Holly and Phoenix Feather

Harry was quiet over his ice-cream. It was raspberry and chocolate, with nuts on, and he hardly tasted a mouthful of it.

“What’s up?” said Hagrid.

“Nothing.”

Halfway down the glass, he came out with it at last.

“There was a girl in the robe shop,” said Harry. “She said there were too many of the other kind now. People whose families aren’t magic. She said half of them hadn’t heard of Hogwarts till an owl came.” He looked at the pavement. “I hadn’t.”

“She doesn’ know what she’s talkin’ about,” said Hagrid. “An’ she’d not have said it if she’d known whose son yeh were. Magic turns up where it likes, Harry. Yer mum was the first witch her family ever had, an’ there wasn’ a cleverer one in the school. An’ her own sister’s yer Aunt Petunia. Same mum, same dad. No, Harry, what’s in yer blood don’ mean nothin’.”

Harry finished his ice-cream in better spirits than he had left the robe shop.

They stopped for parchment and quills, and a bottle of ink that went a different colour as you wrote with it. His schoolbooks came from a crowded bookshop, and Hagrid had to haul him bodily away from a book of curses that he’d been leafing through with Dudley in mind. Next came a cauldron — pewter, because Hagrid put his foot down about a gold one — and a set of scales, and a telescope that folded up small. Then they went into the Apothecary’s, which smelt of bad eggs, but was so interesting that Harry forgave it.

Outside the Apothecary’s, Hagrid stopped short in the middle of the street.

“I never got yeh a present,” he said. “Eleven years old today, an’ all I’ve given yeh is a squashed cake.”

“You don’t need to. You’ve already —”

“I know I don’ need to. I want to.” Hagrid was looking up and down the row of shops. “Now. It says on yer list yeh can bring a creature. Yeh don’ want a toad. Nobody’s had a toad since I was a lad. An’ I can’t go near a cat without me eyes streamin’. An owl, that’s the thing. Yeh’ll not find a child at Hogwarts who doesn’ want one. An’ they fetch yer post, so yeh get some use out of ’em.”

It was twenty minutes before Harry came out again, blinking, from a shop so dark that the only way to tell you weren’t alone in it was the rustling of feathers and the feeling of eyes on you from every perch. He had a cage in his hands, and in it, fast asleep and tucked away under one wing, was a snowy owl. He’d chosen her himself, and he couldn’t stop thanking Hagrid for her.

“Only one thing left on yer list,” said Hagrid.

Half an hour after that, Harry came out of the wand shop in a daze, with a long thin box under his arm, and didn’t say a word until they were halfway down the Alley.

He hadn’t liked that man. The wandmaker had stared at him without blinking, and known him before he said a word. He knew which wands Harry’s mother and father had carried and what each had been good for, and he had reached out one long white finger and touched Harry’s scar.

Harry had held a wand once before: black plastic with white tips, out of a box with a rabbit on the lid, until Dudley snapped it over his knee. This was something else. He’d tried dozens, and the old man had grown happier with every one that wouldn’t do. The one that chose him in the end was holly and phoenix feather, eleven inches. It went warm in his hand and sent red and gold sparks shooting up the walls, and Hagrid cheered.

The old man didn’t. The phoenix whose feather was in Harry’s wand, he said softly, had given only one other, and he had sold that one too. It was the wand that had given Harry his scar.

Harry carried the box carefully all the way down the Alley, and kept thinking about it.

The sun was getting low by the time they came back out through the wall. People stared at them all the way across London, at Hagrid mostly and then at the owl, but Harry hardly noticed, and he didn’t take in where they’d got to until Hagrid had sat him down in a station and pushed a hamburger into his hand.

“Yeh’ve gone very quiet,” said Hagrid.

It wasn’t that he had nothing to say. Harry just didn’t know how to put it. He’d just had the best birthday of his life, and still he had to chew for a while before the words would come.

“Everybody looks at me as if I’ve done something. The people in the pub. The man with the wands. But I haven’t done anything. I didn’t know any of it was real until last night. The only magic I know is the kind with cards.” He turned the hamburger round. “What if I get there and I’m no good at it?”

Hagrid leaned across the table, and somewhere behind all that beard he was smiling.

“Nobody gets there knowin’ it, Harry. That’s what the school’s for. There’ll be plenty who never held a wand before September, same as you, an’ they’ll all be as scared as you are. It’s not easy, bein’ stared at. I know a bit about that.” He looked down at the vast length of himself, and Harry nearly smiled. “But yeh’ll be happy there. I was. I am.”

After that the questions came tumbling out of Harry one after another, and Hagrid answered every one, though not always in the order they’d been asked.

A Muggle, it turned out, was anybody with no magic in them. That took in the Dursleys, and all of Little Whinging, and nearly everybody Harry had ever met.

There were four Houses, and you were put into one on your first night and stayed in it for seven years. Hagrid had been in Gryffindor, and so had Harry’s mother and father. He spoke well of Ravenclaw and kindly of Hufflepuff. Of Slytherin he said first that it had turned out more bad wizards than the other three put together, then that there was good and bad in every House, to be fair, and then that he wouldn’t want Harry in it all the same. Harry thought about the girl in the robe shop. She was going to be in Slytherin. So had all her family been.

Then Harry asked about Durmstrang, because the girl had said she’d sooner go there than be a Hufflepuff. It was another school, Hagrid said, a long way north, and he wouldn’t send a dog to it. Harry asked what they taught there. Hagrid said more than they ought, and finished off his tea in one long swallow.

Hagrid walked him to the train that would take him back to the Dursleys, and pressed an envelope into his hand. It was his ticket: King’s Cross, the first of September.

“Don’ lose it,” said Hagrid, “an’ don’ let yer uncle near it.” He looked at the owl. “An’ yeh’ve her now, so there’s no excuse not ter write. She’ll find me.”

“Thanks,” said Harry. It didn’t seem anything like enough. “For all of it.”

“Get on with yeh,” said Hagrid, and went pink somewhere behind the beard.

The train began to move. Harry knelt up on the seat with his nose squashed against the glass, meaning to keep Hagrid in sight for as long as he could, but before the train had cleared the platform Hagrid was gone.

As the platform slid away the window darkened, and his own face came up in it. His hair was standing up at the front again, the way it always had. He put a hand up and felt the scar under his fingers, out where anybody could see it. Whatever Hagrid had done had lasted exactly as long as it was needed. Harry thought that was the mark of a good trick.

He sat down again with the cage on his knees and went back over the day. He kept getting stuck in the robe shop. The girl had looked pleased with herself all the way out of the door, the way Dudley looked when he’d got one over on him, and the longer Harry thought about it, the surer he was that she had been laughing at him. Every time he went over it he found something else he ought to have said, and by the time the train got in he had five.