About a week before the end of November, posters started to appear around Hogwarts.
Harry saw the first one in the corridor near the Charms classroom on Tuesday, and stopped to have a look at it. It was stark black on white parchment, four feet tall, and it listed more than two dozen wizards and witches before announcing that Hogwarts' human-only policy had produced the best graduates of the institution.
"Wow," Ron said.
"Huh?" Dean asked, glancing at him. "I don't disagree, but is it anything in particular?"
"It's just… wow," Ron repeated. "I can see the logical flaw in that one."
"It's nonsense, is what it is," Hermione said, and made to pull the poster off the wall. It didn't come off, at first, and she produced her wand and tapped it before removing the poster and rolling it up.
"Are you sure it's okay to do that?" Neville asked.
"If a teacher had put it up, they'd probably put their name on it," Harry said. "And if they didn't, they just need to do that. Right?"
He glanced at Hermione. "Is that how we do things?"
"You've been a prefect as long as me," Hermione replied. "But probably."
Harry had his own guess about who might have put it up, and she was a teacher. But nobody seemed to want to say it.
"You know it was Umbrage who put that up, right?" Ron asked, as they took their seats in Charms.
Harry privately revised his opinion about nobody seeming to want to say it.
"It probably was," Hermione agreed, putting the poster into her bag. "But if it doesn't say it's put up by a teacher, then it's not certain."
"That's cunning, that is," Ron declared. "Don't you think?"
"It certainly seems to be," Neville said.
"Someone find a Slytherin so we can ask them," Ron suggested.
"All right, everyone," Professor Flitwick said, getting their attention. "Today we will be covering a pair of spells – and, as you may have guessed, they are a pair because one of them is the counterspell to the other."
He pointed his wand into the air. "Avis."
There was a tremendous bang, and half a dozen birds came flying out of the tip of Professor Flitwick's wand. They all flew in circles, then out the window, and Harry watched them leave with a frown.
"Su," Flitwick added, and Harry saw she had had her hand up.
"Professor, I was wondering why the window was open," she explained. "It's warm in here, so there must be a charm making it be warm, but if you're going to show the counterspell don't you need the birds here?"
"An excellent observation," Professor Flitwick said. "In fact, neither of the spells we will be working on today is the bird-conjuring spell, because you have already learned that spell."
He smiled brightly. "Surprisingly, this is not revision! Instead, this is the first spell we will be learning."
Holding his wand out in front of them, he waved it in a slow movement. "Priori Incantatem."
Misty smoke flowed out of the end of the wand, showing a monochrome image of a bird. The spell itself jogged Harry's memory a bit, and he seemed to recall Professor Dumbledore using it once in front of him years ago.
It was something about showing what the last spell you'd cast with the wand was?
"The thing about this spell which makes it so useful is that it references back to the wand," Professor Flitwick told them. "Though that is also a problem, for a few reasons we'll get into later. For now I want you to write this down as an example of a charm that is also a meta-spell, a spell which is about spells."
The class started taking notes, and Harry put the poster out of his mind.
After they'd learned about the other charm in the pair (Deletrius, the only way to make the smoky shadows go away), and taken notes about the way the spell worked and some examples of how it could act in odd ways, the lesson was over and Harry and his friends went off to break (and then, in three cases out of five, Runes).
Now that Harry was looking for them, even in a not-very-consciously-looking sort of way, he kept noticing more of those posters around the school. There was one on the way up towards Gryffindor which declared that Teachers Know Best! and another one on the way back down to Runes which said that good children didn't break any school rules.
Both of those were the sort of thing that Harry could agree with in general, but they managed to be at the same time really kind of simplistic black-and-white statements (or in the case of the school rules poster, black and pink, because if Professor Umbridge was behind them she'd started making some of them using pink parchment) that missed all the nuance, and really condescending.
"I know we're technically still not adults until we turn seventeen, but really," Hermione said, as they waited outside Runes. "Does she think our school year is our age?"
That made Harry frown, as he was suddenly struck by a thought.
"It just occurred to me," he said. "I wasn't a dragon until I was in primary school, I think, but I was one by the time I was six. And based on how quickly Nora and the others are learning, I think they might be a lot smarter than me by the time they're six."
"That'd be really weird to think about," Susan contributed, from a few places up the line. "I'm so used to dragons being… well, normal dragons, and you're sort of an exception. But if there are loads of exceptions, then..."
She shrugged.
"Well, in Fifth Year there's only one exception," Ernie said. "In Fourth Year there's more, and then more after that, and so on."
He smiled. "Still. There's only one year where it'll be the first."
There was a bit of silence after that, and Ron glanced over at Harry. "You know how you're going to make the sword for your Runes practical, right?"
"Yeah, or I've got a good idea," Harry replied. "I had this idea of using my breath to help heat up the metal, because it just sounds kind of neat."
"Are you sure you can make your fire hot enough?" Hermione asked. "I suppose you don't have to wear gloves when you're using a hammer on hot metal, or anything, and you wouldn't need to build a forge, but it seems like a lot more work than just Transfiguring it."
"Well, this is sort of a present for Neville as much as anything," Harry explained, though he was also thinking about how he could make his fire a lot hotter than most people could guess.
He didn't want to burn Hogwarts down, though. So maybe he'd just need to use a normal make-fires-hotter spell?
"Excuse me, everyone," Dumbledore said the next day, standing up in the middle of dinner. "Professor Umbridge has asked me to make an announcement on the matter of posters."
He smiled pleasantly. "You see, Professor Umbridge has been putting up some posters, and it seems that some people have been taking them all down. While I can commend those people on their commitment to a tidy school, I would like to ask that we give the posters a try for a week or so to see how it all works out."
Dumbledore tapped his chin. "Of course, it occurs to me that it would be dreadfully lacking in variety for there to just be the one person making posters… but, well, there you go. Please do not take any posters down, and thank you all in advance."
Harry noticed that Professor Umbridge looked mortified.
Maybe it was because she wanted to be the only person allowed to put up posters, or perhaps instead it was because she thought that if everyone was told not to take down her posters then her posters would be taken down a lot.
Or maybe it was just that Dumbledore hadn't punished people for taking posters down. Professor Umbridge seemed like the sort of person who saw 'the number of people who got detention' as a way of keeping score for her tenure as a teacher.
Over the next few days, the halls of Hogwarts got a bit more colourful.
Naturally, some people had abused the freedom Dumbledore had allowed, and there were a few posters that Harry felt really did have to be taken down because they broke school rules about swearing – proper swearing, not saying Merlin a lot – so he sort of provisionally took them down and asked a teacher straight afterwards to be sure about the exception he thought applied.
Those were the only exceptions, though, and most of the posters were of a wide range of quality but much more heartfelt – or funny – in what they said. A surprising and touching number of them said thank you to Harry, or to Tanisis or June, and while there were some which initially looked like they were sort of against Harry and all the other differently-shaped students looking closer made Harry think that they were sarcastic.
Like the one which said 'Talking Dragons Are Unnatural, And So Are Trains, Ban Trains', or one which had a well-done picture of a dragon setting a wizard on fire.
When you looked closer, it turned out that the wizard in question was He Who Must Not Be Flamed. Or, at least, that was what the label sticking out of his robes said – next to that, the posters which were actually trying to say properly negative things about Harry or about the other not-entirely-human students didn't look very well made or convincing.
Then there was one which asked if anyone had seen an escaped toad, adding that the toad in question had a Dreadful on its Defence course and seemed to think it could teach the subject anyway.
Defence Class that Monday was conducted in complete, icy silence. The loudest thing that happened was when someone coughed forty minutes into class, which lost Seamus fifteen House Points.
Then, at dinner, Dumbledore informed everyone that it had been a lovely experiment and that Professor Umbridge had asked that the posters come down again. He said that everyone would have two days to retrieve theirs, and perhaps decorate their common rooms, but that the halls would be best left unposterized from now on.
"That's sort of a pity," Dean said. "I asked my parents for ideas. I was halfway through drawing up a poster with a sphinx paw shaking hands with a human one."
"It can still go up in in the common room," Ron pointed out. "Or Ravenclaw can have it. I bet Luna would like it."
"He's got a point," Ginny said.
"Thanks," Ron smiled.
"And I don't say that much about him, so you can really trust it," Ginny added, which led to Ron giving her a look.
"All right, so we're going to be doing the Impediment Jinx," Draco said one evening, twirling his wand between his fingers. "In case you haven't heard of that one, it's one which slows down or stops someone from moving – or something if you're boring."
He smirked. "It's useful in a duel for several reasons, and one of them is that if you can't dodge or aim your wand in a duel you're in trouble – and, what's more, it's one of those spells that doesn't have a lot of long term effect. The worst it can do is blast you backwards, and most spells do that. So I think we can practice it properly… right, Potter?"
"That's right," Harry agreed, thinking about the mentions of the spell in the Practical Defensive Spellcasting books. "It's also good if someone has used Transfiguration to make things to help in a fight, because using the jinx on them will slow those down too."
He paused. "I don't think it works on dragons, though."
There was a general good-natured groan, and Draco shook his head. "You can't keep saying everything doesn't work on dragons, Potter," he said. "Eventually it starts to count as boasting."
He twirled his wand again, this time right into his hand. "Would anyone like to help me demonstrate?"
June promptly stepped up, and started walking around at the front in a steady, even circle.
"Impedimenta!" Draco said suddenly, flicking his wand across, and the spell jet hit June in the flank. She slowed down suddenly, stumbling and nearly stopping, then was visibly having to work hard to move.
The spell quickly wore off, though – after about ten seconds she started moving slowly again, and a few seconds after that she was back to normal.
"The wand movement is a sideways flick," Draco added, demonstrating it again. "Do remember to end the flick with the spell pointing at the right person, or you might knock Creevey over again and nobody wants that."
"I'm fine so long as I don't land on my camera!" Colin called.
In the first astronomy lesson of December, Ron had a lot to say.
"It's one of those experiments that takes a really long time because space is so big," he said. "They first launched it in, um, 1989 I think? Which was before any of us came to Hogwarts – but it's only reaching Jupiter now."
"I didn't know you could reach Jupiter," Vincent muttered. "How did they do it?"
"They used a rocket to launch it into space," Ron told him. "Then it had to orbit the sun a couple of times to build up speed, I think, and then it just had to fly for years through space."
"Wouldn't it hit one of the asteroids?" Ernie said.
"Remember, the asteroids in the asteroid belt are still quite far apart!" Professor Sinistra told them.
"Oh, yeah, right," Ernie realized.
Ron turned the pages of the astronomy magazine that Harry had got for him. "And – right, it's already launched the little probe thing it was carrying. That's sort of like a smaller bit of Muggle technology, but they're going to send it straight into Jupiter to find out what it's like under the clouds."
"Won't it get destroyed?" Professor Sinistra said.
"Yeah, but they're going to have it send back what it learns by radio before it does," Ron explained. "It's already done it when it went past an asteroid. Though they do say it might be a long time before we get any photographs from Jupiter, because they're worried about the tape recorder."
"You mean they sent it all the way to Jupiter with a tape recorder that doesn't work, whatever one of those is?" Blaise asked.
"I mean, I've tried to work a tape recorder," Ron replied. "My dad tried to use one once and all the tape came out."
"It's going to be there for years," Harry pointed out. "Unless it gets killed first by being close to Jupiter."
Su Li raised her hand. "Sorry, is this the one that they're firing straight into a planet? How is that going to be there for years?"
"There's the probe which goes into Jupiter, and the orbiter which, er, orbits," Ron tried to explain. "Sort of explains itself, but it'd be easier if they hadn't both called them Galileo."
"Galileo?" Justin said.
"After the astronomer Galileo," Ron answered him.
"Figaro," Justin told him.
There was a long moment of silence.
"What?" Ron asked.
"Oh, right, Muggle Studies might not do that bit," Justin decided. "That's from Freddie Mercury."
"I thought we were talking about Jupiter," Gregory said quietly.
Professor Sinistra coughed slightly to get their attention. "Well, thank you for that, Mr. Weasley. It's always interesting to hear about what the Muggles are doing."
"That's not the only thing they're doing," Ron answered her. "It's not been launched yet, but it will be before next week – they're launching a space telescope to study the sun."
"That sounds like an extremely expensive way to make something catch fire," Draco drawled. "Merlin knows we're told not to look at the sun even without a telescope."
"It's okay, things don't catch fire in space," Harry informed him.
"I think it's best if we hear about those things later," Professor Sinistra decided.
She waited while Ron folded up his magazine, then continued. "Tonight we're going to be doing OWL revision. If you could all get your telescopes set up and, without help, locate the Andromeda galaxy."
In the Defence Club meeting the next day – one of the ones for Sixth and Seventh Years, where Harry was sort of along partly to see what he could learn and partly to help with showing off the Patronus Charm, as well as partly because he felt a vaguely proprietary air towards the club and it felt nice to attend – Cedric started off by holding up his wand and waving it at a chalkboard.
He didn't say anything at all, but the chalk rose into the air and began writing on the board.
Silent Casting, Harry read. Silent casting can be useful because it's harder for your opponent to know what you're casting, and it's often quicker as well. The main downside is that the spell ends up a lot weaker unless you practice it a lot.
The chalk finished writing, and Cedric waved his hand at the board before starting to talk. "There's a bit more to it, and it's definitely a fiddly topic, but that's the basics to it. It's actually a good thing that the spells end up weaker, too, because it takes concentration to cast a spell silently and if you don't concentrate on the right thing then you can end up not casting the spell… or, more importantly, casting the wrong spell."
Harry winced, and he wasn't the only one.
Cormac was the first to go up and demonstrate, and he cast the Disarming Charm four times in a row under Cedric's guidance to show how consistent he was – which was to say, quite consistent.
"Good," Cedric summed up. "Now, point your wand at me and cast the charm, but don't actually say the incantation – just think it."
It took Cormac three tries to actually cast the Disarming Charm at all. The first time he tried it normally, the second time he made the wand movement in a more exaggerated way, and the third time he really put a lot of effort into it and got a weak little fizzly jet of red light. It still hit Cedric and made his wand jump in his hand a bit, but it wasn't very strong at all.
"That's good!" Cedric told Cormac, though the background of giggles didn't really help. "You really need conviction – it's a bit like accidental magic, actually, because without the words to shape it you have to want it more."
Cormac tried again, and again, and after a few minutes he seemed to be starting to get the hang of it.
"Right," Cedric agreed. "We'll start off by casting at the walls – this spell's safe enough to do that with – then pair up once people are starting to get it."
Harry had to cast four or five times before the first time he got a jet of red light, and it didn't look very strong, but then it occurred to him that the difference between saying a word out loud and thinking it for silent magic was probably the same as the difference between saying something and using telepathy – like Pernese dragons did – and so the important thing to do was to pay attention to the difference between thinking something using telepathy and just thinking it because… well, because it was a thing you were thinking about.
It didn't seem like there was a proper English word for it, so Harry decided that thinking a word 'out loud' would be 'bespeaking' it.
With that realization made, it seemed quite a bit easier, and Harry bespoke the incantation for the Disarming Charm five times in a row and got five spell jets. One of them was sort of weak and wobbly, and only two looked good enough to actually disarm someone, but it was quite encouraging.
"Who's going to practice against Harry?" Lee Jordan asked. "He looks pretty good at it and he's immune..."
"I'll do it," Cedric decided.
Harry wasn't sure if that was good news or not, and Cedric promptly proved that it wasn't. The Head Boy managed to disarm Harry three times without saying a word, each time by aiming for Harry's wand, before relenting and letting Harry get some silent-casting practice in.
Dumbledore invited Harry to his office for a talk over the weekend, not a particularly serious one this time but just one about the Tales of Beedle the Bard – the popular set of wizarding nursery stories, one of which mentioned the three Deathly Hallows and had thus turned out to be unexpectedly a little bit true – since Harry was someone who did not have the Tales practically memorized since childhood and Dumbledore appreciated the perspective.
It turned out that, on top of having a job as a Headmaster and another job as a Chief Warlock, and another job as a Supreme Mugwump, and whatever it was a Grand Sorc did, along with trying to make sure Tom Riddle wasn't able to come back again, Dumbledore had been writing a book about the Tales. In his spare time, though Harry was quite surprised to discover that Dumbledore had any of that.
"It is a strange thing, spare time," Dumbledore agreed. "Work expands to fill it, and yet despite all that I find myself with spare time at the oddest moments. Perhaps it is because so many of the things I do in my jobs require other people to be there."
He smiled. "Are there any of Beedle's Tales that you especially enjoy, Harry?"
Harry had to admit that he wasn't really sure. The Fountain of Fair Fortune was sort of a nice story, because nobody needed the enchantment in it – so it was a little bit like The Wizard of Oz, perhaps – but the idea that the fountain really had no magic at all was a bit strange to Harry, because there was clearly a lot of magic involved in getting to the fountain and so that sort of counted.
Then the story of the Hopping Pot had a nice moral to it, but Harry wasn't sure about that one either. And the Three Brothers was sort of fascinating, partly because he had one of the things from the story, but at the same time…
"I don't really think any of them are something that I especially enjoy, Professor," he had to admit. "I like them, but they're just not as important to me."
"That is perfectly fine, Harry," Dumbledore assured him. "If I thought I could tell someone to enjoy the same things that I do, rather than simply show them the wonder I feel and hope that they share it, I would not have got very far as a teacher."
Harry filed that away, as it seemed to be a very clever bit of advice.
He flicked through Dumbledore's manuscript to the middle, went back and forth a bit until he reached the start of discussing a particular story, and read it through while trying to think about all the things Dumbledore had written and what he thought about them.
This particular story was Babbity Rabbity, and Harry had to admit that he was impressed with what Dumbledore had written. He said that the story told a young reader not to expect too much from magic, pointing to the times where Babbity Rabbity had told herself (and the reader) that a certain kind of magic couldn't be done at all, while at the same time teaching them that a lot of wonderful things could be done by magic.
He also said that Babbity Rabbity could do things which showed the wondrous things magic could still achieve, such as that she was an Animagus, and that at the same time she could do some small things like speak while in another form that was not truly possible unless one's Animagus form happened to be a particularly loquacious parrot or crow or suchlike.
Finally there was a bit about what about the story Dumbledore liked, and what he didn't.
It was a nice, pleasant read, and Harry said so and that he couldn't really think of a thing that had been missed.
"That is wonderful news indeed, Harry," Dumbledore said, chuckling. "I am aware that you are something of a reader of many books, and if you have enjoyed this one then I feel I can face the public without fear."
He shook Harry's paw. "Thank you very much for the help, Harry, and for visiting to indulge an old man in his hobbies."
In Care of Magical Creatures they covered Thestrals, and as one of the members of the class who could actually see them Harry got called upon by Professor Kettleburn to help describe them to everyone else.
Since Dean was also in the class, that turned into Harry describing things to Dean and Dean drawing them out, and Professor Kettleburn pronounced the result to be really quite a good sketch considering that the artist could not see what it was he was drawing. It did help a bit that Thestral wings were more bat-like, which meant more dragon-like, and Harry could just spread his wing and point out which bits were the same and which bits were different.
"Nobody is quite sure why it is that the Thestral breed in particular is magically invisible to those who have not seen someone die," Professor Kettleburn told them, as Harry helped feed the Thestrals and most of the rest of the class gasped.
It was something about seeing the food get torn apart by invisible claws and teeth which was so interesting, apparently, and Harry sort of wished he'd had this lesson before the Battle of the Forest's Edge or whatever name you wanted to give it. That way he'd be able to see what it was like and decide if it was interesting.
"Is it maybe a bit like how Harry's sort of unimportant to Muggles, Professor?" Dean asked.
"It might well be," Professor Kettleburn agreed. "Though it might not be, as well! I don't suppose you know if anyone who's seen someone die has seen you normally, Mr. Potter?"
"I imagine there must be some people in London who've seen someone die, Professor," Harry replied. "It's a very big city, and nobody's ever seemed to see me normally unless they're magical."
One of the Thestrals bumped into another, which fell over into the snow, and a few of the people over by that side of the class jumped in surprise as a large dent formed in the snow without any warning.
"Indeed, indeed!" Professor Kettleburn nodded.
He indicated the Thestrals. "And Thestrals are not exempt from the laws surrounding creatures such as winged horses and hippogriffs, which is that they should be covered by a Disillusionment Charm so that Muggles do not notice anything is amiss. Of course, someone taking care of a herd of Thestrals should take extra precautions, because buying steak for a horse is not the sort of thing that a Muggle would simply not notice!"
He clapped his hand against his artificial hand, then whistled, and one of the bat-winged horses stepped out of the crowd.
"Now, we're going to be covering how those who cannot see Thestrals are to take care of them," he said, and revealed a kind of harness. "Nyx here is particularly placid. Who would like to help me put the harness on her?"
Harry didn't volunteer, because for him it would be a bit easier. It would be basically the same as a normal winged horse, in fact, except for using meat instead of hay.
On the very last day of term, after the final lesson of term had technically already happened, Ron looked up at the sound of cheering from a Wizarding Wireless.
"Tornadoes," he snorted, going back to his Runes work. "Everyone only supports them because they won the League."
"Wait, hold on," Dean requested. "How many Quidditch teams are there in Britain, mate?"
"Thirteen," Ron answered promptly.
"And how many of them haven't won the League?"
"Well, none of them," Ron replied. "But I mean recently. Anyone can support a team that's won recently, it takes real dedication to support a team even though they're going through a dry spell."
"You mean like how the Sahara Desert is going through a dry spell?" Neville asked innocently.
"I'm sure the Cannons will recover eventually," Harry assured Ron, smiling.
"Blimey, I'm not sure I'd go that far," Ron said.
Harry nodded. "Really. And then there'll be lots more Cannons supporters."
"Right!" Ron agreed, then looked confused. "Wait. No. That'd be… hold on, I need to work this out."
AN:
Umbridge temperature: simmering.
Meanwhile, in Space News, it's 1995 (though not for much longer).