"I'm not asking you to go against the rest of the tribe," Harry said.

"What, then, do you ask?" Hand shook his head, starting at the face and moving through the neck. "I know the stars, young one. Death will come to our forest. That much I do not deny."

"Why stay here, then? Will you fight them?"

"There are those who think of me as another Firenze after all I have spoken with you. Perhaps there are those among your kind who have no respect for my own."

"I mean, that's a certainty," he said. "It's not just mistreating you. They don't even think you're intelligent. They don't care if you can do any form of magic. The fact that you don't wave wands means you're not their equal." He shook his head. "Did you think forcing you back to this place was some sign of respect?"

No words were spoken for a moment. He had prepared much of what he had come to say, but that was more or less off the cuff.

"When I said that I imagined that there were some among your kind who had no respect, I supposed many of us were incorrect when we thought that all of you were of the same opinion. To fail to realize that a human can choose to do the right thing is to believe that the race entire is bound to a twisted nature."

"To be honest, I think it'd be worse if we could still choose, and never did," he said. "Sometimes that's what seems closer to the truth."

He was not one to sit around thinking, but in practicing his Occlumency, there was not much else to do. Hermione was using a different theory and she kept asking him to come up with original thoughts and he would have to tell her how close she got to it. It was like a bizarre, one-way conversation and served as a way of letting the thoughts from their larger situation catch up to him. How had things fallen apart so badly? It almost seemed perfectly reasonable that every so often, someone like Voldemort came along. As unreasonable as his actions were, there was fundamentally no way to just expect it would never happen, and yet, that was exactly what happened. No one was prepared. No one even wanted to fight. With all their magical power, they were perfectly content to sit the fence and ride it out. It was no different the second time around, and their chances of survival were suffering for it.

"It is a paradox of hatred, Harry Potter," Hand said, using his name for the first time. "Whenever you want to hate someone, he must in some way be responsible for it. How else would you avoid hating yourself? No one truly delights in hatred except when he can count himself as still in the right all the way through."

"What's the other part of the paradox?"

"The object of your hatred must never be allowed to redeem himself. Anything he does, there must be some way of seeing it as a wicked deed. If you find yourself enjoying your hatred, why let it end? Why provide a way for it to end, however difficult?"

"I get it," he said. "I get it. If there were some way to win, it wouldn't work at all, but you have to keep acting like there is." He sighed. "I don't know if I'm ever going to use that bit of knowledge, but I genuinely hope I don't have to. I know I don't want to."

"I can tell the others that I believe you are a fair wizard, but I cannot tell them that I believe you are anything like a centaur."

The expression on Hand's face said he knew exactly what was wrong with that statement, but he also saw the humor in it.

"What we need to be isn't more like one or the other," he said. "We need to be fair. We need to be honest. If you're ever using your race as some kind of yardstick for being any of those, you're barking up the wrong tree. Where it should stop is with what we should be, not what we are." He thought of something Dumbledore said to him. "What matters, what makes us... us- is our choices. The dementors aren't like either of us. They don't have a choice. They just hunger for souls and they can't help it. If one of them has ever shown any restraint in all of history, no one was around to see it."

"I expect the rest of the tribe will appreciate that you know the reason we rejected the designation of 'being'. Anything would be better than to share a category with whatever those are."

"I can sympathize." He could also appreciate the reason why he knew, which was Hermione's nearly constant badgering about it. It was not at all vindicating to find that she had been wrong about a few things here and there, not even for Ron, who had directly disagreed with her on countless issues. "It sounds like a terrible thing to say about some group of... things, but it's perfectly accurate. I'm not saying it because I have something against them, and even if I did, it's still true."

"Perhaps we agree on more than we realize," the centaur said. "There are those of us who have dreamed of a day when we can even join hands with the Mer beneath the waves." He shook his head. "It's true. Our ways of life are different. I find it hard to imagine a possible future in which we live in the same society."

"Maybe it won't always be like that," he said after a while. He had almost thought to say agree, that the lesson had been about accepting differences rather than trying to eliminate them. At the same time, there was a thought that would not leave him alone. "You can do anything with magic. Maybe we don't know how to do it just yet, but... we don't know what we'll be able to do in the future. We don't know what's going to be revealed to us."

Hand stared up at the sky for a moment, as if even with the sun he could see the other stars. He wanted to say something disparaging about Divination. After finding himself the subject of a frightfully real prophecy, however, he was at a loss. Was there truly some meaning in the stars, and did Trelawney simply lack the talent to see it? How could that work in the first place, if real prophecies could come through her?

Parvati and Lavendar were committed to the subject, and not only did they answer questions in class, they discussed it in the Gryffindor Common Room; they were not kissing up to their teacher at all. He only heard snippets of their conversations and he barely paid attention to what they said back when he took the class himself, but consistently, their answers were making use of the material provided in the books, to his knowledge. After third year, he had never actually read them, since he found he could get by just fine by making his answers morbid enough. It was unusual, but not something terribly bothered him until he thought about it, that their approach to prophecy was totally different from their teacher's, at least when she was not totally making it up.

"What do you believe about Divination?" he asked. The centaur did not look back.

"I remember only now that your kind have a word for it. We have always believed that there is no past or future, and that all things, at some level, are happening at once and there is no time. Certain events are in your memory, but your memory can be clouded, like the night sky. We tell each other stories to remember those who are gone. To know the rest of what comes to pass, reading and discerning the stars forms a picture still clearer."

"Does it work?" he asked. "I... I have a friend who finds it hard to believe that anyone could live in the present while knowing about the future."

"Would you ask me if I can see the destruction of my tribe coming, at the wands of those who claim to protect us?" Hand asked. "I was only born about thirty winters ago. I remember the days of my grandfather only as clearly as I can see the days of my grandchildren. The same is true in the reverse."

Harry was beginning to see how the centaurs annoyed Hagrid with their manner of speaking, but simultaneously, he was starting to get it. Was it as simple as befriending one and talking to him on a regular basis? He had started the conversation by saying that he did not blame the tribe for not trusting him.

"I'm honestly not sure what to make of that." A lot of what he was saying lately was rehearsed, or at least vaguely plotted out in advance, but here was a topic for which he was totally unprepared. He had wondered what it meant that he was the child of prophecy, and he had wanted to get the centaurs to trust him, but he had never thought that he could hit two birds with one stone. The two things had been entirely separate concepts when he had agonized over them before. "If the stars say something about you, does that mean you have no choice but to do it?"

"Let us suppose that you have not misread the stars. Let us also suppose that in your having seen the truth for yourself, it does not change. Would you not think to do things differently if you heard of an ill fortune?" It was a rhetorical question. "I wonder." It was not the response for which he had been hoping, but he could not say exactly what he had wanted. "What would you say is required for you to have a choice?"

"I think I would have a choice as long as the stars could be wrong about me." The prophecy about himself left him with some sort of choice, but the prophecy that he had heard straight from Trelawney years earlier, technically, had not left Wormtail with any choice. It said that the servant would return to his master, and that was precisely what happened.

"What if you found that you would do something, if only you were equipped?" Hand asked. "Has there ever been a choice that frightened you?" From context, Harry almost wondered who exactly needed to be prompted with that question.

"Are you asking if my mind might change if only I had a little more courage?"

So many people, all throughout his life, had told him he was brave, when he never thought of himself that way. He thought he was only doing what had to be done, or what was obvious. Was there really more to it? Had he been bestowed some abnormal courage? Had he been purged of fears from which everyone else suffered? How? When?

"There are others who are left with no choice in their cowardice," the centaur said, answering the completely unasked question. "Only the path of least resistance is left for them." He shook his head. "I do not know that I have answered your question, but I know that I have answered one of my own."

"Don't worry about it. I think you helped me in the process. I need to know when we can help relocate your tribe once you get an answer back from the others."

"Then when next we meet, I hope that I shall have good news for you."

It would have been cheeky to ask why he would hope and not simply check, because the stars might well not have anything to say. There were more important things to have cross his mind as he tried to apparate back to the Longbottom property a few times before giving up and going further outside the round border around Hogwarts made up of an impossible complex network of charms, jinxes, and wards. It appeared he would have to take the floo when he got to Hogsmeade.

Bizarre as it was, being so close to the school in the summer, he could not take advantage of the opportunity. It was not his childhood wish come to life. Did he have a choice, though, but to stay on the move, and try to avoid places where he might be spotted? The Longbottom house was probably not the absolute last place that investigators would look, but special permissions would be necessary for searching such an estate; it was always more complicated whenever the suspect was involved with the well-to-do and well-connected. In those days it was not simply wanting to get away from the Dursleys, Hogwarts was a place where he felt like he belonged and he could not have cared if he had to be all alone in the castle; he would find a way to take care of himself and it would be better than going back to where he had been. A half-remembered dream featured him wandering up and down the changing stairs, waving to the paintings as he went.

The trip to the town was uneventful, but once there, he was moderately surprised to find that an announcement was being read aloud, as if there were no other way. The doddering old wizard that the Ministry had picked for the job addressed the crowd of shopkeepers and travelers, saying that by the order of the Ministry, the Forbidden Forest was off limits even for them. Harry had not known that the various businesses had anything to do with the forest, but he supposed it made sense; there were probably centaurs that were willing to buy and sell things along certain terms, and a wealth of raw materials for various products could be found between the trees. There were objections to the order, but he ignored it, using it more as cover to get to a fireplace without being noticed. Muttering the exact name of the manor as he tossed the powder in, the green flames roared up as always and he stepped inside. Though people who only went to commonly frequented areas probably did not know as much, all places had specific names and only those names could be used to reach them.

In the antiquated halls of the home of his casual friend, doxies probably lurked in hard-to-reach places in the ornate wood paneling that went all up and down the walls. The windows were round like the portholes on a ship, though he was not sure what the point of that was. When he joined his friends in the library, Hermione was reading and Ron was pretending to read. What was the point when he was better off practicing something? Had she just insisted on it?

"Are you any closer?" the witch asked as soon as he sat down. He grabbed a book she had finished reading on Occlumency. There had to be something he was missing.

"I think they might go along with it. I thought that pushing any harder was just going to ruin things."

"Daphne said that we'd be better off getting a mole in the Ministry and just let them listen to the official updates," Ron said, not looking up, but not convincing anyone either.

"Since when do you talk to her?" Hermione asked. "I thought she was a Slytherin, and not to be trusted. I also can't imagine why she's concerned about what happens to a tribe of centaurs."

"Well, maybe you need to reevaluate your stereotypical thinking," he replied.

Whenever they went back and forth, he reminded himself it was because they were all stressed and he was not much better. While they aired their grievances, he kept everything to himself. It was hard to say if he picked it up at his aunt and uncle's, or whether he had always tried to put in that extra effort to get along with people, and that meant not bringing up unpleasant things. He had always thought it was normal and barely noticed how his friends were odd for being more direct. Was there something wrong with that?

"It looks like you're looking for something," Hermione said after a few minutes of his flipping through pages, which might have been getting on her nerves.

"I don't know exactly what. I just know there's something missing. I'm not happy with just being able to keep you out; I need to keep Voldemort out." The last thing he wanted was to act like she was doing a bad job, even if the limitation of which he complained was something she already acknowledged. "The Order knows we're here, right?"

"Yeah," Ron said. "I never thought I'd see the day you want to take another lesson with Snape, but I don't think it's possible anyways. Mum's always saying that they're busy, but she never says with what."

He had grown in sympathy for his friend and their inability to tell him anything the previous summer. It really was not as simple as what they were willing and not willing to disclose. Apparently, they had managed to keep the exact nature of what they were doing secret for a time, but because they had not heard anything out of the ever-involved Harry Potter for over a month, they figured he was up to something and reasoned that it involved the others when they also enrolled in a mysterious summer program out of nowhere. Though he had not spoken to Dumbledore himself, the last official correspondence from the Order had been through Neville's grandmother, who said that as long as they were all staying out of trouble, whatever they were doing was fine.

"It's not that I want to take another lesson with him. I just... I probably have no other choice." He looked over at his other friend. "It's not that you're rubbish at getting into people's heads; I've had too much experience. I'm probably not even helping you."

"You're a tough nut to crack, Harry. I feel you may be right in turning to Professor Snape for further practice, but I do appreciate a challenge."

There was something else, but he was not about to say it to her, and he did not think she was ever going to get it out of his head. He did not think she was trying hard enough with him, but at the same time he did not want her to try harder. It was embarrassing that the Potions master who disparaged him so much already knew so many of his secrets, but even with his pettiness, it was impossible to imagine that he would spread them around. His idea of the man filed down to someone who very much hated him, but also moved perfectly in line with Dumbledore's orders, even when they were not in the same room. It made sense to make use of his obligations, and learning how to control his temper was part of his training anyway. If the wizard really was a former Death Eater, the very least he could do was learn to face him rather than running.

The more he thought about it, the more he realized that the worst part about putting up with any authority figure who obviously hated him, especially Umbridge, was the insulting narrative that they were only trying to help. Even if people failed to realize that Voldemort was back, at least they would hopefully regard it as a bad thing. With every other problem, he was expected to just sit there and nod along. He looked over at Ron and noticed that he seemed to be reading more seriously. Had he just found something that was interesting enough? It was not as if he ever had bad reports from teachers, though the O.W.L's were a long way from being revealed. Most likely, he had discovered some other way of learning that suited him better than reading.

"I can't help but feel like you have a question," he said, noticing that Harry was looking over.

"As a matter of fact, I do. What has you so interested at the moment?" It looked like he was considering how to respond.

"Well, with Ginny... I decided to look into the dark arts, just to get an idea what to expect. I think I found something."

It was a reference to another book, laden with implications that the casual reader should not even think about calling the author's bluff.

"What's a Horcrux?"