TEN.

It did not happen all at once, but it did happen quickly. The feeble light that had once shone through the skies had sunk into it, leaving behind not a thing. The moon threw faint glows onto the snow but rarely penetrated the thick castle walls, and no matter what time Harry woke or went to bed he could not be sure he didn't have it the wrong way round. One time at lunch, he became so sleepy that he developed a conviction the clocks in Snape's quarters were all mistaken and surely it must have been midnight not midday. He went for a nap to quiet down his brain and woke like he always woke: tired and heavy, as though gravity itself had gone mad with winter.

He dozed through the classes he attended and doze over his own reading. Snape had helped him find literature on natural magic, but Harry thought there must have been something wrong with his eyes because every time he read, the words blurred and shifted out of his field of vision. When he did make them out, the sentences themselves became unintelligible. Maybe it didn't matter. He had not felt natural magic in weeks, not even a single flicker of it, not in his heavy dreams and not while awake. Could it have gone, he wondered? Could it be that he'd wished it away over those evenings he'd spent hating it, or that whatever in him had once resonated with its thrum had ceased to do so when he'd stopped practising magic altogether?

When he woke in the mornings, he searched blindly for the oil lamp, the darkness around him thick and impenetrable. He would not cast a Lumos. It wasn't that he was afraid of the spell itself—what was the worst thing that a Lumos could do, after all—but more that he worried he might discover he'd forgotten how.

You could go blind, he did think one morning as the light from the lamp pushed at the shadows of the empty room. If you put too much power into your Lumos, it might grow so bright your eyes melted and sizzled when they saw, and Harry would be stumbling along the Durmstrang corridors sporting two empty sockets, terrifying anyone who chanced a look at him.

At least he would not be shunned by his roommates. He did not have any. Snape had pulled a set of mysterious strings and got him reassigned to an empty dorm, having correctly ascertained that whoever had punched Harry that day had shared with him. It was good, because the boys he'd lived with had been awful, and good because now Harry never had to put anything away properly, only throw it on one of the unoccupied beds. It was less good when he woke at night to the sight of nothing and the sound of no one. When he did, he would slip out of bed and by touch alone find the edge of the record player and the slip of the vinyl. He'd stolen these from Snape's chambers. When the room swelled with whatever song he'd chanced upon, he felt silly for ever having been afraid, and lay imagining into the dark whatever images the music inspired in him.

Sometimes he spooled fantasies of distant lands and the lives he might have been born into but hadn't. Sometimes he thought about Sirius Black. Sometimes he conjured images of Ron and Hermione in Gryffindor Tower, pouring over homework and forgetting him. Other times, he imagined only what tomorrow might be, but a tomorrow that he knew deep down would not come: a tomorrow when he spoke up in class, when he did his spellwork, and chatted with the nice upper-year student who came to the lab around five every afternoon to work on her research project.

'Do you want to help me?' she'd asked Harry the other day. 'I have lots of spiders to chop up.'

Harry, who had rested his head in the cradle of his folded arms and taken to watching the tiny hairs on his wrist tremble when he breathed, did not see why he would ever chop dead spiders out of his own volition. He could hardly say so to the girl, who'd been kind to notice his idleness, even if she'd made a mistake in taking it for boredom.

'Don't bother,' Snape said from the opposite corner of the room, where he was doing some of his own brewing. It smelled funky. 'Mr Potter is currently on strike from activity. Already the fact that he must continue to breathe and blink goes against his principles.'

Harry hid his face between his elbows, forehead pressed to the cool table, trying to ignore the flush of embarrassment. He didn't acknowledge anything had been said. If he did, he would lose his temper, and then Snape might kick him out after all. He'd made a feeble attempt of it when Harry refused to help him with his potion earlier, but he had not pressed. With someone else watching, he might not relent so easily.

Just so no one could say Harry wasn't doing anything, he leaned over to extract a schoolbook from his bag. The floor was a long way away, and Harry had to clutch at the desk to save himself from dropping pathetically to the ground. The stool canted and scraped. Snape threw him a glare but did not comment: he could hardly tell Harry off for getting on with homework, could he?

The particular schoolbook he'd extracted from the bag was Harry's favourite, because it looked very schoolbook-y. The tome had been his History of Magic syllabus, though no obvious title betrayed its contents, and since Harry hated History of Magic, he'd had no qualms about tearing out the bulk of its pages to make room for his own reading. He would slip thinner, smaller books between the folds of ripped paper, and was in this way free to read novels, which he'd never done much of before but found he quite liked now, while pretending he was deeply engrossed in whatever study he claimed.

Today, though, he had no novel. What lay within the secret hiding space would be more shameful by far if it were discovered, and even as Harry read it, he felt a little sick inside at the idea.

The book, which the librarian had suggested to him a fortnight ago but Harry had only recently struck up the courage to slip off the shelf, was titled Wizarding Families of England and Wales, 1901-1981. It showed pictures of family trees, twining and crossing, and gave dates and biographies of people Harry did not know. People like Harry's grandfather. Like Harry's great aunt. Like another witch whose relation Harry did not know the name for, but in whose severe face Harry saw something of his father's, even if only because they had been both put to page by the same artist.

It showed Sirius Black, too. Harry had contemplated scratching him out, inking over the spindly line that through various witches and wizards ran between him and Harry's father, and it was only fear of the librarian that prevented him. He did not want to be related, however distantly, to Sirius Black. He did not want to be related to the Malfoys, or to the Lestranges, or not even to the great-uncle who had gone to Durmstrang and had made a name for himself studying muggleborns and squibs. We in the wizarding world speak often of blood, the book quoted from his most controversial work. We assign it various features that by nature are to blood alien: we wish for our blood to be strong, we wish for it to be shared and maintained across family lines, we fear that it might become diluted. Those who believe themselves modern would like to scorn these ideas, but in doing so they place their children and their children's children at risk. Although many would frown at applying muggle science to the study of wizarding kind, I believe it is in the recent discoveries made in this field that the proof lies. A substance that muggles name deoxyribonucleic acid, present in the blood, tissue, bone and hair of every man and woman, holds the secrets of inheritance, and indeed a sensitivity toward magic has there its seat.

Harry would have liked his blood a little diluted, he thought, if it made the enormity of the magic that wielded him ease off—or even if it made the pages of this book a little emptier of mentions of his name. How strange that in finding out more about his family, that in discovering so much of the wizarding world was related by blood and that there were still distant relations of Harry who remained alive and well—that in all this, he felt only more alone, and more like a stranger.

'This will need to brew for how long?'

'Three nights,' the girl said. 'I'll just clean up and go.'

'Have you warded it as discussed?'

'Yes, sir.'

Snape was gathering up his things. He'd already poured his own potion into vials, gleaming purplish and gold. He nodded at Harry, prompting him to stuff the book into his bag and hurry out after him. The last thing he wanted was to be stuck in the awkward silence with the older student for another quarter of an hour. With Snape there, at least it was generally understood all the awkwardness was his fault.

'If you'd started on that reading earlier, you would have been done in time for supper,' Snape admonished once they had stepped into the corridor. The Potions lab had warmed up with the fire under the cauldrons and the steam of bubbling brews, but that warmth had not followed them out, and Harry found himself shivering the moment the door shut heavily behind them.

'Can I eat with you?'

Snape glared at him. 'Since you have proven yourself incapable of eating without being supervised, then I suppose so. What sort of a question is that?'

'Well, I don't know. You were pretty mean to me earlier.'

'I was not mean—'

'Yes, you were,' Harry interjected. 'It's not like I didn't want to help you. I mean, if you'd really needed the help then I would have, but you were just trying to give me busy work. What's the point in that?'

'The point in that,' Snape said as he led him up the labyrinthine stairway, the light of his wand making his face appear creased and nightmarish, 'is so you don't sit around lamenting your fate and glaring at me from across the room. I am stuck in this hellhole, too, I will remind you, and I assure you no matter how starved I might be for entertainment, I do not need front-row seats to the tragedy of teenage angst.'

A heat appeared in Harry's throat, full and pressing. He knew well that them being stuck here was entirely his fault, but usually it was a quiet knowledge pushed to the back of his mind. With Snape coming out and saying it, suddenly it became wholly urgent and horrible.

What appetite had come to him since he last ate disappeared. When they sat at the desk in Snape's office, golden cutlery casting shimmery light onto their faces, Harry forced himself to take little bites, keeping his head carefully down so that nothing of his feeling would obviously show. He wished Snape would at least try and pretend being here wasn't so horrible. He wished Harry himself could at least make it better by telling a funny story from class or doing extra well on the chopping of dead spiders.

At least Snape didn't know that Harry wasn't even trying to improve on their situation. At least he didn't know that not only had Harry not completed any of the reading on natural magic he'd been meant to, but he was too much of a coward to use any magic ever.

Something was off about his mashed potatoes. They looked to Harry like discoloured dirt. A clump fell off his fork and splashed sauce around, then drifted in the greasy pool. The sight of it made bile come up to his throat. He felt disgusting. He felt disgusting all too often these days, especially at night, when he dreamed horrid dreams he would rather die than have anyone know about—dreams of his friends bursting into a bathroom to see him with his underpants down, of pus gathering in Harry's ears and of teeth rotting out of Harry's mouth, of teachers coming to look for him when he was missing class and pulling away the sheets to catch him while he was—Ron had written Harry that they were keeping dream journals and reading them out in Divination, and Harry had felt at once inordinately glad he wasn't taking it.

'Harry.'

Harry knew his voice would come out high and thin, so he said nothing.

'You are not leaving this table until you've finished your food.'

Well. If that was the case, Harry might as well make use of the time.

He produced his book from the bag at his feet and, propping it against the edge of the desk, began to read. Or pretend to read, as was the case. It was impossible to do more than fix his gaze hard on the letters and assume a mock expression of focus, what with Snape just a little further into his line of vision.

Then, Snape did something Harry had not anticipated, though surely he would have had he not been annoyed—he reached across the table and snatched the book from Harry's hands.

Harry sprang up after it, fingers grasping at the edges of the cover, but Snape was taller and had the advantage of surprise. 'Give it back!' shouted Harry, heart beating loudly in his ears.

'You'll get it back once the table is cleared. If you think I am going to let you spill meat sauce over any sort of book just because you wish to show how little you care for what I say to you, you are sadly mistaken. Sit down.'

'Fine, I—I'll put it in my bag! Just give it back!'

It was the wrong thing to say. Snape's eyes narrowed.

'No, don't look at it! It's mine—'

Too late. Snape had already discovered the trick of it and was looking with distaste at each of the two books in turn.

'What on Earth have you done to it? Ripping out pages—what is wrong with you? And what's this—'

Harry clutched at his stomach, hoping he might stave off nausea if he drove his fingers in hard enough. He would not have wanted anyone to see him reading the book, but having Snape of all people discover it—

'It's not mine,' Harry stuttered, throat dry. 'It's assigned reading. For History of Magic.'

He felt Snape's gaze on him, heavy and cold. 'And if that is the case, precisely why are you going to such lengths to conceal it?'

Harry didn't know how to answer that. Why, oh why did he have to be so stupid as to pull the book out with Snape in arm's reach?

He heard Snape sigh.

'I'm sorry,' tried Harry.

'What in Merlin's name are you apologising for? Reading?'

'I don't know.'

Snape sat down again. This way, his face was a little lower than Harry's face as he stood, and it was harder to hide his expression from him.

'It's only natural that you are interested in your family history,' Snape said tightly. 'It is your heritage. It is yours to claim.'

'They're not my family,' Harry muttered. 'Not really. I mean—it's like reading about strangers. I don't—the Dursleys are my family. Not the people in this book.'

A shadow fell over Snape's face. He did not like it when Harry mentioned the Dursleys.

'Your aunt and uncle have been stripped of any parental claim to you and for good reason,' he said darkly. 'They are not your family. They are not worthy of being the mud on your shoe.'

'But they are,' Harry insisted. 'I get it that they were—I don't want to go back to them or anything. I'm really glad I don't have to. But when I think about my real family, that's who I see. Even though I don't like it. Does that make sense?'

He looked up on instinct and found himself unintentionally catching Snape's eye. His expression was inscrutable. At least he didn't seem angry anymore. He didn't seem disgusted, either, which did make Harry feel marginally better about the whole thing.

'It makes perfect sense,' he said finally. 'There are fools who will tell you that we can choose our families. Those people live in a fairy-tale world. The rest of us labour in the real one.'

For a moment, Harry was seized with the fear that Snape wasn't just talking about the Dursleys. He thought maybe he was referring to what had happened the summer after first year, when Snape had wanted to—but quickly he understood the feeling in Snape's voice was probably due to his own family history, which Harry did not know much about except that it wasn't great. No, Snape wouldn't have been thinking about that. Snape never spoke about that, not ever, to the point that Harry sometimes wondered if it had even happened at all or if he'd only imagined it.

And thank Merlin, honestly. Harry felt such a burning embarrassment at the very thought of it that he wanted to die. In hindsight, the whole thing just seemed supremely stupid. He imagined Snape felt the same way.

While it was easy enough to get Snape off the topic of homework by looking alternatively sad and hungry, the method had little impact on Harry's actual teachers. Being told off for missing class became a daily occurrence, with even the brightest instructors apparently never figuring out that he was only more likely to skip their class if he knew he was going to be told off when he came. Nutt, the prison guard professor with a vole obsession who taught Harry Herbology, was particularly fearsome, and on one occasion threatened to lock him in the basement overnight so he would most certainly be there for next morning's class.

'We will have ourselves an experiment,' she said. 'Will our flesh-eating specimens break through the magical stasis spells if they smell in the darkness a lamb away from its flock?'

Harry was fairly sure she'd been playing a cruel joke. But the castle's basements, where magical plants were kept warm and wrapped up for the winter and where ferns casting green petals of light climbed over walls and ceilings like a cushioning spell, did not invite in Harry a mood for jokes. Just adjacent to the Herbology rooms lay the torture dungeon, as Snape had referred to it, with its blackened walls and strange devices that had apparently been used in days of old to teach chain-breaking and defensive spells for the event of capture by muggles. If anyone were to be trapped in one of the contraptions, Harry rather thought the depth of the dungeon and the thick cover of ferns would ensure no one in the castle heard even the faintest of screams.

It was perhaps mercy on Harry that the actual consequence for his notorious truancy was in the end only to be summoned to the headmaster's chambers. That the headmaster in question used to be a Death Eater was certainly a complication, but as Harry followed Ludvig up another of the myriad gloomy stairways that afternoon, he thought it might in fact play to his benefit. Karkaroff could not have been much invested in morals if what Snape had told Harry was true, and so he could hardly take personal offense with Harry skipping class. And since according to the whispers among students he seemed to look down on anyone with a pedigree lesser than that of a Malfoy, Harry did not imagine he would go telling on him to Snape, either.

This did not change the fact that Harry had never been summoned to the headmaster's office for poor behaviour before, and he was finding it a decidedly unpleasant experience. His skin crawled and his eyes itched when he stood before Karkaroff, who, sat stiffly in his ornate chair and stroking his beard, regarded Harry like he was the let-down of the century.

'Do you dislike it here, Mr Potter?'

Harry thought it was not terribly smart to tell Karkaroff he thought his entire school was bollocks. He stayed quiet.

'You do not share a dormitory and you do not share your meals with the other students,' Karkaroff enumerated. 'You do not come to class, and when you do, you do not prepare and you do not take part. I must surmise that you dislike it here. Do you know what I tell students who dislike it here, Mr Potter?'

How the hell was Harry supposed to know that? 'No, sir,' he said.

'I tell them the door is always open,' said Karkaroff, voice dripping pleasure. 'You are always free to dress warm, take with you some food for the way, and go find a better life on the ice plane.'

Harry tried his best not to visibly shiver. 'You can't take food with you,' he said. 'We're not allowed to take it out of the dining room because of the voles.'

'I'm sure we can make an exception.'

Harry met his gaze. The man only wanted to scare him, and Harry was not so easily cowed—but there was something in Karkaroff's cool gaze which made him suspect that although he wasn't actually going to exile Harry to die in the snow, it was not because he would find such a thing hard on his conscience.

'It is sad to see a young man like yourself waste such potential,' said Karkaroff. 'But this is a school for those who want to grow and achieve, Mr Potter. Not those who fall short of their promise.'

Harry stared at the floor, fighting the rising blush.

'Quentin Lamotte informed me that you are a skilled Seeker,' Karkaroff continued, ignoring Harry's distress. 'You will join our school team. I have already arranged matters with the captain. They are training at six tonight. Don't be late.'

Harry's head sprung up. 'You want me to play Quidditch, sir? As punishment?'

The yellow of Karkaroff's teeth showed through his thin lips as he laughed. 'Punishment? I don't think it will be much punishment.'

'Right. I know. But then why—'

'I don't think discipline is what you require, Mr Potter. Not for this problem. Would you agree?'

Harry stared at him a moment before nodding slowly. He'd written Karkaroff off as a nasty piece of work with no skill for managing staff or students—but he thought now maybe he'd been wrong.

'Thank you, sir,' said Harry, surprised at finding he meant it.

He did not know why, but six that evening felt like a morning. Maybe it was only that he'd got used to Wood's crack of dawn practice schedule, to setting out broom in hand at the first sign of light, tight from morning shivers. He was shivering tonight, too, gloved hand clamped on his broom, dark stabbing at his eyes. As he trudged through the snow, a blue glow his only hint at where to head for, he felt an emotion rise in him that tasted of ice and made him want to run.

Students milled around at the back of the castle, hefting cases and shucking fur coats. They all held onto brooms that looked to be of Nimbus 2000 class or higher and spoke and laughed loudly in the manner of people who'd known each other long enough to develop a common language Harry would not be able to speak. In the air above them drifted orbs of blue light someone must have conjured beforehand. Each spun slowly and orbited around the others in what seemed to Harry a pattern, though he could not tell what it would have been.

It took an excruciating age of standing there awkwardly for anyone to take notice of him. It was a boy who did, tall and lanky and pretty like a picture, his ears studded golden and reflecting harshly the blue light from above.

'You're the Potter boy,' he said, approaching him. 'Karkaroff sent you, yes?'

Harry nodded quickly. Now that the boy was standing directly before him, looming over Harry like a painted spectre, Harry recognised him as one of Viktor Krum's favourite companions.

'Bogdanova!' the boy called without turning. 'Your new Seeker is here.'

A girl tore herself from the nearest gathering. Her tall fur hat was the same deep and strange black as her narrow eyes and her hair, which had the effect of making them all appear as one. When she stood next to the boy, they looked to Harry for a moment like twins, before the illusion dissipated and he realised it was their manner in the corridors and their manner stood one next to the other now that gave the impression, not any real resemblance. Harry had always seen them move as one behind Krum, and they moved as one now, assessing Harry with identical cold gazes.

'Seriously?' the girl Bogdanova said. When she spoke again, it was in quick Russian, and though Harry couldn't tell what she was saying, he could read the indignation in it well enough.

'Yes, he can,' said the boy patiently. 'He can do whatever he likes. It is his school—'

She spoke over him. Her raised voice had drawn attention to them, several students now casting them looks. An unspoken custom seemed to be at play, though, because no one dared intervene—no one except Viktor Krum.

Harry would have been lying if he'd claimed he hadn't thought about Krum. The moment Karkaroff had said the word Quidditch, Harry had immediately thought about Krum—but since Karkaroff had known Harry played Seeker, he didn't imagine he would get to fly with Viktor Krum until some future match brought them head-to-head. It had seemed an entirely distant possibility and Harry had decided not to mull over it too much lest he melt into a puddle from the sheer wonder of it—and so he was now entirely unprepared for the reality of Viktor Krum, youngest seeker on a national Quidditch team ever, standing before him with his Firebolt in hand.

'What's the problem, Inna? We're waiting to play.' His voice was gruff and low; his English deliberate, like he wasn't much used to it.

'Goddamn Karkaroff is the problem,' said the girl. 'He wants me to drop Danila for a ten-year-old. That is my problem.'

Harry thought he was beginning to understand what was going on, and it was mortifying. 'I didn't know that you already had a Seeker—'

'Well, I do!' the girl exclaimed.

'Are you good?' Krum asked Harry.

'Good? Like, good at Quidditch? Yeah. I mean, I think so. I think I—I was on the Gryffindor—I was on a school team back at Hogwarts.'

'You think you were on a school team?'

'Inna,' Krum chastised. 'If he's good, let him play. It will be good to have someone opposite who will be a challenge. Danila can be his reserve.'

'And if he can't play?'

'I talk to Headmaster Karkaroff.'

Krum and the girl he'd called Inna regarded each other for a terse moment. Then, she dropped her eyes.

'Khorosho,' she muttered under her breath. It sounded like a curse, but Krum apparently took it for agreement.

With Krum gone to convene with his own team, Harry was left with the not-twins, who after Krum's intervention had changed tune and taken to treating him with a confounding courtesy. The boy, Danila, had taken Harry's coat, and Inna had told him to stay close to her until he had the run of the field.

'The field?' asked Harry uncertainly. He hadn't seen any hoops or tribunes anywhere.

'It's outside the castle walls,' Inna explained, pointing. 'Something like three kilometres that way. We've gone and lit it this morning, so you will see it coming in. Never land on the ground. Stay in the air where it's safe. We can only play on clear nights, so we are staying late tonight. If you are cold or if you are tired, you must tell me and I will fly back with you. No flying alone or I will cast you out for the bears to eat.'

Harry nodded emphatically, privately wondering what the obsession was in Durmstrang of constantly threatening people with gruesome death.

'We will do warm-up practice all together and then we will play the other team. Danila will be your reserve. Two seekers in each team, two Snitches. Four Bludgers, two Quaffles. Do you understand?'

It was a bizarre set-up for practice. Harry would never have imagined that two competing teams might be training together, though he supposed that with how difficult it was to organise in the winter, they had to make best use of what limited playtime they got.

In pairs and groups of three, the players took off and disappeared into the night, following the trail mapped by the spinning blue orbs. As Harry watched them, something like excitement began to form in his chest despite the cold and despite the embarrassment he'd suffered, and he found himself going over the wording of his next letter to Ron, where he would break the news to him that Harry had trained Quidditch with the Viktor Krum.

But alongside the excitement, another feeling had been sparked in Harry, and when Inna ordered him on his broom, that feeling swelled and roared and claimed him for its own. The wind in his ears had a note in it that sounded suspiciously like a scream. The dark of the sky was inky, heady with potential. How much magic slept in it?

'What's the matter?' Inna demanded. 'Let's go.'

'Just—can you just give me a minute?'

He tried to ignore her huff of impatience. Nothing would happen, he told himself. There would be no Dementors here and no storms. There would be no cheering students to plummet to the ground. What had happened the last time he'd played had had nothing to do with Quidditch, so choosing to mount the broom or not mount the broom made little difference—

'If you're ill, you shouldn't play,' Danila said softly at his side. 'It isn't safe.'

He could have said it with contempt after how his famous friend had sided with Harry over him—but there was not a trace of bad feeling in it. Harry felt instantly horrible for being here, for trying to cheat his way into a place he did not belong—because he didn't belong, did he? He was not a Durmstrang student, not really. He was not Viktor Krum's friend and he was not the Potter heir. He was barely even a wizard these days.

'Yeah,' he said through a tight throat. 'I think I'd better go—I'm not feeling well.'

'Chert voz'mi,' Inna spat. 'Do I take you to the healer?'

'Oh, no, I'm fine—'

'I'll take you to your dorm then.'

She would not be persuaded out of it. She walked one step behind Harry, all fur hat and soft steps and silent exasperation. Under her gaze, Harry shivered as though he were actually ill, and heard his heart beating loud and off-rhythm in his ears. He wondered if this was how Krum felt like every day, with his two tall and beautiful friends trailing him wherever he went. Harry didn't suppose so.

It was a long way to his dorm. They had just climbed up the first set of steps when he thought of how to lose her sooner.

'I'm actually going to Professor Snape's rooms,' he said. 'He knows me, that is—uhm, we know each other from back at Hogwarts. He'll give me Pepper-Up potion. His office is just—'

'I know where it is,' Inna interrupted. 'Come on then.'

He had previously thought he'd prefer to go back to his room and grieve in solitude, but when Snape opened the door, golden firelight pooling into the dank corridor, Harry felt his shoulders relax just a fraction and understood immediately this was better. He could stay here another night, like he had the night before and the night before that, and he could again do nothing and see no one, and nothing bad would ever happen so long as he did.

'I'm not actually ill,' he told Snape once he was safely inside, door locked behind them and Inna gone back to the world Harry wanted no part of. 'I just told her that.'

Snape still felt at his forehead and pressed on his tonsils. Sometimes, when it was all business-like and rushed like now, he would touch Harry as though he weren't his own person but an object, incapable of voicing objection and free to move around as you pleased. Harry didn't know why, but he really liked it. He thought maybe this was what it might be like to be a cat or a really small dog, and it made him go mute and odd every time.

'I didn't think I'd see you tonight,' said Snape once he had ignored him to his satisfaction. 'Weren't you playing Quidditch?'

'It turned out that they already have a Seeker. It was awkward.'

'And playing in reserve is so below you, Potter?'

Harry coloured. 'Of course not! They told the other Seeker to play reserve.'

'Then I fail to see the problem.'

'The problem is that Karkaroff told them to—'

'As Headmaster, surely he has a say in who makes the Quidditch team. And knowing him, I would guess you are not the only one he has chosen to recommend over the years. Regardless, you are a good player.'

Harry watched as Snape moved to the fireplace to feed the flames. He hadn't expected him to argue like that. Snape didn't even care about Quidditch.

'I just don't think they want me there,' Harry tried to explain.

At this, Snape spun around, face twisting in anger. Taken aback, Harry pressed deeper into the chair, momentarily confused about what exactly was going on.

'Who cares if they want you there?' Snape burst out. 'Who the hell cares what those children think? Do you want to play or not?'

'I—yes, I guess I do, but—'

'Do you not have your own mind? Are you going to stay earthbound until you've been sent a personal invitation?'

'No—'

'Then you intend to commiserate what happened during that unfortunate match for the rest of your life? To wallow in apathy and self-recrimination until you've made yourself sick with it?'

Harry stood. His knees trembled under his weight. He felt as though Snape had punched him the way that boy from his dorm had punched him, the same whirling of shock and discovery pushing tears into his voice. 'I'm not wallowing! Stop talking like I'm—like everything is my fault!'

'If you took care to listen, Harry, you would know I am not saying that everything is your fault. But giving up at the first sight of opportunity because you would rather remain miserable—that is most decidedly your own fault.'

Through the haze of tears, Harry grabbed his broom, knocked it into the leg of the desk and sent something flying, then ran to the door. Snape didn't make to stop him, though Harry did hear a sigh and his own name spoken just before the door slammed shut. He ignored it.

In his room, he put on record after record, blasting the volume loud enough for the walls to vibrate with it. For hours, he lay in bed alternating between fuming and despairing, thinking in turn of bashing in Snape's face and Karkaroff's and Inna's—and even Viktor Krum's—before he was reminded of the letter to Ron he would never write.

Dear Ron, it would have said. You're not going to believe what happened.

It was nearing midnight when through the narrow window at the back of his dorm Harry saw the two teams coming back inside the castle. They were swaying on their feet, their distant voices lilting with hysterical exhaustion. Someone got shoved into a white mound and refused to stand back up. Someone else had rubbed snow into a girl's neck: her outraged scream made a ptarmigan perched on the castle wall take flight in a flurry.

Harry looked at his Nimbus, cast onto the pile of clothes on the bed. He looked at the night sky.

He was supposed to have his own mind, was that right? He was supposed to do whatever he wanted? Well, there he went then.

The moment he'd flung open the front door, he was already airborne. He rose higher than the defence walls, higher than the hulking towers, higher than where the last few splotches of firelight stained the air. The blue orbs Inna and the others had cast were burning low now, fizzling out, but they were still visible in the distance. As he flew between one and the next, Harry saw nothing, not even his own hands on his own broom. The cold was absolute, tingling and scratching at every bit of exposed skin, but now that he'd flown himself into it, Harry felt also the answering warmth of his body: felt the way the hairs on his skin rose, the way his muscles burnt up every last reserve of sugar and fat, the way his limbs shook minutely to produce the heat his blood needed to feed him.

When it revealed itself, the Quidditch field was more of the same: black. The goal posts, brought out of the night by the dimming blue orbs, stood at such awing distance from one another that it seemed to Harry impossible. The tribunes, which he could not see until he nearly broke his neck flying into them, had been carved into the sheer rock of the mountains that bracketed the field from three sides. Harry knew because he flew all around it, trailing the black rock with an extended hand, and though fear seized him at the image of players slamming into the crag walls, bones breaking on impact, he thought at the same time, I could not bring these down if I tried.

He had meant to fly into the night to show himself what defiance looked like. He had expected to be angry, and darkly satisfied, and rebellious and alone. But instead, he saw only the proximity of death—in the sharp edge of the mountain, in the distant ground with its ice and its monsters, in the stretching cold—and he felt only alive.