Chapter 15: Divination

They didn't talk much during the remainder of the journey. At long last, the train stopped at Hogsmeade station, and there was a great scramble to get outside; owls hooted, cats meowed, and Neville's pet toad croaked loudly from under his hat. It was freezing on the tiny platform; rain was driving down in icy sheets.

"Firs' years this way!" called Hagrid. Dawn, Willow, Harry, Ron, and Hermione turned and saw him at the other end of the platform, beckoning the terrified-looking new students forward for their traditional journey across the lake.

"All righ', you three?" Hagrid yelled over the heads of the crowd. They waved at him, but had no chance to speak to him because the mass of people around them was shunting them away along the platform. Dawn opened a portal and ushered Harry, Ron, and Hermione through it into the Great Hall before she and Willow followed closing it behind them.

Dawn and Willow marched off to find Dumbledore. He spotted them and let out a sigh. "Dawn, Willow," he said.

"Why did they board the train?" Dawn asked.

"I do not know," Dumbledore said. "And I am very displeased that they did. Is it true they affected Harry?"

Willow nodded. "Yes," she said. "When he woke he said he had heard someone scream. Yet no one screamed."

"The reason the dementors guard Azkaban is because of what they can do. When in their presence it will seem that all happiness has left the world. They will make you relive your most sad and painful memories. Even if they are memories that you do not know you have."

"So Harry was reliving a memory," Dawn said. "When he fainted."

"Very likely," Dumbledore said. "And whoever he heard scream was in that memory."

"Who is Professor Lupin?" Willow wondered. "He called me Tigerlily."

"He knew your sister in school," Dumbledore said. "Tigerlily was Lily's nickname. He, James, Sirius Black and Peter Pettigrew were all friends in school. Lily joined their group when she started going out with James."

When Dawn, Dumbledore and Willow returned to the Great Hall the sorting had already finished.

"Welcome!" said Dumbledore as he, Willow and Dawn moved to their seats at the staff table. "Welcome to another year at Hogwarts! I have a few things to say to you all, and as one of them is very serious, I think it best to get it out of the way before you become befuddled by our excellent feast…"

Dumbledore cleared his throat and continued, "As you will all be aware after their search of the Hogwarts Express, our school is presently playing host to some of the dementors of Azkaban, who are here on Ministry of Magic business. They are stationed at every entrance to the grounds and while they are with us, I must make it plain that nobody is to leave school without permission. Dementors are not to be fooled by tricks or disguises—or even Invisibility Cloaks. It is not in the nature of a dementor to understand pleading or excuses. I therefore warn each and every one of you to give them no reason to harm you. I look to the prefects, and our new Head Boy and Girl, to make sure that no student runs afoul of the dementors."

Dumbledore paused; he looked very seriously around the hall, and nobody moved or made a sound.

"On a happier note," he continued, "I am pleased to welcome two new teachers to our ranks this year. "First, Professor Lupin, who has kindly consented to fill the post of History of Magic teacher."

There was some scattered, rather unenthusiastic applause. Only those who had been in the compartment on the train with Professor Lupin clapped.

"As to our second new appointment," Dumbledore continued as the lukewarm applause for Professor Lupin died away. "Well, I am sorry to tell you that Professor Kettleburn, our Care of Magical Creatures teacher, retired at the end of last year in order to enjoy more time with his remaining limbs. However, I am delighted to say that his place will be filled by none other than Rubeus Hagrid, who has agreed to take on this teaching job in addition to his gamekeeping duties."

Everyone applauded, well nearly everyone.

As Professor Dumbledore started speaking again, they saw that Hagrid was wiping his eyes on the tablecloth.

"Well, I think that's everything of importance," said Dumbledore. "Let the feast begin!"

The golden plates and goblets before them filled suddenly with food and drink. It was a delicious feast; the hall echoed with talk, laughter, and the clatter of knives and forks.

At long last, when the last morsels of pumpkin tart had melted from the golden platters, Dumbledore gave the word that it was time for them all to go to bed.

"Congratulations, Hagrid!" Hermione squealed as she, Harry and Ron approached the teachers' table and Hagrid, Dawn and Willow.

"All down ter you three," said Hagrid, wiping his shining face on his napkin as he looked up at them. "Can' believe it … great man, Dumbledore … came straight down to me hut after Professor Kettleburn said he'd had enough … It's what I always wanted …"

"I don't think it could have happened to a better person," Willow said. "Go on you three. We'll see you tomorrow."

When Dawn and Willow entered the Great Hall for breakfast the next day, the first thing they saw was Malfoy, who seemed to be entertaining a large group of Slytherins with a very funny story. As they passed, Malfoy did a ridiculous impression of a swooning fit and there was a roar of laughter.

Willow turned and glared at Malfoy. "Mr. Malfoy. Fifty points from Slytherin!"

"For what?" Malfoy said shocked.

"For making fun of your fellow student who was a little under the weather yesterday. Be lucky I am only taking points and not giving you detention," Willow said as Harry passed by them with Ron and Hermione.

Harry whispered as he passed, "Thanks."

Willow smiled and nodded as she and Dawn moved up to the staff table and took a seat.

Just then, Hagrid entered the Great Hall. He stopped and talked to Harry, Ron and Hermione before he joined Dawn and Willow at the staff table.

"Excited?" Dawn asked Hagrid.

"Very," Hagrid said as he grinned broadly at Dawn and Willow.

Eventually the hall started to empty as people headed off toward their first lesson.

"Do you think you can handle our first class yourself, Will," Dawn said. "Harry has Divination first thing. I'm interested in seeing what this teacher is like."

"Sure," Willow said.

Dawn walked over to Ron, Harry and Hermione. "Care for some company."

"You are going to sit in on our class?" Harry asked.

"Yep," Dawn said. "As a seer I want to see if the teacher is up to snuff."

The journey through the castle to North Tower was a long one.

"Dawn—can't—you—portal—us—there?" Ron panted as they climbed their seventh long staircase.

"Next time I could," Dawn said. "But I've never been up here and any memory that holds what this room looks like is still locked away in my mind. So I have no way of picturing the room in question without seeing it first."

Ron sighed and nodded as they emerged on an unfamiliar landing, where there was nothing but a large painting of a bare stretch of grass hanging on the stone wall.

"I think it's this way," said Hermione, peering down the empty passage to the right.

"Can't be," said Ron. "That's south, look, you can see a bit of the lake out of the window…"

Dawn noticed that Harry was watching the painting. She followed his gaze to it and saw a fat, dapple-gray pony had just ambled onto the grass and was grazing nonchalantly. A moment later, a short, squat knight in a suit of armor clanked into the picture after his pony. By the look of the grass stains on his metal knees, he had just fallen off.

"Aha!" he yelled, seeing Dawn, Harry, Ron, and Hermione. "What villains are these, that trespass upon my private lands! Come to scorn at my fall, perchance? Draw, you knaves, you dogs!"

Dawn rolled her eyes as the knight tugged his sword out of its scabbard and began brandishing it violently, hopping up and down in rage. But the sword was too long for him; a particularly wild swing made him overbalance, and he landed face down in the grass.

"Are you all right?" said Harry, moving closer to the picture.

"Get back, you scurvy braggart! Back, you rogue!"

The knight seized his sword again and used it to push himself back up, but the blade sank deeply into the grass and, though he pulled with all

his might, he couldn't get it out again. Finally, he had to flop back down onto the grass and push up his visor to mop his sweating face.

"Listen," said Harry, taking advantage of the knight's exhaustion, "we're looking for the North Tower. You don't know the way, do you?"

"A quest!" The knight's rage seemed to vanish instantly. He clanked to his feet and shouted, "Come follow me, dear friends, and we shall find our goal, or else shall perish bravely in the charge!"

He gave the sword another fruitless tug, tried and failed to mount the fat pony, gave up, and cried, "On foot then, good sirs and gentle ladies! On! On!"

And he ran, clanking loudly, into the left side of the frame and out of sight.

They hurried after him along the corridor, following the sound of his armor. Every now and then they spotted him running through a picture ahead.

"Be of stout heart, the worst is yet to come!" yelled the knight, and they saw him reappear in front of an alarmed group of women in crinolines, whose picture hung on the wall of a narrow spiral staircase.

Dawn followed a puffing Harry, Ron, and Hermione up the tightly spiraling steps, getting dizzier and dizzier, until at last they heard the murmur of voices above them and knew they had reached the classroom.

"Farewell!" cried the knight, popping his head into a painting of some sinister-looking monks. "Farewell, my comrades-in-arms! If ever you have need of noble heart and steely sinew, call upon Sir Cadogan!"

"Yeah, we'll call you," muttered Ron as the knight disappeared, "if we ever need someone mental."

They climbed the last few steps and emerged onto a tiny landing, where most of the class was already assembled. The only door was in the ceiling with a brass plaque on it.

"Sibyll Trelawney, Divination teacher," Harry read. "How're we supposed to get up there?"

As though in answer to his question, the trapdoor suddenly opened, and a silvery ladder descended right at Harry's feet. Everyone got quiet.

"After you," said Ron, grinning, so Harry climbed the ladder first followed by Dawn.

Dawn emerged into the strangest-looking classroom she had ever seen. In fact, it didn't look like a classroom at all, more like a cross between someone's attic and an old-fashioned tea shop. At least twenty small, circular tables were crammed inside it, all surrounded by chintz armchairs and fat little poufs. The room reminded her of a fortune teller's shop she had once gone into out of curiosity.

Ron appeared at Harry's shoulder as the class assembled around them, all talking in whispers.

"Where is she?" Ron said.

A voice came suddenly out of the shadows, a soft, misty sort of voice.

"Welcome," it said. "How nice to see you in the physical world at last."

Professor Trelawney moved into the firelight.

Dawn shook her head. Even the teacher seemed to take on the fortune teller appearance.

"Sit, my children, sit," she said, and the students all climbed awkwardly into armchairs or sank onto poufs. Harry, Ron, and Hermione sat themselves around the same round table.

Trelawney noticed Dawn as if for the first time. "Greetings Professor Rosenberg-Summers. Thank you for accompanying the children."

"Actually I intend to sit in," Dawn said. "I myself am a seer and wanted to see who taught this class."

"Why of course," Trelawney said. "Welcome to Divination." She seated herself in a winged armchair in front of the fire. "My name is Professor Trelawney. You may not have seen me before. I find that descending too often into the hustle and bustle of the main school clouds my Inner Eye."

Dawn rolled her eyes.

"So you have chosen to study Divination, the most difficult of all magical arts. I must warn you at the outset that if you do not have the Sight, there is very little I will be able to teach you. Books can take you only so far in this field …"

At these words, both Harry and Ron glanced, grinning, at Hermione, who looked startled at the news that books wouldn't be much help in this subject.

"Many witches and wizards, talented though they are in the area of loud bangs and smells and sudden disappearings, are yet unable to penetrate the veiled mysteries of the future," Professor Trelawney went on, her enormous, gleaming eyes moving from face to nervous face. "It is a Gift granted to few. You, boy," she said suddenly to Neville, who almost toppled off his pouf. "Is your grandmother well?"

"I think so," said Neville tremulously.

"I wouldn't be so sure if I were you, dear," said Professor Trelawney, the firelight glinting on her long emerald earrings. Neville gulped.

Professor Trelawney continued placidly. "We will be covering the basic methods of Divination this year. The first term will be devoted to reading the tea leaves. Next term we shall progress to palmistry. By the way, my dear," she shot suddenly at Parvati Patil, "beware a red-haired man."

Parvati gave a startled look at Ron, who was right behind her, and edged her chair away from him.

"In the second term," Professor Trelawney went on, "we shall progress to the crystal ball—if we have finished with fire omens, that is. Unfortunately, classes will be disrupted in February by a nasty bout of flu. I myself will lose my voice. And around Easter, one of our number will leave us forever."

Harry looked to his aunt who shook her head.

"I wonder, dear," she said to Lavender Brown, who was nearest and shrank back in her chair, "if you could pass me the largest silver teapot?"

Lavender, looking relieved, stood up, took an enormous teapot from the shelf, and put it down on the table in front of Professor Trelawney.

"Thank you, my dear. Incidentally, that thing you are dreading—it will happen on Friday the sixteenth of October."

Lavender trembled.

"Now, I want you all to divide into pairs. Collect a teacup from the shelf, come to me, and I will fill it. Then sit down and drink, drink until only the dregs remain. Swill these around the cup three times with the left hand, then turn the cup upside down on its saucer, wait for the last of the tea to drain away, then give your cup to your partner to read. You will interpret the patterns using pages five and six of Unfogging the Future. I shall move among you, helping and instructing. Oh, and dear"—she caught Neville by the arm as he made to stand up—"after you've broken your first cup, would you be so kind as to select one of the blue patterned ones? I'm rather attached to the pink."

Sure enough, Neville had no sooner reached the shelf of teacups when there was a tinkle of breaking china. Professor Trelawney swept over to him holding a dustpan and brush and said, "One of the blue ones, then, dear, if you wouldn't mind… thank you…"

Dawn looked at what happened with amusement. Was Neville's breaking of a teacup a suggestion planted by a fraud or a real premonition?

When Harry and Ron had had their teacups filled, they went back to their table and tried to drink the scalding tea quickly. They swilled the dregs around as Professor Trelawney had instructed, then drained the cups and swapped over.

"Right," said Ron as they both opened their books at pages five and six. "What can you see in mine?"

"A load of soggy brown stuff," said Harry as Dawn sat between him and Hermione.

"Broaden your minds, my dears, and allow your eyes to see past the mundane!" Professor Trelawney cried.

"Right, you've got a crooked sort of cross…" Harry consulted Unfogging the Future. "That means you're going to have 'trials and suffering'—sorry about that—but there's a thing that could be the sun… hang on… that means great happiness … so you're going to suffer but be very happy …"

"You need your Inner Eye tested, if you ask me," said Ron, and they both had to stifle their laughs as Professor Trelawney gazed in their direction.

Dawn let out a sigh. She shook her head at the very thought of using tea leaves to foresee the future. Unless you truly had the gift it wouldn't work. Trelawney had been right about that.

"My turn…" Ron peered into Harry's teacup, his forehead wrinkled with effort. "There's a blob a bit like a bowler hat," he said. "Maybe you're going to work for the Ministry of Magic …"

He turned the teacup the other way up.

"But this way it looks more like an acorn … What's that?" He scanned his copy of Unfogging the Future. "'A windfall, unexpected gold.' Excellent, you can lend me some … and there's a thing here," he turned the cup again, "that looks like an animal … yeah, if that was its head … it looks like a hippo … no, a sheep …"

Professor Trelawney whirled around as Harry let out a snort of laughter.

"Let me see that, my dear," she said reprovingly to Ron, sweeping over and snatching Harry's cup from him. Everyone went quiet to watch.

Professor Trelawney was staring into the teacup, rotating it counterclockwise.

"The falcon … my dear, you have a deadly enemy."

"But everyone knows that," said Hermione in a loud whisper. Professor Trelawney stared at her.

"Well, they do," said Dawn. "Everybody knows about Harry and Voldemort."

Several students and Trelawney flinched at Voldemort's name.

Professor Trelawney chose not to reply. She lowered her huge eyes to Harry's cup again and continued to turn it.

"The club … an attack. Dear, dear, this is not a happy cup …"

"I thought that was a bowler hat," said Ron sheepishly.

"The skull … danger in your path, my dear …"

Everyone was staring, transfixed, at Professor Trelawney, who gave the cup a final turn, gasped, and then screamed.

There was another tinkle of breaking china; Neville had smashed his second cup. Professor Trelawney sank into a vacant armchair, her glittering hand at her heart and her eyes closed.

"My dear boy … my poor, dear boy … no… it is kinder not to say … no … don't ask me …"

"What is it, Professor?" said Dean Thomas at once. Everyone had got to their feet, and slowly they crowded around Harry, Dawn, Hermione and Ron's table, pressing close to Professor Trelawney's chair to get a good look at Harry's cup.

"My dear," Professor Trelawney's huge eyes opened dramatically, "you have the Grim."

"The what?" said Dawn.

"The Grim, my dear, the Grim!" cried Professor Trelawney, who looked shocked that Dawn didn't know what the Grim was. "The giant, spectral dog that haunts churchyards!" She looked to Harry. "My dear boy, it is an omen—the worst omen—of death!"

Lavender Brown clapped her hands to her mouth. Everyone was looking at Harry, everyone except Dawn and Hermione, who had gotten up and moved around to the back of Professor Trelawney's chair.

"I don't think it looks like a Grim," Hermione said flatly.

"Neither do I," Dawn agreed.

Professor Trelawney surveyed Hermione and Dawn with mounting dislike.

"You'll forgive me for saying so, but I perceive very little aura around either of you. Very little receptivity to the resonances of the future."

Dawn laughed out and then gasped as a premonition flooded her mind.

"Aunt Dawn," Harry said as he rushed around the table to Dawn. "What do you see?"

"A black dog," Dawn said. "I also see a man."

Harry gulped. "Sirius Black?" he asked.

"I don't know, I can't see his face," Dawn said.

At the end of the class Dawn, Harry, Ron, and Hermione descended Professor Trelawney's ladder and the winding stair in silence.

At the bottom Dawn headed off in a different direction than the trio. She headed straight for Dumbledore's office. After giving the password she made her way up the spiral stair and into knocked.

"Come in."

Dawn opened the door and stepped into the office and saw Dumbledore sitting behind his desk.

"Ah Dawn, what can I do for you?" Dumbledore asked.

"Why do you have Trelawney teaching?" Dawn asked. "She appears to be nothing more than a fraud. Not a true seer."

"Originally I was not going to hire her. The only reason I even gave her an interview was because her grandmother had the gift and I hoped she had passed it down. The interview led me to believe the gift had passed Sybill by. Then I witnessed something. She had a vision of the future, a premonition," Dumbledore said. "And while in that premonition she recited a prophecy."

"What prophecy?" Dawn asked.

Dumbledore sighed. "I wanted to wait till I felt Harry was ready to hear this. I beg of you to wait to tell him till you feel he is ready."

"I can't promise anything," Dawn said. "But I will consider your request."

"Fair enough," Dumbledore said. "It goes like this. The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches ... born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies ... and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not ... and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives ... the one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord will be born as the seventh month dies."

"You're sure that is a true prophecy?" Dawn asked.

"Yes," Dumbledore said. "And some of it has already come to pass. Born to those who have thrice defied him. Lily and James thrice defied Voldemort. Harry himself was born as the seventh month dies. And Voldemort marked Harry has his equal."

"The scar," Dawn said.

Dumbledore nodded. "The scar he received when Voldemort tried to kill Harry when he was a babe."