- CHAPTER TEN -
Gryffindor's Study

Over the next week, they spent more time in the library than Harry would have thought humanly possible, even for Hermione. What with still searching for information on Durand, trying to solve the clues and actual school work, Harry was beginning to see pages and pages of writing in his sleep.

"This last verse has to be about a password," said Hermione, for about the hundredth time. "A word you need, if you would go..."

"But what about the stuff about Muggles knowing magic?" Ron demanded, also for about the hundredth time. Hermione blew up.

"Muggles can't do magic, Ron!"

"I KNOW! That's why they're Muggles!"

"Well then, why do you keep on repeating-?"

"All right, all right." Harry raised his hands. "I think we all need to calm-"

"I am calm!"

"Hey, she's the one who-"

"Shh!" Madam Pince hissed sternly, shooting them a glare. Hermione leapt out of her seat as if she'd been shot.

"Oh my God, that's it!" she gasped, covering her mouth with a hand.

"What's it?" demanded Ron, utterly lost.

"Miss Granger, Mr. Weasley, Mr. Potter - kindly get out of the library if you cannot contain yourselves."

They gathered their books and papers and ran out, an overexcited Hermione leading the way. "That's it!" she repeated, pulling them down a side corridor. "Don't you see! Shh! That's it!"

"Hermione's completely lost it," Ron said worriedly in an aside to Harry.

"No I haven't, I've found it! Look, look!" She jabbed a finger at the rather dog-eared parchment with her copy of the clue from the Gryffindor common room. "'To make one yield you almost seek, but first must call for hush'! Shh! That's what you say when you're calling for hush! Almost yield, but shh first - it's a shield! That's what we're looking for!"

They both gaped at her.

"Well, come on!" she blurted impatiently. "Hogwarts: A History has a whole chapter on all the shields and tapestries and things that are hanging in the castle. Let's go and look it up!"

She shot off down the corridor. Harry and Ron exchanged glances.

"She's either a genius, or a complete and total nutter," said Ron, shaking his head.

Hogwarts: A History provided no help in locating the particular shield they were after, and nor did Magic Armour: Facts and Figures, or Wayland Smith and Other Magical Makers. They stared at the rest of the poem until their eyes crossed.

"That's it," said Ron finally. "The only thing I'm going to be finding under the castle's beds tonight is that box of Fizzing Whizzbees Bill sent me. I'm going to sleep. Coming, Harry?"

"In a while," he said, snapping closed the book in front of him. "I'd better go and check on Hedwig first."

His poor owl was exceedingly grateful to see him. In fact, the entire Owlery was rather fractious, and despite Hedwig's jealous nips he went around and spoke to them all and gave out strokes and owl treats. They were specially bred magical messengers, and not at all used to being cooped up for weeks at a time with nothing to do. Harry glanced down at the floor to see a mess of feathers where several of the birds had been moulting - and then froze.

Beneath the castle's feather beds...

"The Owlery!" he exclaimed aloud.

Hedwig cocked her head to one side and eyed him disapprovingly, as if well aware that he'd just announced the name of the room he was in like a complete idiot.

"Sorry, Hedwig," Harry said, giving her one last hasty pat. "I've got to go - you've just given me a brilliant idea." He took the stairs down to the bottom of the tower two at a time, unfurling the parchment that he'd tucked inside of his robes.

He'd scribbled 'shield' next to the first two lines, so he ignored those and looked at the next bit of the verse. "In hours where the world seems bleak, pass time in one quick rush..."

It was coming up for midnight - surely that qualified as a bleak hour? But how to pass time... pass time... pass time! There was a clock on the wall not far away. And if he was supposed to pass it in one quick rush...

Feeling rather stupid, Harry ran along the corridor towards the clock, and took a flying leap as he passed it. There was a loud click as he hit the floor, and a section of the wall began to swing aside.

"Brilliant," he said softly to himself. He thought about going back for the others, but he wasn't sure there was time, and anyway, he wouldn't be able to get Hermione out of the girls' dorm.

It was pitch black beyond the secret door, and Harry lit his wand with a quick "Lumos!" He carefully descended a flight of narrow stairs, and then raised his wand and looked around.

The walls here were covered in mosaics of fantastic beasts. He recognised some from his Defence Against the Dark Arts lessons, but others were completely unknown to him. He followed the corridor for what seemed like quite a while, until it reached a dead end. He traced the other wall back until he reached the stairs again. No side turnings, in either direction.

He sat down on the bottom step, and took another look at the poem.

Beneath the castle's feather beds, a score of monsters dwell; look on without once counting heads...

A score. A score was twenty. Harry was sure he'd passed far more than twenty mosaics before he hit the dead end. So perhaps he had to count off twenty... but if he wasn't supposed to count heads...

What could he count, if not heads? Something else. Not heads. Heads or-

"Tails!"

Harry walked along the passageway again, this time observing the mosaics more closely. Not all of the creatures had tails. He counted out twenty that did, and found himself standing between a depiction of a rearing unicorn that looked rather more bloodthirsty than usual, and a rather sleepy lion. He stamped his feet a lot and pressed just about every part of the mosaic he could reach, but no further passages opened.

Back to the poem, then. He read aloud to himself, now; he was surely deep enough down in the bowels of the castle that no one could hear, and besides, it was rather dark and lonely down here.

"...without once counting heads, and... rest your eyes a spell." And then it got to the bit about passwords, and Muggle magic. Harry thought for a moment. Rest your eyes... That usually meant darkness, and he was using a light spell, so... "Nox!"

The light at the end of his wand went out. But the darkness, once his eyes adjusted, was not complete. A thin red line showed clearly against the wall, outlining the shape of a rectangular door around the lion figure. He pressed against it and prised at the edges, but nothing happened. Of course - he needed some kind of password. But what?

"Open?" he tried optimistically. "Alohomora! Er... hello? Let me in? Friend?"

Nothing. Harry sighed. To get this far, and then be stuck on the very last part... He sat down on the floor, and thought hard.

Muggle magic. But Muggles didn't know any magic! That was, as Ron had pointed out, exactly why they were called Muggles. So how could the password be 'the magic that all Muggles know'? They didn't know a single word of-

In the darkness, Harry's lips slowly curved upwards into a smile. What's the magic word? he mouthed silently to himself. He stood up, and placed a hand against the lion mosaic. "Open... please," he said.

With a rumbling, grinding sound, the section of wall started to move back.

The red line that had outlined it blossomed into a bright, welcoming glow. Harry stepped, blinking, into a cosy little room with panelled walls. There was a battered but comfortable looking chair, and a giant dark wood desk with clawed feet. Logs burned merrily away in the stone fireplace, and above the mantlepiece was mounted a shield with a red and gold lion painted on.

Harry lifted it down, and stared at it thoughtfully. The lion turned to look at him, and he nearly dropped the shield as a head the size of his fist poked through the metal of the shield and nuzzled at him curiously.

"Hello," Harry said delightedly, lifting the miniature lion out of the shield as if it was a kitten. It sniffed at his school robe, and appeared to approve of it. Then it leapt down from his arms, and started to prowl around the room as if patrolling its territory.

And maybe it was. Harry looked around the room again, taking in the taloned feet of the desk and the thick, red and gold carpet beneath them. This had the look of a private study... and he had a hunch he knew who it belonged to.

"You belong to Godric Gryffindor, don't you?" he said aloud. The little lion paused in mid-stride and looked up at him, as if recognising its master's name.

Harry walked over and sat in the big chair behind the desk. It was wonderfully comfortable, despite the fact it seemed obviously designed for a true giant of a man, much broader and taller than he was.

He blinked in surprise as he looked at the desktop - and saw things that most definitely hadn't been there untouched for a thousand years. A pack of Exploding Snap cards held together by a rather elderly rubber band; scraps of paper covered with doodles and scribbles; empty sweet packets; a casually discarded card from a Chocolate Frog packet that looked like the old-fashioned ones Arthur Weasley had in a binder back at the Burrow. Old things - but twenty, thirty years old at most, not whole centuries.

He pulled the papers closer to him, wondering if they might hold a clue to the identities of those who'd discovered this well-hidden place years before him. Mostly they were just little nonsense sketches or jotted reminders, but he found them fascinating anyway. Then, on the corner of what seemed to be a draft of a piece of Potions homework, he saw it. 'Sirius loves -' Numerous sets of initials had been added and subsequently crossed out, until a noticeably different hand had ended the sequence with 'himself!' He rather thought he recognised it from the helpful little notes he'd read on returned Defence Against the Dark Arts essays in his third year.

Harry sat up straight, the pang of remembered grief almost muted by the thrill of discovery. Of course! Who better to have discovered this place than one of the school's most wide-roaming packs of Gryffindors? It wasn't marked on the Marauder's Map, but perhaps they'd found it afterwards - or considered it too secret to even entrust to that.

His father had probably sat in this very chair, years ago... Harry leaned back, luxuriating in the cosy warmth of the place. It felt - now, this was a strange thought - somehow reminiscent of his cupboard back in Privet Drive. Not that it had been a place of happy memories, but it had been his - somewhere to crawl into and huddle up, the only place in the house that he could truly count as his own.

It would be nice to have a bolthole of his own again, Harry thought tiredly. Just somewhere he could retreat to for a while, a place that belonged to him alone where not even well-meaning friends could follow him. A place where he could be just plain Harry, all alone, nobody's saviour and nobody's enemy.

He laid his head down on the desktop, and went to sleep.

When Harry awoke, the magical fire had burned down, and the study grown considerably colder. He sat up with a start, realising it must be very late.

The shield lay abandoned on the carpet, the lion returned to its original position. Harry thrust it somewhat awkwardly under his robes, knowing that if he was stopped in the corridors he didn't have the slightest hope of concealing it. And he hadn't brought his Invisibility Cloak - he would just have to pray no one was roaming the castle at this hour.

His luck was in, although at one point he had to avoid a muttering Filch patrolling the corridors. He gave the password to the Fat Lady, who seemed rather irritable at being disturbed in the small hours of the morning, and scrambled upstairs to his bed.

And then he had a problem. What was he going to do with a full-sized metal shield? Tuck it under the bed and hope really hard no one noticed it?

"You're an awkward size, you know that?" he murmured to the lion, which was regarding him curiously, as if wondering why he was sitting around.

The shield immediately responded - by shrinking in his hands to something barely the size of a Prefect badge. He dropped it on the bedcovers in surprise.

"Whoa!"

Well, at least now it would be easier to hide. Wishing he'd known to shrink it before he'd lugged it all the way across Hogwarts, Harry tucked it away in the folds of his Invisibility Cloak, and tried to get back to sleep.

He showed the shield to Ron and Hermione, but although they were both awed, neither of them could figure out what they were supposed to do with it. The lion would only emerge if Harry asked it to, but it seemed to like both of his friends well enough, and could be induced to butt fingers and even chase quills around and pounce on them like Crookshanks.

"How did you find it, Harry?" Ron demanded, boggling.

Harry explained the part about working out the pieces of the clue, but he didn't mention anything about Gryffindor's Study. They probably both assumed, from the way he described it, that the shield had been in some kind of hidden compartment behind the secret door.

It wasn't that he wanted to keep things from his friends... He just desperately wanted to be able to have this secret to himself, just for a little while.

"Well, that's one clue down, anyway," Ron said confidently. "Maybe we won't know what to do with it until we've collected everything."

Hermione had clearly been doing some more thinking. "We know that the next clues are likely to appear in the other three house common rooms, and if I'm right, I have a pretty good idea of when we'll see the next one."

"When?" Harry asked.

"Well, the one in our common room appeared on the first of November-"

"It was Hallowe'en," Ron objected.

"No it wasn't, Ron, it was after midnight, remember? We got back really late from that meeting after the Hallowe'en feast. I think the clue must have appeared exactly on the stroke of midnight."

"But what's significant about the first of November?" Harry puzzled. "I mean, Hallowe'en-"

"The first of November is Samhain, Harry," she informed him. "When we celebrate Hallowe'en, we're actually celebrating All Hallow's Eve - the day before Samhain, which is the Festival of the Dead. But - more importantly than that - it's a station of the year."

"It's a what?" asked Ron.

Hermione looked miffed. "Honestly, did either of you ever pay any attention to the assigned reading in Astronomy? And I'm surprised you didn't cover this in Divination as well."

"We might have done," Harry conceded.

"We wouldn't know. We were asleep," said Ron.

Hermione could never stay irritated for long if it meant the chance to impart information. "Traditionally, there are eight stations of the year. Samhain is actually the third - the one before it is the Autumnal Equinox, which is in late September, which is-"

"When the other clue appeared!" Harry realised.

"Exactly, Harry," she said knowledgeably. "The next station after Samhain is Yule. Then there's the Vernal Equinox, Beltane - that's another name for May Day - Midsummer, and the eighth and final station is Lammas. That's the day after your birthday, Harry, and sometimes it's actually celebrated as a two-day festival starting on the thirty-first of July. It's traditionally a time of completion, and the first of the three harvests of the year."

"I had a funny dream the night of my birthday," Harry only now began to remember.

"Was it - you know?" Ron made a gesture to his head that resembled the universal symbol for 'crazy' but was probably meant to indicate Harry's scar. He shook his head.

"No. But it had something to do with Hogwarts." He strained to recall the details. "I think Hagrid... Hagrid was trying to warn me about something. But I don't remember what."

"Well, that might be something to do with the Curse of Durand, and it might not," Hermione frowned. "If it came into effect on the night of your birthday, then there should have been three clues since then; this one, the one in the library-"

"And the one before that, which Flitwick covered up," Harry completed.

"So if we're right... the next clue's going to appear at Christmas?" said Ron.

"In one of the other houses' common rooms," Hermione agreed, nodding.

"We'll have to tell the rest of the DA to look out for it," Harry said, a little reluctantly. He was sure they could all be trusted, but the more people they got involved in this, the more risky it became.

Ron suddenly sat bolt upright. "Oh, God! What are we going to do if it's in Slytherin?"

"There must be someone in Slytherin we can trust..." Hermione ventured uncertainly.

"Oh - who? Malfoy? Pansy Parkinson?" Ron made a disgusted noise. Hermione bit her lip.

"We'll just have to think of something. Maybe we can sneak in again somehow..."

"Not with Polyjuice Potion," Harry warned. "Snape's still got it in for me over those supplies we took in the second year. If the same things go missing again, he'll be sneaking Veritaserum into my breakfast for sure."

"Well, something else then. We've got until Christmas to think about it, and if we're lucky, the clue for one of the other houses will appear instead."

"If we're lucky," said Ron darkly.