Twenty minutes later, Harry and Hermione came back down into the common room, each of them having gone up to their own dormitory to see exactly what had been done.
The fire in the grate had burned low while they were gone, and the round room, so cosy and noisy on any ordinary evening, felt strangely hushed.
The students who had come back from Avalon had mostly changed by now and drifted away to supper, leaving only damp footprints drying on the flagstones and a faint smell of wet wool.
Their roommates had not moved. They sat together on the sofa nearest the stairs, like people waiting outside a headmaster's office.
"Well? Harry, Hermione?"
It wasn't the first time a thief had gone through Harry's dormitory, and so Neville, Seamus and Dean were holding themselves together better than most would have. Even so, Neville's round face was grave as he got to his feet. "Did you find anything missing?"
Fury practically blazed from Harry's green eyes. His fists were clenched tight, and his mouth was twisted into a thin, bitter line.
Out of caution, he didn't answer Neville. He looked at Hermione instead.
Hermione, for her own reasons, said nothing either. Her face was pale and tightly composed, and she only traded a glance with Harry.
"Someone sneaked into the girls' dormitory to steal things!"
Parvati seemed badly frightened by the news. She clutched the collar of her red sweater in both hands, as though it might shield her, and her voice came out shrill enough to make the portraits on the nearby wall stir in their frames. "We have to tell Professor McGonagall—and Professor Watson, too! He's in charge of student safety!"
Even without Parvati's reminder, Harry would have decided to do exactly that. But there was a more urgent problem first, one that had been gnawing at him since he'd walked into the empty space where Ron should have been.
"Has anyone seen Ron and Lavender?"
He fought to keep his emotions in check. His voice came out low and strained as he looked around at the faces of these trustworthy friends.
"Ron and Lavender?"
Neville knitted his brow and thought hard. He had come in only a short while ago and had hardly stopped to look at anyone, but he went back over it carefully, and the answer was no. "I haven't seen either of them since this morning. They… Harry, you don't think those two…"
Explaining would be complicated. At any other time Harry wouldn't have minded saying a few words more, but now he had no heart for it.
His worry for Ron outweighed even his anger over what he'd lost. He turned to Hermione. "We go to the Great Hall first and make Malfoy tell us exactly where Ron and Lavender are. Hah… If he dares say he doesn't know, I swear I'll knock his teeth out in front of every professor!"
'Malfoy had done this?'
Neville, Seamus and Dean, who knew nothing of what lay behind all this, showed varying degrees of shock. Dean's mouth fell slightly open. Seamus glanced from Harry's face to Hermione's and back again, as though one of them might laugh and say it was a joke.
But what startled them even more was Hermione. She was far more level-headed, in their eyes, the sort who would normally have caught Harry by the arm and lectured him on proof and procedure.
This time she didn't try to talk him out of anything. She nodded, ardently and without hesitation.
Whoosh—
The Fat Lady's portrait swung aside on its hinges, and a gust of cooler air from the corridor stirred the last embers in the grate.
Alicia's face appeared in the opening, flushed from running.
"Oh, good, Harry, you're right here!"
She said it happily, and waved at him.
"Sorry, Alicia. If Angelina sent you to call a tactics meeting, I'm afraid I don't have time right now."
Harry kept his voice low, with an effort.
"Oh, it's nothing to do with Quidditch, Harry. It's Professor Dumbledore—"
"Professor Dumbledore?"
Harry's voice cracked in alarm, and his heart gave a sudden, sick lurch against his ribs.
"Just now in the Hall, Professor Dumbledore seemed to get a message from Professor Watson's Patronus, and then he went upstairs with Professor McGonagall. They left in such a hurry that half the staff table stopped eating to watch. Before he left, he told me to find the two of you—"
Alicia glanced toward Hermione again, her cheerfulness thinning into something uncertain as she took in their faces. "He hopes you'll both go to the hospital wing as soon as you can!"
"The hospital wing? Why?"
Harry's voice cracked again, but even as the words left his mouth, he already had the answer in his heart. He simply didn't want to face it.
"Come on, Harry, let's get over there right away!"
Hermione caught hold of his sleeve, and the two of them hurried out through the portrait hole, leaving a common room full of anxious, silent faces behind them.
Harry ran downstairs faster than he ever had in his life. His wet trainers slapped against the stone, and the torches along the walls streaked past in smears of orange.
He couldn't wait for the sluggish moving staircases to grind into place; several times, before a staircase had finished swinging back, he simply sprang up and threw himself across the yawning gap.
Such a reckless move frightened even Hermione.
"Calm down, Harry! Ron and Lavender will be fine. Malfoy wouldn't dare do anything so outrageous at Hogwarts!"
Hermione hurried along behind him, holding her skirts clear of her ankles, and she said it breathlessly, as much to convince herself as him.
"Oh, really? I don't have your confidence in Malfoy—"
Harry's reply was full of hatred.
He didn't yet know what had happened, but by his own reckoning he had guessed nearly all of it.
The thought of how, when he had walked into the Great Hall earlier, Malfoy had actually had the nerve to sit at the Slytherin table, perfectly at ease, slowly eating his dinner as though the world were exactly as it should be, made Harry feel that his heart would burst!
The two of them reached the fourth floor of the castle, where the hospital wing was.
Because of the sudden cold snap now that October had arrived, the hospital wing was busier than usual.
The beds of the public ward were almost all filled with listless young wizards, red-nosed and sniffling, propped up on pillows with thin plumes of Pepperup smoke still curling from their ears.
The air was filled with the sharp, herbal smell of potions and the soft, dry, endless sound of coughing. Madam Pomfrey's lamps burned low and golden along the walls, and outside the tall windows the rain was beating steadily on the glass.
"Come in, Harry, Hermione—"
The two stood in the doorway, looking left and right over the rows of beds, searching for a familiar face among the crowd of patients.
On the left, the door of a small, separate ward suddenly opened, and Professor Watson's composed face appeared in the gap before them.
Harry and Hermione hurried over and rushed into the softly lit room.
It was a small room, hushed and warm, with two narrow beds set side by side beneath a single shaded lamp.
Ron lay on the nearer one, his freckles standing out like spattered ink against a face gone unnaturally flushed, his ginger hair was dark with damp and plastered to his forehead.
On the bed beside him, Lavender's curls lay spread across the pillow, her lips parted, her breath coming shallow. Neither of them was awake.
Harry stopped dead in the middle of the room.
"It seems you already had some idea of this situation. Is that right?"
Professor Watson asked, quite unperturbed, watching the two of them stand frozen at the foot of the beds in silence.
Just as Alicia had said, Professor Dumbledore and Professor McGonagall were also in the ward.
Professor Dumbledore stood by the window, observing them with eyes as tolerant and wise as ever, and the lamplight glinted on his half-moon spectacles.
Professor McGonagall, standing stiffly beside him with her hands folded, wore a far sterner expression… as though all this trouble were somehow their doing!
"We…"
Hermione didn't expect Harry to come up with anything brilliant in a situation like this, so she took up the conversation herself. "We…"
But under the gaze of three professors, the quick wits Hermione prided herself on abruptly deserted her.
For a awful moment she couldn't find a single plausible reason to explain why they had arrived already knowing that something had happened to Ron and Lavender. Every excuse she reached for fell apart in her hands.
"I suspect you don't fully understand the current situation, Harry, Hermione—"
Professor Dumbledore said gently, and then he turned his face toward Professor Watson, inviting him to speak.
"Here's how it is—"
Bryan's calm face revealed nothing of his emotions.
He stood with his hands clasped loosely behind his back, as steady as he had been in the barbican that morning. "As soon as I returned to Hogwarts, I sensed that someone had entered my office without permission, so I went straight back to see for myself—"
Professor Watson's office… had been broken into after all.
Harry pressed his lips together. He wasn't particularly surprised; ever since he had discovered what was missing from his own dormitory, he had suspected as much.
But he hadn't had the chance to tell Hermione what he'd lost, and so Hermione still wore a look of shock, with a subtle, creeping fear beneath it.
"Ron and Lavender were lying right there on my office floor… I examined them—"
"And?"
Harry's voice trembled slightly. He asked it point-blank, no longer caring that his tone was somewhat presumptuous, or that he was speaking to a professor.
"What knocked the two of them out was a Stunning Spell… And they both have high fevers—"
Bryan pointed Harry and Hermione toward the robes hanging on a stand to one side, which belonged to Ron and Lavender. "From the look of it, they were caught in the rain. Their clothes are soaked through. In addition—"
He paused briefly. The lamplight cast a still, thoughtful shadow across his face, and the only sounds in the small room were the wind against the window and the uneven breathing from the two beds.
"Before I brought them here, I made a quick check of my office… Oh, there was hardly any need to check. What's been taken is obvious at a glance."
"What is it… Professor Watson?"
Though many questions remained, Harry asked this one first. He wanted to know what, exactly, Malfoy had been planning to steal all term… what task Voldemort had given him!
"Oh, you've both seen it. It's the staff I seized from the dark witch Cliodna, the one I always kept in the display cabinet in my office."
The words fell into the silence like stones into still water.
That impressive, powerful staff… was gone. The staff that had conjured a jungle of vines and a towering oak giant out of nothing … This was what Voldemort had wanted stolen!
"Mr. Potter, Miss Granger—you understand how serious this is!"
Professor McGonagall was the first to break the oppressive silence. She walked up to them with quick, sharp steps, her eyes holding a hard light, and looked down at them sternly.
"Madam Pomfrey has given Mr. Weasley and Miss Brown a calming draught. She says that, for the sake of their health, it would be best to let them sleep through the night.
But it seems to me that the two of you know something. Is that so?"
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