- Chapter Two -

The Dead Beech Tree

One year later...

Harry Potter was chewing his fingernails, pondering. His attention was turned towards the parchment lying in front of him, so he was not able think happily of the glorious sunshine outside, the chirping birds, or anything else that might promise a good morning's lazing about. Very early this morning at five o'clock, he was awoken by the nervousness and anxiety caused by the final examination of the seventh-year students at Hogwarts, the last written test of which, Herbology, was scheduled for this sunny Friday.

When he got up and washed the sleepiness from his eyes, he started to read over the class notes he had received from his former roommate, Neville Longbottom. Neville was a truly exceptional talent in the field of magical herbs and fungi, having passed his final exam with an "Outstanding" grade and even a ministerial commendation, which is only awarded to the best students.

Harry had by then passed his theoretical and practical exams in Transfiguration, Charms, Defence Against the Dark Arts, and Potions, but for an "O" like Neville he could only hope for in the infamous DADA. So far, all the exams had proved particularly difficult and truly nastily exhausting, and Harry had been railing against himself after the first theoretical test for having had virtually no contact with the school library all year. His laziness got the better of him, so much so that it was only when his living conscience, Hermione Granger, gave him a tirade of slander that would have taken a trained Quidditch commentator an hour to recite. The only excuse Harry could have given was the stressful trials and tragedies of the past few years, though he was actually glad to spend his waking moments not thinking about them. In his sleep, the memories and sacrifices of the war against Lord Voldemort came back often enough.

Because of the war, Harry and his friends were only able to finish their studies at Hogwarts a year later, along with many other students who were not allowed back to school by Voldemort's supporters because of their origins and were forced to go into hiding. However, after the fall of the Death Eaters and the corrupt Ministry, everyone was welcomed back to the school, so Harry and his friends were able to complete their seventh year, along with the original cohort one year below them.

The seventh year was also the year of the final exams, which, apart from being Harry's first pleasant school year free of assassinations, murders and intrigue, also had a lot of extra studying in store.

Harry scribbled his all-too-brief answer to a question he'd been pondering in vain for a quarter of an hour ('Which introduced magical plants caused the radical transformation of the Australian magical flora in the 1700s, and what effect did this have on the century's barter trade – apart from the 1692 Magical Potions Act – in the light of the changes in international law affecting the trade in magical potions in the second half of the 1700s? Name the plant species that have become extinct and the common weeds that were proliferating due to that!') then looked at his watch and realised that there were only ten minutes left in the exam. 'Damn it!' he cursed under his breath. He had barely enough time to even grasp the next, equally convoluted question, think of the answer and revise his four-page paper. As if in confirmation, Professor Flitwick cleared his throat.

'Attention, only ten minutes left!' said the professor in his thin voice. 'Everyone, check your answers again!'

Harry sighed heavily, and glanced at Hermione, sitting to his right and one row ahead, hoping for some kind of help. But the girl's back was not marked with the solution to the last problem, and she showed no sign of doing anything but writing. Harry stared for a minute at the hard-working girl, who had already broken three of her quills in the last hour and a half.

Hermione's hand was now raised in the air.

'Professor, may I have another parchment?' she spoke rapidly to McGonagall, who was patrolling up and down the seats with the barrel-bellied Professor Slughorn, the soil-smelling Professor Sprout and the diminutive Flitwick, hunting for students who were cheating and peeking.

The Hufflepuff boy sitting next to Hermione shook his head in disbelief. McGonagall flicked her wand, and a bundle of brand new parchment appeared in front of Hermione.

Sitting directly in front of Harry was Ginny, who flipped back and forth between the exam questions, occasionally adding a few words to an assignment. Her bright red hair glistened in the sunlight, which had too often distracted Harry from his work.

Harry was now looking to his left and two seats back, where his other best friend Ron Weasley was leaning with his head on his hand, scribbling idly on the edge of the page and staring out the window, bored.

'Mr Potter, stop spinning like a billiwig!' McGonagall screeched at him.

Harry immediately turned back over his work. He hadn't even made the slightest effort to solve the last problem, a list of the organisms involved in the pollination of Venomous Tentacula - but McGonagall gave him an unexpected idea: he quickly scribbled the billiwig at the bottom of the page, and out of the corner of his eye he saw his left-hand neighbour Dean Thomas spectacularly slap his forehead and franticly scribble. McGonagall cleared her throat loudly, then bolted toward the front of the room, where another student had put his hand up.

'One minute left!' Flitwick said again.

Harry went back to the very beginning of the essay to quickly review the questions. In large letters at the top of the page it read:

Nastily Exhausting Wizarding Test

HERBOLOGY FINAL EXAM

The exam consisted of a total of thirty nastily exhausting questions, including both essay and multiple choice questions. Harry flipped through the papers, glancing at almost every third question – he'd had enough, though he was too embarrassed to admit it to himself, and he would never have dared tell Hermione.

'Your time is up! Everybody put your quills down!' Flitwick announced, but his last words were drowned out by the ringing bell. 'You too Prichard! Miss, I won't say it again!'

One after another, the four teachers waved their wands, and the students' papers rose up and flew in four neat piles on the teacher's desk. Harry put away his badly frayed quill and inkwell, slung his bag over his shoulder and waited for his friends at the entrance to the main hall.

'How did it go?' he asked Ron, who had just arrived. Hermione was slowly slaloming between the benches as she searched for answers in the book she had hastily fished out of her bag.

'I hope I got through,' Ron summed up the exam, not too enthusiastically. 'Question twenty-nine got me, but it was a lot easier than Transfiguration. Since McGonagall became the head of the supervisory board, I have the feeling that they take that subject a bit too seriously... Who did you write that novel for?'

She addressed the question to Hermione, who almost walked past them as she buried herself in the book.

'What... what novel?' stuttered the girl, who had just noticed them, blinking at them as if she didn't know what year it was.

'Put that book down for a minute!' Ron said in a pitiful tone, then pulled the surprised Hermione to him and kissed her. Her copy of One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi was pressed between them as she whimpered painfully. Harry waited behind them with his hands folded, impatient, others whooping and whistling as they passed the entwined pair.

'Look at the love birdies!' Ginny whispered snidely, but in a way that everyone around them could still hear. Harry, Dean Thomas and a couple of other Gryffindors responded with a roar of laughter.

Ron finally released the blushing Hermione, and as they were joined by the sleepy Luna Lovegood, the six friends went out through the entrance hall into the castle courtyard.

Harry's face has been hit by the summer sunshine, of which he had only had a taste during the exam in the Great Hall. There were barely a few wisps of cloud in the sky, a soft breeze, and it seemed that all the students at Hogwarts were eager to spend the last day of the school year outdoors.

'Well, we're done!' Dean summed it up wisely, then yawned and stretched.

'Unfortunately, we aren't yet,' Hermione shook her head, 'Ginny and I still have Arithmancy left.'

'And Muggle Studies,' Ginny added. 'Although I'm completely confused about Muggles...'

'What do you mean?' Hermione asked.

In the meantime, they reached the lakeside and the huge beech tree, which has always been a pleasant resting place in the park in recent years. They all settled down underneath - except Luna, who took off her shoes and socks and dipped her feet in the water of the lake.

'This year I've learned,' Ginny frowned, 'that Muggles are our friends, who deserve to live safely and free just as much as we do, and to leave them alone. And last year Professor Carrow tried to convince us that instead of a stupefying charm, it was more effective to put a body freezing spell on old Muggle women crossing the zebra crossing... How's that now? I don't understand!' she sighed theatrically, and her friends gasped with laughter.

Ron and Harry opened a box of chocolate frogs, and after no one asked for any, they ate the whole box. Hermione and Ginny were in deep conversation about their next exam, their faces showing that they would love to postpone it for a few more years. Dean took his sketchpad from his bag and began drawing the girls sitting on a nearby bench with an ordinary charcoal pencil. Luna stumbled barefoot back to them, watching with visible interest as the small, sketchy drawings were made – Harry watched her with one eye. He knew that she was a talented painter in her spare time, but he had never mentioned to her or any of their friends that he had seen the paintings hanging in her room. He felt he had then gained a glimpse into her heart, and was embarrassed by what he saw. For Luna, this little group of friends meant a lot.

Half an hour later, the two girls announced that it was time for their Arithmancy exam; Luna and the boys wished them luck and then resumed their sweet idleness. Harry lazily threw Ginny a lucky kiss, then slumped back on the grass with his arms under his head for support. He closed his eyes and munched thoughtfully on the torn left leg of a chocolate frog.

He remembered the events of the past year – he couldn't help it, the final exam had brought out his nostalgic, sentimental side. Though he disliked this brooding old Harry Potter, he greeted him more and more often as an old acquaintance. Every time he picked up an old object, looked at a yellowed photograph, turned a worn notebook or scribbled book over in his fingers, memories flooded his mind.

Now of all times he suspected the beech tree and its cool shade for his sentimental mood – how often they had settled down at its trunk with Ron and Hermione! Especially this year. The explanation was simple enough: their seventh year was with absolute certainty Harry's most peaceful year at Hogwarts, free of intrigue and conspiracies. Compared to previous years, even the inter-house Quidditch tournament seemed like a calming respite, even after all the hard training. Harry got the old team together – Ginny, Demelza Robins, Ritchie Coote, Jimmy Peakes, Ron and Dean – and instead of N.E.W.T.-preparations, they put all their efforts into the tournament, which brought the expected result: the Quidditch Cup was again decorating the clubroom of the Gryffindor House after the final match against Hufflepuff. Ginny's skills with the quaff were so amazing that Harry could not help but admire her talent. He was sure any professional Quidditch team would kill for such a chaser.

At Hogwarts, everything seemed to be back to normal, although as Harry thought about it, that had never really been the case anyway. Life at Hogwarts was normal when nothing was normal. It was a quiet, homely place Harry hadn't known much before, except perhaps the first few months of his first year, when he hadn't suspected anything about the Philosopher's Stone or the return of a dark wizard vegetating as a ghost.

McGonagall, after two previous interim appointments, had finally taken her rightful headmaster's chair officially and permanently, and Harry felt she had every right to sit in the middle of the teachers' desk. McGonagall's term was very much like Dumbledore's, except that Peeves, the school's poltergeist, had become much more reckless and wild in plotting and executing various pranks.

Harry had never seen so many new teachers at the same time at the opening dinner as he had this year: they got a new professor in Defence Against the Dark Arts, Muggle Studies and Transfiguration. Professor McGonagall was forced to resign as head of Gryffindor house when she took over the headmaster's chair, which she handed over to the rather sturdy teacher of Defence Against the Dark Arts named John Eakle. Professor Eakle was only a few inches taller than Flitwick, but unlike the professor of Charms, he had long, thick auburn hair and beard, and muscular arms that rivalled a lion tamer's. Harry and his friends' somewhat restrained attitude dissipated immediately after the first DADA lesson, and they agreed that the subject had finally gained a truly competent and able teacher, and the Gryffindor House a just and fair leader.

Mr Eakle did not admire Harry as a wonder of the world, and the teenage boy was particularly glad of this, for there were very few people in those days who did not shower him with admiration and thanks. Professor Eakle had been a childhood friend of the Weasley family, in particular of the late old grandfather Weasley, and made no secret of the fact that Ron was his favourite pupil. This attention of course was passed on to Hermione. Harry felt his two friends indeed deserved this respect – he could never have done it without them. Without Hermione's wit and magical power, he wouldn't have been able to make any steps forward, the first Death Eater would have killed him. Ron's absence he was actually able to experience during the Horcrux hunt: he represented their fellowship, their hearts and souls during the hunt.

In the months following the fall of Voldemort, there was plenty of cheering, both official and unofficial. Hagrid and the other surviving members of the Order of the Phoenix made it almost compulsory for them to accompany them to every victory party they threw in Britain, from the Three Broomsticks to the Leaky Cauldron to the Strangled Cat.

Kingsley, who was confirmed in his temporarily elected ministerial post by the unanimous vote of the Wizengamot, nominated the three good friends for the highest Order of Merlin award; Harry and his friends accepted and received the honour, but the three thousand galleons it meant they had given to a foundation which was created to care for the family members and orphans of those killed by Voldemort.

As many things had changed since Voldemort's death, one thing remained the same: Harry hated the fuss. And the fuss would continue tomorrow: it was the one-year anniversary of Voldemort's defeat, and the commemoration was to be held at Hogwarts. The school had been preparing for this event for a month, and the atmosphere was far from festive. Harry, Ron and Hermione had agreed to attend the anniversary on one condition: that it would not be about fanfare and glory, but rather a silent remembrance of the victims of the battle against the Death Eaters.

'Have you finished memorizing your speech?' Ron asked casually, breaking the long silence that had been going on for minutes.

'Sort of...' replied Harry with a shrug.

Hermione had been annoying him with it for days, and Harry had tried to avoid her every time. If she bothered him with studying, he'd refer to the speech; if she bothered him with preparing for the memorial service, he'd use the N.E.W.T.s as an excuse. The result was that he neither studied enough for the exams, nor could he memorise half of the speech.

'Hermione practices in front of the mirror all the time,' Ron said, dipping into the bag of chocolate frogs. 'She's got stage fright... How much do you want to bet she'll drop a clanger?'

Harry just waved a hand.

'Come on! She just doesn't like to perform. We'd much rather be the ones making a fool of ourselves,' he shared his opinion, and following Ron's example, he reached for another sweet.

'I'm afraid you are right,' nodded his friend with a worried face. 'Good thing Hermione wrote it for us.'

Harry did not entirely agree, as the speech she had written ran to a good four pages. He opened the box of chocolate frog and looked at the enclosed card from the Famous Witches and Wizards card set.

'There you go, you're on it again...' he threw the card casually to Ron, who was stuffing two flailing chocolate frogs into his mouth.

'Buat'm I supposed to do wi'it?' he muttered with his mouth full, but with a sloppy gesture he dropped it into a pocket of his bag.

Harry grinned to himself. However much Ron was trying to hide it, he thought it was the best day of his life when his face appeared in the chocolate frog card series, along with Hermione's. Harry, who'd been in the cards for eighteen years, had a new picture and accompanying description – 'The Boy Who Lived', 'sole survivor of the death curse', and 'currently staying with unknown foster parents' were now considered rather outdated information. The new card text read:

Harry Potter, the Chosen One (1980 - )

One of the most famous young wizards of our time, the only known survivor of the death curse, his childhood was overshadowed from the age of one by He Who Must Not Be Named. He is also credited with the defeat of the sorcerer known as the Dark Lord, which, according to popular rumour, he was destined to do before he was born. Mr Potter is a talented seeker at his school and a fan of Quidditch – he wouldn't miss a match of his favourite team, Puddlemere United.

'Where do they get all this nonsense from?' Harry mused. He had only been to one real Quidditch match in his life, the World Cup final between Bulgaria and Ireland. That Puddlemere United would be his favourite team? After all, why not? Puddlemere's keeper Oliver Wood was the quidditch team captain of the Gryffindors, who elected him as his seeker. With that Harry had decided that indeed Puddlemere's team will be his favourite. 'Who knows?' he thought to himself and grinned, 'Perhaps some day he may as well visit one of their matches...'

Harry's card was annoyingly often in his hand, as Ron tended to have a full bag of chocolate frogs at his disposal lately, and he insisted that they eat this "extraordinary sweet" during boring hours and every other waking minute. It didn't help that around Christmas, Ginny lashed out at her brother, accusing him of eating "those poor toads to stare at his own stupid, freckled face" instead of their mother's Christmas cake. Ron has since assumed a phlegmatic and bored expression whenever his card got in his hand.

It wasn't just the chocolate frog cards that bothered Harry, but rather the throngs of newspaper articles and books that tried to explain – with little success – how three untrained young sorcerers had managed to defeat the most powerful dark wizard of all time. Each of the eager investigators were convinced of their own truth, but as many as there were, as many different opinions, and the three good friends knew well that all of them were far from the truth. At least they could not complain that the scribblers were harsh; each wrote with the greatest respect and admiration about their real or imagined actions, with one exception.

As Harry had expected, Rita Skeeter would never have missed such a unique opportunity to uncover the dubious side of Voldemort's vanquishers. A few months after the Battle of Hogwarts, she published a seven hundred page book entitled The True Face of the Chosen One. Harry was reluctant to think about this book and chose to skip reading it. Hermione, on the contrary, chewed her way through Skeeter's work, which led to her suing the annoying scribbler after much anger, indignation and threatening letters.

'I can't let that cockroach write such things about you!' Hermione shouted with a flushed face as she told her friends at the breakfast table one windy Saturday in November that she had written a letter to the Ministry.

'What kind of things?' Ginny snapped her head up, but Harry couldn't care less.

'All lies, what did you expect?' answered the girl angrily. 'Not only does she question Voldemort's death, she's also linking you to Grindelwald, and me and Ron too... It's as if Dumbledore has chosen us to carry out his old plans about the 'Greater Good' and all that nonsense!' Hermione was getting more into it, her face flushed red with anger. Ron listened with his mouth agape.

'Moreover, she tries to support the old lies with her new ones. She's assuming...' laughed Hermione hysterically, causing Harry, Ron and Ginny to exchange frightened glances, '...assuming that the only way you got the Wand of Destiny was to disarm Dumbledore in the tower, and that the whole Draco Malfoy story is fiction, and too complicated and confusing to fool anyone...'

Now Harry snapped his head up.

'How does Skeeter know about the Wand of Destiny?' Hermione took a deep breath and sat down on the bench next to him.

'Harry,' she said, with a pitiful look. 'There were about two hundred people there when Voldemort died. Everyone heard you talking about the Wand of Destiny and Malfoy. Did you think that little conversation would stay between four hundred ears?'

'Three hundred and ninety-nine!' interjected Ron with a grin, pointing his fork at Hermione's. 'You forgot about George.'

Harry and Ginny laughed at the joke, but Hermione didn't appreciate the tasteless humour.

The trial was of course protracted, as the Wizengamot did not find Hermione's reasons for claiming that the journalist had committed defamation sufficient at first attempt, since nowhere in her book does she specifically state that she thought this or that had happened, but merely put assumptions and questions in front of the reader.

Hermione, of course, was not one to let the matter rest, and despite Harry's best efforts to dissuade her, she launched a second lawsuit for reputational damage against Skeeter. This time, the accusation was that at several points in Rita's book, she had written with unforgivable disrespect about Dumbledore, Moody and several deceased members of the Order of the Phoenix, again only assuming that they had something to do with the dead headmaster's dubious plans.

The Wizengamot had by then agreed to initiate the lawsuit, although as Harry suspected – and Skeeter was sure – it may have involved the Minister for Magic, Kingsley Shacklebolt, who himself admitted in a conversation that the book was the tip of the iceberg of audacity.

'I don't understand you, Hermione,' Ginny shook her head, 'If you want to shut Skeeter down so badly, why don't you just declare that she's an unregistered animagus? They'd probably lock her up for a while...'

'Unfortunately we missed out on that," she said, annoyed. "Skeeter is already a registered animagus. She went to the Ministry and registered before the Dumbledore book was published. She must have been afraid we'd report her in retaliation... She doesn't know how right she would have been!'

This was six months ago. The lawsuit was still going on and Harry felt it was going nowhere. Every two months or so, Hermione would pop into the Ministry for a trial, which was either adjourned because Skeeter did not turn up, or the Department of Magical Enforcement had requested the full panel in a case against a former Death Eater. There were a lot of these nowadays, one almost every week, although they were preceded by lengthy investigations and inquiries. This slowed down the Wizengamot's work – Mr Weasley said the court has not been as busy since the ministry was founded – but at least it gave them a better chance of avoiding wrongful convictions, such as the "wise and just" panel did seventeen years ago in the case of Sirius Black. Even Hermione had to admit that her little media war, however much it attracted interest, was insignificant compared to, say, the judgement of a mass-murdering werewolf. Unfortunately, Rita was well aware of this, and in an interview with the Daily Prophet she announced that she was already working on a book entitled The Dubious Triumvirate: The Most Intimate Secrets of the Notorious Trio, which she had obtained from sources as reliable as some of Harry's former classmates. Harry had a few guesses as to who the "reliable sources" might be...

The weather was getting slightly warmer as the clock tower started to ring at noon and Hermione and Ginny's Arithmancy exam was slowly drawing to a close. At the sound of the bell, Harry awoke from his quiet musing. The benign shade of the beech tree had meanwhile swung over their heads, and Harry's forehead was quite hot from the sunlight, yet strangely soothing as he looked inwardly at his reddening eyelids. He yawned and opened his eyes; for a while the sunlight made them dance with patches of colour, but his vision slowly cleared.

The sky was cloudy.

Harry frowned. Everything was covered in a continuous grey cloud cover, which perhaps held the promise of calm rain later. There was no sign of the sun in the sky, its languid glow spreading across the gloom.

Harry yawned again, and turned his head slightly to the side. The bald, gnarled branch of the beech tree hung over him. There was not a single leaf on it.

Harry was fully awake now and had only been lying on the soft turf because there was nothing to wake up for. A musty smell hit his nose, coming like an unexpected breeze, uninvited, invading his nostrils, filling his senses. He didn't like the smell, it reminded him a little of the cupboard under the stairs in the Dursley House.

Harry now sat up immediately and looked up at the tree. The old, huge beech tree, his favourite tree, was completely bare, not a single leaf on it; in fact, the thick branches were as dry, withered and black as if the haggard tree had been dead for years.

'What's up? Why are you jumping around?' Ron's voice rang out next to his ear. Harry flinched at the sudden voice, and turned towards him. Until now he hadn't even realised he was there, so preoccupied he was with the dead beech tree.

'What happened to the tree...?' pointed out Harry, but his hand froze in the air.

'What do you mean?' Ron asked without much attention, opening another box of chocolates and shoving another card into his bag.

The beech tree was luxuriant in leaves, its branches spreading richly above them as if nothing had happened. It was as beautiful and healthy as when they sat down at its trunk. What's more, the sky was bright blue again, with not a cloud in sight, and the sun was shining brightly.

'Didn't you see what happened to the tree?' he asked Ron. 'It was completely bare just now! I swear there wasn't a leaf on it.'

His friend was looking at him with such a dumb look on his face, with the struggling frog's legs hanging out of his mouth, that Harry almost laughed, despite his shock.

'There was nothing wrong with the tree,' Ron shook his head.

Dean listened with interest; his drawing board was already quite full with drawings, with a few crumpled paper balls lying beside it. Luna, meanwhile, had fallen asleep, leaning against the boy's shoulder.

Harry jumped up from his seat, took the momentum and ran around the tree, rubbing his eyes, squinting, blinking, hoping the image would come back, but nothing happened. The tree was intact and untouched, its perfect canopy casting a cool shadow on the ground. He sniffed the air, but the musty stench was gone, as if it had never been there. His movements woke Luna, who was now yawning with a big stretch, which resulted in her nearly popping Dean's eye out.

Harry paused. The two boys were looking at him as they used to when he dreamed of Voldemort – a little reserved, worried, and Harry suspected he was beginning to look like an idiot, running around a tree, sniffing the air.

Don't panic!, he told himself. Surely there must be a logical explanation, like with the thestrals... He opened his arms, as if waiting for an answer to emerge from behind the tree, but only Luna's curious eyes were looking at him.

'What, are you chasing a squirrel?'

Harry didn't answer, but Ron raised an eyebrow.

'A squiiiiiirrelllll?!' he howled in disbelief. 'Are you okay, Luna? Didn't you mean to say... errr... nargles?'

Luna frowned at him in a very unusual way. Harry could have sworn that no one had ever seen her make that expression before.

'Nargles do not exist, silly...'

Ron snorted in astonishment, Dean covered his mouth, and Harry found her statement momentarily more interesting than the mystery of the beech tree. Luna just lay back on Dean's shoulder, folded her arms around herself as if she were cold, and said no more. Harry didn't bring up the beech tree topic again either, not mentioning it to Hermione or Ginny, and Ron seemed to simply dismiss it as one of his friend's "psychotic nightmares." Harry was also finding this explanation increasingly satisfying as he pondered: after all, it could have been...