“It was a laugh!” said Ron, upending a ketchup bottle over his sausages

“It was a laugh!” said Ron, upending a ketchup bottle over his sausages. “Just a laugh, Hermione, that's all!”

“Dangling people upside down by the ankle?” said Hermione. “Who puts their time and energy into making up spells like that?”

“Fred and George,” said Ron, shrugging, “it's their kind of thing. And, er—”

“My dad,” said Harry. He had only just remembered.

“What?” said Ron and Hermione together.

“My dad used this spell,” said Harry. “I—Lupin told me.”

This last part was not true; in fact, Harry had seen his father use the spell on Snape, but he had never told Ron and Hermione about that particular excursion into the

Pensieve. Now, however, a wonderful possibility occurred to him. Could the Half-Blood Prince possibly be—?

“Maybe your dad did use it, Harry,” said Hermione, “but he's not the only one. We've seen a whole bunch of people use it, in case you've forgotten. Dangling people

in the air. Making them float along, asleep, helpless.”

Harry stared at her. With a sinking feeling, he too remembered the behavior of the Death Eaters at the Quidditch World Cup. Ron came to his aid.

“That was different,” he said robustly. “They were abusing it. Harry and his dad were just having a laugh. You don't like the Prince, Hermione,” he added, pointing

a sausage at her sternly, “because he's better than you at Potions —”

“It's got nothing to do with that!” said Hermione, her cheeks reddening. “I just think it's very irresponsible to start performing spells when you don't even know

what they're for, and stop talking about ‘the Prince’ as if it's his title, I bet it's just a stupid nickname, and it doesn't seem as though he was a very nice person

to me!”

“I don't see where you get that from,” said Harry heatedly. “If he'd been a budding Death Eater he wouldn't have been boasting about being ‘half-blood,’ would he?

”

Even as he said it, Harry remembered that his father had been pure-blood, but he pushed the thought out of his mind; he would worry about that later.

“The Death Eaters can't all be pure-blood, there aren't enough pure-blood wizards left,” said Hermione stubbornly. “I expect most of them are half-bloods pretending

to be pure. It's only Muggle-borns they hate, they'd be quite happy to let you and Ron join up.”

“There is no way they'd let me be a Death Eater!” said Ron indignantly, a bit of sausage flying off the fork he was now brandishing at Hermione and hitting Ernie

Macmillan on the head. “My whole family are blood traitors! That's as bad as Muggle-borns to Death Eaters!”

“And they'd love to have me,” said Harry sarcastically. “We'd be best pals if they didn't keep trying to do me in.”

This made Ron laugh; even Hermione gave a grudging smile, and a distraction arrived in the shape of Ginny.

“Hey, Harry, I'm supposed to give you this.”

It was a scroll of parchment with Harry's name written upon it in familiar thin, slanting writing.

“Thanks, Ginny... It's Dumbledore's next lesson!” Harry told Ron and Hermione, pulling open the parchment and quickly reading its contents. “Monday evening!” He

felt suddenly light and happy. “Want to join us in Hogsmeade, Ginny?” he asked.

“I'm going with Dean—might see you there,” she replied, waving at them as she left.

Filch was standing at the oak front doors as usual, checking off the names of people who had permission to go into Hogsmeade. The process took even longer than normal

as Filch was triple-checking everybody with his Secrecy Sensor.