Harry Potter: Master of Talismans

Madam Pomfrey made Lockhart explain what he had cast before allowing him to leave. He began with Harry’s dramatic fall, which she interrupted after the first sentence. She wanted the spell, precisely. Once he supplied the words, she examined the arm, asked two short questions and looked at McGonagall with an expression which made me glad I had touched nothing beyond Harry’s sleeve.

‘I could have treated the original injury without this,’ she said. Harry watched her face and asked what Lockhart had done. She told him the bones had been removed from his arm. Ron made a sound beside me, and Hermione took his sleeve. I could not tell which of them the gesture was intended to steady.

Harry wanted to know whether she could put them back. Pomfrey turned towards him at once and explained that they could be regrown. It would take time and would not be pleasant, but she could treat it. I watched him absorb the important part before looking down again at an arm he had been using perfectly well that morning.

McGonagall took Lockhart aside. I heard enough to understand that future treatment of injured students was to be left to the matron. He began describing an unfortunate misunderstanding. McGonagall’s reply suggested she did not intend to let that phrase replace an explanation, and Pomfrey returned her attention to Harry rather than inviting us to listen.

Malfoy occupied another bed across the room. He held himself stiffly and complained when moving his leg, with no evident interest in inspecting Harry. For once, neither seemed inclined to make the other’s injury entertaining. I looked back towards the door when Wood appeared, hoping he had brought information which required no further treatment.

The equipment had been collected. Harry’s broom would be checked before anyone used it again, and Hooch was keeping the Bludger fragments. I was relieved to hear it. Whatever remained of the magic that had sent it after Harry deserved examination, and the scattered iron would be more useful with the teacher than in somebody’s collection of match souvenirs.

Pomfrey brought a bottle labelled Skele-Gro and poured a glass. Harry read the name before taking it in his left hand. He asked how long he would have to stay. She said that depended on how the bones grew and whether she was satisfied he could use the arm properly; it might be the day after tomorrow.

He drank while she waited beside the bed. His face changed with the first swallow, explaining why she had remained there to make sure he finished. He coughed, shut his eyes and called it horrible. She agreed without appearing troubled by the opinion, then took the glass and told us that rest was the next thing he needed.

Hermione asked whether we could bring his belongings. Pomfrey allowed a few essentials and made clear that a procession of celebrating Gryffindors would not qualify. Ron began collecting the things we had carried in. I stayed beside the bed long enough to promise I would return when she let me, and Harry thanked me again.

The Snitch had gone with the match equipment. Without its wings moving in his hand, he looked less like the person people outside were cheering and more like a tired boy in a hospital bed. I had wanted to see him enjoying the win. I left before Pomfrey needed to repeat herself, with the sound of the Bludger hitting my shield still uncomfortably easy to remember.

The next morning I went out early to exercise. I had kept to the permitted grounds and planned to return before breakfast. Coming back, I passed groups talking quietly where I usually saw only a few people hurrying indoors. There were more at the next turn, and by the time I reached Gryffindor I was sure something had happened.

Percy met me inside the portrait hole and asked where I had been. When I told him I had been running, he said there would be no going out alone for the moment. I was to wait until we went down together. Beyond him, Ron was already dressed and Hermione held a closed book against her chest.

I asked who it was. Hermione came nearer and said Colin’s name. For a moment I saw him beside our table, offering his camera and explaining why he wanted pictures to send home. Ron told me he had been petrified during the night. They did not know much more yet.

I put a hand against the back of a chair. Mrs. Norris had made the danger real enough, but the boy who had told us about his father’s milk round was harder to keep at a distance. I asked whether he was alive. Hermione said that was what they had heard, and Percy was waiting for the teachers’ instructions.

I went upstairs to change before he needed to hurry me. Hermione’s unopened book stayed in my thoughts, a familiar object she had brought down without finding a use for it. At breakfast we arrived together under Percy’s supervision. The other houses came with their own prefects, leaving fewer empty gaps between groups than usual.

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Dumbledore confirmed the attack before the meal began. Colin was alive and being cared for. Students were to travel in company, with organised journeys to meals and lessons under prefect supervision. Evening arrangements would be stricter, and private walks or investigations were not reasons to leave the group. I thought of my run and understood Percy’s greeting.

There was little laughter over breakfast. Younger students looked towards Colin’s empty place, and I wondered when his family would hear what had happened. He had wanted photographs to explain the school. Someone now had a much worse explanation to give, and I was glad I did not have to find the words for the letter.

Harry returned that evening, sooner than I expected. He found us in the common room and raised his right hand before Ron could ask. Pomfrey had tested it, he said; the bones had grown faster than she anticipated, and she had allowed him back. He moved his fingers, then lowered the arm carefully and added that training was still forbidden.

He was to return if anything changed. Ron asked what the regrowth had felt like, receiving a tired look before the answer. Harry described something crawling through the middle of his arm, where he could not scratch or find a comfortable position. He had slept very little. Then he said there was something else, and we moved to a quieter place away from the busiest chairs.

‘Dobby came back,’ he told us. I straightened and asked whether he meant the hospital wing. Harry nodded, waiting until nobody was leaning over our seats. The elf had appeared during the night while he was awake and miserable, and this time Harry had asked the questions we had been discussing since September.

Dobby had admitted closing the barrier at the station. He had also admitted tampering with the Bludger. I said nothing for a moment, remembering the ball tearing itself out of the ground for another attempt. We had wondered who was attacking Harry. The explanation he had received made it no easier to accept.

‘He wanted me sent home,’ Harry said. ‘Hurt enough that I couldn’t stay.’ Ron pointed out that he had nearly been killed, and Harry assured us he had told Dobby that. I said good more sharply than I intended. Wanting somebody away from danger was difficult to reconcile with battering them into the grass until they could no longer move.

Dobby still insisted Hogwarts was unsafe. He would not explain the danger plainly or identify the household he served. When he approached something he believed he should not say, he began punishing himself. Harry had tried to stop that too, without getting the explanation he needed from the fragments between it.

‘He called it helping,’ Harry said. ‘I told him to stop. To promise he wouldn’t do anything else to force me out.’ I asked whether he had agreed, and Harry said he had. I was glad the demand had been made. It did not persuade me that we understood the problem well enough to put it aside.

I asked whether he had told anyone else. He had spoken to Madam Pomfrey that morning, he said, and she was sending word to Dumbledore. The headmaster would want to talk to him. That removed one concern: whoever examined the Bludger needed the account of a confession, even though the rest of us knew it through Harry rather than hearing Dobby ourselves.

Hermione returned to the barrier. What had been our guess now had the elf’s admission behind it. Why he was so determined to keep Harry away remained unclear. Harry lowered his voice further and explained that Dobby had left when the teachers brought Colin into the ward. He had pretended to be asleep while they carried the boy past.

Colin had still held his camera in the position in which he was found. Harry described Dumbledore examining it, then discovering the ruined film and damaged inside. Ron asked whether Colin had photographed whoever attacked him. Harry could only say that the camera had been raised. There was no usable photograph to answer the question for us.

Hermione pressed her lips together. Something had happened to the camera as well as the boy, she said. Harry agreed, then repeated a remark he had overheard from Dumbledore: the Chamber of Secrets had been opened again. I looked at him and asked whether again was the word he had used.

Harry nodded. I took out my notebook, leaving room after the word rather than filling it with a history we did not possess. If Dumbledore was right, we were dealing with something that had happened before, not merely a threat borrowed from a legend. The remark did not tell us when. Teachers could know about events they had never personally witnessed.

Dobby might know something about the chamber, Hermione suggested. I agreed that the connection was possible without proving his master had opened it. He could have overheard a plan or learnt of the danger another way. We still did not know why he could not tell Harry more, beyond the fear and restrictions apparent in the account.

Ron argued for the Malfoys. They had the old family, the money and the sort of house in which he could imagine an elf being frightened to speak. I called it possible, and he assured me that it was a very good possibility. I told him that made asking good questions more useful than deciding we already had the answers.

Then I asked Hermione how long the potion still needed. We had not reached halfway through the brewing time, she said. More than another fortnight remained if everything went well. Ron made a frustrated noise, but she reminded him that shortening a preparation because we were worried would not help Colin. Getting the potion wrong would give us another problem.

I looked down at the notes. A voice only Harry heard, a petrified cat and boy, a ruined camera, and a warning which had nearly killed the person it claimed to protect. I said we would keep working while the potion brewed and tell the teachers what we actually found. Harry nodded, and Hermione opened her book at last.

I left space beneath the line about Colin’s camera. There ought to have been a picture we could examine, something which might make the other details fit. Instead we had another damaged object and Harry’s description of what the teachers had seen. I put the notebook where all four of us could read it, careful not to fill the empty space with what I merely wanted to believe.