Harry Potter 04 - Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

realised that the absence of Neville’s usual snores meant that he was not the only one lying awake.

 
     
— CHAPTER FIFTEEN —
     
Beauxbatons and Durmstrang
    Early next morning, Harry woke with a plan fully formed in his mind, as though his sleeping brain had been working on it all night. He got up, dressed in the pale dawn light, left the dormitory without waking Ron and went back down to the deserted common room. Here he took a piece of parchment from the table upon which his Divination homework still lay, and wrote the following letter:
     
    Dear Sirius,
    I reckon I just imagined my scar hurting, I was half-asleep when I wrote to you last time. There’s no point coming back, everything’s fine here. Don’t worry about me, my head feels completely normal.
    Harry
     
    He then climbed out of the portrait hole, up through the silent castle (held up only briefly by Peeves, who tried to overturn a large vase on him halfway along the fourth-floor corridor), finally arriving at the Owlery, which was situated at the top of West Tower.
    The Owlery was a circular stone room; rather cold and draughty, because none of the windows had glass in them. The floor was entirely covered in straw, owl droppings and the regurgitated skeletons of mice and voles. Hundreds upon hundreds of owls of every breed imaginable were nestled here on perches that rose right up to the top of the tower, nearly all of them asleep, though here and there a round amber eye glared at Harry. He spotted Hedwig nestled between a barn owl and a tawny, and hurried over to her, sliding a little on the dropping-strewn floor.
    It took him a little while to persuade her to wake up and then to look at him as she kept shuffling around on her perch, showing him her tail. She was evidently still furious about his lack of gratitude the previous night. In the end, it was Harry suggesting she might be too tired, and that perhaps he would ask Ron to borrow Pigwidgeon, that made her stick out her leg and allow him to tie the letter to it.
    ‘Just find him, all right?’ Harry said, stroking her back as he carried her on his arm to one of the holes in the wall. ‘Before the Dementors do.’
    She nipped his finger, perhaps rather harder than she would ordinarily have done, but hooted softly in a reassuring sort of way all the same. Then she spread her wings and took off into the sunrise. Harry watched her out of sight with the familiar feeling of unease back in his stomach. He had been so sure that Sirius’ reply would alleviate his worries rather than increasing them.
    *
    ‘That was a lie , Harry,’ said Hermione sharply over breakfast, when he told her and Ron what he had done. ‘You didn’t imagine your scar hurting and you know it.’
    ‘So what?’ said Harry. ‘He’s not going back to Azkaban because of me.’
    ‘Drop it,’ said Ron sharply to Hermione, as she opened her mouth to argue some more, and for once, Hermione heeded him, and fell silent.
    Harry did his best not to worry about Sirius over the next couple of weeks. True, he could not stop himself looking anxiously around every morning when the post owls arrived, nor, late at night before he went to sleep, prevent himself seeing horrible visions of Sirius, cornered by Dementors down some dark London street, but between times he tried to keep his mind off his godfather. He wished he still had Quidditch to distract him; nothing worked so well on a troubled mind as a good, hard training session. On the other hand, their lessons were becoming more difficult and demanding than ever before, particularly Defence Against the Dark Arts.
    To their surprise, Professor Moody had announced that he would be putting the Imperius Curse on each of them in turn, to demonstrate its power and to see whether they could resist its effects.
    ‘But – but you said it’s illegal, Professor,’ said Hermione uncertainly, as Moody cleared away the desks with a sweep of his wand, leaving a large clear space in the middle of the room. ‘You said – to use it against another human was –’
    ‘Dumbledore wants you taught what it feels like,’ said Moody, his magical eye swivelling onto Hermione and fixing her with an eerie, unblinking stare. ‘If you’d rather learn the hard way – when someone’s putting it on you so they can control you completely – fine by me. You’re excused. Off you go.’
    He pointed one gnarled finger towards the door. Hermione went very pink, and muttered something about not