HARRY POTTER STORY: Lions in snake den

Part 41

The carriages from Hogsmeade station moved through the darkness with their usual unhurried certainty, the Thestrals pulling them invisible and silent up the long road toward the castle. Harry had been able to see them since his second year, though he had not known what they were until Hermione had found the reference in a Care of Magical Creatures text the previous summer and told him quietly, without making it into more than it needed to be.

He watched them now through the carriage window — the lean, dark shapes moving through the pooled light of the lanterns that lined the road — and found, as he sometimes did, a strange comfort in them. They were honest creatures. They showed themselves only to those who had seen death, which meant they could not be hidden from, and they did not pretend to be anything other than what they were.

He appreciated that more than he used to.

"You're staring at something the rest of us can't see again," Draco remarked from the seat opposite, his tone conversational rather than pointed.

"Thestrals," Harry said.

Draco absorbed this without comment. He had learned, over the past year, not to ask follow-up questions about certain things unless Harry offered them. It was one of the more quietly considerate things about him that Harry suspected most people never noticed.

Hermione, seated beside Harry, glanced out of the window in the direction he was looking and then back at her hands. She could see them too. They didn't talk about that between them very often, but it was there — a shared knowledge, another thread in the complicated weave of what they were to each other.

The castle came into view as the carriages crested the last rise, its towers lit warmly against the Highland sky. From a distance it looked exactly as it always had — ancient and permanent, the kind of place that seemed to exist slightly outside of ordinary time. Harry had loved it once with the uncomplicated devotion of someone who had never had anywhere better to compare it to.

He still loved it. That hadn't changed. But the love was different now — clearer-eyed, less innocent. He knew what the castle contained and what it concealed, who moved through its corridors with good intent and who did not. He knew the difference between Hogwarts the place and Hogwarts the institution, and he knew that this year, those two things were going to be in significant tension with each other.

The carriages rolled to a stop.

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The Great Hall received them with its customary grandeur — the enchanted ceiling showing a sky scattered with early stars, the four long tables already filling with students returning from their carriages, the candles floating at their usual heights, the general noise of four hundred young witches and wizards resuming contact with each other after a summer apart.

The Slytherin table was toward the right of the hall, and Harry led their group to it with the ease of someone who had, over the course of a year, stopped thinking of it as the wrong table. He was aware, as he always was, of the eyes that followed them — some curious, some still faintly scandalized, some calculating in ways that had more to do with politics than with house loyalty.

Fifth year Slytherins occupied their usual stretch of the table, making room with the particular efficiency of people who had agreed on seating arrangements before anyone suggested them. Harry found himself between Hermione on his left and, after a moment's natural settling of the group, Daphne on his right. Draco was across from Hermione. Blaise and Theo anchored the ends with Tracey beside Blaise, and the arrangement had the comfortable inevitability of something that had simply become true over time.

The first years were sorted — Harry watched with the mild interest of someone observing a tradition he understood thoroughly — and then Dumbledore rose to begin the start-of-term announcements.