A new page has been added to the archive.
Mind the fine print.
The castle is listening.
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By the second week of October, Neville could tell which bell was late by the way the other students kept walking.
The one after breakfast rang thin and uncertain.
People looked up, decided they had another minute, and were wrong.
The bell before Transfiguration rang so loudly that even the suits of armor seemed to stand straighter.
Neville had begun leaving the Gryffindor table before either one.
Being early did not make him good at a lesson.
It at least meant he could be bad at it from the right room.
On Tuesday he was early enough to hear Hermione argue with a notice board.
“It says the north passage opens at half past ten,” she told Ron.
“Yesterday’s sheet said half past eleven.”
“Yesterday’s sheet wasn’t meant for us,” Ron said.
“That doesn’t make this one right.”
Neville stopped beside them.
The paper was pinned under a glass panel outside the Charms classroom.
NORTH PASSAGE: ACCESS RESTORED, 10:30.
Beneath it, in smaller writing, stood a direction to the library’s east door.
Someone had copied the time with a broad nib.
The second digit was so heavy it might once have been a one.
“Where’s the new time from?” Neville asked.
“The board,” Ron said.
“Try to keep up.”
“I mean who put it there.”
Ron looked at the blank corner where a prefect’s initials should have been.
Hermione had already found it.
Her mouth tightened.
Harry arrived with his bag over the shoulder that did not pull on his wand wrist.
The wrist still bothered him sometimes.
Neville had seen him switch hands to open a door and pretend it was because the other hand was occupied.
“What’s wrong?” Harry asked.
“Perhaps nothing,” Hermione said.
“The passage may have opened early.”
“And if it hasn’t?”
“We can ask.”
Ron tapped the library direction.
“Or we can take a look.
The east door goes past the faculty shelves, doesn’t it?”
“Past them, not into them,” Hermione said.
“There was a card with Flamel’s name on it,” Ron replied.
“I’d settle for learning which side of a door it means.”
Neville remembered the card lifting itself toward Hermione’s hand, and the gray book thumping under Madam Pince’s cloth.
The memory made the ordinary notice look less ordinary than it deserved.
He did not know where the restricted books were kept.
He did not know where the Stone was kept, either, no matter how easily those two questions joined inside his head.
“If the time is wrong, someone will go through expecting it to be safe,” he said.
“Someone would be us,” Ron said.
“Not only us.”
Flitwick opened the classroom door before Ron could answer.
Students folded themselves into a line.
Hermione looked back at the notice once, as if it might correct itself out of shame.
It did not.
In class, they were meant to turn small brass rings the color of copper without warming the metal.
Neville’s ring went green.
Seamus’s went black.
Hermione made hers shine like a new coin and then tried to help Neville without taking over his wand.
“Less pressure at the end,” she whispered.
“You sound like Flitwick.”
“He is right.”
“That’s why I said it.”
He tried again.
The ring turned brown, which might have been a victory if it had started green.
Flitwick gave him another attempt instead of a mark.
Neville took it.
Outside, the ten-thirty bell sounded.
Several heads lifted.
Ron’s did.
Hermione’s quill paused over her notes.
Neville’s ring slipped from his fingers and rolled beneath the desk.
When he retrieved it, the metal was still the color of old pennies.
He had spent the hour thinking about a corridor instead of the instruction in front of him.
That was one cost the notice had charged before he could fix it.
After class, Hermione tucked her notes under one arm.
“The east door is on our way to History.
We can see whether the passage is open.”
“We can see it from outside,” Harry said.
“No testing locks.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“You had the voice.”
“What voice?”
“The one you use when a rule looks like a badly written question.”
Ron laughed.
Hermione looked offended enough to make Neville glance away.
Harry’s joke had made her curiosity sound like a habit everyone could watch.
It also saved Neville from being the first to say the thing none of them wanted to hear.
The passage was not open.
Beyond it, the floor had been scrubbed dark and wet.
A pail and a stiff brush sat against the wall.
The library’s east door was visible at the far end, but there were two turns and a stretch of wet stone between it and them.
A book could not have told them which parts of that distance were meant for students.
Neither could the notice.
Hannah Abbott stood on the other side of the junction with a sheaf of parchment hugged against her chest.
A Hufflepuff scarf trailed from her bag.
She had come by a staircase Neville did not know and looked angry at the rope rather than lost.
“They said this way was open,” she told them.
“The board says so,” Hermione replied.
“It may be a mistake.”
“I have to take these to Professor Sprout before lunch.
Her office is past the east court.” Hannah shook the parchment.
Damp had already curled one corner.
“The long way takes me back through the greenhouses.”
“That’s still a way,” Neville said.
“I know.
I’m not asking you to carry them.”
He had meant to help.
He had heard himself sound like a boy telling her to stop complaining.
Ron made a small noise through his nose.
Neville deserved it.
From behind the rope came a scrape of brush on stone.
Filch appeared at the far turn, sleeves rolled above his wrists.
He stopped when he saw five first-years studying his wet floor.
“If you cross that, you can scrub it again,” he said.
“The board says it reopened at ten-thirty,” Hermione told him.
“The board is wrong.
Noon.
And don’t quote paper at me when you can see the rope.”
He dragged the pail out of sight before she could ask who had changed the time.
Ron watched him go.
“Noon,” Ron repeated.
“That gives us time to ask at the east door after lunch.”
“About the correspondence?” Hermione asked.
“About whether the card is real.”
“Madam Pince already saw it,” Harry said.
“Ask her, then.
Not a side door.”
Ron kicked gently at the base of the post.
“She told us not to speak about the other book.
She might tell us not to breathe at this one.”
Neville wanted to know too.
That was the irritating part.
Flamel had become a name at their table, and for one afternoon the wrong time looked like a chance to be brave instead of merely late.
He imagined slipping through, finding a shelf label, bringing back one useful fact.
He also imagined Hannah watching him climb a rope while she took the long way to do an ordinary errand.
“I’m going back to the board,” he said.
Ron turned.
“Why?
Filch has told us the answer.”
“He hasn’t told everyone.”
“A prefect can fix it.”
“I’ll find one.”
Hermione looked at him over the parchment in her arms.
“The faculty sheet we found wasn’t a permission slip.
You know that.”
“I do now.
I shouldn’t have taken it off the floor.” Neville felt the old heat in his face.
“But someone else will believe the board.
Hannah did.”
Hannah drew herself up.
“I read it.
That’s not the same as believing every word on it.”
“You’re right,” Neville said.
“I meant I don’t want anyone else to waste the walk.”
That did not quite repair the first sentence.
Hannah shifted the parchments and looked at the far staircase.
Harry gave Neville a brief nod, then followed Hermione and Ron toward History.
Ron lingered long enough to say, “You don’t have to prove you’re useful by doing a prefect’s work.”
Neville looked at the rope.
“I’m not trying to prove it to you.”
“Good,” Ron said, too quickly.
He went after the others.
Hannah waited until their footsteps faded.
“Do you know the greenhouse way?”
“I know part of it.”
“That’s more than I know from here.”
They walked back to the notice board together.
Neville found a Ravenclaw prefect coming out of Charms and explained the time.
The prefect asked who had confirmed noon.
Neville said Filch, named the wet floor and the rope, and admitted he had not seen who wrote the notice.
She pulled the paper from under the glass and held it close to the light.
“Eleven-thirty,” she said.
“It was crossed out and copied wrong.
Noon is the repair time, then.
I’ll check with Filch before I put up another one.”
“Hannah has to get to Sprout’s office,” Neville said.
“Use the greenhouse path.”
“Nor do I from here.” The prefect tucked the faulty notice into her book.
“I’ll ask the next monitor to stand at this junction until I confirm the replacement.
You can take her by the outer walk.
It is marked from the courtyard.”
The next bell was for History.
Neville heard it and did not move.
The prefect noticed.
“I’ll tell Professor Binns why you’re late,” she said.
“He won’t remember.”
“Then you can tell him.”
Hannah gave Neville a look that made it clear she did not need to be delivered like a parcel.
“You can go to class.
I can follow signs.”
“The signs have been excellent today.”
That earned a reluctant smile.
She chose to let him come, and he made himself ask at every turn rather than decide for her.
The outer walk led them under dripping ivy, past a door that would only open when someone lifted the iron latch from below.
Hannah knew that latch.
Neville knew the next stair moved after the midday bell.
Between them they reached the greenhouse court without guessing twice.
Sprout accepted the parchments at her office door and asked Hannah why the corner was damp.
Hannah said a timetable had sent them to a wet passage.
Neville began to apologize for the late delivery.
Sprout stopped him.
“A wrong notice is not an invitation to walk through a rope.
You brought the work.
That is enough.”
Hannah had already stepped inside to arrange the pages in order.
She had a lesson of her own to reach.
Neville had one to return to.
The outer walk took him past the greenhouse wall twice before he found the stair he needed.
By the time he reached History, the final bell was ringing.
Students came through the door with their books half closed.
Binns floated after them, still talking through a date, unaware that Neville had missed the whole lesson.
Neville had a page ready for notes and nothing to put on it.
Ron was waiting outside with his own book.
“You missed the goblin treaties.
Lucky you.”
“All of them?”
“The entire miserable family.
Binns asked a question at the end.”
“He didn’t ask me.”
“You weren’t there.
He may not have noticed.
That’s not the same thing.” Ron held out his notes.
“Copy these before you invent a war that never happened.”
Neville took them.
“Thanks.”
“People are saying you reported a secret passage.”
“It wasn’t secret.
It was wet.”
“Try telling people that without sounding like a prefect.”
Neville could hear the edge under the joke.
He had cost Ron and Hermione a possible look at the library’s east door, even if it had never really been theirs to take.
Ron could also see that Neville had come back without a useful fact about Flamel.
Neither wanted to be the one to say that the uselessness mattered.
The Ravenclaw prefect was at the board with a fresh notice.
This one said NOON and bore her initials, Filch’s, and an arrow to the outer walk.
A Hufflepuff coming out of Charms asked whether the arrow would move if the stairs did.
The prefect told him no.
Neville had used the outer walk once and knew how little that promise was worth.
“The arrow gets you to the court,” he told the boy.
“After that, ask whoever is there.”
Ron looked at him.
“That’s your grand system?
Ask a person?”
“It worked for Hannah.”
“And cost you History.”
“Yes.”
Ron waited for Neville to defend the price.
Neville did not.
He tucked Ron’s notes into his bag and started toward the stairs.
Ron came with him, taking the outside position where students hurried past.
It was not an apology.
Neville found he preferred the company.
On the next school morning, Hannah met him by the breakfast doors.
She had no papers to carry.
“The outer walk?” she asked.
“Unless they change it.”
They checked the board, then asked the monitor at the junction, then went together as far as the greenhouse turn before parting for their separate classes.
It took longer than trusting a single line under glass.
Neville arrived early enough to open his book this time.
When someone behind him called it the Longbottom escort service, he kept his place in the paragraph until the voice got bored.
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