A new page has been added to the archive.
Mind the fine print.
The castle is listening.
✦
Hermione waited until Harry had taken the stairs before she asked Ron what he had seen.
“Of which bit?” Ron said.
“There was quite a lot of it.”
The library corridor had filled again.
A pair of students edged around them, watching the folded notice in Ron’s hand.
Harry had left it on the window ledge when he hurried off, and Ron had picked it up without unfolding it.
He held it by one corner, as if the school seal might leave a mark.
“When Professor Quirrell came around the corner,” Hermione said.
“He came around the corner.”
“Did he look at the notice?”
Ron turned the parchment over.
“I was looking at Harry.”
Hermione had hoped he’d been watching Quirrell.
“I saw him stop,” she said.
“Only for a moment.
He looked at us.”
“He has eyes.”
“And Harry said someone noticed.”
“Harry says things like that when he wants you to ask him what he means, then acts surprised when you do.”
Hermione took the notice before Ron could bend the corner.
The heading was visible, but the names at the bottom were hidden by the fold.
She had seen enough of it beside the library window.
She had not seen why Dumbledore had given Harry a copy before posting it to everyone else.
“He looked frightened,” she said.
Ron glanced up the staircase.
“He looked frightened when the Hat called Slytherin.
Didn’t stop him going.”
“This isn’t about the Hat.”
“It always comes back to that with him.
He can tell us there’s danger, then decide we’re too delicate to hear the rest.”
She was tempted to defend Harry.
She was also angry enough to agree with Ron, which made her more careful with both.
“I asked for facts,” she said.
“He gave us one warning and a sentence about being watched.
I don’t know whether the second is a fact.”
“There’s a solution.
Give him his paper back and stay away from the corridor.”
“The paper belongs to him,” Hermione said.
“Staying away doesn’t settle whether someone at school ought to hear what happened.”
Ron gave a short laugh.
“You want to tell a professor that Harry Potter was seen reading a rule?”
“I want to decide what we can say without inventing the rest.”
“Then say nothing.
Easy.”
He started toward the Great Hall.
Hermione followed, irritated by how much faster he walked when he wanted a discussion to end.
He slowed after the first staircase, but did not turn around.
It was a concession too small to acknowledge aloud.
They found Harry at a junction below the library.
He had stopped to retie his bag strap and looked up when he heard them.
Hermione held out the notice.
“You left this.”
Harry took it.
“Thank you.”
Ron waited for Harry to add something.
Harry tucked the parchment into his bag.
“That’s it?” Ron asked.
Harry looked from one of them to the other.
“I don’t know what answer you’re expecting.”
“Neither do I,” Ron said.
“That’s becoming the problem.”
Harry’s mouth tightened.
For a moment Hermione thought he might explain what he had meant by “someone.” Instead a group of Slytherins appeared at the far end of the passage.
One called his name.
Harry said he had to go and went, not quite quickly enough to look like an escape.
Ron watched him join them.
“He could have said he didn’t know.”
“He might not,” Hermione said.
“Or he might know and enjoy being the only one.”
She had no useful answer.
The Quirrell she had seen was a teacher passing a corner.
Harry’s fear was real, but fear did not identify its cause.
She put the sentence away before it could become a story she liked better than the evidence.
Dinner was loud and smelled of roasted onions.
Hermione had brought a book because she had intended to read while eating.
She kept turning the same page.
Across from her, Ron attacked his potatoes with enough force to suggest the potatoes had made a poor first impression.
“You were right about one thing,” she said.
“Mark the hour.”
“We should keep away from the west wing.”
“That wasn’t my point.”
“It was a good point by accident.”
Ron looked up.
He might have smiled if he had not been watching two students further down the table lean toward each other.
Their whisper reached them in pieces: Potter, notice, corridor.
“They know about the notice?”
“Percy told half the House there was a restriction,” Ron said.
“He likes it when people know he’s obeying something.”
“The general restriction.
How do they know Harry received it privately?”
Ron set down his fork.
“I said it.
To Neville.”
“When?”
“On the way in.
He asked why I was cross.
I said Dumbledore had handed Harry a private notice and Harry still couldn’t give us a straight answer.”
“Neville wasn’t the only person on the way in.”
“I know that now.”
The nearer student caught Hermione looking and resumed eating with exaggerated attention.
At the other end of the table someone asked whether Potter had been given a map to whatever was hidden upstairs.
A laugh answered.
Neither voice sounded as though it had been in the library corridor.
Ron stared at his plate.
“I didn’t say there was a map.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“Don’t sound like I wanted them to do it.”
“Then help stop it.”
Hermione stood before she had decided what she meant to say.
Several faces turned.
Ron caught her sleeve.
“Don’t.
You can’t tell them what he said without making it worse.”
She sat down.
Her cheeks burned.
He was right about that, and he was the last person she wanted to be right just then.
“What did Neville say?” she asked.
“That Harry probably didn’t ask for special treatment.” Ron pushed a potato with his fork.
“I told him that wasn’t the point.”
“It wasn’t.
But you made it sound as though the private copy proved Harry had a plan.”
“I made it sound as though he could trust us enough to say if he did.”
Ron kept his eyes on his plate.
Hermione looked across the Hall.
Harry was at the Slytherin table, listening to a boy she did not know.
She could not tell whether he had heard the rumor.
A girl beside him closed a book when someone glanced her way.
“He could tell us more,” she said.
“I don’t know that he safely can.
Those are different questions.”
“You sound like him.”
“You sound like you want me to choose a side.”
Ron flushed.
“I want you to admit he keeps choosing for us.”
Hermione lifted her book, then put it down without opening it.
She had no appetite for the careful sentence that would let them both feel correct.
The rumor moved faster than they did.
By the time dinner ended, a Gryffindor at the door asked Ron whether Potter had recruited him to stand guard at the west stair.
Ron told him to get stuffed.
The boy laughed as if that confirmed it.
A girl behind him looked at Hermione and asked whether she had been taking notes for Harry.
“For myself,” Hermione said.
The girl raised her hands and walked away.
It should have felt like a successful correction.
It did not.
Hermione had spent two days being told she asked too many questions.
Now the questions could be made to look like service to a boy in the wrong House.
Ron heard the exchange.
He looked as if he might go after the girl, then remembered his own part in getting them here.
He offered Hermione the last of the bread he had carried from the table in a napkin.
“I’m not hungry.”
“I know.
Neither am I.” He put the bread on the windowsill between them and did not mention it again.
In the Gryffindor common room the fire had made the chairs too warm.
Hermione took a corner of a table, spread out her Charms work, and found that she could not remember what spell the essay was meant to discuss.
Ron sat opposite her with a chess piece in his hand.
He turned it over and over without setting up the board.
“If you’re writing down what I said at dinner,” he told her, “spell it correctly.”
“I’m writing down what I saw outside the library.”
“For whom?”
“Professor McGonagall, perhaps.”
Ron put the piece down.
“You can’t be serious.”
“The rumor will reach an adult with or without us.
I’d rather the first account wasn’t about a map nobody saw.”
“You’d be telling on Harry.”
“I’m not going to say he went anywhere.
He didn’t.”
“You’d still put his name in it.”
Hermione looked at the parchment.
She had written “Harry Potter received a restricted-areas notice” and stopped.
It was also the sentence Ron had said loudly enough to feed an evening of nonsense.
She crossed it out.
“What did you actually see?” Ron asked, less sharply.
“Professor Quirrell came around the corner.
He paused.
He smiled.
He went on.”
“Did you see him read the notice?”
“No.”
“Did you hear him say anything about us?”
“No.”
“Then his name doesn’t belong in a complaint.”
“This isn’t a complaint.” She pressed the quill too hard.
The nib tore a small hole in the page.
“I need to say what I saw without making him the reason.”
Ron pulled the ruined sheet away before she could write over the tear.
He slid her a clean one.
“Then do that.”
She stared at him.
“I thought you wanted me to say nothing.”
“I still think a note is a bad idea.
But if you make a professor imagine the bit you left out, it’ll be worse.”
Hermione began again.
She wrote the time approximately because she had not checked a clock.
She wrote that the three of them had been speaking near the library, that a professor had passed, and that no one had spoken to him.
She omitted Harry’s frightened guess about being watched; it was his statement, not her observation to report as fact.
Then she added a sentence about the rumor she had heard at dinner: someone had described a private notice as a map.
She had seen no map.
Ron leaned over the last line.
“You didn’t see the whole notice either.”
“I saw the heading and the signatures.
Harry told us what it covered.”
“Then those aren’t all the same source.”
“I know.”
She corrected the sentence.
She hated how much better it was after his objection.
“Put your name next to mine?” she asked.
“Only for what you heard at dinner.”
Ron leaned back.
“No.”
“You heard it.”
“I started it.
Not the map nonsense, but the private notice.
If I sign that, it looks like I’m agreeing with everything you’ve put on the page.
And if I sign only one line, Percy will still say I helped send a report about Harry.”
“You could say exactly that to Percy.”
“He’d make me say it in front of Mum by Christmas.”
Hermione almost smiled.
Ron did not.
His brother’s judgment was comic only from a safe distance.
“I’ll tell McGonagall what I said if she asks me,” he added.
“I won’t put my name under your account.”
She had wanted his name beside hers.
He had drawn the line at it, so she signed alone and folded the note.
There was no accusation in it, no request for punishment, and no theory of what lay behind the west-wing door.
A professor might still read more into it.
Hermione could not control that without saying nothing at all.
“You’re really taking it tonight?” Ron asked.
“Before the story acquires a dragon.”
“Fred would argue the dragon improves it.”
“Fred is not writing my name under it.”
They left the common room together.
Ron carried the bread in its napkin, forgot he had it, and handed it to Hermione halfway down the stairs.
She ate a piece.
Neither called attention to it.
McGonagall’s office was closed.
Hermione knocked once.
No answer came.
She slipped the folded account beneath the door, then regretted leaving it where anyone might see.
Ron had already crouched to check the gap.
“It’s well inside,” he said.
“No one’s getting it without opening the door.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No,” Ron said, standing.
“I looked.”
Hermione thanked him.
By the next stair she was cross with him again for refusing the signature.
On the way back they passed two students debating whether the Headmaster’s warning meant something was kept in the west wing or something was kept out of it.
Neither theory had come from Hermione’s note.
Both would be there in the morning.
Ron walked beside her without correcting them.
Hermione did not correct them either.
She had given one adult what she could defend; the rumor belonged to a school full of mouths now.
Harry had not asked either of them to carry it.
That did not make leaving him under it any easier.
✦
✦
✦
Want to read past the public chapters?