The mirror tilted wildly, and I got a view of a ceiling and half a bedpost. When Sirius's face came back, he was sitting bolt upright in bed with his hair everywhere.
"Say that again," he said.
"Voldemort's dead," I said. "Properly this time. And Wormtail's at the Ministry, tied up. Dumbledore took him there himself."
"Twelve years," Sirius said. "I've spent twelve years wanting to get my hands round his neck, and somebody else got there first."
"He's not going anywhere," I said. "Dumbledore said Fudge was going to have a very interesting night."
Sirius put his hand over his mouth and kept it there.
"How?" he asked through his fingers. "Harry, how did you... When did you even..."
So I told him, as quickly as I could, from Gringotts all the way to Moody's trunk. I left out most of the details about the orb.
When I'd finished, he took his hand away from his mouth.
"You went after him," he said. "On a school night."
"It was the soonest we could do it," I said. "Every day we waited, he was getting stronger."
"You're fourteen." He dragged a hand down his face. "James would have... no. James would have loved it. Lily would have killed you. Then she'd have killed me for not stopping you."
"You didn't know."
"That's not going to be much of a defence, is it?" he said, but he was grinning. Then he leaned closer to the mirror. "Is that Hermione next to you?"
Hermione moved over so the mirror could see her. "Hello, Sirius."
"Were you there?"
"I caught Wormtail," she said. "He was a rat at the time."
Sirius started laughing. He laughed until he had to put the mirror down on the bed, and for a while all we could see was a blurry view of his blankets.
When he picked it back up, his eyes were wet, and he didn't bother hiding it.
"Thank you," he said. "Both of you. I don't..." He stopped and shook his head. "I'm going to come up to the castle."
"Wait until Dumbledore says it's safe," Hermione told him at once. "As far as the Ministry knows, you're still a murderer. If you turn up at Hogwarts tonight, someone will panic."
"You sound exactly like Lily," Sirius said. "James used to say she was always right, and he was wrong about loads of things, but not that."
He pushed his hair out of his eyes. "All right. I'll wait. But the second Dumbledore says so, I'm coming, and I'm bringing Buckbeak, and nobody's stopping me."
"Hagrid will be thrilled," I said.
"Now go to bed, the pair of you," he said. "I'm going to sit here and grin at the wall until morning."
I didn't sleep much. Hermione told me the next morning that she hadn't slept at all.
Breakfast was strange. None of the students knew anything yet, so the Great Hall was exactly as loud and normal as always.
Seamus was complaining about his Herbology homework, and Ron was halfway through his second plate of bacon.
Up at the staff table, Moody's chair was empty.
Snape's wasn't. He was eating toast, slowly, and every few seconds his right hand went to his left arm and stopped just before touching it.
He looked down the hall once and caught my eye. His face stayed completely blank.
From Snape, that was practically a thank-you card.
Then he went back to his toast.
Further along, Karkaroff was in a wonderful mood. He helped himself to three kippers, and at one point he actually hummed. I'd never seen anyone so relieved to have lost their boss.
"Where's Moody?" Ron asked, looking up at the staff table with his mouth full.
"Ill, I think," Hermione said, without looking up from her tea.
"Huh," said Ron, and went back to his bacon.
Dumbledore sent for us at the end of breakfast. Professor McGonagall delivered the message herself, and she didn't ask us a single thing all the way up the stairs, which must have nearly killed her.
He was waiting by the window when we came in. He looked as if he hadn't been to bed, which he probably hadn't.
"Sit down, both of you," he said. "I have news from the Ministry, and I suspect you would like to hear it before you read a version of it in the Daily Prophet."
Hermione took the chair nearest his desk and sat on the very edge of it, as if she expected to be marked on this.
I took the other one. On his perch by the door, Fawkes looked us over once and went back to preening.
"Peter Pettigrew was questioned under Veritaserum shortly after three o'clock this morning," Dumbledore said. "He confessed to betraying James and Lily, to framing Sirius, and to killing those twelve Muggles. Cornelius was present for all of it."
Hermione grabbed my hand on the arm of the chair.
"So Sirius is..." I started.
"There will be a hearing," Dumbledore said. "It is a formality, I'm told. Sirius Black should be a free man within the week."
Twelve years in Azkaban for something he hadn't done, and it was going to be sorted out by a formality.
I didn't know whether that was the best news I'd ever heard or the most annoying thing about the wizarding world.
"And Crouch?" I asked.
Dumbledore sat down behind his desk at last. "Barty Crouch Junior has also told us a great deal. Among other things, that his father has spent most of this year at home under the Imperius Curse. He was found there this morning. He is at St Mungo's now."
In the books, Mr Crouch had broken free in May, made it as far as the edge of the Forbidden Forest, and been murdered there by his own son. This time he was going to wake up in a hospital bed instead.
"What did Fudge say?" I asked. "About Voldemort?"
Dumbledore's mouth twitched.
"Cornelius has decided," he said, "that Lord Voldemort has been dead since the night he attacked you as a baby. Whatever was in that house last night was, in his words, a sad relic of a long-dead wizard, kept alive by a deranged servant. The official story will be that the Ministry has caught an escaped Death Eater and the man who really betrayed the Potters, and righted a terrible miscarriage of justice."
"But that's not what happened," Hermione said.
"No. But it is the version that will set Sirius free, and I find I can live with it."
"He's going to take the credit for all of it. For Harry's..." She stopped, because there were portraits listening. "For all of it."
"Cornelius has always found credit easier to take than blame," Dumbledore said.
Hermione folded her arms tightly and glared at the floor.
"What about Nagini?" I asked.
"Alive," Dumbledore said, "and somewhere she will never harm anyone again. That is all I'll say for now." He leaned back in his chair. "There is one more thing, Harry. The tournament will continue. The third task is still set for the twenty-fourth of June. I thought you would want to know."
"Good," I said. "I've got plans for the prize money."
After classes, we went up to the hospital wing to see Moody.
Madam Pomfrey had put him in the bed at the very end, with screens round it, and she didn't want to let us in at all until he barked at her from behind them that he wasn't dead yet and could see who he liked. She let us in, looking deeply disapproving.
He looked better than he had at the bottom of the trunk, which wasn't saying much.
Somebody had got his wooden leg back off Crouch, and the magical eye was back in its socket, whirring round as if it was making up for lost time. When it landed on me, it stopped.
"Potter," he growled.
"Professor."
"Don't you start that. I haven't taught a lesson in this castle in my life." His real eye narrowed. "Apparently I've been doing a grand job, though. Half the staff keep coming in to tell me so."
Hermione's mouth went thin. The Moody who'd been doing such a grand job had put the Imperius Curse on our whole class.
"Dumbledore says it was you who spotted him," Moody went on.
"Eventually," I said.
"Eventually's more than anyone else managed. Including me." He shifted against his pillows and winced. "Took me about four seconds to get caught. Thirty years of chasing Dark wizards, and I got jumped in my own back garden."
"Is there anything you need, Professor?" Hermione asked.
Moody's eye swivelled to her at the "Professor", but he let it go. "My hip flask," he said.
"I've got it," I said, and took it out of my pocket.
He looked at it the way you'd look at someone else's toothbrush. "Boiled out first," he said. "At least a few times."
That evening, the two of us sat by the lake, on the same patch of grass where we'd talked about plot armour before the second task.
The sun was going down over the Forbidden Forest. A few second-years were trying to feed toast to the giant squid near the shore, and the squid seemed to be enjoying itself.
"Sirius is going to be free," Hermione said. She'd said it about four times that day.
"I heard you the first three times," I said.
That got a smile out of her, a tired one. "And nobody's ever going to know it was you," she went on. "Fudge is going to put his name on all of it, and you're just going to let him."
"I don't mind," I said. I'd thought I might, but I didn't. "You know. Dumbledore knows, and Sirius. That's enough people for me."
She leaned against me. The giant squid made a grab for a whole loaf, and the second-years shrieked.
"So what happens now?" she asked.
I thought about it. There was still a cup and a ring sitting in a drawer in the Room that needed proper homes, and a maze in June. Most of it could wait.
"Now I go back to being a normal fourth-year for a few weeks, I think," I said. "Lessons and homework, mostly. Maybe I'll let Ron beat me at chess."
"I haven't had a week without a plan in it since January." Hermione pulled up a bit of grass and started tying it in a knot. "I finished revising weeks ago. I don't think I'd know what to do with a normal week."
"You could try one. People do it all the time."
"I could do Ancient Runes again, I suppose." She frowned at the grass. "I wasn't really concentrating the first time. Half of it was the week before Gringotts, and I kept thinking about that dragon."
She settled back against my shoulder. About a minute later, she asked if I had any spare parchment.
*
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