A few more minutes passed in total silence, Harry drinking his coffee so fast that he would soon need a fresh cup. Beside them, Roger Davies and his girlfriend seemed glued together at the lips.

  Cho’s hand was lying on the table beside her coffee and Harry was feeling a mounting pressure to take hold of it. Just do it, he told himself, as a fount of mingled panic and excitement surged up inside his chest, just reach out and grab it. Amazing, how much more difficult it was to extend his arm twelve inches and touch her hand than it was to snatch a speeding Snitch from midair…

  But just as he moved his hand forwards, Cho took hers off the table. She was now watching Roger Davies kissing his girlfriend with a mildly interested expression.

  “He asked me out, you know,” she said in a quiet voice. “A couple of weeks ago. Roger. I turned him down, though.”

  Harry, who had grabbed the sugar bowl to excuse his sudden lunging movement across the table, could not think why she was telling him this. If she wished she were sitting at the next table being heartily kissed by Roger Davies, why had she agreed to come out with him?

  He said nothing. Their cherub threw another handful of confetti over them; some of it landed in the last cold dregs of coffee Harry had been about to drink.

  “I came in here with Cedric last year,” said Cho.

  In the second or so it took for him to take in what she had said, Harry’s insides had become glacial. He could not believe she wanted to talk about Cedric now, while kissing couples surrounded them and a cherub floated over their heads.

  Cho’s voice was rather higher when she spoke again.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you for ages… did Cedric—did he—m-m-mention me at all before he died?”

  This was the very last subject on earth Harry wanted to discuss, and least of all with Cho.

  “Well—no—” he said quietly. “There—there wasn’t time for him to say anything. Erm… so… d’you… d’you get to see a lot of Quidditch in the holidays? You support the Tornados, right?”

  His voice sounded falsely bright and cheery. To his horror, he saw that her eyes were swimming with tears again, just as they had been after the last D.A. meeting before Christmas.

  “Look,” he said desperately, leaning in so that nobody else could overhear, “let’s not talk about Cedric right now… let’s talk about something else—”

  But this, apparently, was quite the wrong thing to say.

  “I thought,” she said, tears spattering down on to the table, “I thought you’d u-u-understand! I need to talk about it! Surely you n-need to talk about it t-too! I mean, you saw it happen, d-didn’t you?”

  Everything was going nightmarishly wrong; Roger Davies’s girlfriend had even unglued herself to look round at Cho crying.

  “Well—I have talked about it,” Harry said in a whisper, “to Ron and Hermione, but—”

  “Oh, you’ll talk to Hermione Granger!” she said shrilly, her face now shining with tears. Several more kissing couples broke apart to stare. “But you won’t talk to me! P-perhaps it would be best if we just… just p-paid and you went and met up with Hermione G-Granger, like you obviously want to!”

  Harry stared at her, utterly bewildered, as she seized a frilly napkin and dabbed at her shining face with it.

  “Cho?” he said weakly, wishing Roger would seize his girlfriend and start kissing her again to stop her goggling at him and Cho.

  “Go on, leave!” she said, now crying into the napkin. “I don’t know why you asked me out in the first place if you’re going to make arrangements to meet other girls right after me… how many are you meeting after Hermione?”

  “It’s not like that!” said Harry, and he was so relieved at finally understanding what she was annoyed about that he laughed, which he realised a split second too late was also a mistake.

  Cho sprang to her feet. The whole tearoom was quiet and everybody was watching them now.

  “I’ll see you around, Harry,” she said dramatically, and hiccoughing slightly she dashed to the door, wrenched it open and hurried off into the pouring rain.

  “Cho!” Harry called after her, but the door had already swung shut behind her with a tuneful tinkle.

  There was total silence within the teashop. Every eye was on Harry. He threw a Galleon down on to the table, shook pink confetti out of his hair, and followed Cho out of the door.

  It was raining hard now and she was nowhere to be seen. He simply did not understand what had happened; half an hour ago they had been getting along fine.

  “Women!” he muttered angrily, sloshing down the rain-washed street with his hands in his pockets. “What did she want to talk about Cedric for, anyway? Why does she always want to drag up a subject that makes her act like a human hosepipe?”

  He turned right and broke into a splashy run, and within minutes he was turning into the doorway of the Three Broomsticks. He knew he was too early to meet Hermione, but he thought it likely there would be someone in here with whom he could spend the intervening time. He shook his wet hair out of his eyes and looked around. Hagrid was sitting alone in a corner, looking morose.

  “Hi, Hagrid!” he said, when he had squeezed through the crammed tables and pulled up a chair beside him.

  Hagrid jumped and looked down at Harry as though he barely recognised him. Harry saw that he had two fresh cuts on his face and several new bruises.

  “Oh, it’s yeh, Harry,” said Hagrid. “Yeh all righ’?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” lied Harry; but, next to this battered and mournful-looking Hagrid, he felt he didn’t really have much to complain about. “Er—are you OK?”

  “Me?” said Hagrid. “Oh yeah, I’m grand, Harry, grand.”

  He gazed into the depths of his pewter tankard, which was the size of a large bucket, and sighed. Harry didn’t know what to say to him. They sat side by side in silence for a moment. Then Hagrid said abruptly, “In the same boat, yeh an’ me, aren’ we, ’Arry?”

  “Er—” said Harry.

  “Yeah… I’ve said it before… both outsiders, like,” said Hagrid, nodding wisely. “An’ both orphans. Yeah… both orphans.”

  He took a great swig from his tankard.

  “Makes a diff’rence, havin’ a decent family,” he said. “Me dad was decent. An’ your mum an’ dad were decent. If they’d lived, life woulda bin diff’rent, eh?”

  “Yeah… I’s’pose,” said Harry cautiously. Hagrid seemed to be in a very strange mood.

  “Family,” said Hagrid gloomily. “Whatever yeh say, blood’s important…”

  And he wiped a trickle of it out of his eye.

  “Hagrid,” said Harry, unable to stop himself, “where are you getting all these injuries?”

  “Eh?” said Hagrid, looking startled. “Wha’ injuries?”

  “All those!” said Harry, pointing at Hagrid’s face.

  “Oh… tha’s jus’ normal bumps an’ bruises, Harry,” said Hagrid dismissively, “I got a rough job.”

  He drained his tankard, set it back on the table and got to his feet.

  “I’ll be seein’ yeh, Harry… take care now.”

  And he lumbered out of the pub looking wretched, and disappeared into the torrential rain. Harry watched him go, feeling miserable. Hagrid was unhappy and he was hiding something, but he seemed determined not to accept help. What was going on? But before Harry could think about it any further, he heard a voice calling his name.

  “Harry! Harry, over here!”

  Hermione was waving at him from the other side of the room. He got up and made his way towards her through the crowded pub. He was still a few tables away when he realised that Hermione was not alone. She was sitting at a table with the unlikeliest pair of drinking mates he could ever have imagined: Luna Lovegood and none other than Rita Skeeter, ex-journalist on the Daily Prophet and one of Hermione’s least favourite people in the world.

  “You’re early!” said Hermione, moving along to give him room to sit down. “I thought you were with Cho, I wasn’t expecting you for another hour at least!”

  “Cho?” said Rita at once, twisting round in her seat to stare avidly at Harry. “A girl?”

  She snatched up her crocodile-skin handbag and groped within it.

  “It’s none of your business if Harry’s been with a hundred girls,” Hermione told Rita coolly. “So you can put that away right now.”

  Rita had been on the point of withdrawing an acid-green quill from her bag. Looking as though she had been forced to swallow Stinksap, she snapped her bag shut again.

  “What are you up to?” Harry asked, sitting down and staring from Rita to Luna to Hermione.

  “Little Miss Perfect was just about to tell me when you arrived,” said Rita, taking a large slurp of her drink. “I suppose I’m allowed to talk to him, am I?” she shot at Hermione.

  “Yes, I suppose you are,” said Hermione coldly.

  Unemployment did not suit Rita. The hair that had once been set in elaborate curls now hung lank and unkempt around her face. The scarlet paint on her two-inch talons was chipped and there were a couple of false jewels missing from her winged glasses. She took another great gulp of her drink and said out of the corner of her mouth, “Pretty girl, is she, Harry?”

  “One more word about Harry’s love life and the deal’s off and that’s a promise,” said Hermione irritably.

  “What deal?” said Rita, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand. “You haven’t mentioned a deal yet, Miss Prissy, you just told me to turn up. Oh, one of these days…” She took a deep shuddering breath.

  “Yes, yes, one of these days you’ll write more horrible stories about Harry and me,” said Hermione indifferently. “Find someone who cares, why don’t you?”

  “They’ve run plenty of horrible stories about Harry this year without my help,” said Rita, shooting a sideways look at him over the top of her glass and adding in a rough whisper, “How has that made you feel, Harry? Betrayed? Distraught? Misunderstood?”

  “He feels angry, of course,” said Hermione in a hard, clear voice. “Because he’s told the Minister for Magic the truth and the Minister’s too much of an idiot to believe him.”

  “So you actually stick to it, do you, that He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is back?” said Rita, lowering her glass and subjecting Harry to a piercing stare while her finger strayed longingly to the clasp of the crocodile bag. “You stand by all this garbage Dumbledore’s been telling everybody about You-Know-Who returning and you being the sole witness?”

  “I wasn’t the sole witness,” snarled Harry. “There were a dozen-odd Death Eaters there as well. Want their names?”

  “I’d love them,” breathed Rita, now fumbling in her bag once more and gazing at him as though he was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. “A great bold headline: “Potter Accuses…” A sub-heading, “Harry Potter Names Death Eaters Still Among Us.” And then, beneath a nice big photograph of you, “Disturbed teenage survivor of You-Know-Who’s attack, Harry Potter, 15, caused outrage yesterday by accusing respectable and prominent members of the wizarding community of being Death Eaters…”

  The Quick-Quotes Quill was actually in her hand and halfway to her mouth when the rapturous expression on her face died.

  “But of course,” she said, lowering the quill and looking daggers at Hermione, “Little Miss Perfect wouldn’t want that story out there, would she?”

  “As a matter of fact,” said Hermione sweetly, “that’s exactly what Little Miss Perfect does want.”

  Rita stared at her. So did Harry. Luna, on the other hand, sang “Weasley is our King” dreamily under her breath and stirred her drink with a cocktail onion on a stick.

  “You want me to report what he says about He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named?” Rita asked Hermione in a hushed voice.

  “Yes, I do,” said Hermione. “The true story. All the facts. Exactly as Harry reports them. He’ll give you all the details, he’ll tell you the names of the undiscovered Death Eaters he saw there, he’ll tell you what Voldemort looks like now—oh, get a grip on yourself,” she added contemptuously, throwing a napkin across the table, for, at the sound of Voldemort’s name, Rita had jumped so badly she had slopped half her glass of Firewhisky down herself.

  Rita blotted the front of her grubby raincoat, still staring at Hermione. Then she said baldly, “The Prophet wouldn’t print it. In case you haven’t noticed, nobody believes his cock-and-bull story. Everyone thinks he’s delusional. Now, if you let me write the story from that angle—”

  “We don’t need another story about how Harry’s lost his marbles!” said Hermione angrily. “We’ve had plenty of those already, thank you! I want him given the opportunity to tell the truth!”

  “There’s no market for a story like that,” said Rita coldly.

  “You mean the Prophet won’t print it because Fudge won’t let them,” said Hermione irritably.

  Rita gave Hermione a long, hard look. Then, leaning forwards across the table towards her, she said in a businesslike tone, “All right, Fudge is leaning on the Prophet, but it comes to the same thing. They won’t print a story that shows Harry in a good light. Nobody wants to read it. It’s against the public mood. This last Azkaban breakout has got people quite worried enough. People just don’t want to believe You-Know-Who’s back.”

  “So the Daily Prophet exists to tell people what they want to hear, does it?” said Hermione scathingly.

  Rita sat up straight again, her eyebrows raised, and drained her glass of Firewhisky.

  “The Prophet exists to sell itself, you silly girl,” she said coldly.

  “My dad thinks it’s an awful paper,” said Luna, chipping into the conversation unexpectedly. Sucking on her cocktail onion, she gazed at Rita with her enormous, protuberant, slightly mad eyes. “He publishes important stories he thinks the public needs to know. He doesn’t care about making money.”

  Rita looked disparagingly at Luna.

  “I’m guessing your father runs some stupid little village newsletter?” she said. “Probably, Twenty-Five Ways to Mingle With Muggles and the dates of the next Bring and Fly Sale?”

  “No,” said Luna, dipping her onion back into her Gillywater, “he’s the editor of The Quibbler.”

  Rita snorted so loudly that people at a nearby table looked round in alarm.

  “‘Important stories he thinks the public needs to know,’ eh?” she said witheringly. “I could manure my garden with the contents of that rag.”

  “Well, this is your chance to raise the tone of it a bit, isn’t it?” said Hermione pleasantly. “Luna says her father’s quite happy to take Harry’s interview. That’s who’ll be publishing it.”

  Rita stared at them both for a moment, then let out a great whoop of laughter.

  “The Quibbler!” she said, cackling. “You think people will take him seriously if he’s published in The Quibbler?”

  “Some people won’t,” said Hermione in a level voice. “But the Daily Prophet’s version of the Azkaban breakout had some gaping holes in it. I think a lot of people will be wondering whether there isn’t a better explanation of what happened, and if there’s an alternative story available, even if it is published in a—” she glanced sideways at Luna, “in a—well, an unusual magazine—I think they might be rather keen to read it.”

  Rita didn’t say anything for a while, but eyed Hermione shrewdly, her head a little to one side.

  “All right, let’s say for a moment I’ll do it,” she said abruptly. “What kind of fee am I going to get?”

  “I don’t think Daddy exactly pays people to write for the magazine,” said Luna dreamily. “They do it because it’s an honour and, of course, to see their names in print.”

  Rita Skeeter looked as though the taste of Stinksap was strong in her mouth again as she rounded on Hermione.

  “I’m supposed to do this for free?”

  “Well, yes,” said Hermione calmly, taking a sip of her drink. “Otherwise, as you very well know, I will inform the authorities that you are an unregistered Animagus. Of course, the Prophet might give you rather a lot for an insider’s account of life in Azkaban.”

  Rita looked as though she would have liked nothing better than to seize the paper umbrella sticking out of Hermione’s drink and thrust it up her nose.

  “I don’t suppose I’ve got any choice, have I?” said Rita, her voice shaking slightly. She opened her crocodile bag once more, withdrew a piece of parchment, and raised her Quick-Quotes Quill.

  “Daddy will be pleased,” said Luna brightly. A muscle twitched in Rita’s jaw.

  “OK, Harry?” said Hermione, turning to him. “Ready to tell the public the truth?”

  “I suppose,” said Harry, watching Rita balancing the Quick-Quotes Quill at the ready on the parchment between them.

  “Fire away, then, Rita,” said Hermione serenely, fishing a cherry out from the bottom of her glass.

  26. SEEN AND UNFORESEEN

  Luna said vaguely that she did not know how soon Rita’s interview with Harry would appear in The Quibbler, that her father was expecting a lovely long article on recent sightings of Crumple-Horned Snorkacks, “—and of course, that’ll be a very important story, so Harry’s might have to wait for the following issue,” said Luna.

  Harry had not found it an easy experience to talk about the night when Voldemort had returned. Rita had pressed him for every little detail and he had given her everything he could remember, knowing that this was his one big opportunity to tell the world the truth. He wondered how people would react to the story. He guessed that it would confirm a lot of people in the view that he was completely insane, not least because his story would be appearing alongside utter rubbish about Crumple-Horned Snorkacks. But the breakout of Bellatrix Lestrange and her fellow Death Eaters had given Harry a burning desire to do something, whether or not it worked…

  “Can’t wait to see what Umbridge thinks of you going public,” said Dean, sounding awestruck at dinner on Monday night. Seamus was shovelling down large amounts of chicken and ham pie on Dean’s other side, but Harry knew he was listening.

  “It’s the right thing to do, Harry,” said Neville, who was sitting opposite him. He was rather pale, but went on in a low voice, “It must have been… tough… talking about it… was it?”