25th September 1995, Hogwarts, morning
The new Educational Decree was waiting on the noticeboard when they came down from their morning classes.
Harry, Hermione, Neville, Ron, Draco, and Daphne stopped before it as they read it in a deepening silence.
EDUCATIONAL DECREE NUMBER SIXTY-EIGHT. All student organisations, societies, teams, groups, and clubs are henceforth disbanded. An organisation, society, team, group, or club is hereby defined as a regular meeting of three or more students. Permission to re-form may be sought from the High Inquisitor. No student organisation may exist without the knowledge and approval of the High Inquisitor. Any student found to have formed, or to belong to, an organisation that has not been approved will be expelled.
It was signed, with a flourish, Dolores Jane Umbridge, High Inquisitor.
A small, miserable crowd had gathered along the corridor to read it, and the groaning was general and low. The Gobstones Club, gone. Flitwick's Duelling Society, gone — even that, beloved and harmless, swept up with the rest. A knot of Ravenclaws stood glaring at the notice with open hostility, while nearby a clutch of Umbridge's hangers-on tried to sweet-talk a pair of bemused exchange students about what a sensible and orderly measure it all was.
Harry read it twice, and the cold settled in him. The timing was too neat to be chance. Three or more students. The week after the Hog's Head.
Hermione had gone white. She looked at Draco; Draco looked back; and the same thought passed between them without a word.
"Theodore," Hermione said, very low. "He found out. He must have. Why else would this come down now, the exact week we—" She broke off, fists clenched. "But how? The parchment — Luna's parchment — anyone who talked should have had the words turn to nothing in their mouth. So how did he—"
"Doesn't matter how, right this second." Draco's voice was clipped, already three steps ahead. "What matters is that she's looking, and she's got a Decree built to catch exactly what we're doing, and expulsion is the price now, not detention."
He glanced round the corridor, checking faces. "The Room. The space we set aside for the M.S.S.G. — it's the only place in the castle she can't get into and can't hear. We meet there, we meet only there, and we are a great deal more careful than we were." He was already moving. "I need to check something. Room of Requirement, all of you — I'll find you."
And he was gone, off down the corridor at a pace that was almost a run.
...
Lunch brought more of it.
"Quidditch is off," Ron reported grimly, dropping onto the bench. "All the teams. Disbanded under the Decree." He stabbed at his food. "And guess which team got permission to re-form about ten minutes later? Go on. Guess."
"Slytherin," said Harry.
"Slytherin." Ron's jaw worked. "Angelina's spitting. She made me promise — actually made me promise not to give Umbridge any reason, any reason at all, in case it puts her off letting us re-form. Begged me, near enough." He looked wretched. "I hate it. But I promised."
Hermione had gone very still, and very dangerous. "She approves her own House's team in the same breath she bans everyone else's. She disbands every club the week after our meeting. She doesn't even pretend to be fair any more."
Her hand had drifted toward her wand. "I could leave something in Theodore's bag that would make him regret ever—"
"No," said Viktor and Harry together.
Viktor laid a steadying hand on her shoulder. "Hermione. No. Is exactly vhat they vant — one of us, caught doing something. Then it is not a Decree, it is proof." He kept his hand there until she breathed out. Ron, who had been opening his mouth to encourage the trap-curse idea on principle, caught Harry's eye and shut it again.
The afternoon classes were subdued — the whole school dimmed a shade, save for Theodore and his crew, who wore their borrowed power like new robes and could not stop preening in it. Harry let the snide remarks slide off him; there were O.W.L.s coming, and the work, at least, gave everyone something to bury their heads in.
It nearly came apart before Potions.
Theodore, waiting outside the dungeon, had found a fresh cruelty to amuse himself with — a sneering little riff on the sort of people who ended up in the long-term ward at St Mungo's, the permanent residents, the ones who didn't know their own names any more.
Neville went for him.
It was fast, silent and absolute — Neville simply moved, and it was only Harry's arm across his chest and Ron seizing him from behind that kept him off Theodore entirely, the two of them hauling him back while he shook with a fury that was terrible precisely because it was so unlike him.
Hermione and Daphne stepped in front, throwing back cuts of their own — and then cut themselves off sharp, all of them, because the dungeon door had opened and Snape's footsteps were coming, and a scene in front of Snape helped nobody.
Theodore smirked the whole way into the classroom. He had no idea — Harry was grimly certain — how close he'd just come, or to what. Neville said nothing for the whole of the lesson, and his cauldron came out perfect, and Harry kept half an eye on him the entire time.
It was before Divination that the day turned strange.
Word came up the stairs ahead of them: Professor Trelawney had been placed on probation. The inspection results had come back, and she'd been in a dreadful state over them all day — and now, as Harry and the others climbed toward the North Tower, they found something else entirely happening.
Students were pouring the other way, down and out — whole years of them, and others with a free period, streaming toward the entrance hall and the great iron gates beyond, drawn by some news running ahead of them all.
Harry caught Cedric and Cho in the flow. "What's happened?"
Cho's face was tight. "It's Trelawney. Umbridge isn't just putting her on probation — she's sacking her. Throwing her out of the castle. Now, today, in front of everyone." She shook her head, genuinely shaken. "She's — I know she's odd, Trelawney, but she's kind. She's been here longer than most of us have been alive. You can't just—"
They went with the crowd, out into the yard before the gates.
And there it was — as ugly a thing as Harry had seen at Hogwarts. Sybill Trelawney stood amid her own trunks and cases, which had been dragged out and dumped on the flagstones, clutching herself, shaking, weeping openly, her shawls askew — while Dolores Umbridge stood over her, pink and serene and enjoying it, delivering her dismissal in that horrible patient coo for the whole gathered school to witness. McGonagall had an arm around the sobbing woman and a look on her face like a drawn blade, and even she could not comfort her, could only hold her up and glare murder at the High Inquisitor.
A murmur ran through the crowd — Dumbledore — and Harry felt the hope lift through all of them as the Headmaster came striding across the yard.
But it sank again almost at once. Dumbledore was calm, and kind, and immovable — and what he could do, it became clear, was only half. He could forbid Umbridge from turning Trelawney out of the castle; she would stay, she would keep her rooms, she was home. But he could not give her back her post. The High Inquisitor had the authority to dismiss a teacher, and dismissed she was. Trelawney wept with relief at not being cast out, and the relief was its own small heartbreak.
And Ron, beside Harry, muttered the thing they were all feeling: "That's it, then. That's how it goes now. She just — takes things, and the best anyone can do is soften the landing. The whole school's going to be hers by Christmas."
"Perhaps," said Dumbledore — who had, somehow, heard him — "not quite yet."
He turned to the watching school, and there was something in his eye now, the particular twinkle that meant a card was about to come off the bottom of the deck.
"As it happens," the Headmaster said, "the post of Divination is not one I am required to leave vacant. And I am fortunate — most fortunate to have to hand a replacement of quite singular gifts. A gentleman who comes to us, moreover, on the authority of the Department of Mysteries itself, to teach this subject and to pursue, while he is among us, a matter of considerable importance to that Department, and to the Ministry."
He gestured to the doorway behind him.
And Ethan Esther stepped out into the autumn light.
He came unhurried, easy, in a dark Victorian coat and a hat he lifted courteously to the assembled school, amber eyes sweeping the crowd — and over the gathered students a ripple of half-recognition went: that man, the one who was always about with the Atid Stella people at the Tournament. Most of them placed him no further than that.
Harry placed him a very great deal further.
His whole chest went up like a sunrise. Beside him Hermione gasped; Draco's head snapped round; Daphne's careful composure cracked into open delight; and Ron very nearly did leap and shout his name across the yard — got as far as "ETH—" before Lavender clapped a hand over his mouth and hauled him down by the collar.
"What a charming gathering," Ethan observed mildly, his gaze settling on Umbridge among the dumped trunks. "Though I must say — turning a tenured professor out of doors in front of the children does seem a robust interpretation of one's authority, High Inquisitor. One does wonder where the limits of it are imagined to lie."
Umbridge's smile stayed fixed on her face. Her voice, when it came, was pitched a register too high, and it shook with the effort of staying sweet. "Hem, hem. I'm sure I don't know who you—"
"Ethan Esther." He inclined his head. "Newly appointed Professor of Divination — and an agent of the Department of Mysteries, here on the Department's business." And he produced, from inside his coat, a single sheet of parchment, and held it out toward her face — not a pink Educational Decree, this, but something darker, its border worked in a strange shifting pattern that seemed to swallow the light. "My credentials. Do read them."
Umbridge's eyes went down it — and her face did something marvellous.
Because the parchment bore three signatures, and Harry, craning, watched her read each one. Samantheus Faramundo, Head of the Department of Mysteries. Beneath it, Cornelius Fudge, Minister for Magic. And beneath that, Albus Dumbledore.Effective immediately. Her own Minister's name, on a document she had no power whatever to overrule.
She reached for it — fingers twitching to snatch, to study, to find the flaw —
— and Ethan, with the smallest wave of his hand, drew the parchment smoothly back out of her reach and folded it away into his coat before her fingers closed on empty air. The watching students stifled their laughter.
Umbridge gathered herself. The smile hardened. "And what, precisely," she said, "are your qualifications to teach Divination, Mr Esther? It is a demanding discipline. One would hate to inflict upon these children an instructor who could not tell a prophecy from a parlour trick."
A great many of the watching students leaned in at that — Hermione foremost, and Lavender beside her, both of whom had heard the whispers about this man and never once seen the thing itself. A true Seer. Here. About to be provoked into proving it.
Ethan smiled.
He took off his glasses, slowly, and folded them, and tucked them away — and the yard changed.
It was subtle, and it was total. The autumn light seemed to thicken and cool. The wind shifted, came round, breathed differently through the gathered crowd, raising the hair on the back of every neck. And Ethan's eyes — Harry watched it land on the whole school at once — caught fire from within, a slow brilliant starlight rising in them, deep and strange and absolutely real.
A shiver went through the crowd. Several students stepped back without meaning to.
Harry, however, narrowed his eyes — and leaned in to murmur to the others. "He's hamming it up. The light's real, that part's true Sight. But the wind, the cold, the theatre of it — that's all for her. He's doing it on purpose."
He almost grinned. "He hates being stared at. He must really want to make a point."
"I don't care if it's theatre," Hermione breathed, riveted. Lavender nodded fervently beside her, equally lost.
"Working, though," Ron muttered. "Look at the Toad — she's actually shivering."
And she was. For all her composure, Dolores Umbridge had gone faintly, visibly unsteady before those burning eyes.
Then Ethan spoke — quiet, almost gentle, a riddle wrapped round the coldest smile Harry had ever seen on his father's face.
"I see," Ethan murmured, eyes alight, "a small bright fall. A clatter of old armour, charging where it should stand still — and a descent, High Inquisitor. Mind the stairs. Iron does so love to run, when it's least convenient, and the steps at the bottom are very hard." The starlight flickered. "Soon, I think. Do take care."
Silence. Then a wave of barely-smothered delight rolled through the watching school.
Umbridge's face had gone blotchy. "What — absolute nonsense," she said, too loud, too fast, recovering her smile by main force. "Vague, unfalsifiable theatrics — exactly the sort of woolly fraud this subject is riddled with. I shall be watching you very closely, Mr Esther." And she turned on her pink heel and removed herself from the yard at a pace just short of fleeing.
Ethan watched her go, his eyes curving, the starlight fading gently from them as he slid his glasses back on. He turned his head, just slightly — and winked at Harry and his friends across the crowd.
"Yes, well," said Dumbledore, with enormous serenity, into the buzzing yard. "I think that concludes the morning's excitement. Off you go, all of you. There are, I am reliably informed, O.W.L.s."