“And Katie, can’t you do something about that nosebleed?”
“It’s just getting worse!” said Katie thickly, attempting to stem the flow with her sleeve.
Harry glanced around at Fred, who was looking anxious and checking his pockets. He saw Fred pull out something purple, examine it for a second, and then look around at Katie, evidently horrorstruck.
“Well, let’s try again,” said Angelina. She was ignoring the Slytherins, who had now set up a chant of “Gryffindor are losers, Gryffindor are losers,” but there was a certain rigidity about her seat on the broom nevertheless.
This time they had been flying for barely three minutes when Angelina’s whistle sounded. Harry, who had just sighted the Snitch circling the opposite goalpost, pulled up feeling distinctly aggrieved.
“What now?” he said impatiently to Alicia, who was nearest.
“Katie,” she said shortly.
Harry turned and saw Angelina, Fred, and George all flying as fast as they could toward Katie. Harry and Alicia sped toward her too. It was plain that Angelina had stopped training just in time; Katie was now chalk-white and covered in blood.
“She needs the hospital wing,” said Angelina.
“We’ll take her,” said Fred. “She — er — might have swallowed a Blood Blisterpod by mistake —”
“Well, there’s no point continuing with no Beaters and a Chaser gone,” said Angelina glumly, as Fred and George zoomed off toward the castle supporting Katie between them. “Come on, let’s go and get changed.”
The Slytherins continued to chant as they trailed back into the changing rooms.
“How was practice?” asked Hermione rather coolly half an hour later, as Harry and Ron climbed through the portrait hole into the Gryffindor common room.
“It was —” Harry began.
“Completely lousy,” said Ron in a hollow voice, sinking into a chair beside Hermione. She looked up at Ron and her frostiness seemed to melt.
“Well, it was only your first one,” she said consolingly, “it’s bound to take time to —”
“Who said it was me who made it lousy?” snapped Ron.
“No one,” said Hermione, looking taken aback, “I thought —”
“You thought I was bound to be rubbish?”
“No, of course I didn’t! Look, you said it was lousy so I just —”
“I’m going to get started on some homework,” said Ron angrily and stomped off to the staircase to the boys’ dormitories and vanished from sight. Hermione turned to Harry.
“Was he lousy?”
“No,” said Harry loyally.
Hermione raised her eyebrows.
“Well, I suppose he could’ve played better,” Harry muttered, “but it was only the first training session, like you said . . .”
Neither Harry nor Ron seemed to make much headway with their homework that night. Harry knew Ron was too preoccupied with how badly he had performed at Quidditch practice and he himself was having difficulty in getting the chant of “Gryffindor are losers” out of his head.
They spent the whole of Sunday in the common room, buried in their books while the room around them filled up, then emptied: It was another clear, fine day and most of their fellow Gryffindors spent the day out in the grounds, enjoying what might well be some of the last sunshine that year. By the evening Harry felt as though somebody had been beating his brain against the inside of his skull.
“You know, we probably should try and get more homework done during the week,” Harry muttered to Ron, as they finally laid aside Professor McGonagall’s long essay on the Inanimatus Conjurus spell and turned miserably to Professor Sinistra’s equally long and difficult essay about Jupiter’s moons.
“Yeah,” said Ron, rubbing slightly bloodshot eyes and throwing his fifth spoiled bit of parchment into the fire beside them. “Listen . . . shall we just ask Hermione if we can have a look at what she’s done?”
Harry glanced over at her; she was sitting with Crookshanks on her lap and chatting merrily to Ginny as a pair of knitting needles flashed in midair in front of her, now knitting a pair of shapeless elf socks.
“No,” he said heavily, “you know she won’t let us.”
And so they worked on while the sky outside the windows became steadily darker; slowly, the crowd in the common room began to thin again. At half-past eleven, Hermione wandered over to them, yawning.
“Nearly done?”
“No,” said Ron shortly.
“Jupiter’s biggest moon is Ganymede, not Callisto,” she said, pointing over Ron’s shoulder at a line in his Astronomy essay, “and it’s Io that’s got the volcanos.”
“Thanks,” snarled Ron, scratching out the offending sentences.
“Sorry, I only —”
“Yeah, well, if you’ve just come over here to criticize —”
“Ron —”
“I haven’t got time to listen to a sermon, all right, Hermione, I’m up to my neck in it here —”
“No — look!”
Hermione was pointing to the nearest window. Harry and Ron both looked over. A handsome screech owl was standing on the windowsill, gazing into the room at Ron.
“Isn’t that Hermes?” said Hermione, sounding amazed.
“Blimey, it is!” said Ron quietly, throwing down his quill and getting to his feet. “What’s Percy writing to me for?”
He crossed to the window and opened it; Hermes flew inside, landed upon Ron’s essay, and held out a leg to which a letter was attached. Ron took it off and the owl departed at once, leaving inky footprints across Ron’s drawing of the moon Io.
“That’s definitely Percy’s handwriting,” said Ron, sinking back into his chair and staring at the words on the outside of the scroll: To Ronald Weasley, Gryffindor House, Hogwarts. He looked up at the other two. “What d’you reckon?”
“Open it!” said Hermione eagerly. Harry nodded.
Ron unrolled the scroll and began to read. The farther down the parchment his eyes traveled, the more pronounced became his scowl. When he had finished reading, he looked disgusted. He thrust the letter at Harry and Hermione, who leaned toward each other to read it together: