“Have you got a new headmaster yet?” said Harry.
Krum shrugged. He held out his hand as Fleur had done, shook Harry’s hand, and then Ron’s. Ron looked as though he was suffering some sort of painful internal struggle. Krum had already started walking away when Ron burst out, “Can I have your autograph?”
Hermione turned away, smiling at the horseless carriages that were now trundling toward them up the drive, as Krum, looking surprised but gratified, signed a fragment of parchment for Ron.
The weather could not have been more different on the journey back to King’s Cross than it had been on their way to Hogwarts the previous September. There wasn’t a single cloud in the sky. Harry, Ron, and Hermione had managed to get a compartment to themselves. Pigwidgeon was once again hidden under Ron’s dress robes to stop him from hooting continually; Hedwig was dozing, her head under her wing, and Crookshanks was curled up in a spare seat like a large, furry ginger cushion. Harry, Ron, and Hermione talked more fully and freely than they had all week as the train sped them southward. Harry felt as though Dumbledore’s speech at the Leaving Feast had unblocked him, somehow. It was less painful to discuss what had happened now. They broke off their conversation about what action Dumbledore might be taking, even now, to stop Voldemort only when the lunch trolley arrived.
When Hermione returned from the trolley and put her money back into her schoolbag, she dislodged a copy of the Daily Prophet that she had been carrying in there. Harry looked at it, unsure whether he really wanted to know what it might say, but Hermione, seeing him looking at it, said calmly, “There’s nothing in there. You can look for yourself, but there’s nothing at all. I’ve been checking every day. Just a small piece the day after the third task saying you won the tournament. They didn’t even mention Cedric. Nothing about any of it. If you ask me, Fudge is forcing them to keep quiet.”
“He’ll never keep Rita quiet,” said Harry. “Not on a story like this.”
“Oh, Rita hasn’t written anything at all since the third task,” said Hermione in an oddly constrained voice. “As a matter of fact,” she added, her voice now trembling slightly, “Rita Skeeter isn’t going to be writing anything at all for a while. Not unless she wants me to spill the beans on her.”
“What are you talking about?” said Ron.
“I found out how she was listening in on private conversations when she wasn’t supposed to be coming onto the grounds,” said Hermione in a rush.
Harry had the impression that Hermione had been dying to tell them this for days, but that she had restrained herself in light of everything else that had happened.
“How was she doing it?” said Harry at once.
“How did you find out?” said Ron, staring at her.
“Well, it was you, really, who gave me the idea, Harry,” she said.
“Did I?” said Harry, perplexed. “How?”
“Bugging,” said Hermione happily.
“But you said they didn’t work —”
“Oh not electronic bugs,” said Hermione. “No, you see . . . Rita Skeeter” — Hermione’s voice trembled with quiet triumph — “is an unregistered Animagus. She can turn —”
Hermione pulled a small sealed glass jar out of her bag.
“— into a beetle.”
“You’re kidding,” said Ron. “You haven’t . . . she’s not . . .”
“Oh yes she is,” said Hermione happily, brandishing the jar at them.
Inside were a few twigs and leaves and one large, fat beetle.
“That’s never — you’re kidding —” Ron whispered, lifting the jar to his eyes.
“No, I’m not,” said Hermione, beaming. “I caught her on the windowsill in the hospital wing. Look very closely, and you’ll notice the markings around her antennae are exactly like those foul glasses she wears.”
Harry looked and saw that she was quite right. He also remembered something.
“There was a beetle on the statue the night we heard Hagrid telling Madame Maxime about his mum!”
“Exactly,” said Hermione. “And Viktor pulled a beetle out of my hair after we’d had our conversation by the lake. And unless I’m very much mistaken, Rita was perched on the windowsill of the Divination class the day your scar hurt. She’s been buzzing around for stories all year.”
“When we saw Malfoy under that tree . . .” said Ron slowly.
“He was talking to her, in his hand,” said Hermione. “He knew, of course. That’s how she’s been getting all those nice little interviews with the Slytherins. They wouldn’t care that she was doing something illegal, as long as they were giving her horrible stuff about us and Hagrid.”
Hermione took the glass jar back from Ron and smiled at the beetle, which buzzed angrily against the glass.
“I’ve told her I’ll let her out when we get back to London,” said Hermione. “I’ve put an Unbreakable Charm on the jar, you see, so she can’t transform. And I’ve told her she’s to keep her quill to herself for a whole year. See if she can’t break the habit of writing horrible lies about people.”
Smiling serenely, Hermione placed the beetle back inside her schoolbag.
The door of the compartment slid open.
“Very clever, Granger,” said Draco Malfoy.
Crabbe and Goyle were standing behind him. All three of them looked more pleased with themselves, more arrogant and more menacing, than Harry had ever seen them.
“So,” said Malfoy slowly, advancing slightly into the compartment and looking slowly around at them, a smirk quivering on his lips. “You caught some pathetic reporter, and Potter’s Dumbledore’s favorite boy again. Big deal.”
His smirk widened. Crabbe and Goyle leered.
“Trying not to think about it, are we?” said Malfoy softly, looking around at all three of them. “Trying to pretend it hasn’t happened?”