Harry woke the next morning on the same sofa, under the same crocheted blanket, to the smell of bacon and the sound of two people disagreeing quietly about him in the kitchen.
"...can't just keep him, Lily."
"I'm not keeping him, he's not a cat-"
"You know what I mean."
"He lives with the worst people in Surrey. You've seen the state of his shoes."
"His shoes aren't my business. Nor yours." A pause, the sound of something being turned in a pan. "He can stay for breakfast. Then he goes home, before anyone starts wondering where he's got to."
"Nobody's wondering," said Lily. "That's the whole point of him."
There was a short silence, and Harry, lying very still on the sofa with his eyes shut, understood two things: that Lily had told her aunt considerably more about the Dursleys than he had ever told Lily, and that the silence was the sound of her aunt deciding what to do about it.
"Breakfast," said the aunt at last. "Go and wake him."
Harry arranged himself hastily into someone who had been asleep. Lily came round the doorway, took one look at him, and said, "You're a terrible actor. Come on, bacon's ready."
Margaret Hale turned out to be a short, square woman with grey hair cut short for convenience rather than fashion, and a way of looking at you that made you sit up straighter without being told to. She put a plate in front of Harry and studied him for a moment.
"Sit down properly and eat," she said. "You look like death warmed up."
He ate. It was very good bacon, and he was suddenly ravenous, and for a few minutes nobody said anything, which suited everyone.
The Daily Prophet lay folded by her elbow, open at the crossword. It was half finished, in pen, with no corrections. Harry looked at it slightly longer than he meant to.
"Lily says you fainted," said Margaret, buttering toast.
"Er... yes."
"Mm." She didn't look up. "I was a nurse for thirty years. I had a look at you when she brought you in. Nothing broken, nothing bleeding, heart going away like a clock. You were just asleep, and nothing I did would wake you. A day and a half of that."
"I'm sorry," said Harry. "For the trouble."
"It wasn't trouble. It was a worry, which is different." She put the toast down in front of him. "I'm not going to ask what happened. Lily says it's magic business, and I've learned there's no sense asking about magic business: you only get half an answer and a headache. I want to know one thing, that's all." She looked at him properly then. "Are you in trouble? The real kind?"
Harry thought about lying. He found, under that look, that he didn't have it in him.
"I don't know," he said. "Maybe. Not right now."
"Right." She nodded slowly, as though this were a sensible answer rather than a worrying one. "Then eat your breakfast. And if maybe turns into yes, you come here. Never mind the hour. Understand?"
"Yes," said Harry, to his plate, because his throat had done something unexpected.
"Good," said Margaret, and went back to her toast.
At no point did she mention his name, or his forehead, or the newspaper at her elbow, which had printed his name eleven times that summer. She talked about the allotment, and a delivery of manure that had gone to the wrong address, and what the man at number nine had to say about it, which was apparently plenty. When Harry got up to help clear the plates she raised an eyebrow.
"Well," she said. "You've got manners off somebody. I doubt it was them."
At the door, on her way out to her shift, she stopped.
"Harry."
"Yes?"
"We do a proper fry-up on Sundays," said Margaret Hale, and was gone down Church Road before he could answer.
* * *
Lily's garden was six feet of paving and a strip of grass with a rotary washing line in it, but it had a bench, and the morning was warm, and Harry had no intention whatever of going home before he had to. He sat on the bench with a mug of tea while Lily read out the worst bits of the Prophet in a fair imitation of the wireless news.
"'Sources close to the Ministry suggest' (that means nobody) 'that Albus Dumbledore's recent decisions have raised questions' (it doesn't say what questions) 'among those who know him best' (so, nobody again)..."
Harry was only half listening. The other half of him was busy with something under his ribs.
The warmth had been there all morning, low and quiet, like a fire the night before someone rakes it out. Mostly it simply sat. But when Lily had read out the line about Dumbledore, something in Harry had flared up, sudden and disgusted, and the warmth had flared with it, rising through his chest and down his arm like water finding a channel, and the handle of his mug had gone, briefly, too hot to hold.
He set it down. He looked at his own hand.
"Lily."
"'declined to comment on'... what?"
"Can I show you something? It might... I don't know. It might be nothing. It might not work."
He held his hand out flat, palm up, over the paving, well away from both of them. Then he stopped trying to explain it to himself and did what he had done in the pale space: he stopped fighting the door.
Fire stood up out of his palm.
It was small (a flame the size of an egg, gold at the middle) and it made no sound and gave off no smoke, and it did not burn him. It sat on his hand the way a candle flame sits on a wick, and bent when the breeze went over, and came back.
Lily didn't say anything at all for a moment. The newspaper slid off her lap.
"Harry," she said. "That's fire."
"I know."
"That's actual fire. Coming out of your hand. Does it hurt?"
"No. It's warm. It's..." He turned his hand slightly; the flame stayed put, riding it, like it belonged there. Something in his chest was pouring forwards, steady and glad, and he had the strangest feeling that the gladness wasn't his. "It's him. Fawkes. I can feel him doing it."
"Can you put it out?"
He closed his hand. The flame folded away into his palm and was gone, and the last of it went out of the air with a faint smell like a snuffed birthday candle.
"Okay," said Lily, with enormous restraint. "That is the best thing I have ever seen, and you're not to do it in front of my aunt."
"Wasn't planning to-"
"Do it again."
He laughed, and did it again, and this time held it a little longer: grew it, carefully, to the size of an orange, and passed it from one hand to the other, which worked, and felt the gladness in his chest pour and pour.
Then the cold arrived.
It came up his spine first, out of nowhere at all, in the middle of a warm July morning: a deep, spreading chill, as though somebody had opened a door behind him onto January. His teeth clicked. The flame in his hand shrank and went out (he hadn't put it away, it simply went) and then he was shivering, properly shivering, hunched over on the bench with his hands shaking too hard to pick up the mug.
"Harry-"
"I'm f-" His teeth were chattering too much to finish the lie, which he later thought was probably good for him.
Lily got the crocheted blanket from the sofa and put it round a boy who had just been holding fire, and if she saw anything funny in that she kept it to herself. The shivering went on for about ten minutes. His ears rang, high and thin, like the aftermath of a loud noise nobody else had heard. Deep in his chest the warmth pressed close against the cold from the inside, doing what it could, which was not much.
By the time it passed, the tea was stone cold, and Lily was sitting very close, watching him with the paperback-knuckle look again.
"So that's what it takes out of you," she said quietly.
"Looks like it." His voice came out unsteady.
"Then you're not doing it all the time. I mean it: look at your hands, you can't even hold the mug." She pulled the blanket up over his shoulder where it had slipped. "It's brilliant. It's the most brilliant thing I've ever seen. But not if you shake to bits every time. We ration it. Agreed?"
"...Agreed," said Harry.
He didn't argue, because he was too cold to argue, and besides, under the shivering, under the ringing ears, there was a small, sober voice pointing out that a thing that could stand in his hand and burn nothing had come from somewhere, and nothing came from nowhere, and he had felt, when the flame poured out, exactly how deep the well behind it went.
It was a long way down, and it wasn't his.
* * *
He tried to write the letter that afternoon, at Lily's kitchen table, while she was returning the wheelbarrow.
Dear Sirius, he wrote, and stopped.
Sirius's last letter had said to keep his head down and stay out of trouble. There was no version of a phoenix flew into my chest and I fought Voldemort inside my own head and won that counted as keeping his head down. He crossed it out and started again.
Dear Professor Dumbledore, he wrote, and stopped for longer.
He looked at the sentence he would have to write next. He imagined it arriving at Hogwarts, being read. He imagined it in the Prophet, because things got into the Prophet, that was the whole lesson of the summer, things leaked sideways out of the Ministry and turned up on page four with quotation marks round them. Potter, 15, claims phoenix "lives inside him." They wouldn't even have to lie. That was the trick of it, he was starting to understand. They would only have to print exactly what he said.
And underneath that, quieter and worse: Dumbledore hadn't written to him all summer. Not once. Not after the graveyard, not after Cedric, not a line. Whatever the reason was (and Harry had invented many reasons, at night, with great generosity), the fact sat where it sat.
He crumpled both attempts into the bin under the sink, and put a saucepan lid on top of them, and felt, in a small grim way, that he had learned something true this summer that had nothing to do with magic: that the time to tell somebody a thing is when it happens, and every day you don't, the thing grows a shell, and after enough days the shell is the problem.
He'd tell them when he saw them. Face to face. Where nothing could be printed.
That was, at any rate, what he told the saucepan lid.
* * *
He got back to Number Four at six o'clock, and was received with the usual warmth.
"And where," said Uncle Vernon, filling the hall, "the devil have you been?"
"Friend's house," said Harry.
"You haven't got friends. Not round here."
"I have now."
Vernon opened his mouth, reviewed the available material, and settled for the essentials. "Two days! Two days, and not a word. Your aunt was..." He stopped. Recalibrated. "We could have had the police round here, asking questions, with the neighbours watching-"
"You didn't call the police," said Harry. It came out even. "You hoped I wasn't coming back."
The silence that followed was extremely informative.
It was Aunt Petunia who broke it, from the kitchen doorway, tea towel in hand, and there was something in her face that was not the usual pinched dislike. It was gone before Harry could name it.
"He's back now," she said. "That's the end of it. Wash your hands, dinner's at half past."
Vernon stared at her. Harry stared at her. Petunia turned back into the kitchen as though nothing whatever had happened, and could be heard dealing violently with a cupboard.
Harry went upstairs and washed his hands, on the grounds that he had no better ideas. As mysteries went he filed it well below the phoenix, but he filed it.
Dinner was silent. Dudley, who had spent two days enjoying an undivided refrigerator, regarded Harry's return with open resentment and said nothing at all. Afterwards Harry went up to his room, and found Hedwig back on top of the wardrobe with her head under her wing and no letter tied to her leg. She had delivered his silence, apparently, and brought him Ron's silence home in exchange, which was fair, and felt terrible.
He sat on the bed as the light went. Through the wall, the television murmured. He put his hand out, palm up, in the dark, and thought about it, and didn't (we ration it, said Lily's voice in his head) and put his hand down again, and was surprised to find that the warmth in his chest gave a small flicker anyway, like a nod. Like being let off.
He was nearly asleep when the cold came down the street.
It was not the fire's cold; that came from inside, and this came from outside: it slid over the windowsill and through the glass, a thin wrong chill underneath the warm night, there and gone in the space of three breaths. The streetlamp opposite guttered once and steadied. Somewhere down Privet Drive, a cat came off a wall in a hurry.
Harry was at the window with his wand in his hand before he was aware of crossing the room. The street lay orange and empty in both directions. Nothing moved on it. The night was, once again, only warm.
Under his ribs, the banked fire had come awake, and was not settling.
He stood at the window a long time. When he finally lay down again, he put the wand on the pillow beside him, where his hand would already be closed around it when he woke, a habit that would, before the year was out, save his life once and everyone else's twice.
But that came later.