apartments, and then up again to even grander rooms and chambers, and all in their quest to find what she had forgotten to take with her when she escaped.
At one point, Box asked, “Are you lost?”
Turning to face him, Harry gave Box such a nasty look it would most certainly have curdled butter. He never asked her that question again.
Along the way, Box saw many more paintings, and all of them as brilliant in their creation as the first, but he avoided each and every one like they were infested with the plague.
Although Hagswords appeared large and formidable from the outside, inside its dimensions were even greater. It was so huge Box wondered if they would ever find what they were looking for. Feeling brave, he asked, “Where did you actually leave it?”
This question placed Harry into a quandary, a most difficult situation altogether, because if she answered him truthfully, Box would have a good idea of what she was up to. So instead of telling him the truth, she lied, saying, “In a study room.”
“Hmm,” he replied, unhappy with so vague a description. Risking her anger further, he asked, “Isn’t there a shortcut?”
“Questions, questions, that’s all I get from you,” she said, “stupid questions.”
“I was only asking,” he mumbled.
Just then, they heard the sound of footsteps at the far end of the hallway they were passing through. Extinguishing her wand, Harry ducked behind a large stone statue, pulling Box so hard after her he almost fell over.
The sound of footsteps grew louder. Peering carefully, secretly, from behind the statue, the cousins tried to see who it might be, but without the light offered by her wand they saw little.
Conversation; they heard conversation, so more than the one person approaching, but why now, so late in the evening? Had they been spotted? Were they about to be ferreted out, with no more dignity than two miserable wild rabbits? Harry and Box shrank further behind the statue, thanking its creator for having the foresight to have carved it.
The talking, the sound of what could only be described as heated conversation, grew louder. “Who are they?” Box whispered.
“Shush,” Harry replied, “they might hear you.”
When the footsteps were almost upon them, they stopped, and for a moment both Harry and Box thought they were discovered. Then the conversation resumed and the cousins being so close heard each and every word of it.
“And of course it goes without saying, that dreadful child, Harry Rotter, must be stopped,” said the first voice, a male.
“I wholeheartedly agree,” said the second voice, a female. “The future of the entire school rests upon it.”
“We know she is on her way, but the owls were unable to stop her,” said the first voice.
“In stopping her, yes, I agree,” said the female. “But they were excellent at intelligence gathering. I hear she has an accomplice, a Muddle by all accounts”
“A Muddle? You must be joking! A Muddle would be more of a hindrance than a help.”
Box resisted the urge to jump up and punch the man squarely on the nose.
“I totally agree, but Harry is on her way, and for all that we know she might already be here, skulking about somewhere, perhaps even listening to us.” Leaning towards the statue, the woman inspected it as if it were alive.
“What do you think she is up to?” asked the man, “One minute she can’t get away from Hagswords fast enough, then the next thing we know she’s blazing a trail to our very doorstep!”
“She always was a freethinker,” said the woman.
“A free thinker? More like a renegade!”
“Freethinker or renegade, it makes no matter,” the woman continued. “What does matter is that she’s on her way.” She paused for a moment, and then beginning again said, “What puzzles me is why she is doing it. It’s almost as of she has forgotten something…”
“Forgotten her senses, if you ask me,” the man said defiantly, yet sounding strangely worried. “Are the remaining owls on duty?” he asked.
“Yes, every last one of them,” said the woman, finally relinquishing her gaze from the statue. “And if Harry gets anywhere near Hagswords, she will be in for the fright of her young life.” The man and the woman began walking away, and the sound of their footsteps echoed down the long hallway until, turning a corner, they finally went silent.
“Phew, that was close,” Box whispered, wiping the sweat from his brow.
“Too close,” said Harry. “We must hurry.”
“I’m with you,” he replied, starting off down the hallway, in the same direction the voices had gone.
“Box!”
Turning, he said, “Yes?”
“It’s this way.”
“Oh. I knew that,” he said. “I was just stretching my legs…”
As they made their way down the corridor, in the opposite direction the man and the woman had taken, Box asked, “Anyway, who were those two?”
“The first one, the man,” Harry explained, “is Albert Tumbledown.”
Laughing, Box said, “Tumbledown? That’s a silly name.”
“If you will allow me to continue?”
Stifling a chuckle, he said, “Sorry, go on.”
“As I was saying, Albert J Tumbledown is the Principal, the head of Hagswords, and also our Alchemist. The woman is called McGonagain, Professor McGonagain. She is the Vice Principal. They’re as thick as thieves, those two.”
For a second time in as many minutes, Box found a name incredibly funny, and he began laughing again.
“Do you want to let everyone in the entire school know that we are here?” Harry asked, fuming at Box’s weird sense of humour.
“No, I don’t,” he apologised. “Sorry.”
They set off again, and now that the pressure was on, Harry appeared to be taking the shortcuts Box had asked her about, earlier. Passing through sumptuously decorated classrooms with beautifully constructed stained glass windows, through moth-eaten secret passageways that led to even more sumptuously decorated classrooms with even grander stained glass windows, their journey continued until, standing outside a huge and incredibly formidable door, Harry said, “This is where I left it.”
Feeling small and dreadfully inadequate, Box asked, “Here?”
“Yes,” she said, “I left it in here.”
Turning the handle, trying to push the door open, Box found it locked tight. “I know it sound like a cliché,” he said, “but how do we get in?”
Withdrawing her new electro magical wand, Harry smiled, and said, “With the use of this, of course.”
Standing back, Box waited for his cousin to open the door, and judging from the wands previous performances he had no intention of being anywhere near the tremendous, but sometimes unpredictable, power.
Kneeling, holding her wand with both hands, Harry asked, “Are you ready?”
Shielding his eyes, in case of a flash, Box replied, “Yep, let her rip.”
As per usual, Harry waved the wand from left to right and then left again, then speaking in a low hushed voice, she said, “Open Ses Me.”
“Is that it?”
“Less is more,” she replied, turning the handle and (all too easily?) pushing the door open.
Staring in through the doorway, Box felt a terrible sense of foreboding. Harry, however, simply strolled into the room like she owned the place. Then turning round, she said, “Come in and close the door, there’s a frightful draft in here.”
A frightful draft is something that can be created by many different things, one of which is hundreds of white-feathered wings all flapping in unison, swooping down en masse, fully intent on killing two interfering cousins…
As the door closed behind him, something caught Box’s eye, and looking upwards he saw the grave threat swooping down from above. Shouting, he said, “Run, Harry, run for your life!”
“Get out! Get out – quick!” Harry shouted.
Pulling frantically on the handle, the two cousi
ns tried desperately to open it, but the door remained stubbornly shut.
“Has it been locked?” Box asked.
Harry said nothing she just pulled and pulled at the handle.
“Use your wand!” Box shouted, “Use your wand!”
She tried, Harry tried desperately to use her new wand, to wave it in front of her, to ward off the owls, but the attack of the killer birds was so fierce, so brutal and so intense she was unable to do anything more than a paltry attempt to protect herself.
“Use the button!” Box shouted again.
“Which one?” she asked, in a total disarray.
“Anyone – JUST DO IT!” he hollered, as one of the attacking owls struck him in the face, slitting his skin like it was butter. Blood oozed from the cut.
Trying her best to ignore the melee, Harry pressed one of the buttons, and being more concerned with saving her life than studying small, shiny switches, she had no idea which of them she had pressed. It was the second one, because huge flames shot out from the wand, scorching the owls like so many moths to a flame. Screeching, hissing and spitting their hate, the birds fell to the floor, quite dead. The room stank of burning feathers and death.
“I hope that’s the last of them,” whispered Box.
“I fear the time for whispering has passed,” said Harry, her eyes facing upwards to where the birds had seconds earlier been lying in wait, where the sound of so many footsteps scrambling in to action on the floor above, signalled another threat.
“Get what you came for, and let’s be off,” Box shouted, “before everyone in the school is onto us!”
Going over to a particularly ornate cabinet, Harry forced its lock. And despite her best