Sirius came up the hall fast and quietly, on floorboards he had plainly learned by heart, and took hold of Harry before Harry had finished working out what to do with his arms.
The hug was hard enough to bruise, and it went on. Harry had been hugged perhaps four times in his life that he could count, and had no procedure for it, so he stopped hunting for one and held on. Sirius smelled of dust and woodsmoke. He was thinner than the photographs in Harry's album. His grip wasn't.
"Let me look at you," Sirius said at last, low, holding him at arm's length. His eyes went over Harry the way Margaret's had, checking for damage, and found none. "Two dementors. Two. And you drove them off, and then you broke out of a locked house, and the first the Order hears of it, you've done a moonlight flit across Surrey with a wheelbarrow involved somehow-"
"That part's mostly her."
"and I want you to know," said Sirius, "that I have never been prouder in my life, and if you tell Molly I said that, I'll deny it in front of witnesses." He looked past Harry then, at Lily, who was standing by the trunks with her hands in her pockets and her chin up. "You'll be the wheelbarrow."
"Lily Moon," said Lily. "I came with the luggage."
"Sirius Black," said Sirius, and grinned at what it did to her face. "Yes. That one. Long story, you'll get it with the soup. Sorry about the house. You'll see." He raised his voice as far as the hall allowed, which was not far. "Kitchen, everyone, before Molly comes up. And keep it down through here. My mother's on the wall, and if she wakes, we get her until sunrise."
Harry did not get a chance to ask what that meant.
They went down the hall in single file, past the curtained portraits and a stand made of what Harry sincerely hoped was not a real troll's leg, under candle brackets shaped like serpents, and along a row of small mounted plaques on the stair wall that he took for hunting trophies until he was level with them and saw that they were the heads of house-elves, dozens of them, going back into the dark with their snouts raised.
He stopped. He could not help it. Lily, behind him, did not stop; she looked up at the row of them as she passed, the whole row, with her face perfectly composed, the way she might have looked at a line of family portraits in a house she was visiting, and went on down after Sirius.
Harry looked at the heads a moment longer. Then he looked at the back of her head, going down into the light, and followed.
"Family tradition," said Sirius, from ahead, without turning round. "The house and I are having a disagreement about it. The house is losing slowly."
* * *
Ron and Hermione were waiting at the far end of the hall, by the door to the kitchen stairs, half in shadow. Sirius went past them with a hand on Lily's shoulder and a murmured "I'll take her down." Hermione's head turned after them. "Was that-" The door shut behind the two of them, and Harry stopped where he was.
Hermione got there first, of course. She came at him in a rush that halted a foot short, both hands twisted together, words already spilling: "Harry, we wanted to write, you have to believe us, we begged him, Dumbledore made us swear not to put anything important in letters, he said the owls could be intercepted, he said it was for your own-"
"I know," said Harry.
Hermione stopped.
"You... know?"
"I worked most of it out in July. Letters get read. The Prophet's been printing things only the Ministry could know all summer; you didn't need to draw me a map. What I haven't worked out is the rest of it."
"The... rest?"
"You've been here a month. Together." He had to keep his voice down for the portraits, and it came out cold instead. "I was in a flowerbed in Little Whinging, reading four column inches a week about how I'm a liar and off my head, and the two people who know better than anyone alive said nothing. Dumbledore told you not to write anything important. Fine. Nobody stopped you writing something true. 'We believe you.' Three words. The Ministry could have steamed open every owl in Britain and read that, and it would have cost you nothing, and I'd have had it to hold on to." He looked from one of them to the other. "A whole month, and it didn't occur to either of you what six weeks of that was like."
Nobody said anything. Behind its curtain, a portrait muttered in its sleep.
"Harry..." Hermione's voice had gone very small. "You're right. I should have... we didn't..."
"Mate," said Ron, wretchedly, "if you want to shout-"
"I'm not going to shout."
Ron looked as if he would have preferred it.
There was plenty in Harry that wanted to. The warmth under his ribs came up with it, the way the mug handle had gone too hot to hold in Lily's garden. He shoved his hands in his pockets and kept them there.
"Three weeks ago I'd have taken the roof off," he said. "I had the speech ready. But I've had..." He heard where the sentence was going. He finished it anyway. "I've had a good summer. Since. No thanks to any of this."
Hermione looked at the floor.
"So are we..." Ron stopped, and had another run at it. "Are we all right?"
"Ask me in a few days," said Harry.
The door at the end of the hall opened, and light came up the steps behind it, and Lily's head appeared round the frame. "They're asking where you've all got to. Also, there is soup."
They went down. On the stairs Hermione caught Lily's sleeve and said, low and fast, "Did you see the heads?"
"Yes," said Lily.
"They're actual... they've mounted them, like, like stags, there's a plaque under each one with a-"
"I saw," said Lily, and smiled at her, and went into the kitchen. Hermione was left on the step with her mouth open.
* * *
The kitchen was long and low and cavernous, and warm, with a scrubbed table down the middle that could have seated twenty and, at this hour, was working up to it. Sirius pulled the door to behind them, and the hush came off everybody at once; the kitchen, it turned out, was the one room in the house where you were allowed to make a noise. Mrs. Weasley met Harry halfway across the flagstones, hugged him with tearful violence, held him back to inspect him, announced that he was skin and bone and that dinner had been kept warm since ten o'clock, and then did precisely the same to Lily, who had not been expecting any of it, and came out of the hug looking staggered, and then extremely pleased.
After that it was all noise, kept under the ceiling.
Ron, in search of safer ground, stuck a hand out to Lily across the table. "Ron Weasley."
Lily shook it. "I know. I sit behind you in Charms."
Ron looked at her. Then he looked at Hermione.
"She's in our year, Ron," said Hermione. "She's in my dormitory."
"Since when?"
"Since we were eleven," said Lily, who did not seem to mind in the least, and took her hand back.
Hermione was still looking at her across the table, with a small frown. "You never said you lived near Harry. You never say anything about home."
"Nobody ever asks," said Lily, in her bright voice.
Fred and George arrived with two cracks like a car backfiring twice, were savaged in a whisper for it, and bowed. "The wheelbarrow girl," said Fred, or possibly George, taking Lily's hand with tremendous ceremony. "We've been doing reenactments. George does your aunt."
"I do her very well," said George.
"Nobody does my aunt," said Lily, "but you're welcome to fail," and the twins looked at each other like men who had found money in the street.
Ginny arrived in pyjamas, ignored three empty chairs, and took the seat beside Lily. By the time the soup came round she had extracted the full account of Saturday night, and the table got it in instalments over Mrs. Weasley's objections: the owl call ("I've been practising," said Lily, wounded, over the laughter), the one slipper, Vernon wishing the lit windows a good evening.
"And Harry pushed it the whole way," said Fred, with respect.
"Harry pushed it the whole way this time," said Lily. "The first time he was in it."
"In it," said George.
"Unconscious. Face down. His feet stuck out the end." Lily demonstrated with two fingers over the edge of the table. "I had to go round the long way because of the kerbs."
"You left that bit out," said Harry.
"You'd had a hard night." She was not sorry at all. "I did say you were heavier than you look."
Fred had put his head down on the table. Ron was making a noise. Ginny said, "Face down?" with reverence, and Mrs. Weasley said, "Fred, sit up," and Moody, from the far end, said only, "Hacksaw," into his goblet, and left it there.
"And you actually cut through a padlock and two bolts," said George, awed, "with a Muggle-"
"We keep serious tools," said Lily serenely, and under the table Harry pressed his knee against hers, once, and she pressed back and went on looking at George.
Tonks turned her nose into a beak over the pudding, in Ginny's honour, and knocked the salt over restoring it. Mundungus Fletcher was not there; Lupin, asked, said, "Detained. A matter of cauldrons," without expression.
Mrs. Weasley went down the table refilling plates that were not empty. And at the head of it, half in and half out of the lamplight, Sirius sat saying almost nothing, watching Harry eat, watching Harry be laughed at, with an expression Harry had last seen on Hagrid's face in a hut with a birthday cake in it.
It was nearly one in the morning.
Then the plates were empty, and Mrs. Weasley said, "Ginny. Bed," and the room went quiet.
"Molly," said Sirius. "He asked his question in Surrey. Remus gave his word. I intend to keep it."
"He's fifteen, Sirius-"
"He was fourteen in that graveyard, Molly. Nobody asked his age on Wednesday either." Sirius said it without raising his voice. "I'm not sitting in my own kitchen telling him the weather's fine."
Mrs. Weasley looked round the table for allies and found Lupin quiet, Moody flatly interested, Tonks studying her spoon. Ginny went up in a state of loud injustice. The twins, being of age, stayed where they were and looked insufferable about it. Lily half rose. "Should I-" And it was Moody who growled, "Sit. You were in the alley. You're past the door now, girl; better in the room than guessing." Mrs. Weasley opened her mouth, looked at Moody, and shut it again. Lily sat back down and kept very quiet.
"All right, Harry," said Sirius. "Ask."
"Where's Voldemort?" Half the table flinched at the name; Harry didn't slow down for it. "It's been six weeks. He came back in front of thirty Death Eaters and since then, nothing. No attacks, no bodies. The Ministry calls me a liar and the Prophet prints it. So where is he?"
"Lying low," said Lupin. "Think about what you cost him in June, Harry, just by leaving that graveyard alive. He wanted to come back the way he went out, with the whole country too frightened to say his name. Instead the one person who saw it happen warned Dumbledore the same night. So he has to come back quietly, and he hates it, and he lets the Ministry do his work for him meanwhile."
"That's what the paper's for," said Sirius. "They're making sure that when it can't be hidden any longer, nobody remembers you told them a year early."
"But Fudge knows-"
"Fudge was told the truth to his face, in June, by Dumbledore. By July, Dumbledore was the problem." Sirius shrugged. "It's easier. He'll take easy over true every time."
"And while everyone looks the other way, he recruits," said Moody. "The old families. The giants; he's sent envoys, we know that much. And the dementors." The blue eye fixed on Harry. "Which brings us to Wednesday. Dementors answer to whoever feeds them. Either he's reached them already, in which case Azkaban's a paper wall, or somebody inside the Ministry sent them to shut you up for good, and when you had the nerve to survive it, they put you on trial for how. We don't know which. I'd rather know."
Harry said nothing. The kitchen fire ticked.
"And the Order? What do you actually do?"
"Watch," said Lupin. "Recruit, where the Ministry won't. Warn the people he'll go to first. Guard the ones he wants." He paused. "Guard other things."
"What other things?"
Nobody answered straight away. Mrs. Weasley's hands went still on the teapot.
"There's something he wants," said Sirius. "Something he didn't have last time. It's under guard. Some of the people at this table have stood over it, and most of us don't know what it is. Dumbledore keeps that one to himself, and I'd complain, except I've met Mundungus." He turned his cup round on the table. "I could guess. I'd probably guess wrong, and last time, wrong guesses in the wrong ears got people killed. So that's everything I actually know."
Harry looked at him for a moment.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay?" said Ron faintly. "A month we've been here. A month, and he gets more out of them in ten minutes than we got all July."
"One more," said Harry, to the table. "You said he's lying low. Is it going the way Dumbledore expected? All of it?"
Lupin hesitated.
"Mostly," he said. "Except one thing. Since the end of July he's been... rattled is the best word we have. It reaches us third-hand. Something happened to him. An illness, an injury, nobody can say. He's frightened, and hiding it badly, and none of our guesses fit the little we hear. Dumbledore's word for it was interesting." He rubbed his eyes. "I have never once liked that word in his mouth."
The end of July.
Harry looked at his hands on the scrubbed table. A pale space. A boy with a prefect's badge, coming apart like soot. A piece, it had called itself. The rest of me is out there. Whatever the rest of him had felt that morning, Harry could have dated it to the hour.
Beside him, Lily was very carefully not looking at him.
Not yet, he thought. Not until he knew what he would be handing them, or how many kitchens it would have travelled through by morning.
"Interesting," Harry agreed. "Is there more tea?"
* * *
The meeting broke up around two. They went from the kitchen in ones and twos, saying their goodnights in the practised murmur the whole house ran on. Tonks went last, walking backwards up into the hall to finish a point to Lily about hair.
She got the troll's leg square on.
The crash was extraordinary. The umbrella stand went down on the flagstones with Tonks in it, umbrellas rolling everywhere, and before anyone had drawn breath, the moth-eaten curtains at the far end of the hall flew open of their own accord and the screaming began.
There was an old woman in the portrait behind them, life-size, black-capped, yellow-skinned, and she screamed as though she were being murdered, though the words were all aimed outward: "FILTH! SCUM! Blood traitors and half-breeds, defiling the house of my fathers! Spawn of dirt, OUT, OUT!"
"Not again," said Sirius, at full volume for the first time all night, and charged down the hall.
The other portraits woke along the walls and joined in; Mrs. Weasley went from frame to frame slamming curtains on them; Lupin took the old woman's left-hand curtain and Sirius the right, and the two of them hauled while she screamed on. "YOU! Shame of my flesh, abomination!" "SHUT UP!" And with a last heave the curtains came together.
Tonks, still seated among the umbrellas, said, "That leg. Every single time. I'm having it moved."
"It's a family heirloom," said Sirius, breathing hard. He put his hair back with both hands, turned round, and nodded at the shut curtains. "My mother. You see the disagreement."
"She seems lovely," said Lily.
Sirius looked at her and barked one short laugh. Then he caught Harry's eye over her head, and raised his eyebrows, and said nothing whatever, and Harry became extremely interested in an umbrella.
* * *
Sirius caught him at the foot of the main stairs, one hand on his shoulder, the last of the goodnights going on down the hall.
"We'll get you ready for the twelfth. Arthur will take you in, and before that we'll drill you on the questions until you're bored of your own answers. You've done nothing wrong, and Arthur will say so. Don't expect the room to be friendly about it." He stopped. "And whatever happens at that hearing, this is your home for as long as you want one. I mean that. God knows it needs somebody in it who isn't me."
"Thanks," said Harry. Sirius grinned and pushed him up the stairs.
He and Ron had the second-floor back bedroom: two beds, and a portrait of nobody, and curtains that smelled of vinegar. Hedwig had taken the wardrobe top without negotiation. Somewhere below, the adults' voices went on another hour, too low to carry.
In the dark, Ron said, "It's good you're here, mate. It's been like living in a museum where everything bites."
"Yeah," said Harry. And then, because Ron sounded like he needed it, and because it was nearly true: "It will be."
"Face down," said Ron, after a while, to the ceiling. "With your feet out the end."
"Go to sleep."
"I'm just saying. Four years. Basilisk, dragon, You-Know-Who. And a wheelbarrow does it."
Harry threw a pillow at him in the dark and missed. It hit the wardrobe. Hedwig said something about it. He lay down again. Five days to the hearing. He was still grinning when he fell asleep.