Chapter 26 - 26

After Sirius Black's attack on the Fat Lady, Harriet found it increasingly difficult to get food to Snuffles. Professor Snape had restarted last year's routine of snarling at her if he caught her wandering alone, and he just didn't seem like the type of person to approve of feeding stray dogs. He'd probably think the dog was Sirius Black in disguise or something. Professor McGonagall had also asked Madam Hooch to oversee Harriet's Quidditch lessons, since the team was now practicing well into the evening, which was deepening as November settled down around the castle like an angry dragon. With too many people watching her and the short afternoons eaten up with classes and Quidditch, Harriet couldn't sneak away.

She thought about writing to Hagrid to leave out some food, but Snuffles had seemed so alarmed by the idea that she didn't. Then she felt extemely silly for not doing something sensible because a dog didn't want her to do it.

Harriet had a great many things to preoccupy her—about sixteen things too many—but with the first Quidditch match of the season on the horizon, it took first importance, if only because Oliver was making it so. Then, just a couple of days before the match, a furious, anguished Wood delivered some very unwelcome news:

"We're not playing Slytherin," he said furiously. "Flint's just been to see me. We're playing Hufflepuff instead."

"Why?" the team asked.

"Flint's excuse is that his Seeker's arm's still injured," Wood said, burning with righteous fire. "They just don't want to play in this weather—think it'll damage their chances."

"Malfoy's faking it," Harriet said angrily, picturing his smug git face. "There's nothing wrong with his arm."

"I know that," Wood said bitterly, "but we can't prove it. But it causes us a major problem, which I suppose Slytherin has guessed, too. We've been basing all our practices on countering Slytherin moves, and now we'll be playing Hufflepuff, and their style is entirely different. Their captain, Cedric Diggory—"

Angelina, Katie and Alicia all giggled. Then they looked at Harriet expectantly, and when she blinked at them, nudged her.

"You know," Alicia said. "The Seeker—the really handsome one."

"Really handsome—and tall," said Katie.

"Strong and silent," Angelina said, and they all giggled again. Harriet giggled too that time, not because she knew who they were talking about, but because the expression on Oliver's face—all the boys' really—was quite funny.

"He's only silent because he's too thick to string two words together," Fred said impatiently.

"Oooh," Harriet said. "Somebody sounds a teeeensy bit jealous." That made Angelina, Katie and Alicia giggle harder, all nudging each other and Harriet. Fred stared at them with a jaw slack from outrage.

The day before the match, the winds rose to howling point and the rain thrashed against the castle's walls and windows. It was so dark inside the castle that extra torches had to be lit, and everyone shuffled to classes in their cloaks. Mrs. Weasley had sent Harriet a pair of knitted green legwarmers that she pulled on over her stockings.

The Slytherin team were very smug, Malfoy most of all.

"Ah, if only my arm was a bit better!" he sighed as the windows rattled and whistled. Pansy Parkinson hung on his good arm and smirked across the hall at Harriet.

Ginny knew who Cedric Diggory was, and Katie had been right: he was very tall. The top of Harriet's head wouldn't even have come up to his chest if she stood next to him. In fair conditions, she'd have had the advantage of being smaller and speedier, but in wind that was blowing branches off the trees in the forest, she'd probably be hurtled into the Quidditch stands, while Diggory flew blithely around in the lashing rain.

And Oliver kept grabbing her between classes and heaping tips on her. The third time it happened, he talked for so long that Harriet realized she was ten minutes late for Defense Against the Dark Arts. She pelted off without a word of goodbye, Oliver shouting after her, "Diggory's got a very fast swerve, Harriet, so you might want to try looping him—"

She skidded to a halt outside the classroom, winded, and wrenched the door open. "Sorry, Professor Lupin, I—"

But it wasn't Professor Lupin who spun round to face her. It was Snape.

"So glad you decided to join us at last, Miss Potter." His face had that pale, strange look to it again and his eyes were glittering. "Sit," he snarled, jabbing his wand at a desk right up front in the room, which had been left empty. (In fact, the closest desk that had been taken was in the third row back. Clearly no one had wanted to sit near the teacher's desk if it had Snape in it.)

With his teeth bared slightly like that, Harriet didn't dare argue or even ask where Professor Lupin was. She hurried to the desk as silently as she could and sat down, feeling quite isolated and defenseless.

"As I was saying." Snape paused to give Harriet a glare so ferocious that she froze in the middle of pulling out her parchment and quills. "When Miss Potter finally decided to arrive—Professor Lupin has not left any record of what you have covered so far—"

"Please, sir, we've done Boggarts, Red Caps, Kappas and Grindylows," said Hermione quickly, "and we're just about to start—"

"Be quiet," Snape said in a voice so close to a snarl that Hermione cut off like a tape player whose cord had been pulled. "I did not ask for information, I was merely commenting on Professor Lupin's lack of organization."

"He's the best Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher we've ever had," said Dean Thomas boldly, and the rest of the class murmured agreement. Menace flashed in Snape's face. Harriet tried to hide behind her book without being too obvious about it.

"You are easily satisfied. Lupin is hardly over-taxing you. I would expect first-years to be able to deal with Red Caps and Grindylows. Today we shall discuss—"

He grabbed Harriet's textbook right out of her hand, making her jump, and slammed it open on the desk. He ran one long finger down the table of contents, and then slammed to the back of the book, which he must know they hadn't covered.

"Werewolves," he said, eyes glittering now more menacingly than ever.

"But, sir," Hermione said, like she couldn't restrain herself, and Harriet closed her eyes, "we're not supposed to do werewolves yet, we're due to start Hinkypunks—"

"Miss Granger," said Snape in that voice that made Harriet's skin prickle, "I was under the impression that I was taking this lesson, not you. And I am telling you all to turn to page three hundred and ninety four." His glare cut a swathe across the room. "All of you! Now!"

Harriet didn't dare turn around and look at the rest of the class, but she could hear sullen muttering. Snape jerked her book back around and shoved it at her; it was already open to the right page. She stared down at the inky woodcut of a half-man, half-beast thing that didn't look much like a wolf at all. Its eyes were wild, its snout pulled back in a snarl, its open teeth dripping saliva. It looked, in fact, like a crazed monster.

Wizards sure liked their gruesome drawings.

"Which of you can tell me how to distinguish between the werewolf and the true wolf?" Snape demanded. Normally he would have prowled through the rows of desks, unnerving everyone, but this time he stuck right by Harriet's, practically vibrating with ferocious tension.

A vauge suspicion formed in her mind like smoke. Had he thought she was late to class because Sirius Black had jumped out from behind a suit of armor and slain her in the corridor?

Harriet glanced up at his face, which was deathly pale. His deep-set eyes were all shadow, and the lines on his face seemed harder. A smell, familiar but one she couldn't immediately name, hung around him . . . was it . . . cigarette smoke?

She boggled. Thinking of Snape smoking was like thinking of him fancying her mum (or anybody, really); it was realizing he had some other life that one of them knew about, some grown-up life.

"Are you telling me," he was saying, looking out over the class, not at Harriet, "that Professor Lupin hasn't even taught you the basic distinction between—"

"We told you," said Parvati. "We haven't got as far as werewolves yet, we're still on—"

"Silence," Snape snarled, so viciously a new, thicker kind of quiet fell across the room. "I never thought I'd meet a third year class who wouldn't even recognize a werewolf when they saw one—"

I'd recognize this, Harriet thought, staring at the woodcut. If that's not artistic license.

"Please, sir," said Hermione, and Harriet almost groaned. "The werewolf differs from the true wolf in several small ways. The snout of the werewolf—"

"That's the third time you've spoken out of turn, Miss Granger," Snape said in a voice that promised imminent suffering. "Five points from Gryffindor for being an insufferable know-it-all."

Harriet glared up at him. A furious reply built in her throat—but then Ron burst out, "You asked a question and she knows the answer! Why ask if you don't want to be told?"

Harriet dropped her face in her hands. Snape finally left her desk-side, advancing on Ron so slowly and quietly you almost couldn't hear him moving.

"Detention, Weasley," he said in a soft, very dangerous voice. "And if I ever hear you criticize the way I teach a class again, you will be very. Sorry. Indeed."

Nobody dared make a sound for the rest of the lesson. They all made notes on werewolves out of the textbook while Snape twitched around in front of Harriet's desk. That was the only thing she could call it: he paced tightly back and forth, never going many feet to either side of her desk before turning back, with an almost rattled air.

When the bell rang for class, he held them back to snarl, "You will each write an essay, to be handed in to me, on the ways you recognize and kill werewolves. I want two rolls of parchment on the subject, and I want them by Monday morning. Weasley, stay behind, we need to arrange your detention."

Hermione caught up with Harriet at her desk and they left the room together, lagging behind the rest of the class, who'd trooped on ahead to rant about Snape.

"He was in a really foul mood today, wasn't he?" Hermione said. However she'd reacted when Snape called her an insufferable know-it-all, Harriet couldn't tell now; she looked more or less normal, if pale and tired. But she always looked like that these days.

Harriet started to say, "I think he's worried that—" But then Ron caught up with them in a towering fury and she broke off.

"Do you know what that son of a bitch is making me do?" he demanded.

"Ron!" said Hermione reprovingly.

"He's making me clean out all the bedpans in the hospital—without magic!" His fists were clenched and he was shaking with anger. "Why couldn't Black have hid out in Snape's office, huh? He could've finished the bastard off for us!"

When dawn struggled up from the horizon on Saturday morning, so much rain was falling that it was impossible to see anything beyond the windows. Severus hadn't interfered with Flint's decision to postpone the match—in fact, he'd approved it—but he found himself wishing that Gryffindor weren't such fucking martyrs. It figured that Hufflepuff had been the team to fill in the gap; the Ravenclaws, like his Slytherins, had better sense.

"I wonder how they'll even see anything in all this?" he heard Lupin saying to Minerva as they opened the front doors. The wind snatched it out of their grip and tried to slam it shut. Sprout lost her hat from the same gust of wind that knocked Flitwick clean off his feet.

"Hope they don't freeze to death," Sprout said, dredging both her hat and Flitwick out of an icy puddle.

So did Severus. The temperature outside would be below freezing with the wind-chill. If the girl contracted hypothermia, he would murder Oliver Wood.

If it weren't for keeping an eye on her, he would have stayed in his dungeon, which was, in relation to the miserable, icy, wailing storm, as dry and warm as the southern coast of France. But most of his Slytherins were heading outside, driven so hard by House-rivalry that they would cheer for Gryffindor's defeat even in conditions as shitty as these

He passed Daphne Greengrass, who was wearing a hood against the rain and pleading with her younger sister: ". . . stay inside, Aster? It's freezing and raining and it's Quidditch. . ."

"Please don't come if you don't want to," Asteria Greengrass said, struggling with a large umbrella. "I only have a strange fancy to go and see—I've never been to a Quidditch game before, you know. . ."

"They're terribly boring, Aster . . and I doubt we'll see a thing in all this wretched, freezing rain. . ."

Asteria Greengrass was likely going to observe her new heroine. Since Lily's daughter had pummeled a boy in the face for tormenting her, Asteria had . . . well, she hadn't changed. She was still timid enough to make Longbottom look as bold as a dragon-slayer in comparison. She still stared at Severus in white-faced fright if he stood within ten feet of her cauldron, and on Thursday Minerva had set her back quite a bit by asking a question of her desk partner which Asteria had thought was directed at her. Madam Pomfrey had advised the both of them to "be less scary."

Perhaps the staff ought to leave Asteria's well-being to Harriet Potter. If she could defeat Voldemort three times and slay his giant pet snake, the next insurmountable feat to tackle was surely the great timidity of Asteria Greengrass.

He'd found himself dwelling on it, ever since it had happened. He'd found himself thinking, Lily stood against Gryffindors for a Slytherin, and then, For a friend. And once you weren't her friend any longer, she never stood against them again.

He'd tried to think of some instance when Lily had protected, or even attempted to protect, a Slytherin who wasn't himself. He couldn't recall any. It hadn't mattered to him; he'd probably have been more put out if she had because he'd wanted her to care for only himself. It still didn't matter that she hadn't. But her daughter had. What was Asteria Greengrass to her? The girl hadn't even known who she was.

He had never really thought of her as being like Lily before. The eyes were the same, of course, at least in shape and color, if seldom ever in expression; but there, for him, had the similarity ended. This was the first instance where he could say that she had done something that made her appear to be Lily's daughter in more than name. . . and yet, at the same time, the action had been quite different. Asteria Greengrass was not the girl's friend. Lily might have done the same thing in the same situation, or she might not have.

He would never know.

And here went Asteria Greengrass and himself, through the icy wind and rain, to watch the girl fly circles around the Quidditch pitch.

Even with water-repelling charms, he was soaked straight through getting to the teacher's stands, and the only thing he could see clearly was his breath misting the air in front of him. The stands rang from the drumming rain and possibly the students' shouting, but the rain caused such a din it was impossible to make out any individual noises.

Lee Jordan was there, dripping, ready to commentate, and Minerva skidded across the wet stands to the seat beside him. Severus sat closer to the front than he usually did, ignoring the back-spray from the storm, trying to make out the girl on the sodden pitch down below. Some blurry shapes in crimson and yellow were barely visible, but he wasn't the only one having trouble seeing. "Are they going yet?" Jordan asked Minerva, and then he said into his microphone, "And they're off! I think . . . Gryffindor, I think it's Gryffindor, takes the Quaffle—"

One of the crimson figures detatched from the rest, struggling upward through the rain to a point overlooking the pitch from on high. He kept his eyes on it as the match wore on.

Lightning forked the air, cracking so hard and near the sound was deafening. Harriet flinched in shock and her broom dropped a few feet. The wind buffeted her to the left, and she slipped a bit on her broom, her numb hands sliding on the wet handle.

"Harry!" yelled Wood in an anguished voice. "Harry, behind you!"

Whipping round, she saw Diggory streaking across the pitch toward the opposite end. Harriet didn't think; she wheeled her Nimbus a hundred and eighty degrees and shot off after him, lying flat on her broom. Rain lashed at her face and the wind tried to hurtle her off course.

"Come on!" she begged, flinching at the whipping rain but pushing the broom forward. "Faster!"

It was so, so cold . . . the further she flew, faster through the rain, the colder it seemed to get . . . and the wind was so loud that it was making a strange, hollow silence fall across the stadium, and it was getting darker, as the lightning rippled across the sky. . .

And then, as if from somewhere far away and growing slowly closer, she heard the screaming start: first a thread, then a swell, and finally. . .

She took her eyes off the Snitch, off of Diggory, and finally saw the Dementors.

Streaming through the air, blacker than the stormy sky, their rotting cloaks rippling out behind them—moving oddly, not like birds or bats, not like swimming watersnakes, not like anything she'd ever seen—trailing over the Quidditch stands, around the goal post rings, from far above, from below they came. . .

And as they flew closer, the screaming voice was turning into words.

"Not Harriet, please not Harriet—"

"Stand aside, you silly girl, stand aside now—"

"Take me, kill me instead—"

Everything was going black. Harriet was so cold, so terrified, she couldn't move, couldn't think.

"Not Harriet! Please, have mercy, have mercy—"

Then scream again, the one she knew so well already, and this time a high, cold laugh, a flash of green light, and

Blackness.

"Lucky the ground was so soft."

"I thought she was dead for sure."

"She didn't even break her glasses. . ."

Severus's eyes were shut but he could hear the children whispering. They didn't know he was there, concealed behind one of the dark dividers that partitioned the beds off from each other. Later, he could reflect on how it made him feel like a pedophiliac stalker, but at present he was having trouble controlling his breathing. He needed to keep it quiet, so they wouldn't hear him.

The sight of her slipping off her broom, boneless, and plummeting through the air—

The children all gasped. "Harry!" said one of the Weasley twins, sounding like a person who'd had a very bad fright and was struggling to act normal. "How're you feeling?"

The girl didn't answer right away. When she did, her voice was hoarse and tremulous. "What h-happened?"

"You fell off," said a Weasley twin—the same one or a different one; they couldn't be told apart, even when Severus gave a shit. "Must've been—what—fifty feet?"

"We thought you'd died," said Spinnet, her voice shaking.

Someone squeaked—probably Granger.

The girl was silent again. There was some shuffling from the others, like they didn't know what to say.

"What happened . . . with the match?" the girl asked slowly, sounding, to Severus's ears at least, as if she were asking because she ought to, more than because she cared. But when no one said anything, she said, with much more real feeling, "We didn't lose?"

"Diggory got the Snitch," said A Weasley Twin. "Just after you fell. He didn't realize what had happened. . ."

The Twin went on blathering, but Severus tuned him out. The sight of the Dementors streaming through the rain, of the girl slipping off her broom, of Dumbledore running onto the field to slow her descent, of the girl landing softly in the grass, utterly motionless—it all played in a loop in his mind, a constant stream of cold horror, like the rain was pounding through him.

Madam Pomfrey rustled past his hiding place and began shooing out the children. When she passed on the way back to her office, she glanced at him, but said nothing, and pulled the door to her office half shut.

"Are you okay?" Granger asked the girl in a quaking voice. They seemed to be the only two left in the ward.

"I'm okay." She didn't remotely sound like she was.

Granger was silent a moment. "They're horrible things, Dementors," she half-whispered. "I looked them up, you know, at the start of term—they make you remember the worst things of your life."

The girl didn't reply. Severus wouldn't have either. Granger sounded like she had guessed which memory would be bad enough to reduce her friend to unconsciousness.

"This isn't the first time you . . . it isn't the first time this has happened to you. Is it?" Granger asked after a long silence.

Still the girl didn't reply. But whatever she'd done, or not done, it was confirmation enough for Granger.

"Oh, Harry," she said thickly.

They stayed in silence, all three of them, while rain poured down the windows outside.

Madam Pomfrey insisted on keeping Harriet in the hospital for the rest of the weekend. Harriet didn't argue or complain. In fact, she didn't do much of anything. She felt like all her emotions had been scooped out.

Hagrid visited and brought a bouquet of earwiggy yellow flowers that closed their buds at night but opened gradually throughout the day, exposing bright white and orange cores, and someone sent Harriet a hand-made card with a beautiful drawing of pink and yellow roses on it. Please get well soon, it said, in gorgeous calligraphy. There was no signature anywhere on it.

Hermione only left the Hospital wing when Madam Pomfrey shooed her out at curfew, and she was there waiting whenever Madam Pomfrey went to unlock the doors in the morning. She even took off from doing her homework to play Travel Scrabble with Harriet, and Ron set aside his growing boy-ness to stay with them. He didn't even suggest they play chess. Instead, he brought Harriet a broom catalogue, which he'd already read so many times he was able to tell her specs on any broom she was interested in, and even a few she wasn't.

Harriet's broom had been smashed to pieces by the Whomping Willow. She supposed she was upset about this, but she didn't know where, in all the things distressing her, to find room for it. She kept the pieces by her bed, even though they were just rubbish now. She wouldn't let Madam Pomfrey throw them out.

The nights were the worst. Alone in the dark, she lay awake for hours, replaying the sound of her mother's voice, the last words she'd ever spoken, in her head on an infinite loop. They were the only words she could ever remember hearing her mother say: begging for Harriet's life in exchange for her own.

She wondered if the Patronus could find old, joyful memories, so deep inside you they couldn't be remembered without the help of magic. If Dementors and Patronus were the dark and bright mirrors of the soul, shouldn't it be possible? If her mother had loved her so much to die for her, shouldn't there be, in some long-ago memory, an inprint of that?

But that's also what that memory was, the one the Dementors brought out of her, wasn't it? It was the last thing her mum had done for love of her. Like the scar on her forehead and the protection in her skin, it was a dark reflection of something indescribable. Just like it said in the book . . . When you are sorrowful, look again in your heart, and you will find you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

At night, it all became too much. She'd cry, pressing her pillow over her face in case Madam Pomfrey heard, wishing there was someone who knew what it was like to miss someone so much much you knew it would never go away, even though it had already been there for so long, because it was a part of you and always would be.

By Monday morning, she'd made up her mind. She grabbed her things and left the hospital wing, marching down to the Entrance Hall. But instead of veering right into the Great Hall for breakfast, she strode across the foyer to the dungeon staircase.

Snape's office door was shut but there was a light under it. She knocked three times, hard, and then stood there, staring grimly at the woodgrain.

"Yes, what?" his voice called from inside.

She pushed the door open. He was sitting at his desk, marking, and didn't look up.

"Make it quick, whatever it is," he said curtly.

Fine, then, she would. "I need to learn the Patronus Charm."

He did look up then, jerking his quill so that ink splattered through the air. He stared at her as though he'd thought she was off in Nepal. She thought he looked even more exhausted than the last time she'd seen him, on Friday. His hair was so greasy it had a wet sheen to it, and his face looked twice as pale, which she wouldn't have thought possible if she hadn't seen for herself.

"I could have died," she said when he only continued to stare, not saying anything. "Falling off my broom, I mean. I need to be able to defend myself."

"And why are you telling me this?" he asked. She wasn't sure he'd blinked since she walked into the room.

She didn't actually know why, but she wasn't going to tell him that. She was even going to pretend I don't know hadn't even crossed her mind. "You already know I'm trying to learn it. I don't want to have to explain to someone else. Besides, who else would I ask?"

He laid down his quill slowly, staring at it, now. Then he rubbed his fingers over his eyes. Harriet waited, her heart thumping.

"Do you imagine I'll be able to tell you anything that I haven't already?" he asked eventually. "You know what you need to do. The task is to do it."

"You can tell me more about the blocking stuff," Harriet said. "Blocking certain kinds of thoughts, I mean."

"I really don't think I can." Now that he'd looked away from her, he didn't seem to want to look back.

There was no other choice. She'd have to use her secret weapon.

"Please?" she said.

Snape's eyes fixed on her again, as suddenly as the strike of a snake. He stared at her for another long moment, as if time, not himself, had frozen.

"As you wish," he said when that long, long moment finally passed back into real time. "Next Hogsmeade weekend—that Saturday. I have too much to do before then."

Heart full, Harriet only nodded. She wasn't sure if she felt happy or apprehensive or a hundred things; she only knew she felt very much of something.

As she turned to go, she stopped and forced past that knot of emotion: "Thank you." Then she dashed out before he replied. But as she shut the door behind her, she glanced back, and saw him sitting perfectly still, staring at nothing at all.