24th August 1994, The Burrow, Ottery St Catchpole, Devon, 7:12 PM
The garden had been transformed by the particular alchemy that Molly Weasley applied to any outdoor space given sufficient motivation and approximately two hours of brisk activity. Mismatched chairs had been arranged around two long tables pushed together and covered with what appeared to be every tablecloth in the house—a quilted patchwork of florals and stripes that somehow achieved, against all reasonable expectation, an effect of cheerful abundance. Fairy lights had been strung between the apple tree and the fence post, not entirely level, glowing warmly in the early evening air. The gnomes had been evicted from the immediate vicinity and were conducting their protests from the hedgerow at a volume that occasionally punctuated the conversation.
The smell was the first thing that had made Harry stop on the back step.
It came rolling out of the kitchen past him in a warm, complex wave, something slow-cooked and deeply savoury, threaded through with the particular fragrance of spices he had not smelt in a kitchen other than his own since Shanghai. Star anise and Sichuan pepper and something darker, woody, that he associated specifically with the spice market they'd found tucked behind a canal in the old quarter, where a vendor with no English and no particular interest in acquiring any had watched Ethan taste test his way through seventeen different blends with the focused attention of a man conducting important research.
He had bought rather a lot.
Evidently, at some point, he had shared.
The table, when Harry took his seat between Ron and Hermione, was laden with the results: a slow-braised pork belly lacquered in something that caught the fairy lights; a whole roast chicken whose skin had gone the deep amber of properly caramelised spice; bowls of root vegetables and something fragrant with ginger that he couldn't immediately identify but was prepared to eat a significant quantity of. Molly moved between the table and the kitchen with the efficient warmth of a woman in her element, depositing dishes, redirecting Fred's elbow from the serving spoon, and ensuring that Arthur didn't give Bill the last of the braised pork before everyone had been offered it first.
"Mrs Weasley," Harry said, genuinely, "this is extraordinary."
Molly's expression performed the particular combination of pleasure and modest deflection that she brought to every compliment regarding her cooking. "Oh, it's nothing special. Though I will say—" she set down a dish of something bright and fragrant that made the air around it shimmer very slightly, "—these spices make a world of difference. Ethan gave me some when the boys were at Atid Stella. I've been rather careful with them."
Hermione, seated to Harry's left, had straightened almost imperceptibly. Harry recognised this posture—it was the posture of someone who had done their research and was finding a natural opening in which to deploy it.
"Actually," Hermione began, with the particular air of someone settling in for a pleasant presentation, "those would almost certainly be from China—Sichuan province specifically, given the profile. The Zanthoxylum genus, which produces that numbing quality—the Chinese call it málà, and the combination of heat and—"
"Shanghai," Harry said, reaching for the serving spoon. "We went in April of 1990. Dad bought half a market's worth on the way out of the old quarter. The ginger paste on the chicken is from a different stall, the one near the canal—the vendor had it in a blue jar. He wouldn't tell Dad what was in it but Dad bought four of them anyway."
The slight silence from Hermione's direction lasted approximately two seconds.
Ron, who had been watching this exchange with the bright eyes of someone who had correctly anticipated the outcome, made a sound into his water glass that was technically not a laugh.
Hermione's gaze swivelled to him with the directional precision of artillery.
"Don't," she said.
"I didn't say anything," Ron said.
"You were thinking very loudly."
"That's not something that can happen."
"Ronald—"
"It's delicious, Hermione," Harry said, which was true, and served the secondary purpose of redirecting the conversation before it achieved full velocity. He looked down the table, where Ethan was engaged in something architectural involving the gravy boat and appeared not to have been listening, which Harry suspected was a performance. "You're right about the málà, though. Dad explained the Sichuan pepper on the train back."
Hermione absorbed this with the expression of someone recalibrating. "Oh," she said. Then, with the fundamental intellectual honesty that always eventually asserted itself over competitive instinct: "What did he say about it?"
The evening fell into its rhythm after that—the particular rhythm of a Weasley family dinner, which operated at a pace and volume that initially felt chaotic and gradually revealed itself to be its own complex order, each voice finding its register in the general noise the way instruments found their place in a piece of music.
Bill, seated near the top of the table with his dragon-fang earring catching the fairy lights, was holding court on the subject of Egyptian curse-work to an audience of Fred, George, and Charlie, who were listening with the varied expressions of three people who found danger professionally interesting. Arthur had arranged himself next to Ethan and was asking, with barely contained delight, about the Chinese magical community's approach to Arithmancy—a question that had apparently been forming in his mind for some time, given the specificity with which he asked it. Percy sat with the upright posture of a man who had recently joined the Ministry and felt this ought to be visible.
Harry ate, and listened, and let the warmth of it settle around him.
Across the table, a movement caught his eye—Ginny, who had been talking to Hermione, had glanced in his direction. Harry met her gaze with a mild, wry smile. Ginny looked immediately at her chicken with the focus of someone examining it for structural deficiencies.
This had been happening since he'd arrived. Harry filed it somewhere and turned back to his food.
Luna would have loved this, he thought, without particularly intending to. He could picture it clearly—Luna at a table like this, perfectly at ease in the chaos, eating methodically through the spiciest dishes on the table whilst discussing something that had nothing to do with spice and everything to do with some creature the Ministry currently refused to acknowledge. Her capacity for heat had been a source of quiet amusement since the first time he'd watched her work through a bowl of Sichuan noodles without blinking, her slight frame apparently containing no mechanism for discomfort regarding capsaicin whatsoever. She'd looked up mid-bowl and caught him watching and tilted her head, that particular right-side tilt, and said, very seriously, 'The Wrackspurts tend to avoid warm food. It's quite practical.'
Harry smiled at his plate.
"You're doing it again," Ron said next to him.
"Doing what?"
"The smiling at nothing."
"I'm smiling at the chicken."
"Mm," Ron said, and had the wisdom to leave it there.
Later, when the dishes had been cleared and the sky above the garden had resolved into the deep blue of August evening, the gnomes had retired from active protest, and the fairy lights had grown more prominent against the dusk, the gathering sorted itself as gatherings did—along the lines of interest and energy. Bill, Charlie, Fred, and George migrated toward the far end of the garden with their chairs, the conversation drifting toward Quidditch with the ease of water finding downhill. Arthur disappeared inside for a moment and returned with a Wireless that began issuing Celestina Warbeck at low volume, which Molly permitted with the air of a woman choosing her battles.
Percy had installed himself in a chair with his particular quality of deliberate significance.
"The World Cup's only half of it," Percy said, to no one in particular and everyone within hearing distance. "There's a rather major event in the works at the Ministry. Highly confidential, I really can't say much—"
"You've said that four times," Ron observed.
"Because it is confidential, Ronald."
"Then why do you keep mentioning it?"
Percy's expression underwent the complex negotiation of a man who wished to convey the existence of a secret without technically divulging it. "I'm simply making the point that the World Cup exists within a broader context of—"
Just then, as if realizing something Percy casually mentioned a quite absurd piece of information. " "Bertha Jorkins is still missing. The paper mentioned it—she's been gone since spring. She went to Albania, apparently, and simply—didn't come back.""
Hermione raised a pivotal question. "Who's that?"
Ron elaborated just in time. "An a acquaintance of my Dad, met her once, a really nice lady, oh and her boss is Ludo Bagman, the match commentator and head of the Department of Magical Games and Sports and the man who got them their tickets."
Once again, Hermione marveled at Ron's knowledge in certain areas that she might not know.
"Oh Bagman's likable enough, of course, but how he ever got to be Head of Department ... when I compare him to Mr. Crouch! I can't see Mr. Crouch losing a member of our department and not trying to find out what's happened to them." Percy snorted. "Anyway, the Ministry's looking," Percy said, finding his footing on familiar ground. "I happen to know—"
"What do they think happened?" Harry asked.
"Albania's fairly remote in parts," Ron said, with the authority of someone who had listened to his father discuss it. "Dad reckons she got lost somewhere. She was always a bit—well, Dad says she was a bit of a gossip, but still. You'd think someone would have—"
The name didn't mean anything to Harry. He filed it alongside the various pieces of adult concern that circulated through Weasley dinner conversations, present, noted, not yet connected to anything he could see clearly.
Ron had produced the chess set.
The board was on the low table outside the kitchen door, the fairy lights close enough to illuminate it without quite reaching the corners of the pieces' expressions, which was perhaps for the best. Ron's chess pieces were the kind that had developed strong opinions over several years of use and were not shy about sharing them.
Harry's pieces were borrowed—a set of Arthur's that was older and more philosophical in outlook, disinclined to the commentary but capable of surprising strategic independence.
They had been playing for the better part of an hour.
Inside the kitchen, the light was still on.
Ethan had accepted Molly's offer of tea with the ease of a man who had learnt that accepting Molly Weasley's hospitality was considerably simpler than declining it, and sat at the kitchen table with the cup before him and the sounds of the garden conversation muffled pleasantly through the closed door.
Arthur settled opposite him. Molly leant against the counter, her hands wrapped around her own cup, her expression carrying the quiet of someone who had been waiting for a natural moment and had found one.
"I have my channels," Arthur said, without preamble, in the tone of a man who worked at the Ministry and had therefore long since learnt that directness was a courtesy. "Regarding Sirius Black."
Ethan looked at him over the rim of his cup.
"The announcement caught most people entirely off-guard," Arthur continued. "The speed of it. The weight of evidence that....suddenly existed." He paused. "I had a feeling, when I heard, that there was a hand in it that the official record wasn't reflecting."
"There was," Ethan said.
Molly exhaled—a quiet sound, the kind that preceded a significant conversation she had prepared herself for.
"Tell us," she said.
So Ethan did. He told it the way he told most things—without excess, the details placed precisely where they carried weight and not elsewhere. Sirius appearing on Baker Street on a cold November night, gaunt and barely coherent, the Azkaban years having stripped him to something barely recognisable as the young man in the photographs. The Animagus—the large black dog that had frightened Jasper and alarmed Osian and stood in the hallway of 221B, the large black dog that lookedat Harry at the park with an expression that was entirely human in its grief. The two years of careful work. Peter's trail, followed through channels Ethan declined to specify in detail, and what the trial had ultimately produced.
Arthur listened with his elbows on the table and his expression very still. Molly listened with her hands tight around her cup and the occasional small sound—not interruption, merely the acoustic evidence of feeling.
"Harry," Molly said, when Ethan paused. "Does he know? About all of it?"
"He knows Sirius," Ethan said. "He knows the truth of what happened to his parents. He knows Peter is alive." A brief pause. "He doesn't know everything. There are things that should come in their own time."
Arthur turned his cup in his hands. "How is he? Sirius."
"Better than he was," Ethan said. "Considerably." He looked at Arthur directly. "He has his name, now. And somewhere to be."
"I want to see him," Arthur said, with the simple directness of a man who had known Sirius Black in another life, in a world before the war had taken it apart, and who had never quite managed to make peace with what the intervening years had done to that world's inhabitants. "When it's right. When he's ready. I want to—" He stopped, rearranged. "We both do."
"I'll tell him," Ethan said.
Molly set down her cup and looked at Ethan with the expression she reserved for moments when gratitude exceeded what the available words could carry comfortably. She said nothing, which was, in its way, more than words.
Outside, from the direction of the low table by the kitchen door, a sound rose—Ron's voice, with a particular note in it that meant a chess piece had done something unexpected and he wasn't certain whether to be impressed or alarmed.
Harry's knight had been in the wrong position for six moves, and he knew it, and had been three moves ahead of the problem without quite finding the solution, and then the solution arrived sideways, as solutions sometimes did, through a sacrifice of his bishop that made Ron sit forward with the particular focus of a player who has suddenly realised the game has changed.
Four moves later, it was over.
Harry breathed out. The relief was genuine for Ron at wizard chess was not a comfortable opponent. The borrowed pieces made congratulatory sounds that were muted but sincere.
Ron stared at the board. His expression ran through several stages before arriving at something that was not quite defeat and considerably more than determination.
"Again," Ron said.
"Ron—"
"I'm not tired. You're not tired. Again."
"Tomorrow," Harry said. "We leave at dawn. If you're still thinking about this at the World Cup we'll play at the campsite."
Ron processed this, found it acceptable on balance, and began resetting the pieces with the brisk energy of a man investing in future revenge.
Hermione, seated to Harry's right with her knees drawn up and an expression of intense internal calculation, had been very quiet for the last ten minutes. "If you'd moved the rook on move fourteen instead of move seventeen," she said, to neither of them specifically, "you'd have closed the left flank four moves earlier."
"I know," Harry said.
"Then why—"
"I was waiting to see what he'd do with the bishop."
Hermione made a small sound of unwilling approval and returned to her internal dissection.
From Charlie's direction, several feet away, came a different sound—the particular quality of surprised reassessment from a man who had watched Ron lose wizard chess to Percy, to Bill, to Fred, to George, and to a brief experiment involving two enchanted opponents that had ended in a draw and a sulk. "Ron," Charlie said. "I'll be honest. I didn't see that coming."
"Told you," Ron said, though the ears had gone slightly pink.
"The Keeper position suits you. Your defensive thinking has—"
"Seeker," Ron said, with the automatic correction of someone who had made it before. "I'm Seeker now."
Charlie's eyebrows rose. "Since when?"
"Since last year. We'll talk about it at breakfast. When I haven't just lost."
A movement at the periphery of Harry's vision—Ginny, emerging from the back door with a glass of water in each hand, her red hair loose around her shoulders in the August evening. She crossed the small distance to the chess table with her eyes on the glasses and set one before Harry with the careful attention of someone performing a task they have rehearsed.
"Well played," she said, to the middle distance approximately six inches to Harry's left. "That was—you're very good. At chess. That was impressive." Her voice had the particular quality of someone who has composed this sentence in advance and is delivering it at speed in order to get through it.
"Thank you," Harry said, accepting the glass with a mild smile. "It was close."
Ginny nodded. Her ears, which were visible where her hair fell back, were the colour of the fairy lights on their warmer setting. She turned, with some purpose, and walked back toward the house at a pace that was brisk without quite being a run.
Harry watched her go, glass in hand.
He turned to Ron and Hermione.
"Has something happened to Ginny?" he asked, keeping his voice low and his tone genuinely curious rather than concerned. "Since I arrived she's been—" He considered the right word. "Distant. Has she said something? Did I do something to offend her? I honestly can't think what—"
Ron and Hermione shared a look.
It was the kind of look that communicated a great deal between two people and nothing whatsoever to the person it was about. It lasted approximately one and a half seconds and contained what appeared to be a small, private negotiation about who was going to respond and in what terms.
Ron put his hand on Harry's shoulder. "Mate..." he said, with genuine solemnity. "Haizz, my poor sister."
Hermione patted Harry's other shoulder with the brisk, conclusive air of someone closing a chapter. "She'll get through it," she said. "It'll pass. These things do."
Harry looked between them. Their expressions were perfectly composed in a way that expressed absolutely nothing useful.
"What things?" Harry asked.
Neither of them answered. Ron found his chess pieces suddenly requiring rearrangement. Hermione located something of great interest in the middle distance.
Harry looked at the glass in his hand, then back at the kitchen door through which Ginny had disappeared.
The evening continued around him—the fairy lights, the low music from the Wireless, Charlie's voice describing something from the reserve that made Fred and George simultaneously lean forward, the sound of Ethan's voice from inside the kitchen, low and steady, the smell of the garden and the apple tree and the lingering warmth of Molly's extraordinary dinner.
The puzzle of Ginny Weasley he set aside, filed next to all the other things he did not yet have enough information to understand.
Tomorrow, they were going to the Quidditch World Cup.
That, at least, required no analysis whatsoever.