 perched on the windowsill.
"Hedwig!" he shouted, and he launched himself out of his chair and across the
room to pull open the window.
Hedwig flew inside, soared across the room, and landed on the table on top of
Harry's predictions.
"About time!" said Harry, hurrying after her.
"She's got an answer!" said Ron excitedly, pointing at the grubby piece of
parchment tied to Hedwig's leg.
Harry hastily untied it and sat down to read, whereupon Hedwig fluttered onto his
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knee, hooting softly.
"What does it say?" Hermione asked breathlessly.
The letter was very short, and looked as though it had been scrawled in a great
hurry. Harry read it aloud:
Harry -
I'm flying north immediately. This news about your scar is the latest in a series of
strange rumors that have reached me here. If it hurts again, go straight to
Dumbledore - they're saying he's got Mad-Eye out of retirement, which means he's
reading the signs, even if no one else is.
I'll be in touch soon. My best to Ron and Hermione. Keep your eyes open, Harry.
Sirius
Harry looked up at Ron and Hermione, who stared back at him.
"He's flying north?" Hermione whispered. "He's coming back?"
"Dumbledore's reading what signs?" said Ron, looking perplexed. "Harry - what's
up?"
For Harry had just hit himself in the forehead with his fist, jolting Hedwig out of
his lap.
"I shouldn't've told him!" Harry said furiously.
"What are you on about?" said Ron in surprise.
"It's made him think he's got to come back!" said Harry, now slamming his fist on
the table so that Hedwig landed on the back of Ron's chair, hooting indignantly.
"Coming back, because he thinks I'm in trouble! And there's nothing wrong with
me! And I haven't got anything for you," Harry snapped at Hedwig, who was
clicking her beak expectantly, "you'll have to go up to the Owlery if you want
food."
Hedwig gave him an extremely offended look and took off for the open window,
cuffing him around the head with her outstretched wing as she went.
"Harry," Hermione began, in a pacifying sort of voice.
"I'm going to bed," said Harry shortly. "See you in the morning."
Upstairs in the dormitory he pulled on his pajamas and got into his four-poster, but
he didn't feel remotely tired.
If Sirius came back and got caught, it would be his, Harry's, fault. Why hadn't he
kept his mouth shut? A few seconds' pain and he'd had to blab. . . . If he'd just had
the sense to keep it to himself.
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He heard Ron come up into the dormitory a short while later, but did not speak to
him. For a long time, Harry lay staring up at the dark canopy of his bed. The
dormitory was completely silent, and, had he been less preoccupied, Harry would
have realized that the absence of Neville's usual snores meant that he was not the
only one lying awake.
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CHAPTER FIFTEEN - BEAUXBATONS AND DURMSTRANG
Early next morning, Harry woke with a plan fully formed in his mind, as though
his sleeping brain had been working on it all night. He got up, dressed in the pale
dawn light, left the dormitory without waking Ron, and went back down to the
deserted common room. Here he took a piece of parchment from the table upon
which his Divination homework still lay and wrote the following letter:
Dear Sirius,
I reckon I just imagined my scar hurting, I was half asleep when I wrote to you last
time. There's no point coming back, everything's fine here. Don't worry about me,
my head feels completely normal.
Harry
He then climbed out of the portrait hole, up through the silent castle (held up only
briefly by Peeves, who tried to overturn a large vase on him halfway along the
fourth-floor corridor), finally arriving at the Owlery, which was situated at the top
of West Tower.
The Owlery was a circular stone room, rather cold and drafty, because none of the
windows had glass in them. The floor was entirely covered in straw, owl
droppings, and the regurgitated skeletons of mice and voles. Hundreds upon
hundreds of owls of every breed imaginable were nestled here on perches that rose
right up to the top of the tower, nearly all of them asleep, though here and there a
round amber eye glared at Harry. He spotted Hedwig nestled between a barn owl
and a tawny, and hurried over to her, sliding a little on the dropping-strewn floor.
It took him a while to persuade her to wake up and then to look at him, as she kept
shuffling around on her perch, showing him her tail. She was evidently still
furious about his lack of gratitude the previous night. In the end, it was Harry
suggesting she might be too tired, and that perhaps he would ask Ron to borrow
Pigwidgeon, that made her stick out her leg and allow him to tie the letter to it.
"Just find him, all right?" Harry said, stroking her back as he carried her on his
arm to one of the holes in the wall. "Before the dementors do."
She nipped his finger, perhaps rather harder than she would ordinarily have done,
but hooted softly in a reassuring sort of way all the same. Then she spread her
wings and took off into the sunrise. Harry watched her fly out of sight with the
familiar feeling of unease back in his stomach. He had been so sure that Sirius's
reply would alleviate his worries rather than increasing them.
"That was a lie, Harry," said Hermione sharply over breakfast, when he told her
and Ron what he had done. "You didn't imagine your scar hurting and you know
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it."
"So what?" said Harry. "He's not going back to Azkaban because of me."
"Drop it," said Ron sharply to Hermione as she opened her mouth to argue some
more, and for once, Hermione heeded him, and fell silent.
Harry did his best not to worry about Sirius over the next couple of weeks. True,
he could not stop himself from looking anxiously around every morning when the
post owls arrived, nor, late at night before he went to sleep, prevent himself from
seeing horrible visions of Sirius, cornered by dementors down some dark London
street, but betweentimes he tried to keep his mind off his godfather. He wished he
still had Quidditch to distract him; nothing worked so well on a troubled mind as a
good, hard training session. On the other hand, their lessons were becoming more
difficult and demanding than ever before, particularly Moody's Defense Against
the Dark Arts.
To their surprise, Professor Moody had announced that he would be putting the
Imperius Curse on each of them in turn, to demonstrate its power and to see
whether they could resist its effects.
"But - but you said it's illegal, Professor," said Hermione uncertainly as Moody
cleared away the desks with a sweep of his wand, leaving a large clear space in the
middle of the room. "You said - to use it against another human was -"
"Dumbledore wants you taught what it feels like," said Moody, his magical eye
swiveling onto Hermione and fixing her with an eerie, unblinking stare. "If you'd
rather learn the hard way - when someone's putting it on you so they can control
you completely - fine by me. You're excused. Off you go."
He pointed one gnarled finger toward the door. Hermione went very pink and
muttered something about not meaning that she wanted to leave. Harry and Ron
grinned at each other. They knew Hermione would rather eat bubotuber pus than
miss such an important lesson.
Moody began to beckon students forward in turn and put the Imperius Curse upon
them. Harry watched as, one by one, his classmates did the most extraordinary
things under its influence. Dean Thomas hopped three times around the room,
singing the national anthem. Lavender Brown imitated a squirrel. Neville
performed a series of quite astonishing gymnastics he would certainly not have
been capable of in his normal state. Not one of them seemed to be able to fight off
the curse, and each of them recovered only when Moody had removed it.
"Potter," Moody growled, "you next."
Harry moved forward into the middle of the classroom, into the space that Moody
had cleared of desks. Moody raised his wand, pointed it at Harry, and said,
'1mperio!"
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It was the most wonderful feeling. Harry felt a floating sensation as every thought
and worry in his head was wiped gently away, leaving nothing but a vague,
untraceable happiness. He stood there feeling immensely relaxed, only dimly
aware of everyone watching him.
And then he heard Mad-Eye Moody's voice, echoing in some distant chamber of
his empty brain: Jump onto the desk. . . jump onto the desk. . .
Harry bent his knees obediently, preparing to spring.
Jump onto the desk....
Why, though? Another voice had awoken in the back of his brain.
Stupid thing to do, really, said the voice.
Jump onto the desk....
No, I don't think I will, thanks, said the other voice, a little more firmly. . . no, I
don't really want to.
Jump! NOW!
The next thing Harry felt was considerable pain. He had both jumped and tried to
prevent himself from jumping - the result was that he'd smashed headlong into the
desk knocking it over, and, by the feeling in his legs, fractured both his kneecaps.
"Now, that's more like it!" growled Moody's voice, and suddenly, Harry felt the
empty, echoing feeling in his head disappear. He remembered exactly what was
happening, and the pain in his knees seemed to double.
"Look at that, you lot. . . Potter fought! He fought it, and he damn near beat it!
We'll try that again, Potter, and the rest of you, pay attention - watch his eyes,
that's where you see it - very good, Potter, very good indeed! They'll have trouble
controlling you!"
"The way he talks," Harry muttered as he hobbled out of the Defense Against the
Dark Arts class an hour later (Moody had insisted on putting Harry through his
paces four times in a row, until Harry could throw off the curse entirely), "you'd
think we were all going to be attacked any second."
"Yeah, I know," said Ron, who was skipping on every alternate step. He had had
much more difficulty with the curse than Harry, t