In Harry's memory, no Halloween had ever gone by as… bleak as this year's.
Yes. Bleak was exactly the word.
To be fair, no one could say the castle hadn't tried.
On the day before Halloween, Hagrid had crammed the Great Hall with a great number of frighteningly huge pumpkins, each so enormous that a first-year could have hidden behind it, and had gone off beaming and covered in earth.
As usual, Filch and the school's staff had strung golden ribbons across the Great Hall, hung brand-new banners for all four Houses, set out jack-o'-lanterns and rounded up a great swarm of bats.
The ribbons shimmered in the candlelight. The new banners hung bright and stiff along the walls. The jack-o'-lanterns grinned from every windowsill, their flames were bowing in each draught, while the bats turned squeaking in a black, flickering cloud beneath the enchanted ceiling.
Ever since Hogwarts had stopped being short of money, the students' everyday meals had risen to a whole new level, and this year the house-elves had outdone themselves.
They had brought out their very best skills, and delicacies perfect in colour and fragrance were heaped along the long tables: pumpkin pasties with golden crusts, glistening toffee apples, roast fowl crackling in their skins, and cakes iced in orange and black, with steam curling up from every dish into the candlelit air.
In short, Hogwarts was still doing everything in its power to create the cheerful atmosphere of a traditional festival.
But few people, Harry included, were able to enjoy the festive mood.
The matter of exactly what had gone missing from Professor Watson's office had been placed under strict orders of secrecy, and the students who weren't involved were still in the dark, knowing nothing.
But two other things had spread like wildfire: that Ron and Lavender had been attacked at school, and that Harry's and Hermione's dormitories had likewise been ransacked.
The news passed from mouth to mouth along the staircases and across the common rooms, growing a little more garish with every telling.
Even several days after Halloween, a mood of fearful unease still hung over the school.
Harry even caught a whiff of the dread that had blanketed Hogwarts back in his second year, when rumour had swirled endlessly that the Heir of Slytherin had opened the Chamber of Secrets and every Muggle-born student was to be purged.
Really, it shouldn't have gone this far.
It was just that the tense situation outside had the young wizards jumping at shadows.
For months, every so often, the Daily Prophet had run stories of several calamities in the Muggle world, natural and man-made both: a train derailment, a snapped bridge, or some nameless little town struck with "pinpoint" accuracy by an earthquake or a typhoon, and the like.
The photographs showed twisted wreckage and drifting smoke. Between the lines, every one of those articles hinted that these disasters were bound by a tangled threads to Voldemort's Death Eaters.
Hogwarts, with Professors Dumbledore and Watson holding the fort, had always been considered the safest place of all. But now even the school had seen an attack, and one that involved Harry Potter.
The young wizards could hardly help but worry.
Even without the professors' warnings, over these past few days the young wizards had seldom gone alone into the castle's dark corners. Whether in class, at meals, or out for a stroll, they moved about in twos and threes.
Walking through the castle, Harry could always feel people sizing him up with odd looks, as if the attacker had really gotten the wrong person. As if the one the attacker had truly meant to take down was him.
Come to think of it, it seemed to Harry that it had been a very long time since he'd felt that kind of strange stare at school.
This made Harry anxious.
Not to mention he was still worrying about whether Malfoy had already sent the staff out of Hogwarts. And as time went on, Sirius's safety weighed constantly on his mind.
And that worry reached its peak on the Friday of the new week!
"Where's Professor Watson?"
Harry, fresh out of that morning's Charms class, had come into the Great Hall for lunch and instinctively glanced up at the staff table.
The empty seat beside Professor Dumbledore sent a shudder through his whole body. The chair was pushed in neatly, the goblet before it was clean and dry, and next to it the headmaster sat peacefully buttering a roll.
"Isn't Remus's wedding tomorrow?"
Harry murmured, almost dazed.
"The International Confederation of Wizards' preparatory meeting is tomorrow too."
Hermione had come up quietly beside him with her bag over her shoulder, and her gentle voice carried a thread of worry as well.
"Maybe the times clashed. He might have left for Paris early—"
In the silence, Harry looked, expressionless, toward the Slytherin table, and those grey eyes were there as if waiting for him.
Malfoy sat among the green-and-silver ranks with his plate untouched, Pansy close at his elbow, and the clatter and chatter of the hall seemed to draw back from the space between them. Their gazes met in midair, and after a while, each looked away.
Harry looked again at Professor Watson's empty seat.
Somehow, a strange illusion suddenly rose in his heart.
It was nearly three years ago that Professor Watson had suddenly appeared at Hogwarts, suddenly appeared before people's eyes. He had arrived so abruptly that it had felt, within a few weeks, as though he had always been there. Perhaps one day, when he left, people would be caught just as unprepared.
In fact, Hermione's guess was mistaken; Bryan had not gone to Paris. Something was going to happen there tonight, but it no longer needed him to worry about it.
He had boarded the Hogwarts Express and let the scarlet engine carry him south through the long afternoon, over moors and viaducts and slate-roofed towns, until the hills flattened out and the towns ran together into London.
At King's Cross he stepped out into the roar of the Muggle station, hailed a taxi, and rode through grey streets and early lamplight to the bus station. From there a bus with windows fogged by the breath of weary passengers carried him to a town on London's outskirts, a place he had never set foot in all his life.
By then, the sky had put on a wondrous sight.
In the half of the sky where the sun had not yet set, clouds as vividly red as blood drifted like a great mass of foam bobbing on a rolling sea. In the half where the moon's shadow had surfaced, the sky was an elegant, marvellous dusky violet, the many stars of the heavens were flickering in and out of sight.
For the rest of the way, Bryan would have to rely on himself.
The bus had left him at the last stop, where the houses thinned out into fields and the paved road gave way to plain earth.
Luckily, while he was measuring that road with his two legs, a farmer came ambling up behind him, driving a horse-drawn flatbed cart, the kind used for hauling melons, fruit, and vegetables. The wheels creaked, the harness jingled, and the old horse's breath smoked in the cooling air.
And so, Bryan caught a ride.
"Oh, thank you so much! If it weren't for you, I'd probably have a long walk ahead of me—"
Bryan smiled sincerely at the farmer who was on his way into town to sell melons and fruit, and drew a ten-pound note from the inner pocket of his coat.
The old man, his fluffy, straw-like curls wedged beneath a straw hat, deliberately put on a ferocious face, with his bristling brows drawn down like a thundercloud.
"Put that money away, boy, or you can go on walking on those two legs of yours!"
Bryan took the advice gracefully, put the note away with a grin, and vaulted onto the flatbed, its boards still stuck with a few vegetable leaves and smelling of earth and ripe melon.
At the old man's hearty, full-voiced urging, the cart started rolling again.
As on an evening where summer shades into autumn, a gentle, refreshing breeze frolicked freely across the broad fields.
On both sides of the dirt road, the pumpkins in the vast pumpkin fields had been picked clean before Halloween, which had passed only a few days before; now the fields held nothing but wide stretches of green vines with a scant few tender stems still hanging on, trembling in the wind.
"The Tonks family!"
The old man turned around on the driving board, chewing over the name Bryan had given him when he climbed aboard.
A good part of his face was filled by a lush, vigorous brown beard. Seeing the grey-haired young man on the cart, gazing into the distance with a contented, strange smile, he smiled too.
"I know which village they live in, but it'll take about an hour to get there!"
"Oh, that's all right—I'm in no hurry—"
Bryan answered with a smile.
It wasn't that he had no faster way to get there; he simply felt that all along the road he had been in a hurry.
Hurrying to make himself stronger, to make himself without a single weakness.
He had been planning everything with painstaking care: concerning Voldemort, concerning the crisis only just coming to light, concerning how to change the state of the wizarding world in Britain, even in all of Europe which was stagnant…
Watching the dusky violet gradually creep across the sky, Bryan smiled silently.
Thanks to the many who had walked beside him, most of what he had set out to achieve had been achieved, and the rest was moving in the direction he wanted to see.
So, it was time to adjust his pace and let himself catch his breath.
The old man hummed tunelessly to himself as they went, and the cart rocked on, past dark hedgerows and the pale ghosts of the picked-over fields, while the red in the west faded to ash and the violet deepened to blue.
When the moon's shadow hung over the treetops, the old horse pulling the old man and Bryan stopped, wheezing.
Like so many people met by chance in life: a fleeting meeting, and then parting. Bryan and the old man waved, smiling, without a word, and each turned away.
He walked along a narrow, dead-grass-covered ridge between fields. He passed through a bed of reeds that stood taller than his head and rattled dryly as he pushed through, and jumped a snaky little stream that glinted black and silver under the moon.
And so, Bryan arrived at the future home of Remus and Tonks.
Like most wizards who lived among Muggles, they had a home that lay some distance from the village.
Tonks's home was the same, though the house, which stood on an open stretch of ground, had been rendered invisible by the magic that protected it, and, likewise through that magic, Muggles would overlook the change.
To any eye but a wizard's, there was nothing here at all but a moonlit clearing and a ring of black trees.
Standing in the clearing, Bryan once again put a hand into his pocket and, after fumbling a moment, drew out a slip of paper that Remus had written out in his own hand.
One glance, and a house that looked old slowly came into view before Bryan's eyes, like a photograph developing in a tray.
Kind Remus, unwilling to add to anyone's burdens or raise anyone's risk, and so—
That's right: he had cast the Fidelius Charm over this house, and he himself was its Secret-Keeper.
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