The Girl Who Hid | ✓

|36| Quidditch World Cup

The stairs into the stadium were carpeted in rich purple. We clambered upward with the rest of the crowd, which slowly filtered away through doors into the stands to their left and right. The lot of us kept climbing, and at last we reached the top of the staircase and found ourselves in a small box, set at the highest point of the stadium and situated exactly halfway between the golden goal posts. About twenty purple-and-gilt chairs stood in two rows here, and I, filing into the front seats with the Weasleys, looked down upon a scene the likes of which I could never have imagined.

A hundred thousand witches and wizards were taking their places in the seats, which rose in levels around the long oval field. Everything was suffused with a mysterious golden light, which seemed to come from the stadium itself. The field looked smooth as velvet from our lofty position. At either end of the field stood three goal hoops, fifty feet high; right opposite us, almost at eye level, was a gigantic blackboard.

"Dobby?" said Harry incredulously.

I looked over to where Harry had been looking to a tiny creature looked up and stretched its fingers, revealing enormous brown eyes and a nose the exact size and shape of a large tomato. It wasn't Dobby— it was, however, unmistakably a house-elf, as Harry's friend Dobby had been. Harry had set Dobby free from his old owners, the Malfoy family during our second year at Hogwarts.

"Did sir just call me Dobby?" squeaked the elf curiously from between its fingers. Its voice was higher even than Dobby's had been, a teeny, quivering squeak of a voice, and I suspected — though it was very hard to tell with a house-elf — that this one might just be female. Ron and Hermione spun around in their seats to look. Though all of us had heard a lot about Dobby from Harry, we've had never actually met him. Even Mr. Weasley looked around in interest.

"Sorry," Harry told the elf, "I just thought you were someone I knew."

"But I knows Dobby too, sir!" squeaked the elf. She was shielding her face, as though blinded by light, though the Top Box was not brightly lit. "My name is Winky, sir— and you, sir—" Her dark brown eyes widened to the size of side plates as they rested upon Harry's scar. "You is surely Harry Potter!"

"Yeah, I am," said Harry.

"But Dobby talks of you all the time, sir!" she said, lowering her hands very slightly and looking awestruck.

"How is he?" said Harry. "How's freedom suiting him?"

"Ah, sir," said Winky, shaking her head, "ah sir, meaning no disrespect, sir, but I is not sure you did Dobby a favor, sir, when you is setting him free."

"Why?" said Harry, taken aback. "What's wrong with him?"

"Freedom is going to Dobby's head, sir," said Winky sadly. "Ideas above his station, sir. Can't get another position, sir."

"Why not?" said Harry.

Winky lowered her voice by a half-octave and whispered, "He is wanting paying for his work, sir."

"Paying?" I said blankly. "Well
— why shouldn't he be paid?"

Winky looked quite horrified at the idea and gave me a judged look. She closed her fingers slightly so that her face was half-hidden again.

"House-elves is not paid, miss!" she said in a muffled squeak. "No, no, no. I says to Dobby, I says, go find yourself a nice family and settle down, Dobby. He is getting up to all sorts of high jinks, sir, what is unbecoming to a house-elf. You goes racketing around like this, Dobby, I says, and next thing I hear you's up in front of the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, like some common goblin."

I nodded, I hadn't known that despite the fact growing up in a wizarding family. Lupin and I never had an house-elf, it wasn't a necessity. Harry continued talking to Winky until Cornelius Fudge came around. He greeted Harry and I like old friends. Quite odd that man. We had met before, and Fudge shook my and Harry's hands in a fatherly fashion, asked how we were, but only introduced Harry to the wizards on either side of him.