Another Prisoner, Another Professor

Hogwarts at night could be an eerie place. It was at night, with the dark shadows against the walls and the echoing footsteps in the corridors, that Harry remembered the past secrets of the castle - the giant chess set miles beneath the school that had guarded the Stone, the Chamber of Secrets, perhaps even further underground, which for centuries had hidden a deadly basilisk beneath their feet. He thought of the dementors outside and tried to shake off the slight chill that caressed his spine.

"There's a book in the Restricted Section that screams," he whispered to Hermione. "Just so you know."

"You don't think there can be any really dangerous books there, do you?" she whispered in reply. "I mean, not books that tell you how to do dangerous things, books that are dangerous in and of themselves."

"Doubt it," said Ron, who seemed to have grown over the summer and was hunching his shoulders downward as they walked. "Dad confiscates them sometimes when he's at work. There aren't going to be any in a school library."

The door to the library was unlocked; they opened it slowly, listening for creaking hinges but hearing none. Silently, they crept past the seemingly endless rows of shelves until they reached the back, pulled off the cloak, and hesitantly stepped over the rope.

"All right," Hermione said quietly, "it doesn't look like anything is labeled in here. We're going to have to just take things off the shelves and look through the tables of contents and the indexes."

"If they have tables of contents and indexes," said Harry. "Some of them don't have titles."

He reached out and took down a scaly-covered book with a spine that was cracked in the middle and opened it. The lettering on the pages was in some unfamiliar language, but there were illustrations, of young witches in flowing dresses who had their throats split open. Swallowing, he paged through the rest of the book and found that it was all in the same graceful, foreign script.

The next book he tried was very small, about the size of a Chocolate Frog card, and had pictures of merrily smiling children on the cover. Harry looked at the first page and read:

Hecate built the fire high,

With oak, ash, thorn, and yew.

Then she hacked the Muggle's brains

And put them in her stew.

With a morbid curiosity, he turned to the next page:

The elf cleans the chimneys, the elf makes our bread,

The elf rocks the baby and smoothes down the bed.

The elf brings the mulled wine, the elf sweeps the floor;

We'll strike the elf dead when he can work no more.

"I think I might have found something," said Ron; Harry shoved the ghastly little book back into the shelving and looked over at him.

Ron was holding a book that looked as though it were covered in something like red velvet. Looking near the top of the page, he read aloud, "'Though most of the modern fervor associated with pureblood elitism is due to fear and prejudice, the desire to keep one's family free from non-magical relations does have a basis in ancient theory. Several of the Dark Ages' leading magical scholars believed that the connections and magic of blood were more powerful than any other sort of magic found in the world, though none of them were ever able to prove their hypotheses. Satyrdoro the Sensuous is said to have wielded control over his forty-seven children by pricking their skin as they slept and keeping the blood to use in mysterious rituals.'"

Hermione looked over Ron's shoulder. "What is that book? Does it say any more?"

"The Magic of the Body, Volume One," Ron said. "That's all it says on blood magic that I can find. I don't see Volume Two anywhere."

Hermione glanced at Ron, and then at Harry. "Let's take it."

"Okay," he replied.

"I'm not sure it's going to help us," said Ron quickly. "It's talking about stuff with family and blood; this bloke Satyrdoro might have only been able to control his children because they were related. It doesn't say anything about being able to use blood magic on someone who isn't your family." He closed the book and turned to Harry. "Remus Lupin - he isn't your third cousin twice removed or anything, is he?"

Harry had never met a single relative of his other than the Dursleys; as far as he had ever known, they were his only family. Dudley had Aunt Marge and had had a grandmother in Dorset who had sent him enormously large boxes of sweets and stuffed animals until she died when he was perhaps six or so, but they were both on Uncle Vernon's side of the family and no blood relation to Harry. He had always assumed that if he had had other relations, the Dursleys would have assuredly given him to them, because no one could loathe his presence more than the Dursleys could.

And yet, now that he thought more about it, the Dursleys had always wanted to somehow take the magic out of him, to stamp it out and make him "normal". Maybe it had been worth it to Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia to put up with him, as long as they had the possibility of raising him to be a regular Muggle without any hints of magic around him. He had never known anything about his father's side of the family, and had never spent much time wondering about them, except when he had had vague thoughts of a distant relative rescuing him when he was younger and when, last year, he had wondered if perhaps it was possible he was related to Salazar Slytherin. No one had ever said anything about his father being Muggle-born, like his mother. Were there wizard relatives somewhere who might have raised Harry, had the Dursleys allowed them?

Ron's question resurfaced in his mind and popped the brief sensation of hope that had risen in his chest. Perhaps there were wizard relatives somewhere who would have been more horrible to him than the Dursleys had ever been, or who would have killed him outright.

"I don't know," he said slowly. "I think the Dursleys are my only family anywhere, but - it would be weird for me not to have any distant cousins or anything, wouldn't it? Don't most people have some distant family that they've never met?"

"I think most people do," said Ron. "I know I do. Besides the accountant cousin who no one ever talks about, I think one of my uncles said something once about Dad having a second cousin once removed or something like that who the Ministry had on trial for being a Death Eater, and I know I've never met him."

"You're related to Malfoy somehow, aren't you?"

"I think so," Ron said slowly. "I'm pretty sure I am, somewhere. I said that mostly to shut him up, but yeah..."

"There have to be books on it," said Hermione. "With people like Malfoy's family as fascinated with their bloodlines as they are, there has to be a book somewhere where you can look up how all the pureblood wizards are related."

Ron looked at her. "I bet you're happy that no one you're related to can use any blood magic on you."

"Well, it is an advantage," she replied. "The only dangerous person in my family I can think of is Aunt Emily, and that's because she hunts rabbits on the weekends and once accidentally shot my Uncle Cecil in the leg - "

There was a swift and heavy noise at the other end of the room; the door was being opened, and Harry heard a voice say, "We'll talk in here."

"Quick!" Hermione gasped under her breath. "Under the cloak!" She dove to the floor where they had dropped it and picked it up, throwing it over the three of them.

Harry could hear bits of conversation from the other end of the room, but the distance and Ron's heavy breathing made it difficult. " - just once, that's all I'm asking," he heard a second voice say. Both of the voices belonged to men. "If I could...once, that's all...dreams where I don't know if..."

"Let's move closer," Harry whispered to Hermione. "I want to hear what they're saying."

She bit her lip, and then nodded; they stepped out carefully over the rope and walked slowly, carefully down the main aisle.

Dumbledore and Black were standing near Madam Pince's desk; Dumbledore was wearing his slippers and a purple dressing gown over a white nightshirt, but Black was still wearing the same blue robe and leather boots that he had been wearing in class. "I know it can lead to obsessions," he said. "I don't want an obsession, I want to get rid of an obsession. You don't understand what it's like."

"No one can exactly understand what another feels," Dumbledore replied calmly, "but I do understand the burdens of a tormented mind."

Black sighed heavily. "Look," he said. "I keep having these dreams where I'm chasing someone, but I don't know who it is, or why I'm chasing him. It's one of the four, but I can never get close enough to see who it is. It's getting to the point where I don't even want to bloody sleep anymore, in case I have the dream again."

"Severus could make you a potion for a dreamless sleep," said Dumbledore.

"I'm not drinking anything he gives me," Black retorted. "I don't care if it's pumpkin juice and he drinks some himself first. And it isn't about the dream, really. The dream's only a symptom of the problem."

Dumbledore closed his eyes for a moment, and then opened them again. "This goes against my better judgement," he said, "but I have a feeling that you will find the mirror regardless of whether I lead you to it or not. You must promise me, Sirius - "

"I will," said Black immediately.

"You must promise me," Dumbledore said again, slowly, "that once you see it, you will not go looking for it again."

"I promise."

"Even if you think that what you see will have changed."

"I promise," said Black again; he seemed very impatient, and Harry thought he could see him shifting his weight back and forth from one foot to the other.

Dumbledore did not move.

"I think," he said slowly, "that if you could see the wildness in your eyes right now, it would frighten you more than you imagine."

Black stopped shifting and was still.

Dumbledore looked at him; it was a rather mournful sort of expression, Harry thought, as though Black had greatly disappointed him somehow. "Come with me," he said quietly, and the two of them turned to the door.

"Do we follow them?" Hermione whispered the moment that the door closed behind the two teachers.

"Yes!" replied Ron at once.

They managed to open the door again without being noticed; Dumbledore and Black were beginning to climb the staircase at the other end of the corridor, and Harry, Ron, and Hermione followed them as silently as they could. They reached the fifth floor, where Dumbledore opened a very thin door that Harry had always assumed to be the entrance to a broom cupboard. Harry wondered how three people were going to manage to get through the door together, but luckily Dumbledore left the door wide open and he was able to stand just outside it with Ron and Hermione.

The door did not lead to a broom cupboard, though the room it did lead to was around the size of one, if there was ever a broom cupboard that had such a high ceiling. The room was covered, floor and walls, with tile made of jet-black stone. It seemed to have nor furniture, or windows. In fact, it seemed to be empty, except for Dumbledore, Black, and, standing up against the wall opposite the door, the Mirror of Erised.

Black glanced at Dumbledore and then stepped forward to approach the mirror. Harry had a feeling that he should leave; Dumbledore had told him, in his first year, not to seek out the mirror again, but while his mind kept urging him to poke Ron and Hermione and gesture to the staircase, his body remained still.

Black kept staring at the mirror. He moved his head slightly as he looked, up and down and to the side at an angle, as though the mirror were showing him many things that he wanted to examine from all sides. The mirror seemed to radiate a faint light from its golden frame, which illuminated Black's face in the shadows; for the first time Harry saw that underneath his handsomeness there was a sort of desperate gauntness to his features.

"All right," he said abruptly, and turned away from the glass. "I saw it. I'll go."

Ron tugged on Harry and Hermione's shirts, but there was no need - they were already backing away from the door.

Dumbledore was the one who closed the door to the room; it had a keyhole, and Harry expected him to lock it, but Dumbledore did not take out a key. Black looked right at Harry and stared, which made his heart race, until he realized that he was standing right in front of the window.

"Good night, Sirius," Dumbledore said to Black. "I hope you will be able to have some restful sleep."

"I suppose you aren't going to ask me what I saw," Black replied, "because you figure that if I wanted you to know, I would have told you." He took a step forward. "Are you that sure you can trust me?"

"Good night, Sirius," Dumbledore said again, and walked off into the darkness.

Black stayed for a moment; he ran his fingers back through his hair, looked out the window a final time, and then turned towards the stairs and was gone.