The doorbell of the house on Church Road went at half past seven that evening, while Harry was drying and Lily was washing and Margaret was reading out the clues neither of them could get.
Margaret put the paper down and went to the door, and Harry stood in the kitchen doorway with a wet plate in his hands and his other hand, without any instruction from him, resting on the wand in his waistband.
On the step stood a tall, grizzled man in a long travelling cloak, leaning on a staff. A chunk was missing from his nose. One of his eyes was small and dark and fixed on Margaret; the other was large, round, electric blue, and pointed straight through the wall at Harry.
"Evening," the man growled. "We're here for the boy."
"Are you," said Margaret Hale.
Something in the two words made the normal eye blink. Behind the grizzled man, the step and the little path were, Harry now saw, entirely full of people: a heap of them, eight or nine, standing in the twilight in travelling cloaks among Margaret's pots, one of them holding a top hat, one of them with hair of a violent bubblegum pink.
"Madam," began the grizzled man again, "there's no call for-"
"There's every call. Nine strangers on my step at half past seven." Margaret folded her arms. "Who are you when you're at home?"
A second man stepped forward into the porch light, and Harry's stomach did something complicated, because he knew the face: tired, kind, more grey in the hair than there had been two years ago, in a shabby travelling cloak that had been carefully mended.
"My name is Remus Lupin," he said. "I taught Harry at school. Harry..." His eyes found him down the hall, and something in them eased. "Before anyone comes in or goes anywhere: what form does your Patronus take?"
"A stag," said Harry.
"It's him," said Lupin, to the man with the eye.
"I know it's him," the man growled. "I've been watching him dry that plate through the wall for half a minute. Nobody dries a plate that suspiciously unless they're Potter."
"That's Alastor Moody," said Lupin, in the tone of a man apologising in advance for a great deal. "May we come in?"
Margaret looked the nine of them over, pot to pot, cloak to cloak, as though counting surgical instruments back in after an operation.
"You'll wipe your feet," she said at last. "All of you. Sticks pointed at the floor in my house. And if that eye goes through any more of my walls, it can stop before the bathroom."
Moody's normal eye narrowed. The blue one, for the first time, held still.
"I like her," announced the pink-haired one, from the back.
* * *
Nine wizards do not fit in a sitting room built for three, but they tried. They perched on chair arms and the piano stool and the windowsill; a small, excitable man in a violet top hat wrung Harry's hand and squeaked, "Dedalus Diggle, we've met, you won't remember-"
"You bowed to me once," said Harry. "In a shop."
Diggle dropped his hat.
The others came in a blur of names Harry knew he was losing as fast as they arrived: Kingsley Shacklebolt, slow-voiced and calm, a bald black wizard with a gold earring; Emmeline Vance, stately in an emerald shawl, who inclined her head; Sturgis Podmore; Hestia Jones, pink-cheeked, who had discovered the toaster and had to be moved along from it; a wheezy, silver-haired wizard called Elphias Doge who said "marvellous" quietly to nobody in particular; and the pink-haired witch, who tripped on the doorstep coming in, righted herself against the coat rack, and said, "Wotcher, Harry. Tonks. Just Tonks. I'll know if you've been told my first name, and there's no need for anyone to get hurt."
Lily, who had come out of the kitchen still holding the washing-up brush, watched Tonks's hair turn from pink to a deep plum, apparently out of politeness to the furniture, and said, "Do it again."
Tonks did it again.
"Harry," said Lily faintly, "I want you to know the Prophet wasted an entire summer writing about you."
Margaret made tea. It took two pots and every cup in the house, including the one with the harvest scene on it that nobody was normally allowed, and she moved through the crowded room filling cups without once asking anybody to repeat their strange name or explain their strange hat.
Moody watched her do it. Harry saw the blue eye leave him, for the first time since the doorstep, and travel slowly round the room: the piano, the photographs, the side table where the Prophet lay folded to its half-finished crossword, in pen. The eye stopped on the newspaper. It stayed there a good deal longer than a newspaper deserved. Then it rose to Margaret, who was standing over him with the pot.
"Milk?" said Margaret.
Moody looked at her with both eyes, which he had not bothered to do with anyone else all evening.
"Aye," he said finally. "Milk."
Nobody explained anything. Margaret poured. Harry put it away with the Petunia business, to think about later.
Then Moody planted himself on the hearth rug, both eyes on Harry, and got to business.
"Right, Potter. Wednesday. Two dementors. We've had Figg's report and the Ministry's version, which disagree in all the places you'd expect. Then Sunday morning we get word you've left your aunt's house." The blue eye rolled horribly towards the window, checked the street, rolled back. "Locked room, according to Figg's sources. Padlock and two bolts, outside the door. Kingsley pulled the Improper Use record for that address: nothing on it since the Patronus. No unlocking charm, no alohomora, nothing." Both eyes came to rest on Harry together, which was worse than either separately. "So. How'd you get out?"
"Hacksaw," said Lily.
Moody turned. Lily looked back at him with the washing-up brush held like a sceptre and a face with nothing whatever to hide.
"Hacksaw," said Moody.
"My aunt was a ward sister for thirty years. We keep serious tools."
The silence went on for three full seconds, and Harry looked carefully at the teapot and thought about nothing at all, in the way the fragment-tools had taught him without ever being asked: a mind closing a door from the inside, quietly, somewhere behind his eyes.
"Must have been a good saw," said Moody at last, and let it go the way a dog lets go of a stick it fully intends to come back for.
"Why are you here?" said Harry.
It came out harder than he'd meant. Cups paused. Harry put his own down, because his hand had started to say things he hadn't decided to say yet, and looked at Lupin, because Lupin was the one it was hardest to say to, and therefore the one it counted with.
"Two dementors came for me on Wednesday. Mrs. Figg reported it Wednesday night. It's Sunday." He kept his voice level, which took most of what he had. "In between I got four letters telling me what not to do. Nobody told me why, or what's happening, or what any of you were waiting for. You've had someone watching me since June, watching me weed the garden, and the first time the Order of whatever-you-are actually knocks on a door, it's nine of you, after I've already left, to collect me like a parcel." He looked round at all of them, the hats and the shawls and the teacups. "So. Why are you here? Because if the answer's 'Dumbledore's orders' and nothing else, I've had that one all summer, and it wasn't worth the parchment either."
Nobody said anything. Hestia Jones looked at her shoes. Diggle's hat revolved slowly in his hands.
"You're right," said Lupin.
Harry, who had been braced for soothing, found he had nothing to put against plain agreement, and it went through his guard entirely.
"It wasn't good enough," Lupin went on quietly. "There are reasons, and you'll have the explanation you're owed, tonight, from people better placed to give it than I am. But no, Harry. Six weeks of silence wasn't protection. It was a mistake, and you've been paying for it." He glanced at the window, at the last of the light. "What I can tell you now is this: you can't stay here, and it can't wait until morning. There's a hearing in six days, and a safe house in London, and people in it who are waiting for you. One of them has been climbing the walls since Wednesday."
Harry's breath went out of him slowly. Sirius.
"All right," he said. "I'll come. But I want it understood..." He made himself say it slowly, so it would sound like a condition and not a plea. "I'm done being moved about like luggage. Tonight somebody explains it. All of it. Properly."
"Tonight," said Lupin. "You have my word."
"And," he added, "we need to talk about Lily."
* * *
Lily put down the washing-up brush.
"Somebody sent those dementors," said Moody, before anyone could soften it. "Dementors don't stray, whatever the Ministry's saying by Friday. Somebody sent two of them to one alley, on the one evening, and the alley had three people in it." The blue eye swivelled to Lily and stopped. "You were one of them, girl. You've been seen with him all summer by anyone who cared to look. Whoever's list Potter is on, you're on the bottom of it by now, and the bottom of that list is not a place I'd leave a witness lying about. You saw the attack. You're the only witch who did. That makes you useful to his hearing and interesting to the wrong people, and this house has one lock and a rotary washing line."
"Alastor," said Lupin, wearily.
"She should hear it plain."
"I'm in the room," said Lily. "You can point the eye at me, I've decided I'm honoured." Then she turned and looked through the kitchen doorway at her aunt.
Margaret stood with the tea towel over her shoulder.
"Well," she said. "She goes back to school in four weeks anyway. September's come early this year, that's all."
"Aunt Margaret-"
"You'll pack the warm things, because I've heard how these people travel." Margaret's voice did not change at all, which Harry was beginning to understand was how you could tell it mattered. "And you'll write Sundays. Real letters. Not three lines."
"Four lines," said Lily, and her voice only just held.
She packed in eleven minutes. She came downstairs in three jumpers, because Tonks had gone up to help and had opinions about altitude, dragging the school trunk that had stood half-ready in her room since July, and Hedwig's cage went on top of the pile with Hedwig inside it wearing the expression of a passenger who has seen the flight crew.
At the door, while Moody ran his eye up and down the darkening street and pronounced it as safe as it was going to get, Margaret took her leave of them with a minimum of ceremony. Lily got a hug that lasted a beat longer than either of them acknowledged. Harry got a hand on the shoulder, once, firm, the way you steady a ladder.
"The Sunday fry-up stands," she told him. "Whenever you're both back. That's not an invitation, mind. It's a booking."
"Yes," said Harry, past something in his throat. "Right."
She looked over his head at Lupin, sorted through the available wizards, and evidently settled on him as the one in charge, or at least the one with ironed cuffs.
"Feed them," she said. "Both of them. They forget."
"Madam," said Lupin gravely, "I give you my word."
* * *
They flew.
Tonks raised her wand at the two of them on the dark lawn first, and Harry, who had a hearing in six days and had once been blamed for a house-elf's pudding, stepped back.
"Relax," said Kingsley. "Anything that logs near either of you tonight comes to my desk first. I saw to that this afternoon."
Tonks's wand rapped Harry hard on the head, and a strange sensation followed, as though an egg had been cracked over his crown and was running in cold trickles down his neck, and where the trickles went he faded, until he was a Harry-shaped piece of the evening. Somewhere beside him, Lily said, in a voice of pure scientific rapture, "I can't see my hands. This is the single best day of my life, and I was attacked this week."
They went up in a formation Moody had planned aloud in the garden with the seriousness of a man invading a small country: Kingsley ahead, Vance and Podmore flanking, Moody behind, "and if anyone comes at us out of the cloud, scatter south and I'll do the arguing." The town dropped away. Little Whinging became a spill of orange beads, then a smear, then gone, and the air went cold and enormous, and Harry, three jumpers or none, would not have traded it. He hadn't been on a broom since June. He had forgotten (actually forgotten, the way you forget a language) that there was a version of him that worked properly, and it was this one, a hundred feet up with his eyes streaming.
Somewhere to his left, disembodied and delighted, Lily was interviewing Tonks.
"but what's stopping you just flying everywhere..."
"Weather, mostly. And the Statute. And Moody."
"I HEARD MY NAME-"
"That's the M25, isn't it? The one that goes all the way round?"
"It is," came Kingsley's deep voice, from ahead.
"But why does it go all the way round?"
There was a pause, at altitude.
"Nobody knows," said Kingsley.
Moody took them on two detours, one to confuse anybody following and one, as far as Harry could tell, to confuse the people being followed, and Tonks complained bitterly about both, and the cold worked in under every hem, and it was, all told, the best hour of Harry's summer that hadn't happened in a garden.
Then London came up beneath them like embers raked apart, and they went down.
* * *
They landed in a mean little square with grass in the middle that had given up, ringed by tall, soot-dark houses with broken railings and bulging bin bags on the steps. The Disillusionment came off them with a sensation of warm water. Somewhere a car alarm was singing to itself. It did not look like anywhere anyone was waiting for anyone.
Moody stumped close, pulled a scrap of parchment from an inner pocket, and held it under the wandlight.
"Read it. Both of you. Memorise it. Don't say it."
The handwriting was narrow and slanted and Harry knew it at once, from envelopes he had watched for all summer and never got: The headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix may be found at number twelve, Grimmauld Place, London.
"Order of the Phoenix," Lily breathed, beside him. "That's a brilliant name, why does nobody tell me anything-"
Moody twitched the parchment away and set fire to it in mid-air.
"Now think about what you've just memorised."
Harry thought. And between number eleven and number thirteen, where there was plainly nothing at all, something began to happen to the terrace. A battered black door swelled out of nowhere, and dirty walls and grimed windows walked out to either side of it, shouldering the neighbouring houses apart without any fuss whatever, and there stood a house that had not been there, wearing the look of a house that had heard about them from the other houses and expected the worst.
Nobody's curtains so much as twitched.
"In," growled Moody. "Quick, up the steps. Don't knock. Don't touch anything once you're inside, and keep your voices down in the hall: there's things in that house better left asleep."
The door had a knocker in the shape of a twisted serpent and no keyhole, and it opened before Lupin's hand reached it.
Inside was a long, dim hallway that smelled of damp and dust and something faintly, anciently unpleasant underneath, lit by gas lamps that hissed as they woke, throwing light on peeling wallpaper and a chandelier webbed grey and a row of portraits with their curtains drawn. Harry stepped over the threshold with Lily's shoulder against his and the whole summer at his back.
At the far end of the hall, a door opened onto warm kitchen light, and standing black against it, thinner than the photographs and grinning like the boy in his parents' wedding pictures, was Sirius.