The Order of the Phoenix Read online

  ‘Shut up,’ said Ron, stony-faced, pulling on his own team robes for the first time. They fitted him well considering they had been Oliver Wood’s, who was rather broader in the shoulder.

  ‘OK, everyone,’ said Angelina, entering from the Captain’s office, already changed. ‘Let’s get to it; Alicia and Fred, if you can just bring out the ball crate for us. Oh, and there are a couple of people out there watching but I want you to just ignore them, all right?’

  Something in her would-be casual voice made Harry think he might know who the uninvited spectators were, and sure enough, when they left the changing room for the bright sunlight of the pitch it was to a storm of catcalls and jeers from the Slytherin Quidditch team and assorted hangers-on, who were grouped halfway up the empty stands and whose voices echoed loudly around the stadium.

  ‘What’s that Weasley’s riding?’ Malfoy called in his sneering drawl. ‘Why would anyone put a flying charm on a mouldy old log like that?’

  Crabbe, Goyle and Pansy Parkinson guffawed and shrieked with laughter. Ron mounted his broom and kicked off from the ground and Harry followed him, watching his ears turn red from behind.

  ‘Ignore them,’ he said, accelerating to catch up with Ron, ‘we’ll see who’s laughing after we play them …’

  ‘Exactly the attitude I want, Harry,’ said Angelina approvingly, soaring around them with the Quaffle under her arm and slowing to hover on the spot in front of her airborne team. ‘OK, everyone, we’re going to start with some passes just to warm up, the whole team please –’

  ‘Hey, Johnson, what’s with that hairstyle, anyway?’ shrieked Pansy Parkinson from below. ‘Why would anyone want to look like they’ve got worms coming out of their head?’

  Angelina swept her long braided hair out of her face and continued calmly, ‘Spread out, then, and let’s see what we can do …’

  Harry reversed away from the others to the far side of the pitch. Ron fell back towards the opposite goal. Angelina raised the Quaffle with one hand and threw it hard to Fred, who passed to George, who passed to Harry, who passed to Ron, who dropped it.

  The Slytherins, led by Malfoy, roared and screamed with laughter. Ron, who had pelted towards the ground to catch the Quaffle before it landed, pulled out of the dive untidily, so that he slipped sideways on his broom, and returned to playing height, blushing. Harry saw Fred and George exchange looks, but uncharacteristically neither of them said anything, for which he was grateful.

  ‘Pass it on, Ron,’ called Angelina, as though nothing had happened.

  Ron threw the Quaffle to Alicia, who passed back to Harry, who passed to George …

  ‘Hey, Potter, how’s your scar feeling?’ called Malfoy. ‘Sure you don’t need a lie down? It must be, what, a whole week since you were in the hospital wing, that’s a record for you, isn’t it?’

  George passed to Angelina; she reverse-passed to Harry, who had not been expecting it, but caught it in the very tips of his fingers and passed it quickly to Ron, who lunged for it and missed by inches.

  ‘Come on now, Ron,’ said Angelina crossly, as he dived for the ground again, chasing the Quaffle. ‘Pay attention.’

  It would have been hard to say whether Ron’s face or the Quaffle was a deeper scarlet when he again returned to playing height. Malfoy and the rest of the Slytherin team were howling with laughter.

  On his third attempt, Ron caught the Quaffle; perhaps out of relief he passed it on so enthusiastically that it soared straight through Katie’s outstretched hands and hit her hard in the face.

  ‘Sorry!’ Ron groaned, zooming forwards to see whether he had done any damage.

  ‘Get back in position, she’s fine!’ barked Angelina. ‘But as you’re passing to a teammate, do try not to knock her off her broom, won’t you? We’ve got Bludgers for that!’

  Katie’s nose was bleeding. Down below, the Slytherins were stamping their feet and jeering. Fred and George converged on Katie.

  ‘Here, take this,’ Fred told her, handing her something small and purple from out of his pocket, ‘it’ll clear it up in no time.’

  ‘All right,’ called Angelina, ‘Fred, George, go and get your bats and a Bludger. Ron, get up to the goalposts. Harry, release the Snitch when I say so. We’re going to aim for Ron’s goal, obviously.’

  Harry zoomed off after the twins to fetch the Snitch.

  ‘Ron’s making a right pig’s ear of things, isn’t he?’ muttered George, as the three of them landed at the crate containing the balls and opened it to extract one of the Bludgers and the Snitch.

  ‘He’s just nervous,’ said Harry, ‘he was fine when I was practising with him this morning.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I hope he hasn’t peaked too soon,’ said Fred gloomily.

  They returned to the air. When Angelina blew her whistle, Harry released the Snitch and Fred and George let fly the Bludger. From that moment on, Harry was barely aware of what the others were doing. It was his job to recapture the tiny fluttering golden ball that was worth a hundred and fifty points to the Seeker’s team and doing so required enormous speed and skill. He accelerated, rolling and swerving in and out of the Chasers, the warm autumn air whipping his face, and the distant yells of the Slytherins so much meaningless roaring in his ears … but too soon, the whistle brought him to a halt again.

  ‘Stop – stop – STOP!’ screamed Angelina. ‘Ron – you’re not covering your middle post!’

  Harry looked round at Ron, who was hovering in front of the left-hand hoop, leaving the other two completely unprotected.

  ‘Oh … sorry …’

  ‘You keep shifting around while you’re watching the Chasers!’ said Angelina. ‘Either stay in centre position until you have to move to defend a hoop, or else circle the hoops, but don’t drift vaguely off to one side, that’s how you let in the last three goals!’

  ‘Sorry …’ Ron repeated, his red face shining like a beacon against the bright blue sky.

  ‘And Katie, can’t you do something about that nosebleed?’

  ‘It’s just getting worse!’ said Katie thickly, attempting to stem the flow with her sleeve.

  Harry glanced round at Fred, who was looking anxious and checking his pockets. He saw Fred pull out something purple, examine it for a second and then look round at Katie, evidently horror-struck.

  ‘Well, let’s try again,’ said Angelina. She was ignoring the Slytherins, who had now set up a chant of ‘Gryffindor are losers, Gryffindor are losers,’ but there was a certain rigidity about her seat on the broom nevertheless.

  This time they had been flying for barely three minutes when Angelina’s whistle sounded. Harry, who had just sighted the Snitch circling the opposite goalpost, pulled up feeling distinctly aggrieved.

  ‘What now?’ he said impatiently to Alicia, who was nearest.

  ‘Katie,’ she said shortly.

  Harry turned and saw Angelina, Fred and George all flying as fast as they could towards Katie. Harry and Alicia sped towards her, too. It was plain that Angelina had stopped training just in time; Katie was now chalk white and covered in blood.

  ‘She needs the hospital wing,’ said Angelina.

  ‘We’ll take her,’ said Fred. ‘She – er – might have swallowed a Blood Blisterpod by mistake –’

  ‘Well, there’s no point continuing with no Beaters and a Chaser gone,’ said Angelina glumly as Fred and George zoomed off towards the castle supporting Katie between them. ‘Come on, let’s go and get changed.’

  The Slytherins continued to chant as they trailed back into the changing rooms.

  ‘How was practice?’ asked Hermione rather coolly half an hour later, as Harry and Ron climbed through the portrait hole into the Gryffindor common room.

  ‘It was –’ Harry began.

  ‘Completely lousy,’ said Ron in a hollow voice, sinking into a chair beside Hermione. She looked up at Ron and her frostiness seemed to melt.

  ‘Well, it was only your first one,’ she said consolingly, ‘it’
s bound to take time to –’

  ‘Who said it was me who made it lousy?’ snapped Ron.

  ‘No one,’ said Hermione, looking taken aback, ‘I thought –’

  ‘You thought I was bound to be rubbish?’

  ‘No, of course I didn’t! Look, you said it was lousy so I just –’

  ‘I’m going to get started on some homework,’ said Ron angrily and stomped off to the staircase to the boys’ dormitories and vanished from sight. Hermione turned to Harry.

  ‘Was he lousy?’

  ‘No,’ said Harry loyally.

  Hermione raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Well, I suppose he could’ve played better,’ Harry muttered, ‘but it was only the first training session, like you said …’

  Neither Harry nor Ron seemed to make much headway with their homework that night. Harry knew Ron was too preoccupied with how badly he had performed at Quidditch practice and he himself was having difficulty in getting the ‘Gryffindor are losers’ chant out of his head.

  They spent the whole of Sunday in the common room, buried in their books while the room around them filled up, then emptied. It was another clear, fine day and most of their fellow Gryffindors spent the day out in the grounds, enjoying what might well be some of the last sunshine that year. By the evening, Harry felt as though somebody had been beating his brain against the inside of his skull.

  ‘You know, we probably should try and get more homework done during the week,’ Harry muttered to Ron, as they finally laid aside Professor McGonagall’s long essay on the Inanimatus Conjurus Spell and turned miserably to Professor Sinistra’s equally long and difficult essay about Jupiter’s many moons.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Ron, rubbing slightly bloodshot eyes and throwing his fifth spoiled bit of parchment into the fire beside them. ‘Listen … shall we just ask Hermione if we can have a look at what she’s done?’

  Harry glanced over at her; she was sitting with Crookshanks on her lap and chatting merrily to Ginny as a pair of knitting needles flashed in midair in front of her, now knitting a pair of shapeless elf socks.

  ‘No,’ he said heavily, ‘you know she won’t let us.’

  And so they worked on while the sky outside the windows became steadily darker. Slowly, the crowd in the common room began to thin again. At half past eleven, Hermione wandered over to them, yawning.

  ‘Nearly done?’

  ‘No,’ said Ron shortly.

  ‘Jupiter’s biggest moon is Ganymede, not Callisto,’ she said, pointing over Ron’s shoulder at a line in his Astronomy essay, ‘and it’s Io that’s got the volcanoes.’

  ‘Thanks,’ snarled Ron, scratching out the offending sentences.

  ‘Sorry, I only –’

  ‘Yeah, well, if you’ve just come over here to criticise –’

  ‘Ron –’

  ‘I haven’t got time to listen to a sermon, all right, Hermione, I’m up to my neck in it here –’

  ‘No – look!’

  Hermione was pointing to the nearest window. Harry and Ron both looked over. A handsome screech owl was standing on the windowsill, gazing into the room at Ron.

  ‘Isn’t that Hermes?’ said Hermione, sounding amazed.

  ‘Blimey, it is!’ said Ron quietly, throwing down his quill and getting to his feet. ‘What’s Percy writing to me for?’

  He crossed to the window and opened it; Hermes flew inside, landed on Ron’s essay and held out a leg to which a letter was attached. Ron took the letter off it and the owl departed at once, leaving inky footprints across Ron’s drawing of the moon Io.

  ‘That’s definitely Percy’s handwriting,’ said Ron, sinking back into his chair and staring at the words on the outside of the scroll: Ronald Weasley, Gryffindor House, Hogwarts. He looked up at the other two. ‘What d’you reckon?’

  ‘Open it!’ said Hermione eagerly, and Harry nodded.

  Ron unrolled the scroll and began to read. The further down the parchment his eyes travelled, the more pronounced became his scowl. When he had finished reading, he looked disgusted. He thrust the letter at Harry and Hermione, who leaned towards each other to read it together:

  Dear Ron,

  I have only just heard (from no less a person than the Minister for Magic himself, who has it from your new teacher, Professor Umbridge) that you have become a Hogwarts prefect.

  I was most pleasantly surprised when I heard this news and must firstly offer my congratulations. I must admit that I have always been afraid that you would take what we might call the ‘Fred and George’ route, rather than following in my footsteps, so you can imagine my feelings on hearing you have stopped flouting authority and have decided to shoulder some real responsibility.

  But I want to give you more than congratulations, Ron, I want to give you some advice, which is why I am sending this at night rather than by the usual morning post. Hopefully, you will be able to read this away from prying eyes and avoid awkward questions.

  From something the Minister let slip when telling me you are now a prefect, I gather that you are still seeing a lot of Harry Potter. I must tell you, Ron, that nothing could put you in danger of losing your badge more than continued fraternisation with that boy. Yes, I am sure you are surprised to hear this – no doubt you will say that Potter has always been Dumbledore’s favourite – but I feel bound to tell you that Dumbledore may not be in charge at Hogwarts much longer and the people who count have a very different – and probably more accurate – view of Potter’s behaviour. I shall say no more here, but if you look at the Daily Prophet tomorrow you will get a good idea of the way the wind is blowing – and see if you can spot yours truly!

  Seriously, Ron, you do not want to be tarred with the same brush as Potter, it could be very damaging to your future prospects, and I am talking here about life after school, too. As you must be aware, given that our father escorted him to court, Potter had a disciplinary hearing this summer in front of the whole Wizengamot and he did not come out of it looking too good. He got off on a mere technicality, if you ask me, and many of the people I’ve spoken to remain convinced of his guilt.

  It may be that you are afraid to sever ties with Potter – I know that he can be unbalanced and, for all I know, violent – but if you have any worries about this, or have spotted anything else in Potter’s behaviour that is troubling you, I urge you to speak to Dolores Umbridge, a truly delightful woman who I know will be only too happy to advise you.

  This leads me to my other bit of advice. As I have hinted above, Dumbledore’s regime at Hogwarts may soon be over. Your loyalty, Ron, should be not to him, but to the school and the Ministry. I am very sorry to hear that, so far, Professor Umbridge is encountering very little co-operation from staff as she strives to make those necessary changes within Hogwarts that the Ministry so ardently desires (although she should find this easier from next week – again, see the Daily Prophet tomorrow!). I shall say only this – a student who shows himself willing to help Professor Umbridge now may be very well-placed for Head Boyship in a couple of years!

  I am sorry that I was unable to see more of you over the summer. It pains me to criticise our parents, but I am afraid I can no longer live under their roof while they remain mixed up with the dangerous crowd around Dumbledore. (If you are writing to Mother at any point, you might tell her that a certain Sturgis Podmore, who is a great friend of Dumbledore’s, has recently been sent to Azkaban for trespass at the Ministry. Perhaps that will open their eyes to the kind of petty criminals with whom they are currently rubbing shoulders.) I count myself very lucky to have escaped the stigma of association with such people – the Minister really could not be more gracious to me – and I do hope, Ron, that you will not allow family ties to blind you to the misguided nature of our parents’ beliefs and actions, either. I sincerely hope that, in time, they will realise how mistaken they were and I shall, of course, be ready to accept a full apology when that day comes.

  Please think over what I have said most carefully, particularly t
he bit about Harry Potter, and congratulations again on becoming prefect.

  Your brother,

  Percy

  Harry looked up at Ron.

  ‘Well,’ he said, trying to sound as though he found the whole thing a joke, ‘if you want to – er – what is it?’ – he checked Percy’s letter – ‘Oh yeah – “sever ties” with me, I swear I won’t get violent.’

  ‘Give it back,’ said Ron, holding out his hand. ‘He is –’ Ron said jerkily, tearing Percy’s letter in half ‘the world’s –’ he tore it into quarters ‘biggest –’ he tore it into eighths ‘git.’ He threw the pieces into the fire.

  ‘Come on, we’ve got to get this finished sometime before dawn,’ he said briskly to Harry, pulling Professor Sinistra’s essay back towards him.

  Hermione was looking at Ron with an odd expression on her face.

  ‘Oh, give them here,’ she said abruptly.

  ‘What?’ said Ron.

  ‘Give them to me, I’ll look through them and correct them,’ she said. ‘Are you serious? Ah, Hermione, you’re a life-saver,’ said Ron, ‘what can I –?’

  ‘What you can say is, “We promise we’ll never leave our homework this late again,”’ she said, holding out both hands for their essays, but she looked slightly amused all the same.

  ‘Thanks a million, Hermione,’ said Harry weakly, passing over his essay and sinking back into his armchair, rubbing his eyes.

  It was now past midnight and the common room was deserted but for the three of them and Crookshanks. The only sound was that of Hermione’s quill scratching out sentences here and there on their essays and the ruffle of pages as she checked various facts in the reference books strewn across the table. Harry was exhausted. He also felt an odd, sick, empty feeling in his stomach that had nothing to do with tiredness and everything to do with the letter now curling blackly in the heart of the fire.

  He knew that half the people inside Hogwarts thought him strange, even mad; he knew that the Daily Prophet had been making snide allusions to him for months, but there was something about seeing it written down like that in Percy’s writing, about knowing that Percy was advising Ron to drop him and even to tell tales about him to Umbridge, that made his situation real to him as nothing else had. He had known Percy for four years, had stayed in his house during the summer holidays, shared a tent with him during the Quidditch World Cup, had even been awarded full marks by him in the second task of the Triwizard Tournament last year, yet now, Percy thought him unbalanced and possibly violent.