Celestina ended her song on a very long, high-pitched note and loud applause issued out of the wireless, which Mrs. Weasley joined in with enthusiastically.

“Eez eet over?” said Fleur loudly. “Thank goodness, what an ’orrible—”

“Shall we have a nightcap, then?” asked Mr. Weasley loudly, leaping to his feet. “Who wants eggnog?”

“What have you been up to lately?” Harry asked Lupin, as Mr. Weasley bustled off to fetch the eggnog, and everybody else stretched and broke into conversation.

“Oh, I’ve been underground,” said Lupin. “Almost literally. That’s why I haven’t been able to write, Harry; sending letters to you would have been something of a giveaway.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve been living among my fellows, my equals,” said Lupin. “Werewolves,” he added, at Harry’s look of incomprehension. “Nearly all of them are on Voldemort’s side. Dumbledore wanted a spy and here I was… ready-made.”

He sounded a little bitter, and perhaps realized it, for he smiled more warmly as he went on, “I am not complaining; it is necessary work and who can do it better than I? However, it has been difficult gaining their trust. I bear the unmistakable signs of having tried to live among wizards, you see, whereas they have shunned normal society and live on the margins, stealing—and sometimes killing—to eat.”

“How come they like Voldemort?”

“They think that, under his rule, they will have a better life,” said Lupin. “And it is hard to argue with Greyback out there…”

“Who’s Greyback?”

“You haven’t heard of him?” Lupin’s hands closed convulsively in his lap. “Fenrir Greyback is, perhaps, the most savage werewolf alive today. He regards it as his mission in life to bite and to contaminate as many people as possible; he wants to create enough werewolves to overcome the wizards. Voldemort has promised him prey in return for his services. Greyback specializes in children… Bite them young, he says, and raise them away from their parents, raise them to hate normal wizards. Voldemort has threatened to unleash him upon people’s sons and daughters; it is a threat that usually produces good results.”

Lupin paused and then said, “It was Greyback who bit me.”

“What?” said Harry, astonished. “When—when you were a kid, you mean?”

“Yes. My father had offended him. I did not know, for a very long time, the identity of the werewolf who had attacked me; I even felt pity for him, thinking that he had had no control, knowing by then how it felt to transform. But Greyback is not like that. At the full moon, he positions himself close to victims, ensuring that he is near enough to strike. He plans it all. And this is the man Voldemort is using to marshal the werewolves. I cannot pretend that my particular brand of reasoned argument is making much headway against Greyback’s insistence that we werewolves deserve blood, that we ought to revenge ourselves on normal people.”

“But you are normal!” said Harry fiercely. “You’ve just got a—a problem—”

Lupin burst out laughing. “Sometimes you remind me a lot of James. He called it my ‘furry little problem’ in company. Many people were under the impression that I owned a badly behaved rabbit.”

He accepted a glass of eggnog from Mr. Weasley with a word of thanks, looking slightly more cheerful, Harry, meanwhile, felt a rush of excitement: This last mention of his father had reminded him that there was something he had been looking forward to asking Lupin.

“Have you ever heard of someone called the Half-Blood Prince?”

“The Half-Blood what?”

“Prince,” said Harry, watching him closely for signs of recognition.

“There are no Wizarding princes,” said Lupin, now smiling. “Is this a title you’re thinking of adopting? I should have thought being ‘the Chosen One’ would be enough.”

“It’s nothing to do with me!” said Harry indignantly. “The Half-Blood Prince is someone who used to go to Hogwarts, I’ve got his old Potions book. He wrote spells all over it, spells he invented. One of them was Levicorpus—”

“Oh, that one had a great vogue during my time at Hogwarts,” said Lupin reminiscently. “There were a few months in my fifth year when you couldn’t move for being hoisted into the air by your ankle.”

“My dad used it,” said Harry. “I saw him in the Pensieve, he used it on Snape.”

He tried to sound casual, as though this was a throwaway comment of no real importance, but he was not sure he had achieved the right effect; Lupin’s smile was a little too understanding.

“Yes,” he said, “but he wasn’t the only one. As I say, it was very popular… You know how these spells come and go…”

“But it sounds like it was invented while you were at school,” Harry persisted.

“Not necessarily,” said Lupin. “Jinxes go in and out of fashion like everything else.”

He looked into Harry’s face and then said quietly, “James was a pureblood, Harry, and I promise you, he never asked us to call him ‘Prince.’”

Abandoning pretense, Harry said, “And it wasn’t Sirius? Or you?”

“Definitely not.”

“Oh.” Harry stared into the fire. “I just thought—well, he’s helped me out a lot in Potions classes, the Prince has.”

“How old is this book, Harry?”

“I dunno, I’ve never checked.”

“Well, perhaps that will give you some clue as to when the Prince was at Hogwarts,” said Lupin.

Shortly after this, Fleur decided to imitate Celestina singing “A Cauldron Full of Hot, Strong Love,” which was taken by everyone, once they had glimpsed Mrs. Weasley’s expression, to be the cue to go to bed. Harry and Ron climbed all the way up to Ron’s attic bedroom, where a camp bed had been added for Harry.

Ron fell asleep almost immediately, but Harry delved into his trunk and pulled out his copy of Advanced Potion-Making before getting into bed. There he turned its pages, searching, until he finally found, at the front of the book, the date that it had been published. It was nearly fifty years old. Neither his father, nor his father’s friends, had been at Hogwarts fifty years ago. Feeling disappointed, Harry threw the book back into his trunk, turned off the lamp, and rolled over, thinking of werewolves and Snape, Stan Shunpike and the Half-Blood Prince, and finally falling into an uneasy sleep full of creeping shadows and the cries of bitten children…

“She’s got to be joking…”

Harry woke with a start to find a bulging stocking lying over the end of his bed. He put on his glasses and looked around; the tiny window was almost completely obscured with snow and, in front of it, Ron was sitting bolt upright in bed and examining what appeared to be a thick gold chain.

“What’s that?” asked Harry.

“It’s from Lavender,” said Ron, sounding revolted. “She earn honestly think I’d wear…”

Harry looked more closely and let out a shout of laughter, dangling from the chain in large gold letters were the words: “My sweetheart.”

“Nice,” he said. “Classy. You should definitely wear it in front ol Fred and George.”

“If you tell them,” said Ron, shoving the necklace out of sight under his pillow, “I—I—I’ll—”

“Stutter at me?” said Harry, grinning. “Come on, would I?”

“How could she think I’d like something like that, though?” Ron demanded of thin air, looking rather shocked.

“Well, think back,” said Harry. “Have you ever let it slip that you’d like to go out in public with the words ‘My Sweetheart’ round your neck?”

“Well… we don’t really talk much,” said Ron. “It’s mainly…”

“Snogging,” said Harry.

“Well, yeah,” said Ron. He hesitated a moment, then said, “Is Hermione really going out with McLaggen?”

“I dunno,” said Harry. “They were at Slughorn’s party together, but I don’t think it went that well.”

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He looked Lupin straight in the eye.	\|	Ron looked slightly more cheerful as he delved deeper into his stocking.

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