The Purloined Prophetess

XXX: At the Three Broomsticks

The drive to Hogsmeade was uneventful after we got Reg to stop hanging his head and arms out of the windows of my car. In a fit of insanity I let him be in charge of the cassette player instead, which meant we had to listen to him belting out Led Zeppelin songs the whole time, and usually getting the lyrics very wrong.

If there's a bus stop in your hedgerow,

Don't need the lawn man,

It's just a sprinkling for the May queen.

There are tubas you can go buy, but in the long run,

There's still time to change the rope, John.

By the time we reached Nottingham I seriously regretted having given away my migraine pills, but Tonks and Harriet found Reg's performance hilarious and refused to let me switch to classical music. I hoped Remus would take my side, but he was gazing out the window with a strange, distant look on his face and didn't even seem to hear me when I spoke to him. Either something was weighing heavily on his mind, or he had an enviable talent for tuning out lunatics.

We arrived in Hogsmeade around midafternoon. Harriet and I settled into our room at the Three Broomsticks. The inn had looked tiny from the outside, but the narrow back stairway led to a seemingly endless maze of twisted corridors, blind alleys, and dark corners. It was almost impossible to navigate the place without stumbling: the oak floors were ancient and uneven, with the occasional unexpected stairstep in the middle of a hall or at the threshold of a room. The only light came from a few candles set into recesses of the walls at irregular intervals. This didn't pose any problem for guests with wands, of course, but I wished I had thought to bring a torch.

The room itself was surprisingly bright and cozy, with a blazing fire, a bed spread with a beautiful handmade quilt, and a copy of The Book of Merlyn in the nightstand. Harriet drew the curtains and we looked out on a view that must have changed little since the Middle Ages: a cluster of thatched cottages with smoke rising from the chimneys, ducks and swans paddling under a small stone footbridge, low grey walls covered with vines. 'Romantic, isn't it?' she said.

'Very,' I said, sliding an arm around her waist and kissing her.

It took us a long time to find our way back to the bar, where Remus was ordering drinks. 'Five pints of your Halloween ale, Rosmerta. And three butterbeers.' Harry had written to say he would meet us at the Three Broomsticks with Neville and his mysterious guest.

I took a sip. It was the real thing, earthy and complex. It had a sweet, nutty flavour with a touch of bitterness behind it, and it left a warm glow in the mouth. 'Any magic in the brewing process?' I asked.

'Oh no,' he said. 'Real ale is one thing magic can't improve. But the Three Broomsticks has been brewing their own and using the same recipe since 1458.'

Tonks joined us at the bar and showed a photo of Larry to the pub's landlady. 'Rosmerta, we'd like you to take a look at this picture. Has this man been in here recently?'

'He sure has, love. It would have been a few weeks ago, just before I left for my holiday. I remember him because he was talking to another stranger - good-looking woman with wavy auburn hair - I'd put her at around thirty or a bit older. She was about your height, and she had grey eyes and a small mole over one eyebrow. I can describe her so closely because when you've worked in a pub for as long as I have, you get a feel for customers you need to keep your eye on - and this woman was trouble. I didn't think she was quite sane, to tell you the truth. There was something about her eyes that fairly gave me the chills.'

'He says he spoke to her until just before closing time, is that correct?'

Rosmerta looked thoughtful. 'As far as I can remember, that's right. He seemed very interested in what she was saying - he even took notes on it the whole time.'

'When would you say he left, then?' Tonks asked. 'Eleven?'

'Oh no, later than that,' said Rosmerta. 'We're not all that fussed about the licensing laws in Hogsmeade - what are the Muggles going to do about it? Closing time is whenever I feel like going to bed, but I think it was early that night, around half past eleven. As I said, I didn't like the look of that woman at all, and I didn't care to have her hanging around until all hours.'

So the real Larry Lovegood would still have been in the pub when somebody who looked just like him took over guard duty from Minerva. But how had this lookalike known that passing himself off as Larry was the surest way to get Sybill to leave Hogwarts, and where had he taken her after that?

We carried the drinks back to the table, where Harry had already joined my wife and Reg.

'Where are Ron and Hermione?' I asked.

'Ron and Hermione are ... spending a lot of private time together these days.' Harry looked awkward. It isn't easy being a third wheel, I thought.

Two more teenagers joined us a few minutes later: Harry's friend Neville Longbottom, and a thin, dark-haired, gawky-looking boy who kept his eyes firmly planted on the floor.

'This is Theo,' said Neville. 'He's in my History of Magic class, and he's got something he wants to tell you.'

Theo looked at us warily. 'I didn't know it would be so many people,' he muttered. 'Neville just said Professor Lupin was coming.' His eyes lit up as he spotted Reg. 'Mr. Boardman? Could I have your autograph?'

Reg didn't even blink - he wrote 'STUBBY BOARDMAN' on a cocktail napkin in a large, looping handwriting that was as different as possible from his usual untidy scrawl.

'Wow,' breathed Theo. "Thanks." He favoured Reg with a look of pure adoration and began drinking his butterbeer in silence.

'You'd better tell them,' said Neville in a whisper that was a shade too loud. Theo blushed.

'Would you rather talk in private?' suggested Remus. 'We could go to my room upstairs.'

Theo nodded. 'Neville and Mr. Boardman can come too,' he said.

The rest of us sipped our drinks and made conversation rather awkwardly while they were gone. It was good to hear Harry confirm that Mark was settling in well, although we already knew this from his letters. Harriet asked about the substitute History of Magic teacher.

'Oh yeah - Professor de Mimsy-Porpington,' said Harry, smirking a little. 'Of course everybody still calls him Nearly Headless Nick behind his back. He cancelled all the lessons on goblin rebellions the first day. We're doing the Wars of the Roses now, and then we move on to the early witch trials, and after that he's going to cover the history of Hogwarts from 1500 to the present. He's brilliant. You can tell he lived this stuff instead of reading about it in books.'

'And that's the class where you met Theo? What do you make of him?' I asked.

Harry looked guarded. 'Well, Neville seems to like him a lot. He wanted me to tell him about the D.A. - the defence club I started.'

'It sounds like you're not sure that's a good idea.'

Harry nodded. 'I mean, it's not just that he's a Slytherin, his father's a Death Eater. And, well, if the Death Eaters wanted a student to spy on us, I think they would use someone like Theo, because he hasn't been openly mean to us and he's the sort of person who doesn't attract notice. I didn't really know he existed until this term.'

After half an hour, Remus returned alone. 'Theo seems to have taken to Reg,' he said, looking slightly amused. 'I thought it would be better to let them bond for a while.'

He took a swallow of Halloween ale and explained, 'Theo admitted he has been passing information about recent goings-on at Hogwarts to his father and his older sister - not as their agent, but as their dupe. They didn't take him into their confidence, but for years they've been picking up casual gossip from him about daily life at Hogwarts, the way the staff feel about each other, and anything unusual that happens. At the beginning of this term, he told them about the relationship between Larry and Sybill, which he overheard me discussing with Harry and Neville during the first week of term. He also seems to have told them a fair amount about the school's security measures over the years, including Sir Cadogan's habit of using characters from the legend of King Arthur as passwords. He changes them about twice a day and Larry always had trouble remembering them, so Sir Cadogan probably wouldn't suspect anything if Sybill's kidnapper rattled off half the knights of the ! Round Table before hitting on the right one.

'Theo also informed his sister that Stubby Boardman had come out of retirement in Barbados for a special performance at Hogwarts. He seems to be quite a fan.' Remus smiled in a way that suggested this was an extreme understatement. 'I don't think they connected that piece of information with Sybill and her guards. It seems more likely that they got interested in Larry first, guessed he might be the weak point in our security system, and thought the Stubby Boardman story would provide a plausible excuse for gaining access to his office.'

'Who are Theo's father and sister?' I asked.

'Their names are Jephthah and Medea Nott. Medea is much older than her brother, by the way - I think she was about four or five years behind me at school. Their mother's dead. She was killed by Aurors in a raid on their home when Theo was a baby.'

I remembered the names. They had joined the Death Eaters at the same time Reg did.

Tonks, who had brought copies of the Aurors' files on various suspects, looked up with interest. 'We already know that Jephthah might be the man who posed as Stubby Boardman - and Medea exactly matches the physical description of Fidessa Fauntleroy that Rosmerta gave us. If it's her, Rosmerta's ability to judge character is dead on. Medea Nott went to trial early in 1981 and claimed to be acting under the Imperius curse. She got off, but at the time of her release she appeared to be suffering from Azkaban flu.'

'What's Azkaban flu?' asked Harry.

'That's a flippant way of saying she was deranged,' Tonks explained. 'Not that it's really anything to joke about, but you have to joke in our business or we'd be in danger of going mad ourselves.'

Remus' face tightened. I suspected he didn't find the joke funny.

'Anyway,' Tonks continued, 'she seemed to disappear from the ranks of active Death Eaters after that. The people who were working on her case at the time conjectured that she had become too unstable for Voldemort to use her, but he allowed her to go home and go about her business because he wanted to keep her father on his side. We haven't seen any evidence that he took her back into his confidence until now.'

Harriet smiled at me. 'What makes you think he did? Maybe her father trusted her and thought she'd enjoy being along for the ride. It's been known to happen - and Death Eaters are human too, aren't they?'

XXXI: In Memoriam

'Eleven o'clock,' I told Harry. 'We'll understand if you're a little late. The most important thing is to be careful.'

I was a little relieved that Ron and Hermione hadn't shown. I didn't fancy explaining our plan to Molly if she heard about it, let alone the Grangers, whom I'd met only twice. But with Harry I felt no responsibility to anyone else except the dead, and I believed they would have approved. Well, two of them certainly would, and between them I hoped they'd be able to talk Lily into giving her blessing.

I asked Jack and Harriet to join us, but they declined. 'We didn't know him,' they said. (This was a proper and tactful sentiment, but I suspected they were also experiencing the Hogsmeade Effect, which can be as powerful for long-married couples as for third-year students on their first date, and could think of more exciting ways to spend the evening.)

I approached Rosmerta, meaning to ask if we could borrow four of her glasses, and then I remembered a scene from my own first Hogsmeade weekend: James and Sirius clowning around in the Three Broomsticks and getting so noisy I was afraid we were going to be kicked out, and the pretty girl behind the bar, only a few years older than we were, laughing indulgently. I told her what we were about to do and invited her to join us.

Her eyes widened. 'But didn't he...'

'No,' I said. 'He did not.'

'I never thought so,' she said immediately. 'He was the last person I would have expected to do anything of the sort, and Rubeus Hagrid will tell you I've been saying so for years.'

When I become Minister of Magic I shall fill the ranks of the Wizengamot with bartenders.

We had chosen a stretch of sand at the edge of the lake, hidden from the village by a clump of pine trees and underbrush. Rosmerta joined us after she finished closing the Three Broomsticks, and Harry followed a few minutes later under his invisibility cloak.

Tonks kindled a fire and Reg opened the bottle of Scotch. It was, I thought, time for a quiet word with Harry. I thanked Merlin that my father was a Frenchman. He'd given me the same talk when I was slightly younger than Harry. The English, for the most part, don't know how to drink, and they certainly don't know how to talk to their children about the subject.

'I'm not going to ask how experienced a drinker you are,' I whispered to him, 'because I really don't want to know, but I'm going to give you some guardianly advice which you should heed even if you think you are very experienced, because this stuff is liquid gold. Sip it slowly. Single malt Scotch is an acquired taste, so you don't have to finish it if you don't want to. And if you do happen to have acquired the taste, stop while you can still appreciate its complexities. That means three drinks or fewer. After you get back to the castle, have some water and do not under any circumstances think of moving on to the bottle of firewhiskey Dean Thomas has stashed under his bed.' (This was a pure guess, but one look at his face told me it had been a shrewd one.) 'You'll thank me in the morning.'

Rosmerta winked at me. 'I wish all my customers had guardians who were half as sensible.'

I laughed. 'You'd be out of business if they did.'

Reg poured us each a shot of Scotch and threw one into the fire, which blazed more brightly.

The ceremony was really Reg's idea, but in a completely uncharacteristic moment of modesty he had insisted that he was no public speaker and asked me to say a few words. I am not much of a speaker either, but neither Tonks nor Harry was willing to take the role off my hands, so I did the best I could.

I took a nip of Scotch, cleared my throat, and said, 'Friends, we are gathered here tonight to remember Sirius Black.

'So many lies have been spread about him that I must begin by setting the record straight about the kind of man he was. He was a true friend and a loving godfather. He was the sort of man who would gladly give his life to protect those he loved. And he was an innocent man who was condemned to pay with his freedom and sanity for another man's crime and a government bureaucrat's career.'

I had to tread lightly here, at least in front of Harry. The Aurors call it Azkaban flu, but it's more like cancer - slow, degenerative, fatal. I had hoped at first that he was entirely free of it. He wasn't. I do grieve for him, but I cannot help feeling a touch of relief that none of us had to watch him slip farther and farther beyond the reach of love or joy or reason. I could, at least, spare Harry this knowledge for a while.

'He died by treachery, but the great tragedy of his life is that so many years had already been stolen from him through treachery. Those of us who cared for him are left mourning the boy who was and the man who might have been, as well as the man who was killed at the Department of Mysteries last spring.

'I don't know what becomes of us after we die, but I believe he has not left us altogether as long as some of us remain alive to remember him. And much of him lives on in the three of you, his closest kin --'

'Am I related to the Blacks?' Harry asked in surprise.

'There are more kinds of kinship than blood,' I said. 'Looking at all of you, I believe I see something of what should have been - the humour and energy and optimism that should have stayed with him into adult life...'

I had thought out a few words more, but I was getting too choked up to deliver them. I poured a last shot of Scotch onto the flames. 'Good night, Padfoot.'

'I remember the time he switched my bottle of Worcestershire sauce with a Cauliflower-Ears potion,' said Rosmerta, who was already well past the three-drink limit I'd imposed on Harry. 'Well, Argus Filch was the only person who ever ordered Bloody Marys, so I didn't notice for two weeks. I'll never forget the sight of Argus hopping up and down on one leg digging bits of vegetables out of his ears.' She laughed until the tears were streaming down her face.

Good thing I'd invited her; she was better than I was at giving him the sort of wake he would have wanted. Tonks and Reg chuckled appreciatively and began swapping stories in the same vein. I kept an eye on Harry, but he was smiling and he even managed a tale or two of his own. Rosmerta left us after an hour or so, weaving only slightly and humming 'God Rest Ye Merry Hippogriffs' as she walked back to the village. We all became much quieter after she had gone.

'All right?' I asked Harry, putting a cautious hand on his shoulder. One never knows how teenaged boys are going to take this sort of thing, especially in front of other people, but he didn't shrug it off.

'Yeah. I'm glad we did this. You might want to have a word with Reg, though, he looks kind of ... distressed.' (Good, I thought, he'd started to be concerned about others. That is a sign of healing.)

Reg, as usual, got straight to the point. 'You said once that he never talked about me. Is that true? I mean, no offence, but you do lie your head off sometimes, especially when you don't want to hurt people.'

Unlike his brother, Reg had always looked younger than his years. He seemed about eleven now, and without the slightest indication of malice he'd put his finger on one of my worst faults. I struggled to find the right words.

'It's all right, Moony,' he added quietly. 'I know he hated me until the day he died.'

I'd forgotten that he had an uncanny ability to see through polite lies.

'Yes. He did speak about you sometimes. The last time I remember was in March. He said, 'If my idiot brother hadn't been thick enough to join the Death Eaters and get himself killed, we would have shown them something ...' I broke off, realising for the first time that this speech suggested an entirely different emotion than hatred. How had I missed it for so long?

'Thanks, Moony.'

I turned away and looked into the shadows. Sixteen years, and they'd missed each other by two months. Two short months. It didn't bear thinking about.

On the other side of the flames, Tonks was saying something to Harry about chaos and randomness and the fog of war. I wondered how she had learned so much, at her age, and then realised she wasn't so young at all. She was a year older than I had been - when... That wasn't worth thinking about either. I tried to forget how close it was to Halloween.

I don't know how it happened, but suddenly she was standing at my side. 'Let's leave them for a while,' she said. 'Harry and Reg have to make their peace with him in a way we don't.'

We walked along the edge of the lake, under the bare trees and piercingly bright stars of autumn.

We had been stepping around each other in an awkward and embarrassed way for the last two weeks, and it was time it ended. I had another speech thought out, one that I hoped would take the sting out of some of Snape's words and at the same time reassure her that of course I didn't think she was attracted to me at all, that he liked to fling out taunts at random and he'd been doing it to me for years and I'd long since learned not to take anything he said very seriously. I was debating whether I should also say some complimentary things about Charlie Weasley, who was home on leave recovering from a dragon attack, or whether this would sound like I was taking it all too seriously.

I had spent most of the long drive from London working out what I should say, but I never got the chance. When we first walked away from the fire, I couldn't speak because I didn't want her to know I was crying - and then after that it didn't matter because we were both crying, and she was kissing me much harder than I'd ever been kissed in my life.

Charlie ... Weasley? Honestly, Remus, you can be so clueless! - N. T.

Well, how was I to know? He seems like a nice young man, and I thought dragons would be right up your alley - obviously you don't object to dangerous creatures in principle ... - R. J. L.

I don't. Come here ... - N. T.