The post owls came in on Wednesday morning, and for about ten seconds after the first copies of the Daily Prophet landed, the Great Hall was quieter than I'd ever heard it at breakfast. Then everyone started talking at once.
Hermione had hers open before the owl had even let go of it. I'd never bothered getting the Prophet myself, mostly because she always told me the interesting bits anyway, so I leaned over and read it with her.
The headline took up half the front page.
PETTIGREW ALIVE: MINISTRY CAPTURES POTTERS' BETRAYER
Underneath it was a photo of Peter Pettigrew being marched along a Ministry corridor between two Aurors, blinking at the camera and trying to duck his head behind his shoulder.
He still had both his hands, which was more than the books had let him keep by June.
"Acting on information received," Hermione read out under her breath, "a Ministry team entered a house in the village of Little Hangleton late on Monday night, where they apprehended Peter Pettigrew, believed since 1981 to have been murdered by Sirius Black."
She looked up at me. "A Ministry team."
"Perhaps they thought Dumbledore was worth three or four Aurors."
Hermione ignored that and went back to reading.
Most of it was exactly what Dumbledore had said it would be. Pettigrew had confessed under Veritaserum to everything, right down to the finger he'd cut off to fake his own death, and the Ministry had "moved swiftly to correct a grave injustice."
Sirius Black would go before the Wizengamot on Friday.
On the second page there was a whole column about Barty Crouch Junior, "believed to have died in Azkaban more than ten years ago," who had been discovered "living under a false identity on the staff of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry."
"'Serious questions,'" Hermione read out. "The Minister says there will be serious questions about how a Death Eater spent a whole year at Hogwarts without anybody noticing."
"He'll have to start with the Goblet," I said. "And whoever was supposed to be checking it."
"That was the Ministry," said Hermione.
"Then it'll be a short inquiry."
I looked up at the staff table. Dumbledore was reading the same page, holding his copy out at arm's length while he ate his porridge, and he looked about as bothered by it as if it had been the weather forecast.
I was in the whole thing exactly once, on page three, as "Black's godson, Harry Potter (14)."
The byline was Rita Skeeter's, and she'd kept it short. In the books, this same newspaper had spent the whole of my fifth year calling me a liar and an attention-seeker.
This time it got my name and age right and stopped there, which suited me fine.
Ron had been reading Dean's copy over his shoulder. About halfway down the front page, he put his fork down.
"They got Scabbers," he said, and then he said it again, a bit louder. "They actually got Scabbers."
"Your old rat?" Seamus asked. "What's he got to do with anything?"
"Nothing," said Ron. "Forget it." He took Dean's paper right out of his hands and read the front page again from the top while Dean complained.
When he'd finished, he put it down and said, mostly to his plate, "He slept on my pillow. For years."
"Crookshanks tried to tell you," said Hermione.
Ron picked his fork back up and looked at the sausage on it for a while. "I owe your cat a kipper," he said.
"He likes the smoked ones," said Hermione, and turned the page.
Ron gave Dean his paper back.
"So Black gets off, then," he said after a minute. "Sirius, I mean. On Friday."
"That's what it says."
"Does that mean you can go and live with him? Instead of those Muggles?"
I'd been wondering the same thing since Monday night. With Voldemort gone, the blood protection at Privet Drive didn't have much left to protect me from, and the Dursleys had always been more the original Harry's problem than mine.
I had no particular wish to spend another summer in Little Whinging when I could be in a house with a godfather who'd actually asked for me.
None of that was something I was going to explain to Ron over breakfast.
"Probably yes," I said.
"Lucky," said Ron, and went back to his sausage.
Over at the Slytherin table, it was quieter than usual. Malfoy read the whole front page twice without a single sneer, while Crabbe and Goyle watched him and waited to be told how to feel about it.
His father had a Dark Mark too, and it would have faded on Monday night like all the others. Whatever Lucius Malfoy had written to his son since then, I doubted it had been very cheerful.
***
I'd been keeping an eye on Neville since the owls came in.
He was sitting a few places down, with his copy of the Prophet folded open at the second page, and he'd stopped eating.
His toast was still in his hand, and his eyes hadn't moved down the page in a while.
Barty Crouch Junior was one of the four Death Eaters who'd tortured Frank and Alice Longbottom with the Cruciatus Curse until they lost their minds, in the months after Voldemort fell.
They'd been in St Mungo's ever since, in a closed ward, and Neville's grandmother took him to visit them in the holidays.
Neville had never told any of his friends, and in the books Harry had only found out by accident, from a memory in Dumbledore's Pensieve.
I'd never been anywhere near that Pensieve this year. As far as anyone in the castle was concerned, I had no way of knowing any of it.
Neville folded the paper up very small, put it in his bag, and left the Hall without finishing his toast.
I could have gone after him, but I didn't know what I would have said.
'I know about your parents' would have needed an explanation I couldn't give, and from what I remembered of Neville, the last thing he'd want was somebody making a fuss over him in a corridor.
So I let him go and tried to think of something better before Herbology.
We had Herbology that afternoon with the Hufflepuffs, and Professor Sprout had us repotting Fanged Geraniums, which, aptly named, do bite.
Hermione paired up with Hannah Abbott before I could say anything, and I went and stood next to Neville at the end of the bench.
He looked surprised to see me. Usually I worked with Hermione, and usually Neville ended up with whoever was left.
"Do you mind?" I asked.
"No," he said. "No, that's fine." He picked up his trowel, and it wasn't quite steady.
I'd read the chapter on Fanged Geraniums in One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi, and with the Archmage Essence, reading it once meant I could have recited it backwards.
But there's a difference between knowing which end bites and actually getting your hand round one, and Neville had been the best in our year at Herbology since we'd started.
So I asked him how he'd hold it.
"Round the stem," he said, "just under the flowers. If you go for the pot first, it gets your fingers." He showed me, and the geranium snapped at the air and then gave up.
"And you've got to talk to it a bit. The book says it doesn't make any difference, but I think it helps."
"What do you say to it?"
Neville went a bit pink. "Just... that it's all right. That it's only a bigger pot."
So I talked to mine, and it bit me anyway. Neville laughed before he could stop himself, then apologised for laughing.
My hand was fine. Godric's body magic didn't think much of geranium teeth. But I shook it and made a fuss anyway, because it was the first time he'd looked like himself all day.
We did four pots like that. Neville did most of the talking, about compost, and about why Fanged Geraniums liked being a bit too cold, and I asked enough questions to keep him going.
On the fourth, he pressed the compost down round the stem a lot harder than he needed to.
"My gran will have seen the paper by now," he said, without looking up.
"Yeah?"
"She'll write." He pressed the compost down again. "She always writes when something's in the paper."
I waited, in case there was more. There wasn't, and I didn't ask for it.
"Want to do the next one?" I asked instead. "I'll hold it. You talk."
Neville nodded, and pulled the next pot towards him.
***
At dinner on Thursday, Dumbledore stood up before the pudding and told the school what most of it had already heard from the Prophet and from Fred and George.
The man who had been teaching Defence Against the Dark Arts all year had not been Alastor Moody.
The real Professor Moody had been found and was recovering well. He had very kindly agreed to teach the subject himself for the rest of term.
"He has asked me," Dumbledore added, "to inform you that he does not do homework extensions, and that he will know if you have been in his office."
"He can't actually know that," Seamus whispered.
"It's Moody," said Dean. "He probably can."
The real Moody wasn't there to hear any of it. According to Fred, who claimed to have heard it from Madam Pomfrey, he was eating in the hospital wing until he'd checked every dish in the castle for himself.
Our first proper lesson with him was on Friday, the same morning as Sirius's hearing.
He was already in the classroom when we got there, which nobody was expecting, and he was sitting with his back to the corner, where he could see the door and all the windows at once.
He waited until we'd all sat down, and then he waited a bit longer, while his magical eye went over every single one of us.
"Hands up," he said, "anyone who's actually who they say they are."
Everyone put their hand up. Seamus put both up, to be safe.
"Wrong answer," Moody growled. "That's exactly what you'd say if you weren't. Hands down."
He leaned forward on his staff. "The last bloke who stood up here put the Imperius Curse on every one of you and had you doing tricks round the room, so you think you know what it looks like."
"You don't. That's what it looks like when someone wants you to know. When a Dark wizard does it properly, the person under it looks completely normal, and that's what you're learning to spot today."
I'd half expected the real Moody to be a gentler version of the one we'd had all year. He wasn't.
Crouch had been doing an impression for nine months, and like most impressions, it had been toned down for the audience.
The real one checked under his desk before he sat down, and twice more during the lesson.
He spent the whole hour on the signs.
Somebody under the Imperius answered questions half a second too late, he told us, and they kept glancing at whoever was controlling them before they did anything, even when they had no idea they were doing it.
Hermione took four pages of notes and had to borrow ink from Dean.
Between Moody's checks under the desk, I mostly thought about the Ministry.
Somewhere under London, Sirius was standing up in front of the Wizengamot in borrowed robes, and there was nothing at all I could do about it, which was not a feeling I'd had much practice with this year.
I'd pulled a soul out of a dark lord on Monday night. On Friday morning, I was sitting in a classroom waiting for some old wizards to finish reading a confession.
When the bell went, Moody's magical eye swivelled round and stopped on me.
"Potter. A word."
The others filed out. Hermione packed her bag very slowly.
"Dumbledore says you'd rather your name stayed out of all this," Moody growled, once the door had shut behind Ron. "So I won't be thanking you in front of the class."
"Thanks," I said.
"Don't thank me for not thanking you." The magical eye moved on to Hermione, who had finally finished packing and was doing a very bad job of pretending she hadn't been listening.
"Same goes for you, Granger. Go on. Out, the pair of you."
***
The mirror went warm in my pocket halfway through dinner.
I got up and went out into the Entrance Hall without saying anything, and Hermione watched me go.
Sirius's face came up in the glass before I'd even said his name. He was outside somewhere, with the wind blowing his hair across his face, and he was grinning so widely that I could see most of his teeth.
"Not guilty," he said. "All of it. Unanimous. They gave me a bit of paper that says so, Harry. With a seal on it."
"That's brilliant," I said. It came out a lot louder than I meant it to, and a passing Hufflepuff looked round.
"Fudge shook my hand for the photographers four times."
"Why so many?"
"He kept getting the angle wrong." Sirius pushed his hair out of his face, and behind him something large and grey screeched.
A beak swung into view at the edge of the mirror and tried to eat it. "Get off, you great... Buckbeak says hello. Dumbledore wants to talk about where you're spending the summer, and I'd like to see you without a mirror in the way. He says I can come up tomorrow. Ten o'clock, through the front gates."
"We'll be there."
"You'd better be," he said, and then Buckbeak got the edge of the mirror properly, and the picture spun round into a view of the sky and went dark.
I went back into the Great Hall and slid onto the bench next to Hermione. She put her spoon down.
"Well?" she asked.
"Ten o'clock tomorrow," I told her. "Front gates."
She sat back and smiled at her treacle tart, and Ron, who'd missed all of it, asked if she was going to eat that.
*
For advanced chapters
Eternal97