Chapter 114 — What We Brought Back

Knowing Black was Harry’s godfather gave the old accusations a weight they had never carried for me. Harry watched my face as he explained the protection around his parents’ hiding place: a Fidelius Charm, held through a Secret-Keeper. According to the conversation inside the pub, that responsibility belonged to Black.

‘They trusted him,’ Harry said. ‘He told Voldemort where they were.’ I kept quiet as he struggled to continue, hearing the account through his shock rather than from the adults who discussed it. Another friend, Peter Pettigrew, had confronted Black afterwards. People died in the street, Harry told us, and only a finger of Pettigrew had been found.

Ron made a small sound of disgust. Harry’s hands shook round the false face while Hermione sat beside him, leaving enough space for him to move if he wanted. I remained where he could see me, uncertain which question might help and increasingly certain that asking it immediately would not.

‘Don’t start telling me something might be strange about it, Oswald.’ Harry’s voice rose at my name. ‘He was my godfather. If he comes for me—’ He stopped to draw breath, still looking at me as though he expected an argument.

‘We need to keep you safe,’ I said. That was the useful part I could hold on to while he shook his head. His anger had brought us here, but we did not have to help it choose where he went next.

‘I don’t want to be kept safe from him. I want—’ His voice broke before he finished. He bent forward with the mask dangling from one hand, and I stayed beside him while speaking and breathing seemed too difficult to do together.

‘You’re not on your own, mate,’ Ron said. He came to the other side of the wall, where his robes blocked some of the wind. Harry offered no reply, but did not ask him to leave. After a little while I poured the last warm tea into a cup, which Harry accepted with both hands.

Snow settled in Hermione’s hair. I brushed some from my sleeve and looked towards shelter among the buildings. ‘We can stay with you somewhere warmer. You needn’t explain anything else yet,’ I said. Harry stared into the cup before nodding and putting the disguise away. This time, when he drew the cloak round himself, he stayed beside us.

We sheltered until he could manage the return. He said little, though once he apologised for shouting and Ron told him better reasons for apologising could be found when he felt better. Hermione gave Ron a look, but Harry almost smiled. We saw him to the agreed point near Honeydukes with a time for meeting in the tower and a plan if he failed to arrive.

Separating was harder than that morning. I watched him disappear beneath the cloak, wishing I could see the entire passage from where I stood, then returned with Ron and Hermione by our own route. Harry reached the castle safely and handed back my map as soon as we met. His thanks was quiet, and neither of us seemed satisfied with what the day had brought.

We changed out of wet clothes and found places near the common-room fire. Harry held a mug while the warmth reached him, with nobody demanding another account of the pub. Later he brought out his father’s diary, and I left him to read. Some questions a friend could help ask; those pages still belonged to him alone.

That evening I began my statement for Buckbeak’s appeal. I wrote what happened before attempting to improve its presentation: volunteering for the flight, watching Malfoy cross the boundary, hearing Hagrid’s warning and moving to pull him clear. The injury to my leg stayed in the account alongside what led to it.

So did the inconvenient parts. Hagrid caring for his creatures had not made every arrangement adequate, and Malfoy ignoring instructions did not remove the resulting harm. I wanted something that could be compared with the original evidence. Hermione organised the material while Harry and Ron wrote their own accounts, leaving differences of viewpoint intact instead of smoothing them into one convenient story.

McGonagall helped Hagrid identify the proper submission and material already on file. I signed my account, asking for the injury and circumstances to be considered together. Hagrid sent the appeal before the deadline, and we kept copies. When he showed us its receipt, I felt we had moved something forward without confusing receipt with a changed decision. The order remained while we waited.

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Before the holiday, I told Luna that Harry had learned painful news about his family. She asked whether he had people with him without requesting the details he entrusted to us. I said he did, and she took my hand before we went to find somewhere quieter than the entrance hall.

We finally kept the afternoon postponed during my preparations. A slow walk through the castle brought us to a glass robin pecking at painted berries in a window. I thought it looked hungry; Luna thought it looked persistent, and our attempts to settle the matter ended in laughter without improving the bird’s prospects. I was glad to have nowhere else I needed to be.

Before leaving, I kissed her goodbye and promised to write. ‘You can use your good hand now,’ she said. ‘I kept the other note, though.’ She meant the badly written line about the part of the day I looked forward to. I carried that answer home with me, finding it more pleasant to remember than the questions Emma would certainly have.

Her first was whether I was well. The next concerned the interval between being told to wait and deciding otherwise, which I described without asking her to admire the lion quickly enough to forget it. She listened to the return, the examination and McGonagall’s subsequent arrangements before speaking again.

‘I am pleased for you, Oswald. I’m also still cross,’ she said. I had begun recognising that combination and accepted it without offering my improved technique as an answer. The achievement could wait while she finished asking about what made it necessary to be cross in the first place.

Harry stayed at Hogwarts for the holiday. We wrote, and I welcomed the ordinary complaints among things he still struggled to understand, since they gave me something to answer without pretending to repair the news about his parents. Dobby wrote too, with a practical note from Tom confirming that he accepted paid work at the bookshop.

Hours and duties had been agreed, and he received his first wages. His account of them made me read the page twice before checking Tom’s explanation and replying myself. I asked how he found the work, wanting more than gratitude as the answer, and passed the news to Harry.

Luna’s letters were less orderly than Tom’s and more welcome. We managed a short call while both away from Hogwarts and able to get a signal. Hearing her laugh without waiting for an owl was worth arranging, though it did not replace seeing her. I returned to school with fresh stationery, unresolved questions and the appointment with Lupin marked prominently in my notebook.

By its morning, Ron and Hermione were barely speaking. Scabbers was missing, and the box on Ron’s bed had been found with its fastening unsecured. That offered a possible escape without explaining where the rat went afterwards. Ron had already settled on Crookshanks as the explanation he preferred.

‘He keeps watching him,’ he said, looking beneath the bed again. ‘I told you to keep him away.’ The words reached Hermione while she checked behind a piece of furniture, bringing her upright before she answered.

‘And I did. Being a cat doesn’t mean he’s eaten your rat,’ she replied. We had reached this point several times already, with none of the repetitions producing Scabbers. Harry and I searched among Ron’s unpacked things while Neville checked another corner, until another accusation stopped Hermione’s work.

‘Enough,’ I said before they completed the same exchange again. They looked equally displeased with the interruption. I asked Ron where he had last definitely seen Scabbers and wrote it down, then took Hermione’s account of when Crookshanks was in his carrier. Those details gave us somewhere to continue looking without deciding what happened first.

I opened the map with brush and password as well. Nothing I could identify as Scabbers appeared, though I did not know how reliably ordinary pets were shown. Closing it left us with a search instead of a verdict. At appointment time Ron was still among his belongings, while Hermione offered to ask other students whether they had seen the rat. I let them work separately for a while.

Harry and I went to Defence, where Lupin looked up from a trunk beside his chair. ‘Good morning. Just the two of you?’ he asked. Harry explained the search for Scabbers, and I added that our friends were arguing about his disappearance. Lupin recognised enough from what he heard in the corridor to spare us another account.

He asked about Harry’s holiday and checked that we continued the memory work. This was the appointment made before Christmas, and the trunk was part of the next stage he intended to explain. I put my notebook on the desk, ready to add something more useful than a list of things we still could not settle.

‘We’ll begin without opening it,’ Lupin said. ‘The incantation is Expecto Patronum.’ I wrote the words and repeated them while he demonstrated the movement. The brush stayed on the desk; pronunciation was something we could practise before any paper was prepared or released.