backward, beaming, drinking them in. “Never mind that stuff… Is it true? Did you break into Gringotts? Did you escape on a dragon? It’s everywhere, everyone’s talking about it, Terry Boot got beaten up by Carrow for yelling about it in the Great Hall at dinner!”
“Yeah, it’s true,” said Harry.
Neville laughed gleefully.
“What did you do with the dragon?”
“Released it into the wild,” said Ron. “Hermione was all for keeping it as a pet—”
“Don’t exaggerate, Ron—”
“But what have you been doing? People have been saying you’ve just been on the run, Harry, but I don’t think so. I think you’ve been up to something.”
“You’re right,” said Harry, “but tell us about Hogwarts, Neville, we haven’t heard anything.”
“It’s been… Well, it’s not really like Hogwarts anymore,” said Neville, the smile fading from his face as he spoke. “Do you know about the Carrows?”
“Those two Death Eaters who teach here?”
“They do more than teach,” said Neville. “They’re in charge of all discipline. They like punishment, the Carrows.”
“Like Umbridge?”
“Nah, they make her look tame. The other teachers are all supposed to refer us to the Carrows if we do anything wrong. They don’t, though, if they can avoid it. You can tell they all hate them as much as we do.”
“Amycus, the bloke, he teaches what used to be Defense Against the Dark Arts, except now it’s just the Dark Arts. We’re supposed to practice the Cruciatus Curse on people who’ve earned detentions—”
“What?”
Harry, Ron, and Hermione’s united voices echoed up and down the passage.
“Yeah,” said Neville. “That’s how I got this one,” he pointed at a particularly deep gash in his cheek, “I refused to do it. Some people are into it, though; Crabbe and Goyle love it. First time they’ve ever been top in anything, I expect.”
“Alecto, Amycus’s sister, teaches Muggle Studies, which is compulsory for everyone. We’ve all got to listen to her explain how Muggles are like animals, stupid and dirty, and how they drive wizards into hiding by being vicious toward them, and how the natural order is being reestablished. I got this one,” he indicated another slash to his face, “for asking her how much Muggle blood she and her brother have got.”
“Blimey, Neville,” said Ron, “there’s a time and a place for getting a smart mouth.”
“You didn’t see her,” said Neville. “You wouldn’t have stood it either. The thing is, it helps when people stand up to them, it gives everyone hope. I used to notice that when you did it, Harry.”
“But they’ve used you as a knife sharpener,” said Ron, winding slightly as they passed a lamp and Neville’s injuries were thrown into even greater relief.
Neville shrugged.
“Doesn’t matter. They don’t want to spill too much pure blood, so they’ll torture us a bit if we’re mouthy but they won’t actually kill us.”
Harry did not know what was worse, the things that Neville was saying or the matter-of-fact tone in which he said them.
“The only people in real danger are the ones whose friends and relatives on the outside are giving trouble. They get taken hostage. Old Xeno Lovegood was getting a bit too outspoken in The Quibbler, so they dragged Luna off the train on the way back for Christmas.”
“Neville, she’s all right, we’ve seen her—”
“Yeah, I know, she managed to get a message to me.”
From his pocket he pulled a golden coin, and Harry recognized it as one of the fake Galleons that Dumbledore’s Army had used to send one another messages.
“These have been great,” said Neville, beaming at Hermione. “The Carrows never rumbled how we were communicating, it drove them mad. We used to sneak out at night and put graffiti on the walls: Dumbledore’s Army, Still Recruiting, stuff like that. Snape hated it.”
“You used to?” said Harry, who had noticed the past tense.
“Well, it got more difficult as time went one,” said Neville. “We lost Luna at Christmas, and Ginny never came back after Easter, and the three of us were sort of the leaders. The Carrows seemed to know I was behind a lot of it, so they started coming down on me hard, and then Michael Corner went and got caught releasing a first-year they’d chained up, and they tortured him pretty badly. That scared people off.”
“No kidding,” muttered Ron, as the passage began to slope upward.
“Yeah, well, I couldn’t ask people to go through what Michael did, so we dropped those kinds of stunts. But we were still fighting, doing underground stuff, right up until a couple of weeks ago. That’s when they decided there was only one way to stop me, I suppose, and they went for Gran.”
“They what?” said Harry, Ron, and Hermione together.
“Yeah,” said Neville, panting a little now, because the passage was climbing so steeply, “well, you can see their thinking. It had worked really well, kidnapping kids to force their relatives to behave. I s’pose it was only a matter of time before they did it the other way around. Thing was,” he faced them, and Harry was astonished to see that he was grinning, “they bit off a bit more than they could chew with Gran. Little old witch living alone, they probably thought hey didn’t need to send anyone particularly powerful. Anyway,” Neville laughed, “Dawlish is still in St. Mungo’s and Gran’s on the run. She sent me a letter,” he clapped a hand to the breast pocket of his robes, “telling me she was proud of me, that I’m my parent’s son, and to keep it up.”
“Cool,” said Ron.
“Yeah,” said Neville happily. “Only thing was, once they realized they had no hold over me, they decided Hogwarts could do without me after all. I don’t know whether they were planning to kill me or send me to Azkaban, either way, I knew it was time to disappear.”
“But,” said Ron, looking thoroughly confused, “aren’t—aren’t we heading straight back for Hogwarts?”
“’Course,” said Neville. “You’ll see. We’re here.”
They turned a corner and there ahead of them was the end of the passage. Another short flight of steps led to a door just like the one hidden behind Ariana’s portrait. Neville pushed it open and climbed through. As Harry followed, he heard Neville call out for unseen people:
“Look who it is! Didn’t I tell you?”
As Harry emerged into the room behind the passage, there were several screams and yells:
“HARRY!”
“It’s Potter, it’s POTTER!”
“Ron!”
“Hermione!”
He had a confused impression of colored hangings, of lamps and many faces. The next moment, he, Ron, and Hermione were engulfed, hugged, pounded on the back, their hair ruffled, their hands shaken, by what seemed to be more than twenty people. They might have just won a Quidditch final.
“Okay, okay, calm down!” Neville called, and as the crowd backed away, Harry was able to take in their surroundings.
He did not recognize the dorm at all. It was enormous, and looked rather like the interior of a particularly sumptuous tree house, or perhaps a gigantic ship’s cabin. Multicolored hammocks were strung from the ceiling and from the balcony that ran around the dark wood-paneled and windowless walls, which were covered in bright tapestry hangings. Harry saw the gold Gryffindor lion, emblazoned on scarlet; the black badger of Hufflepuff, set against yellow; and the bronze eagle of Ravenclaw, on blue. The silver and green of Slytherin alone were absent. There were bulging bookcases, a few broomsticks propped against the walls, and in the corner, a large wood-cased wireless.