Harry Potter and the Secret Prophecy

Harry Potter
and the
Secret Prophecy

Alternate Universe Remix
fanfiction by Fox in the Stars

Chapter Five
The Ancient and Most Noble House

After breakfast, everyone went upstairs to bed. With only three beds in the Blue Room, Hermione and Ginny squeezed into one together and left Ron and Harry the other two. Harry was glad to have one to himself; as he lay down he remembered listening in on the Order's meeting, and now in the silence he couldn't escape thinking about it...

Someone named Dedalus Diggle... The name sounded familiar, but Harry couldn't place it; he didn't think it was someone he'd known well, but it was at least someone he had heard of. Whoever he was, he must be a member of the Order, on guard duty protecting whatever Voldemort was after if Ron's guess was right, and he'd been caught by the Ministry and was facing six months in Azkaban, surrounded by Dementors... Not only caught, but they had said Diggle was 'incoherent' when he was found, and that only the doctors at St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries would know how to take proper care of him. Had the Death Eaters gotten to Diggle? Had they tortured him with the Cruciatus Curse and driven him insane --- as they had done to the parents of Harry's classmate Neville Longbottom?

When Voldemort had returned, he had cast the Cruciatus Curse on Harry more than once, and even now in this warm bed, Harry trembled at the memory of that agony, like his body being pulled apart with white-hot hooks. Dumbledore had told him about Neville's parents, that they had been driven insane by that Unforgivable Curse and had lived at St. Mungo's ever since. The very thought of it made Harry's eyes ache with sadness --- and anger. He couldn't even begin to decide what he would do if he ever had his wand pointed at the people guilty of such a thing...

But now his eyes ached not just from that, but from exhaustion; his body felt heavier and heavier until at last it broke the tether of those dark thoughts and he sank deep into sleep.

Harry tried waking up several times that afternoon; his consciousness would bob to the surface, but he didn't want to move, and with the room still and quiet, he just let himself sink down again. The fact that the light through the window grew milder, not brighter, every time he saw it didn't help matters; it made his brain feel fuzzy and tired. When he finally came up again and saw the light of the fireplace through his eyelids, heard his friends talking, and felt a warm body weighing on his legs, he at last pulled himself up and blinked his eyes open.

He found his glasses and put them on, and when the warm weight at the end of the bed came into focus, Harry was happily unsurprised to find that it was a massive black dog --- Sirius in animal form --- curled up around his feet. As Harry climbed out of bed, Sirius lifted his head and yawned hugely, rolling his tongue.

Harry had to ask the others out of the room so that he could get dressed, and in taking off his pyjamas he found the piece of candy Fred and George had slipped him; wanting to hurry out and join the others but knowing he'd never find it loose in his trunk, he just put it in his phial-case. As he pulled on jeans and a sweater --- one Mrs. Weasley had knitted for him for a Christmas gift --- he heard them talking outside in the hall.

"I've gotta ask, what is all of this?" Ron said.

Harry heard a soft pop! as his godfather turned human again. "Oh, Remus got all that blue paint, said it was a protective color. He started painting protective symbols on the walls and then we just got carried away. We were up too late and getting silly..."

"Looks like you had fun," Ginny said.

"That makes the protection stronger, or so the Professor said --- and you have got to admit, it's harder to feel threatened with all of this on the walls. We've still got a bit of the paint left; ought to pour it out sometime and just cover the place in blue footprints."

"I hadn't heard of anything like that before" Hermione said. "I'll have to ask Professor Lupin about it..."

Harry smiled to himself as he tied his shoes, thinking he heard a note of distress in her voice at encountering something she didn't know from her books.

"Well, it's pretty old fashioned Defense," Sirius explained. "One of our professors used to stress it a lot, though."

Harry glanced in the mirror over one of the dressers, decided his hair was acceptable, and went out into the hall. "Hey."

"Hey, Harry," Ron greeted.

"Rise and shine," Ginny said.

"Feel up to helping out a bit?" Sirius asked.

The prospect of helping the Order woke Harry up a bit more. "Yeah, of course."

"Don't get excited, Harry, it's just housecleaning," Sirius told him. "There's all sorts of junk laying about the drawing room, and that's where the visual aid is --- since I promised you some explanations."

That brought Harry around even further, and he and his friends followed Sirius down to the second floor balconey. The doors there opened into the luxuriant-but-dilapidated drawing room. At first it only smelled musty and looked smudgily gray in the dim light, but then Sirius pointed his wand toward the ceiling. "Lumiere." A huge, elaborate chandelier of tarnished gold and grimy crystal illuminated the room, and they could see the extent of the damage. The curtains were moth-eaten, the walls festooned with cobwebs and pockmarked with waterstains. The once-plush upholstery of the chairs scattered about was now full of holes, peppered with bits of stuffing and what looked like mouse droppings, but as Harry passed one of the arm chairs, he didn't think any mouse would make the whispering noise he heard come out of it. The floor was also cluttered with boxes of various junk; the boxes themselves looked less dusty, so he guessed that the Order must have deposited debris in here while cleaning the rest of the house.

The room was a crosswise oblong that spanned the width of the house; on each of its short sides, a large black marble fireplace stood between two tall, narrow windows. The long wall where the doors opened was lined with chests of drawers and display cabinets filled with strange objects: oddly-twisted dried plants and fungi, animals preserved whole or in fragments. On one mirrored table, Harry noticed a glass globe containing the pickled remains of what was unmistakeably a three-headed snake, although the liquid was now cloudy and the creature had settled to the bottom and begun to go to bits over the years. Flanking the decaying treble-snake and scattered about the display space were sculptures also, most in black marble or dark, gnarled wood, all at least vaguely disturbing and threatening.

Harry turned away from all of that to find Sirius facing the other long wall, which was covered by a large velvet curtain; once probably deep purple, the fabric was now faded to a sooty lavendar. Sirius raised his wand to it. "Toujours Pur!"

The curtain parted in the center and swept to the ends of the room, raising a great cloud of dust that sent them all into coughing and sneezing fits. When the haze cleared, Harry looked up to find the entire wall covered by a huge tapestry: a genealogy chart running the full length of the room. At the top center, ornate, shining golden letters proudly announced,

The Ancient And Most Noble House of
~ BLACK ~
' Toujours Pur '

The letters of the motto must have been enchanted, because the instant Harry saw the phrase on the tapestry, he knew just what it meant: "Toujours Pur: Always Pure."

"My 'Noble' family," Sirius proclaimed with tart irony.

Harry's eyes flitted about the tapestry, failing to pick up the entries of so many strangers, but he was assaulted by the name over and over: "... Black ... Black ... Black ..." Precious embroidery embellished the fabric, yet it was pocked here and there with holes --- not as if moths had eaten at it, but as if holes had intentionally been burned with a lit cigar. Scattered through it also were other surnames Harry recognised. Some he was sure he had seen on Chocolate Frog Cards, others were more close to home: Karkaroff, Fudge, Trelawney, Malfoy...

"Malfoy!?" Harry exclaimed. "You're related to the Malfoys!?"

"Oh, I'm related to all those people," Sirius said with a dismissive wave of his hand. "All the 'great' pureblood families are always marrying each other to consolidate the money and the snobbery, and Black blood was the richest and most snobbish of them all, or at least Mum thought so." He walked down toward the end of the chart. "After hearing her, I would have thought you'd seen enough of the house already to know what sort of people I came from."

Harry picked his way among the chairs and boxes and followed Sirius, staring. He had seen enough of the house to know, but somehow he just couldn't believe it. Sirius had been his father's best friend, known in his school days for mischief and pranks. He was a member of the order of the Phoenix. He's my godfather! How could his family have been people like the Malfoys?

Sirius came to the right end of the tapestry. There the forking chart ended in a fringe of gilded names, where all the others were stamped in black. He scanned it up and down and at last jabbed a finger at it, right through one of the cigar-sized holes. "Aha! There I am."

"That burn-mark?" Ron asked. He and Ginny appeared over Harry's shoulders; Hermione was examining the tapestry further up, but turned to look occasionally so they knew she was listening.

"That's right," Sirius said with a twisted smile, almost brightly. "Mum disowned me, blasted me right off. I wish I could call it one of my proudest achievements, but the fact is it was the one time I hadn't done anything."

"Oh?" Harry asked.

"It was over Dad. Around Christmas of my sixth year in school, Mum was having one of her social parties, and Dad excused himself and went upstairs --- I don't suppose anyone will ever know why..." Sirius took a deep breath. "...Put his wand to his head and blew his brains out."

Harry gasped.

"My goodness!" Hermione cried; that brought her over toward them.

"There he is, and Mum," Sirius continued, pointing to the pair of names just to the left of his: "Orion Edward Black" and "Estelle Marion Black née Chandler." "He hadn't seen me in years when he died, but Mum was sure it was because of me that he did it, because I was such a disgrace to the family. Every time that portrait goes off she brings it up; I would've had to tell you before long..."

Harry didn't know what to say and just stared at the tapestry. The line leading from Sirius's parents to the burn-mark forked, leading also to "Regulus Valerian Black;" a jewelled brooch was affixed next to it. "Your brother?" Harry asked, pointing.

"Yes, Regulus. A much better son than me, as I was constantly reminded..."

"But," Hermione said, regarding the name gravely, "if living people are in gold, and the rest are black..."

Harry realised that she was right; only the most recent names were gilded, the ones new enough to be people living now. There was even a little gold residue around Sirius's hole, but Regulus's name was written in black.

Sirius nodded, frowning. "If not for that, he at least would've taken the house off my hands. Regulus always thought the way Mum did about everything, including the glories of pure wizard blood. The idiot became a Death Eater, died in a battle with the Order."

"Were your parents...?" Harry asked.

"No, but believe me, Mum was proud of him when he joined up. That brooch is one of hers; I suppose she wanted to mark him as her favorite." He unfastened the pin, and it struggled in his hand until he cast "Finite" on it, then he tossed it into a nearby box.

"I used to joke," he said with a bitter chuckle, "that Mum would have joined Voldemort, but he wouldn't quote her a price on the Death entrée, and she couldn't risk being caught Eating anything at less than twenty galleons a plate. She didn't leave me a knut, though --- only left me the house because letting it pass outside the family name would've hurt her pride even slightly more. All the money went to St. Mungo's, so at least it's doing some good, but they probably had to name a ward after her or something..."

"So you don't have any money...?" Harry wondered, then remembered --- "But you bought me the Firebolt!" Might Sirius have spent everything he had on the gift!?

"No, don't worry, my great aunt left me some gold --- not the family fortune, but enough to make Mum choke." He looked further up the tree and indicated another burned hole. "There she is, burned off even before I was born: Great Aunt Lyra. After she broke from the family she went by the name LaNoire."

"Lyra LaNoire, the voice actress?" Ron questioned. "She was really big when the Wizard Wireless was new and everybody listened to it," he told Harry.

"I read that she was the first pureblood witch to play a Muggle-born character," Hermione added.

"What do you think got her blown off here?" Sirius questioned. "But it's good to know that the mischief in my blood didn't just spring up out of nowhere..."

"Hey, there's Tonks!" Ginny exclaimed, pointing. "---And there's Draco??"

Harry followed her pointing finger and did indeed see "Draco Malfoy" there in glittering gold letters.

"Ah, yes, he is Cousin Cissy's son, isn't he?" Sirius said.

Harry and Ron both had to snigger at anyone calling Draco's mother, Narcissa Malfoy, "Cousin Cissy." Harry had seen her one time, a year ago. She had been tall, thin, and blonde, with what he now recognised as the Blacks' aristocratically angled features and a disdainful scowl that went beyond haughty into the impression that something smelly was permanently fixed just under her nose.

"There they are, Uncle Alphard's three girls," Sirius said. He had traced the tree up to the fork at his paternal grandparents and back down to indicate a column of three names with attached in-laws: "Bellatrix Lestrange née Black" with "Rodolphus Lestrange," "Andromeda Tonks née Black" with "Theodore Tonks," and "Narcissa Malfoy née Black" with "Lucius Malfoy." A line from that last pair led naturally to "Draco Malfoy."

"Hm, looks like Annie got reinstated somehow," Sirius said. "When we were kids, she was a sweetheart. Cissy was always an insufferable priss, though. Of course Bella was the worst. She joined up with Voldemort, and I know he never had any reason to complain about her; she and her husband both got life sentences in Azkaban."

Harry recognised the Lestranges' names as Death Eaters --- some of the very ones who had tortured Neville Longbottom's parents. Bellatrix Lestrange, the cruel, haughty woman with the black hair and heavy eyelids whom he had seen in Dumbledore's Pensieve, in the Headmaster's memories of the trial... Harry's mind simply couldn't absorb the idea that she was Sirius's first cousin. He was able to distract himself when he followed the line from Andromeda and Theodore to "Nymphodora Tonks" and a laugh struggled out of his chest. "Tonks' name is 'Nymphodora'??"

"No one gets to call her 'Nymph' but me," was Sirius's reply. "Her parents got married right out of school. They were both Ravenclaw Prefects --- as far as I know, the rest of the family were all Slytherins except me. Annie was disowned over the marriage, since Ted was Muggle-born. I might not have snapped that summer if she'd been around..."

"'Snapped'? What do you mean?" Harry prompted.

"Well, you can imagine what it was like, growing up surrounded by those people," Sirius said. "Dad was always dark and quiet; he never quite knew what to do if he had to relate to another human being. Mum had all her ways of pulling the rest of the family's strings, so she never had to say outright what she expected, but we generally figured out what it was and always knew we'd have the worst of it if we didn't do it, whether we could figure it out or not... Both of them and Regulus, and all their friends, everyone just desperately pretended that there was nothing wrong with any of them. I suspect most of those 'great' families were every bit as pathetic as mine, but they had their club to cover it all up and assure each other that they were better than everybody else. Somehow I managed not to buy into it, thank heavens, but the older I got the more that just being around it all made me feel like falling down in fits or tearing myself to pieces."

Harry certainly could imagine how that would have felt. In some ways it sounded very much like the Dursleys, always insisting that they were better than everyone else, turning up their noses at anyone who was different or odd or whom they disapproved of, and falling over themselves to prove how upright and ordinary they were, when they had known all along that they had a young wizard in their midst... And to think that just a few days before, he'd been telling himself Sirius couldn't possibly understand what it was like at Privet Drive!

"It was more than I could do to keep my mouth shut, and I had the most awful rows with the lot of them," Sirius went on. "Mum would overdraught on sleeping potion a few times a year because I'd shot off my mouth in front of company or some such thing. When it came time to go to Hogwarts, they gave me the standard debut party, but I screamed at the whole room that if they were sending me off somewhere to make me like them I'd rather run away and go to a Muggle School. Mum actually cut her wrists that time.

"--- But with her, all that kind of thing was just a ploy to pull everyone around by the guts; I was the only one who ever figured that out. She never would've done anything that would really kill her. I hear even when she fell sick, she fought it to the bitter end out of sheer spite. ...Or maybe she was just bitter about Dad finally stealing her act."

He paused for a moment to straighten out his frown, then turned to Harry. "It's a good thing I met your father on the train. His family had all been Gryffindors and he told me his uncle's stories about the trouble they got into and what fun it was, enough that I wanted to go in there with him. The Sorting Hat wanted to put me in Slytherin, said I'd do well there, but..." he chuckled. "I threatened to tear it to bits on the spot in front of the entire school if it did. I think I would have, too, or else actually run away..."

"Maybe that's why the Hat looks so shabby now," Ron suggested. "Maybe it didn't always know to listen to people like you."

"Could be," Sirius laughed.

Hermione held her hand to her mouth, though, and Harry was more grave, as well. For him, it sounded a strange echo. The Sorting Hat had wanted to put him in Slytherin as well, and had only made him a Gryffindor --- as his father and Sirius had been --- because, like Sirius, he had insisted that he didn't want to be a Slytherin. He might not have known enough to do so if he hadn't met Draco Malfoy before the Sorting and instantly disliked his haughty manner, or if he hadn't met Ron on the train and immediately hit it off with him...

"During the holidays, Cousin Annie did a lot to keep me sane and quiet and out of trouble," Sirius continued. "When they called a meeting of the Self-Admiration Society, I could just split off in a corner with her to talk and hide from the rest of the room and all the garbage they spouted. Just listening to them was more than I could take: 'You won't believe it; this week I found out that poor people exist!'" he mocked. "'And sometimes they even have children or own small objects --- couldn't you just die??'"

"'Oh, yes, I totally agree --- it's mortifying!'" Ginny played along, complete with the back of her hand draped swooningly on her forehead.

"Exactly," Sirius said. "---And the summer she was cut out was the same summer Regulus was about to start school. Of course James and I had already built up quite a reputation, so I had to stand around at all those awful parties listening to Mum just barely bothering to sprinkle a little tact on it: 'This one will be much better than the other, we promise'... It didn't take much of that before I went off. Mum had one of her episodes, Dad and I came to blows and I got a black eye out of it..."

Hermione pressed her hand to her mouth a little harder.

"...And I decided I'd had enough. That very night, I made off with Dad's broom and ran away and never looked back; flew all the way to James' house in Manchester. Don't even ask me how I managed not to get lost. Of course I told him what had happened. I didn't want his folks to know, but he had enough brains to snitch on me that time, and the Potters took me in from then on, treated me just like another son. I don't know what they told my family, but they made it clear that I was welcome at their place anytime, no matter what my parents thought of it, so I just stayed there and never set foot in this old dungeon again until this summer."

"Your father hit you...?" Hermione questioned softly.

"Oh, only... twice including that," Sirius said; he seemed to take the subject much more casually. "I admit, I hit him first both times."

Harry agreed more with Hermione's assessment, and was happy to note that his father's family apparently had, too.

"It kind of seems to be thinning out," Ron pointed out awkwardly, looking across the tapestry. Harry skimmed the length of it and had to agree. Toward the middle it fanned out to perhaps two dozen names, but as it came toward where they were standing, it narrowed again until the column representing the current generation contained only Draco and Tonks, and neither of them actually had the name "Black." Harry looked back up the chart to try to find "Black" written in gold, but it wasn't anywhere, except as the three sisters' forfeited maiden names --- and the trace of glitter around Sirius's burn-mark.

Sirius nodded. "I'm the only Black left as a matter of fact, and at this point, getting married and carrying on the name is just about the last thing I intend to do." He smiled to himself. "It is satisfying to know that I'll put an end to the whole nonsense, especially with the kind of last word I'll be, in all my illustrious ancestors' opinions."

He at last turned from the tapestry, took out his wand, and looked over a wingbacked chair. "Molly said she'd seen some Doxies in the upholstery in here. Just in case..." He motioned Harry and the others over to him. One by one he cast an armoring charm on them, "Loricatus," and it made the air feel strangely stagnant around Harry's skin. Sirius explained that it was a spell to block minor physical assaults --- not too useful for combat, especially not against wizards, but enough to protect against Doxy bites or annoying siblings. He led them to start shaking chairs and tossing off the cushions to chase out anything living in them, which indeed turned out to include a number of Doxies --- small fairies with beetle-like wings and a poisonous bite, covered in black bristly hair.

Emboldened by the armoring charm, Harry decided to favor curiosity over apprehension, and he shook the chair that had made that un-mouse-like sound. What crawled out of it looked at first like a slimy black worm, or perhaps large flies walking in a line, but then Harry recognised it as a very small black snake, about the size of a thin pencil, with two ridges of feathers along its back. Indeed, with his gift of Parseltongue --- imprinted on him so long ago by Voldemort's curse --- he could hear its whispery little voice: "trying to sssleep... nasssty noisy light...." It slithered up onto an arm of the chair, spread out the feathers into winglike sails, and glided away into a box.

"Oh, a quetzicalle," Hermione identified it.

"Say, Sirius," Ginny said, "when you told Harry you'd explain things, you said you'd answer his questions 'about whatever'..."

That was right! "Does that mean you'll tell me about what's going on, what the Order's doing?" Harry asked.

"I'll tell you as much as I can," he said. He tossed the cushion off his chair and kicked it a few times as it stood up against a box. "Probably better to wait until we're alone for that, though. Molly wouldn't like it. She doesn't really have any say in what I tell you, but..."

"But he'll just tell us as soon as you're done telling him," Ginny argued. "Why bother putting it off?"

"Yeah," Ron concurred as he and his sister shook another chair between them.

"If it's important, then the less times it's repeated the better," Hermione argued, surprising Harry. "Every person it has to go through has some chance of being overheard or getting things confused, right?"

Sirius scratched his messy hair and frowned thoughtfully. "If Molly asks, I waited for you to hear it from Harry --- fair enough?"

"Oh, yesyes!" Ginny said. She and Ron came back over next to Harry and Hermione, and the four of them clustered around Sirius to listen.

They all stood around for a moment before Sirius looked at Harry, and Harry realised that everyone was waiting for him to ask the questions. "So, what have Voldemort and the Death Eaters been doing since he came back?" Harry asked. "Why haven't they made any attacks or anything?"

Sirius looked very thoughtful and walked over to another chair --- a particularly smelly one as it turned out --- while he considered his answer. "He's working more in the shadows for now, getting things in place for when he makes his move, gathering allies and such."

"Like the Dementors," Harry said.

"Apparently."

"I heard that the Order was stopping him from something," Harry said. "What are you doing?"

"Trying to head him off from gathering support," Sirius answered, "trying to get some allies of our own..." He wordlessly shook the chair and kicked it, but Harry waited as he seemed to be mulling over saying more.

"There's also some thing that he wants," he added at last. "He'll get it before making a move if he can, and if he does get his hands on it, it will put us in a very bad spot. The Ministry ought to be protecting it, but they can't guard against Voldemort as long as they believe that he's still gone, so the Order has been picking up the slack."

"What is it? What are you guarding?" Harry asked eagerly.

Sirius stopped working with the chair and looked him in the eyes, very seriously. "It's something you mustn't know about, Harry. Don't bother asking me. That's the one thing I will absolutely not tell you."

"Why not!?"

"I said I'd tell you everything I could; this is something I can't. Can you just trust me on that?"

Putting it in those terms, Harry had to nod; he definitely trusted Sirius, but it was strange and stunning to be told so directly that his godfather was keeping a secret from him --- a great and important secret. Harry couldn't help it. I want to know! He was still looking into Sirius's eyes...

Cold late-autumn wind blew on his face, carrying the scent of pulverised dust and char. His body burned with a sick, trembling fire that the chill in the air couldn't touch, but the breeze lifted his silky hair aside to kiss the nape of his neck and sent an added shiver through him. With one hand he clung to the arm of an immense black-bearded man --- Harry recognised Hagrid, Hogwarts' gamekeeper, but he looked somewhat younger than the Hagrid Harry knew. Nestled deep in the cradle of his massive arms was a blanket-wrapped bundle, a sliver of a baby's bright flushed face, a flash of red blood --- My blood... The bundle kicked and squalled.

"Give him to me," Harry heard himself say, reaching toward the baby. "I'll take good care of him."

Hagrid shook his head and tried to be gentle with his great rough voice. "I'd give him ter yeh if I could, but I can't give him ter nobody."

Through the blanket, Harry felt his fingers just brush the baby's foot before Hagrid gathered him up a little closer, out of reach.

"Dumbledore done tol' me Harry's ter go ter his aunt an' uncle."

Harry jumped back in shock. His heel caught against a box and sent him flailing for balance, and he would have fallen if not for Ron grabbing him and hauling him forward again.

"Harry, mate, what happened?" Ron asked.

"Nothing... nothing."

"You look like you just saw a ghost!" Hermione insisted.

"I just had a shudder, I'm fine!" Harry told her. He desperately looked around for Sirius, afraid that his godfather might contradict that.

"You're sure you're all right?" Sirius asked. He came around the chair and took Harry's shoulder, but there was an odd look on his face, and he spoke to the design on Harry's sweater rather than his face.

"Yeah, I'm sure..."

"Eww!" Ginny squealed. Harry looked up; she had lifted up the chair-cushion and uncovered a nest of dead Puffskeins. All five of them clasped their noses and fled across the room as the source of that chair's strange odor became violently clear.

"Remind me not to sit in that one," Ron remarked with disgust once they were clear of the smell.

"Oh, none of these are any good," Sirius said. "I was going to toss them once they stopped moving --- just pitch it over the balconey; might as well."

"You mean...?" Ron questioned, pointing toward the drawing room doors standing open.

"Down into the foyer, right."

The four students stared at him.

"Why not?"

"I don't guess there's any reason we shouldn't, is there?" Ron realised, breaking into a grin.

Sirius crossed back to the chairful of rotting Puffskeins and pointed his wand at it. "Mobiliscamnum." It levitated about a foot into the air, and he led it at wandpoint out one of the doors. A moment later Harry heard a wonderful crash and a general uproar of disapproval from the portraits downstairs. Sirius's mother was silent, however; apparently no flying debris had struck her curtains.

Ron and Ginny each took an arm of the chair they had been shaking before and together, both grinning, hauled it out onto the balconey and threw it over with another crash. Hermione picked up the cushions that had been left behind --- gingerly handling the one that had covered the dead animals --- and followed.

Sirius was the first to come back in, and Harry paired with him to take out another of the chairs they had already shaken clear of pests. As they were lifting it at the balconey railing, Harry remembered something else he wanted to know. "Who's Dedalus Diggle?" he asked Sirius.

Sirius let the chair down to rest with the cross supports of its legs on the rail. He looked slyly at Harry. "I thought I heard a fly on the wall last night."

Harry felt the heat of his face flushing red; how could he have been so thoughtless to ask? "Well... I just thought I'd heard of him and the name happened to come across my head and I couldn't place it," he fumbled.

Sirius's eyes were saying "right, and I'm the Queen Mother," but his mouth smiled briefly before he became more grave. The moment of silence was broken by the others loudly shaking out another chair in the drawing room. "Dedalus is a member of the Order. He was... injured on guard duty, and the Ministry arrested him."

"What for?" Harry asked, still trying to angle in at the secret Sirius was holding back.

"Being somewhere the Ministry doesn't want us," Sirius answered. "That's all I'll---"

"SIRIUS LUCIEN BLACK!"

For a moment, Harry thought that Estelle's portrait had been set off, but the sound wasn't coming from below; it was coming from the stairway, over Sirius's shoulder. He turned around to look, and Harry leaned to see past him.

It was Mrs. Weasley.

Harry let his grip on the chair loosen, not realising that Sirius had done the same until its weight slipped out of his fingers and it went tumbling over the rail. Harry looked over to see it hit, and this time bits of wood did fly up under the balconey, at the back wall of the foyer---

"SIRIUS LUCIEN BLACK!!! BLOOD-TRAITOR!! I CAN ONLY THANK THE STARS YOUR FATHER DIDN'T LIVE TO SEE OUR NOBLE NAME LEFT IN YOUR DISGRACEFUL FILTH-POLLUTED HANDS!!!"

Sirius clapped his hands over his ears as they all fled up the stairs, including Ginny, Ron, and Hermione, who dashed out of the drawing room to follow on Harry's heels. They were met in the third floor hallway by Lupin, who had just burst out of the master bedroom in his night-robe with his hair still mussed from the pillow, wand in hand. "What's going on down there!?" he asked.

"Uh, we were... throwing chairs," Hermione explained lamely.

Sirius let himself fall back to lean on the wall, coincidentally just up against the figure of the great blue dog. "You're sure you want to stay with your godfather now...?" he asked Harry.

His tone hadn't been all that serious, but Harry took no chances and gave him a squeeze around the chest. "Quite sure."

"Aww." Over Mrs. Black's continuing tirade, Harry could just hear Ginny's coo of approval.

to be continued in...
Chapter Six: My Lady's Lowest Servant