He leaned forwards a little.

“I heard, from my dear friend Tiberius Ogden, that you can produce a Patronus? For a bonus point…?”

Harry raised his wand, looked directly at Umbridge and imagined her being sacked.

“Expecto patronum!”

His silver stag erupted from the end of his wand and cantered the length of the Hall. All of the examiners looked around to watch its progress and when it dissolved into silver mist Professor Tofty clapped his veined and knotted hands enthusiastically.

“Excellent!” he said. “Very well, Potter, you may go!”

As Harry passed Umbridge beside the door, their eyes met. There was a nasty smile playing around her wide, slack mouth, but he did not care. Unless he was very much mistaken (and he was not planning on telling anybody, in case he was), he had just achieved an “Outstanding” O.W.L.

On Friday, Harry and Ron had a day off while Hermione sat her Ancient Runes exam, and as they had the whole weekend in front of them they permitted themselves a break from revision. They stretched and yawned beside the open window, through which warm summer air was wafting as they played wizard chess. Harry could see Hagrid in the distance, teaching a class on the edge of the Forest. He was trying to guess what creatures they were examining—he thought it must be unicorns, because the boys seemed to be standing back a little—when the portrait hole opened and Hermione clambered in, looking thoroughly bad-tempered.

“How were the Runes?” said Ron, yawning and stretching.

“I mis-translated ehwaz,” said Hermione furiously. “It means partnership, not defence; I mixed it up with eihwaz.”

“Ah well,” said Ron lazily, “that’s only one mistake, isn’t it, you’ll still get—”

“Oh, shut up!” said Hermione angrily. “It could be the one mistake that makes the difference between a pass and a fail. And what’s more, someone’s put another Niffler in Umbridge’s office. I don’t know how they got it through that new door, but I just walked past there and Umbridge is shrieking her head off—by the sound of it, it tried to take a chunk out of her leg—”

“Good,” said Harry and Ron together.

“It is not good!” said Hermione hotly. “She thinks it’s Hagrid doing it, remember? And we do not want Hagrid chucked out!”

“He’s teaching at the moment; she can’t blame him,” said Harry, gesturing out of the window.

“Oh, you’re so naive sometimes, Harry. You really think Umbridge will wait for proof?” said Hermione, who seemed determined to be in a towering temper, and she swept off towards the girls’ dormitories, banging the door behind her.

“Such a lovely, sweet-tempered girl,” said Ron, very quietly, prodding his queen forward to beat up one of Harry’s knights.

Hermione’s bad mood persisted for most of the weekend, though Harry and Ron found it quite easy to ignore as they spent most of Saturday and Sunday revising for Potions on Monday, the exam which Harry had been looking forward to least—and which he was sure would be the downfall of his ambitions to become an Auror. Sure enough, he found the written paper difficult, though he thought he might have got full marks on the question about Polyjuice Potion; he could describe its effects accurately, having taken it illegally in his second year.

The afternoon practical was not as dreadful as he had expected it to be. With Snape absent from the proceedings, he found that he was much more relaxed than he usually was while making potions. Neville, who was sitting very near Harry, also looked happier than Harry had ever seen him during a Potions class. When Professor Marchbanks said, “Step away from your cauldrons, please, the examination is over,” Harry corked his sample flask feeling that he might not have achieved a good grade but he had, with luck, avoided a fail.

“Only four exams left,” said Parvati Patil wearily as they headed back to Gryffindor common room.

“Only!” said Hermione snappishly. “I’ve got Arithmancy and it’s probably the toughest subject there is!”

Nobody was foolish enough to snap back, so she was unable to vent her spleen on any of them and was reduced to telling off some first-years for giggling too loudly in the common room.

Harry was determined to perform well in Tuesdays Care of Magical Creatures exam so as not to let Hagrid down. The practical examination took place in the afternoon on the lawn on the edge of the Forbidden Forest, where students were required to correctly identify the Knarl hidden among a dozen hedgehogs (the trick was to offer them all milk in turn: Knarls, highly suspicious creatures whose quills had many magical properties, generally went berserk at what they saw as an attempt to poison them); then demonstrate correct handling of a Bowtruckle; feed and clean out a Fire Crab without sustaining serious burns; and choose, from a wide selection of food, the diet they would give a sick unicorn.

Harry could see Hagrid watching anxiously out of his cabin window. When Harry’s examiner, a plump little witch this time, smiled at him and told him he could leave, Harry gave Hagrid a fleeting thumbs-up before heading back to the castle.

The Astronomy theory paper on Wednesday morning went well enough. Harry was not convinced he had got the names of all Jupiter’s moons right, but was at least confident that none of them was inhabited by mice. They had to wait until evening for their practical Astronomy; the afternoon was devoted instead to Divination.

Even by Harry’s low standards in Divination, the exam went very badly. He might as well have tried to see moving pictures on the desktop as in the stubbornly blank crystal ball; he lost his head completely during tea-leaf reading, saying it looked to him as though Professor Marchbanks would shortly be meeting a round, dark, soggy stranger, and rounded off the whole fiasco by mixing up the life and head lines on her palm and informing her that she ought to have died the previous Tuesday.

“Well, we were always going to fail that one,” said Ron gloomily as they ascended the marble staircase. He had just made Harry feel rather better by telling him how he had told the examiner in detail about the ugly man with a wart on his nose in his crystal ball, only to look up and realise he had been describing his examiner’s reflection.

“We shouldn’t have taken the stupid subject in the first place,” said Harry.

“Still, at least we can give it up now.”

“Yeah,” said Harry. “No more pretending we care what happens when Jupiter and Uranus get too friendly.”

“And from now on, I don’t care if my tea-leaves spell die, Ron, die—I’m just chucking them in the bin where they belong.”

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This information took the edge off Harry and Ron’s desire for brain stimulants.	\|	Harry laughed just as Hermione came running up behind them. He stopped laughing at once, in case it annoyed her.

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