Harry Potter: Master of Talismans

Norbert was hanging from the cuff of Hagrid’s glove when we returned. Hagrid supported his body with one hand while trying to persuade him to release the other. The dragon beat his wings furiously, contributing very little to the process beyond further damage to the leather.

‘What did the boy hear?’ Hagrid asked. He glanced towards the window, then back at the four of us.

‘He talked about the dragon,’ I said. ‘He didn’t mention Fluffy. I think he’ll keep quiet about Norbert, but that doesn’t mean you can keep him here.’

Ron agreed before Hagrid could object. He knew about the ban on keeping dragons, largely through Charlie, and began explaining what would happen when this particular one stopped fitting on a table. Hermione added that the hut would be a poor hiding place once Norbert could look through its windows without climbing anything. Hagrid listened with his shoulders sinking, then looked down at the hatchling as it tore a piece from his glove.

‘He’s only a baby,’ he protested. Norbert dropped the leather and immediately tried to bite his thumb.

‘He won’t stay one.’ I moved the damaged glove out of reach. ‘Ron, write to Charlie. Ask whether the people he works with can take him, and how soon.’

Ron nodded and said he would do it that night. Hagrid asked whether they would look after Norbert properly, sounding much more concerned about that than the bites across his hands. Ron assured him that looking after dragons was what they did all day. Eventually Hagrid agreed to let us ask, though he stroked Norbert’s back throughout the conversation and never sounded pleased about it.

Before we left, I brought him back to the stranger. ‘Dumbledore needs to know somebody’s been asking how to get past Fluffy. Even if the man never comes near Hogwarts.’

Hagrid looked uncomfortable. ‘I’ll tell him,’ he said, and put his ruined glove down. ‘You lot get back to the castle. Leave that to me.’

Outside, I checked the time and swore under my breath. We had spent too long in the hut, even without chasing Malfoy across the grounds. Harry began listing what a thief might know as we hurried uphill: Snape’s own protection, Fluffy’s weakness and possibly whatever Quirrell had contributed. Hermione pointed out that we still did not know whether Quirrell had contributed anything.

‘How many protections can there be?’ Ron asked. He was walking quickly enough that the words came between breaths.

I could imagine the heads of houses helping, along with Quirrell and Dumbledore himself. Imagining a list would not tell us which parts were real. What worried me was that somebody had apparently found the precise gift that made Hagrid forget what he was supposed to keep secret. A guessed number of further obstacles would do very little to reassure me.

I kept returning to Quirrell. He had raised the alarm about the troll, and Harry had heard Snape threatening him afterwards. If Hagrid was right to trust Snape, that left another way of reading their argument. I wanted more than that before presenting the others with a second professor to accuse.

We reached the entrance hall almost at a run. McGonagall stood waiting with a lamp, and Malfoy was behind her. Harry started towards him, getting no further than an angry ‘You—’ before she ordered all of us to follow her. Nobody spoke on the way to her classroom.

She set the lamp on her desk and looked at us in turn. ‘Four first-years outside the castle after hours. I found Mr Malfoy returning through the entrance hall, and he informed me that you were still out.’

Malfoy’s smile widened. I had expected to lose points if we were caught, but McGonagall’s next sentence made Hermione draw in a sharp breath beside me.

‘Fifty points each from Gryffindor,’ she said. ‘And all five of you will serve detention.’

‘Five?’ Malfoy stepped forwards, his smile disappearing. ‘Professor, I came to tell you—’

‘Reporting your classmates does not excuse your own breach of curfew, Mr Malfoy.’ She waited until he had closed his mouth before explaining the detention. We would help Hagrid patrol the edge of the Forbidden Forest, on a date she would give us later. Malfoy tried objecting to the forest and then to Hagrid, abandoning both arguments under her stare.

For a moment I enjoyed watching him realise that he had earned a place beside us. Then I looked at Hermione and remembered the arithmetic. Two hundred points had gone in a single sentence, and finding a fifth person to share the detention did nothing to restore them.

Outside the classroom, Harry and Ron moved towards Malfoy. He backed against the wall and raised a hand before either reached him. ‘I didn’t tell her about the dragon. That great oaf can keep his lizard for all I care.’

‘Then what was that for?’ Harry demanded. He stopped close enough that Malfoy had to look up at him.

‘The flying lesson. And you, Mercer.’ Malfoy found a gap beside Ron and pushed through it. ‘Don’t think I’ve forgotten.’ He hurried away before we could block the corridor again.

Ron turned on me. ‘You said he wouldn’t tell. That worked brilliantly.’

‘I said he wouldn’t mention the dragon.’ The distinction sounded especially feeble outside McGonagall’s classroom. I had given Malfoy a reason to find another way of getting at us, and he had managed it before we reached the castle. When Hermione said as much, I could only agree.

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We had kept Hagrid out of trouble and lost two hundred points doing it. Both facts followed us up to Gryffindor Tower, where Ron wrote to Charlie before going to bed. Harry offered Hedwig, and we watched her leave with the letter. At least the request would be on its way before everyone discovered what had happened to the hourglass.

By breakfast, the missing rubies had attracted all the attention we could have expected. Seamus asked whether it was really two hundred, and none of us could supply an answer that made the number smaller. People shifted along the benches as we sat down, leaving an uncomfortable amount of space. I concentrated on eating rather than deciding which conversations had stopped because of us.

Our classmates had spent months earning those points. The Quidditch victory still stood, but winning a match did not cancel a House Cup penalty, however often people spoke as though Harry had dropped the Snitch on his way to bed. Some Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff students were annoyed too. They had hoped Gryffindor might finally prevent another Slytherin victory, and now seemed ready to blame us for losing a cup which would not be awarded for months.

Harry came back from practice looking thoroughly miserable. He said the team spoke to him when necessary and otherwise managed without using his name. I wanted to promise that it would pass, but I had spent the afternoon discovering how much space an entire common room could leave around one chair. We sat together over our homework, making rather less noise than usual.

Charlie’s reply arrived a few days later. He knew people who could take Norbert to the reserve, and they would collect him on Saturday night from the highest tower. Ron read the arrangements aloud before we took the letter to Hagrid. Hagrid read it himself, slowly, then sat down with it resting across his knees.

‘Saturday, then,’ he said. Norbert was trying to climb a chair leg beside him. Hagrid reached down and lifted him away, already asking how much food he should send for the journey.

The practical problems occupied the rest of the week. Harry and Ron could fit beneath the cloak with a carrier between them if they stayed close, and Hagrid had a sturdy crate with air holes. Concealing the dragon would do nothing about the noise it made, however. I took responsibility for that and asked Professor Flitwick about quietening a noisy object.

He demonstrated the Silencing Charm on a small bell. The clapper continued moving after the sound stopped, which looked wonderfully simple until I tried to reproduce the result. I threw a prepared strip and spoke the charm. The paper burned, and the bell rang through the entire attempt. Flitwick waited for it to finish before showing me where I had lost the shape of the charm.

On the next attempt, the ringing weakened and returned halfway through. ‘You found it that time,’ he told me. ‘Now you need to hold it cleanly. Listen for where it slips.’

Before leaving, I asked him something else. If a wizard watched somebody and repeated a spell, did that mean he was attacking them? Flitwick said it could equally be a counter-curse maintained on the target. The answer made me think of Snape’s moving lips through Hagrid’s binoculars. I had seen his concentration; I had never heard the words.

I packed the bell away with a better reason to doubt our accusation. It did not prove Snape innocent or Quirrell guilty, but it took away the certainty we had been trying to build from where one man had been looking. That evening I told Harry, Ron and Hermione what Flitwick had said. Harry listened without arguing, although he still wanted an explanation for the broom.

Between lessons, I worked on the charm. Eventually one preparation kept the bell quiet through its full movement, and later attempts held more reliably. The targeting still needed care. When I knocked a chair while releasing a piece towards the bell, the chair made enough noise to bring Hermione round in her seat. I could not treat success on one object as silence over an entire area.

Norbert provided a less cooperative test on Friday. Hagrid held him steady on the table while I sent a prepared strip towards him and said, ‘Silencio.’ His next screech vanished, though his jaws remained open and his claws continued scraping across the wood.

Ron grinned at the sudden improvement. ‘Good. Now do the floorboards, and Hagrid’s door, and anything Harry walks into.’

‘We still have to carry him carefully.’ I watched Norbert turn against Hagrid’s hand, making the table creak. ‘The crate will be noisy if he hits it. This only deals with his voice.’

The charm wore off later, announcing itself through a renewed burst of complaint. We had watched it last long enough for the route we intended, provided the boys did not have to stop for too long. I prepared a fresh talisman for Saturday and packed it separately, keeping the successful design in my notes. It had taken practice and paper to get there; I did not want to lose the details and have to discover them again.

By Saturday, Norbert was several times larger than the creature that had struggled out of its shell. Hagrid had food ready beside the padded crate and bites across his hands. When the time came to put the dragon inside, he bent over the opening and spoke to him for so long that Ron eventually held up Charlie’s letter.

‘They’ll be waiting,’ Ron said gently. ‘And they know how to look after him. We’ve still got to get up the stairs.’

Hagrid nodded and moved aside, wiping his face with the back of his hand. I released the fresh strip towards Norbert through the open top and spoke the charm. The paper burned, his squeal stopped, and the crate shifted as he turned inside it. We fastened the lid and checked that the air holes were clear before Harry and Ron lifted their ends.

The cloak settled over them, initially leaving a shoe and a corner of wood visible. Harry adjusted it until both disappeared. I stayed beside the crate’s last visible position, listening to the boys agree on how they would turn through the doorway.

‘If one of you stops, tell the other,’ I said. ‘And remember the cloak when you come back. Don’t leave it up there with the empty space where the crate was.’

‘We’ve got it,’ Harry answered. The carrier touched the doorframe a moment later, followed by a whispered apology and careful footsteps. I held the door until they were clear, then let it close on Hagrid’s suddenly quieter room.

Hermione and I returned to the common room separately from them. We would only have been two more people to conceal on the tower stairs, but waiting made that sensible decision increasingly difficult to appreciate. I kept looking up whenever the portrait hole opened. Hermione tried to read and spent a long time on the same page.

Harry and Ron eventually came back without the crate. Ron dropped into a chair, held out his aching hands and explained how Charlie’s friends had secured the carrier between their brooms. Harry said Norbert had begun making noise again near the top, fortunately close to the handover. When I asked about the cloak, he lifted it from beneath his robes.

I finally stopped watching the entrance. We still had detention ahead, and the rest of Gryffindor had not suddenly forgiven us. Hagrid would miss Norbert badly, however much safer the dragon would be elsewhere. For that night, at least, the boys had returned with the cloak and the carrier was on its way to people who could keep its occupant.