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xi. into the thick of it
The view from the Ravenclaw Tower windows was some of the best in the entire castle. But it was as if something was missing. The weather was warming. The Herbology gardens were in full bloom, the ground's butterflies migrating there, the brightly colored wings fluttering quickly as they hovered over the flowers. But there was no Hagrid visible from any of the castle windows. No one could see him walking the grounds with Fang, the scene didn't look right anymore. And things were no better inside the castle.
Matilda had gone once to the hospital wing to try and visit Hermione, but she'd found out visitors were now barred.
"We're taking no more chances," Madam Pomfrey told her severely through a crack in the infirmary door. "No, I'm sorry, there's every chance the attacker might come back to finish these people off..."
With Dumbledore gone, fear had spread as never before, so that the sun warming the castle walls outside seemed to stop at the mullioned windows. There was barely a face to be seen in the school that didn't look worried and tense, and any laughter that rang through the corridors sounded shrill and unnatural and was quickly stifled.
Matilda was constantly reciting Dumbledore's final words to herself, "I will only truly have left this school when none here are loyal to me... Help will always be given at Hogwarts to those who ask for it," who were they supposed to ask for help?
There was hardly a time when she found herself able to talk about the riddles they heard that night. Matilda wasn't allowed to go anywhere alone. No one was. The buddy method had quickly been enacted once Dumbledore left the castle. A housemate was to always be with you. And Matilda couldn't really talk about any of this with Padma or Luna.
Hagrid's hint about the spiders was far easier to understand—the trouble was, there didn't seem to be a single spider left in the castle to follow. Matilda would look everywhere she went. She was hampered, of course, by the fact that she wasn't allowed to go off on her own. Most of her fellow classmates seemed glad that they were being shepherded from class to class by teachers and the head of their houses, but Matilda found it very irksome.
One person, however, seemed to be thoroughly enjoying the atmosphere of terror and suspicion. Draco Malfoy was strutting around the school as though he had just been appointed Head Boy. Matilda knew he'd been pleased to see Dumbledore go. He was hardly quiet about it. One day in her Potions lesson about two weeks after Dumbledore and Hagrid left, when sitting right in front of Draco, Matilda once again had to hear him gloat to Crabbe, Goyle, and Pansy.
