Buckbeak?
Tris looked at the blond fellow with the rather odd accent. The former deputy head of France's Department of Magical Law Enforcement?
Oh, that rang a bell.
Tris recalled a report he had read two months earlier.
After a mole had been uncovered in Britain's Ministry of Magic, possibly connected to an astonishingly large organization of Dark Wizards, countries across Europe had all conducted their own investigations.
Several countries had turned out to have problems.
The Ministries of Magic in several major European countries had actually been infiltrated. Few cases had been made public, but Tris reckoned those caught had been executed internally rather than exposed to spare the ministries the embarrassment.
Of those whose identities had been exposed, the highest-ranking was Buckbeak, the second-in-command of France's Department of Magical Law Enforcement.
The story had even appeared in the Daily Prophet. Britain and France had never gotten along, and that went for the wizarding world as well as ordinary people. So what if Britain's Ministry of Magic had been infiltrated too? At least none of its senior officials had been involved, right?
The Daily Prophet had therefore made a point of running it as a front-page story to mock the French Ministry of Magic.
When Tris had read it, nothing else had particularly struck him, but the name had sounded familiar. After a moment's thought, he had realized that it was the name of Hagrid's Hippogriff in the films!
How had he ended up a fugitive from the French Ministry of Magic?
What was this supposed to be?
Buckbeak, wanted by the Ministry of Magic?
He had muttered about it at the time and then moved on. There had been plenty of amusing scandals in the various Ministries of Magic back then, after all. He had never expected to