Fudge slipped his hands into the pockets of his robes. His smile remained, the curve of his mouth remained, and the light in his eyes remained. He walked ahead with light steps, his boots crunching over the frozen mud like ice breaking beneath his feet.
Harry followed behind him with his head lowered. The light from his handheld lamp cast a swaying, irregular circle across Fudge's back. It moved between Fudge's shoulder blades, from left to right, then back again, like a frantic insect that could find nowhere to land, nowhere to settle.
The blue torches lining the corridor cast cold shadows across Harry's face, freezing his expression into a nameless painting without warmth. He watched Fudge's back—the shoulders of those fine-striped robes were tailored perfectly, gleaming dully under the torchlight like a gray flag billowing in the wind.
He heard a low, muffled sob from behind him, as though something had smothered it. The sound had not come from a throat, but from a chest, squeezed out from the deepest part of that huge half-giant body.
It was not loud, but it was heavy—heavy enough to pass through the wooden door, the wind, Fudge's brisk footsteps, and the pot of porridge still boiling uncontrollably in Harry's mind, before dropping into his ears like a stone thrown into deep water. It had sunk, but the ripples it stirred kept spreading outward, ring after ring, refusing to stop.
They emerged through the visitors' entrance and stood inside the red telephone box. Fudge reached out and pulled open the glass door, but he did not step aside. Instead, he turned sideways and looked down at Harry. The lamp above the telephone box cast a dim yellow circle across his face, deepening the shadows in his eye sockets.
"Mr. Potter." Fudge lowered his