“Mr. Potter, I’m a reporter from the Daily Prophet—what is your personal view on the charges currently being brought against you by the Ministry of Magic?”

“Mr. Potter, I’m from France. Can you tell us—what was your motive for attacking an innocent Muggle?”

“Was this a premeditated murder, or did you simply find it amusing?”

“What role did Mr. Weasley and Miss Granger play in this killing? Were they your accomplices?”

“As the legendary figure who defeated He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, how do you feel about your current situation? Has surviving one impossible thing made you feel entitled to—”

“Say something, Mr. Potter—how do you intend to defend yourself?”

The questions came from everywhere at once. Faces pressed in from every side—flushed, bright-eyed, twisted with the hysterical excitement. Cameras flashed. Quills scratched. Elbows jabbed for position.

Under the tight escort of Order members who had formed a human barrier on all sides—Harry, Ron, and Hermione fought their way through the army of reporters. Past the Auror barricade erected in a tense line around the Fountain of Magical Brethren and at last into the shelter of the lift hall, where the doors behind them swallowed the worst of the noise.

“Harry! Harry! Harry!”

Sirius’s face swam before Harry’s eyes like something seen through disturbed water. He was speaking and the words reached Harry’s ears as though they were travelling a very great distance to get there, passing through layers of something thick and muffling before they arrived.

“Don’t let these reporters frighten you, any of you—they’re only here for the spectacle. They don’t matter. None of what they said in there matters. Do you hear me?”

The Aurors guided the entire group into a lift car that had been cleared and held for them alone. The gilded lattice slid shut with a sound that, in the sudden comparative quiet, seemed very loud.

Ding—

The car began to descend.

Sirius’s face had gone ashen. He looked at the three of them and what he saw there made something flicker behind his eyes.

Because whether it was Harry, Ron, or Hermione—all three stood as though someone had cast a Petrificus on them where they stood. Blank-faced, glassy-eyed, staring at Sirius with expressions of complete and absolute emptiness, unable to produce a single word between them.

“This won’t do, you three—”

Remus moved forward, his expression sharpening into alarm. “You must keep your heads clear. All of you. Answer every question the Wizengamot puts to you—precisely, and carefully. Don’t let them lead you. Don’t rush. Think before you speak.”

“And don’t volunteer anything they haven’t specifically asked for,” Kingsley added. His voice was the steadiest in the car. “If a question can be answered in ten words, answer it in five.”

“And don’t you dare be afraid.” Moody’s growl cut across everything else. “You have to believe you’re innocent—because you are!.”

The remaining Order members pressed in, each adding their piece of a fragment of advice, a word of encouragement. The words layered over each other in the close air of the descending car, overlapping and blurring together until they became a single indistinguishable sound.

Harry heard none of it.

‘Murder’

The word sat in the center of his mind like something that had been dropped from a great height and had driven itself deep into the ground.

How could the Ministry charge him with something so monstrous?

“Don’t worry, Ron!”

Mr. Weasley had seized Ron by both shoulders. His voice was hoarse. “Your mother and I both know you haven’t done anything stupid. Fudge and Umbridge cannot touch you for something you didn’t do. Bryan and Dumbledore will both be present at the hearing—they’ll speak for you!”

“Dumbledore’s had half the Order on standby, youngsters!”

Moody had turned his full attention to Harry now, advancing until he was close enough that Harry could see every scar on that face. His magical eye had gone very still, locked on Harry’s face.

“Understand? We will not stand by and watch the Minister run roughshod over you. If it comes to it, we won’t hesitate to use force!”

That, unexpectedly, was the thing that reached him. Of everything said in that lift, it was Moody’s blunt statement of readiness that found the gap in whatever had closed over Harry’s mind and let a thin thread of something through.

A flicker of light returned to his eyes. He gave a small, stiff nod.

After that, time and space seemed to come apart at the seams.

Later, Harry would not be able to account for the interval between the lift and the courtroom. He remembered stepping into the gleaming, gilded Atrium via the old red telephone box and then, in what felt like the space between one heartbeat and the next, he was standing before a pair of massive iron doors, threaded through with thick veins of rust.

Ron and Hermione were still at his sides. But when he turned, the Order members had vanished. Only Kingsley remained, standing a pace behind them.

“Go on in, you three.”

Even the normally unshakeable Kingsley could not keep the worry entirely from his eyes. He nodded toward the iron doors.

“It’s in there. But I can’t follow you.”

Harry gave a hollow nod. His hand reached for the cold iron handle, and the cold of it went up through his palm and into his wrist and seemed to travel the whole length of his arm before it stopped.

He turned the handle.

The moment the door swung open, a wave of air hit him full in the face. Harry jolted, the shock of it sharp enough to cut through the fog.

The muffled sounds that had been following him like a headache since the lift fell away all at once, and the world snapped back into sharp clarity.

He turned to look at his two best friends.

The despair on Ron’s face was almost too painful to witness. Hermione, though—she seemed to have surfaced from whatever fog had overtaken her. When she caught Harry’s eye, she said nothing. She only managed a small, bleak smile.

The walls of the courtroom were cleaved from black stone it. The torchlight was dim and cold.

The three of them went inside in a ragged line, and the scene that greeted them was not quite what Harry had been bracing himself for.

He had imagined fifty-odd witches and wizards arranged in their tiers, robed in plum and severity, all of them turning to fix the three with the kind of hard, imposing stare.

Instead, those fifty-odd figures — all robed in deep plum, a silver W embroidered precisely on each left breast—had their attention fixed elsewhere entirely.

The majority were watching, two figures at the front of the chamber who appeared to be in the advanced stages of a disagreement that had long since passed polite. A few others were glancing up with a poorly concealed unease.

“I stand by what I said, Cornelius!”

The witch arguing her case with such fierce, controlled composure was Amelia Bones.

All three of them had seen her at the Triwizard Tournament, and her name had come up more than once in conversation since. Her reputation, it seemed, was worth more than the rest of the Ministry combined.

“There is not one clause in the procedural charter of the Wizengamot, not one—that permits the deployment of Dementors during an official questioning.”

‘Dementors’

Even Harry not just Ron—nearly choked on his next breath.

Was the Ministry planning to break them in front of a live audience?

“You’re taking that entirely out of context, Amelia. I never said I intended to use the Dementors!”

The voice that followed belonged to the man Harry had come to despise most: Minister for Magic Cornelius Fudge.

“Having them present is purely a precautionary measure—in the event of an unforeseen incident!”

“An unforeseen incident,” Amelia repeated the phrase back, her voice cutting like a blade.

“I don’t know what incident you’re anticipating, Cornelius. But let me make sure I understand your precautionary measures correctly.” Her voice was steady and precise.

“You have summoned Dementors and positioned them in this chamber. You have simultaneously insisted that no witch or wizard attending this hearing may carry a wand. I might choose, generously, not to ask which specific law authorizes either of those two decisions.”

She paused. “But I will ask you this—has it occurred to you that the Dementors who were contracted to guard Azkaban oversaw a mass breakout less than one month ago? That following that event, we no longer hold the contract that bound them to Ministry authority? That if they no longer answer to the Ministry—”

“Absolute rubbish!” Fudge’s face had gone a terrible colour. “The Dementors always obey the Minister for Magic! Always have, always will—”

“Dementors…”

Harry heard himself murmur the word without having made a decision to speak.

“Up above, Harry,” Ron said.

It was the first time Ron himself had remembered he could speak. His voice floated out loose and slightly ghostlike, as though it had been kept somewhere it wasn’t quite sure how to get back from.

Harry looked up.

The cold that rose from somewhere deep inside him nearly froze his soul solid.

Dementors. Far too many to count with any ease, and Harry’s eyes did not particularly want to try.

The creatures drifted beneath the ceiling in their slow, soundless way.

In the dim torchlight they were almost indistinguishable from the dark itself, shadow moving through shadow, and the only reason they had not yet affected the witches and wizards below was immediately apparent: a thin membrane of black-tinged light had been stretched beneath the dome, containing them.

Harry lowered his gaze before it could absorb any more of what was above, and forced himself to take in the rest of the room.

Security was stifling in a way that had clearly been designed to communicate something beyond mere caution.

In every shadowed corner—every angle a casual eye might be tempted to dismiss or overlook stood an Auror, hard-faced and very still. They had clearly been granted special privilege to carry their wands.

And the point at which all those Auror gazes converged was the front of the hearing bench, where two figures sat in a stillness of their own that was entirely different from the Aurors’.

Professor Dumbledore. And Professor Watson.

Something inside Harry—frozen since the moment he’d arrived began, haltingly, to move again.

Like most of the Wizengamot members, both professors were watching the argument between Amelia and the Minister. But unlike the others, they were utterly calm as though it had not yet occurred to them that the oppressive security measures in this room had been arranged specifically with them in mind.

Then a familiar figure rose to his feet.

Ludo Bagman.

He seemed to be the first person to notice that the three of them had entered.

Ludo didn’t appear to care in the least about their status as suspects. He gave them a warm, easy smile, then carefully stepped past the witches and wizards in his row, made his way to Dumbledore and Watson, and leaned in to murmur something, gesturing in the direction of the three of them.

But to Harry’s sharp disappointment, neither Dumbledore nor Professor Watson glanced over.

Not even once.

It wasn’t.

“Minister—”

A witch sitting in the shadow cast by Fudge’s standing figure rose to her feet. Her gaze found the three of them, lingering on Hermione for a beat longer than the rest, and a look of satisfied relish crept into those bulging, toad-like eyes.

In a voice that made Harry’s skin crawl—sweet, soft, saccharine—she said:

“The three defendants have arrived. I wonder—might we begin?”

Scrape!

A wave of shifting benches, as fifty-odd members of the Wizengamot turned the full consolidated weight of their attention away from the argument at the front of the chamber and onto Harry, Ron, and Hermione, standing just inside the iron door.

Dumbledore and Professor Watson were the only exceptions. They were still talking quietly between themselves, and still had not looked over.

A swell of resentment rose in Harry’s chest.

The last time he had been in the same room as Professor Watson was the morning he had been brought to Grimmauld Place.

More than twenty days had passed since then. Twenty days in which he had been left to pace the house, shut out of Order meetings, told to stay inside, watched his godfather disappear for days at a time on errands he was not permitted to explain, and counted down the hours to a hearing that might end with him never seeing the outside of Azkaban again.

And not once—not one single time—in twenty days had Professor Watson sought him out.

“You’ve arrived.”

Cornelius Fudge turned away from Amelia at last. He cast one final glance at the two composed figures at the front of the bench—Professor Watson and Albus Dumbledore, neither showing any sign of yielding—and drew a slow, deep breath.

His cold gaze settled on the three small, silent figures before him. He pointed toward the center of the room, where three chairs waited, each fitted with chains.

“Sit down.”

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