"Have you heard? A fugitive from your wizarding world has escaped. Do you know any details about him? He's giving us quite a headache."
Over dinner, Duke Philip carefully cut into the foie gras before him and spoke in an elegant, casual tone.
"I know a little. He's a vicious murderer who once blew up an entire street with a single spell. Mm, this caviar is pretty good."
Given Xu Yue's current culinary skills, food that he considered pretty good was exceptionally rare. It had won him over purely through the quality of its ingredients.
Whether it was rarity, difficulty of acquisition, or shipping costs, every bite he took was money.
Sirius had still escaped from prison.
That had practically been inevitable.
Ron, who had originally planned to invite Xu Yue to his home for the summer, had already told him that his family had won a grand prize, so they had gone to Egypt for a vacation.
Since they had won the prize, they naturally had to cooperate with the publicity campaign, and so a photograph of the whole family had appeared in the Daily Prophet.
The large rat Ron held on his shoulder in that photograph was the reason Sirius had been forced to escape!
For Sirius, whether or not he escaped depended entirely on whether he wanted to. As an unregistered Animagus, he had that ability.
The only reason he had remained in Azkaban, suffering under the Dementors, was to atone for his sins. He had always believed that he was responsible for the deaths of his friends, James Potter and his wife.
When they learned that the Dark Lord intended to hunt down the Potter family during the war against him, they came up with the Fidelius Charm as a protective spell.
They publicly declared that