Harry Potter: Master of Talismans

The celebration had ended by the time McGonagall reached us. Neville took the Remembrall from Harry’s hand with unusual care, as though dropping it might somehow make the situation worse. Harry watched our Head of House approach and lost most of the colour the flight had put in his face.

She told him to come with her. Ron began explaining that Malfoy had taken the Remembrall, but McGonagall said she would hear from Harry first. I caught his sleeve as he passed and reminded him to describe the whole thing. She had listened when I explained my own difficulty; he had reason to expect a hearing, even if her expression made it hard to imagine one.

Harry nodded and followed her towards the castle. I watched them reach the path, trying not to remember Hooch’s warning about leaving the ground. Behind me, Malfoy laughed and remarked that Potter had barely learnt to land before getting himself sent home.

I turned towards him. Neville had already had one frightening experience that afternoon, and Malfoy had chosen to follow it by taking his present. Now Harry was walking away with a teacher while the person who had provoked him stood between Crabbe and Goyle, enjoying the result. I started across the grass before the thought became any more sensible.

Malfoy saw me coming. His gaze dropped to the pouch, then returned to my face as he began another remark about paper. I caught his sleeve and upper arm, stepped close and turned. His balance came across my hip before he finished speaking, and he landed on his back with the breath driven out of him.

Goyle lunged. I moved off the line of his shoulders and swept the foot carrying his weight, letting his momentum take him into the space I had left. Crabbe arrived from the other side with his arms out. I drove a foot against his chest and pushed him back until his own feet failed to keep up.

Then all three were on the ground, and the crowd had become much quieter. My elbow throbbed from Neville’s rescue. The movements and the satisfaction which followed them were familiar enough to make it difficult to claim I had acted without knowing what I was doing. I had advised Harry to trust McGonagall to hear the truth, then decided not to wait for what she might do about it.

Ron reached me with several Gryffindors close behind him. He had been coming to help, but stopped when he saw where everybody was. The Slytherins who had started forward slowed as the space filled. Nobody drew a wand, and I was grateful for that much sense even while Malfoy struggled upright enough to speak.

‘Leave Neville’s things alone,’ I told him. I had barely finished before Hooch’s voice came from the path, asking what was happening.

She looked from Malfoy to Goyle and then to Crabbe, who had tried sitting up too quickly and was holding his chest. Her question about why three pupils were on the ground gave Malfoy the opening he needed. I supplied an answer before he could use it.

‘They lost their balance,’ I said. ‘I was about to help them up.’

I offered Malfoy my hand. Hooch watched the gesture with an expression which made it clear that I hadn’t supplied a convincing account of the last few moments. Goyle muttered agreement anyway. Malfoy took my hand long enough to be pulled upright, then jerked away and began brushing grass off his robes.

Hooch checked that he could stand properly and had Crabbe take a full breath while she watched. Only then did she order everyone back beside the brooms. We would finish with our grips, she said. Even Malfoy followed the instruction without offering any more information about what his father had taught him.

When Hooch passed me, she stopped long enough to say she would be watching closely. I told her I understood. I had escaped an immediate punishment, but her disbelief remained, and Harry was still somewhere in the castle where none of us could find out what was happening to him.

After we were dismissed, Ron put an arm around my shoulders and began describing Goyle’s fall back to me. He wanted to know where I had learnt to do that. I said it took practice, which was true and left out several years I couldn’t explain. He advised me to warn him before he ever did anything likely to put him on the receiving end.

Hermione walked on my other side. She reminded me that Malfoy could still report what had happened and that Hooch hadn’t believed me. I admitted both points. Before she could develop the argument, Neville asked whether we thought Harry would be sent home, and none of us had much appetite for discussing a different punishment.

Seamus spotted him first, coming towards us near the entrance. Harry wasn’t carrying luggage and was having trouble hiding a smile, both of which improved the afternoon considerably. Neville hurried ahead, so Harry told him straight away that he wasn’t being expelled. Ron demanded the rest of the story before he had finished saying it.

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Harry suggested telling us upstairs, away from the students passing through the hall. He managed to wait until the first landing before announcing that McGonagall had taken him to see Wood. I asked whether he meant Oliver Wood, remembering the questions about my talisman throws at dinner. Harry nodded, his smile finally escaping the effort to keep it quiet.

‘She wants me to be Gryffindor’s Seeker,’ he said. Ron stopped so abruptly that I nearly walked into him. ‘Wood wants to train me. McGonagall said she’d deal with the first-year rule.’

I thought about the Nimbus under my bed and let out a remark which made Harry’s smile falter. He hadn’t asked her for an exception, he said quickly. I told him I knew, then congratulated him properly. Watching him catch the glass ball had nearly stopped my heart; I could acknowledge how well he had flown without wanting to compete with him in the air.

Harry added that he would be the youngest Seeker in a hundred years. Ron made him repeat that part, then tried saying it himself while we resumed walking. After listening to the achievement being discussed from several directions, I asked what a Seeker actually did. Ron looked at me as though we had discovered an urgent gap in my education.

He explained the Snitch, the hundred and fifty points for catching it and the way its capture ended a match. Then he described the other balls and positions, using the width of the corridor to indicate where players would go until Hermione told him to let people past. Chasers scored through hoops, Keepers defended them and Beaters dealt with the Bludgers trying to hit everybody.

That last part explained why Fred and George enjoyed their positions. I asked why anyone bothered with the rest of the match if catching the small ball was worth so much. Ron moved in front of me, determined not to let the question survive another staircase.

A team could be more than a hundred and fifty points behind, he explained. The score also mattered across the school competition, so ending a match wasn’t always the same as obtaining the result the team needed. Wood would have plans which depended on knowing the difference. Harry listened closely enough that Ron stopped sounding offended and began enjoying himself.

‘Then he’d better teach me quickly,’ Harry said when we reached the corridor. Before Ron could offer another lesson, Fred and George appeared ahead of us with expressions which suggested the news had travelled faster than our walk.

George put an arm round Harry while Fred welcomed him to the team. Between them they promised to protect their new Seeker from Bludgers and supplied enough qualifications to that promise to make him look less comfortable about the job. Wood became difficult without a Seeker, George explained. That gave them an excellent reason to keep the one they had just acquired.

They left with a promise to see him at training. Harry looked down at his hands after they had gone. He had flown once, he reminded us; now people would expect him to play for Gryffindor. The pleasure of being chosen was beginning to acquire the weight of what came next.

I knew that feeling from other rooms and other uniforms. Being offered a place could be easier than walking into it the following morning. I told him to train, beginning with whatever Wood asked him to do first. He didn’t have to know how to play a whole season before bedtime.

Harry nodded without looking entirely persuaded. Hermione had been quiet through much of the conversation, but near the next staircase she stopped him. There was something he ought to see, she said. She led us towards the trophy room before Ron could resume explaining how much training he was going to need.

Late light lay across the cases inside. Trophies, medals and shields crowded behind glass, making the room feel full of students who had finished school long before we arrived. I had passed it without finding a reason to enter. Hermione went straight to a shield and indicated an engraved entry beside the word Seeker.

The name was James Potter. Harry moved closer until the glass stood only a short distance from his face, and Ron began a remark about talent running in families. He stopped when Harry raised a hand towards the inscription. His fingers hovered without quite touching the case.

There was nothing about Voldemort on the shield. It recorded no famous death and offered no account of the night everybody seemed to know better than Harry did. James Potter had played a game here with other boys, and somebody had put his name beside theirs because of it.

I thought of Ken’s handwriting in the margins of his notebooks. A complaint, an impatient correction or a stupid remark about Dead Face had sometimes told me more about him than hearing how brave he had been. Harry had been given stories about parents he couldn’t remember. Here was a small, ordinary part of his father’s life, kept in a case among school prizes.

‘You didn’t know?’ Hermione asked quietly. Harry shook his head, still looking at the name. We stayed while he read the other entries, leaving him enough time to find whatever he wanted in them.

When he stepped back, his eyes were bright and the smile had returned. He said he would like to come again. I moved aside so he could take another look and told him the shield would be easier to find than the ball he was going to chase. That earned a small laugh before he wiped his nose on his sleeve.

Hermione offered a handkerchief. Then she asked whether he wanted to borrow her Quidditch book, with none of the urgency she had used at the lunch table. Harry said yes. Ron offered to explain the parts it got wrong, and for once she let the comment pass after looking at the boy between them.

We went to the library together. Ron found a pitch diagram and used scraps of parchment to show how other players could box a Seeker in. Hermione brought a book with clearer pictures. Harry leaned over both, asking questions which made Ron forget how quietly people expected him to answer.

I listened until I could follow the example, then opened my own work. On the lawn I had held a shield with no reliable way to help someone falling from above us. Owning a faster broom hadn’t answered that problem, and knowing how to put Malfoy on the ground hadn’t improved my chances of catching Harry.

I turned to the Levitation Charm and set a clean sheet beside the book. Reading it would not make it work, as my earlier attempts had already demonstrated, but it gave me somewhere useful to begin. Harry had training to prepare for. I still had a spell to learn.