“And under here, Hedwig”—Harry pulled open a door under the stairs—“is where I used to sleep! You never knew me then—Blimey, it’s small, I’d forgotten…”
Harry looked around at the stacked shoes and umbrellas, remembering how he used to wake every morning looking up at the underside of the staircase, which was more often than not adorned with a spider or two. Those had been the days before he had known anything about his true identity; before he had found out how his parents had died or why such strange things often happened around him. But Harry could still remember the dreams that had dogged him, even in those days: confused dreams involving flashes of green light and once—Uncle Vernon had nearly crashed the car when Harry had recounted it—a flying motorbike…
There was a sudden, deafening roar from somewhere nearby. Harry straightened up with a jerk and smacked the top of his head on the low door frame. Pausing only to employ a few of Uncle Vernon’s choicest swear words, he staggered back into the kitchen, clutching his head and staring out of the window into the back garden.
The darkness seemed to be rippling, the air itself quivering. Then, one by one, figures began to pop into sight as their Disillusionment Charms lifted. Dominating the scene was Hagrid, wearing a helmet and goggles and sitting astride an enormous motorbike with a black sidecar attached. All around him other people were dismounting from brooms and, in two cases, skeletal, black winged horses.
Wrenching open the back door, Harry hurtled into their midst. There was a general cry of greeting as Hermione flung her arms around him, Ron clapped him on the back, and Hagrid said, “All righ’, Harry? Ready fer the off?”
“Definitely,” said Harry, beaming around at them all. “But I wasn’t expecting this many of you!”
“Change of plan,” growled Mad-Eye, who was holding two enormous, bulging sacks, and whose magical eye was spinning from darkening sky to house to garden with dizzying rapidity. “Let’s get undercover before we talk you through it.”
Harry led them all back into the kitchen where, laughing and chattering, they settled on chairs, sat themselves upon Aunt Petunia’s gleaming work surfaces, or leaned up against her spotless appliances; Ron, long and lanky; Hermione, her bushy hair tied back in a long plait; Fred and George, grinning identically; Bill, badly scarred and longhaired; Mr. Weasley, kind-faced, balding, his spectacles a little awry; Mad-Eye, battle-worn, one-legged, his bright blue magical eye whizzing in its socket; Tonks, whose short hair was her favorite shade of bright pink; Lupin, grayer, more lined; Fleur, slender and beautiful, with her long silvery blonde hair; Kingsley, bald and broad-shouldered; Hagrid, with his wild hair and beard, standing hunchbacked to avoid hitting his head on the ceiling; and Mundungus Fletcher, small, dirty, and hangdog, with his droopy beady hound’s eyes and matted hair. Harry’s heart seemed to expand and glow at the sight: He felt incredibly fond of all of them, even Mundungus, whom he had tried to strangle the last time they had met.
“Kingsley, I thought you were looking after the Muggle Prime Minister?” he called across the room.
“He can get along without me for one night,” said Kingsley, “You’re more important.”
“Harry, guess what?” said Tonks from her perch on top of the washing machine, and she wiggled her left hand at him; a ring glistened there.
“You got married?” Harry yelped, looking from her to Lupin.
“I’m sorry you couldn’t be there, Harry, it was very quiet.”
“That’s brilliant, congrat—”
“All right, all right, we’ll have time for a cozy catch-up later,” roared Moody over the hubbub, and silence fell in the kitchen. Moody dropped his sacks at his feet and turned to Harry. “As Dedalus probably told you, we had to abandon Plan A. Pius Thicknesse has gone over, which gives us a big problem. He’s made it an imprisonable offense to connect this house to the Floo Network, place a Portkey here, or Apparate in or out. All done in the name of your protection, to prevent You-Know-Who getting in at you. Absolutely pointless, seeing as your mother’s charm does that already. What he’s really done is to stop you getting out of here safely.”
“Second problem: You’re underage, which means you’ve still got the Trace on you.”
“I don’t—”
“The Trace, the Trace!” said Mad-Eye impatiently. “The charm that detects magical activity around under-seventeens, the way the Ministry finds out about underage magic! If you, or anyone around you, casts a spell to get you out of here, Thicknesse is going to know about it, and so will the Death Eaters.”
“We can’t wait for the Trace to break, because the moment you turn seventeen you’ll lose all the protection your mother gave you. In short, Pius Thicknesse thinks he’s got you cornered good and proper.”
Harry could not help but agree with the unknown Thicknesse.
“So what are we going to do?”
“We’re going to use the only means of transport left to us, the only ones the Trace can’t detect, because we don’t need to cast spells to use them: brooms, thestrals, and Hagrid’s motorbike.”
Harry could see flaws in this plan; however, he held his tongue to give Mad-Eye the chance to address them.
“Now, your mother’s charm will only break under two conditions: when you come of age, or”—Moody gestured around the pristine kitchen—“you no longer call this place home. You and your aunt and uncle are going your separate ways tonight, in the full understanding that you’re never going to live together again, correct?”
Harry nodded.
“So this time, when you leave, there’ll be no going back, and the charm will break the moment you get outside its range. We’re choosing to break it early, because the alternative is waiting for You-Know-Who to come and seize you the moment you turn seventeen.
“The one thing we’ve got on our side is that You-Know-Who doesn’t know we’re moving you tonight. We’ve leaked a fake trail to the Ministry: They think you’re not leaving until the thirtieth. However, this is You-Know-Who we’re dealing with, so we can’t rely on him getting the date wrong; he’s bound to have a couple of Death Eaters patrolling the skies in this general area, just in case. So, we’ve given a dozen different houses every protection we can throw at them. They all look like they could be the place we’re going to hide you, they’ve all got some connection with the Order: my house, Kingsley’s place, Molly’s Auntie Muriel’s—you get the idea.”
“Yeah,” said Harry, not entirely truthfully, because he could still spot a gaping hole in the plan.
“You’ll be going to Tonks’s parents. Once you’re within the boundaries of the protective enchantments we’ve put on their house you’ll be able to use a Portkey to the Burrow. Any questions?”
“Er—yes,” said Harry. “Maybe they won’t know which of the twelve secure houses I’m heading for at first, but won’t it be sort of obvious once”—he performed a quick headcount—“fourteen of us fly off toward Tonks’s parents?”
“Ah,” said Moody, “I forgot to mention the key point. Fourteen of us won’t be flying to Tonks’s parents. There will be seven Harry Potters moving through the skies tonight, each of them with a companion, each pair heading for a different safe house.”
From inside his cloak Moody now withdrew a flask of what looked like mud. There was no need for him to say another word; Harry understood the rest of the plan immediately.
“No!” he said loudly, his voice ringing through the kitchen. “No way!”
“I told them you’d take it like this,” said Hermione with a hint of complacency.
“If you think I’m going to let six people risk their lives—!”
“—because it’s the first time for all of us,” said Ron.
“This is different, pretending to be me—”
“Well, none of us really fancy it, Harry,” said Fred earnestly. “Imagine if something went wrong and we were stuck as specky, scrawny gits forever.”
Harry did not smile.
“You can’t do it if I don’t cooperate, you need me to give you some hair.”