Harry Potter and the Dark Mark

Chapter Twenty

"Now remember, the Querent must ask a question before picking five runes from the bag. Then the runes must be cast onto the table. The runes will only predict the future, so please do not ask questions pertaining to the past," Professor Trelawney articulated. Harry ignored her as Ron whispered to him and passed the bag containing the runes. He selected five and put them in front of him.

"So do you think that whoever poisoned Dumbledore poisoned Hagrid and Maxime and Fang?" Ron whispered when Trelawney bent to peer at Lavender's runes.

Harry surveyed his runes dispassionately as Trelawney floated past and then replied as she busied herself with Neville, who had caught Dean in the eye with a stray rune as he cast them.

"I should imagine so. But what bothers me is that it must be someone in the school, because we didn't see anyone unusual at the Quidditch Match."

"Who!?" Ron gasped, eyes bulging. He peered suspiciously at the rest of the class before giving Professor Trelawney such a glance that she felt moved enough to speak to him about it.

"Mr Weasley, is there something wrong?" she asked.

"No, Professor Trelawney," Ron answered in a Parvati tone. He bowed his head and inspected Harry's rune casting. The runes were small rectangular ivory tablets about the size of pear drops and there were different markings on each. The markings were stick symbols that reminded Harry of the Vikings for some obscure reason.

"Now you've all cast the runes you selected at random from the bags, you can interpret the meaning by turning to page sixty-three in your textbooks," Professor Trelawney announced mysteriously.

"That one's upside down, do you have to throw it again?" Ron asked in an undertone.

"No, the meanings are different," Harry sighed. "More stuff to learn. I can't believe Hermione is revising for her O.W.Ls already. They're months away!"

"Aha - that funny looking 'B' is Beorc, and it represents woman," Ron recited. "Yes, but Hermione would be revising for her N.E.W.Ts now if her O.W.Ls weren't nearer."

"Woman, you say?" Harry asked nervously.

"There a special girl you haven't told me about, Harry?" Ron winked crudely and Harry grinned weakly. Inside, he was cringing at Ron's false cheer.

"Don't be daft! Get on with it! What's this blank one all about?"

"That's called - weird!"

"Weird?"

"No... weird with a 'Y'. Wyrd. Like the Wyrd Sisters," Ron said, flicking his eyes over the page. "It represents fate. That's it."

"Great..." Harry said in a long-suffering manner.

"Where's the death rune? You can't tell me Harry Potter can go through a divination lesson without at least ONE prediction of death," Ron grumbled. "That one there means the discovery of something hidden, and that one..." There was a pause as Ron scanned the page.

"There," Harry said, pointing to the paragraph about a rune called Hagall.

"Yep. That's an unfortunate event or disruptive force. Well, your death is pretty unfortunate, I'd say. There's your death for this week," Ron said with a watery smile.

"Ahh, but look!" Harry countered. "This one here is a symbol of resurrection - so I come back to life. You'll not be free of me yet, Weasley!" He pointed at a rune that resembled a 'Z' drawn backwards. The centre stick of the design was parallel with the sides instead of being at forty five degrees however, so that it appeared crooked.

Ron looked at Harry earnestly in the sudden silence. "You know, Hermione and I, we've talked, and we know that you might get some stupid noble idea that we're in danger by being your friends..."

"You are," Harry cut in bluntly. Ron silenced him and continued talking.

"Well we don't care. So don't start any daft schemes and try to stop being friends with us or anything, will you?" he pleaded. It was more than Harry could bear to refuse him.

"I'd thought about it before," he admitted. "But I needed you so much at the time I didn't do anything about it. And now I-"

"And now you won't, because you know better. We mean it Harry. We won't let you let us go." Ron paused, fingering the crushed velvet bag the rest of the runes were in. "The same goes for Ginny too."

"Ginny?" Harry asked, trying to feign surprise.

Ron smiled to himself as if recalling something. "I think you don't like Ginny in the way I didn't like Hermione," he smirked. Harry froze and stared in fascination at Ron's hands.

"Did you ever learn how to transfigure worms into ribbons?" he asked curiously.

Ron's ears reddened. "Er... no, strangely enough, we, er, never got round to that..."

Harry would have laughed but he saw Trelawney approaching. Besides, Ron was far more observant than he had given him credit for, and he wasn't in the mood for laughing. He still felt drained from last night. Dreamless Sleep Potions were as good as their name, but a lack of dreams made him feel listless and empty.

"Mr Potter, did you follow my instructions exactly? That seems to be a rather odd selection of runes. May I enquire as to what information you asked the celestial bodies to unveil?" Professor Trelawney breathed.

Harry blinked owlishly.

"She means what question you asked before you picked the runes," Ron muttered.

"Oh!" Harry hadn't asked a question. He had just randomly pulled five runes out of the bag. "I asked if I'd pass my exams," he lied on the spur of the moment.

"Well, it seems that you didn't concentrate hard enough. Remember that when you write this up for homework," she instructed gravely.

Harry nodded automatically. "Yes, Professor."

"Class dismissed!"

As they climbed down the ladder from the incense filled room Harry smiled bitterly. The runes had turned out to be right after all. Ginny was the woman referred to, no doubt, and Hagrid's murder was the unfortunate event. Harry snorted to himself. 'Unfortunate' was a glaring understatement. He felt glad for the first time in his life that he hadn't had to cope with his parents' death as a small child. If it hurt this much to lose Hagrid then the pain would have been unbearable for the loss of his mother and his father. It was bad enough only as a vague Dementor induced memory.

For a wild instant Harry wondered if the resurrection rune meant Hagrid would be restored to life but he dismissed the thought almost instantly. For one thing, Divination was a pile of Hippogriff dung, and the Philosopher's Stone had been destroyed and that was the only thing Harry could imagine coming close to giving life to the dead. Surely if there were some way then someone would have used it by now - on Cedric, or his parents, even. No, Hagrid was dead, and he was going to stay that way. Spitefully Harry wished Voldemort were dead instead of Hagrid. The world would certainly be a better place.

"Leonem Aureum," Ron whispered to the Fat Lady as they approached the Common Room before break. History of Magic had been as boring as usual, only Hermione paying much attention to Professor Binns. Ron and Harry had done their Divination homework instead of taking notes, much to Hermione's disapproval, but it had given her a chance to read Harry's rune casting over his shoulder. She had frowned at it and pinched her lip before returning to her notes on eleventh century witchcraft.

The three of them settled down into some armchairs near the window, and stared at the view in silence. No one approached them.

"Who did it?" Ron asked quietly. Harry shrugged, numb.

"We ought to tell McGonagall about Lucius Malfoy," Harry said softly. Hermione looked at him sharply.

"No," she warned.

"Why not?" Ron questioned in surprise.

She took her time in replying. "We were out in the grounds after dark. I'm a Prefect, we could get Gryffindor into serious trouble. We overheard the Professors discussing something we obviously weren't meant to hear, again putting us at risk of being punished even more. Lucius was under an Invisibility Cloak. We can't prove that without revealing the Marauder's Map and Harry's Cloak. We stand to lose those and get really, really severely punished. They might even take you two off the Quidditch Team, and replace me as Prefect," she said calmly. She stared steadfastly out of the window, refusing to meet the eyes of either boy.

Harry could tell straight away that something did not ring true. It was very unlike Hermione to name such selfish reasons given the gravity of the situation the School was in.

"What are the real reasons, Hermione?" Harry asked. She flinched and looked at her hands. When she finally looked up, the only emotion Harry could see in her face was fear.

"You must have worked out that someone from Hogwarts is behind both attacks, because no one from outside has been spotted, and the Streeler Venom is not toxic to Humans, so it wasn't Wormtail..."

Harry and Ron nodded obligingly.

"Well... I can hardly believe this myself, but it seems the only logical conclusion, when you weigh up all the facts..."

"Go on," Ron prompted.

"When we heard that conversation outside Hagrid's Hut, at first I thought they meant Professor Lupin. But what if they meant Lucius Malfoy? And what if Lucius poisoned Hagrid and Madame Maxime? He was wearing an Invisibility Cloak - I know Hagrid could be daft sometimes, but he would have noticed his door opening and closing by itself. Lucius would have needed someone to open and close the door for him as he entered and left. Snape and McGonagall could have been those someones.

"Then there's the fact that they never drank anything whilst visiting him. You know Hagrid always gives everyone a mug of tea, and yet they didn't. The only empty cups were Hagrid's and Maxime's. Why? There were no lessons to rush back to because it was after school hours.

"McGonagall believed Harry straight away when he said Hagrid was dead. Wouldn't most teachers question even a little? I certainly would have thought you were joking or something.

"There was a Prefect's meeting last week, after the Quidditch Match. McGonagall told us all that Professor Snape would be the one coaching us all in the Dark Arts and that Professor Brauen would be taking over as Potions Mistress. I thought it made sense, at the time, because Snape will know all about the Dark Arts, so he seemed the perfect choice. And when we had that argument with Malfoy, and he said that there was more than one reason Snape wanted a Potions Assistant this year - wouldn't an excellent reason be that you knew at some point you would be teaching the Dark Arts?

"The worst part is they are close to Dumbledore, so it would have been easy for either one of them to poison him. They could be finishing him off now and we'd never know!" Hermione gulped and put her hands to her face. "There. I said it!" she gasped.

"Snape!" Ron snarled, his face warping into a mask of hatred and fear. "Once a Death Eater, always a Death Eater! I was right when I said he was away the day after every Dark Mark! But McGonagall? Surely not? She would have to be really clever to pull the wool over everyone's eyes!"

"She is really clever," Hermione said, "probably as clever as Dumbledore in her own way. But she would really have to hate Dumbledore or support Voldemort to do this."

Harry felt sick. The evidence was overwhelming. "At the match, when Dumbledore fainted, McGonagall acted strangely," he admitted. "She looked as if she was struggling to decide what to do, choosing between helping him and something else. Almost as if part of her didn't want to help him."

"Perhaps that's why Professor Lupin acted strangely," Hermione mused. "If he suspected any foul play when we met him at Hagrid's..."

Harry sucked in his breath. "Ron, Hermione!" he breathed. "If we're right, then they know all Dumbledore's plans. They must be receiving information from Sirius on behalf of Dumbledore. Sirius is in danger!" Hermione and Ron gazed at him with matching expressions of sorrow, fear and anger. Ron uttered the thought Harry didn't have the strength to voice.

"Well, if McGonagall really is working for the Dark Order, we've had it. There's no one we can tell who'd believe us. There's nothing we can do."

The bell rang to signal the end of Break. It was a very sombre and nervous group who left the Common Room for their first Dark Arts lesson.