Nothing happened for two days, which Harry found worse than something.
The heat wave thickened. Privet Drive lay stunned under it; lawns went brown, cars stood dusty, and the ice cream van's little tune, three streets over, began to sound like something losing its mind slowly. Harry did the weeding, went to the park, walked the loop, and all of it with his wand shoved down the waistband of his jeans, which Lily noticed on the first morning and did not mention until the second.
"You're carrying it everywhere now."
"Yeah."
"Because of the cold thing. The one you told me about."
"Yeah."
She looked at him for a moment, and for once didn't make anything of it at all. "Then I'll tell you if I see anything weird," she said, and went back to shelling peas into a colander, because Margaret had views about buying what you could grow.
The first of the two days was his birthday. The Dursleys observed it in the usual way, by not observing it. Pigwidgeon came to his window before it was light, towing two cards and a parcel several times his own size, and Harry opened them sitting on the bed. Ron's said Happy birthday mate, can't say much, hope you're OK. Hermione's said Happy Birthday! I'm so sorry this is short, we've been told not to, and was two lines longer than Ron's and said exactly as little. The parcel was Chocolate Frogs, from both of them, gone soft in the heat into one large frog.
Lily turned up at the park at ten with a paper bag and put it in his lap without comment. Inside was a calabrese, very large, with a bow of garden twine round the stalk.
"Happy birthday," she said. "Five times fast. Go on."
"How did you even know?"
"It was in the Prophet. Page six, under the bit about you being unstable." She sat down on the bench beside him. "Also I've grown about forty of them, and my aunt's run out of ways to cook it."
He took it home and put it in the fridge at Number Four. Aunt Petunia found it there that evening. She stood with the door open, looking at it, and then shut the door.
On the third evening, Harry walked her home.
It was nearly nine and still light, the sky gone the colour of weak tea, the heat finally loosening its grip. They cut through the alley between Magnolia Crescent and Wisteria Walk, a narrow gap between garden fences that smelled of bins and creosote, because it saved five minutes and because fifteen-year-olds do not take the long way round anything on principle, even when one of them is carrying a wand in his waistband.
Dudley was coming the other way.
He was alone, which was unusual, and pleased with himself, which was not. His gang had peeled off at the corner (Harry had heard Piers's laugh, unmistakable, like a drain), and Dudley came down the alley with the rolling walk he'd developed since taking up boxing, and stopped when he saw them, and grinned.
"Ooh," said Dudley. "Look at this."
"Leave it, Dudley."
"Out with your girlfriend." He looked at Lily with small, delighted eyes. "Does she know you talk in your sleep? I've heard you. Through the wall. Whimpering."
"Dudley-"
"'Don't kill Cedric! Don't kill Cedric!'" Dudley's voice went up into a horrible falsetto. "Who's Cedric, your boyfriend?"
"Shut up," said Harry. It came out low.
"'Mum, help me! Mum!' Does she know you cry for your mum in the night? Your dead mum? Does she-"
Several things happened then, and Harry was never afterwards able to put them in an order he trusted.
His wand was in his hand, though he had no memory of drawing it. Lily had said something sharp, one syllable. And the sky went out.
Not clouded over. Out. The tea-coloured evening died between one heartbeat and the next; the alley went black at both ends; and the heat of the day was simply gone, as if it had never been there. Frost crawled up the wheelie bin beside Harry with a sound like paper crumpling. His breath came out white.
Dudley said, in a voice entirely unlike his own, "What are you doing? Stop it. Stop it."
"I'm not doing anything. Shut up and don't move-"
The cold reached for him. He knew what it was by then; his whole body knew, two years of knowing, and he waited for the drowning to start: his mother's voice, the screaming, the green. It came. But it came muffled, as though from behind a shut door. The scream was there, and it was terrible, and it was one room away instead of inside his skull, and between him and it stood something warm that had planted itself in the doorway of him and did not intend to move.
That was new. He had no time to be grateful for it.
Because behind him, Lily made a sound he had never heard from her.
He turned. She had gone down against the fence. Not fallen; folded, knees up, arms wrapped over her head, making herself small in the way of a person who has practised it, and from inside the cage of her arms came a whisper with hardly any voice in it: "please... I didn't... please..."
"Lily..."
She didn't hear him. Wherever she was, it wasn't the alley.
Two dementors came over the fences.
They came from opposite ends, gliding a foot above the ground, ragged hems trailing, and the dark came off them like cold off ice. One turned its hooded face towards Dudley, who was blundering along the fence with his hands out in front of him, blind. The other came for Lily.
The warmth in Harry's chest went up like a struck match.
It wanted out. He could feel it gathering behind his sternum, enormous and glad, a whole fire leaning against the inside of him, and he stood in the freezing alley for one endless half-second with the choice in his hands. We ration it, said Lily's voice in his memory. Lily, who was folded against a fence with a dementor's hood tilting down at her.
He raised his wand instead.
"Expecto Patronum!"
Silver vapour. It hung in the air, thin as breath on glass, and the dementor pushed through it without pausing.
Happy thought. He reached for the mornings, the park, the buns, the wheelbarrow, and found the cold had got there first; they came up drained, like photographs left in the sun. The hood was six feet from Lily now. Under it, something rattled.
He went further back. Four years back, to a green lawn and a September afternoon: eleven years old, a broom rising under him for the first time, the world dropping away, and the sudden, complete, astonished discovery that there was something he was good at.
"EXPECTO PATRONUM!"
The stag came out of his wand at full gallop, silver-white, lighting the alley from fence to fence. It hit the first dementor mid-body and drove it up and over the gardens, wheeled, turf flying up silver where its hooves struck though the ground was tarmac, and charged the second, which fled ahead of the antlers, out over the rooftops, into the dark it had brought with it, taking the dark along.
Warmth came back into the world all at once. The streetlamp at the alley's end sputtered on. The frost on the wheelie bin turned to beads of water and slid.
The stag stood glowing in the middle of the alley for a moment, looking at Harry with an expression stags do not have. Then it faded.
Harry's knees suggested, quite seriously, that everyone sit down. He overruled them and got to Lily.
"Hey, hey. It's over. They're gone."
For a moment she didn't move, and the whisper wound on, thin and dreadful, please, I didn't, please, and then it ran down like a clock, and her arms came off her head slowly, and she looked at him from somewhere a long way back inside her own face.
"Harry," she said, as though checking.
"Yeah."
"Right." She unfolded, one joint at a time, using the fence. Her hands were shaking, worse than his had after the fire, and she looked at them as though they belonged to someone else, and then she stuffed them in her pockets and hitched her voice up bright, and it wobbled exactly once on the way. "Well. That was... dementors, Harry. Those were dementors. In Surrey. They don't leave Azkaban, that's the whole... they guard things, they don't do house calls... Trust you. Honestly. I go on one walk with you."
"Lily-"
"I'm fine." It came out flat. For a second they just looked at each other.
"Okay," said Harry.
"Okay," said Lily, and turned to look at Dudley, who was on all fours by the fence being sick with tremendous thoroughness. "Oh no. We have to carry that."
They didn't, as it turned out, have to carry it.
"Don't put your wand away!" shrieked a voice from the mouth of the alley. "Are you mad? Suppose there are more of them! Oh, I am going to skin Mundungus Fletcher..."
Mrs. Figg came down the alley at a shuffling run, string bag over one arm, carpet slippers on her feet, tartan shopping trolley abandoned behind her, and her whiskery face was wild with fear and fury in roughly equal parts. Harry stared at her. Batty old Mrs. Figg, cats and cabbage-smell and boring teas, Mrs. Figg who had babysat him a dozen times...
"You... you saw them?" he said stupidly.
"Saw them! Of course I saw them, I've been watching you, haven't I, all summer (much good I am, a Squib can't do anything against dementors but watch), and where is Mundungus Fletcher? Cauldrons! He left at four o'clock (dodgy cauldrons, he says, a business opportunity, he says). I told him I'd have his guts..."
The words went into Harry slowly.
"You've been watching me. All summer."
"On Dumbledore's orders, of course-"
"Dumbledore's orders." Something was rising in him that had nothing to do with dementors. "Dumbledore's had people following me round Little Whinging all summer. Watching me weed the garden. And in all that time nobody, not one of you, could write me a letter?"
Mrs. Figg looked at him, and for a moment the fury went out of her face and left something older and sadder behind.
"Don't shout at me, Harry Potter," she said. "I'm the wrong target and you know it. Now get that great lump home before the neighbours come out. And you," to Lily, who had been taking all of this in with her mouth slightly open, "you're the Moon girl, Church Road. You didn't see anything, you weren't here."
"I absolutely was here," said Lily.
"She was here," said Harry.
Mrs. Figg threw up her hands. She had spent too long among cats to expect obedience from anything. "Then make yourselves useful! I have to report this. Oh, he'll be beside himself. Move, boy!"
Moving Dudley proved to be a two-person job with a third acting in an advisory role. He was grey, damp, and roughly the weight of a rolled carpet full of sand, and they had managed perhaps thirty yards of the alley, one of his arms over each of their shoulders, when Lily stopped dead.
"Wait. Wait-wait-wait. Put him down."
"What-"
"I'll be two minutes," she said, already running, and was back in three, rattling and triumphant, with Mrs. Prentice's wheelbarrow.
They tipped Dudley into it. He fitted, mostly. His legs hung over the front and his head lolled against the rim, and Lily took the handles before Harry could, and Mrs. Figg, who had watched the whole operation with her lips pressed very thin, said only, "Mind his head at the kerbs," and shuffled along beside them down Wisteria Walk like the world's strangest funeral procession, muttering about Mundungus the entire way.
At the corner of Privet Drive she stopped.
"This is where I leave you. I must get word out tonight. Don't leave that house, Harry, whatever comes. And it will come," she added grimly. "The Ministry can smell underage magic quicker than a cat smells fish. Stay put." She looked at Lily, opened her mouth, closed it again, and said, in a completely different voice, "You got the wheelbarrow. That was good thinking, that was," and shuffled off into the dark with her string bag, leaving Harry with the distinct impression that the evening had been handed a grade.
At the gate of Number Four, Lily set the wheelbarrow down.
"I'd better not come in."
"No," Harry agreed, looking at the lit window, behind which Vernon Dursley's silhouette could be seen enjoying the last thirty seconds of his ordinary life. "You'd better not."
"Harry." She had her hands back in her pockets. "What Dudley said. In the alley. About your mum, and... Cedric."
"Forget it."
"I'm not going to forget it. I'm just not going to say anything about it. Sunday. Fry-up. My aunt's expecting you, and she doesn't cook for people who don't come."
She went. Ten feet down the pavement she turned round, walking backwards.
"And I want the wheelbarrow back," she called. "That's Mrs. Prentice's. There's a deposit."
Then Harry hauled his cousin out of the wheelbarrow and onto the front step of Number Four, took a breath, and rang the bell.
* * *
What followed was, even by the standards of Number Four, a bad evening.
Petunia screamed. Vernon went from red to purple to a colour Harry did not expect to see again outside a jar of beetroot. Dudley, propped on the sofa, grey as porridge, could produce nothing but "him" and a trembling finger, aimed at Harry, which as evidence went was apparently watertight.
"WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY SON?"
"Nothing! It wasn't me, it was..." Harry stopped, assessed the available audience, and said it anyway. "Dementors. Two of them."
"Demen... what the ruddy hell are demen-"
"They guard the wizard prison," said Aunt Petunia.
The words dropped into the room like a plate breaking. Vernon stopped mid-bellow. Harry turned. Aunt Petunia had both hands pressed flat to the front of her apron, and she was looking at nothing at all, with the face of a woman watching something arrive that she had spent fourteen years telling herself wasn't coming.
"They guard Azkaban," she said, to nobody. "The wizard prison. They make you... they take..." She caught herself. Her mouth snapped shut like a purse.
Vernon stared at his wife. "How the devil do you-"
"I heard him," Petunia said, too quickly. "Years ago. Telling her. That awful boy."
Harry opened his mouth, and the first owl came down the chimney.
It shot into the living room in a spray of soot, dropped a heavy parchment envelope on the carpet, and left the way it had come, pursued by Vernon's roar. Harry got to the envelope first. It was thick and cream-coloured, with the Ministry seal on the back, and it had barely left his fingers on the way to being opened when it did the rest itself: the letter stood up on the carpet, unfolded in mid-air with a sound like a deckchair, and began to read itself aloud in a cool female voice.
Petunia made a small strangled noise.
Dear Mr. Potter,
The Ministry has received intelligence that you performed the Patronus Charm at twenty-three minutes past nine this evening in a Muggle-inhabited area, and in the presence of a Muggle.
The severity of this breach of the Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery has resulted in your expulsion from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Ministry representatives will be calling at your place of residence shortly to destroy your wand.
As you have already received an official warning for a previous offence under Section 13 of the International Confederation of Warlocks' Statute of Secrecy, we regret to inform you that your presence is required at a disciplinary hearing at the Ministry of Magic at 9 a.m. on the twelfth of August.
Hoping you are well,
Yours sincerely,
Mafalda HopkirkImproper Use of Magic OfficeMinistry of Magic
The letter folded itself, lay down on the carpet, and was still.
Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Vernon began to laugh.
It started low and built, and by the end of it he had one hand on the mantelpiece to hold himself up. "Expelled," he said, wiping his eyes. "Expelled! Oh, this is... Petunia, did you hear that? They've thrown him out. They've finally seen sense-"
"Shut up," said Harry.
He didn't say it loudly. He was looking at the letter on the carpet. Destroy your wand. Hagrid's had been snapped in half when they expelled him; Harry had seen what was left of it, more or less, inside a pink umbrella. His hand had gone to his back pocket without asking him. The wand was there. He kept hold of it.
"Don't you tell me to-"
"They're coming to snap my wand," said Harry. "Tonight. And after that I can't go back. Ever." He looked up. "So you'll have me here till I'm seventeen. Longer, probably. Where else would I go?"
Vernon's laugh stopped as though someone had switched it off at the wall.
The second owl hit the window.
It came in through the gap Petunia had left open for the heat, a barn owl, dishevelled, and dropped a scrap of parchment on Harry's knee and went out the way it had come without stopping. The scrap was a scrawl, blotted, written fast, and Harry knew the hand.
Harry,
Dumbledore's just arrived at the Ministry and he's trying to sort it all out. DO NOT LEAVE YOUR AUNT AND UNCLE'S HOUSE. DO NOT DO ANY MORE MAGIC. DO NOT SURRENDER YOUR WAND.
Arthur Weasley
He read it twice. Dumbledore's just arrived at the Ministry. So Dumbledore was alive, then, and in England, and could get himself to the Ministry inside twenty minutes of a Patronus in Surrey; he simply had not been able to get a letter to Privet Drive in six weeks. Harry folded the note and put it in his pocket with the wand.
"Who's that from?" Vernon had come round the sofa. "What does it say? Give it here-"
"It says don't hand over my wand." Harry looked at him. "So I won't."
The third owl came down the chimney before Vernon could answer, and it was the Ministry again, and the letter did the same trick, stood and unfolded and read itself, in the same cool voice, now sounding faintly winded.
Dear Mr. Potter,
Further to our letter of approximately twenty-two minutes ago, the Ministry of Magic has revised its decision to destroy your wand forthwith. You may retain your wand until your disciplinary hearing on the twelfth of August, at which time an official decision will be taken.
Following discussions with the Headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the Ministry has agreed that the question of your expulsion will also be decided at that time. You should therefore consider yourself suspended from school pending further enquiries.
With best wishes,
Yours sincerely,
Mafalda HopkirkImproper Use of Magic OfficeMinistry of Magic
"Suspended," said Harry, to the room.
"Expelled," said Vernon.
"It said suspended. It said it twice. You were standing right-"
"Not in my house it isn't!" Vernon had found his footing again. Whatever suspended meant, it had the word hearing in it, and hearings were for criminals, and criminals did not live at Number Four. "I've had enough! Owls in the chimney, freaks at the door, my son half-dead on my sofa. OUT!" He was advancing now, finger first, vast and unstoppable, a delivery van of a man. "Pack your things! I don't care where you go, you're not staying under this roof one more-"
The fourth owl came down the chimney like a small red bomb.
It dropped its envelope not at Harry's feet but at Petunia's, and was gone before the soot settled. The envelope was scarlet. Smoke was already curling from its corners.
"Open it," said Harry, into the sudden quiet. "It's a Howler. It'll be worse if you don't."
Petunia picked it up with two fingers, as she picked up things Dudley's friends left under the sofa. It was smoking harder now. Her hands, Harry saw with astonishment, were trembling.
The envelope burst into flame in her grip, and out of the fire came a voice, cold and enormous, filling the room, rattling the ornaments on the mantel, a voice that had never once needed to shout in its life and was not shouting now.
REMEMBER MY LAST, PETUNIA.
The flames guttered out. Ash sifted onto the carpet. In the silence afterwards, the television next door could be heard advertising something with a jingle.
Vernon's mouth opened and shut. "Petunia? What... whose... remember whose last what?"
Aunt Petunia stood looking at the ash on her carpet, and Harry watched something cross her face and settle. When she spoke it was to Vernon, but she was looking at the ash.
"He stays."
"What?"
"He stays," said Petunia. She turned, and there was nothing in her face at all. "The boy stays. That's the end of it. Duddy needs bed. Help me get him up."
And she walked out of the room, stepping over the ash, and up the stairs, and not one further word could be got out of her that night by anyone.
* * *
Much later, Harry sat on his bed with his window open to the warm dark and the evening's letters spread out around him, three of them; a fourth had arrived after midnight in the beak of an enormous tawny, one line, unsigned, in a handwriting he'd have known anywhere:
Arthur's just told us what's happened. Don't leave the house again, whatever you do. S.
He read it perhaps forty times, and it did not improve. Don't leave the house. Don't do magic. Don't hand over your wand. Don't leave the house again. Four letters in one night, from three different hands, and between them they had told him what not to do and nothing else: not why, not what was happening, not who had sent two dementors to an alley in Surrey. We'll explain when we see you. Six weeks of that. He put Sirius's note on the pile with the others.
He looked out at Privet Drive, orange and silent under its lamps. Three nights ago the wrong cold had come down this street, softly, and gone away again. A scout, he thought. Finding the ground. Somebody had sent them. Dementors didn't leave Azkaban on their own, Lily was right, they didn't do house calls; somebody had sent two of them to the exact alley where Harry Potter walked of an evening.
He thought about Church Road. If maybe turns into yes, Margaret Hale had said, you come here. Never mind the hour. He thought about it for some time. Then he put it away, because there were four letters on his bed telling him not to.
Harry lay awake in the orange dark with his hand on his wand, listening to his own street.