“Potter!”
“Yes, Professor?”
She glanced up and down the corridor; there were students coming from both directions.
“Bear in mind,” she said quickly and quietly, her eyes on the scroll in his hand, “that channels of communication in and out of Hogwarts may be being watched, won’t you?”
“I—” said Harry, but the flood of students rolling along the corridor was almost upon him. Professor McGonagall gave him a curt nod and retreated into the staff room, leaving Harry to be swept out into the courtyard with the crowd. He spotted Ron and Hermione already standing in a sheltered corner, their cloak collars turned up against the wind. Harry slit open the scroll as he hurried towards them and found five words in Sirius’s handwriting:
Today, same time, same place.
“Is Hedwig OK?” asked Hermione anxiously, the moment he was within earshot.
“Where did you take her?” asked Ron.
“To Grubbly-Plank,” said Harry. “And I met McGonagall… listen…”
And he told them what Professor McGonagall had said. To his surprise, neither of the others looked shocked. On the contrary, they exchanged significant looks.
“What?” said Harry, looking from Ron to Hermione and back again.
“Well, I was just saying to Ron… what if someone had tried to intercept Hedwig? I mean, she’s never been hurt on a flight before, has she?”
“Who’s the letter from, anyway?” asked Ron, taking the note from Harry.
“Snuffles,” said Harry quietly.
“‘Same time, same place’? Does he mean the fire in the common room?”
“Obviously,” said Hermione, also reading the note. She looked uneasy. “I just hope nobody else has read this…”
“But it was still sealed and everything,” said Harry, trying to convince himself as much as her. “And nobody would understand what it meant if they didn’t know where we’d spoken to him before, would they?”
“I don’t know,” said Hermione anxiously, hitching her bag back over her shoulder as the bell rang again, “it wouldn’t be exactly difficult to re-seal the scroll by magic… and if anyone’s watching the Floo Network… but I don’t really see how we can warn him not to come without that being intercepted, too!”
They trudged down the stone steps to the dungeons for Potions, all three of them lost in thought, but as they reached the bottom of the steps they were recalled to themselves by the voice of Draco Malfoy who was standing just outside Snape’s classroom door, waving around an official-looking piece of parchment and talking much louder than was necessary so that they could hear every word.
“Yeah, Umbridge gave the Slytherin Quidditch team permission to continue playing straightaway, I went to ask her first thing this morning. Well, it was pretty much automatic, I mean, she knows my father really well, he’s always popping in and out of the Ministry… it’ll be interesting to see whether Gryffindor are allowed to keep playing, won’t it?”
“Don’t rise,” Hermione whispered imploringly to Harry and Ron, who were both watching Malfoy, faces set and fists clenched. “It’s what he wants.”
“I mean,” said Malfoy, raising his voice a little more, his grey eyes glittering malevolently in Harry and Ron’s direction, “if it’s a question of influence with the Ministry, I don’t think they’ve got much chance… from what my father says, they’ve been looking for an excuse to sack Arthur Weasley for years… and as for Potter… my father says it’s a matter of time before the Ministry has him carted off to St. Mungo’s… apparently they’ve got a special ward for people whose brains have been addled by magic.”
Malfoy made a grotesque face, his mouth sagging open and his eyes rolling. Crabbe and Goyle gave their usual grunts of laughter; Pansy Parkinson shrieked with glee.
Something collided hard with Harry’s shoulder, knocking him sideways. A split second later he realised that Neville had just charged past him, heading straight for Malfoy.
“Neville, no!”
Harry leapt forward and seized the back of Neville’s robes; Neville struggled frantically, his fists flailing, trying desperately to get at Malfoy who looked, for a moment, extremely shocked.
“Help me!” Harry flung at Ron, managing to get an arm around Neville’s neck and dragging him backwards, away from the Slytherins. Crabbe and Goyle were flexing their arms as they stepped in front of Malfoy, ready for the fight. Ron seized Neville’s arms, and together he and Harry succeeded in dragging Neville back into the Gryffindor line. Neville’s face was scarlet; the pressure Harry was exerting on his throat rendered him quite incomprehensible, but odd words spluttered from his mouth.
“Not… funny… don’t… Mungo’s… show… him…”
The dungeon door opened. Snape appeared there. His black eyes swept up the Gryffindor line to the point where Harry and Ron were wrestling with Neville.
“Fighting, Potter, Weasley, Longbottom?” Snape said in his cold, sneering voice. “Ten points from Gryffindor. Release Longbottom, Potter, or it will be detention. Inside, all of you.”
Harry let go of Neville, who stood panting and glaring at him.
“I had to stop you,” Harry gasped, picking up his bag. “Crabbe and Goyle would’ve torn you apart.”
Neville said nothing; he merely snatched up his own bag and stalked off into the dungeon.
“What in the name of Merlin,” said Ron slowly, as they followed Neville, “was that about?”
Harry did not answer. He knew exactly why the subject of people who were in St. Mungo’s because of magical damage to their brains was highly distressing to Neville, but he had sworn to Dumbledore that he would not tell anyone Neville’s secret. Even Neville did not know Harry knew.
Harry, Ron and Hermione took their usual seats at the back of the class, pulled out parchment, quills and their copies of One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi. The class around them was whispering about what Neville had just done, but when Snape closed the dungeon door with an echoing bang, everybody immediately fell silent.
“You will notice,” said Snape, in his low, sneering voice, “that we have a guest with us today.”
He gestured towards the dim corner of the dungeon and Harry saw Professor Umbridge sitting there, clipboard on her knee. He glanced sideways at Ron and Hermione, his eyebrows raised. Snape and Umbridge, the two teachers he hated most. It was hard to decide which one he wanted to triumph over the other.
“We are continuing with our Strengthening Solution today. You will find your mixtures as you left them last lesson; if correctly made they should have matured well over the weekend—instructions—” he waved his wand again “—on the board. Carry on.”
Professor Umbridge spent the first half hour of the lesson making notes in her corner. Harry was very interested in hearing her question Snape; so interested, that he was becoming careless with his potion again.
“Salamander blood, Harry!” Hermione moaned, grabbing his wrist to prevent him adding the wrong ingredient for the third time, “not pomegranate juice!”
“Right,” said Harry vaguely, putting down the bottle and continuing to watch the corner. Umbridge had just got to her feet. “Ha,” he said softly, as she strode between two lines of desks towards Snape, who was bending over Dean Thomas’s cauldron.
“Well, the class seem fairly advanced for their level,” she said briskly to Snape’s back. “Though I would question whether it is advisable to teach them a potion like the Strengthening Solution. I think the Ministry would prefer it if that was removed from the syllabus.”
Snape straightened up slowly and turned to look at her.
“Now… how long have you been teaching at Hogwarts?” she asked, her quill poised over her clipboard.