He left a note on Hermione's pillow via Sable the night before.
Not a letter — a single card, the Hogwarts crest replaced on the front with something he had drawn himself: the starflower, in the same wirework geometry as the pendant, rendered in ink. Inside, in his handwriting: 'Wear something warm. Comfortable shoes. We leave at eight.'
She found him in the common room at seven fifty with her coat already on and her hair down, which was not how she usually wore it on an ordinary day and which she had clearly decided about and not mentioned.
'Where are we going,' she said.
'You said you knew it was a more casual setting,' he said.
'I said I knew it wasn't formal,' she said. 'That leaves a significant range.'
'Yes,' he said.
She looked at him with the expression she had when she had decided to accept incomplete information and was choosing to find it interesting rather than frustrating. 'Alright,' she said. 'Lead on.'
They went through the same passage they had used the day before — the Honeydukes cellar, the Hogsmeade morning, the Floo from the Three Broomsticks. He had told Madam Rosmerta the night before. Madam Rosmerta, who had been working in a wizarding pub long enough to have seen most configurations of human behavior and found Hogwarts students among the more manageable categories, had taken the Galleons and confirmed the early opening without comment.
The Floo destination this time was different.
He had spent two evenings establishing the connection in November, working through the Floo Network directory in the library with the methodical attention of someone who understood that the Network's coverage of non-wizarding locations was patchy and required cross-referencing. There was a wizarding household in Padstow — a retired Charms professor and her husband who had moved there in the 1970s and who maintained their Floo connection as a matter of principle.
He had written to them in December, explained the situation with the directness that tended to produce responses from people who valued directness, and received back a two-line reply:
'You may use the connection on the fourteenth. Leave by ten pm. — M. Trelawn.'
He had sent a thank you note and a jar of his mother's best plum jam.
They stepped out of the Trelawns' cottage fireplace at eight forty-five into a living room full of plants and books and the specific warm quality of a house that had been lived in carefully for a long time. Mrs Trelawn — small, seventy, with the look of someone who had spent decades in an academic environment and had the specific sharpness that produced — looked at them over her tea.
'Weasley,' she said.
'Mrs Trelawn,' he said. 'Thank you for this.'
She looked at Hermione with the assessment of someone for whom the evaluation of young people was a long-practised habit. Whatever she found appeared to satisfy her. 'The path down to the harbour is icy,' she said. 'Mind your step.' She returned to her book. 'Back by ten.'
'Back by ten,' he confirmed, and they went out into the February morning.