The letter Harry received on the morning before Slytherin's match against Hufflepuff read thus:
Dear Harry,
please, call me Sirius. Mr. Black just gives me all sorts of negative associations. My father was called Mr. Black, and I do not have fond memories of him.
I was surprised to hear that you're happy with little Alduin, but I suppose it is better than with Petunia. Living with her must have been almost as bad as with the dementors, and I am very sorry you had to go with that. If you ever get bored or frustrated at Alduin's, my door is open to you. I would also like to warn you that your father found him untrustworhy as far as any confidence went, so be careful with your secrets around him. His own, he can keep wonderfully, but other people's, not so well.
But I am grateful to him for taking you from Petunia, and I should probably write him a thank-you note. Perhaps with some little surprise attached to it, for old times' sake.
I am glad to hear you are doing well. I did see you playing Quidditch, and you did excellently. Just as great as your father. He would be proud of you.
Roger Davies, eh? Adolphus' son? His father was in the year above me. It was quite a scandal back then – his fiancée graduated from Hogwarts with a much bigger belly than is normally expected from students. I am glad their son is a successful Quidditch player. Clearly, the circumstances of his birth did him no harm.
As for my own well-being, don't worry about it. As you said, it's leagues better than Azkaban, and though it's not quite freedom, I do at least have a trial date to look forward to now.
Tell me about your friends. Who do you hang out with? I wrote to Remus Lupin and found out he's your teacher. How is he? He was always the most serious of all of us, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but it's still strange to imagine him meting out discipline to students…
Take care,
Sirius
Harry folded the letter as he headed down to the pitch. If he could only forget the parts Black – Sirius – wrote about Alduin, he would seem like a fun person to be around. Unfortunately, Harry had some trouble forgetting them, and they made him so angry he knew he would need to take a few days again to reply to the letter.
He setted himself in the stands and prepared to watch.
It was bound to be an interesting show. Both teams had new captains and were completely revamped. While this was interesting to Harry in case of Ravenclaw, because he knew Roger, it was interesting with Hufflepuff because the captain, Cedric Diggory, was a Seeker. Harry had never seen a Seeker captain before, and was curious to see if it influenced team tactics in any way.
At any rate, the changes Diggory made to the team definitely did it good. Their chasers were excellent, and they kept scoring goal after goal as the game went on. Not that Harry spent much time focusing on them. No, garteful for the distraction from Sirius – though the letter did sit on his mind still – he took great care to follow the Ravenclaw Seeker with his omniculars. Her name was Cho, he'd discovered from Hermione, and she was truly an excellent flier. She tracked Diggory throughout the game, never letting him out of her sight and blocking him several times when he flew for the Snitch, and, in the end, succeeding to snatch it for herself.
She was also just as pretty now as she'd been in December.
Harry talked about her for some time and with quite a bit of enthusiasm when the game was over, not noticing the smiles appearing on the faces of his friends, until they ran into the Ravenclaw girls from their year in the stands and Luna Lovegood with them, and it took her about two sentences of Harry's rambling to say: "Harry fancies her, don't you?"
"No!" Harry blurted immediately, going beet red.
Sophie snorted. "Yeah, right," she muttered.
"You shouldn't be ashamed of that, Harry," Luna told him serenely. "She's very pretty."
Harry blinked, staring at the twelve-year old, entirely at a loss for words, which made everyone around him burst out laughing.
"She's not wrong," Su told him between peals of laugher.
Hermione shook her head and gave an impatient huff. "Oh for heaven's sake, leave him alone," she said, and grabbed Harry's arm. "Come on," she said, "let's get out of here."
Harry followed her, grateful for the rescue, and still dazed with what had just happened.
Did he fancy Cho? He didn't know. He certainly thought she was very pretty, but...he shook his head at himself. It didn't matter, because he definitely wasn't going to ask her out or anything.
Just the idea made him terrified.
Hermione was muttering under her breath as he marched out of the stands, something about people delighting in other people's embarrassment, and Harry finally came out of his stupor enough to say: "They didn't mean anything by it, really."
"I know they didn't," she said impatiently, "but I still hate it when people do things like this." Then she gave Harry a mischievous smile. "Though Luna is right," she added, "Cho really is very pretty."
Harry groaned. "Not you, too!"
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Alduin and Alexandra were sitting in Wynn's nursery, watching him play as Alduin cradled Edric in his arms.
"How is your investigation coming along?" Alexandra asked.
Alduin hesitated. "You mean-?"
Alexandra gave him a look. "I'd rather not say the words in front of our sons. The older is certainly old enough to start repeating it, and we don't want people asking questions."
Alduin cringed at the mere idea. "True enough, I suppose," he said. "Anyway, we have a theory about what another of them could be. Perhaps it's in the Black house, though I have my doubts. But in any case, there is still the lost diadem of Ravenclaw, and I made no progress on that at all."
She gave a small frown. "Do you have no clue at all?"
Alduin shook his head. "No. Everyone I talked to simply states that it's been lost as long as they remember, and I've talk to the oldest Ravenclaws I know."
Alexandra thought about that for a moment. "Well, have you tried Miss Brigit?" She asked then.
"No," Alduin admitted with a sigh. "She isn't that much older than Mrs. Bagshot, to be honest, and not a historian, so I wasn't sure if it would be useful, and you know I don't like bothering her."
"Yum-yum!" Wynn interrupted them in that moment, taking the bit of cut banana that was set on the side for him and trying to put in into Edric's mouth.
Alexandra caught his hand. "It's nice you want to feed the baby," she said, "but the baby can only drink mummy's milk now."
"Milk?" Wynn asked uncertainly, looking around as if to find it.
"Not like you drink, sweetie. From mummy's breast. I already showed you."
Wynn frowned. "Yum yum!" He insisted.
"The baby is sleeping right now, sweetie. We don't want to wake him up."
Wynn looked unconvinced, and to Alduin handed Edric over to Alexandra and took up Wynn to play at broom racing with him. It worked: by the time he put him back on the ground, all that flying through the air put all thoughts of feeding Edric out of his mind.
"Sorry," Alduin said, "where were we?"
"You were saying Miss Brigit is unlikely to know much either, about the diadem," Alexandra reminded him. "I agree, but she might give you a tip for someone else who could know. It's worth a try. And if she gives you nothing, you can try the portraits, too. I know none of them go quite as far back as the founding of Hogwarts, but..."
Alduin had to concede she had a point. The oldest portraits were from the 15th century, since there hasn't been much of a potrait-painting tradition in Britain before that, but it was still half a millennium closer to Rowena Ravenclaw than he was. But he'd try the ghost option first, and so, once Wynn was taken for his nap, he headed to the attic to speak to Miss Brigit.
She was about as happy to see him as she always was, but she did listen to his request.
"Well," she said then, "your obvious choice is the Gray Lady."
That surprised Alduin. "Why? Do you think the diadem is at Hogwarts?"
She looked at him like she thought he was stupid. "No," she said, "but the Grey Lady is Rowena Ravenclaw's daughter."
Alduin blinked, several times in a row. "...what?" He asked, when there was no elaboration forthcoming, or better yet, an explanation that it was a joke. Not that he had ever heard Miss Brigit joke in his life, but it'd have still surprised him less than what he did learn.
"You didn't know?" She shook her head. "And your wife is a historian, too. Disgraceful."
"Not even Mrs. Bagshot knew this, I'm pretty sure," Alduin muttered. Which was quite astonishing, really – after all, it didn't seem like it was some well-kept secret. Miss Brigit, at least, told him readily enough!
Miss Brigit pursed her lips. "Well, that's the living for you. Too distracted by their lives to notice things around them. But in any case, she is, so talk to her. And now be so kind and leave me to my work."
Alduin did as she asked, deep in thought. It seemed he would have to go see another Quidditch match...
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It was at a training session with Snape towards the end of January that Harry was surprised by not having to dodge a hex as soon as he walked inside the door. That was how these things usually went: a bout on intense duelling to start with, then drilling of some particular spell ad nauseam while Snape made the temperature plummet, lights flash, made Harry hang upside down and just generally did his best to distract him, and then, to close with, another bout of duelling, this time in some conjured terrain that gave Harry furniture of trees and stumps to hide behind as Snape relentlessly pursued him.
Harry hadn't won a bout yet, nor did it look like he was about to any time soon, but Snape put a clock on the wall that timed how long he lasted before Snape got him, and he was getting better, at least.
Snape apparently thought so, too, because he was simply waiting for Harry as he entered this time, and once the door closed behind him, said: "You have been managing relatively well for the last year, even with the gradually increasing difficulty. You also seem to retain the tactical advice I give you reasonably well. So let's make it more complicated, shall we?"
Harry grimaced. And just when he was starting to get a good feeling about it, too!
It turned out that by making it more complicated, Snape meant adding more people for Harry to worry about. Not enemies, that was – allies.
Harry had thought that'd make it easier, but he couldn't have been more wrong.
"Let us imagine," Snape said, "that you get in a dangerous situation not on your own, but with some of your friends by your side. Your friends, who, while reasonably magically powerful, have no training of the sort you do. Now, how do you keep them safe and make sure they do not endanger you?" Snape waved his wand and three training dummies appeared, animated, doing to Harry's side. "Go," Snape said, and attacked.
It was hell.
It turned out the fight changed completely when there were other people you had to look out for, and they were all down within a few minutes, with Snape giving Harry that cold, superior look of his.
"Again," he said, "and try to remember, Potter, that first of all, you need to survive. You're the only trained one in this situation, and if you go down, all of your friends will follow."
Harry left the training room half an hour later, completely depressed, decided on ignoring Snape's advice on saving himself first, and determined that Neville was right: he really did need to be trained.
After all, if there was one person who he was likely to be caught in a tight situation with, it was Neville. And he wanted to learn, he actually showed some interest, unlike all his other friends.
Then Harry realized the others didn't even know there was a chance for something like this because they didn't know what his training with Snape was about, and frowned. Maybe he should start with telling them – but then, it would make no sense to tell them without telling them about the Prophecy, and well.
With Ron, there was still the same problem of his possible weird reaction to Harry being singled out in any way, and with Sophie and her unreasonable attitude to danger...Harry really didn't think it would be entirely safe to tell her.
He could probably risk Ron, though. The worst that could happen there was that he'd have to deal with some of Ron's moods, and he could handle that.
To that end, Harry took him and Neville back to their dormitory one evening when he was sure Seamus and Dean were occupied in the common room, and sitting on his bed, told Ron about the prophecy.
As he'd predicted, Ron's reaction was...strange.
"So you're actually some kind of Chosen One?" He said. "Like, a fated hero to save us all or something?"
He sounded bitter, and Harry gave a sigh. "Not so much fated," he said. "The prophecy says it can go both ways, really."
Ron made a sort of apologetic grimace. "Right, yeah. That...well, it kinda sucks, doesn't it? Couldn't it have just said you're going to win and that's it?"
Harry would have preferred if there'd been no prophecy at all, but he supposed this would have been a better alternative to the one that did exist. "Yeah," he said. "Would have been nice. Anyway, so far the only thing that's really come of it," except for my parents being dead, he thought bitterly, "is the duelling lesson I have with Snape, so..."
Ron grimaced. "Ugh," he said. "Better you than me."
"He's actually a good teacher," Harry confessed. "I mean, I get why he wants to teach Defence. I think that if he taught us what he actually wanted to teach, he might be a lot less unpleasant."
Ron gave him a very dubious look. In its light, Harry decided to save the question if Ron wanted to learn some duelling for a different day. It didn't seem like it would go over particularly well at this point.