After his birthday, and finishing the Northern Lights book – which was one of the most obvious cases of a book being ready for a sequel he'd read in a while – Harry carefully packed his things up in his tent, packed his tent up in his bag, politely told Aunt Petunia that he'd be going to Sirius' house for the rest of the summer, and took off into the blue sky to make his way to London.

It was a fine day and Harry was in no hurry, so he flew north to the Thames before turning to make his way gradually downriver. It was a nice way to stretch his wings, following the meandering route of the river – which, now it had so many houses on both sides, was probably pretty much stuck taking the same route forever instead of continuing to meander – until he was well into the middle of London with Southwark Bridge disappearing behind him and London Bridge coming up ahead.

Pulling up, Harry got his bearings and then flew straight to Grimmauld Place with a feeling that he was quite ready for lunch, thank you very much.

He wasn't sure what Kreacher would be able to make on short notice, but he had the feeling it would be nice.

"Any idea who the Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher is going to be this year?" Sirius asked, after he'd said hello to Harry and given him a hug (which was sort of saying hello again, really).

Harry was a bit confused, because he thought he knew who the teacher would have to be this year. "Isn't it Remus again?"

"He's still busy with the pack," Sirius explained, shrugging, and waved Harry through into the living room.

Kreacher was making a noise in the kitchen, and poked his head around the door as Harry put down his bag. "Polite dragon! Kreacher is making pancakes. Would polite dragon like cheese, ham, spinach, tuna, peppers, chicken, mushroom, strawberries, cream, ice cream, chocolate spread or banana?"

Harry had to think about that, tilting his head as he did, then nodded. "Yes, thank you."

Sirius cackled. Kreacher looked quite pleased, though, and disappeared back into the kitchen.

"You're going to get either three or four confusing pancakes or one really big one," Sirius advised him, shaking his head.

"I answered the question," Harry pointed out, and looked around to see if anything had changed.

As it happened, something had. There were a collection of new drawings and paintings all framed together on one wall, all of them magically moving and each of them showing a different animal, and Harry only needed to look for a moment before spotting the connection.

There was a squirrel, a wolf, a dog, a dinosaur, a stag…

"Are those all of us?" he asked, waving his wings vaguely to try and express the expansive definition of 'us' he was using. "And shouldn't there be one or two fox ones?"

"Those are on the waiting list," Sirius replied. "So is the heron one. Your friend Dean's still working on them."

He winked. "I thought it'd make a nice summer job for him."

Harry had the feeling that Sirius was paying Dean quite well for the pictures, because it was just the sort of thing Sirius would do to pay a Muggle-born wizard (or possibly half-blood, Dean wasn't sure) a lot of money to help decorate the Black family house.

"Anyway, Remus is too busy teaching to teach, this year," Sirius clarified. "He's doing really well, but he's basically having to give all the others a full magical education himself – well, you know, all the ones who are witches and wizards. And they're all learning maths and English and so on."

"Will Martin and Alex be able to get jobs?" Harry asked, worried. "They didn't grow up in Muggle society, so if anyone tries checking they'll be kind of… invisible."

"I did ask Remus that," Sirius told him. "He pointed out that there are jobs for Squibs, and it's the same sort of thing – then he reminded me that once Fred and George graduate next year they could do with shop help, so that's just one of the things they could do. And I'm sure those two will be understanding of little furry problems like that."

"Right," Harry agreed, following what Sirius meant.

He had to admit, he didn't do pranking and he was interested to see what Fred and George would be coming up with.

"Pancakes are ready!" Kreacher reported, bringing in two plates – one of them with a giant pancake on it, the other with a sort of folded up chaos of several pancakes on top of one another. "Master did not say what he wanted, so I made a pancake pancake."

"...I knew I should have remembered to do that," Sirius muttered. "Can I have some ice cream?"

Harry cut himself a slice of his pancake, tried it, and found to his pleasure that Kreacher had sort of arranged things so that at one end was the cheese-and-ham, then the rest of the fillings were in different places and each slice was a different portion of the meal.

As he was going through the chicken and mushroom, though, he remembered something and swallowed.

"Why did you ask me, Sirius?" he checked. "When I arrived, I mean."

"Oh, well, Dumbledore talks to you a lot, so I thought I'd see if he'd said anything to you," Sirius explained. "I've never been a Prefect, I don't know how much input they get."

"Neither have I," Harry said, a bit confused by the non sequitur.

"Really?" Sirius asked. "Dumbledore asked me two weeks ago if there'd be any problem with you being a Prefect, and I said there wasn't any, so he said you'd be one."

Harry's ears poinged up in surprise, and his glasses went flying. They nearly landed in Sirius' pancake, but he caught them just before they got ice cream on them.

"Pardon?" Harry asked, once he was sure he wasn't going to lose his glasses to ice cream.

Sirius looked confused. "Wasn't it in your letter with your things to get?"

"We haven't got those yet," Harry explained.

He took his glasses back and settled them properly on his nose. "Don't Prefects have to spend lots of time patrolling the corridors?"

"It's usually only about one evening a week for each Prefect," Sirius replied, thinking back. "After we made the Map we kept track of it."

"Oh, I could use the Map to check," Harry realized. "That would be helpful."

"It wasn't made for evil, Harry," Sirius warned him.

Now that he was at Grimmauld Place – and Dogwarts, depending on what sort of day he wanted – Harry could go and visit his friends, or his friends come and visit him, more easily.

And without requiring an owl escort.

The first visit was when Blaise Zabini came around, which was a bit of a surprise for Harry – or, at least, the owl asking for the chance to visit was a surprise, the visit itself wasn't a surprise because it had been arranged – and Harry was quite impressed with how Blaise took the trouble to arrive by Tube and walk from the station instead of using the Floo.

"One of my stepfathers was a Muggle," he explained. "I thought I'd see if I still remembered what he said. How do I look?"

Harry took a step back, and looked Blaise up and down.

"I'm not sure about the hair," he said, critically. "It looks more like the sort of thing my aunt and uncle would think magical people would do."

Blaise reached up to the spikes his hair had been gelled up into, and winced slightly. "Pity, I spent ages on these. What about the clothes?"

Those were a pair of slightly faded blue jeans and a T-shirt announcing the existence of a band called D : Ream, and Harry considered them for just a moment before nodding. "Those are great. If your hair's back to normal I don't think most Muggles would even notice you."

Blaise said he'd take that as a win.

Unlike with Dean at Privet Weyr, there were things set up at Grimmauld Place that let Harry do the sort of thing Dudley did when he had a friend around. It had been a bit tricky to properly wire Grimmauld Place for electricity – according to Sirius he'd had to do a bit of fast talking to explain why somewhere in London hadn't been set up for electricity until the nineteen nineties, especially when it had what looked a lot like electric lighting and even a fridge – and there was the occasional problem with Chizpurfles, but the practical upshot of it all was that there were a couple of games consoles and a video player all connected to a fancy switch-button arrangement that told the TV what it was supposed to be showing.

Harry decided that, since Blaise was probably either new to video games or at least a bit out of practice, the best choice was going to be Sonic The Hedgehog 3 because you could have one player playing Sonic (who played the game like normal) and the other player playing his sidekick Tails (who could be knocked out and recover without any ill effects).

"So you're telling me," Blaise began, once Harry had finished explaining, "that Muggles regularly plug things into their tellies that let them move around a supersonic blue hedgehog and a flying two tailed fox."

"I don't know if a lot of Muggles do," Harry was at pains to explain. "But this game is quite popular."

"I really don't know why Draco thinks Muggle entertainment is boring," Blaise told him. "I can understand why he might not like it, but one thing that idea is not is boring."

"I kind of think that it's hard for a big group of people of all ages to be boring," Harry said, as he pressed the button to switch the television over to the games console with a clunk. "It's sort of like… if you have a group of people, some of them are going to be thinking creative things. And if there isn't already the creative thing they want, if they want to read it they have to write it themselves. Or if it's a game, they have to invent it themselves… so the smaller the group, the more writing the average person seems to do."

The console announced that it was by SE-GA, which made Blaise glance at it in surprise – then the Slytherin boy shrugged.

"I wonder if Tyler and Anne know about this," he said, as Harry navigated through the menu to select a new game and pick the two-player mode. "If you can play a fox, I mean."

"Maybe I'll have to tell them, in case they don't already know," Harry suggested.

After about twenty minutes, Blaise decided that – while interesting – the game wasn't really his sort of thing.

Harry was fine with that, because it would be kind of rude to insist that someone didn't know what they really liked, and instead got out a chess set. That promptly led to him being thrashed three times in a row, but it wasn't like he'd expected anything else.

"So, what do you plan to do after Hogwarts?" Blaise asked.

Harry was trying to work out how to get out of a rather nasty fork Blaise had unleashed, and he tried to fix in his head the idea he was thinking of trying.

Once that was done – he thought maybe he could move a bishop so it would threaten Blaise's forking knight, and a valuable piece Blaise had on the other side of the knight – he looked up, actually thinking about Blaise's question.

"I don't really know," he had to admit. "Or… there are lots of things I could do, I'm just not sure which of them is actually a plan. Bishop forwards left two spaces."

The bishop duly moved, and Blaise nodded in contemplation. "Not bad. So what sort of things?"

"Well, one of them is being an Auror," Harry said. "Or… another idea was that I could start teaching? That's interesting, I've already been teaching Dragonish but it'd be good to teach it all over the place."

"You could always join the Ministry," Blaise pointed out. "You'd be sure to enter the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures if you wanted, even once Anne and Tyler and the others have done their NEWTs you're always going to be the most senior non-human Hogwarts graduate. And from there, and with your start, you could end up Minister in a decade."

Harry had to snigger. "That sounds like you want me to take over the country."

"Yes?" Blaise asked. "I know it's a Slytherin thing to want to be sneaky and gain power, but it's a Gryffindor thing to want to be famous."

He pointed to one of his pawns, ordering it to move forwards. "Besides, if the country's yours then as a dragon you'd have to protect your hoard. That's how it works, isn't it?"

Put like that, Harry had to admit the idea was sort of tempting.

Even if it sounded a little bit like Smaug running for mayor of Laketown.

A few days later, Harry had the chance to go around to Ron's house.

Saying that Harry went around Ron's house, though, sort of undersold what happened. Harry wasn't just visiting Ron, he was visiting all of the Weasleys (and none of them for the first time), as well as saying hello to Dobby (who was quite different from Kreacher, and it was sort of funny to Harry that it was the cheerful Dobby who'd tried to injure him in the past rather than the crabby Kreacher) and dropping in on Luna while he was at it.

Also, Sirius came along, so it was more like the two of them visiting Ottery St. Catchpole as a whole rather than anything else.

Still, it was a nice day.

"You don't know how much of a nightmare it's been, these last couple of weeks," Ron told Harry earnestly.

"Why's that?" Harry asked, looking up at The Burrow and then around in case he could see the reason why it might be a nightmare.

It wasn't guaranteed, exactly, but sometimes with magic things were obvious like that. Maybe a Dementor had moved in next door, for example, though Harry couldn't imagine why.

Perhaps it was something to do with the Housing Market. Uncle Vernon always complained about the Housing Market, which was either going down (which left him grumbling) or going up (which left him grumbling in an almost identical but presumably distinct way).

"It's because of Fred and George," Ron explained. "The first few weeks of summer they were doing, well, stuff – you know, homework, or inventing, the kind of thing they do – but then someone pointed out that they're of age now and get to cast magic over the summer."

Harry asked what, to him, was the obvious question. "If they weren't able to cast magic over the summer before, how have they been inventing?"

"It's all Potions, or something," Ron shrugged. "I think? But they did their Apparition tests, and they've got good enough that they can do it in Animagus form. So now they keep randomly appearing to mess with people."

"It sounds like it's a good thing that Apparating is blocked in Hogwarts," Harry summarized.

"Yeah, I think that's going to be the best place to get peace," Ron agreed.

"Maybe that's something I need to work on," Bill suggested, coming and sitting down on the lawn next to them.

"What, peace?" Ron asked. "Don't you get enough of that in those Egyptian tombs and stuff?"

"It's not really what you'd call relaxing in there," Bill told his brother.

He leaned back on the slope, stretching – Harry noticed that Ron was still shorter than Bill was, but it was getting closer – and shrugged. "If you're not sure what's going to set off the next curse, that can be worrying… and so can some of the nasty traps they set up there. I ran into one once where it counted steps. You'd be fine when you went in, fine when you checked for traps, and then days later when you were three chambers deeper you ran out of steps and – wham!"

He clapped his hands together. "Ceiling falls in."

"Wow," Harry admitted. "So why do they have all these protections and stuff? Why not just bury it all in a pile of rubble the size of a pyramid?"

"Same reason you leave your things in a Gringotts vault, really," Bill said.

Ron yawned, which Harry thought was probably because he'd heard it before. Harry hadn't, though, and found it all interesting.

"These Egyptian wizards believed that they'd be able to come back to life," the older Weasley clarified. "Maybe in a different body. So they hid their most prized treasures and magical objects away behind traps, and they'd be the only ones able to get past."

Harry was briefly struck by the disconcerting similarity to how Voldemort had come back in Professor Quirrell's body, then frowned. "So… why do you go in and help take the treasures? Aren't they safe where they are?"

"They're safe, but nobody around them is," Bill replied, propping himself up on one arm to get a better angle. "Sometimes Muggles get lost, wander into the wrong parts of pyramids, and they can have a really bad time. A year ago we found someone who'd gone through a door by accident – it was invisible to Muggles – and then got paralyzed by an ancient Body Bind curse. Poor chap had to go to the Hypatia hospital in Alexandria for a few months."

Harry winced, not having thought of it that way.

It sounded sort of like Bill's job was a bit like what Indiana Jones did, in the films and stuff, but also a bit like bomb disposal.

And some proper archaeology, too.

"The other part of it is that we don't really know all the magical tricks the Ancient Egyptians did," Bill continued. "That's why I had to do Arithmancy – you don't just break the curses, you study them and pull them to bits and see how they did stuff. Most of it's not really useful – there's this one spell which makes a glow completely unrelated to Lumos, only it's got twelve syllables and it's five times fainter – but sometimes you get good stuff."

Harry nodded, thinking that that part of it sounded interesting as well.

He could see why someone would go into Curse-Breaking as a career, even if it didn't quite feel like the sort of thing he'd go for.

It wasn't anything bad about the career, really, it was just that Harry felt like he wouldn't be able to fully trust his co-workers. Not because of who they were – he hadn't even met them, except possibly Bill – but he felt like he'd never be entirely able to shake the image of them sneaking into a dragon's den and taking a dragon's hoard.

It was silly – there was only one dragon's hoard in the world, as far as Harry knew, and it was in a tent somewhere in Greater London – but you had to think about these things. Or possibly find some other way to make a decision.

Then Harry's thoughts were interrupted as Trouble and Strife appeared overhead in a twin crack sound, dropped balloons, and vanished again. Harry shielded himself with his wing, which sent the water from the balloon splashing everywhere except on the rest of him, and Ron let out a high-pitched yelp before shouting that he'd turn Fred and George into a stole.

Really, for people who were Of Age (even if in the Magical world that meant seventeen, which explained why the Triwizard Tournament had been for those seventeen years of age and older), Fred and George weren't acting like it. Though, then again, neither did Sirius sometimes.

About halfway through the month of August, Harry woke up suddenly in the middle of the night.

He blinked for a moment, thinking over the idea that had woken him up to see if it actually made sense, then scrabbled for a piece of notepaper and a pen to write it down before he forgot.

It wasn't anything to do with any of the books he'd been reading recently, except in a sort of tangential way, so Harry thought it must have been one of those times when an idea sort of fizzed away in the back of your mind for months before finally all coming into a single coherent shape at once.

Down it went onto the paper, written in a set of bullet points so it would be easy to understand even if he did forget in the morning, and Harry looked at it to make extra sure that – if he did have to rely on it – it'd actually make sense.

It did look like it, and Harry wrote it all down a second time in case the first note went missing.

Then, because he was now feeling entirely too awake, he got the book he'd been reading before bed and settled down on his blanket (which was on his hoard) to read until he got back to sleep.

As names for dragons went, Windrider was quite a good one, and it was good for dragon representation that she was the title character. He didn't think the trick she'd done of flying over a magic barrier would work in the real world, though, because with so many broomsticks around it seemed like someone would already have thought of that.

The idea was still there in the morning, so Harry wrote a letter to Dumbledore saying that he thought he'd worked out something to help with one of their puzzles.

He sent Hedwig off with it, sending her from Dogwarts because it was closer to Hogwarts, but the moment that she was in the air she turned around and flew back into the house.

Confused, Harry followed, and found his snowy owl perched next to the Floo powder with an expectant set to her beak.

"Oh, he's in London?" Harry asked, and got a pleased beak snap.

"I've known some smart owls in my time," Sirius told Harry, as Harry got the Floo powder and stoked up the fire a little. "But that one's sort of intimidating."

"Grimmauld Place! I think she's meant to be," Harry replied.

Hedwig vanished through the flames, and Harry went over to sit down.

"Apparently that one we watched on Thursday was the end of the series, for the Crystal Maze," Sirius told Harry, after a few minutes of companionable silence.

"Really?" Harry asked, then shrugged. "I suppose we'll just have to record the next series, or something."

He did quite like the program, which felt sort of like the sort of thing they might play at Hogwarts – revolving around solving puzzles or doing tasks inside a time limit. It was almost like a non-magical Triwizard Tournament, only with less dragons.

Since dragons improved everything, this made it a worse Triwizard tournament, but you couldn't have everything from telly.

Dumbledore, it seemed, was quite interested, and the next day Harry and Sirius went up to visit him in the Headmaster's Office.

The password this time was 'Frosties', which quite surprised Harry as he would have expected that to be a breakfast if anything.

"Sirius, Harry, it is always a pleasure to see you both," Dumbledore informed them. "Perhaps I should ask for a photograph, so I can see you much more often. Now, I believe that you had something to discuss, Harry?"

"I sort of realized it at night, Professor," Harry explained. "You know the Resurrection Stone?"

"I do, Harry, though I must caution you that I have decided – based on your own advice, of course – that it is far too dangerous to use," Dumbledore said, much more gravely. Which was appropriate, Harry supposed. "The story about the Three Brothers is quite clear that it would be a tremendously bad idea to become too lost in grief to pay attention to the world of the living, and after much thought I have decided that – in my case, as in many others – it would be best to heed the warning."

There was a little catch in Dumbledore's voice which made Harry feel terribly sad. It reminded him of how Belgarath had felt for the thousands of years when he had thought his wife gone for good, perhaps.

"But that's not what Harry wants to use the Stone for," Sirius said, taking up the thread of discussion after a moment of silence.

"That's right," Harry agreed. "I was thinking about it, and I realized that you can't really be lost in grief if you're talking to a ghost from so long ago – and who doesn't matter to you as much – so that you don't really have any connection to them. You could ask Ravenclaw what happened to her diadem, or Gryffindor what happened to his sword, and both of those would be fine. Right?"

Dumbledore seemed quite surprised by Harry's suggestion, and sat back in his chair.

"It is quite a remarkable suggestion," he said, after a long pause, and chuckled. "Perhaps it had to be someone who had not grown up with the story to realize it."

"It'd still have to be used really carefully," Harry cautioned. "Because it's one of those things that's powerful enough you need to be really careful. But… let's see, we sorted out the diary, the ring and the locket, we know Riddle got Hufflepuff's Cup but we don't know where it is, we know Gryffindor's Hat is right here and it's fine, and we don't know where Ravenclaw's Diadem and Gryffindor's Sword are."

"And don't forget that the diary was Riddle's diary, not something from one of the Founders of Hogwarts," Sirius reminded them. "And we don't know how many others he made, either. There could be a tap in a Muggle bathroom somewhere in Slough that has a bit of Riddle's soul in it."

"I have given this much thought, and I do not think such would be the case," Dumbledore told them both. "You see, I think everything Tom made into a Horcrux had to be meaningful in some way, and so were the places where he hid them. The locket – an object from the Founders of Hogwarts, and left in a cave where he did some early and evil thing. The ring – an inheritance from Salazar Slytherin, no less, and left in the ancestral home of the Gaunts. The diary – the proof of his heritage, and left with a pure-blooded supporter."

"Pardon?" Sirius asked. "I must have missed hearing about that."

"Perhaps you did," Dumbledore said, spreading his hands. "It was a while ago I was able to gain a memory of the argument in the book shop, as part of the trial of Mr. Lockhart, and in exploring it closely I was able to catch that it was Lucius who placed the book in with Harry's purchases. I must confess however that I was rather busy that week, and it may have slipped my mind."

"I sort of feel like saying thank-you to him," Harry admitted. "It would be a very strange thing to do to a Horcrux to give it to me, wouldn't it?"

"If he knew what it was, indeed it would be," Dumbledore agreed. "So perhaps he did not, or perhaps he did, and either way perhaps we should not ask."

Working out how to actually do what Harry was thinking of took quite a lot of time, and quite a lot of discussion as well.

Dumbledore said that it would be terribly bad manners to interrupt someone who had moved on to the next great adventure without an extremely good reason, and while he agreed that helping to sort out Tom Riddle would be an extremely good reason it was hard indeed for him to think of any others.

"You see, Harry," he said, "I find that when there is something I would very much like to do, and that I know is not something I should be doing whenever I wish, I must place some very strict rules indeed upon myself so that I do not give in to temptation."

"That sounds like a good idea, Professor," Harry admitted.

Really, they weren't even sure if using it once would be safe, but it was the sort of thing that seemed like it would be worth the risk.

Sirius had been taking notes, and eventually he put his quill down. "Okay, so… we don't have a reason to ask Salazar Slytherin anything, and even if we did we wouldn't be sure he'd tell the truth."

Harry nodded.

"And Helga Hufflepuff only had the Cup, and we know that Voldemort got his hands on it, but we don't know what he did with it after that. So nobody we could bring back with the Stone would be able to help," Sirius went on.

"Indeed," Dumbledore sighed. "I very much doubt that Hepzibah Smith would be able to tell us what became of her erstwhile possessions after her death, though of course we have dealt with Slytherin's Locket already and all we lack of Hufflepuff's Cup is a location. But that leaves the two we are sure of."

Harry was quite impressed by how everyone was enunciating the capital letters in words like 'Locket' and 'Cup'.

Sirius tapped the parchment. "Gryffindor's Sword and Ravenclaw's Diadem. We need to ask Gryffindor where his Sword went, and Ravenclaw what happened to her Diadem, and if they don't know where the Sword or the Diadem are we follow the trail until we find someone who does know."

"What's that?" the Sorting Hat asked, jumping a little on his shelf.

He yawned. "Terribly sorry, wasn't expecting to be needed for nearly another month. I'm having trouble with one of the rhymes, and if I don't sort this out before September I may have to resort to alliteration."

"I am sorry, my dear Hat," Dumbledore apologized. "We must remember not to discuss such weighty matters while you are composing."

"No, no, do please continue," the Hat requested. "It's really quite fortunate, you know – I can answer one of your questions right away! Why, Gryffindor's Sword is to be found nowhere else than right inside my brim!"

Thinking about it, both then and later, Harry was quite sure it was one of the only times he'd ever seen Dumbledore quite speechless.

"How does that work?" Sirius asked.

"It's all about great need, my good fellow," the Hat replied brightly. "If a truly brave Gryffindor is in great need, all he has to do is ask for help and Gryffindor's Sword appears!"

His pointy tip dipped as the whole of his fabric creased in a considering frown. "Of course, it does tend to be quite rare that someone is actually wearing me and asks for help."

"Well… the good news is that we know Riddle didn't get Gryffindor's Sword?" Harry suggested.

"An excellent point indeed, Harry, an excellent point indeed," Dumbledore agreed, his aplomb seeming to largely be restored. "Though it does remind me that we still do not know how many Horcruxes Tom actually made… but I believe that we can go ahead and ask Rowena Ravenclaw."

He rose from his chair and walked over to a cabinet. A tap with his wand and it opened, revealing a small box, and he took the box out before placing it on the table.

Leaning over it, he cleared his throat. "Matthias broom-handle." There was a faint click, and the box opened.

"Matthias broom-handle?" Sirius repeated, sounding honestly offended as Dumbledore took out the Resurrection Stone. "Where did that come from?"

"It would be terribly irresponsible of me to use a password that made any kind of sense," Dumbledore replied with a smile. "Now, then… I believe that you are supposed to turn the stone over three times…"

Over it went, and then stopped.

"Did it work?" Sirius asked.

"Ignosce," Dumbledore requested, holding up his hand, then turned his attention to Sirius. "I am dreadfully sorry, Sirius, Harry – it appears that those summoned by the Stone are only visible to the one who has summoned them."

He smiled quite brightly. "Fortunately, it seems that Rowena Ravenclaw and I share the language of Latin. I would say she also speaks Gaelic, and English, but alas those tongues are not the same as they were in her day; Latin, however, is all but unchanged."

"That's good," Harry said, thinking about how hard it would have been to carry on the conversation if it had been someone else who'd tried using the Stone.

"Gratias ago tibi, quia in tempore non tuo," Dumbledore went on, and now Harry could see he was looking at someone a little to the right. "Ego enim ex vena Scolae Hogwarts."

He listened, then spread his hands in a shrug. "Vae, Gryffindor."

"This might take a while," Sirius observed.

"Est quaestio magni momenti est," Dumbledore continued. "Si forte quaeritur de diadema regni tui?"

Harry recognized what sounded like the word 'diadem', and since diadem was the sort of old word that sounded like it was from Latin then that probably meant Dumbledore had asked the important question.

It was sort of odd having to rely on someone translating later to know what the answer to a question was. Maybe it was how everyone else felt dealing with his occasional conversations with other dragons, basilisks, or (presumably, though he'd never tried) actual normal snakes.

Dumbledore talked to Rowena Ravenclaw for another few minutes, sounding at different times interested, melancholy and conciliatory, then held out his hand and dropped the stone. It clattered to the floor, and after contemplating it Dumbledore sat back down.

Nobody said anything for a bit.

"How very strange an experience," Dumbledore said, eventually. "It is a great pity we cannot write it up for inclusion in the best magical journals, as I suspect Tom would notice. And if he knew that we were aware of his Horcruxes, well, I do not think it would go well for us."

"He wants to keep his Horcruxes in important places," Harry said, following along, and picked up the stone from the floor to put it back on the desk. "But that's not necessarily something he has to do, and he might hide them somewhere we could never find in the first place if he knew we'd found some of them."

"My thought exactly," Dumbledore confirmed.

"So what about the Diadem?" Sirius checked.

"Alas, Rowena did not know – or perhaps I should say does not know – where it is," Dumbledore told them. "Nor for that matter did she know about Empress, though I suppose that should not be surprising... it took Empress a considerable amount of time to grow to her present size, after all."

He steepled his long fingers together. "It seems that her diadem was stolen many years before she passed away, by her daughter Helena Ravenclaw. Rowena said that she concealed the loss from even her closest friends, and certainly did not try to retrieve it, but on her deathbed she sent a knight to retrieve Helena so that she could see her daughter one last time."

Dumbledore looked down at the desk. "To her knowledge, neither of them came back to Hogwarts. Certainly they had not returned by the time of her demise, which came about a week later."

Harry had to blink away tears.

The sadness that Dumbledore was describing was something that had happened about a thousand years ago. The only person left alive from that time was Empress, who had probably known little to nothing about it – if Salazar hadn't known then there wasn't really a way for Empress to know, after all – but it still seemed fresh, somehow.

"And I thought my family had problems," Sirius muttered. "So… I'm going to guess that we should ask Helena Ravenclaw? Or the knight?"

"Helena Ravenclaw seems the best option, to me," Dumbledore said, after considering. "She is the one who absconded with the Diadem, and she is also the one for whom we have a name. If it transpires that the Diadem is still wherever it is she left it, then we can simply retrieve it ourselves, test it and then – assuming of course that the Diadem is not a Horcrux and does not require an encounter with Harry's rather tremendous inflammatory capabilities – count ourselves grateful to have the Diadem back."

He paused. "I do believe I have said the word Diadem far too many times in a short space of time."

Despite knowing what they were going to do next, they didn't get straight on with activating the Resurrection Stone again.

Dumbledore had a House-Elf by the name of Kayley bring them up some tea and biscuits, and the biscuits arrived with quite an unusual appearance – whichever elf had baked them had done so to make it look as though they had made a plate of half-a-dozen breakfast buns, complete with a little fondant egg in the middle.

Harry pronounced them to be both clever and delicious, and Dumbledore looked as pleased as if he'd made them himself.

"I shall have to inform the baker you approve," he smiled. "I do so like a little experimentation in the food we eat. It adds colour to the day, and brings delight to the tongue."

Once the biscuits were gone, however, Dumbledore rose again.

"I fear we may once more need my facility with the fine language of Latin," he explained, picking up the stone. "Let me see, now… Helena Ravenclaw, daughter of Rowena Ravenclaw."

He turned the stone over in his hand, and then there was a sudden blur of silvery light and the Grey Lady of Ravenclaw Tower was stood there.

She looked around, seeming quite confused, and Dumbledore frowned.

"This is most peculiar," he said.

"That's the Grey Lady, isn't it?" Sirius asked, just ahead of Harry who was about to ask the same question. "Is she Helena Ravenclaw?"

"Where did you hear that name?" the Grey Lady demanded, shocked. "What's happening?"

"We're trying to find out how many of the Founders' artefacts Tom Riddle got to," Harry tried to explain. "We know he got Slytherin's – Salazar Slytherin's Locket and Ring, and Helga Hufflepuff's Cup."

It felt like it was a good idea to use the full names, right now, because of course Helena Ravenclaw had known Salazar Slytherin and Helga Hufflepuff, and perhaps whoever the sons and daughters of Helga and Salazar (and Godric) had been, so using the full names would keep things less confusing.

"Tom Riddle," the Grey Lady repeated, putting more venom into the words than Harry thought even Empress could have managed. "Yes, I know who you mean. And… he wore a ring when I knew him, yes. It could have been Slytherin's."

"Harry-" Sirius began, but Harry saw Dumbledore make a wordless gesture.

"If he got to the Diadem, then we need to destroy it," Harry said. "Or, we almost certainly need to destroy it. We've already done it to Slytherin's Ring and his Locket, because Riddle did something terribly evil to them."

"I hid my mother's diadem in a hollow tree in Albania," the Grey Lady said, and Harry's ears pricked up. "But when I talked to him… he seemed to understand. He was flattering… he told me so many things about how I had felt... it seemed like nobody else who had wanted the Diadem had wanted it for the right reasons, but that he did."

"You would not be the only person Tom has tricked," Dumbledore said, sorrowfully. "Not the first, nor the last. He convinced the previous Headmaster of this school he had saved it from a peril of his own making, and talked a man I thought I knew into surrendering his own body to aid in Tom's plans."

"Do you know where the Diadem went?" Harry asked, and his heart sank when the Grey Lady shook her head.

"I only know that he took it from the tree near where I died," she answered. "I died far from Hogwarts, murdered by the Baron when my mother sent him after me, and he died but a few minutes later to his own sword. As we both died there, we can haunt it; as we both lived in Hogwarts once, we can haunt this place. But I could not follow Riddle elsewhere, and even when he was in Hogwarts afterwards I did not want to see him."

Her ghostly fists clenched. "He was too much a reminder of how I had been tricked."

"So it could be in Hogwarts," Harry said, thinking out loud and frowning. "And – I know – wait, um, when did he find that out?"

"He was in his seventh year," the Grey Lady answered. "He took it less than a month after he left Hogwarts."

"It couldn't be in the Chamber of Secrets, then," Harry decided. "The only ones he had while he was in Hogwarts were the Locket and the Diary, and we got to both of those."

"Didn't you say he was in Hogwarts afterwards?" Sirius asked the Grey Lady.

"Tom came back to Hogwarts but once," Dumbledore told them. "He was applying for a job, though of course I refused. I do not believe he entered the Chamber of Secrets either before or afterwards."

"That is the second time you have mentioned the Chamber of Secrets," the Grey Lady said, and Harry sort of idly thought that she seemed to have given up her usual near-total silence.

Perhaps this was the most that had happened in the last several decades of her death.

"I've talked to the Basilisk inside," Harry explained. "We're keeping her sort of secret for now, but she's just glad to have someone to talk to. Riddle made her do things she regrets as well."

"It's just occurred to me," Sirius contributed. "He could have hidden either the Cup or the Diadem in the castle during his visit for that interview. And he could have got to the Chamber – we'd need to ask Empress to look, for that one."

Harry thought she was asleep, and said so, then asked whether the House-Elves could have a look.

"Hogwarts has been turned upside down many times by students seeking the Diadem," Dumbledore said, considering. "But it is true that the House-Elves know more about the castle than anyone else – even I, remarkable as it may seem."

"What about me?" Sirius asked. "I helped make a map of the castle!"

"Indeed you did," Dumbledore smiled. "But, alas, I cannot accept it as Charms course work because you did not hand it in in time."

He considered, then raised his voice. "Kayley?"

The same House-Elf from before appeared in a pop.

"Would you be so kind as to ask all the Elves to search Hogwarts top to bottom?" he asked. "They will be looking for Ravenclaw's Diadem, or Hufflepuff's Cup."

Kayley nodded briskly, and vanished with another pop.

Twelve seconds later she appeared again, this time with her hands raised high holding a glittering diadem. "Found it, Headmaster Sir! It was being in the Come And Go Room!"

"...I'm almost annoyed," Sirius groaned.

Fifteen minutes later, in a little seaside cove, Dumbledore placed Ravenclaw's Diadem on the soft sands.

"There is one thing that occurs to me," Sirius said, looking at it.

"What's that?" Harry asked. "A way we can get away without destroying it?"

Sirius shook his head. "No, no luck there. More that this now means we know where Riddle hid the one in the castle… so where else is important enough to him to hide the Cup?"

He looked at Dumbledore. "His orphanage?"

"An excellent idea, Sirius, but fruitless," Dumbledore informed him. "I have checked the building, and nothing of the sort was to be found."

He waved towards the diadem. "But we had best be sure we get on with our business, as it would not do to go to tea with our task still undone."

Harry nodded, and took a deep breath. It had been a while since he used Fiendfyre, and he spent a long moment trying to remember everything he'd learned about controlling it.

It took long enough for him to be sure that he had to let out the deep breath and take a second one, but once he was sure he took a half-unconscious step back and reared up with his wings spread.

"Infernus!" he roared, sending forth a billowing jet of orange-yellow flame, and it shot right into the middle of the Diadem. It was engulfed for a long second until Harry released his fire, and then it was surrounded by burning sand and fused glass.

Harry wondered if the attack had worked at all, as the Diadem didn't look much more than scorched, then he noticed the ichor leaking out of it. Then it broke cleanly in half, issuing forth the faint and ghostly shriek of pain that always seemed to come with the destruction of a Horcrux.

"Fine work, Harry," Dumbledore told him, and stepped forwards with his wand raised high. A jet of bluebell flames covered the Diadem, the sand and the glass, and Dumbledore waited for a moment before flicking his wand and dispelling the now-diluted Fiendfyre. "Fine work indeed."

"So that is the end of my mother's diadem," the Grey Lady said.

She looked different this far from the castle, sort of washed-out, and she was staring at the peculiar fused mess of glass that Harry had made out of the beach.

It was sort of interesting, really. It looked like the actual core of his fire breath had missed the diadem itself, instead drilling a tunnel several inches deep into the sand.

"What do you think you will be doing now, if I might be so bold as to ask?" Dumbledore said.

The Grey Lady looked sort of torn, then came to a decision. "I will stay, I think," she told him.

Harry hadn't known there was a choice, and said so, and she put a finger to her lips.

"You will find out in your own due time," she replied, and drifted off back towards the castle.

Harry watched her go, puzzled, then turned his attention to the splash where his fire had hit. His claws got easily underneath the hardened surface, letting him break it away in fragments, and he dug around a bit before pulling out a tube of melted glass.

"Do you think I could have that, Harry?" Dumbledore asked. "It would go quite well among the many things in my office – at least with that one I would know what it was."

Sirius made a strangled coughing noise.

"You don't know what they are, Professor?" Harry said, quite surprised.

"I am sure they do many useful things, and perhaps even a few useless ones," Dumbledore told him. "But it would be nice to have some glass to enliven the picture. Of course, the choice is yours."

That evening, Harry wondered about whether it meant anything for how dragon psychology meant that he'd not felt even a twinge about giving the glass away.

Was it because it wasn't precious? Because he could make more any time he really wanted?

Because it hadn't yet become his?

Whichever it was, it was at least clear that his version of dragon psychology was quite different to the version of dragon psychology applied to Nora, Sally, Ollie and Gary. All four of them had been quite pleased to see him, and the three younger dragons had been full of excitement as they asked him to watch them fly – and in formation, no less.

Now with two years of Care Of Magical Creatures behind him, Harry could say quite firmly that the dragonets were much better behaved with one another than normal dragons were with other normal dragons.

Which was nice. Even if their best behaviour wasn't quite up to Nora.

It was almost the end of summer when the letter finally arrived with Harry's book list. There were only a few this year, including a new Defence textbook (at last) and a book on advanced runic combinations by Edda Carver.

It also came with a shiny Prefect badge, which Harry carefully put somewhere he wouldn't lose it, and two extra sheets of parchment.

The first, which was addressed to 'Prefect', said that Prefects were to go to the Prefect Carriage on the Hogwarts Express to get instructions from the Head Boy and Girl.

Harry hoped he wouldn't have to stay there all journey, but then again Percy had been on the train at various points in Harry's first few years – and he couldn't imagine what they could possibly be told that would take the full seven or eight hours it took to go to Hogwarts, so he was sort of optimistic about it.

The second, which was addressed to 'Harry' specifically and which was signed by Dumbledore, told him that there would be several new non-human students at Hogwarts this coming year – one of whom was Isaac, the griffin that Harry had met in Care Of Magical Creatures, along with a vampire by the name of Melody and a second member of June's pack (this time with the rather more prosaic name of Matthew). Dumbledore expressed his hope that Harry would find the time to make them all comfortable, and said that he was sure that Harry would have done so anyway but that this way Harry would know that Dumbledore would appreciate it.

It was quite a lot of responsibility to think about, but Harry did have to admit that it was probably what he'd have done anyway. It didn't stop it being imposing, like how being told that you had to do something was even if you were planning on doing it.

Still, now Harry knew what shopping to get, and that was important.

And it meant he knew what to do on September the First. That was more important.

AN:

It's all about who you ask.

The Cup, on the other hand, is going to be harder to work out. Only a couple of people know where it is, all in Azkaban (or in Voldemort's case mostly dead), and once you know that's only half the battle…

Oh, also, Harry has a badge.