Six Days and Seven Nights

ARRIVAL

Dear Diary,

Another year, another travel diary. Lavender would just die to know that I am writing in you. How many times have I told her that she would be better off writing her Potions essays than scribbling away in that fluffy purple journal where she draws pink hearts next to the names of her latest crushes? But a travel diary is different. When one travels, one sees so many different things and meets so many different people that one cannot keep it all in one’s head. One needs to write just to keep everything straight, to understand the strange new experiences one is having.

As it turns out, this may be the strangest diary of them all. Oh, why didn’t I just go to France with Mum and Dad like they had asked?

The third week in July. Mum and Dad had made me promise that I would go on holiday with them—regardless of whatever I might be doing to help Harry and Ron hunt for Horcruxes. Maybe the wizarding world was in the middle of a great war with a Dark Lord, but as long as Mum and Dad could take their little girl on a Muggle holiday, they could cling to some bit of normalcy. There had been no arguing. Harry, Ron, and I had found and destroyed the Hufflepuff cup that Voldemort had imbued with a piece of his soul, and we were in the middle of our search for Slytherin’s locket, but there was no question of where I would be the third week in July.

So I left Harry and Ron back at Grimmauld Place. Before today’s meeting with my parents at the train station, I stopped in Flourish and Blotts to pick up some reading for my journey. If I was going to be stuck on a beach in southern France, at least I could be doing some research. But that was where everything went wrong.

Diagon Alley is bleak these days. Most of the stores are boarded up, and few shoppers people the streets. Perhaps that’s why I noticed the flash of red when I left the bookstore. Curious, I followed it to somewhere behind an empty fortune teller’s hut, where I met an unexpected sight.

Fawkes.

Nobody had seen Professor Dumbledore’s phoenix since the Headmaster’s funeral. Harry had been especially hopeful that Fawkes would arrive some morning at Grimmauld Place’s doorstep. His hope was driven by more than just the fact that the restorative powers of a phoenix’s tears could be helpful to the Order. I think he wanted Fawkes to return because of their experience together in our second year. Harry’s loyalty to Dumbledore had brought Fawkes to the rescue during the fight with Tom Riddle’s Basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets. If Fawkes came back, Harry could believe that the Headmaster was still with us, working in those mysterious ways that none of us ever fully understood.

Until that moment, as far as I was concerned, Fawkes’s return had mainly only seemed like the chance for a much-needed morale-booster, yet when I saw Dumbledore’s pet perched atop a pile of crates, I couldn’t help but think he might still be part of some grand design. The phoenix gazed intently at me, looking as deeply into me as Dumbledore ever could. It was clear that he had a mission.

“What is it, Fawkes?” I asked. “Where did you come from? What do you want?”

The bird bobbed its head at me.

“Me?” I asked, wondering why I should be so important. Why not go to Harry or to one of the adult Order members? “What do you want with me?”

The bird looked up toward the cloudy sky.

“You want me to go somewhere with you?” That was the point at which I should have stopped to say, ‘Hermione, why do you think you can talk to a bird? How do you know that he isn’t just watching the skies for some cute finch that caught his eye?’ How did I know in this dark age of shape-shifters and deceit that this was even Fawkes? How did I know where he had been these past few months? How did I know I could trust him?

But I didn’t ask any of these questions. I was too intent upon doing my part for the Order. I was too caught up in the dream that Dumbledore might still be working his plots from somewhere beyond the grave. So I rented an owl to send a message to my parents: something had come up and I could not join them in France. There would be hell to pay. I knew that then. I just didn’t know in which direction I would be paying it.

Fawkes took me by the back of my robes, and suddenly I was flying somewhere to the north. When he set me down in front of a ramshackle house that would have made the Shrieking Shack look like luxury accommodations, I thought the bird must finally have tired. What on earth could there be for us at this simple Muggle dwelling? But then he pecked at the door, and suddenly I was face-to-face with none other than Severus Snape.

“Hermione Granger,” he said with an arch of his eyebrows. Under that cool look of discernment, I thought I caught a glimmer of surprise.

Snape’s exact feelings toward me weren’t my main focus, though. I was too busy fumbling for my wand in preparation for a duel with Albus Dumbledore’s killer. But he was the Defense Against the Dark Arts Teacher—or had been, if only for a year—and he had my wand in his hand before I could utter a single spell. He pulled me inside with Fawkes fluttering after me.

“What do you think you are doing?” Snape demanded without bothering to look at me. I realized he was talking to Fawkes.

“Fawkes?” I asked, completely betrayed. “You brought me here on purpose? Is this where you’ve been all this time?”

“Yes, he’s been here,” Snape snapped. “And I’ve no doubt that he brought you here on purpose. Sending me a bushy-haired know-it-all is precisely the sort of twisted logic that Dumbledore would have had.”

Dumbledore.

That was when things started falling into place. Harry—angry, hurt, embittered Harry—had scoffed for over six years whenever I had suggested that Snape was Dumbledore’s man. Since the Headmaster’s death, he had just looked at me like a traitor the few times that I had carefully conjectured that there still might be more to Snape than met the eye. At first I too had thought that my instinct was no more than my stubborn faith in my teachers, but then there had been the night in Glastonbury when Harry, Ron, and I had destroyed Hufflepuff’s cup. Our fight with the Inferi had not been going well, but then a jet of repulsing fire had come out of nowhere to frighten the Horcrux’s guardians. The light had illuminated the shadows, and I could have sworn that I had glimpsed the unmistakably lanky but graceful figure of our black-haired, big-nosed former Potions and Defense professor. I had tried chasing the figure through the maze-like ruins of the Abbey, but then a wall had collapsed to block my way, and I had had to return to Harry to help him and Ron with the fight.

“You were at Glastonbury,” I breathed.

“Ten points for Gryffindor for your talent at stating the obvious,” Snape sneered. “Potter couldn’t tie his shoe, let alone destroy a Horcrux on his own.”

“Then you have been helping us.”

“Forgive me if I don’t congratulate you, Miss Granger, on your tremendous powers of discernment. In fact, twenty points from Gryffindor for your snooping.”

“I am not here to snoop,” I said indignantly. “I had no idea that Fawkes was going to bring me to you.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Snape snapped. “I mean that if you had let your insatiable curiosity well enough alone, Fawkes needn’t have bothered bringing you here. Your Gryffindor snooping is making me lose my magic.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, and Snape clearly looked like he regretted sharing that last bit of information, but Fawkes started tugging at his sleeve.

He sighed. “Your illogical choice to chase after me when a host of Inferi were chasing after your friends did not go without repercussions. You made me run right into one of the Dark Lord’s booby traps. Now,” he declared with sullen indignation, “I am losing my magic. I will be no better than a squib by the time of the full moon.”

I gaped at him, trying to take in his words. Snape was still helping the Order. He was loyal enough to have Fawkes on his side. He had helped us destroy the Horcrux, but my actions were now destroying him. What would happen without him? What would happen because of me?

“Surely there is something that could be done,” I insisted.

He opened his mouth as if to speak and then seemed to think better of it. “No, there is nothing,” he said at last.

Fawkes squawked and Snape hushed the bird, but the phoenix swept across the room and landed on an ancient tome laid out on a spindly table near me. He looked at me and squawked again.

“What is it, Fawkes?” I asked.

“Don’t look at that!” Snape cried.

But it was too late. I had already moved the bird off the book and was deciphering the Latin. “This looks like a remedy for Magic-Draining Curses.”

“It’s rubbish,” Snape declared. “It won’t work.”

“Have you tried it yet?” (Oh, diary, if only I’d read further down the page.)

“No.”

“Then how do you know?” I demanded. I kept thinking of the looming task ahead of Harry, of his mission to destroy the Horcruxes and ultimately battle Voldemort. He needed all the help he could get. If Snape was still supposed to be serving the Order, then his ease at letting his magic fizzle away seemed horribly selfish.

“I don’t have access to all the necessary…components,” Snape said carefully.

I continued reading the description of the remedy. “The spell doesn’t seem that hard. There’s some basic Arithmancy and…oh.”

“Oh,” Snape repeated. “Yes, oh. Now you understand, Miss Granger, why the remedy is impossible. One does not fetch a virgin to deflower three times the way one goes to the apothecary to purchase some boomslang skin.”

I sunk down at the table to take this news in. Snape was going to lose his magic in no more than a week. He might never have been my favorite professor. He might have been cranky and devious, but he was also proud and, it turned out, loyal. Losing his magic would destroy him, I knew. And it might very well destroy the Order too.

I felt Fawkes giving me another penetrating gaze. Now I thought I knew what Harry felt like when Dumbledore had turned him into one of his many pawns. I stood back up and looked squarely at Severus Snape—Slytherin’s sneaky Head of House, Hogwarts petrifying Potions Master, Albus Dumbledore’s infamous killer, and now a man as much in need of the world as the world was in need of him.

“I’ll do it.”