WE'LL TAKE ON THE WORLD ; h.j.p.

22 | Mass Breakout

Hermione ended up right regarding her assumption that training Occlumency was exhausting and would rather weaken Harry during the first few lessons rather than strengthening his mind: Walking to breakfast, he told them that he had felt You-Know-Who being extremely happy last evening - and once the owl bringing Hermione her Daily Prophet had arrived, they knew why.

She had barely stared at the smoothed front page for a second before she gave a yelp that caused everyone in the vicinity to stare at her.

"What?" Harry and Ron said together while Allison had already peaked over her shoulder, pressing the newspaper down onto the table. Her mouth fell open:

Ten black-and-white photographs filled the whole of the front page, nine showing wizards' faces and the tenth, a witch's. The page was titled with:

MASS BREAKOUT FROM AZKABAN - MINISTRY FEARS BLACK IS "RALLYING POINT" FOR OLD DEATH EATERS

Some of the people in the photographs were silently jeering; others were tapping their fingers on the frame of their pictures, looking insolent. Each picture was captioned with a name and the crime for which the person had been sent to Azkaban.

Antonin Dolohov, read the legend beneath a wizard with a long, pale, twisted face who was sneering up at them, convicted of the brutal murders of Gideon and Fabian Prewett.

Augustus Rookwood, said the caption beneath a pockmarked man with greasy hair who was leaning against the edge of his picture, looking bored, convicted of leaking Ministry of Magic Secrets to He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.

Allie's eyes travelled down to the picture of the witch. She had long, dark hair that looked unkempt and straggly in the picture and glared up at Allison through heavily lidded eyes, an arrogant, disdainful smile playing around her thin mouth.

She had looked very pretty in the picture in Kreacher's little shack in the kitchen, but it seemed as though her years at Azkaban had taken most of her beauty.

Bellatrix Lestrange, convicted of the torture and permanent incapacitation of Frank and Alice Longbottom.

Allison's stomach turned and she glanced at Neville a couple of seats down the table, laughing at something Seamus had said. He had no idea. Quickly, her eyes travelled back towards the article underneath the pictures, saying that the mass break-out of Azkaban was surely related to Sirius, who had fled two and a half years earlier.

"There you are, Harry," Ron said, looking awestruck. "That's why he was happy last night..."

"I don't believe this," Harry snarled, "Fudge is blaming the breakout on Sirius?"

"It's the easiest option, isn't it? He won't admit that he's in the wrong, so he'll just pin it on Sirius..." said Allison.

"Right," Hermione said bitterly. "He can hardly say, 'Sorry everyone, Dumbledore warned me this might happen, the Azkaban guards have joined Lord Voldemort and now Voldemort's worst supporters have broken out too.' I mean, he's spent a good six months telling everyone you and Dumbledore are liars, hasn't he?"

Hermione ripped open the newspaper and began to read the report inside while Allison looked around the Great Hall. She could not understand why the other students were not looking scared or at least discussing the terrible piece of news on the front page, but very few of them took the newspaper every day like Hermione.

There they all were, talking about homework and Quidditch and who knew what other rubbish, and outside these walls ten more Death Eaters had swollen Voldemort's ranks...

She glanced up at the staff table. It was a different story here: Dumbledore and Professor McGonagall were deep in conversation, both looking extremely grave. Professor Sprout had the Prophet propped against a bottle of ketchup and was reading the front page with such concentration that she was not noticing the gentle drip of egg yolk falling into her lap from her stationary spoon.