Thankfully, the Defense Against the Dark Arts Professor's office was not far from Gryffindor tower, so they didn't encounter Mrs. Norris on the way, though they were almost bowled over by a pompous-looking Ernie McMillan, on rounds. Hermione worried the whole way there. "It's terribly late, we're bothering a teacher after 10:00! We're going to get in so much trouble," she muttered, with a panicky tone.

"I don't think she'll mind, Hermione. Really," Harry replied. "She's said to come by and visit loads of times."

"You're Head Girl, after all, you should have your own ruddy office," Ron said.

"Oh, really..."

They rounded a corner and suddenly found themselves facing the doorway. As Harry raised his hand tentatively to knock on the enameled wood of the Professor's door, they heard Sakura say, "Enter." The door swung open and they were met by a small floating indoor garden of bamboo, and what Harry thought were small tree figurines, but were actually miniaturized, potted trees in ceramic containers. "Just walk through the plants; they'll move out of your way," said the voice inside smoothly. As Ron, Harry and Hermione approached them, the trees drifted against the walls, and the bamboo stalks parted to admit them into the office of the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor.

Sakura's office was a very interesting and splendid space, far different from any of the other Defense Against the Dark Arts professors' offices. Two of the walls were white, and two of them were red, not an ominous bloody vermilion, but a happy scarlet, with ornate brocaded hangings, Oriental ink paintings, several paper fans, and, bolted onto one wall, an ebony rack displaying several long, sharp Japanese samurai swords. Alongside the swords, Harry recognized the staff that Sakura had carried to class. A thin paper screen stood in one corner, and a large bamboo mat sat in front of it, surrounded by soft, fluffy cushions in place of armchairs. A small cauldron bubbled merrily over a fire on a white clay pedestal at the room's center. In an aquarium on the professor's unoccupied desk, something long, thin, and red swam cheerfully among submerged bamboo stalks. Sakura herself looked at ease, lying on her back on a worn, squashy black brocade sofa, with a black quill hovering in midair beside her and a red one in her hand as she pored over some parchments from her first-year classes. Her hair was piled into a messy, low-slung knot at the back of her head, skewered with one of the chopsticks from the opening feast.

"We're not interrupting, are we?" Hermione asked.

"Course not," said Uzume, tossing down the stack of parchments in a pile and poking the quills into porcelain inkbottles. "Just marking first-year papers, essays on 'why is Defense Against the Dark Arts necessary', as if it isn't obvious nowadays. Deathly dull stuff, nothing interesting. What can I help you with?" She popped to her feet brightly, and ushered them into the room, bowing slightly as she did. "Please, please, come in, sit down."

Ron scuttled over to the wall where the swords were bolted. "Wow! These are bloody brilliant! Where d'ye get 'em?"

"Those" Sakura said, inserting herself hastily in front of Ron, "are kitanas. They're traditional Japanese swords. Sharp enough to sever bone. Don't quite like students playing with them; sorry..." She half-smiled apologetically. "But do take a seat, I'll put some tea on." She disappeared behind the paper screen, and the three of them cautiously sat down around the large bamboo mat, Ron still gazing longingly at the swords. Hermione was gazing at the same wall, but for a different reason entirely.

As Uzume bustled out from behind the screen with a tea tray and replaced the cauldron with a teapot, Hermione tentatively asked, "Profes— Sakura?"

"Hm?"

"Why do you carry that stick?"

Uzume looked pleased. "Don't miss a trick, do you?" she asked, going over to the wall. "This staff was made in the Wazuma Daigaku--it's where I did some additional studies." She extracted the staff from the bolts holding it. "Here... take a closer look. Then maybe you'll see why I carry it," she said, handing it to Hermione. Upon closer inspection, the wooden staff turned out to be more than just black: it was inlaid with fine bits of brilliant white and red behind what appeared to be a less-than-paper-thin layer of heavily smoked gray glass.

"The wood looks like..." Hermione tapped it with her fingers "ebony?"

"Correct," Sakura confirmed. "Soaked in a solution of dragon's blood for 6 months. Now try the red and white bits."

"The white is powdered unicorn hair, I'm sure of it," Hermione mused, tilting the staff. Seeing Sakura's nod of assent, she continued. "Some of the red looks like... phoenix feather..."

"Some of it is...but some of it isn't. Look closer."

Hermione squinted. "Are those...dragon scales?"

"Good job. From an Ishiguro Red, to be precise," the professor asserted. "Ishiguro Reds are indigenous to a few specific mountain regions in Japan; they're an interestingly quirky variety of dragon. They start as water-bound creatures, like Sensei;" she indicated the red--Harry assumed it was a dragon-- undulating in the aquarium on her desk.

"That's not a Chinese fireball, is it?" Ron asked. Harry thought he seemed slightly determined to impress the Professor; Hermione didn't seem to care.

"Well, they're related to what you call Chinese fireballs, but not quite so large," Sakura explained. "Sensei, here, is about 40 years old, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. Reds stay that size for nearly fifty years. Later, when they become airborne, for a time they're quite docile and affectionate, as dragons go." Harry noticed a Japanese ink painting of small children with what on closer inspection proved to be minute crimson dragons perching like parrots on their shoulders. "At full maturity, however, they're extremely defensive and have been known to protect individual villages for hundreds of years. They're incredibly rare; not many people have ever seen them, and they live for millennia so the blood and scales are very hard to come by indeed. It doesn't help, either, that people are constantly grinding up their eggs for potion ingredients."

"So basically, it's a really enormous wand?" Ron asked. "How is that useful? Did you buy it? I bet it cost a thousand Galleons."

"Not exactly a wand, per se; though it is capable of a few rudimentary spells. But I didn't pay for it, because, you see, I made it." Sakura indicated the inlays. "A magical object like this one can't be bought. That's part of the enchantment of it: the hard work of its maker. If anyone else were to use it, it wouldn't work nearly as well. But magical substances and hard work alone aren't enough to make this more useful than any other magical device. Think further, Ron. Why would something I went to all the trouble of making colorful end up so charred?" Harry was thinking to himself that he'd seen something blackened like this once before... suddenly it occurred to him: Dumbledore's hand.

"Has it been cursed?" Harry asked.

"Well done, Harry. It has indeed been struck with many curses, but it's been protected by a complex series of preventative incantations." She gently took the staff from Hermione. "A demonstration. Fire off a spell at me, go on..." Sakura shook a hand at them encouragingly. Harry had never been encouraged to hex a teacher before; he wasn't quite sure he could do it. He cast a weak Bat-Bogey Hex at her, and she, seeing the bolt of orange light that accompanied it, tilted the staff, which absorbed the bolt with a shudder and a puff of thin gray smoke.

"It's hex-proof?" Hermione exclaimed, delightedly.

"Hex, jinx, and curse-proof for the most part. It won't completely block the Unforgivables, or any of the -sempra spells," Uzume cast a look at Harry, and it occurred to him that maybe she'd heard of his exploits against Malfoy last year in the bathroom. "But it can diminish their effects; with the exception of the Killing Curse." She ran a finger along its surface. "It's not perfect, but it's saved my life, many times over."

"Why don't people make suits of armor of these things, then?" Hermione interrupted. "If it's so protective."

"A variety of reasons, chief among them mobility and stamina. A wooden suit wouldn't permit a wizard much space to move his arms and legs, to outrun an opponent, and the protective incantation is enormously complex. Written down, it fills a 300-page book, and it takes three consecutive, uninterrupted days and nights of nothing but solid spell work and concentration to cast." Sakura bustled over to the tea cauldron, which had just whistled, and poured them four cups of greenish tea; which she balanced skillfully as she returned to them. "But the primary reason is effort. Most wizards and witches don't have time to take a year out of their lives to make a single stave; much less a full suit of protective armor." In a single fluid motion, she bent her knees and ankles, knelt on the floor, set down the tray, and pushed it forward to them, bowing her head slightly. "But somehow, I don't think a discussion of Wazuma weaponry was what you had in mind when you came."

Harry hesitantly reached into his robes, then decided that Sakura was trustworthy enough for a translation. He extracted the photograph, facedown, from his sleeve and showed her the back of it. "What sort of characters are these?"

Uzume's thin black eyebrows raised slightly, and she squinted at the spiky characters, then drew her wand, tapped it once, and murmured, "Traduzco!"

The lines in the characters lifted off the paper and began rearranging themselves, settling back down to read in a very spiky handwriting,

"So, my dear Snake,

"Have I told you recently that I hate you, and that I think you should die at your earliest convenience? (Well, no, not really. I actually mean the opposite. So there.)Hopefully you won't forget my name over the summer.

"Yours,

"Kiko."

The Japanese witch gave a slight smile. "I take it you weren't out after hours to ask me about something you found in an old textbook?" she asked with a raised eyebrow. "May I?" She turned the photograph over and studied it, squinting again, then produced a pair of spectacles and perched them on her stubby nose, where they looked extremely like a large dragonfly that was preparing to dive at any moment. "She's very familiar... I can't place the name... How did you get this?"

"Well..." Harry stopped, and then he and Hermione in turn explained everything that had happened with Dumbledore's letter,

Uzume removed her glasses. "A.I. Vance..." she said, blowing out a long, sighing breath. "Yes, now that you mention it, that is her... I haven't heard that name in seventeen years. Very friendly, intellectually, just above average; brilliant Quidditch player...very sweet girl, that one."

"A.I. Vance...was a girl?" Ron asked, dumbfounded.

"Akiko Irene Vance, that's the only A.I. Vance I know of," Sakura replied as she extracted her wand from her sleeve, and flicked it behind her. A drawer in her desk yanked itself open, and a photo album came floating toward them, which she snagged from the air. Flipping through it, she added in a sporadic tumble of words, "Rather sad story, really...her parents were murdered by Yakuza—those'd be Muggles—when she was two. Dumbledore himself traveled to Japan and brought her here. When I came to Britain after juku, Dumbledore introduced us. We were something like...second or third cousins by blood, no significant relation, but all the same, it was comforting for both of us. " She pulled a faded photo of a Quidditch team from its backing and set it in front of Harry and Hermione, indicating a smiling girl on the front row, who looked to be about 14 years of age and had a complicated tangle of various braids, stitched throughout with bright blue and bronze ribbons. "She was raised by a close friend of Dumbledore's, a witch called Emmeline Vance. Got on famously with your father and his friends," Uzume recalled as she continued to flip through the photo album.

"You knew my parents?"

Sakura looked at Harry over the top of the photo album. "Lily Evans was one of my best friends; of course I knew your parents. Your dad thought of Akiko Vance as something like a little sister." She paused at a photograph, peered down at it, and then continued to turn pages. "Her boyfriend lived in the flat next door to mine, in Diagon Alley; at the time he was working for Slug and Jiggers," she said, shaking her head. "Never would have pegged that one for a Death Eater."

"Whom?"

"Severus Snape."

The force of this hit Harry like a slap in the face. It seemed utterly impossible to imagine Snape as anyone's "boyfriend," much less someone his father considered a little sister. "Of course; that's why he pulled those pages out of Advances in Defense Against the Dark Arts," Hermione declared matter-of-factly. "He knows you."

"Was Severus saving my columns? How splendid of him," Sakura commented airily. Ron was clearly dumbstruck by this as well, and after a moment, the redhead spluttered, "Are you daft? How could you not have pegged Snape as a Death Eater? The man's sneaky; he's obsessed with the Dark Arts! You'd just have to take a shufti at him to know he's a right black-hearted old..."

"Ron," Hermione cut him off, pleadingly, and the redhead grumbled into silence.

Sakura seemed nonchalantly determined not to notice Ron's outburst. "At the time, he wasn't obsessed with the Dark Arts...he had been at one time, and he knew a terrific amount about them, but only in a morbidly fascinated academic sense. No, the Severus Snape I knew in Diagon Alley was young, lovestruck, and impetuous..." Harry tried to imagine Snape loving anything, and failed miserably. Uzume noticed the look on his face, faltered, but continued. "He was absolutely taken with Kiko. Would've done anything to make her happy. One always got the distinct impression that she had a bit more control over things than he did, but he didn't seem to mind." She paused, and offered more tea, before she continued. "Well, this was around the time things started to really heat up with You-Know-Who and the pure-blood obsession was raving along at full speed. Britain was getting to be a lousy place to live, absolutely impossible to go anywhere without seeing a brawl based on blood break out. Around that time, I'd just got an offer for graduate study at Wazuma Daigakuin Daigaku, in Hokkaido, so I decided to take them up on it. Shortly before I left, Severus told me he was going to ask" she paused for only the briefest of split seconds "Akiko to marry him. I was gone for a week to get things in Japan all set up so that I could bring my things over; I came back to find out that Akiko had disappeared without a trace, and Snape had disappeared." She sipped her tea bitterly. "The general consensus among the gossips was that he killed her, but charges were never brought against him because a corpse was never found. So it was a bit of a shock for all of us." She shook her head. "Damn shame, too. He was brilliant. Invented new spells and potions all the time."

"Did anyone search among Inferi to find her body?" Harry asked.

Uzume sputtered a bit on a hot mouthful of tea, and then swallowed, thickly, and wiped her lips on her sleeve. "At the time, You-Know-Who hadn't quite begun amassing an army of Inferi just yet. He had a few well-placed ones, but he made them all himself, and they were still in the experimental phases. In any case, he wouldn't have trusted a newly-minted Death Eater to create one on his initiation trial."

"Initiation trial?" Hermione asked, incredulously.

"Every new Death Eater the Darkest One brands has to go through a trial to prove their devotion to the cause before becoming a full Death Eater," Uzume explained serenely. "Typically, he sends a new follower out to kill someone; in most cases, he sends them to kill the person that they loved most: a husband or wife, a significant other, a family member, a friend, a respected teacher, anyone along those lines. The only way they could get out of it would be to convert their victim to the cause."

"What happens if they don't do either one?"

"He hunts them down and kills them personally," Uzume replied. "Two things the Darkest One won't stand for among his followers are failure and disloyalty. No, Severus Snape wouldn't have been trusted with a job as important as the murder of Albus Dumbledore if he'd failed on his first job." She paused, then added as an afterthought, "Besides, he has a phobia of Inferi, he finds them extraordinarily unnatural."

"Really?" Hermione asked. Harry shared her disbelief: it was a bit difficult to think that Professor Snape might be afraid of anything.

"Indeed. He has this great, dark, moody belief in the sanctity of death; he believes that once you die, you're dead, and that's it; end of story. His true deepest fear is not dying, but being made an Inferius. Then again, seeing that happen to one's father will do that to you, I suppose." The clock chimed 11:30 pm, and Sakura started. "Oh dear, I've kept you late. Well, off to bed with the three of you."