The road that led up to the Hog and Hammer was one that most people had, sensibly, forgotten. It ran between two low hills on a stretch of moor that the mapmakers had abandoned to the bracken. The sign over the door had faded until the name on it was anyone's guess. Weeds had come up between the stones of the path. A crow, watching from a stunted rowan tree, made a remark about the state of things and flew away.
Inside, the barkeep, who answered to the name Murk, though the name was not, strictly speaking, his, was wiping a glass he had already wiped twice that afternoon. It had been a slow week. The last customer had come in on a Tuesday, and this was, if he had counted correctly, a Friday. He was in no hurry to get to Saturday.
The door pushed open.
Murk very nearly dropped the glass. He set it down instead and took hold of the bar with both hands. He had not heard footsteps on the path, not one, and this was an establishment where the sound of an approaching customer generally arrived a full minute before the customer did, because the path was gravel, and nobody crossed gravel quietly.
The figure in the doorway was cloaked. That was the first thing Murk noticed. The second was that the cloak was so dark against the evening light that he could not work out where the cloak ended and the doorway began.
"Evenin'," he said cautiously.
The figure did not answer at once. They stepped inside, and the hood turned slowly from the scarred tables to the candle stubs to the great smear on the mirror behind the bar, like a landlord pricing the place for sale. Then they crossed to the table furthest from the door and sat down. There was a small delicate chime from one of their sleeves as they moved. Bangles, Murk thought, after a moment of listening. Several of them.
The figure raised a single gloved finger.
Murk went. He did not ask himself why he was going, because to ask would have been to consider not going, and he had already decided he would rather be a barkeep who obeyed a raised finger than a barkeep who did not.
"Sir?" he ventured, from a polite distance.
The figure turned the hood towards him. Inside it Murk could make out the tip of a chin, and nothing else. When they spoke, the voice was low and dry, as if it had not been used much lately.
"Tea, please."
"We don't... we don't really do tea, sir."
"You have a kettle."
"Well... yes..."
"Then we're most of the way there, aren't we." The figure said it kindly, the way a teacher says it to a child who has announced he cannot do long division. "Lemon, if you have it. Two sugars. The lemon matters more than the sugar. If it's a choice, the lemon."
"Right you are, sir," said Murk, who was, he realised with mild horror, actually going to make the tea.
"And take your time. I shall be here some hours."
He shuffled off to the back room, where he owned one kettle and two lemons in a state of advanced decline. He examined the lemons. They would, at a stretch, do. He put the kettle on and stood watching it, wondering whether the strange calm in the front of the house was likely to last.
When he brought the tea out, the figure took the cup, tasted it, and said, "Very nice. Thank you." Murk had never once been thanked in that tavern. He almost dropped the tray.
Time went by. The figure drank the tea slowly, then a second cup, then a third, and the light in the crusted windows began to fail. Once or twice Murk tried to busy himself with the affairs of the bar, but the affairs of the bar were not extensive, and his eye kept drifting back to the far table, where the hooded figure sat and did not move.
By the time evening had properly settled in, Murk had polished the same three glasses seven times each and had begun to hope the figure might simply finish the pot and go.
The figure raised their head.
A single note sounded high above the moor, like a great bell struck once, very far up. It was gone almost before it arrived. A heartbeat later a flash lit the grime on the windows, silver-white, and that was gone too.
"There you are," said the figure softly.
They rose, and set the empty cup down dead in the centre of the table. At the door they paused and looked back at Murk.
"Lock this behind me, if you would."
"Sir?"
"There is going to be a great deal of noise outside in the next few minutes," said the figure calmly. "You will not want to hear it. Lock the door. Draw the shutters. Take yourself into the back room and pour yourself a drink. Do not, whatever else you do, open that door again until morning. Are we agreed?"
Murk found himself nodding.
"The coin is on the table," the figure said. "You have been most obliging."
They stepped out.
Murk did not, at first, do any of the things he had been told to do. He stood with a tea towel bunched in one hand while a minute went by. Then he did what any man in his position would have done. He shuffled across the floor and leaned up to peer through the least filthy of the three windows.
He could see almost nothing through it: a strip of path, a shred of moor, a corner of sky the colour of stewed tea. Then a dark shape rose across his line of sight. Upwards. At a speed and angle that no walking man ought to manage.
Murk fell back from the window. He fell all the way down. He crawled on his elbows, fast, into the back room, shut the door, sat with his back against it, and reached for the bottle he kept for emergencies. He had not needed it in eleven years. He was very glad he had kept it.
Above the moor, the phoenix had arrived.
He had come, as the message had promised, from a wooded valley three hundred miles away, where (so someone had written to Albus Dumbledore, and Albus Dumbledore had believed the letter) an abandoned young phoenix was crying alone in a clearing. Fawkes had been sent to see whether it was true. Dumbledore had once or twice in his long life managed to leave a wounded creature to fend for itself. He had never yet managed to leave an abandoned young one. It was, in the figure's private opinion, his single most useful weakness.
The figure hung in the air a comfortable distance away and raised a gloved hand.
"Hello, you," they said. "I've been waiting a long time."
Fawkes hovered. He tilted his head one way, then the other, like an animal who has just understood that he has been very badly misled. He did not sing.
"There's no lost chick," the figure said. "There's no clearing. There is, I'm afraid, only me. Which brings us to what I need from you."
The phoenix made a low sound in his throat.
"Yes," said the figure. "I'm afraid so."
The ball of light that began on the figure's palm was small. No larger than a coin. Fawkes, who understood magic rather better than most creatures who used it, did not fly at the figure and attack, which is what a young phoenix would have done. He circled instead, keeping his distance, one golden eye fixed on the growing ball of light.
"Come along, then," said the figure encouragingly.
Fawkes came.
He came fast. A ribbon of flame left his beak and crossed the space between them quicker than a blink. The figure raised their other hand, palm out, and the air in front of them thickened; the ribbon struck it, slid sideways, and dropped into the bracken below, where a small patch burned sullenly for a minute and gave up.
"Not bad," said the figure. "You've done that before."
Another ribbon. Another thickening. The flame skidded off in the opposite direction and burned a second patch of bracken. In his back room, Murk heard a distant hiss and took a very large pull from his bottle.
"You can do that all night," said the figure, "and it will make no difference. I would rather you didn't."
Fawkes evidently did not consider this good advice. He flicked his head hard, and a dozen streaks of gold shot at the figure from a dozen directions at once. It very nearly worked. The figure raised six small shields of thickened air in the same half-second, in a sequence they had rehearsed, alone, in a room, many years before. Six streaks slid away. Four died in the air. Two got through. One caught the figure across the shoulder of the cloak, and the other went past their ear and burned a small hole in the hood.
The figure paused.
"Now that was excellent," they said. "Where did you learn it? Not from him. He's never had the imagination."
Fawkes did not answer. He was looking, very deliberately, over the figure's shoulder: north, towards home. The figure understood at once. He was measuring the distance for a phoenix's leaving, and phoenixes, once they have decided to leave, leave rather absolutely.
The figure snapped their fingers.
Out of the heather below rose a wall of grey, smooth as poured lead and utterly silent. Fawkes had plainly never seen anything like it, because he did the wrong thing: he tried to outclimb it. The wall climbed faster. He turned along it, hunting for an edge. The wall curved with him. He tried sheer stubborn speed, and the wall matched that too.
"I'm sorry," said the figure.
Fawkes did what a brave and desperate creature does. He turned and flew straight into the wall.
For an instant the grey swallowed him whole. Then it let him out the other side, several feet lower, with one wing bent at an angle wings do not take. He had broken through. It had cost him most of what he had left.
"Oh," said the figure quietly. "You are a brave thing."
The ball on the figure's palm had been growing all this while. It was the size of a grapefruit now, and it had stopped being light in any ordinary sense. It looked as though a small piece of night sky had been caught and compressed. The figure drew back their arm.
"Hush now," they said gently, and threw.
Fawkes raised a shield of golden fire. The thrown thing went straight through it. It struck, and expanded, and swallowed the phoenix from beak to tail, and inside it there began a series of muffled sounds like small explosions going off one after another, at which point Murk, in his back room, put both hands over his ears and kept them there.
The light hung in the air for the better part of a minute. Then it faded.
Fawkes hung where it had left him. His chest rose, stopped, and rose again. His eyes were nearly shut. He was only just staying up.
The figure drifted forward, hand out, palm up, to take what they had come for.
Fire got there first.
It leapt from the crown of the phoenix's head, a sputtering flare, and it doubled, and doubled again, and in the space of a breath there was a hot bright column shivering in the air where the bird had been. A phoenix's burning day is a slow and orderly affair. This was a house fire.
The figure snatched their hand back.
The column burned for three heartbeats. Then it went out, and the evening was suddenly very dark, and there was no phoenix in it anywhere.
For a long moment the figure did not move. They looked at the place where Fawkes had been. They looked at their own empty palm.
"Damn," said the figure, quite quietly.
Below, the moor buckled.
A stone at twenty paces jumped three feet into the air and came down. The stunted rowan split from crown to root without a sound. Half an acre of heather went white, and then slowly purple again. Three hundred yards away a slate slid off the roof of the Hog and Hammer and cracked into three neat pieces on the flagstones by the door.
Then the figure turned once in the air, and, with a crack much deeper and softer than any Apparition Murk had ever heard, they were gone.
The moor lay still.
Murk did not come out of the back room until well after sunrise. He never told anyone what he had seen through the window. But from that night until the day he retired, he kept a bottle of good whisky under the bar, and allowed himself one small measure at closing time, every night, without fail.
* * *
The next morning, two hundred miles to the south, the sun came up over Little Whinging.
It rose late in Privet Drive; the tall roof of Number Six ate the first half hour of the morning, so that by the time the light reached Number Four the milk had been delivered, the paperboy had come and gone, and Petunia Dursley had been at her front window for a quarter of an hour, observing the neighbours. Petunia observed the neighbours the way other people watched television.
Harry Potter, meanwhile, was in the garden.
He was doing the weeding. He had done the weeding four days a week for most of the summer holidays, and had reached the point where he could tell sixteen kinds of weed apart by leaf alone. He had never asked for the skill, but it was better than being indoors.
He knelt on a piece of foam that Petunia had bought for herself and passed on to him in one of her small acts of half-charity, with the remark that if he was going to spend his summer on her lawn he could at least not wear a hole in it. At present he was working a very long dandelion out of the border. It was resisting. He was resisting back. The morning was already too warm for the hour, and a bead of sweat ran down his temple, past his ear, and into the collar of a T-shirt he had owned since he was thirteen and which now fitted him nowhere except the shoulders.
He was thinking about not very much. He had decided, some weeks ago, that this was the best available thing to think about. Whenever he thought about anything else (the letters that arrived once a week and said nothing, the newspaper he had stopped reading, the silence from Dumbledore that had lasted all summer), the morning became rapidly harder to get through. So he thought about the dandelion.
It came free at last, with most of its root. He dropped it in the green council bin and reached for the next one.
"You're losing," said a voice from the wall.
Harry looked up fast. A girl was sitting on the low brick wall at the front boundary of Number Four: his age, brown hair escaping its tie, one foot swinging. He knew the face, and a moment later the name arrived with it, though it took longer than it should have. He could not, if pressed, have repeated a single thing she had ever said.
"Lily Moon."
"You remembered!" She looked genuinely delighted. "I would've bet money you didn't know my name. Four years in the same common room!"
"What are you doing here?" It came out ruder than he'd meant, so he added, "I mean, I've never seen you round here before."
"We moved here at Easter, Church Road, behind the chemist's. It's not far." She went past Easter quickly and was on to the next thing by the end of the sentence. Harry, who went past things quickly himself all the time, noticed anyway. "You set my planter on fire once."
"That was Seamus."
"It was you."
"It was mostly Seamus."
"I've still got the pot," said Lily. "The scorch mark's shaped like Wales."
"Why would you keep it?"
"Because you set it on fire! It's the most interesting thing I own."
She watched him wrestle the next dandelion for about ten seconds, and then made a noise like a kettle reaching the boil.
"Oh, stop, stop. I can't watch this, you're rubbish at it. Budge up." She knelt down on the other side of his foam mat and pinched a small thistle out of the soil, low down, between finger and thumb. "You have to get under the crown, see? Not the leaves. The leaves just come off, that's what they do."
"Plants don't-"
"Try it."
He tried it on the next dandelion. It came up whole: the entire root, five inches of it, pale as a worm.
"Look at that," said Lily, with real reverence. "That's a prize-winner, that is."
He felt more pleased about it than the situation strictly deserved.
"Where'd you learn all this?"
"On my Aunt Margaret's allotment. I did a whole summer on it when I was ten. Hard labour." She dropped a thistle in the bin. "I lost a bet."
"What bet?"
"I'm not telling you that."
"Right."
"I bet her I could say calabrese five times fast," she said, immediately. "And I couldn't. But nobody can. Nobody on earth can. It's a rigged bet."
"Cala-"
"Don't you dare."
"Calabrese, calabrese, cala-" Harry stopped.
"See!" She looked vindicated. "Rigged."
They worked their way down the border. She talked most of the time: about Mrs. Prentice's marrow, which she thought was too big to be honest; about the chemist on Church Road, who she was fairly sure sold the same cough syrup under three different names; about her aunt's opinion of the local bakery, which was long. Harry mostly listened, and pulled weeds, and realised at some point, with a jolt, that a whole hour had gone by without him thinking about anything at all.
Then she went quiet.
He noticed the quiet at once, because it was the first one all morning.
"Okay. Serious thing now," she said. "I'm rubbish at serious, so I'm just going to say it, all right? Do you get the Prophet here?"
His stomach tightened. And there it was: the reason. Nobody just talked to him this summer. "So that's why you stopped," he said. "Come and see the famous nutter doing the weeding. Check if I'm off my head yet."
"No! I stopped because..." She waved at the border. "You were losing to a dandelion." A beat too late, she winced. "Sorry. Not funny. I joke when I'm nervous, ignore me." She took a breath. "They've been writing about you. All summer. Little things."
"What sort of things?"
"Sneaky ones. They never actually come out and call you a liar. You were 'seen looking distraught' at King's Cross. The Ministry 'declined to confirm your account'. Dumbledore's 'judgement has been questioned'. Page four. Page seven. Never the front page." She yanked a weed. "My aunt takes it for the crossword. And about a week ago she looked up over breakfast and said, 'That poor Potter boy needs help.' And she didn't mean help fighting anyone."
Harry pulled the next dandelion very slowly. Four weeks. Ron's letters said we're quite busy, can't say much. Hermione's said we'll explain when we see you. Every week, letters that took the trouble to arrive and then said nothing. And not one of them had mentioned that the entire wizarding world was being taught, four column inches at a time, that he was off his head.
"You didn't know any of that, did you," said Lily, watching him.
"I knew some of it." The dandelion had come apart in his fist. "Doesn't matter."
"Well, it sort of does."
"It doesn't matter," said Harry, "because there's nothing I can do about it from a flowerbed in Little Whinging, is there."
"No," she agreed. "Probably not." And then, instead of leaving it decently alone: "Is it true, though? What you said happened in June?"
For the second time that morning, she wasn't joking at all. Nobody had asked him that all summer. Not the Dursleys, who didn't want to know; not Ron or Hermione, who already knew; not Dumbledore, who hadn't written. She just asked it, looking at him, waiting.
"Yeah," said Harry. "It's true."
"Right," said Lily. She nodded, once, and picked up her trowel. "Well, they're all idiots. My aunt says so, and she does that crossword in pen."
Harry laughed. The sound surprised him. It had been a while.
They finished the border around eight. She stood, dusted her jeans, and handed him the trowel.
"I'm at the park most mornings, the one on Wisteria Walk, by the swings. Tennish." She climbed back onto the wall and paused at the top. "You don't have to."
"I know I don't have to."
"Ten, then," said Lily Moon, as though he'd said something else entirely, and dropped down the other side, and was gone.
Harry stayed kneeling in the border. Then he set the trowel down and flexed his right hand; his fingers, he discovered, had cramped around the handle.
Behind him, Petunia rapped twice on the window glass.
He picked the trowel back up and started on the next section without turning round.
Two hundred miles away, on a moor whose name Harry would never learn, a scorched circle in the heather was cooling. Of the phoenix who had made it there was no sign at all. He was travelling. He had not yet decided where.