Astra

XLV - The Welcoming Feast

Just then, a highly excited, breathless voice called down the table.

"Hiya, Harry!" said Colin Creevey, Harry's fanboy.

"Hi, Colin," said Harry warily. Astra smirked at his response as Colin continued to try to get Harry's attention.

"Harry, guess what? Guess what, Harry? My brother's starting! My brother Dennis!"

"Er - good," said Harry.

"He's really excited!" said Colin, practically bouncing up and down in his seat. "I just hope he's in Gryffindor! Keep your fingers crossed, eh, Harry?"

"Er - yeah, all right," said Harry. He turned back to Hermione, Ron, Astra, and Nearly Headless Nick. "Brothers and sisters usually go in the same Houses, don't they?" he asked.

"Oh no, not necessarily," said Hermione. "Parvati Patil's twin's in Ravenclaw, and they're identical. You'd think they'd be together, wouldn't you?"

"Where's the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher?" said Hermione, who was now looking at the staff table.

Astra shrugged, wishing for the millionth time that Moony had just returned to teach, but no, his Gryffindor moral said he had to resign. She wondered whether if she had told him that James and Lily wanted to him to stay, then he would, but it seemed like his mind was made up already anyway.

"Wish Moony were back," Astra sighed. Harry looked at her strangely; for only knowing him as a professor, she knew an awful lot about him and acted as if she had known him her whole life.

"Maybe they couldn't get anyone!" said Hermione, looking anxious.

"Oh hurry up," Ron moaned, beside Harry, "I could eat a hippogriff."

The words were no sooner out of his mouth than the doors of the Great Hall opened and silence fell. Professor McGonagall was leading a long line of first years up to the top of the Hall. If Harry, Ron, and Hermione were wet, it was nothing to how these first years looked. They appeared to have swum across the lake rather than sailed. All of them were shivering with a combination of cold and nerves as they filed along the staff table and came to a halt in a line facing the rest of the school - all of them except the smallest of the lot, a boy with mousy hair, who was wrapped in what Astra recognized as Hagrid's moleskin overcoat. The coat was so big for him that it hooked as though he were draped in a furry black circus tent. His small face protruded from over the collar, looking almost painfully excited. When he had lined up with his terrified-looking peers, he caught Colin Creevey's eye, gave a double thumbs-up, and mouthed, 'I fell in the lake!' He looked positively delighted about it.

Professor McGonagall now placed a three-legged stool on the ground before the first years and, on top of it, an extremely old, dirty patched wizard's hat. The first years stared at it. So did everyone else. For a moment, there was silence. Then a long tear near the brim opened wide like a mouth, and the hat broke into song, like every year.

The Great Hall rang with applause as the Sorting Hat finished.

"That's not the song it sang when it Sorted us," said Harry, clapping along with everyone else.

"Sings a different one every year," said Astra. 

"It's got to be a pretty boring life, hasn't it, being a hat? I suppose it spends all year making up the next one," added Ron.

Professor McGonagall was now unrolling a large scroll of parchment.

"When I call out your name, you will put on the hat and sit on the stool," she told the first years. "When the hat announces your House, you will go and sit at the appropriate table.

"Ackerley, Stewart!"

A boy walked forward, visibly trembling from head to foot, picked up the Sorting Hat, put it on, and sat down on the stool.