The next week of school, for Harry, involved considerably less being underwater than the week just gone. Which was fortunate, because Underwater was nice to visit but you wouldn't want to live there.

There'd be no books, for a start.

The weather slowly improved, as it usually did when heading out of winter, and even the excitement about the Triwizard Tournament died down slightly as everyone slowly realized that, for the next month or two at least, nobody had any details at all.

The Champions certainly didn't.

"It's got to involve the Quidditch Pitch again, right?" Ron asked, one lunchtime. "If they were done with the Quidditch Pitch, then we'd be able to play Quidditch again."

"I'm pretty sure they could already have fitted the entire years' worth of games into the space the pitch wasn't being used," Neville added. "...maybe. Quidditch games do sometimes run pretty long."

"Maybe we could ask for some games limited to three hours?" Ron mused. "And after three hours they release Harry and he catches the Snitch to end the game."

"Wouldn't that count as Gryffindor catching the Snitch?" Hermione said, looking up from her Arithmancy notes. "And that would mean either a hundred and fifty points for Gryffindor by what's basically cheating, or a hundred and fifty points off for Gryffindor by being caught cheating."

"...couldn't they just average it out?" Neville asked.

"Or they could have me just point out the Snitch," Harry suggested. "Kind of like how after long enough a football game has a penalty shootout."

"I wish," Dean snorted. "Maybe with a few good penalty shootouts we wouldn't be down here in the relegation zone."

"Pardon?" Ron asked. "What's relegation? And who do you mean?"

"The hammers, who else?" Dean asked. "We've had five drawn games this season, and we're right near the bottom of the table. If we'd won a few penalty shootouts we might not be."

"I think the bigger problem there might be not the five drawn games," Hermione said delicately. "But all the lost ones."

"Ouch," Ron muttered.

"Yeah, well, at least there's just League games to go," Dean said. "No more places where a single lost game is going to mess us up."

He frowned. "Though I'm not sure who to support in the Euros."

"Bulgaria?" Ron suggested. "I don't even know if they're in it."

"They could be," Dean told him. "So are Ireland, I think. It's not like Quidditch, though, don't think you could bet on Bulgaria getting the Snitch to win or something."

"The Euros aren't until 1996, right?" Harry asked, fairly sure he remembered Dudley mentioning something along those lines over the previous summer. "And aren't England hosting, so you could just support them?"

"I mean after England goes out," Dean shrugged. "It's not like it's worth pretending that won't happen."

Somewhat to Harry's annoyance, it was only a few days later that they covered Tempus in Charms.

"This is quite an interesting little spell," Professor Flitwick said, demonstrating it with a wave of his wand. "Tempus!"

Numbers appeared, showing the date and the time, and then he shooed them away before waving his wand a second time.

This time, his incantation of Tempus produced a clock – the hands and numerals of an older type of clock, instead of a digital one.

"You see, this is a spell about time!" Flitwick added. "And one of the things you must know about time is that it is we humans who have decided what time is!"

He chuckled. "Admittedly the same could be said about a lot of things, such as spelling. But if you cast a spell that tells the time, you must remember to be very clear about how you want to be answered – it would do you no good to be told what time it is in Egypt – and even if you cast the spell to give you the time here, our clocks use the time in London!"

Seamus put his hand up. "Professor?"

"Of course, Mr. Finnegan," Flitwick invited.

"So how do you know you've cast the spell right?" Seamus asked. "If you might get the time in Ireland or the time in England, and you don't know the time so you don't know which you're getting, how useful is it?"

"Excellent question!" Professor Flitwick said, very excited. "And the trick there is to make the spell at least a little bit about yourself. You must master how to make it so that the spell is cast to give you the time, in the way you would most like to see the time! Let's first make sure we have the incantation correct – and the wand movement is number three then number seven, like so..."

Casting the time-telling spell turned out to be quite easy, but casting it right turned out to be very tricky indeed.

Harry found it terribly hard to get the right kind of focus to get the right sort of time telling, because he kept thinking about other ways you could tell the time – things like how they worked it out in the Star Trek show he'd read some books about (which gave him a confusing number with a dot in the middle), then on Pern (where he got a number of Turns and a large but negative Interval number), and finally a sundial (which was a lot better than before, but was still not very useful for knowing when the class was).

"When we started this class I wondered why wizards had watches," Dean confided, as Harry tried again and got a clock labelled in tally marks – I, II, III, IIII, IIIII and so on. "Now I wonder why they have this spell and don't just use watches."

"Maybe the idea is that, once you actually get used to using it, you can check what time it is in France?" Harry suggested.

Dean tried, and got a digital-style clock telling them that it was twelve thirty.

"That doesn't look too bad," Harry said, thinking about how it wasn't lunch time yet. "But I think that's French time."

"I'm going to choose to blame you on the grounds that you distracted me," Dean replied. "You have another go."

Harry did, and this time he decided to do the sensible thing (as far as dragons, specifically, were concerned) and more-or-less ignore the bit about focusing the spell on you.

Instead, he just cast the spell into the air, thinking about how he wanted to know what the time was right here and right now, and he got clock face saying it was eleven ten.

"That looks..." Dean began, checking his watch. "About twenty, twenty five minutes off? Isn't that what Professor Flitwick said was the local time here?"

Harry was a bit disappointed he hadn't managed to get Greenwich Mean Time, but Local Time was a pretty good start.

Then he tried again and got words which said it was 'now, in this galaxy' which was very nearly completely useless.

The March edition of the Quibbler reported in great detail on Rita Skeeter, but almost none of it was about the legal case. Instead, they had a set of half a dozen photos of Rita Skeeter's Animagus form, and spent almost a quarter of the magazine discussing exactly what beetle she was and what the implications of that might be.

Then there were another few articles which talked about things Rita Skeeter had reported on in the past where she'd had information nobody would have given her.

Then, amusingly, there was an article titled STILL WRONG where the Quibbler's journalist discussed all the times Rita Skeeter had got things incorrect despite having such an unusual source of information.

It made Harry wonder why she bothered to do all the Animagus-y spying, if she was just going to make half of it up anyway.

That was sort of in the back of his mind for the next few days, until Neville passed him a Daily Prophet at breakfast.

"I was wondering what the punishment was for being an unregistered Animagus," he said. "I didn't think it was this bad!"

Harry had a look at the headline, which said that Rita Skeeter was going to Azkaban for several months, then at the story in the article itself.

"I don't think it's just for that," he said, reading that one of the reasons why the trial had taken more than a week was because suddenly lots of people had decided to sue her for libel at once. "But it's still not very nice. You'd think maybe there'd be a not-quite-Azkaban wizard prison, for people who need to be punished but who aren't as bad as Death Eaters."

"Gran told me once that there's bits of Azkaban that aren't that bad," Neville volunteered. "There's bits where the Dementors don't go, so it's just a bit chilly. Maybe they'll just have to fit some kind of spell to stop her from flying away in beetle form?"

Harry frowned, thinking about that.

"I suppose there has to be spells on Azkaban anyway to stop people getting away," he said. "More than just the prison bars and stuff. They'd have to make it so you couldn't Disapparate, like at Hogwarts, and then on top of that do something like make a Portkey."

"They don't let people have wands," Neville replied. "But there is wandless magic, so you could be right. And maybe they need to stop people transfiguring the bars?"

"Or melting them, or something," Dean contributed, shuffling over a seat so he could join in. "And Dumbledore knows so many ways of doing magic it'd be almost impossible to put him in prison and keep him there."

"What would happen if they caught You-Know-Who?" Neville asked, suddenly sounding curious. "Everyone thought he couldn't be stopped, but if they did manage to stop him… he was really good at magic, wasn't he? And the Dementors are supposed to have liked him, anyway."

"They'd have to," Harry said, remembering something Remus had told him. "You can only cast a Patronus if you're not a Dark Wizard, and he was a really Dark Wizard. So if they didn't like him they'd probably have just eaten him."

"That would make a great end to that bloke," Dean sniggered. "Would they start calling the one who did it the Dementor Who Didn't Not Live?"

"That bloke?" Neville repeated. "You're calling him that bloke?"

"Well, yeah, because he wants to sound important," Dean shrugged. "Why should I let him sound important?"

"Professor Dumbledore once said that if you were afraid of a name it meant you were more afraid of the thing itself," Harry said, remembering. "I said that it was probably a good idea for most people to be afraid of a dark wizard who kept killing people, and he said that that was actually quite a good point."

He nodded. "I sort of get what he means as well, though… I just think it's a lot easier for Dumbledore to say you're not meant to be scared of someone, when that person's scared of Dumbledore."

"Or if you're a dragon," Neville added. "Actually, come to think of it, are we allowed to say we're scared of anything? We are Gryffindors."

"It might be in the school rules," Harry said. "Buried somewhere under the thousands of rules that got added because of Fred and George specifically, anyway."

"Maybe it's a good thing the Smiths joined the school," Dean pointed out. "Or they'd have to ditch two thirds of the rulebook when Fred and George leave."

"All right, everyone!" Professor Kettleburn said, one Monday morning in the middle of March. "You'll be pleased to hear that, today, we are not going to be dealing with the dragons."

There was a sigh of relief from most of the other students.

"They are a lot less dangerous than most dragons," Hermione said. "Present company excepted."

"I didn't say anything," Dean shrugged. "It was getting a bit repetitive, though."

"Instead, you will be meeting someone new today," Professor Kettleburn added, and waved his one remaining original hand.

Nobody saw what he was waving at for a moment, then Lavender Brown gasped as a pair of feathered wings spread atop one of the Hogwarts towers.

A big, bulky, four-legged two-winged shape took off and flapped its wings hard. It kept enough height to overfly them at about a hundred feet, came around in a circling movement, then landed with a thump-thump in front of them.

Harry recognized what it was straight away, but didn't say anything because he thought maybe Professor Kettleburn was going to ask them.

"Now!" Professor Kettleburn said. "Who can tell me about this particular Creature?"

Several hands went up, and after a bit of consideration Kettleburn called on Draco.

"It's a griffin, Professor," he said. "It's one of the ones everyone really should know, there's a House practically named after them."

"Quite right, Mr. Malfoy," Kettleburn agreed. "But can any of you tell me the most important thing to know about a griffin?"

Lavender Brown said that it was a four-X creature, which Professor Kettleburn said was a good point but not the thing he was thinking of, and then Harry put up his paw.

"They're like sphinxes," he said, when it was his turn to answer. "They're properly intelligent."

"Exactly!" Professor Kettleburn agreed, and the griffin waved.

"Oh, Merlin," Draco sighed. "Another one."

"The specifics of today's lesson," Professor Kettleburn continued, "are that we will be focusing on how one interacts with a Magical Creature which can understand you quite well but who is not able to easily reply."

"Oh, I think I get it," someone said, though Harry couldn't see who. "Sort of like someone who's French."

One by one, they were all called up to have a few minutes with the griffin. Professor Kettleburn told them quite early on that he was going through the process of learning to pronounce English, but that as his accent was still terrible it was a good way to experiment for those situations when someone might not be capable of English speech at all.

Harry had to admit that that sounded sort of useful, even if the ones he was thinking of were dragons (like Nora) and basilisks (like Empress) and so he could understand them. But most people couldn't.

Hermione tried to work out what sounds the griffin could make, or could make without breaking the implied rules and starting to use their still-broken English, and they settled on having one chirp mean yes and a different chirp mean no. Then she talked about things so that it was a yes or no answer as often as possible, which Professor Kettleburn said was quite good work.

Then Terry Boot turned out to have got quite good at British Sign Language over the last year or two, and was able to understand some of the griffin's own sign language – which, now Harry was looking, was about as similar as it could get to the way that Tiobald used sign after you allowed for how their hands or paws were differently shaped.

What Harry did was, he thought, quite clever. He asked if their guest could spell – he could – and drew out letters with his claw in the ground, then asked him to please spell his name. That told Harry – and everyone else – that the griffin's name was Isaac, which made it much easier to talk to him.

"Very well done, Harry!" Professor Kettleburn told him. "It's surprisingly easy for people to forget how helpful it can be to have a name to use, and one reason I did not tell you Isaac's name was to see who'd remember!"

Then it was Dean's turn, and as soon as he was called on he put his hand up.

"Professor?" he asked. "What about if we get Isaac a piece of slate or a blackboard? That way if he needs to explain something complicated, he could try drawing a picture."

"Another excellent suggestion!" Professor Kettleburn told him. "I must admit, I didn't actually prepare for that one – one moment, please."

Professor Kettleburn had to Transfigure some stone to get a small blackboard and a piece of chalk, but after that the rest of the Care of Magical Creatures lesson sort of turned into a game of Pictionary.

It probably wasn't quite what the original idea had been, but everyone seemed to be having a lot of fun. Including Isaac.

Hogwarts life continued, as did the world outside – though sometimes it was hard to remember that – and Harry picked up a new book in which not only the main character but just about every single character who appeared was a dragon. Some of them had magic, which meant they were Charmed, and some of them didn't and were called Natural even though the Charmed ones had actually come first.

Sadly, even in a book there was the same kind of tension between people with magic and people without magic – even when they were all dragons – but Harry hoped that if just about everyone really was a dragon then they'd be able to find some shared ground in being able to fly.

Or maybe shared ground was the wrong word.

One Saturday, one of the first really sunny days of the year, Harry was lying on the lawn and half-watching as Dean tried to explain to everyone how Rounders worked.

Fred and George seemed quite interested, which meant there was probably going to be some trouble (if Harry was any judge) as Fred and George were Beaters and that meant they could knock a Bludger about. The poor Rounders ball wouldn't know what it was in for.

That was just one reason why Harry was somewhere off to the side – though another reason was that Blaise, Daphne and Tracy had already set out a picnic blanket, and Harry was sort of wondering if there'd be anything going spare.

Then there was a whack as Fred demonstrated, and the ball vanished somewhere behind one of the hills. Harry listened out for a faint plop, but when none came for several seconds he decided Fred might have managed to avoid hitting the lake.

Shifting his right wing forwards to give him a bit of shade from direct sunlight, he rummaged in his pocket and got out the Game Boy. He turned it on to have a bit of a play with, but he'd only just started when Daphne noticed.

"What's that?" she asked. "Is that a Muggle thing?"

"And how's it working?" Blaise asked. "I thought that wasn't allowed."

"Sirius got it for me as a present," Harry explained. "He thought I'd just eat it, it was sort of a joke, but it actually turned on. Muggle radios work as well, but Muggle TVs only have the sound work."

"Can I have a look?" Tracy asked.

"Sure," Harry agreed. "So the idea is that there's these blocks that appear at the top of the screen, and they move down, and you have to arrange them into complete rows. It's harder than it sounds, but it's fun."

He demonstrated, then gave it to Tracy, and she started giving it a go herself.

Three hours later, the battery died, and Harry finally got his Game Boy back.

"It was kind of fun to see what that Muggle sport was like," Neville said, that evening. "I didn't know there was so much running in them."

"That's the difference with a lot of Muggle sports," Dean agreed. "Especially ball games. All the stuff wizards do seems to be on brooms somehow, but Muggles don't have brooms and I don't think it'd be safe to play rugby on bicycles."

"There's games like Polo though, where they play it on horses," Harry pointed out.

"Yeah, but horses can steer themselves," Dean said. "It's a lot harder to crash a horse."

"I've certainly never seen anything in the news about a horse pileup on the M 25," Harry agreed.

"I'd say maybe there should be a version of Quidditch that you play on Hippogriffs," Ron said. "But knowing what the Cannons are like you'd end up running out of players."

"Cannons players, or players full stop?" Dean checked.

"Either," Ron shrugged.

"Hey, Harry?" Neville asked, a few days later. "There was something in Muggle Studies and I wanted to ask for your help."

"Is this the music thing?" Hermione checked, looking up.

"Well, yeah," Neville agreed. "I'm not really sure I understand what modern Muggle music is like. Have you listened to any of these before, Harry?"

Harry took the textbook, and had a look.

He hadn't actually heard of many of them before, even though the textbook chapter was called 'modern Muggle music'. There were some very strange photographs, as well.

One picture had someone on stage, singing into a microphone, dressed in a suit of armour with a British flag on. Then another one had someone in a flower costume, and a third photograph showed the singer (who might be a man or a woman, actually) wearing a fox's head and a dress.

Then there was a whole page about someone called Ziggy Stardust. There was a photograph of him, as well, and the person who wrote the textbook thought that 'unlike most Muggles, Mr. Stardust dresses sensibly'.

"I wanted to know what their music is like," Neville explained. "Do you think you can see if there's some in Fort William? There should, if he's popular."

"You'd probably have to come down to Dogwarts to listen to it," Harry said, but he was frowning. "Or… no, Dean has that Walkman, right?"

"I think so," Neville agreed.

"I'll see if I can find any cassettes, then," Harry decided. "And probably get some batteries as well."

"Mr. Weasley, do stop humming David Bowie songs," Professor Snape cautioned, in their next Potions practical. "This Hair-Raising Potion requires a great deal of attention. If you are not careful then you and Mr. Thomas will end up floating in a most peculiar way."

He turned back to the rest of the class. "Since some of you are undoubtedly foolish enough to forget this, I would like to remind everyone that if you add the Billywig stings before the sugar beet then you will add too much lightness to the potion. However, you must make sure to add precisely the right amount of sugar beet."

"Professor?" Blaise said, raising his hand. "What would happen if you added too much sugar beet?"

Professor Snape sighed, and walked over to inspect Blaise' cauldron.

"Mr. Zabini, when I put the instructions on the board, did I or did I not specify exactly how much sugar beet to add?" he asked. "You have added a whole half-ounce more than the requirement. Can you tell me what the next step is after the sugar beet?"

"Stir the Billywig stings into the potion, Professor," Blaise replied.

"Correct, at least," Snape allowed, then waved his wand and the cauldron floated into the air – then flipped over.

Nothing dropped out.

"It is somewhat hard, Mr. Zabini, to stir a solid," Professor Snape went on. "Fortunately this can be solved. You will need precisely one Shrake spine, which you must boil for ten minutes; at the end of this process, you will then need to stab the potion with the sharp end of the spine. This will inject heat into the potion as a whole and re-melt it, at which point you must add half an ounce of salt to prevent it solidifying again. I hope everybody has been copying this down, because I will only say it once."

Harry had started writing as soon as Professor Snape had mentioned what the extra sugar beet would do, and he was only slightly tempted to make that mistake deliberately to make sure he could do the fix.

It probably wouldn't be fair, though.

Harry was quite surprised one week when he flew into Fort William and discovered that (at least according to the book shop) it was World Book Day today.

The idea of a day that was all about books was really quite a nice one, as far as Harry was concerned, and when he went inside the displays reminded him of all sorts of books he'd read back in primary school. They were usually more children's books than the ones in his current hoard, but he did decide that (in the spirit of World Book Day) he'd get some Roald Dahl books and make copies of them for his friends.

He thought Fred and George might especially like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which would give them ideas for sweets that they might not have come up with, though The Witches was something he'd probably not get because the witches in that book weren't very nice, but Fantastic Mr. Fox was the sort of thing that he thought Tyler and Anne would like a lot.

Then he came to Matilda.

"...I haven't actually read it in years," Hermione admitted, when Harry got back to Hogwarts. "But you're right – I didn't think of it like that."

"What's that?" Neville asked.

"It's this book," Harry explained, holding it up. "It's about a very smart girl who's sort of so smart that she starts being able to do things with her mind – like knock over a glass of water, or float some chalk around."

"...so it's about Hermione, then?" Neville asked. "I knew there were those books about you, Harry, but I only really read that last one with the human you and the dragon you."

"I don't think so," Hermione replied, frowning. "I'd be about the right sort of age, maybe a year or two older, but my childhood was kind of nice. Matilda's childhood is really nasty, her parents don't like her and her headmistress doesn't either."

She shook her head. "I'm starting to wonder if Roald Dahl knew someone who went to Hogwarts, now. It's a lot like accidental magic, but it's enough different that you can say it's not..."

"And maybe George's Marvellous Medicine is about how Fred and George do potions research," Harry suggested.

"I doubt it," Hermione replied tartly. "They haven't blown Gryffindor Tower off the castle yet."

"Is it okay if I ask for some help?" Conal said, during the Society meeting one evening. "I'm not sure my flying lessons are going very well."

"That happens," Tanisis told him. "Don't worry. I think it takes a while because Madam Hooch has taught loads of humans, but quadrupeds are different and she's only taught a few."

"It took me ages to get it right," Harry volunteered. "I had to use two for a long time, just so it was properly balanced, and I crashed a few times."

Conal thought about it, then shook his head. "I don't crash any more, not really, but I had a few when we were going slow and low. But I never really feel like I've got my weight on the broom right..."

"I think that sounds like something to do with the cushioning charm," Harry said. "You might need one that's more springy towards the front, or maybe stiffer towards the front because more of your weight is at the front."

"I suppose," Conal said, deep in thought. "But what about Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail? Wouldn't you have the same sort of thing?"

"Oh, wow, we had much bigger problems!" Mopsy said.

"Yes," Cottontail agreed.

"It's because we had a lot of trouble agreeing which direction we were going to go," Flopsy clarified. "We're normally pretty good about it, but flying was a whole new level of difficulty."

"Don't you lean your weight to control the broom, though?" Conal asked. "I sometimes get a bit dizzy when I do that, but..."

"Actually, that sounds like it might be a problem," Tanisis interjected. "Something to do with having more of your body mass at the front?"

"I think I'm just going to rely mostly on galloping," Conal decided. "And Apparating, when it's possible, but I'm used to galloping."

Harry was used to flying, but he had to admit he was looking forward to Apparating as well.

"And yes, you do lean from side to side," Flopsy said. "But it sort of listens to what you're thinking, as well, and when one of us thinks the best thing to do is to go straight and another thinks we're going to be slowing down a bit…"

"And it doesn't help when one of us sneezes," Cottontail added.

"Hey!" Flopsy protested. "That was just one time."

"Bit hard to forget," Mopsy giggled. "It took ages to get all the grass stains off."

When the holidays came around, it still felt like they had almost as much work as they did during term. It did mean they could treat it as a break, though, because they could get up and go to bed on a different schedule.

It somehow felt different to keep working until two in the morning and then get up at nine, to going to bed at midnight and getting up at seven. It should have been exactly the same, because it was the same amount of sleep, but it wasn't and Harry wasn't at all sure why.

Still, it felt like there wasn't much they had left to learn before the exams.

By the end of the Easter holiday, Harry was most of the way through Dragonquest with Empress – they'd got through the bit where Ruth hatched, while Empress had pronounced that Kylara was the most unpleasant person she'd yet encountered in a book – and Harry had explained that the next two books they could look at if they wanted to stay with Pern were one called Dragonsong (which was about a new character, by which Harry meant Menolly) and one called The White Dragon (which was directly continuing the story so far, but focused more on Jaxom who'd already appeared).

Empress hadn't decided yet, but it sounded like she thought they were both good choices.

"You're going to want to make sure you get this one right," Professor Moody was saying, during class. "Any spell you use in a fight, you want to get it right, but you use this one to slow someone down – if it doesn't work, they've arrived!"

He chuckled darkly. "Of course, it's also a good one to start with if you catch someone by surprise. Means you can get them tied up with another spell, or just disarm them. Always be thinking about new uses for your spells."

He pointed at Seamus. "Except you. If every spell you cast blows someone up, just make sure you cast spells on someone who needs blowing up… which is almost everyone, in a fight. Now, wand movements."

Harry watched as their Defence professor demonstrated, and gave it a go himself. First with his wand in his paw, then with his tail, then tried with his head as well in case he ever wanted to breathe the spell.

"And the incantation is Impedimenta," the Professor went on. "Work it out yourselves."

"You what?" Ron asked, blinking.

"I quit," Professor Moody added. "Nothing to do with you lot, but I want to keep that jinx guessing."

With that he stumped straight out of the classroom, and Harry just caught him muttering about how at least now he wouldn't need to take Mandrake potion every few hours.

There was a long, stunned silence.

"Did that just happen?" Neville blinked.

"What's this going to mean for our exams?" Hermione fretted. "The teacher usually sets the end of year exams, but now we don't know what's going to be on them!"

"Well, this is just a guess," Ron said. "But I think Impedimenta might be on them. Let's give it a go?"

"Someone should probably tell Professor Dumbledore that the Defence teacher just quit," Sally-Anne Perks suggested.

"I'll do it," Harry volunteered. "Expecto Patronum."

Ruth listened to his message and then vanished in a flicker of light, and then Theodore stood up.

"Let's go outside," he said. "Free afternoon, right?"

"We should really see what the textbook says we're supposed to be learning," Hermione protested.

"We can do that when we've got a new Defence teacher," Pansy said, also standing up. "I'm going to go and enjoy the sun."

"If I could have everyone's attention," Dumbledore began pleasantly, halfway through dinner. "Doubtless many of you are aware that my old friend Alastor Moody has unexpectedly quit."

He indicated the empty chair next to him.

"Fortunately, I was expecting this," he added, which got a few puzzled looks. "I have always believed that it makes things much easier if you can expect the unexpected, as it means very few things can catch you by surprise."

Harry was sure it had to be harder than that, but then again Dumbledore was the expert.

"Anyone who has Defence Against the Dark Arts lessons tomorrow will regrettably have to do without a teacher," Dumbledore informed them. "I recommend that you all spend the time doing something productive, so you may use the time you normally use for homework doing something unproductive instead. I will be seeking out an interim teacher for the last little bit of the year, and I hope that things will return to as normal as Hogwarts normally sees next Monday."

"Nobody seems very surprised," Dennis Creevey said.

"Well, the Defence teacher we had in our first year turned out to be a fraud," his brother told him. "I heard Harry chased him down and caught him!"

"Wow," Dennis gaped. "That's really cool!"

"I didn't really," Harry said, a bit embarrassed. "I chased him, yeah, but Neville's the one who really caught him."

"Any idea what happened to that Firebolt?" Ron asked. "Just curious if there's one going spare… Nev, you won it off him by beating him, right?"

"That's not a thing," Neville replied. "I think it would have been sold to pay for helping his victims."

"Oh, yeah, that's much more likely but still kind of boring somehow," Ron admitted, sounding vaguely disappointed.

Their temporary replacement Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, it turned out, was none other than Percy Weasley.

Dean asked him why in the first lesson – Ron was too busy reminding himself under his breath to say 'Mr. Weasley' rather than either Sir or Perce – and Percy answered by simply saying that it would help international magical co-operation if Hogwarts students didn't all fail their Defence exams. So long as the exams were properly designed, of course, which was what he was spending much of his time doing.

Since it was only about a month until the final of the Triwizard Tournament – which, everyone now knew, was a giant hedge maze occupying the whole of the Quidditch Pitch – Harry could only wonder whether Percy was extremely overworked (because there was so much to do at once) or doing just fine (if what was currently going on for the Triwizard Tournament was mostly just waiting for the hedge to grow, because you couldn't exactly leave the traps and stuff in there for a month).

Harry did manage something new during one of the classes, which was that he was able to cast the same spell from his wand (on his tail) and his breath (which, obviously, came out of his mouth) at the same time. Actually aiming them still left him a bit cross-eyed, which on one occasion led to a stunned Hermione and some heartfelt apologies, but it was still sort of neat.

"It seems like everything is focusing on exams, again," Ron grumbled, a week or so later. "This is the fourth time, and it's worse every time."

"Exams are important," Hermione said.

"But aren't they testing what we know, instead of what we've memorized?" Ron asked. "Doesn't that mean you shouldn't revise, just go with what you already remember?"

"Yeah, but then you'd do worse than people who have revised," Neville said.

"And if some people revise and some don't, then the ones who do revise are sort of getting extra marks for it," Harry contributed. "You couldn't ban revising, so instead it's like you get marks for good time management?"

He shrugged his wings. "That's what I think about it."

"I'd say Hermione having a time turner was cheating, then," Dean snorted. "But I don't want her workload, it's ridiculous."

"It's not that bad," Hermione defended herself. "I have a schedule all worked out."

"Yeah, I helped you colour it off properly," Dean agreed. "That's how I know it's ridiculous. You know she's asleep during History of Magic?"

"That's just a coincidence," Hermione told him. "And I'm attending History of Magic as well."

She pointed down at the table. "We should really be doing this Transfiguration work."

"So this is something I don't quite understand," Ron said. "We have to explain why this spell turns a meddling man into a monkey. Why does it have to be a meddling man, and not any man?"

"Maybe it's because of the law of similarity," Dean suggested. "Transfiguration's easier the more similarities you're working with?"

"So a man into a monkey is harder if they're not meddling, because then they're less monkey...ish," Ron replied, thinking about it. "Maybe, but then why isn't it a meddling person?"

"Aliss Archer's Alliteration Aphorism?" Harry asked.

"Exactly," Hermione said. "Maybe you could turn someone into an orangutan whether they were a man or a woman, but you'd have to make a Perplexed Person to Primate spell instead."

"If working out these rules is half of what Arithmancy does, it's a lot," Ron sighed. "Okay, so it's about Arithmantic resonance… what about that classic spell about turning someone into a frog?"

"I think that's just tradition," Harry said. "Like turning mice into horses."

"Or rats into prisoners," Ron said.

All five of them found that tremendously funny.

Just a few days before the exams started, Harry looked up from his latest book.

He'd got it to give it a go and see what it was like, because it was a new book and it seemed interesting. But something about it in particular had caught his fancy.

"Hermione?" he asked. "Do you think someone could have a rune somewhere on their body, and use that to cast magic?"

"Oh, well… I don't think we've done that anywhere," Hermione said, thinking about it. "I suppose it's not impossible, or I can't think of a reason. Why?"

"There's things called charter marks, in this book," Harry explained – showing her the cover and the title, Sabriel. "It sounds like some people have them on their foreheads, and I started wondering about my scar."

"Oh, I see," Hermione realized. "It does look a bit like Sowilo, I remember thinking about that before, but I don't think it's shaped quite right."

"I probably couldn't do anything like they do in this book, anyway," Harry added. "Sabriel can do lots of things with magic, and that's before you start thinking about how she's also meant to stop the undead. And stuff."

"Undead like vampires, or undead like Inferi?" Hermione checked. "And I know some people put werewolves in that category, but it's not really correct."

"Like both, I think," Harry replied. "I'm not really very far into the book. But I do think the writer is one of those people who knows about Hogwarts, somehow – he's got this thing where technology doesn't work in the magical lands, but it goes both ways and it's sort of gradual. So if you're a couple of hundred miles into the Old Kingdom you're lucky if a gun works, but if you're a couple of hundred miles into Ancelstierre you're lucky if a really basic spell works."

"That would..." Hermione began, then frowned. "I'm not really sure if that would make keeping the secret easier or harder."

"Probably a lot harder," Harry decided. "Whether or not technology works changes depending on the wind, too."

If learning magic was inconvenient enough, imagine having to check the weather before scheduling Transfiguration class. Wizards didn't even want to check the weather before scheduling Astronomy class.

AN:

After all that Task nonsense, it's good to have a look at normal school work.

For certain definitions of "normal" that don't rule out the teacher randomly quitting mid-sentence.