Harry Potter: Master of Talismans

Ron leaned over the desk without touching the scrap. ‘That’s Mum’s stitching,’ he said, and the certainty in his voice made my stomach tighten.

McGonagall asked him what he recognised. He pointed to the small W above the torn name, explaining how his mother marked their clothes, then stopped halfway through saying his sister’s name.

I remembered the inside of the jumper he had shown me at Christmas. The arrangement matched, though there was nowhere near enough fabric to identify a whole garment. Three surviving letters had done a great deal to change the room.

‘It could be hers,’ I said. Ron turned on me so quickly that I held up my hands. ‘That doesn’t tell us how it got here.’

Leo was settling his feathers on the cupboard. I wanted him to be able to tell me whom he had scratched, but I had not seen him scratch anyone. He could have caught clothing on the floor or pulled at something carried into the room; the scrap alone could not show us which.

McGonagall folded it back into its paper. ‘I shall speak to Ginny and compare this with her belongings. None of you is to make an accusation in the common room.’

Ron’s mouth opened, then closed again. I understood the impulse to say she would never do it, but the book had disappeared from my trunk, and her name might be on the one thing left behind. We needed an explanation that dealt with both facts.

‘What if somebody made her take it?’ I asked. McGonagall looked directly at me, waiting for the rest. ‘I don’t know how the diary works. It took over what I was seeing without waiting for me to agree.’

I told her about Luna’s concern before the first attack and my conversations with Ron and Percy. Ron confirmed that he had asked Ginny whether something was wrong. She had said she was all right, then pulled her bag closer.

‘She might have been frightened of explaining something,’ Hermione said. She was standing beside Ron now, giving him room without leaving him alone at the edge of the desk. ‘That doesn’t tell us what.’

McGonagall added the earlier concern to her notes. She would ask Percy about his conversation with Ginny and arrange to speak to her privately; we were to report anything else we remembered and leave the questioning to her.

I was glad Ron had heard all of it. Keeping him ignorant while I decided what the cloth meant would have left him defending his sister against a case I had assembled behind his back.

Another teacher took charge of the damaged dormitory, and McGonagall brought us downstairs. We stayed together near the entrance hall while she sent Percy to find Ginny. The folded scrap went with her, along with my account of how we had found it.

Wood had already sent a message asking where Harry was. McGonagall allowed him to join the players heading down to the pitch, provided he remained with the team and returned immediately if called. He looked back at us before leaving, but Ron scarcely noticed him go.

I sat beside Ron and opened my notebook. The drawing of Nick and Justin lay opposite the notes about Colin’s camera, with the positions copied as carefully as I could remember them. I had drawn the scene once for Dumbledore and again for Hermione; on both pages, Nick stood between my approach and Justin’s fallen body.

A faint reflection of the room floated in the window opposite us. I looked from it to the notebook, and remembered red writing wavering in the water beneath Mrs Norris.

‘Hermione, I saw the writing reflected before I looked at the wall.’ I turned the page towards her. ‘What if the cat saw something in that water too?’

She pulled her chair closer. Ron looked up as I pointed to the camera, then to Nick’s position on the other drawing.

‘Colin was still holding this up when they carried him past Harry’s bed. Justin was behind Nick.’ I followed the line across the paper. ‘Something could have been between each of them and whatever they saw.’

‘A reflection, a camera and a ghost,’ Hermione said. She stopped on the last word and looked at the drawing again. ‘You’re thinking about the creatures that kill when you see them.’

‘We kept setting them aside because the victims were alive. What if they hadn’t seen it directly?’ I could feel the idea coming together faster than I could test it. For weeks, survival had looked like the reason those accounts did not fit; perhaps the important part was how each victim had survived.

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Hermione put one finger beside the note about Mrs Norris. ‘We don’t know where she was looking. And Justin might have moved before he fell.’

‘I know. But these positions make it possible.’ I resisted the urge to press harder on the pencil, as though a darker line would make the evidence stronger. ‘We need to check whether something can have those two effects.’

Ron pointed to Nick. ‘He was attacked as well. If Justin saw it through him, what happened to Nick?’

‘Nick was already dead.’ The words sounded brutal with his name attached to them. I pictured him suspended in the corridor, looking horribly unlike any ghost I had known. ‘It couldn’t kill him again. Perhaps it did something else to him, and Justin saw through him.’

Hermione traced the possible line of sight without touching the ink. ‘A killing gaze, with petrification when the sight is indirect,’ she said. ‘That’s specific enough to look for.’

An old fragment of memory stirred again: something like a giant snake. I could not pull a name out of it, and I would not put it into the notes as evidence. Harry understanding the voice, spiders leaving the corridors and three possible ways of seeing indirectly were things I could actually explain to someone else.

When McGonagall returned, I stood up with the notebook open. ‘Professor, I think we may have misunderstood the petrification. Could you look at these positions?’

She took the drawing and listened while I separated what we had observed from what I was proposing. I told her where the cat had hung, what Harry had reported about the camera and where Nick had been in relation to Justin. Then I described the possibility connecting them.

‘If looking straight at it kills, the next person might not survive.’ I found myself watching her face rather than the page. ‘We shouldn’t rely on everybody so far having been petrified.’

McGonagall examined the diagrams, then asked me to repeat the point about Colin. When I had finished, she kept the sheet and went to speak to the other teacher, sending an urgent message towards the staff rooms.

Hermione was already listing the references we had consulted. She crossed out one title, added another and checked the order against her earlier notes before McGonagall returned.

‘There’s a fuller creature reference in the library,’ she said. ‘We were comparing the wrong effects when we used it. Madam Pince can find the volume quickly if she has this list.’

McGonagall called Penelope Clearwater from the students gathered near the stairs. I recognised the Ravenclaw prefect, and Hermione knew her from the library. They were to take the written request straight to Pince and bring the reference back together, using the occupied route without making other stops.

It sounded like the arrangements we had been following for weeks: a familiar journey, another person alongside, a prefect responsible for bringing a younger student back. I looked at Hermione collecting her notes and accepted the shape of it before I properly considered what we had just told McGonagall.

‘A moment,’ I said, opening the little case of tools we used for examining inscriptions. I took out the small mirror and held it towards Hermione. ‘Use this at the corners. Don’t look round first to find out whether you need it.’

She turned the mirror in her hand, angling it towards the passage. ‘I’ll show Penelope. If we hear anything unusual, we’ll come back.’

‘It’s a guess, Hermione. I don’t know that this will protect you.’ I wanted to make her understand the difference between having a useful idea and being certain enough to trust her life to it.

‘I know what you’re saying.’ She put it carefully with her notes, then joined the prefect. Together they went towards the library, carrying a request from a teacher and the best precaution I had thought to offer.

McGonagall retained my diagram. The cloth was with her too, and for the first time that morning the separate pieces seemed capable of leading somewhere. I sat back down beside Ron, who was still watching the stairs.

‘Do you think Ginny’s in trouble?’ he asked. His hands were clasped so tightly that his thumbs had gone pale.

‘I think somebody searched our room for a book that did something dangerous. Her name may be on a piece of clothing left there.’ I waited until he looked at me. ‘She may need help. I don’t know that she chose to hurt anybody.’

He nodded, though his fingers did not loosen. Percy returned a little later and said he had found Ginny; she was waiting to speak to McGonagall. Ron started to get up, but Percy asked him to let the professor talk to her first.

‘I’ll stay nearby,’ Percy said. He looked towards McGonagall, checking that she had heard him, then went with her.

Ron sat down again. Around us, students were waiting for instructions about where they should go, and somebody complained that they would miss the beginning of the match. I had wanted to see Harry fly that afternoon; now the thought of leaving before we heard about Ginny felt absurd.

I looked up the passage Hermione had taken. She had not been gone long enough for a library errand to seem unusual, and I made myself turn back to Ron instead of checking again.

The voices in the hall changed when a teacher came quickly through the doors. Another hurried towards the hospital wing, and the conversation nearest us broke off as people tried to hear what they were saying. I could not make out the words.

Then the announcement reached us from the grounds: the match would not take place. Ron looked at me, and I was already standing when McGonagall entered with Harry beside her, still in his match robes.

‘Where’s Hermione?’ I asked. McGonagall’s expression had given me enough of an answer to make the question difficult, but I needed her to say it.

‘Come with me. She is alive, Mr Mercer.’ She waited until I was looking at her. ‘I want you to hear that before we go in.’

I followed her, with Harry and Ron close behind. Nobody tried to fill the walk with explanations, and by the time we reached the ward I could hear my own footsteps much too clearly.

Screens enclosed two beds. Near the first, a teacher held a small mirror by its edge; I recognised it before I saw the person lying beyond it.

Hermione’s hand was lifted, fixed in the last movement she had made. Her eyes were open, her face terribly still, and she gave no sign of hearing me when I said her name.

I had worked out a way the others might have survived. Then I had put it into her hand and watched her walk away.