Chapter 123 — The Words in the Quiet Room

I turned sharply, lifting my free hand before I recognised Trelawney beside the screen. The movement stopped with my arm awkwardly raised between us. She tightened her grip on my sleeve and stared past me, her spectacles catching the light from the window.

‘Professor?’ I lowered my hand. Her mouth opened as though she were trying to draw a breath that wouldn’t come, and I glanced towards the nearest chair. ‘Do you need to sit down?’

She spoke without answering. The voice was low and rough, strained in a way I had never heard during her lessons. There was none of the soft emphasis she usually gave a warning about someone’s future.

‘The traitor will come into the open. He will be free again. Innocent blood will be spilled, and the servant will find his master. They will be together again.’

The final words dragged at her breath. Her hand loosened, and she coughed hard enough to bend forward, catching the edge of the shelf. I moved the crystal further back on its stand before bringing the chair close enough for her to sit.

Trelawney lowered herself into it and pressed a handkerchief to her mouth. I waited until she could breathe more easily, then asked what she had meant. She looked up at me, blinking as though I had just entered the room.

‘My dear boy, what are you doing here?’ Her gaze moved towards the shelf. The crystal was clear again.

‘Returning the ball. You took hold of my arm and said something about a traitor, and a servant finding his master.’ I watched her face while repeating it, hoping for some sign that she recognised the words.

‘I don’t remember saying that.’ She stayed quiet for a few seconds, then touched the beads at her throat. ‘The mind can reach beyond the limits we imagine for it. That is what I’ve been trying to teach you, if you would approach the subject with the proper openness.’

‘Do you remember seeing anything?’ I asked. She stopped, and I became conscious of how closely I was watching her in the empty room. I stepped back from the chair. ‘You seemed unwell. I wanted to make sure.’

Trelawney drew herself upright, her voice recovering its familiar softness. She was a little tired, she said, and I could go to lunch. When I offered to fetch someone, she refused firmly enough that I left the ball on its stand and went down the ladder.

On the landing, I took out my notebook and wrote before anything else could intrude on the words. I could still hear that strained voice. Beneath the quotation, I recorded the faces in the ball and her statement that she didn’t remember speaking, then drew a line before beginning anything I thought those observations meant.

Black and Pettigrew had occupied a great deal of my attention recently. I had also been tired enough to fall asleep in the lesson. Seeing their faces in a crystal ball didn’t make me an expert on visions, but I had been fully awake when Trelawney caught my arm.

The servant finding his master was the part I kept returning to. I remembered the thing that had spoken through Quirrell and the younger face emerging from the diary. Voldemort had already found more than one way to remain dangerous after people thought they understood what had happened to him.

If somebody connected with Harry’s parents could help him return, leaving the warning in my notebook would accomplish very little. I closed it and went down to the Great Hall, where Harry and Ron had found Hermione. Her books were piled beside her plate, and Ron held mine out as I reached them.

‘You took your time,’ he said. I accepted the book but stayed on my feet, telling them something had happened after they left and that I needed to speak to Dumbledore.

Harry’s face changed. ‘About Peter?’ he asked. Hermione stopped moving her fork and looked up at me.

‘It may be. Trelawney said something I want him to hear before I try explaining it to everybody else.’ I told them where I was going and promised to come back. Harry offered to join me, but first I needed to give an account of something only I had witnessed; I would ask if the headmaster wanted us together.

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Harry nodded. Ron pushed a piece of bread towards me before I could leave, and I took it at his insistence. Getting admitted to Dumbledore’s office required a message and a short wait, which gave me time to eat it and reread my notes.

Fawkes watched from his perch as I entered. Dumbledore put aside a paper and indicated a chair, saying he understood the matter concerned Professor Trelawney. I put the notebook on his desk and began with returning the crystal ball.

I explained the mist and the faces, including where I had seen Pettigrew’s photograph. Then I repeated the words. Dumbledore asked to hear them again, and I read directly from the page instead of trusting that telling the account once hadn’t already changed it.

He asked what happened before her voice altered, how long it lasted and what she said afterwards. I answered as closely as I could, with the notebook between us. He neither smiled at the account nor suggested I had simply spent too long in a warm classroom.

‘I don’t know that the faces and the words belong to the same thing,’ I said. ‘They came together, but she didn’t name either man.’

‘No, she didn’t.’ Dumbledore looked at the line I had drawn across the page. ‘And below this is what you think the event might concern?’

‘Voldemort.’ The name sounded very clear in the office. I pointed to the words about the servant. ‘If Peter is alive, and if he betrayed them, that could be what she meant.’

Dumbledore remained still for a moment, then turned to a portrait behind his desk. He asked its occupant to find McGonagall and Lupin; there was new information concerning the search. The painted figure left its frame while I watched, and some of the tension eased out of my shoulders.

‘You think it was a real prediction,’ I said. Dumbledore brought his attention back to the account on his desk.

‘I have reason to take what Sybill sometimes says very seriously. Your description of her voice and her memory of the incident is significant.’ He looked at me over his spectacles when I repeated the word sometimes. ‘You have doubts about the lessons.’

I admitted that I did. There seemed little point in hiding it after the care I had taken to separate the event from my guesses. I also told him Hermione had left the lesson that morning, though I hadn’t heard all the exchange myself.

‘The part Harry told me about was unkind,’ I said. ‘Hermione should be able to explain what happened.’

‘I’ll ask Minerva to speak with her.’ Dumbledore set my notebook where we could both see the quotation. ‘We can examine this without requiring you to accept every interpretation offered in class.’

‘What do we do about it?’ I asked. He said they would continue the search with the new information, speak to Trelawney and compare her words with what could be established independently.

‘And if it means Peter is going to get away?’ I kept looking at the sentence about being free again. The words seemed to offer an ending to work we had scarcely begun.

‘Then it’s a warning worth having,’ Dumbledore said. ‘It isn’t a reason to make the escape happen by deciding our actions cannot matter.’

I looked up from the notebook. ‘I want to help stop it,’ I said. He leaned forward a little before answering.

‘You have helped by bringing me this account. If you find Scabbers, call a member of staff promptly and keep the other students away until we can examine him. If you witness another event like this, record what you actually see and hear, as you’ve done today.’

‘And the larger part?’ I asked. He didn’t need me to name it again.

‘I’ll need to consider it with people who can act on more than the information we have here. When there’s something you need to know for your safety, or for anything I ask you to do, you will be told.’

I still had questions, but that answer gave me something definite to expect. Dumbledore made a copy of the account and returned my notebook. As I put it away, he opened a cabinet beside the desk, revealing a shallow stone basin filled with a light that didn’t move quite like water.

He touched his wand to his temple and drew away a fine silver strand. I stopped fastening my pouch while he lowered it into the basin. The surface stirred, leaving me unable to decide whether I had just seen something removed, copied or made visible.

‘A memory,’ Dumbledore said, noticing where I was looking. ‘There’s something I need to review before our next conversation.’

I could see no face or scene in the moving light. I asked whether it concerned what I had told him, and he said it was something to consider alongside it. Then he closed the cabinet, leaving me with no view of whatever his memory contained.

Back in the Great Hall, the others had saved me a place and enough food to make Ron’s earlier offering seem very small. I sat down and told them about the faces, the words and Dumbledore’s instructions. Hermione listened without interrupting, her abandoned lesson still spread across the books beside her.

‘She really didn’t remember?’ she asked when I finished. I said that was what Trelawney had told me, and Hermione looked towards the teachers’ table.

‘I’m still going to speak to McGonagall about leaving the subject.’ She moved a book away from my plate so I could eat. I told her I understood; an incident neither of us could explain hadn’t answered her questions about the lessons.

Harry read the quotation in my notebook, with Ron leaning close enough to follow it. He stopped at free again, then went back to the beginning. When he looked up, I waited rather than suggesting what he ought to make of it.

‘Then we’d better find him first,’ he said. I agreed and drew the notebook towards the middle of the table, where we could all read the words without turning any of our guesses into part of the quotation.