Chapter 117 — An Afternoon Kept

Luna had put my note in her pocket by the time we reached the Great Hall. She stood beside a tall window, watching sunlight creep across the flagstones, and turned when my shoes caught on the edge of a mat. I had intended a slightly more graceful arrival.

‘I haven’t brought them all the way outside yet,’ I said, going ahead of the others. ‘Would you mind if they came for a while?’

She looked past me. Ron was attempting to hold a door for Hermione without making it seem deliberate, a difficulty Ginny solved by going through first. Luna took my hand and moved aside so we weren’t blocking their way.

‘For a little while,’ she said. ‘I’d still like some of the afternoon with you. We should tell them; it will be easier than hoping they guess.’

Harry accepted the arrangement with an apology for joining us. Hermione had something she wanted us to see, and Ron seemed relieved that nobody asked him to explain why he wanted to leave the tower. We went out together, fastening coats against air considerably colder than the sunlight suggested.

Luna had collected a small covered container from Hagrid. He had agreed where we could leave the food, near the edge of the trees, and we followed the path towards it. Ginny walked beside Harry for a while, asking about the lesson. His answers came more easily with something to look at beyond our faces.

At a sheltered stretch of wall, Hermione took a folded newspaper from her bag. ‘I’ve been looking for this since Hogsmeade,’ she said. ‘There was a spare copy among the library’s old newspapers. I borrowed it.’

The date was November 1981. I held one corner while Harry caught the other, and we stood close enough to shelter the page from the wind. A crease had begun to split near the bottom, leaving Hermione to support it with her palm.

The report described the street explosion, the deaths and Sirius Black’s arrest. Much of it concerned the Ministry’s response, with praise for the people involved and a description of the destruction. Beside the text, a round-faced man smiled out of a small photograph, then glanced away as though someone beyond the frame had called him.

Peter Pettigrew’s name was printed underneath. I had heard it before Christmas, but the photograph made me slow down. He looked younger than the name had felt in Harry’s account, where he had existed chiefly as the person killed after the Potters.

The paper called him a hero and reported the posthumous award of an Order of Merlin. Further down, it repeated the detail Harry had overheard in the Three Broomsticks: only a finger had been recovered. I went back to the beginning of that paragraph and read it again.

‘Twelve years ago,’ Ron said quietly, looking over Harry’s shoulder. Hermione corrected it to a little over twelve, but Harry kept watching the photograph.

His hand tightened until the old crease gave a faint tearing sound. ‘Sorry,’ he said, loosening his grip. Hermione moved his fingers to a stronger part of the page without taking it away from him.

‘Does it say how they established he was dead?’ I asked. Ron turned towards me, and I pointed to the sentence about the remains.

‘You mean apart from the explosion?’ he said. He bent closer to read it himself.

‘It says what they found. I wondered whether there was anything else.’ I kept my finger clear of the print while Hermione searched the surrounding paragraphs.

‘Not in this report,’ she said at last. ‘There may have been something later. Or something they didn’t put in the paper.’

That was the difficulty. A short report could leave out witnesses, examinations, half the work behind a conclusion. Still, the thing named on the page was something a person could lose and survive. The uneasiness it gave me felt familiar, tangled with impressions I couldn’t reliably place; I wasn’t going to turn those scraps into facts for Harry.

‘I’d like to know what else they had,’ I said. ‘This can’t be the only account.’

Hermione nodded, then looked towards Luna. ‘Would your father know where to find others?’ she asked. Luna considered the question while I helped ease the page out of the wind.

‘He might. He keeps a great many things people have told him to throw away.’ She took the container from the wall where she had set it. ‘Some of them become useful after everyone has stopped complaining about them.’

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Ron nearly smiled, and Harry asked whether she would mind finding out. Luna agreed to ask what her father had about the case, adding that she wouldn’t repeat things Harry had only told us. He thanked her, then helped Hermione fold the paper along its existing creases.

I wanted accounts we could compare, particularly something explaining how Pettigrew’s death had been established. For now, Hermione had a borrowed newspaper to protect, Luna had a question for her father, and Harry had spent enough of the walk staring at a man described as murdered. We carried on towards the trees.

The first thestral appeared when Luna lifted the lid. Its narrow black head emerged between two trunks, pale eyes following the container. Behind it, a smaller animal remained partly hidden, one folded wing moving as it shifted its weight.

‘One just ahead,’ I told the others, slowing beside Luna. ‘There’s another behind it, closer to that tree.’

Hermione looked where I indicated. ‘I still can’t see them,’ she said, and Harry admitted that he couldn’t either. He had the same searching expression I remembered from the coaches in September.

I could see the nearest creature clearly enough to follow the movement of its shoulder. I still couldn’t explain the difference between Harry and me, and repeating what I knew about death would hardly help him see it. Luna waited until it had approached and smelled the food, then offered a piece on her open palm.

Ron made a strangled sound when the meat disappeared. ‘That’s horrible,’ he said, taking half a step backwards.

‘It has rather nice manners,’ Luna replied. She showed him her empty hand, fingers still attached, while the thestral chewed with no apparent interest in the complaint.

‘I mean the food vanishing.’ Ron leaned to one side as though he might catch it from another angle. Ginny laughed, and even Hermione smiled when Luna turned her hand over for a more thorough inspection.

I crouched beside the container and took a piece for the smaller animal. It stretched its head towards me, stopped, then tried again when I stayed still. I let it take the food without moving closer, watching its ears shift as the others talked.

‘You’ve learnt to wait,’ Luna said. I looked up to find her smiling at me.

‘In certain narrowly defined circumstances.’ I reached for another piece after the thestral had swallowed. ‘I wouldn’t announce a general improvement just yet.’

Harry asked to try. Luna showed him where to stand and described the position of the larger animal’s head, guiding his hand lower when he held it too high. His startled laugh when the food left his palm was worth bringing the others for.

Ron went next, keeping his free hand well out of the way. Hermione steadied the container while he reached for a second piece, and neither found a reason to object. For a few minutes, his missing rat and her accused cat had to share their attention with something neither of them could see.

The food was nearly gone when Harry reminded the others that we had asked for some time alone. He said we would see them at dinner, and Ron turned back to me before following him onto the path.

‘And the map?’ he asked. I said we would look afterwards and reminded him to bring the list of places he had searched. He nodded, then hurried to catch the others.

Ginny walked backwards for a few steps to finish a question. Hermione warned her about a rut, and I waited until she had turned round before putting the lid on the empty container. The larger thestral investigated once more, found nothing, and moved away.

‘Thank you,’ I told Luna. ‘Especially for putting up with the criticism of your guests.’

‘Ron apologised to the air afterwards. I thought that was promising.’ She slipped her hand around my arm and looked up at me. ‘How tired are you?’

I began to say less than I had been that morning, but her expression made me reconsider the usefulness of that answer. ‘Tired enough to enjoy sitting down,’ I admitted. We found a dry place on the low wall beside the path, and I folded my scarf beneath us to take some of the cold out of the stone.

Luna settled against my shoulder and tucked her hand between mine. We watched the thestrals return to the trees, the smaller one stopping once to look back. When she asked about the Patronus lesson, I told her about the mist and how quickly I had managed to spoil it.

‘Was it good mist?’ she asked. Her thumb moved against my hand while I considered the question.

‘Very encouraging mist. Lupin said I stopped holding on to the memory and started trying to win.’ I told her about the two attempts, then admitted which memory I had used. She looked down at our hands.

‘I thought you were getting rather tired of my writing by the end of the month,’ she said. ‘You did stare at some of those notes for a long time.’

‘I was tired of being unable to answer you properly. There are limits to what I can accomplish with my left hand and a quill.’ I turned my hand beneath hers. ‘And I liked having you there.’

She lifted her face, and I bent towards her slowly enough that she could meet me. The kiss was brief. Afterwards she stayed close, her forehead resting against the side of my face while I put an arm around her.

‘I want more afternoons like this,’ I said. Beyond the path, the last thestral disappeared between the trees.

‘You can have them. You do need to leave room for them.’ She said it gently, then glanced along the path the others had taken. ‘And let some turn out differently.’

I thought of Harry laughing at the empty space above his hand and Ron thanking the wrong patch of air. This afternoon had survived both of them quite well. I drew Luna closer, and we stayed until the light left the treetops and the cold began finding its way through my scarf.

I returned the empty container to Hagrid’s door while she waited on the path. On the walk uphill, she put her hand in mine without checking whether it was free. I closed my fingers around hers and kept pace beside her, letting the unfinished work wait until we reached the castle.