Chapter 121 — What the Map Could Not Prove

‘I don’t know that,’ Lupin said. His eyes had sharpened at Scabbers’s name, and I stopped short of turning the connection into a discovery I hadn’t made.

‘Neither do I. Ron says they’ve had him for twelve years. He belonged to Percy before Ron, he’s been here at Hogwarts with us, and now nobody can find him.’ I pulled the notebook closer, looking for room beneath the account of the corridor.

Lupin gave me a clean sheet instead. He asked for exactly what Ron had said, with what I had seen kept separate. Writing it down made the gaps plain: a missing pet, a family’s account of its history, a name on the map. I hadn’t seen a rat beneath that name or watched anything change shape.

‘We have to find him,’ I said, putting down the quill. Lupin nodded but kept his hand beside the page until I looked up.

‘If you find Scabbers before a member of staff does, call us. Don’t try a transformation spell on him yourself.’ He glanced at the folded map. ‘There are other rats in Hogwarts. We can’t choose one because its history fits part of the question.’

I agreed, with no spell I could honestly claim would settle the matter anyway. Then I asked him to open the map. He touched it with his wand, gave the password and bent over the emerging corridors with me.

Pettigrew’s name was gone. We followed the nearby passages and the rooms around them, finding sleeping students, a ghost crossing a wall and our own names together in the office. Nothing explained what had passed me at the junction.

‘Could it have made a mistake?’ I asked. Lupin kept his eyes on the parchment for a moment before answering.

‘I don’t know a fault that would produce what you’ve described. That doesn’t make every conclusion we draw from it correct.’ He looked at my original entry again. ‘Your observation needs investigating. So does Ron’s.’

It was the answer I had wanted when I went to the Fat Lady, though it made the name no less alarming. I sat back and looked at the writing along the edge of the map, remembering Lupin’s reaction when I first showed it to him.

‘You said you and James helped make it. Were Sirius and Peter the other two?’ I asked. When he confirmed it, I pointed to the heading. ‘Which of those names was yours?’

‘Moony,’ he said. ‘James was Prongs, Sirius was Padfoot and Peter was Wormtail.’ He followed my gaze to the last name and nodded before I asked about the rat.

I had read that word long before hearing Peter Pettigrew’s name. It had been an odd signature, part of a joke left on an old possession. I looked at Padfoot next and asked what form Sirius took.

‘A large black dog.’ Lupin gave the answer after a shorter pause this time. I thought of the watched entrances and all the conversations in which we had imagined a man trying to pass through them.

‘Have the people searching been told?’ I asked. Lupin looked away from me and said no.

I waited for the qualification. When none came, I asked why, and he pressed his fingers together on the desk before letting them go.

‘Explaining it means explaining what we did at school, and why. There are things in that account I’m ashamed of keeping from Dumbledore.’ He brought his gaze back to mine. ‘I was afraid of losing his trust.’

Names moved across the parchment between us, people whose work might have been different if they had known that fact. ‘You need to tell him now,’ I said. Lupin agreed without asking me to make the admission easier for him.

I wanted to know how Moony fitted the other names and what he had been so afraid to explain. Those questions could wait while he wrote down Sirius’s form for the headmaster. A dog and a rat were enough to change tonight’s search.

‘Was James a stag?’ I asked, looking at Prongs. Lupin nodded, and I thought of Harry asking what his Patronus might become. I left the thought alone before it turned into another answer we didn’t have.

‘If Peter is alive, the story Harry heard may be wrong,’ I said. Lupin leaned back, the light catching the tired lines around his eyes.

‘Part of it certainly would be.’ He looked at the name in my notebook. ‘You’re asking how much else might be wrong.’

I nodded, and he began with the days around the Potters’ deaths. Sometimes he stopped to correct himself, distinguishing something he had been told from an event he had witnessed. James and Lily had died first; the explosion in the street came afterwards. He had believed Sirius was the Secret Keeper, but he hadn’t been inside the house to see a betrayal.

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‘I couldn’t reconcile Sirius with what they said he’d done,’ Lupin told me. ‘Then Peter was dead too.’ His voice changed on the last name, and he reached for his handkerchief.

I found a loose page to straighten so he wouldn’t have to compose himself with me staring at his face. When he looked up, I said I was sorry. He gave the same answer, with enough weariness in it to stop me attempting anything more elaborate.

I turned the notebook towards him again. ‘I’ve wondered whether Black might be looking for something other than Harry. If he knew Peter was alive, that could bring him here.’

‘How would he know?’ Lupin asked. I admitted I didn’t have an answer, then tried the dates: the escape in July, the warnings we had seen during the summer, Black coming to Hogwarts after term began.

‘A warning doesn’t tell us where he was,’ Lupin said. ‘Or whom he could reach. The dates may matter, but they won’t tell us his purpose by themselves.’

I had begun a new line with therefore. I crossed the word out, leaving the dates, and said I still wanted the possibility checked. Lupin agreed that it should be, and that Harry must remain protected while we found out.

I looked towards the door, wondering whether Snape would return with the headmaster. His part in tonight’s events had brought back a question from the lesson: Lupin had confirmed the work he shared with Ken, but I still didn’t know whether they had been friends.

‘Their history isn’t simple,’ Lupin said when I asked. I told him that seemed to be the answer everyone had, which brought a tired smile to his face. ‘You can ask Severus about the work. I won’t pretend to know every part of what happened between them.’

The notebook Snape had lent me had been useful whatever lay behind the loan. I was trying to find a better way to ask when a knock interrupted us. Dumbledore entered with McGonagall, Snape just behind them, and I sat straighter without deciding to.

Lupin stood. ‘There’s something else you need to know,’ he told the headmaster, and gave him the information plainly: the makers of the map, Sirius’s dog form and Peter’s rat form. Neither had been registered at the time. He admitted that he had failed to report it earlier without looking towards me.

Dumbledore listened until he finished. Then he turned to the map and my notes. ‘And this began with your observation, Oswald?’ he asked.

‘I read the name. Ron saw it before I left the tower.’ I repeated the account of the corridor while McGonagall asked where I had gone beyond the place the Fat Lady had told me to wait. Showing her the distance made my reasoning sound considerably less sensible than it had at the entrance.

She asked where I had cast the light and what I had seen beneath it. ‘No person,’ I said. ‘I can’t say I saw everything small enough to fit against the wall.’

McGonagall wrote that down too. The headmaster checked the map with Lupin, comparing the corridor and nearby rooms before asking about access too small for a person. I explained why I had mentioned Scabbers, and Lupin passed him the separate account of Ron’s words.

‘That remains a possible connection,’ Dumbledore said. ‘It isn’t an identification.’ I told him I understood, and he looked at me over his glasses. ‘Continue understanding it when you speak to your friends.’

McGonagall described the room behind the tapestry and the way my name had disappeared from the map inside it. Dumbledore added it to the places staff would examine. Watching that gap become part of the search was more reassuring than being told the map would certainly find whatever they wanted.

Lupin copied my entry onto two loose sheets. Snape took one and left to examine the corridor and nearby access points; the information about animal forms would go to staff involved in the search. Lupin would keep the map under observation, with the second copy of the entry beside it. McGonagall would take me back and speak to the boys in the dormitory.

The work had begun before I left my chair. I put my brush and notebook away, then looked at the parchment remaining on the desk. Lupin followed my glance.

‘It stays here for now,’ he said. I agreed, adding that it was still mine. His expression softened a little. ‘Temporary custody, Oswald. I haven’t forgotten how it came back to us.’

My pouch felt different without it. The spent Patronus pieces were still wrapped separately; I had used one more prepared strip for light in the corridor. Those were simple enough things to record. What the moving name meant for Harry was much harder.

‘He’ll want to know about Black,’ I said at the door. McGonagall waited until I turned towards her before answering.

‘We’ll tell him what we’ve found and what we still don’t know. There’s enough here to be careful with, without inventing either reassurance or despair.’ She led me out, leaving Lupin beside the open map.

Ron waited when the portrait swung aside, with Harry beside him in his dressing gown. McGonagall brought us away from the stairs and let me begin with the name I had read. Harry watched my face while I explained Peter’s rat form, Black’s dog form and why Scabbers had become part of the question.

I didn’t tell him his godfather was innocent. McGonagall explained that staff were searching and that finding the rat meant calling a professor. We weren’t to try catching or transforming him ourselves.

‘So Peter might be alive,’ Harry said. I answered that he might, and his eyes moved towards Ron. ‘And Scabbers might be—’

‘We don’t know,’ I said. Harry drew a long breath, nodded and stayed beside us while McGonagall checked that we understood the instructions. She took Ron’s account separately before sending us upstairs.

As I turned to go, she reminded me about the written report. ‘Include the useful discovery and the unnecessary risk,’ she said. ‘I expect an honest account of both.’

I promised she would have it. Upstairs, I lay awake long after the others had stopped moving, remembering the footprints crossing the illuminated floor. The map was elsewhere now, open on a professor’s desk, but I could still see the name passing me through the empty light.