Adventures of Harriet Potter

Beauxbatons and Durmstrang

Early next morning, Harriet woke with a plan fully formed in her mind, as though her sleeping brain had been working on it all night. She got up, dressed in the pale dawn light, left the dormitory without waking Hermione, and went back down to the deserted common room. Here she took a piece of parchment from the table upon which her Ancient Runes homework still lay and wrote the following letter:

Dear Sirius,
I reckon I just imagined my scar hurting, I was half asleep when I wrote to you last time. There's no point coming back, everything's fine here. Don't worry about me, my head feels completely normal.
Harriet.

She then climbed out of the portrait hole, up through the silent castle (held up only briefly by Peeves, who tried to overturn a large vase on her halfway along the fourth-floor corridor), finally arriving at the Owlery, which was situated at the top of West Tower. The Owlery was a circular stone room, rather cold and drafty, because none of the windows had glass in them. The floor was entirely covered in straw, owl droppings, and the regurgitated skeletons of mice and voles. Hundreds upon hundreds of owls of every breed imaginable were nestled here on perches that rose right up to the top of the tower, nearly all of them asleep, though here and there a round amber eye glared at Harriet. She spotted Hedwig nestled between a barn owl and a tawny, and hurried over to her, sliding a little on the dropping-strewn floor.
It took her a while to persuade her to wake up and then to look at her, as she kept shuffling around on her perch, showing her her tail. She was evidently still furious about her lack of gratitude the previous night. In the end, it was Harriet suggesting she might be too tired, and that perhaps she would ask Ron to borrow Pigwidgeon, that made her stick out her leg and allow her to tie the letter to it. "Just find him, all right?" Harriet said, stroking her back as she carried her on her arm to one of the holes in the wall. "Before the dementors do."
She nipped her finger, perhaps rather harder than she would ordinarily have done, but hooted softly in a reassuring sort of way all the same. Then she spread her wings and took off into the sunrise. Harriet watched her fly out of sight with the familiar feeling of unease back in her stomach. She had been so sure that Sirius's reply would alleviate her worries rather than increasing them. "That was a lie, Harriet," said Hermione sharply over breakfast, when she told her and Ron what he had done. "You didn't imagine your scar hurting and you know it."
"So what?" said Harriet. "He's not going back to Azkaban because of me." Determined to make sure he didn't, while reigning in her temper as she was dealing with Morgana's little gift. "Drop it," said Ron sharply to Hermione as she opened her mouth to argue some more, and for once, Hermione heeded him, and fell silent. Harriet did her best not to worry about Sirius over the next couple of weeks. True, she could not stop herself from looking anxiously around every morning when the post owls arrived, nor, late at night before she went to sleep, prevent herself from seeing horrible visions of Sirius, cornered by dementors down some dark London street, but betweentimes she tried to keep her mind off her godfather. She wished she still had Quidditch to distract her; nothing worked so well on a troubled mind as a good, hard training session. On the other hand, their lessons were becoming more difficult and demanding than ever before, particularly Moody's Defense Against the Dark Arts.
To their surprise, Professor Moody had announced that he would be putting the Imperius Curse on each of them in turn, to demonstrate its power and to see whether they could resist its effects. "But — but you said it's illegal, Professor," said Hermione uncertainly as Moody cleared away the desks with a sweep of his wand, leaving a large clear space in the middle of the room. "You said — to use it against another human was —"
"Dumbledore wants you taught what it feels like," said Moody, his magical eye swiveling onto Hermione and fixing her with an eerie, unblinking stare. "If you'd rather learn the hard way — when someone's putting it on you so they can control you completely — fine by me. You're excused. Off you go." He pointed one gnarled finger toward the door. Hermione went very pink and muttered something about not meaning that she wanted to leave. Harriet and Ron grinned at each other. They knew Hermione would rather eat bubotuber pus than miss such an important lesson.
Moody began to beckon students forward in turn and put the Imperius Curse upon them. Harriet watched as, one by one, her classmates did the most extraordinary things under its influence. Dean Thomas hopped three times around the room, singing the national anthem. Lavender Brown imitated a squirrel. Neville performed a series of quite astonishing gymnastics he would certainly not have been capable of in his normal state. Not one of them seemed to be able to fight off the curse, and each of them recovered only when Moody had removed it.
"Potter," Moody growled, "you next." Harriet moved forward into the middle of the classroom, into the space that Moody had cleared of desks. Moody raised his wand, pointed it at Harriet, and said, "Imperio!" It was the most wonderful feeling. Harriet felt a floating sensation as every thought and worry in her head was wiped gently away, leaving nothing but a vague, untraceable happiness. She stood there feeling immensely relaxed, only dimly aware of everyone watching her. And then she heard Mad-Eye Moody's voice, echoing in some distant chamber of her empty brain: Jump onto the desk . . . jump onto the desk. . . . 
Harriet bent her knees obediently, preparing to spring. Jump onto the desk. . . . Why, though? Another voice had awoken in the back of her brain. Stupid thing to do, really, said the voice. Jump onto the desk. . . .  No, I don't think I will, thanks, said the other voice, a little more firmly . . . no, I don't really want to. . . . Jump! NOW! The next thing Harriet felt was considerable pain. She had both jumped and tried to prevent herself from jumping — the result was that she'd smashed headlong into the desk, knocking it over, and, by the feeling in her legs, fractured both her kneecaps.
"Now, that's more like it!" growled Moody's voice, and suddenly, Harriet felt the empty, echoing feeling in her head disappear. She remembered exactly what was happening, and the pain in her knees seemed to double.
"Look at that, you lot . . . Potter fought! She fought it, and she damn near beat it! We'll try that again, Potter, and the rest of you, pay attention — watch her eyes, that's where you see it — very good, Potter, very good indeed! They'll have trouble controlling you!" Moody said, his voice seemed to barely hold back disappointment for some reason. "The way he talks," Harriet muttered as she hobbled out of the Defense Against the Dark Arts class an hour later (Moody had insisted on putting Harriet through her paces four times in a row, until Harriet could throw off the curse entirely), "you'd think we were all going to be attacked any second."
"Yeah, I know," said Ron, who was skipping on every alternate step. He had had much more difficulty with the curse than Harriet, though Moody assured him the effects would wear off by lunchtime. "Talk about paranoid . . ." Ron glanced nervously over his shoulder to check that Moody was definitely out of earshot and went on. "No wonder they were glad to get shot of him at the Ministry. Did you hear him telling Seamus what he did to that witch who shouted 'Boo' behind him on April Fools' Day? And when are we supposed to read up on resisting the Imperius Curse with everything else we've got to do?"
All the fourth years had noticed a definite increase in the amount of work they were required to do this term. Professor McGonagall explained why, when the class gave a particularly loud groan at the amount of Transfiguration homework she had assigned. "You are now entering a most important phase of your magical education!" she told them, her eyes glinting dangerously behind her square spectacles. "Your Ordinary Wizarding Levels are drawing closer —"
"We don't take O.W.L.s till fifth year!" said Dean Thomas indignantly. "Maybe not, Thomas, but believe me, you need all the preparation you can get! Miss Granger and Miss Potter remain the only persons in this class who have managed to turn a hedgehog into a satisfactory pincushion. I might remind you that your pincushion, Thomas, still curls up in fright if anyone approaches it with a pin!" Hermione, who had turned rather pink again, seemed to be trying not to look too pleased with herself.
Harriet and Ron were deeply amused when Professor Trelawney told Ron that they had received top marks for their homework in his next Divination class. She apparently had read out large portions of their predictions, commending them for their unflinching acceptance of the horrors in store for them — but they were less amused when she apparently asked them to do the same thing for the month after next; both of them were running out of ideas for catastrophes.
Meanwhile Professor Binns, the ghost who taught History of Magic, had them writing weekly essays on the goblin rebellions of the eighteenth century. Professor Snape was forcing them to research antidotes. They took this one seriously, as he had hinted that he might be poisoning one of them before Christmas to see if their antidote worked. Professor Flitwick had asked them to read three extra books in preparation for their lesson on Summoning Charms. Even Hagrid was adding to their workload. The Blast-Ended Skrewts were growing at a remarkable pace given that nobody had yet discovered what they ate. Hagrid was delighted, and as part of their "project," suggested that they come down to his hut on alternate evenings to observe the skrewts and make notes on their extraordinary behavior.
"I will not," said Draco Malfoy flatly when Hagrid had proposed this with the air of Father Christmas pulling an extra-large toy out of his sack. "I see enough of these foul things during lessons, thanks." Hagrid's smile faded off his face. "Yeh'll do wha' yer told," he growled, "or I'll be takin' a leaf outta Professor Moody's book. . . . I hear yeh made a good ferret, Malfoy." The Gryffindors roared with laughter. Malfoy flushed with anger, but apparently the memory of Moody's punishment was still sufficiently painful to stop him from retorting. Harriet, Ron, and Hermione returned to the castle at the end of the lesson in high spirits; seeing Hagrid put down Malfoy was particularly satisfying, especially because Malfoy had done his very best to get Hagrid sacked the previous year. When they arrived in the entrance hall, they found themselves unable to proceed owing to the large crowd of students congregated there, all milling around a large sign that had been erected at the foot of the marble staircase. Ron, the tallest of the three, stood on tiptoe to see over the heads in front of them and read the sign aloud to the other two: