Mine

“What’s the problem?” asked Harry.
“Problem? There’s no problem,” said Ron, still refusing to look at Harry. “Not according to you, anyways.”
There were several plunks on the canvas over their heads. It had started to rain.
“Well, you’ve obviously got a problem,” said Harry. “Spit it out, will you?”
Ron swung his long legs off the bed and sat up. He looked mean, unlike himself.
“All right, I’ll spit it out. Don’t expect me to skip up and down the tent because there’s some other damn thing we’ve got to find. Just add it to the list of stuff you don’t know.”
“I don’t know?” repeated Harry. “I don’t know?”
Plunk, plunk, plunk. The rain was falling harder and heavier; it pattered on the leaf-strewn bank all around them and into the river chattering through the dark. Dread doused Harry’s jubilation; Ron was saying exactly what he had suspected and feared him to be thinking.
“It’s not like I’m not having the time of my life here,” said Ron, “you know, with my arm mangled and nothing to eat and freezing my backside off every night. I just hoped, you know, after we’d been running round a few weeks, we’d have achieved something.”
“Ron,” Hermione said, but in such a quiet voice that Ron could pretend not to have heard it over the loud tattoo the rain was beating on the tent.
“I thought you knew what you’d signed up for,” said Harry.
“Yeah, I thought I did too.”
“So what part of it isn’t living up to your expectations?” asked Harry. Anger was coming to his defense now. “Did you think we’d be staying in five-star hotels? Finding a Horcrux every other day? Did you think you’d be back to Mummy by Christmas?”
“We thought you knew what you were doing!” shouted Ron, standing up, and his words Harry like scalding knives. “We thought Dumbledore had told you what to do, we thought you had a real plan!”
“Ron!” said Hermione, this time clearly audible over the rain thundering on the tent roof, but again, he ignored her.
“Well, sorry to let you down,” said Harry, his voice quite calm even though he felt hollow, inadequate. “I’ve been straight with you from the start. I told you everything Dumbledore told me. And in the case you haven’t noticed, we’ve found one Horcrux—”
“Yeah, and we’re about as near getting rid of it as we are to finding the rest of them—nowhere effing near in other words.”
“take off the locket, Ron,” Hermione said, her voice unusually high. “Please take it off. You wouldn’t be talking like this if you hadn’t been wearing it all day.”
“Yeah, he would,” said Harry, who did not want excuses made for Ron. “D’you think I haven’t noticed the two of you whispering behind my back? D’you think I didn’t guess you were thinking this stuff?
“Harry, we weren’t—”
“Don’t lie!” Ron hurled at her. “You said it too, you said you were disappointed, you said you’d thought he had a bit more to go on than—”
“I didn’t say it like that—Harry, I didn’t!” she cried.
The rain was pounding the tent, tears were pouring down Hermione’s face, and the excitement of a few minutes before had vanished as if it had never been, a short-lived
 
firework that had flared and died, leaving everything dark, wet, and cold. The sword of Gryffindor was hidden they knew not where, and their were three teenagers in a tent whose only achievement was not, yet, to be dead.
“So why are you still here?” Harry asked Ron.
“Search me,” said Ron.
“Go home then,” said Harry.
“Yeah, maybe I will!” shouted Ron, and he took several steps toward Harry, who did not back away. “Didn’t you hear what they said about my sister? But you don’t give a rat’s fart, do you, it’s only the Forbidden Forest, Harry I’ve-Faced-Worse Potter doesn’t care what happened to her in there—well, I do, all right, giant spiders and mental stuff—”
“I was only saying—she was with the others, they were with Hagrid—”
“Yeah, I get it, you don’t care! And what about the rest of my family, ‘the
Weasleys don’t need another kid injured,’ did you hear that?”	“Yeah, I—”
“Not bothered what it meant, though?”
“Ron!” said Hermione, forcing her way between them. “I don’t think it means anything new has happened, anything we don’t know about; think, Ron, Bill’s already scared, plenty of people must have seen that George has lost an ear by now, and you’re supposed to be on your deathbed with spattergroit, I’m sure that’s all he meant—”
“Oh, you’re sure, are you? Right then, well, I won’t bother myself about them. It’s all right for you, isn’t it, with your parents safely out of the way—”
“My parents are dead!” Harry bellowed.
“And mine could be going the same way!” yelled Ron.
“Then GO!” roared Harry. “Go back to them, pretend you’re got over your spattergroit and Mummy’ll be able to feed you up and—”
Ron made a sudden movement: Harry reacted, but before either wand was clear of its owner’s pocket, Hermione had raised her own.
“Prestego!” she cried, and an invisible shield expanded between her and Harry on the one side and Ron on the other; all of them were forced backward a few steps by the strength of the spell, and Harry and Ron glared from either side of the transparent barrier as though they were seeing each other clearly for the first time. Harry felt a corrosive hatred toward Ron: Something had broken between them.
“Leave the Horcrux,” Harry said.
Ron wrenched the chain from over his head and cast the locket into a nearby chair. He turned to Hermione.
“What are you doing?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are you staying, or what?”
“I . . .” She looked anguished. “Yes—yes, I’m staying. Ron, we said we’d go with Harry, we said we’d help—”
“I get it. You choose him.”
“Ron, no—please—come back, come back!”
She was impeded by her own Shield Charm; by the time she had removed it he had already stormed into the night. Harry stood quite still and silent, listening to her sobbing and calling Ron’s name amongst the trees.
After a few minutes she returned, her sopping hair plastered to her face.
“He’s g-g-gone! Disapparated!”
 
She threw herself into a chair, curled up, and started to cry.
Harry felt dazed. He stooped, picked up the Horcrux, and placed it around his own neck. He dragged blankets off Ron’s bunk and threw them over Hermione. Then he climbed onto his own bed and stared up at the dark canvas roof, listening to the pounding of the rain.
Chapter Sixteen Godric’s Hollow
When Harry woke the following day it was several seconds before he remembered what had happened. Then he hoped childishly, that it had been a dream, that Ron was still there and had never left. Yet by turning his head on his pillow he could see Ron's deserted bunk. It was like a dead body in the way it seems to draw his eyes. Harry jumped down from his own bed, keeping his eyes averted from Ron's. Hermione, who was already busy in the kitchen, did not wish Harry good morning, but turned her face away quickly as he went by. He's gone, Harry told himself. He's gone. He had to keep thinking it as he washed and dressed as though repetition would dull the shock of it. He's gone and he's not coming back. And that was the simple truth of it, Harry knew, because their protective enchantments meant that it would be impossible, once they vacated this spot, for Ron to find them again. He and Hermione ate breakfast in silence. Hermione's eyes were puffy and red; she looked as if she had not slept. They packed up their things, Hermione dawdling. Harry knew why she wanted to spin out their time on the riverbank; several times he saw her look up eagerly, and he was sure she had deluded herself into thinking that she heard footsteps through the heavy rain, but no red-haired figure appeared between the trees. Every time Harry imitated her, looked around ( for he could not help hoping a little, himself) and saw nothing but rain-swept woods, another little parcel of fury exploded inside him. He could hear Ron saying, "We thought you knew what you were doing!", and he resumed packing with a hard knot in the pit of his stomach.
The muddy river beside them was rising rapidly and would soon spill over onto their bank. They had lingered a good hour after they would usually have departed their campsite. Finally having entirely repacked the beaded bag three times, Hermione seemed unable to find any more reasons to delay: She and Harry gasped hands and Disapparated, reappearing on a windswept heather-covered hillside. The instant they arrived, Hermione dropped Harry's hand and walked away from him, finally sitting down on a large rock, her face on her knees, shaking with what he knew were sobs. He watched her, supposing that he ought to go and comfort her, but something kept him rooted to the spot. Everything inside him felt cold and tight: Again he saw the contemptuous expression on Ron's face. Harry strode off through the heather, walking in a large circle with the distraught Hermione at its center, casting the spell she usually performed to ensure their protection.
They did not discuss Ron at all over the next few days. Harry was determined never to mention his name again and Hermione seemed to know that it was no use forcing the issue, although sometimes at night when she thought he was sleeping, he would hear her
 
crying. Meanwhile Harry had started bringing out the Marauder's map and examining it by wandlight. He was waiting for the moment when Ron's labeled dot would reappear in the corridors of Hogwarts, proving that he had returned to the comfortable castle, protected by his status of pureblood. However, Ron did not appear on the map and after a while Harry found himself taking it out simply to stare at Ginny's name in the girl's dormitory, wondering whether the intensity with which he gazed at it might break into her sleep, that she would somehow know he was thinking about her, hoping that she was all right.
By day, hey devoted themselves to trying to determine the possible locations of Gryffindor's sword, but the more they talked about the places in which Dumbledore might have hidden it, the more desperate and far-fetched their speculation became. Cudgel his brains though he might, Harry could not remember Dumbledore ever mentioning a place in which he might hide something. There were moments when he did not know whether he was angrier with Ron or with Dumbledore. We thought you knew what you were doing ...We thought Dumbledore had told you what to do ... We thought you had a real plan!
He could not hide it from himself: Ron had been right. Dumbledore had left him with virtually nothing. They had discovered one Horcrux, but they had no means of destroying it: The others were as unattainable as they had ever been. Hopelessness threatened to engulf him. He was staggered now to think of his own presumption in accepting his friends' offers to accompany him on this meandering, pointless journey. he knew nothing, he had no ideas, and he was constantly, painfully on the alert for any indications that Hermione too was about to tell him that she had had enough. That she was leaving.
They were spending many evenings in near silence and Hermione took to bringing out Phineas Nigellus's portrait and propping it up in a chair, as though he might fill part of the gaping hole left by Ron's departure. Despite his previous assertion that he would never visit them again, Phineas Nigellus did not seem able to resist the chance to find out more about what Harry was up to and consented to reappear, blindfolded, every few days of so. Harry was even glad to see him, because he was company, albeit of a snide and taunting kind. They relished any news about what was happening at Hogwarts, though Phineas Nigellus was not an ideal informer. He venerated Snape, the first Slytherin headmaster since he himself had controlled the school, and they had to be careful not to criticize or ask impertinent questions about Snape, or Phineas Nigellus would instantly leave his painting.
However, he did let drop certain snippets. Snape seemed to be facing a constant, low level of mutiny from a hard core of students. Ginny had been banned from going into Hogsmeade. Snape had reinstated Umbridge's old decree forbidding gatherings of three or more students or any unofficial student societies. From all of these things, Harry deduced that Ginny, and probably Neville and Luna along with her, had been doing their best to continue Dumbledore's Army. This scant news made Harry want to see Ginny so badly it felt like a stomachache; but it also made him think of Ron again, and of Dumbledore, and of Hogwarts itself, which he missed nearly as much as his ex-girlfriend. Indeed, as Phineas Niggellus talked about Snape's crackdown, Harry experienced a split second of madness when he imagined simply going back to school to join the destabilization of Snape’s regime: Being fed and having a soft bad, and other people
 
being in charge, seemed the most wonderful prospect in the world at this moment. But then he remembered that he was Undesirable Number One, that there was a ten-thousand Galleon price on his head, and that to walk into Hogwarts these days was just as dangerous as walking into the Ministry of Magic. Indeed, Phineas Nigellus inadvertently emphasized this fact my slipping in leading questions about Harry and Hermione's whereabouts. Hermione shoved him back inside the beaded bag every time he did this, and Phineas Nigellus invariably refused to reappear for several days after these unceremonious good-byes.
The weather grew colder and colder. They did not dare remain in any area too long, so rather than staying in the south of England, where a hard ground frost was the worst of their worries, they continued to meander up and down the country, braving a mountainside, where sleet pounded the tent; a wide, flat marsh, where the tent was flooded with chill water; and a tiny island in the middle of a Scottish loch, where snow half buried the tent in the night. They had already spotted Christmas Trees twinkling from several sitting room windows before there came an evening when Harry resolved to suggest again, what seemed to him the only unexplored avenue left to them. They had just eaten an unusually good meal: Hermione had been to a supermarket under the Invisibility Cloak (scrupulously dropping the money into an open till as she left), and Harry thought that she might be more persuadable than usual on a stomach full of spaghetti Bolognese and tinned pears.
He had also had the foresight to suggest that they take a few hours’ break from wearing the Horcrux, which was hanging over the end of the bunk beside him.
“Hermione?”
“Hmm?” She was curled up in one of the sagging armchairs with The Tales of Beedle the Bard. He could not imagine how much more she could get out of the book, which was not, after all, very long, but evidently she was still deciphering something in it, because Spellman’s Syllabary lay open on the arm of the chair.
Harry cleared his throat. He felt exactly as he had done on the occasion, several years previously, when he had asked Professor McGonagall whether he could go into Hogsmeade, despite the fact that he had not persuaded the Dursleys to sign his permission slip.
“Hermione, I’ve been thinking, and –“
“Harry, could you help me with something?”
Apparently she had not been listening to him. She leaned forward and held out The Tales of Beedle the Bard.
“Look at that symbol,” she said, pointing to the top of a page. Above what Harry assumed was the title of the story (being unable to read runes, he could not be sure), there was a picture of what looked like a triangular eye, its pupil crossed with a vertical line.
“I never took Ancient Runes, Hermione.”
“I know that; but it isn’t a rune and it’s not in the syllabary, either. All along I thought it was a picture of an eye, but I don’t think it is! It’s been inked in, look, somebody’s drawn it there, it isn’t really part of the book. Think, have you ever seen it before?”
“No . . . No, wait a moment.” Harry looked closer. “Isn’t it the same symbol Luna’s dad was wearing round his neck?”
 
“Well, that’s what I thought too!”
“Then it’s Grindelwald’s mark.”
She stared at him, openmouthed.
“What?”
“Krum told me . . .”
He recounted the story that Viktor Krum had told him at the wedding. Hermione looked astonished.
“Grindelwald’s mark?”
She looked from Harry to the weird symbol and back again. “I’ve never heard that Grindelwald had a mark. There’s no mention of it in anything I’ve ever read about him.”
“Well, like I say, Krum reckoned that symbol was carved on a wall at Durmstrang, and Grindelwald put it there.”
She fell back into the old armchair, frowning.
“That’s very odd. If it’s a symbol of Dark Magic, what’s it doing in a book of children’s stories?”
“Yeah, it is weird,” said Harry. “And you’d think Scrimgeour would have recognized it. He was Minister, he ought to have been expert on Dark stuff.”
“I know. . . . Perhaps he thought it was an eye, just like I did. All the other stories have little pictures over the titles.”
She did not speak, but continued to pore over the strange mark. Harry tried again.
“Hermione?”
“Hmm?”
“I’ve been thinking. I – I want to go to Godric’s Hollow.”
She looked up at him, but her eyes were unfocused, and he was sure she was still thinking about the mysterious mark on the book.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’ve been wondering that too. I really think we’ll have to.”
“Did you hear me right?” he asked.
“Of course I did. You want to go to Godric’s Hollow. I agree. I think we should. I mean, I can’t think of anywhere else it could be either. It’ll be dangerous, but the more I think about it, the more likely it seems it’s there.”
“Er – what’s there?” asked Harry.
At that, she looked just as bewildered as he felt.
“Well, the sword, Harry! Dumbledore must have known you’d want to go back there, and I mean, Godric’s Hollow is Godric Gryffindor’s birthplace –“
“Really? Gryffindor came from Godric’s Hollow?”
“Harry, did you ever even open A History of Magic?”
“Erm,” he said, smiling for what felt like the first time in months: The muscles in his face felt oddly stiff. “I might’ve opened it, you know, when I bought it . . . just the once. . . .”
“Well, as the village is named after him I’d have thought you might have made the connection,” said Hermione. She sounded much more like her old self than she had done of late; Harry half expected her to announce that she was off to the library. “There’s a bit about the village in A History of Magic, wait . . .”
She opened the beaded bag and rummaged for a while, finally extracting her copy of their old school textbook, A History of Magic by Bathilda Bagshot, which she thumbed through until finding the page she wanted.
 
“’Upon the signature of the International Statute of Secrecy in 1689, wizards went into hiding for good. It was natural, perhaps, that they formed their own small communities within a community. Many small villages and hamlets attracted several magical families, who banded together for mutual support and protection. The villages of Tinworsh in Cornwall, Upper Flagley in Yorkshire, and Ottery St. Catchpole on the south coast of England were notable homes to knots of Wizarding families who lived alongside tolerant and sometimes Confunded Muggles. Most celebrated of these half-magical dwelling places is, perhaps, Godric’s Hollow, the West Country village where the great wizard Godric Gryffindor was born, and where Bowman Wright, Wizarding smith, forged the first Golden Snitch. The graveyard is full of the names of ancient magical families, and this accounts, no doubt, for the stories of hauntings that have dogged the little church beside it for many centuries.’
“You and your parents aren’t mentioned.” Hermione said, closing the book, “because Professor Bagshot doesn’t cover anything later than the end of the nineteenth century. But you see? Godric’s Hollow, Godric Gryffindor, Gryffindor’s sword; don’t you think Dumbledore would have expected you to make the connection?”
“Oh yeah . . .”
Harry did not want to admit that he had not been thinking about the sword at all when he suggested they go to Godric’s Hollow. For him, the lore of the village lay in his parents’ graves, the house where he had narrowly escaped death, and in the person of Bathilda Bagshot.
“Remember what Muriel said?” he asked eventually.
“Who?”
“You know,” he hesitated. He did not want to say Ron’s name. “Ginny’s great-aunt. At the wedding. The one who said you had skinny ankles.”
“Oh,” said Hermione. It was a sticky moment: Harry knew that she had sensed Ron’s name in the offing. He rushed on:
“She said Bathilda Bagshot still lived in Godric’s Hollow.”
“Bathilda Bagshot,” murmured Hermione, running her index finger over Bathilda’s embossed name on the front cover of A History of Magic. “Well, I suppose –“
She gasped so dramatically that Harry’s insides turned over; he drew his wand, looking around at the entrance, half expecting to see a hand forcing its way through the entrance flap, but there was nothing there.
“What?” he said, half angry, half relieved. “What did you do that for? I thought you’d seen a Death Eater unzipping the tent, at least –“
“Harry, what if Bathilda’s got the sword? What if Dumbledore entrusted it to her?”
Harry considered this possibility. Bathilda would be an extremely old woman by now, and according to Muriel, she was “gaga.” Was it likely that Dumbledore would have hidden the sword of Gryffindor with her? If so, Harry felt that Dumbledore had left a great deal to chance: Dumbledore had never revealed that he had replaced the sword with a fake, nor had he so much as mentioned a friendship with Bathilda. Now, however, was not the moment to cast doubt on Hermione’s theory, not when she was so surprisingly willing to fall in with Harry’s dearest wish.
“Yeah, he might have done! So, are we going to go to Godric’s Hollow?”
 
“Yes, but we’ll have to think it through carefully, Harry.” She was sitting up now, and Harry could tell that the prospect of having a plan again had lifted her mood as much as his. “We’ll need to practice Disapparating together under the Invisibility Cloak for a start, and perhaps Disillusionment Charms would be sensible too, unless you think we should go the whole hog and use Polyjuice Potion? In that case we’ll need to collect hair from somebody. I actually think we’d better do that, Harry, the thicker our disguises the better. . . .”
Harry let her talk, nodding and agreeing whenever there was a pause, but his mind had left the conversation. For the first time since he had discovered that the sword in Gringotts was a fake, he felt excited.
He was about to go home, about to return to the place where he had had a family. It was in Godric’s Hollow that, but for Voldemort, he would have grown up and spent every school holiday. He could have invited friends to his house. . . . He might even have had brothers and sisters. . . . It would have been his mother who had made his seventeenth birthday cake. The life he had lost had hardly ever seemed so real to him as at this moment, when he knew he was about to see the place where it had been taken from him. After Hermione had gone to bed that night, Harry quietly extracted his rucksack from Hermione’s beaded bag, and from inside it, the photograph album Hagrid had given him so long ago. For the first time in months, he perused the old pictures of his parents, smiling and waving up at him from the images, which were all he had left of them now.
Harry would gladly have set out for Godric’s Hollow the following day, but Hermione had other ideas. Convinced as she was that Voldemort would expect Harry to return to the scene of his parents’ deaths, she was determined that they would set off only after they had ensured that they had the best disguises possible. It was therefore a full week later – once they had surreptitiously obtained hairs from innocent Muggles who were Christmas shopping, and had practiced Apparating and Disapparating while underneath the Invisibility Cloak together – that Hermione agreed to make the journey.
They were to Apparate to the village under cover of darkness, so it was late afternoon when they finally swallowed Polyjuice Potion, Harry transforming into a balding, middle-aged Muggle man, Hermione into his small and rather mousy wife. The beaded bag containing all of their possessions (apart from the Horcrux, which Harry was wearing around his neck) was tucked into an inside pocket of Hermione’s buttoned-up coat. Harry lowered the Invisibility Cloak over them, then they turned into the suffocating darkness once again.
Heart beating in his throat, Harry opened his eyes. They were standing hand in hand in a snowy lane under a dark blue sky, in which the night’s first stars were already glimmering feebly. Cottages stood on either side of the narrow road, Christmas decorations twinkling in their windows. A short way ahead of them, a glow of golden streetlights indicated the center of the village.
“All this snow!” Hermione whispered beneath the cloak. “Why didn’t we think of snow? After all our precautions, we’ll leave prints! We’ll just have to get rid of them – you go in front, I’ll do it –“
Harry did not want to enter the village like a pantomime horse, trying to keep themselves concealed while magically covering their traces.
 
“Let’s take off the Cloak,” said Harry, and when she looked frightened, “Oh, come on, we don’t look like us and there’s no one around.”
He stowed the Cloak under his jacket and they made their way forward unhampered, the icy air stinging their faces as they passed more cottages. Any one of them might have been the one in which James and Lily had once lived or where Bathilda lived now. Harry gazed at the front doors, their snow-burdened roofs, and their front porches, wondering whether he remembered any of them, knowing deep inside that it was impossible, that he had been little more than a year old when he had left this place forever. He was not even sure whether he would be able to see the cottage at all; he did not know what happened when the subjects of a Fidelius Charm died. Then the little lane along which they were walking curved to the left and the heart of the village, a small square, was revealed to them.
Strung all around with colored lights, there was what looked like a war memorial in the middle, partly obscured by a windblown Christmas tree. There were several shops, a post office, a pub, and a little church whose stained-glass windows were glowing jewel-bright across the square.
The snow here had become impacted: It was hard and slippery where people had trodden on it all day. Villagers were crisscrossing in front of them, their figures briefly illuminated by streetlamps. They heard a snatch of laughter and pop music as the pub door opened and closed; then they heard a carol start up inside the little church.
“Harry, I think it’s Christmas Eve!” said Hermione.
“Is it?”
He had lost track of the date; they had not seen a newspaper for weeks.
“I’m sure it is,” said Hermione, her eyes upon the church. “They . . . they’ll be in there, won’t they? Your mum and dad? I can see the graveyard behind it.”
Harry felt a thrill of something that was beyond excitement, more like fear. Now that he was so near, he wondered whether he wanted to see after all. Perhaps Hermione knew how he was feeling, because she reached for his hand and took the lead for the first time, pulling him forward. Halfway across the square, however, she stopped dead.
“Harry, look!”
She was pointing at the war memorial. As they had passed it, it had transformed. Instead of an obelisk covered in names, there was a statue of three people: a man with untidy hair and glasses, a woman with long hair and a kind, pretty face, and a baby boy sitting in his mother’s arms. Snow lay upon all their heads, like fluffy white caps.
Harry drew closer, gazing up into his parents’ faces. He had never imagined that there would be a statue. . . . How strange it was to see himself represented in stone, a happy baby without a scar on his forehead. . . .
“C’mon,” said Harry, when he had looked his fill, and they turned again toward the church. As they crossed the road, he glanced over his shoulder; the statue had turned back into the war memorial.
The singing grew louder as they approached the church. It made Harry’s throat constrict, it reminded him so forcefully of Hogwarts, of Peeves bellowing rude versions of carols from inside suits of armor, of the Great Hall’s twelve Christmas trees, of Dumbledore wearing a bonnet he had won in a cracker, of Ron in a hand-knitted sweater. . . .
 
There was a kissing gate at the entrance to the graveyard. Hermione pushed it open as quietly as possible and they edged through it. On either side of the slippery path to the church doors, the snow lay deep and untouched. They moved off through the snow, carving deep trenches behind them as they walked around the building, keeping to the shadows beneath the brilliant windows.
Behind the church, row upon row of snowy tombstones protruded from a blanket of pale blue that was flecked with dazzling red, gold, and green wherever the reflections from the stained glass hit the snow. Keeping his hand closed tightly on the wand in his jacket pocket, Harry moved toward the nearest grave.
“Look at this, it’s an Abbott, could be some long-lost relation of Hannah’s!”
“Keep your voice down,” Hermione begged him.
They waded deeper and deeper into the graveyard, gouging dark tracks into the snow behind them, stooping to peer at the words on old headstones, every now and then squinting into the surrounding darkness to make absolutely sure that they were unaccompanied.
“Harry, here!”
Hermione was two rows of tombstones away; he had to wade back to her, his heart positively banging in his chest.
“Is it – ?”
“No, but look!”
She pointed to the dark stone. Harry stooped down and saw , upon the frozen, lichen-spotted granite, the words Kendra Dumbledore and, a short way down her dates of birth and death, and Her Daughter Ariana. There was also a quotation:
Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
So Rita Skeeter and Muriel had got some of their facts right. The Dumbledore family had indeed lived here, and part of it had died here.
Seeing the grave was worse than hearing about it. Harry could not help thinking that he and Dumbledore both had deep roots in this graveyard, and that Dumbledore ought to have told him so, yet he had never thought to share the connection. They could have visited the place together; for a moment Harry imagined coming here with Dumbledore, of what a bond that would have been, of how much it would have meant to him. But it seemed that to Dumbledore, the fact that their families lay side by side in the same graveyard had been an unimportant coincidence, irrelevant, perhaps, to the job he wanted Harry to do.
Hermione was looking at Harry, and he was glad that his face was hidden in shadow. He read the words on the tombstone again. Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. He did not understand what these words meant. Surely Dumbledore had chosen them, as the eldest member of the family once his mother had died.
“Are you sure he never mentioned – ?” Hermione began.
“No,” said Harry curtly, then, “let’s keep looking,” and he turned away, wishing he had not seen the stone: He did not want his excited trepidation tainted with resentment.
“Here!” cried Hermione again a few moments later from out of the darkness. “Oh no, sorry! I thought it said Potter.”
 
She was rubbing at a crumbling, mossy stone, gazing down at it, a little frown on her face.
“Harry, come back a moment.”
He did not want to be sidetracked again, and only grudgingly made his way back through the snow toward her.
“What?”
“Look at this!”
The grave was extremely old, weathered so that Harry could hardly make out the name. Hermione showed him the symbol beneath it.
“Harry, that’s the mark in the book!”
He peered at the place she indicated: The stone was so worn that it was hard to make out what was engraved there, though there did seem to be a triangular mark beneath the nearly illegible name.
“Yeah . . . it could be. . . .”
Hermione lit her wand and pointed it at the name on the headstone.
“It says Ig – Ignotus, I think. . . .”
“I’m going to keep looking for my parents, all right?” Harry told her, a slight edge to his voice, and he set off again, leaving her crouched beside the old grave.
Every now and then he recognized a surname that, like Abbott, he had met at Hogwarts. Sometimes there were several generations of the same Wizarding family represented in the graveyard: Harry could tell from the dates that it had either died out, or the current members had moved away from Godric’s Hollow. Deeper and deeper amongst the graves he went, and every time he reached a new headstone he felt a little lurch of apprehension and anticipation.
The darkness and the silence seemed to become, all of a sudden, much deeper. Harry looked around, worried, thinking of dementors, then realized that the carols had finished, that the chatter and flurry of churchgoers were fading away as they made their way back into the square. Somebody inside the church had just turned off the lights.
Then Hermione’s voice came out of the blackness for the third time, sharp and clear from a few yards away.
“Harry, they’re here . . . right here.”
And he knew by her tone that it was his mother and father this time: He moved toward her, feeling as if something heavy were pressing on his chest, the same sensation he had had right after Dumbledore had died, a grief that had actually weighed on his heart and lungs.
The headstone was only two rows behind Kendra and Ariana’s. It was made of white marble, just like Dumbledore’s tomb, and this made it easy to read, as it seemed to shine in the dark. Harry did not need to kneel or even approach very close to it to make out the words engraved upon it.
JAMES POTTER	LILY POTTER
BORN 27 MARCH 1960	BORN 30 JANUARY 1960
DIED 31 OCTOBER 1981	DIED 31 OCTOBER 1981
The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.
 
Harry read the words slowly, as though he would have only one chance to take in their meaning, and he read the last of them aloud.
“’The last enemy that shall be defeated is death’ . . .” A horrible thought came to him, and with a kind of panic. “Isn’t that a Death Eater idea? Why is that there?”
“It doesn’t mean defeating death in the way the Death Eaters mean it, Harry,” said Hermione, her voice gentle. “It means . . . you know . . . living beyond death. Living after death.”
But they were not living, thought Harry. They were gone. The empty words could not disguise the fact that his parents’ moldering remains lay beneath snow and stone, indifferent, unknowing. And tears came before he could stop them, boiling hot then instantly freezing on his face, and what was the point in wiping them off or pretending? He let them fall, his lips pressed hard together, looking down at the thick snow hiding from his eyes the place where the last of Lily and James lay, bones now, surely, or dust, not knowing or caring that their living son stood so near, his heart still beating, alive because of their sacrifice and close to wishing, at this moment, that he was sleeping under the snow with them.
Hermione had taken his hand again and was gripping it tightly. He could not look at her, but returned the pressure, now taking deep, sharp gulps of the night air, trying to steady himself, trying to regain control. He should have brought something o give them, and he had not thought of it, and every plant in the graveyard was leafless and frozen. But Hermione raised her wand, moved it in a circle through the air, and a wreath of Christmas roses blossomed before them. Harry caught it and laid it on his parents’ grave.
As soon as he stood up he wanted to leave: He did not think he could stand another moment there. He put his arm around Hermione’s shoulders, and she put hers around his waist, and they turned in silence and walked away through the snow, past Dumbledore’s mother and sister, back toward the dark church and the out-of-sight kissing gate.
Chapter Seventeen Bathilda’s Secret
"Harry, stop."
"What's wrong?"
They had only just reached the grave of the unknown Abbott.
"There's someone there. Someone watching us. I can tell. There, over by the bushes."
They stood quite still, holding on to each other, gazing at the dense black boundary of the graveyard. Harry could not see anything.
"Are you sure?"
 
"I saw something move. I could have sworn I did..."
She broke from him to free her wand arm.
"We look like Muggles," Harry pointed out.
"Muggles who've just been laying flowers on your parents' grave? Harry, I'm sure there's someone over there!"
Harry thought of A History of Magic; the graveyard was supposed to be haunted; what if --? But then he heard a rustle and saw a little eddy of dislodged snow in the bush to which Hermione had pointed. Ghosts could not move snow.
"It's a cat," said Harry, after a second or two, "or a bird. If it was a Death Eater we'd be dead by now. But let's get out of here, and we can put the Cloak back on."
They glanced back repeatedly as they made their way out of the graveyard. Harry, who did not feel as sanguine as he had pretended when reassuring Hermione, was glad to reach the gate and the slippery pavement. They pulled the Invisibility Cloak back over themselves. The pub was fuller than before. Many voices inside it were now singing the carol that they had heard as they approached the church. For a moment, Harry considered suggesting they take refuge inside it, but before he could say anything Hermione murmured, "Let's go this way," and pulled him down the dark street leading out of the village in the opposite direction from which they had entered. Harry could make out the point where the cottages ended and the lane turned into open country again. They walked as quickly as they dared, past more windows sparkling with multicolored lights, the outlines of Christmas trees dark through the curtains.
"How are we going to find Bathilda's house?" asked Hermione, who was shivering a little and kept glancing back over her shoulder. "Harry? What do you think? Harry?"
She tugged at this arm, but Harry was not paying attention. He was looking toward the dark mass that stood at the very end of this row of houses. Next moment he sped up, dragging Hermione along with him, she slipped a little on the ice.
"Harry --"
"Look ... Look at it, Hermione ..."
"I don't ... oh!"
He could see it; the Fidelius Charm must have died with James and Lily. The hedge had grown wild in the sixteen years since Hagrid had taken Harry from the rubble that lay scattered amongst the waist-high grass. Most of the cottage was still standing, though entirely covered in the dark ivy and snow, but the right side of the top floor had been blown apart; that, Harry was sure, was where the curse had backfired. He and Hermione
 
stood at the gate, gazing up at the wreck of what must once have been a cottage just like those that flanked it.
"I wonder why nobody's ever rebuilt it?" whispered Hermione.
"Maybe you can't rebuild it?" Harry replied. "Maybe it's like the injuries from Dark Magic and you can't repair the damage?"
He slipped a hand from beneath the Cloak and grasped the snowy and thickly rusted gate, not wishing to open it, but simply so he'd some part of the house.
"You're not going to go inside? It looks unsafe, it might -- oh, Harry, look!"
His touch on the gate seemed to have done it. A sign had risen out of the ground in front of them, up thorough the tangles of nettles and weeds, like some bizarre, fast-growing flower, and in golden letters upon the wood it said:
On this spot, on this night of 31 October 1981, Lily and James Potter lost their lives. Their son, Harry, remains the only wizard ever to have survived the Killing Curse. This house, invisible to Muggles, has been left in its ruined state as a monument to the Potters and as a reminder of the violence that tore apart their family.
And all around these neatly lettered words, scribbles had been added by other witches and wizards who had come to see the place where the Boy Who Lived had escaped. Some had merely signed their names in Everlasting Ink; others had carved their initials into the wood, still others had left messages. The most recent of these, shining brightly over sixteen years' worth of magical graffiti, all said similar things.
Good luck, Harry, wherever you are.
If you read this, Harry, we're all behind you!
Long live Harry Potter.
"They shouldn't have written on the sign!" said Hermione, indignant.
But Harry beamed at her.
"It's brilliant. I'm glad they did. I ..."
He broke off. A heavily muffled figure was hobbling up the lane toward them, silhouetted by the bright lights in the distant square. Harry thought, though it was hard to judge, that the figure was a woman. She was moving slowly, possibly frightened of slipping on the snowy ground. Her stoop, her stoutness, her shuffling gait all gave an impression of
 
extreme age. They watched in silence as she drew nearer. Harry was waiting to see whether she would turn into any of the cottages she was passing, but he knew instinctively that she would not. At last she came to a halt a few yards from them and simply stood there in the middle of the frozen road, facing them.
He did not need Hermione's pinch to his arm. There was next to no chance that this woman was a Muggle: She was standing there gazing at a house that ought to have been completely invisible to her, if she was not a witch. Even assuming that she was a witch, however, it was odd behavior to come out on a night this cold, simply to look at an old ruin. By all the rules of normal magic, meanwhile, she ought not to be able to see Hermione and him at all. Nevertheless, Harry had the strangest feeling that she knew that they were there, and also who they were. Just as he had reached this uneasy conclusion, she raised a gloved hand and beckoned.
Hermione moved closer to him under the Cloak, her arm pressed against his.
"How does she know?"
He shook his head. The woman beckoned again, more vigorously. Harry could think of many reasons not to obey the summons, and yet his suspicions about her identity were growing stronger every moment that they stood facing each other in the deserted street.
Was it possible that she had been waiting for them all these long months? That Dumbledore had told her to wait, and that Harry would come in the end? Was it not likely that it was she who had moved in the shadows in the graveyard and had followed them to this spot? Even her ability to sense them suggested some Dumbledore-ish power that he had never encountered before.
Finally Harry spoke, causing Hermione to gasp and jump.
"Are you Bathilda?"
The muffled figure nodded and beckoned again.
Beneath the Cloak Harry and Hermione looked at each other. Harry raised his eyebrows; Hermione gave a tiny, nervous nod.
They stepped toward the woman and , at once, she turned and hobbled off back the way they had come. Leading them past several houses, she turned in at a gate. They followed her up the front path through a garden nearly as overgrown as the one they had just left. She fumbled for a moment with a key at the front door, then opened it and stepped back to let them pass.
She smelled bad, or perhaps it was her house; Harry wrinkled his nose as they sidled past her and pulled off the Cloak. Now that he was beside her, he realized how tiny she was; bowed down with age, she came barely level with his chest. She closed the door behind
 
them, her knuckles blue and mottled against the peeling paint, then turned and peered into Harry's face. Her eyes were thick with cataracts and sunken into folds of transparent skin, and her whole face was dotted with broken veins and liver spots. He wondered whether she could make him out at all; even if she could, it was the balding Muggle whose identity he had stolen that she would see.
The odor of old age, of dust, of unwashed clothes and stale food intensified as the unwound a moth-eaten black shawl, revealing a head of scant white hair through which the scalp showed clearly.
"Bathilda?" Harry repeated.
She nodded again. Harry became aware of the locket against his skin; the thing inside it that sometimes ticked or beat had woken; he could feel it pulsing through the cold gold. Did it know, could it sense, that the thing that would destroy it was near?
Bathilda shuffled past them, pushing Hermione aside as though she had not seen her, and vanished into what seemed to be a sitting room.
"Harry, I'm not sure about this," breathed Hermione.
"Look at the size of her, I think we could overpower her if we had to," said Harry. "Listen, I should have told you, I knew she wasn't all there. Muriel called her 'gaga.'"
"Come!" called Bathilda from the next room.
Hermione jumped and clutched Harry's arm.
"It's okay," said Harry reassuringly, and he led the way into the sitting room.
Bathilda was tottering around the place lighting candles, but it was still very dark, not to mention extremely dirty. Thick dust crunched beneath their feet, and Harry's nose detected, underneath the dank and mildewed smell, something worse, like meat gone bad. He wondered when was the last time anyone had been inside Bathilda's house to check whether she was coping. She seemed to have forgotten that she could do magic, too, for she lit the candles clumsily by hand, her trailing lace cuff in constant danger of catching fire.
"Let me do that," offered Harry, and he took the matches from her. She stood watching him as he finished lighting the candle stubs that stood on saucers around the room, perched precariously on stacks of books and on side tables crammed with cracked and moldy cups.
The last surface on which Harry spotted a candle was a bow-fronted chest of drawers on which there stood a large number of photographs. When the flame danced into life, its reflection wavered on their dusty glass and silver. He saw a few tiny movements from the
 
pictures. As Bathilda fumbled with logs for the fire, he muttered "Tergeo": The dust vanished from the photographs, and he saw at once that half a dozen were missing from the largest and most ornate frames. He wondered whether Bathilda or somebody else had removed them. Then the sight of a photograph near the back of the collection caught his eye, and he snatched it up.
It was the golden-haired, merry-faced thief, the young man who had perched on Gregorovitch's windowsill, smiling lazily up at Harry out of the silver frame. And it came to Harry instantly where he had seen the boy before: in The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore, arm in arm with the teenage Dumbledore, and that must be where all the missing photographs were: in Rita's book.
"Mrs. -- Miss -- Bagshot?" he said, and his voice shook slightly. "Who is this?"
Bathilda was standing in the middle of the room watching Hermione light the fire for her.
"Miss Bagshot?" Harry repeated, and he advanced with the picture in his hands as the flames burst into life in the fireplace. Bathilda looked up at his voice, and the Horcrux beat faster upon his chest.
"Who is this person?" Harry asked her, pushing the picture forward.
She peered at it solemnly, then up at Harry.
"Do you know who this is?" he repeated in a much slower and louder voice than usual. "This man? Do you know him? What's he called?"
Bathilda merely looked vague. Harry felt an awful frustration. How had Rita Skeeter unlocked Bathilda's memories?
"Who is this man?" he repeated loudly.
"Harry, what area you doing?" asked Hermione.
"This picture. Hermione, it's the thief, the thief who stole from Gregorovitch! Please!" he said to Bathilda. "Who is this?"
But she only stared at him.
"Why did you ask us to come with you, Mrs. - Miss -- Bagshot?" asked Hermione, raising her own voice. "Was there something you wanted to tell us?"
Giving no sign that she had heard Hermione, Bathilda now shuffled a few steps closer to Harry. With a little jerk of her head she looked back into the hall.
"You want us to leave?" he asked.
 
She repeated the gesture, this time pointing firstly at him, then at herself, then at the ceiling.
"Oh, right... Hermione, I think she wants me to go upstairs with her."
"All right," said Hermione, "let's go."
But when Hermione moved, Bathilda shook her head with surprising vigor, once more pointing first at Harry, then to herself.
"She wants me to go with her, alone."
"Why?" asked Hermione, and her voice rang out sharp and clear in the candlelit room, the old lady shook her head a little at the loud noise.
"Maybe Dumbledore told her to give the sword to me, and only to me?"
"Do you really think she knows who you are?"
"Yes," said Harry, looking down into the milky eyes fixed upon his own. "I think she does."
"Well, okay then, but be quick, Harry."
"Lead the way," Harry told Bathilda.
She seemed to understand, because she shuffled around him toward the door. Harry glanced back at Hermione with a reassuring smile, but he was not sure she had seen it; she stood hugging herself in the midst of the candlelit squalor, looking toward the bookcase. As Harry walked out of the room, unseen by both Hermione and Bathilda, he slipped the silver-framed photograph of the unknown thief inside his jacket.
The stairs were steep and narrow; Harry was half tempted to place his hands on stout Bathilda's backside to ensure that she did not topple over backward on top of him, which seemed only too likely. Slowly, wheezing a little, she climbed to the upper landing, turned immediately right, and led him into a low-ceilinged bedroom.
It was pitch-black and smelled horrible: Harry had just made out a chamber pot protruding from under the bed before Bathilda closed the door and even that was swallowed by the darkness.
"Lumos," said Harry, and his wand ignited. He gave a start: Bathilda had moved close to him in those few seconds of darkness, and he had not heard her approach.
"You are Potter?" she whispered.
 
"Yes, I am."
She nodded slowly, solemnly. Harry felt the Horcrux beating fast, faster than his own heart; It was an unpleasant, agitating sensation.
"Have you got anything for me?" Harry asked, but she seemed distracted by his lit wand-tip.
"Have you got anything for me?" he repeated.
Then she closed her eyes and several things happened at once: Harry's scar prickled painfully; the Horcrux twitched so that the front of his sweater actually moved; the dark, fetid room dissolved momentarily. He felt a leap of joy and spoke in a high, cold voice: Hold him!
Harry swayed where he stood: The dark, foul-smelling room seemed to close around him again; he did not know what had just happened.
"Have you got anything for me?" he asked for a third time, much louder.
"Over here," she whispered, pointing to the corner. Harry raised his wand and saw the outline of a cluttered dressing table beneath the curtained window.
This time she did not lead him. Harry edged between her and the unmade bed, his wand raised. He did not want to look away from her.
"What is it?" he asked as he reached the dressing table, which was heaped high with what looked and smelled like dirty laundry.
"There," she said, pointing at the shapeless mass.
And in the instant that he looked away, his eyes taking the tangled mess for a sword hilt, a ruby, she moved weirdly: He saw it out of the corner of his eye; panic made him turn and horror paralyzed him as he saw the old body collapsing and the great snake pouring from the place where her neck had been.
The snake struck as he raised his wand: The force of the bite to his forearm sent the wand spinning up toward the ceiling; its light swung dizzyingly around the room and was extinguished; Then a powerful blow from the tail to his midriff knocked the breath out of him: He fell backward onto the dressing table, into the mound of filthy clothing --
He rolled sideways, narrowly avoiding the snake's tail, which thrashed down upon the table where he had been a second earlier. Fragments of the glass surface rained upon him as he hit the floor. From below he heard Hermione call, "Harry?"
 
He could not get enough breath into his lungs to call back: Then a heavy smooth mass smashed him to the floor and he felt it slide over him, powerful, muscular --
"No!" he gasped, pinned to the floor.
"Yes," whispered the voice. "Yesss... hold you ... hold you ..."
"Accio ... Accio Wand ..."
But nothing happened and he needed his hands to try to force the snake from him as it coiled itself around his torso, squeezing the air from him, pressing the Horcrux hard into his chest, a circle of ice that throbbed with life, inches from his own frantic heart, and his brain was flooding with cold, white light, all thought obliterated, his own breath drowned, distant footsteps, everything going...
A metal heart was banging outside his chest, and now he was flying, flying with triumph in his heart, without need of broomstick or thestral...
He was abruptly awake in the sour-smelling darkness; Nagini had released him. He scrambled up and saw the snake outlined against the landing light: It struck, and Hermione dived aside with a shriek; her deflected curse hit the curtained window, which shattered. Frozen air filled the room as Harry ducked to avoid another shower of broken glass and his foot slipped on a pencil-like something -- his wand --
He bent and snatched it up, but now the room was full of the snake, its tail thrashing; Hermione was nowhere to be seen and for a moment Harry thought the worst, but then there was a loud bang and a flash of red light, and the snake flew into the air, smacking Harry hard in the face as it went, coil after heavy coil rising up to the ceiling. Harry raised his wand, but as he did so, his scar seared more painfully, more powerfully than it had done in years.
"He's coming! Hermione, he's coming!"
As he yelled the snake fell, hissing wildly. Everything was chaos: It smashed shelves from the wall, and splintered china flew everywhere as Harry jumped over the bed and seized the dark shape he knew to be Hermione --
She shrieked with pain as he pulled her back across the bed: The snake reared again, but Harry knew that worse than the snake was coming, was perhaps already at the gate, his head was going to split open with the pain from his scar --
The snake lunged as he took a running leap, dragging Hermione with him; as it struck, Hermione screamed, "Confringo!" and her spell flew around the room, exploding the wardrobe mirror and ricocheting back at them, bouncing from floor to ceiling; Harry felt the heat of it sear the back of his hand. Glass cut his cheek as, pulling Hermione with him, he leapt from bed to broken dressing table and then straight out of the smashed window
 
into nothingness, her scream reverberating through the night as they twisted in midair ...
And then his scar burst open and he was Voldemort and he was running across the fetid bedroom, his long white hands clutching at the windowsill as he glimpsed the bald man and the little woman twist and vanish, and he screamed with rage, a scream that mingled with the girl's, that echoed across the dark gardens over the church bells ringing in Christmas Day...
And his scream was Harry's scream, his pain was Harry's pain... that it could happen here, where it had happened before... here, within sight of that house where he had come so close to knowing what it was to die ... to die ... the pain was so terrible ... ripped from his body ... But if he had no body, why did his head hurt so badly; if he was dead, how cold he feel so unbearably, didn't pain cease with death, didn't it go ...
The night wet and windy, two children dressed as pumpkins waddling across the square and the shop windows covered in paper spiders, all the tawdry Muggle trappings of a world in which they did not believe ... And he was gliding along, that sense of purpose and power and rightness in him that he always knew on these occasions ... Not anger ... that was for weaker souls than he ... but triumph, yes ... He had waited for this, he had hoped for it ...
"Nice costume, mister!"
He saw the small boy's smile falter as he ran near enough to see beneath the hood of the cloak, saw the fear cloud his pained face: Then the child turned and ran away ... Beneath the robe he fingered the handle of his wand ... One simple movement and the child would never reach his mother ... but unnecessary, quite unnecessary ...
And along a new and darker street he moved, and now his destination was in sight at last, the Fidelius Charm broken, though they did not know it yet ... And he made less noise than the dead leaves slithering along the pavement as he drew level with the dark hedge, and steered over it ...
They had not drawn the curtains; he saw them quite clearly in their little sitting room, the tall black-haired man in his glasses, making puffs of colored smoke erupt from his wand for the amusement of the small black-haired boy in his blue pajamas. The child was laughing and trying to catch the smoke, to grab it in his small fist ...
A door opened and the mother entered, saying words he cold not hear, her long dark-red hair falling over her face. Now the father scooped up the son and handed him to the mother. He threw his wand down upon the sofa and stretched, yawning...
The gate creaked a little as he pushed it open, but James Potter did not hear. His white hand pulled out the wand beneath his cloak and pointed it at the door, which burst open...
He was over the threshold as James came sprinting into the hall. It was easy, too easy, he
 
had not even picked up his wand ...
"Lily, take Harry and go! It's him! Go! Run! I'll hold him off!"
Hold him off, without a wand in his hand! ... He laughed before casting the curse ...
"Avada Kedavra!"
The green light filled the cramped hallway, it lit the pram pushed against the wall, it made the banisters glow like lighting rods, and James Potter fell like a marionette whose strings were cut ...
He could hear her screaming from the upper floor, trapped, but as long as she was sensible, she, at least, had nothing to fear ... He climbed the steps, listening with faint amusement to her attempts to barricade herself in ... She had no wand upon her either ... How stupid they were, and how trusting, thinking that their safety lay in friends, that weapons could be discarded even for moments...
He forced the door open, cast aside the chair and boxes hastily piled against it with one lazy wave of his wand ... and there she stood, the child in her arms. At the sight of him, she dropped her son into the crib behind her and threw her arms wide, as if this would help, as if in shielding him from sight she hoped to be chosen instead ...
"Not Harry, not Harry, please not Harry!"
"Stand aside, you silly girl... stand aside, now."
"Not Harry, please no, take me, kill me instead --"
"This is my last warning --"
"Not Harry! Please ... have mercy ... have mercy ... Not Harry! Not Harry! Please -- I'll do anything ..."
"Stand aside. Stand aside, girl!"
He could have forced her away from the crib, but it seemed more prudent to finish them all ...
The green light flashed around the room and she dropped like her husband. The child had not cried all this time. He could stand, clutching the bars of his crib, and he looked up into the intruder's face with a kind of bright interest, perhaps thinking that it was his father who hid beneath the cloak, making more pretty lights, and his mother would pop up any moment, laughing --
He pointed the wand very carefully into the boy's face: He wanted to see it happen, the
 
destruction of this one, inexplicable danger. The child began to cry: It had seen that he was not James. He did not like it crying, he had never been able to stomach the small ones whining in the orphanage --
"Avada Kedavra!"
And then he broke. He was nothing, nothing but pain and terror, and he must hide himself, not here in the rubble of the ruined house, where the child was trapped screaming, but far away ... far away ...
"No," he moaned.
The snake rustled on the filthy, cluttered floor, and he had killed the boy, and yet he was the boy ...
"No..."
And now he stood at the broken window of Bathilda's house, immersed in memories of his greatest loss, and at his feet the great snake slithered over broken china and glass... He looked down and saw something... something incredible...
"No..."
"Harry, it's all right, you're all right!"
He stooped down and picked up the smashed photograph. There he was, the unknown thief, the thief he was seeking...
"No... I dropped it... I dropped it ..."
"Harry, it's okay, wake up, wake up!"
He was Harry... Harry, not Voldemort ... and the thing that was rustling was not a snake ... He opened his eyes.
"Harry," Hermione whispered. "Do you feel all -- all right?"
"Yes," he lied.
He was in the tent, lying on one of the lower bunks beneath a heap of blankets. He could tell that it was almost dawn by the stillness and quality of the cold, flat light beyond the canvas ceiling. He was drenched in sweat; he could feel it on the sheets and blankets.
"We got away."
"Yes," said Hermione. "I had to use a Hover Charm to get you into your bunk. I couldn't
 
lift you. You've been ... Well, you haven't been quite ..."
There were purple shadows under her brown eyes and he noticed a small sponge in her hand: She had been wiping his face.
"You've been ill," she finished. "Quite ill."
"How long ago did we leave?"
"Hours ago. It's nearly morning."
"And I've been... what, unconscious?"
"Not exactly," said Hermione uncomfortably. "You've been shouting and moaning and ... things," she added in a tone that made Harry feel uneasy. What had he done? Screamed curses like Voldemort, cried like the baby in the crib?
"I couldn't get the Horcrux off you," Hermione said, and he knew she wanted to change the subject. "It was stuck, stuck to your chest. You've got a mark; I'm sorry, I had to use a Severing Charm to get it away. The snake hit you too, but I've cleaned the wound and put some dittany on it ..."
He pulled the sweaty T-shirt he was wearing away from himself and looked down. There was a scarlet oval over his heart where the locket had burned him. He could also see the half healed puncture marks to his forearm.
"Where've you put the Horcrux?"
"In my bag. I think we should keep it off for a while."
He lay back on his pillows and looked into her pinched gray face.
"We shouldn't have gone to Godric's Hollow. It's my fault, it's all my fault. Hermione, I'm sorry."
"It's not you fault. I wanted to go too; I really thought Dumbledore might have left the sword there for you."
"Yeah, well ... we got that wrong, didn't we?"
"What happened, Harry? What happened when she took you upstairs? Was the snake hiding somewhere? Did it just come out and kill her and attack you?"
"No." he said. "She was the snake ... or the snake was her ... all along."
"W-what?"
 
He closed his eyes. He could still smell Bathilda's house on him; it made the whole thing horribly vivid.
"Bathilda must've been dead a while. The snake was ... was inside her. You-Know-Who put it there in Godric's Hollow, to wait. You were right. He knew I'd go back."
"The snake was inside her?"
He opened his eyes again. Hermione looked revolted, nauseated.
"Lupin said there would be magic we'd never imagined." Harry said. "She didn't want to talk in front of you, because it was Parseltongue, all Parseltongue, and I didn't realize, but of course I could understand her. Once we were up in the room, the snake sent a message to You-Know-Who, I heard it happen inside my head, I felt him get excited, he said to keep me there ... and then ..."
He remembered the snake coming out of Bathilda's neck: Hermione did not need to know the details.
"...she changed, changed into the snake, and attacked."
He looked down at the puncture marks.
"It wasn't supposed to kill me, just keep me there till You-Know-Who came."
If he had only managed to kill the snake, it would have been worth it, all of it ... Sick at heart, he sat up and threw back the covers.
"Harry, no, I'm sure you ought to rest!"
"You're the one who needs sleep. No offense, but you look terrible. I'm fine. I'll keep watch for a while. Where's my wand?"
She did not answer, she merely looked at him.
"Where's my wand, Hermione?"
She was biting her lip, and tears swam in her eyes.
"Harry ..."
"Where's my wand?"
She reached down beside the bed and held it out to him.
 
The holly and phoenix wand was nearly severed in two. One fragile strand of phoenix feather kept both pieces hanging together. The wood had splintered apart completely. Harry took it into his hands as though it was a living thing that had suffered a terrible injury. He could not think properly: Everything was a blur of panic and fear. Then he held out the want to Hermione.
"Mend it. Please."
"Harry, I don't think, when it's broken like this --"
"Please, Hermione, try!"
"R-Reparo."
The dangling half of the wand resealed itself. Harry held it up.
"Lumos!"
The wand sparked feebly, then went out. Harry pointed it at Hermione.
"Expelliarmus!"
Hermione's wand gave a little jerk, but did not leave her hand. The feeble attempt at magic was too much for Harry's wand, which split into two again. He stared at it, aghast, unable to take in what he was seeing ... the wand that had survived so much ...
"Harry." Hermione whispered so quietly he could hardly hear her. "I'm so, so sorry. I think it was me. As we were leaving, you know, the snake was coming for us, and so I cast a Blasting Curse, and it rebounded everywhere, and it must have -- must have hit --"
"It was an accident." said Harry mechanically. He felt empty, stunned. "We'll -- we'll find a way to repair it."
"Harry, I don't think we're going to be able to," said Hermione, the ears trickling down her face. "Remember ... remember Ron? When he broke his wand, crashing the car? It was never the same again, he had to get a new one."
Harry thought of Ollivander, kidnapped and held hostage by Voldemort; of Gregorovitch, who was dead. How was he supposed to find himself a new wand?
"Well," he said, in a falsely matter-of-fact voice, "well, I'll just borrow yours for now, then. While I keep watch."
Her face glazed with tears, Hermione handed over her wand, and he left her sitting beside his bed, desiring nothing more than to get away from her.
 
Chapter Eighteen
The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore
The sun was coming up: The pure, colorless vastness of the sky stretched over him, indifferent to him and his suffering. Harry sat down in the tent entrance and took a deep breath of clean air. Simply to be alive to watch the sun rise over the sparkling snowy hillside ought to have been the greatest treasure on earth, yet he could not appreciate it: His senses had been spiked by the calamity of losing his want. He looked out over a valley blanketed in snow, distant church bells chiming through the glittering silence.
Without realizing it, he was digging his fingers into his arms as if he were trying to resist physical pain. He had spilled his own blood more times than he could count; he had lost all bones in his right arm once; this journey had already given him scars to his chest and forearm to join those on his hand and forehead, but never, until this moment, had he felt himself to be fatally weakened, vulnerable, and naked, as though the best part of his magical power had been torn from him. He knew exactly what Hermione would say if he expressed any of this: The wand is only as good as the wizard. But she was wrong, his case was different. She had not felt the wand spin like the needle of a compass and shoot golden flames at his enemy. He had lost the protection of the twin cores, and only now that it was gone did he realize how much he had been counting on it.
He pulled the pieces of the broken wand out of his pocket and, without looking at them, tucked them away in Hagrid’s pouch around his neck. The pouch was now too full of broken and useless objects to take any more. Harry’s hand brushed the old Snitch through the mokeskin and for a moment he had to fight the temptation to pull it out and throw it away. Impenetrable, unhelpful, useless, like everything else Dumbledore had left behind ---
And his fury at Dumbledore broke over him now like lava, scorching him inside, wiping out every other feeling. Out of sheer desperation they had talked themselves into believing that Godric’s Hollow held answers, convinced themselves that they were supposed to go back, that it was all part of some secret path laid out for them by Dumbledore: but there was no map, no plan. Dumbledore had left them to grope in the darkness, to wrestle with unknown and undreamed-of terrors, alone and unaided: Nothing was explained, nothing was given freely, they had no sword, and now, Harry had no wand. And he had dropped the photograph of the thief, and it would surely be easy now for Voldemort to find out who he was . . .
Voldemort had all the information now . . .
“Harry?”
Hermione looked frightened that he might curse her with her own wand. Her face streaked with tears, she crouched down beside him, two cups of tea trembling in her hands and something bulky under her arm.
“Thanks,” he said, taking one of the cups.
“Do you mind if I talk to you?”
“No,” he said because he did not want to hurt her feelings.
“Harry, you wanted to know who that man in the picture was. Well . . . I’ve got the book.”
Timidly she pushed it onto his lap, a pristine copy of The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore.
 
“Where --- how --- ?”
“It was in Bathilda’s sitting room, just lying there. . . . This note was sticking out of the top of it.”
Hermione read the few lines of spiky, acid-green writing aloud.
“ ‘Dear Bally, Thanks for your help. Here’s a copy of the book, hope you like it. You said everything, even if you don’t remember it. Rita.’ I think it must have arrived while the real Bathilda was alive, but perhaps she wasn’t in any fit state to read it?”
“No, she probably wasn’t.”
Harry looked down upon Dumbledore’s face and experienced a surge of savage pleasure: Now he would know if all the things that Dumbledore had never thought it worth telling him, whether Dumbledore wanted him to or not.
“You’re still really angry at me, aren’t you?” said Hermione; he looked up to see fresh tears leaking out of her eyes, and knew that his anger must have shown in his face.
“No,” he said quietly. “No, Hermione, I know it was an accident. You were trying to get us out of there alive, and you were incredible. I’d be dead if you hadn’t been there to help me.”
He tried to return her watery smile, then turned his attention to the book. Its spine was stiff; it had clearly never been opened before. He riffled through the pages, looking for photographs. He came across the one he sought almost at once, the young Dumbledore and his handsome companion, roaring with laughter at some long-forgotten joke. Harry dropped his eyes to the caption.
Albus Dumbledore, shortly after his mother’s death, With his friend Gellert Grindelwald.
Harry gaped at the last word for several long moments. Grindelwald. His friend Grindelwald. He looked sideways at Hermione, who was still contemplating the name as though she could not believe her eyes. Slowly she looked up at Harry.
“Grindelwald!”
Ignoring the remainder of the photographs, Harry searched the pages around them for a recurrence of that fatal name. He soon discovered it and read greedily, but became lost: It was necessary to go farther back to make sense of it all, and eventually he found himself at the start of a chapter entitled “The Greater Good.” Together, he and Hermione started to read:
Now approaching his eighteenth birthday, Dumbledore left Hogwarts in a blaze of glory --- Head Boy, Prefect, Winner of the Barnabus Finkley Prize for Exceptional Spell-Casting, British Youth Representative to the Wizengamot, Gold Medal-Winner for Ground-Breaking Contribution to the International Alchemical Conference in Cairo. Dumbledore intended, next, to take a Grand Tour with Elphias “Dogbreath” Doge, the dim-witted but devoted sidekick he had picked up at school.
The two young men were staying at the Leaky Cauldron in London, preparing to depart for Greece the following morning, when an owl arrived bearing news of Dumbledore’s mother’s death. “Dogbreath” Doge, who refused to be interviewed for this book, has given the public his own sentimental
 
version of what happened next. He represents Kendra’s death as a tragic blow, and Dumbledore’s decision to give up his expedition as an act of noble self-sacrifice.
Certainly Dumbledore returned to Godric’s Hollow at once, supposedly to “care” for his younger brother and sister. But how much care did he actually give them?
“He were a head case, that Aberforth,” said Enid Smeek, whose family lived on the outskirts of Godric’s Hollow at that time. “Ran wild. ‘Course, with his mum and dad gone you’d have felt sorry for him, only he kept chucking goat dung at my head. I don’t think Albus was fussed about him. I never saw them together, anyway.”
So what was Albus doing, if not comforting his wild young brother? The answer, it seems, is ensuring the continued imprisonment of his sister. For though her first jailer had died, there was no change in the pitiful condition of Ariana Dumbledore. Her very existence continued to be known only to those few outsiders who, like “Dogbreath” Doge, could be counted upon to believe in the story of her “ill health.”
Another such easily satisfied friend of the family was Bathilda Bagshot, the celebrated magical historian who has lived in Godric’s Hollow for many years. Kendra, of course, had rebuffed Bathilda when she first attempted to welcome the family to the village. Several years later, however, the author sent an owl to Albus at Hogwarts, having been favorably impressed by his paper on trans-species transformation in Transfiguration Today. This initial contract led to acquaintance with the entire Dumbledore family. At the time of Kendra’s death, Bathilda was the only person in Godric’s Hollow who was on speaking terms with Dumbledore’s mother.
Unfortunately, the brilliance that Bathilda exhibited earlier in her life has now dimmed. “The fire’s lit, but the cauldron’s empty,” as Ivor Dillonsby put it to me, or, in Enid Smeek’s slightly earthier phrase, “She’s nutty as squirrel poo.” Nevertheless, a combination of tried-and-tested reporting techniques enabled me to extract enough nuggets of hard fact to string together the whole scandalous story.
Like the rest of the Wizarding world, Bathilda puts Kendra’s premature death down to a backfiring charm, a story repeated by Albus and Aberforth in later years. Bathilda also parrots the family line on Ariana, calling her “frail” and “delicate.” On one subject, however, Bathilda is well worth the effort I put into procuring Veritaserum, for she, and she alone, knows the full story of the best-kept secret of Albus Dumbledore’s life. Now revealed for the first time, it calls into question everything that his admirers believed of Dumbledore: his supposed hatred of the Dark Arts, his opposition into the oppression of Muggles, even his devotion to his own family.
The very same summer that Dumbledore went home to Godric’s Hollow, now an orphan and head of the family, Bathilda Bagshot agreed to accept into her home her great-nephew, Gellert Grindelwald.
The name of Grindelwald is justly famous: In a list of Most Dangerous Dark Wizards of All Time, he would miss out on the top spot only because You-
 
Know-Who arrived, a generation later, to steal his crown. As Grindelwald never extended his campaign of terror to Britain, however, the details of his rise to power are not widely known here.
Educated at Durmstrang, a school famous even then for its unfortunate tolerance of the Dark Arts, Grindelwald showed himself quite as precociously brilliant as Dumbledore. Rather than channel his abilities into the attainment of awards and prizes, however, Gellert Grindelwald devoted himself no other pursuits. At sixteen years old, even Durmstrang felt it could no longer turn a blind eye to the twisted experiments of Gellert Grindelwald, and he was expelled.
Hitherto, all that has been known of Grindelwald’s next movements is that he “traveled around for some months.” It can now be revealed that Grindelwald chose to visit his great-aunt in Godric’s Hollow, and that there, intensely shocking though it will be for many to hear it, he struck up a close friendship with none other than Albus Dumbledore.
“He seemed a charming boy to me,” babbles Bathilda, “whatever he became later. Naturally I introduced him to poor Albus, who was missing the company of lads his own age. The boys took to each other at once.”
They certainly did. Bathilda shows me a letter, kept by her that Albus Dumbledore sent Gellert Grindelwald in the dead of night.
“Yes, even after they’d spent all day in discussion --- both such brilliant young boys, they got on like a cauldron on fire --- I’d sometimes hear an owl tapping at Gellert’s bedroom window, delivering a letter from Albus! An idea would have struck him and he had to let Gellert know immediately!”
And what ideas they were. Profoundly shocking though Albus Dumbledore’s fans will find it, here are the thoughts of their seventeen-year-old hero, as relayed to his new best friend. (A copy of the original letter may be seen on page 463.)
Gellert ---
Your point about Wizard dominance being FOR THE MUGGLES’ OWN GOOD --- this, I think, is the crucial point. Yes, we have been given power and yes, that power gives us the right to rule, but it also gives us responsibilities over the ruled. We must stress this point, it will be the foundation stone upon which we build. Where we are opposed, as we surely will be, this must be the basis of all our counterarguments. We seize control FOR THE GREATER GOOD. And from this it follows that where we meet resistance, we must use only the force that is necessary and no more. (This was your mistake at Durmstrang! But I do not complain, because if you had not been expelled, we would never have met.)
Albus
Astonished and appalled though his many admirers will be, this letter constitutes the Statute of Secrecy and establishing Wizard rule over Muggles. What a blow for those who have always portrayed Dumbledore as the Muggle-borns’ greatest champion! How hollow those speeches promoting Muggle rights
 
seem in the light of this damning new evidence! How despicable does Albus Dumbledore appear, busy plotting his rise to power when he should have been mourning his mother and caring for his sister!
No doubt those determined to keep Dumbledore on his crumbling pedestal will bleat that he did not, after all, put his plans into action, that he must have suffered a change of heart, that he came to his senses. However, the truth seems altogether more shocking.
Barely two months into their great new friendship, Dumbledore and Grindelwald parted, never to see each other again until they met for their legendary duel (for more, see chapter 22). What caused this abrupt rupture? Had Dumbledore come to his senses? Had he told Grindelwald he wanted no more part in his plans? Alas, no.
“It was poor little Ariana dying, I think, that did it,” says Bathilda. “It came as an awful shock. Gellert was there in the house when it happened, and he came back to my house all of a dither, told me he wanted to go home the next day. Terribly distressed, you know. So I arranged a Portkey and that was the last I saw of him.
“Albus was beside himself at Ariana’s death. It was so dreadful for those two brothers. They had lost everybody except for each other. No wonder tempers ran a little high. Aberforth blamed Albus, you know, as people will under these dreadful circumstances. But Aberforth always talked a little madly, poor boy. All the same, breaking Albus’s nose at the funeral was not decent. It would have destroyed Kendra to see her sons fighting like that, across her daughter’s body. A shame Gellert could not have stayed for the funeral. . . . He would have been a comfort to Albus, at least. . . .
This dreadful coffin-side brawl, known only to those few who attended Ariana Dumbledore’s funeral, raises several questions. Why exactly did Aberforth Dumbledore blame Albus for his sister’s death? Was it, as “Batty” pretends, a mere effusion of grief? Or could there have been some more concrete reason for his fury? Grindelwald, expelled from Durmstrang for the near-fatal attacks upon fellow students, fled the country hours after the girl’s death, and Albus (out of shame or fear?) never saw him again, not until forced to do so by the pleas of the Wizarding world.
Neither Dumbledore nor Grindelwald ever seems to have referred to this brief boyhood friendship in later life. However, there can be no doubt that Dumbledore delayed, for some five years of turmoil, fatalities, and disappearances, his attack upon Gellert Grindelwald. Was it lingering affection for the man or fear of exposure as his once best friend that caused Dumbledore to hesitate? Was it only reluctantly that Dumbledore set out to capture the man he was once so delighted he had met?
And how did the mysterious Ariana die? Was she the inadvertent victim of some Dark rite? Did she stumble across something she ought not to have done, as the two young men sat practicing for their attempt at glory and domination? Is it possible that Ariana Dumbledore was the first person to die “for the greater good”?
 
The chapter ended here and Harry looked up. Hermione had reached the bottom of the page before him. She tugged the book out of Harry’s hands, looking a little alarmed by his expression, and closed it without looking at it, as though hiding something indecent.
“Harry ---”
But he shook his head. Some inner certainty had crashed down inside him; it was exactly as he had felt after Ron left. He had trusted Dumbledore, believed him the embodiment of goodness and wisdom. All was ashes: How much more could he lose? Ron, Dumbledore, the phoenix wand . . .
“Harry.” She seemed to have heard his thoughts. "Listen to me. It --- it doesn't make a very nice reading ---"
"Yeah, you could say that ---"
"--- but don't forget, Harry, this is Rita Skeeter writing."
"You did read that letter to Grindelwald, didn't you?"
"Yes, I --- I did." She hesitated, looking upset, cradling her tea in her cold hands. "I think that's the worst bit. I know Bathilda thought it was all just talk, but 'For the Greater Good' became Grindelwald's slogan, his justification for all the atrocities he committed later. And . . . from that . . . it looks like Dumbledore gave him the idea. They say 'For the Greater Good' was even carved over the entrance to Nurmengard."
"What's Nurmengard?"
"The prison Grindelwald had built to hold his opponents. He ended up in there himself, once Dumbledore had caught him. Anyway, it's --- it’s an awful thought that Dumbledore's ideas helped Grindelwald rise to power. But on the other hand, even Rita can't pretend that they knew each other for more than a few months one summer when they were both really young, and ---"
"I thought you'd say that," said Harry. He did not want to let his anger spill out at her, but it was hard to keep his voice steady. "I thought you'd say 'They were young.' They were the same age as we are now. And here we are, risking our lives to fight the Dark Arts, and there he was, in a huddle with his new best friend, plotting their rise to power over the Muggles."
His temper would not remain in check much longer: He stood up and walked around, trying to work some of it off.
"I'm not trying to defend what Dumbledore wrote," said Hermione. "All that 'right to rule' rubbish, it's 'Magic Is Might' all over again. But Harry, his mother had just died, he was stuck alone in the house ---"
"Alone? He wasn't alone! He had his brother and sister for company, his Squib sister he was keeping locked up ---"
"I don't believe it," said Hermione. She stood up too. "Whatever was wrong with that girl, I don't think she was a Squib. The Dumbledore we knew would never, ever have allowed---"
"The Dumbledore we thought we knew didn't want to conquer Muggles by force!" Harry shouted, his voice echoing across the empty hilltop, and several blackbirds rose into the air, squawking and spiraling against the pearly sky.
"He changed, Harry, he changed! It's as simple as that! Maybe he did believe these things when he was seventeen, but the whole of the rest of his life was devoted to fighting the Dark Arts! Dumbledore was the one who stopped Grindelwald, the one who
 
always voted for Muggle protection and Muggle born rights, who fought You-Know-Who from the start, and who died trying to bring him down!"
Rita's book lay on the ground between them, so that the face of Albus Dumbledore smiled dolefully at both.
"Harry, I'm sorry, but I think the real reason you're so angry is that Dumbledore never told you any of this himself."
"Maybe I am!" Harry bellowed, and he flung his arms over his head, hardly knowing whether he was trying to hold in his anger or protect himself from the weight of his own disillusionment. "Look what he asked from me, Hermione! Risk your life, Harry! And again! And again! And don't expect me to explain everything, just trust me blindly, trust that I know what I'm doing, trust me even though I don't trust you! Never the whole truth! Never!"
His voice cracked with the strain, and they stood looking at each other in the whiteness and emptiness, and Harry felt they were as insignificant as insects beneath that wide sky.
"He loved you," Hermione whispered. "I know he loved you."
Harry dropped his arms.
"I don't know who he loved, Hermione, but it was never me. This isn't love, the mess he's left me in. He shared a damn sight more of what he was really thinking with Gellert Grindelwald than he ever shared with me."
Harry picked up Hermione's wand, which he had dropped in the snow, and sat back down in the entrance of the tent.
"Thanks for the tea. I'll finish the watch. You get back in the warm." She hesitated, but recognized the dismissal. She picked up the book and then walked back past him into the tent, but as she did so, she brushed the top of his head lightly with her hand. He closed his eyes at her touch, and hated himself for wishing that what she said was true: that Dumbledore had really cared.
Chapter Nineteen The Silver Doe
It was snowing by the time Hermione took over the watch at midnight. Harry's dreams were confused and disturbing: Nagini wove in and out of them, first through a wreath of Christmas roses. He woke repeatedly, panicky, convinced that somebody had called out to him in the distance, imagining that the wind whipping around the tent was footsteps or voices.
Finally he got up in the darkness and joined Hermione, who was huddled in the entrance to the tent reading A History of Magic by the light of her wand. The snow was falling thickly, and she greeted with relief his suggestion of packing up early and moving on.
"We'll somewhere more sheltered," she agreed, shivering as she pulled on a sweatshirt over her pajamas. "I kept thinking I could hear people moving outside. I even though I saw somebody one or twice."
 
Harry paused in the act of pulling on a jumper and glanced at the silent, motionless Sneakoscope on the table.
"I'm sure I imagined it," said Hermione, looking nervous. "The snow the dark, it plays tricks on your eyes.... But perhaps we ought to Disapparate under the Invisibility Cloak, just in case?"
Half an hour later, with the tent packed, Harry wearing the Horcrux, and Hermione clutching the beaded bag, they Disapparated. The usual tightness engulfed them; Harry's feet parted company with the snowy ground, then slammed hard onto what felt like frozen earth covered in leaves.
"Where are we?" he asked, peering around at the fresh mass of trees as Hermione opened the beaded bag and began tugging out the tent poles.
"The Forest of Dean," she said, "I came camping here once with my mum and dad."
Here too snow lay on the trees all around and it was bitterly cold, but they were at least protected from the wind. They spent most of the day inside the tent, huddled for warmth around the useful bright blue flames that Hermione was adept at producing, and which could be scooped up and carried in a jar. Harry felt as though he was recuperating from some brief but severe, an impression reinforced by Hermione's solicitousness. That afternoon fresh flakes drifted down upon them, so that even their sheltered clearing had a fresh dusting of powdery snow.
After two nights of little sleep, Harry's senses seemed more alert than usual. Their escape from Godric's Hollow had been so narrow that Voldemort seemed somehow closer than before, more threatening. As darkness drove in again Harry refused Hermione's offer to keep watch and told her to go to bed.
Harry moved an old cushion into the tent mouth and sat down, wearing all the sweaters he owned but even so, still shivery. The darkness deepened with the passing hours until it was virtually impenetrable. He was on the point of taking out the Marauder's Map, so as to watch Ginny's dot for a while, before he remembered that it was the Christmas holidays and that she would be back at the Burrow.
Every tiny movement seemed magnified in the vastness of the forest. Harry knew that it must be full of living creatures, but he wished they would all remain still and silent so that he could separate their innocent scurryings and prowlings from noises that might proclaim other, sinister movements. He remembered the sound of a cloak slithering over dead leaves many years ago, and at once thought he heard it again before mentally shaking himself. Their protective enchantments had worked for weeks; why should they break now? And yet he could no throw off the feeling that something was different tonight.
Several times he jerked upright, his neck aching because he had fallen asleep, slumped at an awkward angle against the side of the tent. The night reached such a depth of velvety blackness that he might have been suspended in limbo between Disapparation and Apparation. He had just held a hand in front of his face to see whether he could make out his fingers when it happened.
A bright silver light appeared right ahead of him, moving through the trees. Whatever the source, it was moving soundlessly. The light seemed simply to drift toward him.
 
He jumped to his feet, his voice frozen in his throat, and raised Hermione's wand. He screwed up his eyes as the light became blinding, the trees in front of it pitch black in silhouette, and still the thing came closer....
And then the source of the light stepped out from behind an oak. It was a silver white doe, moon-bright and dazzling, picking her way over the ground, still silent, and leaving no hoofprints in the fine powdering of snow. She stepped toward him, her beautiful head with its wide, long-lashed eyes held high.
Harry stared at the creature, filled with wonder, not at her strangeness, but her inexplicable familiarity. He felt that he had been waiting for her to come, but that he had forgotten, until this moment, that they had arranged to meet. His impulse to shout for Hermione, which had been so strong a moment ago, had gone. He knew, he would have staked his life on it, that she had come for him, and him alone.
They gazed at each other for several long moments and then she turned and walked away.
"No," he said, and his voice was cracked with lack of use. "Come back!"
She continued to step deliberately through the trees, and soon he brightness was striped by their thick black trunks. For one trembling second he hesitated. Caution murmured it could be a trick, a lure, a trap. But instinct, overwhelming instinct, told him that this was not Dark Magic. He set off in pursuit.
Snow crunched beneath his feet, but the doe made no noise as she passed through the trees, for she was nothing but light. Deeper and deeper into the forest she led him, and Harry walked quickly, sure that when she stopped, she would allow him to approach her properly. And then she would speak and the voice would tell him what he needed to know.
At last she came to a halt. She turned her beautiful head toward him once more, and he broke into a run, a question burning in him, but as he opened his lips to ask it, she vanished.
Though the darkness had swallowed her whole, her burnished image was still imprinted on his retinas; it obscured his vision, brightening when he lowered his eyelids, disorienting him. Now fear came: Her presence had meant safety.
"Lumos!" he whispered, and the wand-tip ignited.
The imprint of the doe faded away with every blink of his eyes as he stood there, listening to the sounds of the forest, to distant crackles of twigs, soft swishes of snow. Was he about to be attacked? Had she enticed him into an ambush? Was he imagining that somebody stood beyond the reach of the wandlight, watching him?
He held the wand higher. Nobody ran out at him, no flash of green light burst from behind a tree. Why, then, had she led him to this spot?
Something gleamed in the light of the wand, and Harry spun about, but all that was there was a small, frozen pool, its black, cracked surface glittering as he raised his wand higher to examine it.
He moved forward rather cautiously and looked down. The ice reflected his distorted shadow and the beam of wandlight, but deep below the thick, misty gray carapace, something else glinted. A great silver cross...
His heart skipped into his mouth: He dropped to his knees at the pool's edge and angled the wand so as to flood the bottom of the pool with as much light as possible. A
 
glint of deep red...It was a sword with glittering rubies in its hilt....The sword of Gryffindor was lying at the bottom of the forest pool.
Barely breathing, he stared down at it. How was this possible? How could it have come to be lying in a forest pool, this close to the place where they were camping? Had some unknown magic drawn Hermione to this spot, or was the doe, which he had taken to be a Patronus, some kind of guardian of the pool? Or had the sword been put into the pool after they had arrived, precisely because they were here? In which case, where was the person who wanted to pass it to Harry? Again he directed the wand at the surrounding trees and bushes, searching for a human outline, for the glint of an eye, but he could not see anyone there. All the same, a little more fear leavened his exhilaration as he returned his attention to the sword reposing upon the bottom of the frozen pool.
He pointed the wand at the silvery shape and murmured, "Accio Sword."
It did not stir. He had not expected it to. If it had been that easy the sword would have lain on the ground for him to pick up, not in the depths of a frozen pool. He set off around the circle of ice, thinking hard about the last time the sword had delivered itself to him. He had been in terrible danger then, and had asked for help.
"Help," he murmured, but the sword remained upon the pool bottom, indifferent, motionless.
What was it, Harry asked himself (walking again), that Dumbledore had told him the last time he had retrieved the sword? Only a true Gryffindor could have pulled that out of the hat. And what were the qualities that defined a Gryffindor? A small voice inside Harry's head answered him: Their daring nerve and chivalry set Gryffindor apart.
Harry stopped walking and let out a long sigh, his smoky breath dispersing rapidly upon the frozen air. He knew what he had to do. If he was honest with himself, he had thought it might come to this from the moment he had spotted the sword through the ice.
He glanced around at the surrounding trees again, but was convinced now that nobody was going to attack him. They had had their chance as he walked alone through the forest, had had plenty of opportunity as he examined the pool. The only reason to delay at this point was because the immediate prospect was so deeply uninviting.
With fumbling fingers Harry started to remove his many layers of clothing. Where "chivalry" entered into this, he thought ruefully, he was not entirely sure, unless it counted as chivalrous that he was not calling for Hermione to do it in his stead.
An owl hooted somewhere as he stripped off, and he thought with a pang of Hedwig. He was shivering now, his teeth chattering horribly, and yet he continued to strip off until at last he stood there in his underwear, barefooted in the snow. He placed the pouch containing his wand, his mother's letter, the shard of Sirius's mirror, and the old Snitch on top of his clothes, then he pointed Hermione's wand at the ice.
"Diffindo."
It cracked with a sound like a bullet in the silence. The surface of the pool broke and chunks of dark ice rocked on the ruffled water. As far as Harry could judge, it was not deep, but to retrieve the sword he would have to submerge himself completely.
Contemplating the task ahead would not make it easier or the water warmer. He stepped to the pool's edge and placed Hermione's wand on the ground still lit. Then, trying not to imagine how much colder he was about to become or how violently he would soon be shivering, he jumped.
 
Every pore of his body screamed in protest. The very air in his lungs seemed to freeze solid as he was submerged to his shoulders in the frozen water. He could hardly breathe: trembling so violently the water lapped over the edges of the pool, he felt for the blade with his numb feet. He only wanted to dive once.
Harry put off the moment of total submersion from second to second, gasping and shaking, until he told himself that it must be done, gathered all his courage, and dived.
The cold was agony: It attacked him like fire. His brain itself seemed to have frozen as he pushed through the dark water to the bottom and reached out, groping for the sword. His fingers closed around the hilt; he pulled it upward.
Then something closed tight around his neck. He thought of water weeds, though nothing had brushed him as he dived, and raised his hand to free himself. It was not weed: The chain of the Horcrux had tightened and was slowly constricting his windpipe.
Harry kicked out wildly, trying to push himself back to the surface, but merely propelled himself into the rocky side of the pool. Thrashing, suffocating, he scrabbled at the strangling chain, his frozen fingers unable to loosen it, and now little lights were popping inside his head, and he was going to drown, there was nothing left, nothing he could do, and the arms that closed around his chest were surely Death's....
Choking and retching, soaking and colder than he had ever been in his life, he came to facedown in the snow. Somewhere, close by, another person was panting and coughing and staggering around, as she had come when the snake attacked....Yet it did not sound like her, not with those deep coughs, no judging by the weight of the footsteps....
Harry had no strength to lift his head and see his savior's identity. All he could do was raise a shaking hand to his throat and feel the place where the locket had cut tightly into his flesh. It was gone. Someone had cut him free. Then a panting voice spoke from over his head.
"Are -- you -- mental?"
Nothing but the shock of hearing that voice could have given Harry the strength to get up. Shivering violently, he staggered to his feet. There before him stood Ron, fully dressed but drenched to the skin, his hair plastered to his face, the sword of Gryffindor in one hand and the Horcrux dangling from its broken chain in the other.
"Why the hell," panted Ron, holding up the Horcrux, which swung backward and forward on its shortened chain in some parody of hypnosis, "didn't you take the thing off before you dived?"
Harry could not answer. The silver doe was nothing, nothing compared with Ron's reappearance; he could not believe it. Shuddering with cold, he caught up the pile of clothes still lying at the water's edge and began to pull them on. As he dragged sweater after sweater over his head, Harry stared at Ron, half expecting him to have disappeared every time he lost sight of him, and yet he had to be real: He had just dived into the pool, he had saved Harry's life.
"It was y-you?" Harry said at last, his teeth chattering, his voice weaker than usual due to his near-strangulation.
"Well, yeah," said Ron, looking slightly confused.
"Y-you cast that doe?"
"What? No, of course not! I thought it was you doing it!"
"My Patronus is a stag."
 
"Oh yeah. I thought it looked different. No antlers."
Harry put Hagrid's pouch back around his neck, pulled on a final sweater, stooped to pick up Hermione's wand, and faced Ron again.
"How come you're here?"
Apparently Ron had hoped that this point would come up later, if at all.
"Well, I've -- you know -- I've come back. If --" He cleared his throat. "You know. You still want me."
There was a pause, in which the subject of Ron's departure seemed to rise like a wall between them. Yet he was here. He had returned. He had just saved Harry's life.
Ron looked down at his hands. He seemed momentarily surprised to see the things he was holding.
"Oh yeah, I got it out," he said, rather unnecessarily, holding up the sword for Harry's inspection. "That's why you jumped in, right?"
"Yeah," said Harry. "But I don't understand. How did you get here? How did you find us?"
"Long story," said Ron. "I've been looking for you for hours, it's a big forest, isn't it? And I was just thinking I'd have to go kip under a tree and wait for morning when I saw that dear coming and you following."
"You didn't see anyone else?"
"No," said Ron. "I --"
But he hesitated, glancing at two trees growing close together some yards away.
"I did think I saw something move over there, but I was running to the pool at the time, because you'd gone in and you hadn't come up, so I wasn't going to make a detour to -- hey!"
Harry was already hurrying to the place that Ron had indicated. The two oaks grew close together; there was a gap of only a few inches between the trunks at eye level, an ideal place to see but not be seen. The ground around the roots, however, was free of snow, and Harry could see no sign of footprints. He walked back to where Ron stood waiting, still holding the sword and the Horcrux.
"Anything there?" Ron asked.
"No," said Harry.
"So how did the sword get in that pool?"
"Whoever cast the Patronus must have put it there."
They both looked at the ornate silver sword, its rubied hilt glinting a little in the light from Hermione's wand.
"You reckon this is the real one?" asked Ron.
"One way to find out, isn't there?" said Harry.
The Horcrux was still swinging from Ron's hand. The locket was twitching slightly. Harry knew that the thing inside it was agitated again. It had sensed the presence of the sword and had tried to kill Harry rather than let him possess it. Now was not the time for long discussions; now was the moment to destroy once and for all. Harry looked around, holding Hermione's wand high, and saw the place: a flattish rock lying in the shadow of a sycamore tree.
"Come here." he said and he led the way, brushed snow from the rock's surface, and held out his hand for the Horcrux. When Ron offered the sword, however, Harry shook his head.
 
"No you should do it."
"Me?" said Ron, looking shocked. "Why?"
"Because you got the sword out of the pool. I think it's supposed to be you."
He was not being kind or generous. As certainly as he had known that the doe was benign, he knew that Ron had to be the one to wield the sword. Dumbledore had at least taught Harry something about certain kinds of magic, of the incalculable power of certain acts.
"I'm going to open it," said Harry, "and you will stab it. Straightaway okay? Because whatever's in there will put up a fight. The bit of Riddle in the Diary tried to kill me."
"How are you going to open it?" asked Ron. He looked terrified
"I'm going to ask it to open, using Parseltongue," said Harry. The answer came so readily to his lips that thought that he had always known it deep down: Perhaps it had taken his recent encounter with Nagini to make him realize it. He looked at the serpentine S, inlaid with glittering green stones: It was easy to visualize it as a miniscule snake, curled upon the cold rock.
"No!" said Ron. "Don't open it! I'm serious!"
"Why not?" asked Harry. "Let's get rid of the damn thing, it's been months --"
"I can't, Harry, I'm serious -- you do it --"
"But why?"
"Because that thing's bad for me!" said Ron, backing away from the locket on the rock. "I can't handle it! I'm not making excuses, for what I was like, but it affects me worse than it affects you and Hermione, it made me think stuff -- stuff that I was thinking anyway, but it made everything worse. I can't explain it, and then I'd take it off and I'd get my head straight again, and then I'd have to put the effing thing back on -- I can't do it Harry!"
He had backed away, the sword dragging at his side, shaking his head.
"You can do it," said Harry, "you can! You've just got the sword, I know it's supposed to be you who uses it. Please just get rid of it Ron."
The sound of his name seemed to act like a stimulant. Ron swallowed, then still breathing hard through his long nose, moved back toward the rock.
"Tell me when," he croaked.
"On three," said Harry, looking back down at the locket and narrowing his eyes, concentrating on the letter S, imagining a serpent, while the contents of the locket rattled like a trapped cockroach. It would have been easy to pity it, except that the cut around Harry's neck still burned.
"One . . . two . . . three . . .open."
The last word came as a hiss and a snarl and the golden doors of the locket swung wide open with a little click.
Behind both of the glass windows within blinked a living eye, dark and handsome as Tom Riddle's eyes had been before he turned them scarlet and slit-pupiled
"Stab," said Harry, holding the locket steady on the rock.
Ron raised the sword in his shaking hands: The point dangled over the frantically swiveling eyes, and Harry gripped the locket tightly, bracing himself, already imagining blood pouring from the empty windows.
Then a voice hissed from out the Horcrux.
 
"I have seen your heart, and it is mine."
"Don't listen to it!" Harry said harshly. "Stab it!"
"I have seen your dreams, Ronald Weasley, and I have seen your fears. All you desire is possible, but all that you dread is also possible...."
"Stab!" shouted Harry, his voice echoed off the surrounding trees, the sword point trembled, and Ron gazed down into Riddle's eyes.
"Least loved, always, by the mother who craved a daughter . . . Least loved, now, by the girl who prefers your friend . . . Second best, always, eternally overshadowed . . ." "Ron, stab it now!" Harry bellowed: He could feel the locket quivering in the grip and was scared of what was coming. Ron raised the sword still higher, and as he did so, Riddle's eyes gleamed scarlet.
Out of the locket's two windows, out of the eyes, there bloomed like two grotesque bubbles, the heads of Harry and Hermione, weirdly distorted.
Ron yelled in shock and backed away as the figures blossomed out of the locket, first chests, then waists, then legs, until they stood in the locket, side by side like trees with a common root, swaying over Ron and the real Harry, who had snatched his fingers away from the locket as it burned, suddenly, white-hot.
"Ron!" he shouted, but the Riddle-Harry was now speaking with Voldemort's voice and Ron was gazing, mesmerized, into its face.
"Why return? We were better without you, happier without you, glad of your absence.... We laughed at your stupidity, your cowardice, your presumption--"
"Presumption!" echoed the Riddle-Hermione, who was more beautiful and yet more terrible than the real Hermione: She swayed, cackling, before Ron, who looked horrified, yet transfixed, the sword hanging pointlessly at his side. "Who could look at you, who would ever look at you, beside Harry Potter? What have you ever done, compared with the Chosen One? What are you, compared with the Boy Who Lived?"
"Ron, stab it, STAB IT!" Harry yelled, but Ron did not move. His eyes were wide, and the Riddle-Harry and the Riddle-Hermione were reflected in them, their hair swirling like flames, their eyes shining red, their voices lifted in an evil duet.
"Your mother confessed," sneered Riddle-Harry, while Riddle-Hermione jeered, "that she would have preferred me as a son, would be glad to exchange..."
"Who wouldn't prefer him, what woman would take you, you are nothing, nothing, nothing to him," crooned Riddle-Hermione, and she stretched like a snake and entwined herself around Riddle-Harry, wrapping him in a close embrace: Their lips met.
On the ground in front of them, Ron's face filled with anguish. he raised the sword high, his arms shaking.
 
"Do it, Ron!" Harry yelled.
Ron looked toward him, and Harry thought he saw a trace of scarlet in his eyes.
"Ron --?"
The sword flashed, plunged: Harry threw himself out of the way, there as a clang of metal and a long, drawn-out scream. Harry whirled around, slipping in the snow, wand held ready to defend himself, but there was nothing to fight.
The monstrous versions of himself and Hermione were gone: There was only Ron, standing there with the sword held slackly in his hand, looking down at the shattered remains of the locket on the flat rock.
Slowly, Harry walked back to him, hardly knowing what to say or do. Ron was breathing heavily: His eyes were no longer red at all, but their normal blue: they were also wet.
Harry stooped, pretending he had not seen, and picked up the broken Horcrux. Ron had pierced the glass in both windows: Riddle's eyes were gone, and the stained silk lining of the locket was smoking slightly. The thing that had lived in the Horcrux had vanished; torturing Ron had been its final act. The sword clanged as Ron dropped it. He had sunk to his knees, his head in his arms. He was shaking, but not, Harry realized, from cold. Harry crammed the broken locket into his pocket, knelt down beside Ron, and placed a hand cautiously on his shoulder. He took it as a good sign that Ron did not throw it off.
"After you left," he said in a low voice, grateful for the fact that Ron's face was hidden, "she cried for a week. Probably longer, only she didn't want me to see. There were loads of nights when we never even spoke to each other. With you gone..."
He could not finish; it was now that Ron was here again that Harry fully realized how much his absence had cost them.
"She's like my sister," he went on. "I love her like a sister and I reckon that she feels the same way about me. It's always been like that. I thought you knew."
Ron did not respond, but turned his face away from Harry and wiped his nose noisily on his sleeve. Harry got to his feet again and walked to where Ron's enormous rucksack lay yards away, discarded as Ron had run toward the pool to save Harry from drowning. He hoisted it onto his own back and walked back to Ron, who clambered to his feet as Harry approached, eyes bloodshot but otherwise composed.
"I'm sorry," he said in a thick voice. "I'm sorry I left. I know I was a -- a --"
He looked around at the darkness, as if hoping a bad enough word would swoop down upon him and claim him.
 
"You've sort of made up for it tonight," said Harry. "Getting the sword. Finishing off the Horcrux. Saving my life."
"That makes me sound a lot cooler than I was," Ron mumbled.
"Stuff like that always sounds cooler than it really was" said Harry. "I've been trying to tell you that for years."
Simultaneously they walked forward and hugged, Harry gripping the still-sopping back of Ron's jacket.
"And now," said Harry as they broke apart, "all we've got to do is find that tent again."
But it was not difficult. Though the walk through the dark forest with the doe had seemed lengthy, with Ron by his side, the journey back seemed to take a surprisingly short time. Harry could not wait to wake Hermione, and it was with quickening excitement that he entered the tent, Ron lagging a little behind him.
It was gloriously warm after the pool and the forest, the only illumination the bluebell flames still shimmering in a bowl on the floor. Hermione was fast asleep, curled up under her blankets, and did not move until Harry had said her name several times.
"Hermione!"
She stirred, then sat up quickly, pushing her hair out of her face.
"What's wrong? Harry? Are you all right?"
"It's okay, everything's fine. More than fine, I'm great. There's someone here."
"What do you mean? Who --?"
She saw Ron, who stood there holding the sword and dripping onto the threadbare carpet. Harry backed into a shadowy corner, slipped off Ron's rucksack, and attempted to blend in with the canvas.
Hermione slid out of her bunk and moved like a sleepwalker toward Ron, her eyes upon his pale face. She stopped right in front of him, her lips slightly parted, her eyes wide. Ron gave a weak hopeful smile and half raised his arms.
Hermione launched herself forward and started punching every inch of him that she could reach.
"Ouch -- ow -- gerroff! What the --? Hermione -- OW!"
 
"You -- complete -- arse -- Ronald -- Weasley!"
She punctuated every word with a blow: Ron backed away, shielding his head as Hermione advanced.
"You -- crawl -- back -- here -- after -- weeks -- and -- weeks -- oh, where's my wand?"
She looked as though ready to wrestle it out of Harry's hands and he reacted instinctively.
"Protego!"
The invisible shield erupted between Ron and Hermione. The force of it knocked her backward onto the floor. Spitting hair out of her mouth, she lept up again.
"Hermione!" said Harry. "Calm --"
"I will not calm down!" she screamed. Never before had he seen her lose control like this; she looked quite demented. "Give me back my wand! Give it back to me!"
"Hermione, will you please --"
"Don't you tell me what do, Harry Potter!" she screeched. "Don't you dare! Give it back now! And YOU!"
She was pointing at Ron in dire accusation: It was like a malediction, and Harry could not blame Ron for retreating several steps.
"I cam running after you! I called you! I begged you to come back"
"I know," Ron said, "Hermione, I'm sorry, I'm really --"
"Oh, you're sorry!"
She laughed a high-pitched, out-of-control sound; Ron looked at Harry for help, but Harry merely grimaced his helplessness.
"You came back after weeks -- weeks -- and you think it's all going to be all right if you just say sorry?"
"Well, what else can I say?" Ron shouted, and Harry was glad that Ron was fighting back.
"Oh, I don't know!" yelled Hermione with awful sarcasm. "Rack your brains, Ron, that should only take a couple of seconds --"
"Hermione," interjected Harry, who considered this a low blow, "he just saved my --"
 
"I don't care!" she screamed. "I don't care what he's done! Weeks and weeks, we could have been dead for all he knew --"
"I knew you weren't dead!" bellowed Ron, drowning her voice for the first time, and approaching as close as he could with the Shield Charm between them. "Harry's all over the Prophet, all over the radio, they're looking for you everywhere, all these rumors and mental stories, I knew I'd hear straight off if you were dead, you don't know what it's been like --"
"What it's been like for you??
Her voice was not so shrill only bats would be able to hear it soon, but she had reached a level of indignation that rendered her temporarily speechless, and Ron seized his opportunity.
"I wanted to come back the minute I'd Disapparated, but I walked straight into a gang of Snatchers, Hermione, and I couldn't go anywhere!"
"A gang of what?" asked Harry, as Hermione threw herself down into a chair with her arms and legs crossed so tightly it seemed unlikely that she would unravel them for several years.
"Snatchers," said Ron. "They're everywhere -- gangs trying to earn gold by rounding up Muggle-borns and blood traitors, there's a reward from the Ministry for everyone captured. I was on my own and I look like I might be school age; they got really excited, thought I was a Muggle-born in hiding. I had to talk fast to get out of being dragged to the Ministry."
"What did you say to them?"
"Told them I was Stan Shunpike. First person I could think of."
"And they believed that?"
"They weren't the brightest. One of them was definitely part troll, the smell of him...."
Ron glanced at Hermione, clearly hopeful she might soften at this small instance of humor, but her expression remained stony above her tightly knotted limbs.
"Anyway, they had a row about whether I was Stan or not. It was a bit pathetic to be honest, but there were still five of them and only one of me, and they'd taken my wand. Then two of them got into a fight and while the others were distracted I managed to hit the one holding me in the stomach, grabbed his wand, Disarmed the bloke holding mine, and Disapparated. I didn't do it so well. Splinched myself again" -- Ron held up his right hand to show two missing fingernails: Hermione raised her eyebrows coldly -- "and I
 
came out miles from where you were. By the time I got back to that bit of riverbank where we'd been ... you were gone."
"Gosh, what a gripping story," Hermione said in the lofty voice she adopted when wishing to wound. "You must have been simply terrified. Meanwhile we went to Godric's Hollow and, let's think, what happened there, Harry? Oh yes, You-Know-Who's snake turned up, it nearly killed both of us, and then You-Know-Who himself arrived and missed us by about a second."
"What?" Ron said, gaping from her to Harry, but Hermione ignored him.
"Imagine losing fingernails, Harry! That really puts our sufferings into perspective, doesn't it?"
"Hermione," said Harry quietly, "Ron just saved my life."
She appeared not to have heard him.
"One thing I would like to know, though," she said, fixing her eyes on a spot a foot over Ron's head. "How exactly did you find us tonight? That's important. Once we know, we'll be able to make sure we're not visited by anyone else we don't want to see."
Ron glared at her, then pulled a small silver object from his jeans pocket.
"This."
She had to look at Ron to see what he was showing them.
"The Deluminator?" she asked, so surprised she forgot to look cold and fierce.
"It doesn't just turn the lights on and off," said Ron. "I don't know how it works or why it happened then and not any other time, because I've been wanting to come back ever since I left. But I was listening to the radio really early on Christmas morning and I heard ... I heard you."
He was looking at Hermione.
"You heard me on the radio?" she asked incredulously.
"No, I heard you coming out of my pocket. Your voice," he held up the Deluminator again, "came out of this."
"And what exactly did I say?" asked Hermione, her tone somewhere between skepticism and curiosity.
"My name. 'Ron.' And you said ... something about a wand...."
 
Hermione turned a fiery shade of scarlet. Harry remembered: it had been the first time Won's name had been said aloud by either of them since the day he had left; Hermione had mentioned it when talking about repairing Harry's wand.
"So I took it out," Ron went on, looking at the Deluminator, "and it didn't seem different or anything, but I was sure I'd heard you. So I clicked it. And the light went out in my room, but another light appeared right outside the window."
Ron raised his empty hand and pointed in front of him, his eyes focused on something neither Harry nor Hermione could see.
"It was a ball of light, kind of pulsing, and bluish, like that light you get around a Portkey, you know?"
"Yeah," said Harry and Hermione together automatically.
"I knew this was it," said Ron. "I grabbed my stuff and packed it, then I put on my rucksack and went out into the garden.
"The little ball of light was hovering there, waiting for me, and when I came out it bobbed along a bit and I followed it behind the shed and then it ... well, it went inside me."
"Sorry?" said Harry, sure he had not heard correctly.
"It sort of floated toward me," said Ron, illustrating the movement with his free index finger, "right to my chest, and then -- it just went straight through. It was here," he touched a point close to his heard, "I could feel it, it was hot. And once it was inside me, I knew what I was supposed to do. I knew it would take me where I needed to go. So I Disapparated and came out on the side of a hill. There was snow everywhere...."
"We were there," said Harry. "We spent two nights there, and the second night I kept thinking I could hear someone moving around in the dark and calling out!"
"Yeah, well, that would've been me," said Ron. "Your protective spells work, anyway, because I couldn't see you and I couldn't hear you. I was sure you were around, though, so in the end I got in my sleeping bag and waited for one of you to appear. I thought you'd have to show yourselves when you packed up the tent."
"No, actually," said Hermione. "We've been Disapparating under the Invisibility Cloak as an extra precaution. And we left really early, because as Harry says, we'd heard somebody blundering around."
"Well, I stayed on that hill all day," said Ron. "I kept hoping you'd appear. But when it started to get dark I knew I must have missed you, so I clicked the Deluminator again, the
 
blue light came out and went inside me, and I Disapparated and arrived here in these woods. I still couldn't see you, so I just had to hope one of you would show yourselves in the end -- and Harry did. Well, I saw the doe first, obviously."
"You saw the what?" said Hermione sharply.
They explained what had happened and as the story of the silver doe and the sword in the pool unfolded, Hermione frowned form one to the other of them, concentrating so hard she forgot to keep her limbs locked together.
"But it must have been a Patronus!" she said. "Couldn't you see who was casting it? Didn't you see anyone? And it led you to the sword! I can't believe this! Then what happened?"
Ron explained how he had watched Harry jump into the pool, and had waited for him to resurface; how he had realized that something was wrong, dived in, and saved Harry, then returned for the sword. He got as far as the opening of the locket, then hesitated, and Harry cut in.
"-- and Ron stabbed it with the sword."
"And ... and it went? Just like that?" she whispered.
"Well, it -- it screamed," said Harry with half a glance at Ron. "Here."
He threw the locket into her lap; gingerly she picked it up and examined its punctured windows.
Deciding that it was at last safe to do so, Harry removed the Shield Charm with a wave of Hermione's wand and turned to Ron.
"Did you just say now that you got away from the snatchers with a spare wand?"
"What?" said Ron, who had been watching Hermione examining the locket. "Oh -- oh yeah."
He tugged open a buckle on his rucksack and pulled a short dark wand out of his pocket. "Here, I figured it's always handy to have a backup."
"You were right," said Harry, holding out his hand. "Mine's broken."
"You're kidding?" Ron said, but at that moment Hermione got to her feet, and he looked apprehensive again.
Hermione put the vanquished Horcrux into the beaded bag, then climbed back into her bed and settled down without another word.
 
Ron passed Harry the new wand.
"About the best you could hope for, I think," murmured Harry.
"Yeah," said Ron. "Could've been worse. Remember those birds she set on me?"
"I still haven't ruled it out," came Hermione's muffled voice from beneath her blankets, but Harry saw Ron smiling slightly as he pulled his maroon pajamas out of his rucksack.
Chapter Twenty Xenophilius Lovegood
Harry had not expected Hermione's anger to abate over night and was therefore unsurprised that she communicated mainly by dirty looks and pointed silences the next morning. Ron responded by maintaining an unnaturally somber demeanor in her presence as an outward sign of continuing remorse. In fact, when all three of them were together Harry felt like the only non-mourner at a poorly attended funeral. During those few moments he spent alone with Harry, however (collecting water and searching the undergrowth for mushrooms). Ron became shamelessly cheery.
"Someone helped us," he kept saying, "Someone sent that doe, Someone's on our side, One Horcrux down, mate!"
Bolstered by the destruction of the locket they set to debating the possible locations of the other Horcruxes and even though they had discussed the matter so often before. Harry felt optimistic, certain that more breakthroughs would succeed the first. Hermione's sulkiness could not mar his buoyant spirits; The sudden upswing in their fortunes, the appearance of the mysterious due, the recovery of Gryffindor’s sword, and above all, Ron's return made Harry so happy that it was quite difficult to maintain a straight face.
Late in the afternoon he and Ron escaped Hermione's baleful presence again and under the pretense of scouring the bare hedges for nonexistent blackberries, they continued their ongoing exchange of news. Harry had finally managed to tell Ron the whole story of his and Hermione's various wanderings, right up to the full story of what had happened at Godric's Hollow; Ron was now filling Harry in on everything he had discovered about the wider Wizarding world during his weeks away.
 
"... and how did you find out about the Taboo?" he asked Harry after explaining the many desperate attempts of Muggle-borns to evade the Ministry."
"The what?"
"You and Hermione have stopped saying You-Know-Who's name!"
"Oh, yeah, Well, it's just a bad habit we've slipped into," said Harry. "But I haven't got a problem calling him V ---"
"NO!" roared Ron, causing Harry to jump into the hedge and Hermione (nose buried in a book at the tent entrance) to scowl over at them. "Sorry," said Ron, wrenching Harry back out of the brambles, "but the name's been jinxed, Harry, that's how they track people! Using his name breaks protective enchantments, it causes some kind of magical disturbance --- it's how they found us in Tottenham Court Road!"
"Because we used his *name*?"
"Exactly! You've got to give them credit, it makes sense. It was only people who were serious about standing up to him, like Dumbledore, who even dared use it. Now they've put a Taboo on it, anyone who says it is trackable ---quick-and-easy way to find Order members! They nearly got Kingsley ---"
"You're kidding?"
"Yeah, a bunch of Death Eaters cornered him, Bill said but he fought his way out. He's on the run now just like us." Ron scratched his chin thoughtfully with the end of his wand. "You don't reckon Kingsley could have sent that doe?"
"His Patronus is a lynx, we saw it at the wedding, remember?"
"Oh yeah..."
They moved farther along the hedge, away from the tent and Hermione.
"Harry... you don't reckon it could've been Dumbledore?"
"Dumbledore what?"
Ron looked a little embarrassed, but said in a low voice, "Dumbledore ... the doe? I mean," Ron was watching Harry out of the corners of his eyes, "he had the real sword last, didn't he?
 
Harry did not laugh at Ron, because he understood too well the longing behind the question. The idea that Dumbledore had managed to come back to them, that he was watching over them, would have inexpressibly comforting. He shook his head.
"Dumbledore’s dead," he said. "I saw it happen, I saw the body. He's definitely gone. Anyway his Patronus was a phoenix, not a doe"
"Patronuses can change, though can't they?" said Ron, "Tonks’s changed didn't it?"
Yeah, but if Dumbledore was alive, why wouldn't he show himself? Why wouldn't he just hand us the sword?
"Search me," said Ron. "Same reason he didn't give it to you while he was alive? Same reason he left you an old Snitch and Hermione a book of kid's stories?"
"Which is what?" asked Harry, turning to look Ron full in the face desperate for the answer.
"I dunno," said Ron. "Sometimes I've thought, when I've been a bit hacked off, he was having a laugh or --- or he just wanted to make it more difficult, But I don't think so, not anymore. He knew what he was doing when he gave me the Deluminator, didn't he? He -- well," Ron's ears turned bright red and he became engrossed in a tuft of grass at his feet, which he prodded with his toe, "he must've known I'd run out on you."
"No," Harry corrected him. "He must've known you'd always want to come back."
Ron looked grateful, but still awkward. Partly to change the subject, Harry said, "Speaking of Dumbledore, have you heard what Skeeter wrote about him?"
"Oh yeah," said Ron at once, "people are talking about it quite a lot. 'Course, if things were different it'd be huge news, Dumbledore being pals with Grindelwald, but now it's just something to laugh about for people who didn't like Dumbledore, and a bit of a slap in the face for everyone who thought he was such a good bloke. I don't know that it's such a big deal, though. He was really young when they --"
"Our age," said Harry, just as he had retorted to Hermione, and something in his face seemed to decide Ron against pursuing the subject.
A large spider sat in the middle of a frosted web in the brambles. Harry took aim at it with the wand Ron had given him the previous night, which
 
Hermione had since condescended to examine, and had decided was made of blackthorn.
"*Engorgio*"
"The spider gave a little shiver, bouncing slightly in the web. Harry tried again. This time the spider grew slightly larger.
"Stop that," said Ron sharply, " I'm sorry I said Dumbledore was young, okay?"
Harry had forgotten Ron's hatred of spiders.
"Sorry --- *Reducio*"
The spider did not shrink. Harry looked down at the blackthorn wand. Every minor spell he had cast with it so far that day had seemed less powerful than those he had produced with his phoenix wand. The new one felt intrusively unfamiliar, like having somebody else's hand sewn to the end of his arm.
"You just need to practice," said Hermione, who had approached them noiselessly from behind and had stood watching anxiously as Harry tried to enlarge and reduce the spider. "It’s all a matter of confidence Harry."
He knew why she wanted it to be all right; She still felt guilty about breaking his wand. He bit back the retort that sprung to his lips, that she could take the blackthorn wand if she thought it made no difference, and he would have hers instead. Keen for them all to be friends again, however, he agreed; but when Ron gave Hermione a tentative smile, she stalked off and vanished behind her book once more.
All three of them returned to the tent when darkness fell, and Harry took first watch. Sitting in the entrance, he tried to make the blackthorn wand levitate small stones at his feet; but his magic still seemed clumsier and less powerful than it had done before. Hermione was lying on her bunk reading, while Ron, after many nervous glances up at her, had taken a small wooden wireless out of his rucksack and started to try to tune it.
"There's this one program," he told Harry in a low voice, "that tells the news like it really is. All the others are on You-Know-Who's side and are following the Ministry line, but this one ... you wait till you hear it, it's great. Only they can't do it every night, they have to keep changing locations in case they're raided and you need a password to tune in ... Trouble is, I missed the last one..."
 
He drummed lightly on the top of the radio with his wand muttering random words under his breath. He threw Hermione many covert glances, plainly fearing an angry outburst, but for all the notice she took of him he might not have been there. For ten minutes or so Ron tapped and muttered, Hermione turned the pages of her book, and Harry continued to practice with the blackthorn wand.
Finally Hermione climbed down from her bunk. Ron ceased his tapping at once.
"If it's annoying you, I'll stop!" he told Hermione nervously.
Hermione did not deign to respond, but approached Harry.
"We need to talk," she said.
He looked at the book still clutched in her hand. It was * The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore.*
"What?" he said apprehensively. It flew through his mind that there was a chapter on him in there; he was not sure he felt up to hearing Rita's version of his relationship with Dumbledore. Hermione's answer however, was completely unexpected.
"I want to go and see Xenophilius Lovegood."
He stared at her.
"Sorry?"
“Xenophilius Lovegood, Luna’s father. I want to go and talk to him!”
“er – why?”
She took a deep breath, as though bracing herself, and said, “It’s that mark, the mark in Beedle the Bard. Look at this!”
She thrust The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore under Harry’s unwilling eyes and saw a photograph of the original letter that Dumbledore had written Grindelwald, with Dumbledore’s familiar thin, slanting handwriting. He hated seeing absolute proof that Dumbledore really had written those words, that they had not been Rita’s invention.
“The signature,” said Hermione. “Look at the signature, Harry!”
He obeyed. For a moment he had no idea what she was talking about, but, looking more closely with the aid of his lit wand, he saw that Dumbledore had replaced the A of Albus with a tiny version of the same triangular mark inscribed upon The Tales of Beedle the Bard.
“Er – what are you -- ?” said Ron tentatively, but Hermione quelled him with a look and turned back to Harry.
“It keeps cropping up, doesn’t it?” she said. “I know Viktor said it was Grindelwald’s mark, but it was definitely on that old grave in Godric’s Hollow, and the
 
dates on the headstone were long before Grindelwald came along! And now this! Well, we can’t ask Dumbledore or Grindelwald what it means – I don’t even know whether Grindelwald’s still alive – but we can ask Mr. Lovegood. He was wearing the symbol at the wedding. I’m sure this is important, Harry!”
Harry did not answer immediately. He looked into her intense, eager face and then out into the surrounding darkness, thinking. After a long pause he said, “Hermione, we don’t need another Godric’s Hollow. We talked ourselves into going there, and –”
“But it keeps appearing, Harry! Dumbledore left me The Tales of Beedle the Bard, how do you know we’re not supposed to find out about the sign?”
“Here we go again!” Harry felt slightly exasperated. “We keep trying to convince ourselves Dumbledore left us secret signs and clues –“
“The Deluminator turned out to be pretty useful,” piped up Ron. “I think Hermione’s right, I think we ought to go and see Lovegood.”
Harry threw him a dark look. He was quite sure that Ron’s support of Hermione had little to do with a desire to know the meaning of the triangular rune.
“It won’t be like Godric’s Hollow,” Ron added, “Lovegood’s on your side, Harry, The Quibbler’s been for you all along, it keeps telling everyone they’ve got to help you!”
“I’m sure this is important!” said Hermione earnestly.
“But don’t you think if it was, Dumbledore would have told me about it before he died?”
“Maybe . . . maybe it’s something you need to find out for yourself,” said Hermione with a faint air of clutching at straws.
“Yeah,” said Ron sycophantically, “that makes sense.”
“No, it doesn’t,” snapped Hermione, “but I still think we ought to talk to Mr. Lovegood. A symbol that links Dumbledore, Grindelwald, and Godric’s Hollow? Harry, I’m sure we ought to know about this!”
“I think we should vote on it,” said Ron. “Those in favor of going to see Love good –”
His hand flew into the air before Hermione’s. Her lips quivered suspiciously as she raised her own.
“Outvoted, Harry, sorry,” said Ron, clapping him on the back.
“Fine,” said Harry, half amused, half irritated. “Only, once we’ve seen Lovegood, let’s try and look for some more Horcruxes, shall we? Where do the Lovegood’s live, anyway? Do either of you know?
“Yeah, they’re not far from my place,” said Ron. “I dunno exactly where, but Mum and Dad always point toward the hills whenever they mention them. Shouldn’t be hard to find.”
When Hermione had returned to her bunk, Harry lowered his voice.
“You only agreed to try and get back in her good books.”
“All’s fair in love and war,” said Ron brightly, “and this is a bit of both. Cheer up, it’s the Christmas holidays, Luna’ll be home!”
They had an excellent view of the village of Ottery St. Catchopole from the breezy hillside to which they Disapparated next morning. From their high vantage point the village looked like a collection of toy houses in the great slanting shafts of sunlight stretching to earth in the breaks between clouds. They stood for a minute or two looking toward the Burrow, their hands shadowing their eyes, but all they could make out were
 
the high hedges and trees of the orchard, which afforded the crooked little house protection from Muggle eyes.
“It’s weird, being this near, but not going to visit,” said Ron.
“Well, it’s not like you haven’t just seen them. You were there for Christmas,” said Hermione coldly.
“I wasn’t at the Burrow!” said Ron with an incredulous laugh. “Do you think I was going to go back there and tell them all I’d walked out on you? Yeah, Fred and George would’ve been great about it. And Ginny, she’d have been really understanding.”
“But where have you been, then?” asked Hermione, surprised.
“Bill and Fleur’s new place. Shell cottage. Bill’s always been decent to me. He – he wasn’t impressed when he heard what I’d done, but he didn’t go on about it. He knew I was really sorry. None of the rest of the family know I was there. Bill told Mum he and Fleur weren’t going home for Christmas because they wanted to spend it alone. You know, first holiday after they were married. I don’t think Fleur minded. You know how much she hates Celestina Warbeck.”
Ron turned his back on the Burrow.
“Let’s try up here,” he said, leading the way over the top of the hill.
They walked for a few hours, Harry, at Hermione’s insistence, hidden beneath the Invisibility Cloak. The cluster of low hills appeared to be uninhabited apart from one small cottage, which seemed deserted.
“Do you think it’s theirs, and they’ve gone away for Christmas?” said Hermione, peering through the window at a neat little kitchen with geraniums on the windowsill. Ron snorted.
“Listen, I’ve got a feeling you’d be able to tell who lived there if you looked through the Lovegoods’ window. Let’s try the next lot of hills.”
So they Disapparated a few miles farther north.
“Aha!” shouted Ron, as the wind whipped their hair and clothes. Ron was pointing upward, toward the top of the hill on which they had appeared, where a most strange-looking house rose vertically against the sky, a great black cylinder with a ghostly moon hanging behind it in the afternoon sky. “That’s got to be Luna’s house, who else would live in a place like that? It looks like a giant rook!”
“It’s nothing like a bird,” said Hermione, frowning at the tower.
“I was talking about a chess rook,” said Ron. “A castle to you.”
Ron’s legs were the longest and he reached the top of the hill first. When Harry and Hermione caught up with him, panting and clutching stitches in their sides, they found him grinning broadly.
“It’s theirs,” said Ron. “Look.”
Three hand-painted signs had been tacked to a broke-down gate. The first read, THE QUIBBLER. EDITOR, X. LOVEGOOD
the second,
PICK YOUR OWN MISTLETOE
the third,
KEEP OFF THE DIRIGIBLE PLUMS
 
The gate creaked as they opened it. The zigzagging path leading to the front door was overgrown with a variety of odd plants, including a bush covered in orange radishlike fruit Luna sometimes wore as earrings. Harry thought he recognized a Snargaluff and gave the wizened stump a wide berth. Two aged crab apple trees, bent with the wind, stripped of leaves but still heavy with berry-sized red fruits and bushy crowns of white beaded mistletoe, stood sentinel on either side of the front door. A little owl with a slightly flattened hawklike head peered down at them from one of the branches.
“You’d better take off the Invisibility Cloak, Harry,” said Hermione. “It’s you Mr. Lovegood wants to help, not us.”
He did as she suggested, handing her the Cloak to stow in the beaded bag. She then rapped three times on the thick black door, which was studded with iron nails and bore a knocker shaped like an eagle.
Barely ten seconds passed, then the door was flung open and there stood Xenophilius Lovegood, barefoot and wearing what appeared to be a stained nightshirt. His long white candyfloss hair was dirty and unkempt. Xenophilius had been positively dapper at Bill and Fleur's wedding by comparison.
"What? What is it? Who are you? What do you want?" he cried in a high-pitched, querulous voice, looking first at Hermione, then at Ron, and finally at Harry, upon which his mouth fell open in a perfect, comical O.
"Hello, Mr. Lovegood," said Harry, holding out his hand, "I'm Harry, Harry Potter."
Xenophilius did not take Harry's hand, although the eye that was not pointing inward at his nose slid straight to the scar on Harry's forehead.
"Would it be okay if we came in?" asked Harry. "There's something we'd like to ask you."
"I . . . I'm not sure that's advisable," whispered Xenophilius, He swallowed and cast a quick look around the garden. "Rather a shock . . . My word . . . I . . . I'm afraid I don't really think I ought to ---"
"It wont take long" said Harry, slightly disappointed by this less-than-warm welcome.
"I --- oh, all right then. Come in, quickly, Quickly!"
They were barely over the threshold when Xenophilius slammed the door shut behind them, They were standing in the most peculiar kitchen Harry had ever seen. The room was perfectly circular, so that he felt like being inside a giant pepper pot. Everything was curved to fit the walls - the stove, the sink, and the cupboards - and all of it had been painted with flowers, insects, and birds in bright primary colors. Harry thought he recognized Luna's styles. The effect in such and enclosed space, was slightly overwhelming.
In the middle of the floor, a wrought-iron spiral staircase ld to the upper levels. There was a great deal of clattering and banging coming from overhead: Harry wondered what Luna could be doing.
"You'd better come up." said Xenophilius, still looking extremely uncomfortable, and he led the way.
The room above seemed to be a combination of living room and workplace,
 
and as such, was even more cluttered than the kitchen. Though much smaller and entirely round, the room somewhat resembled the Room of Requirement on the unforgettable occasion that it had transformed itself into a gigantic labyrinth comprised of centuries of hidden objects. There were piles upon piles of books and papers on every surface. Delicately made models of creatures Harry did not recognize, all flapping wings or snapping jaws, hung from the ceiling.
Luna was not there: The thing that was making such a racket was a wooden object covered in magically turning cogs and wheels, It looked like the bizarre offspring of a workbench and a set of shelves, but after a moment Harry deduced that it was an old-fashioned printing press, due to the fact that it was churning out Quibblers.
"Excuse me," said Xenophilius, and he strode over to the machine, seized grubbily tablecloth from beneath an immense number of books and papers, which all tumbled onto the floor, and threw it over the press, somewhat muffling the loud bangs and clatters. He then faced Harry.
"Why have you come here?" Before Harry could speak, however, Hermione let out a small cry of shock.
"Mr. Lovegood - what's that?"
See was pointing at an enormous, gray spiral horn, not unlike that of a unicorn, which had been mounted on the wall, protruding several feet into the room.
"It is the horn of a Crumple-Horned Snorkack," said Xenophilius.
"No it isn't!" said Hermione.
"Hermione," muttered Harry, embarrassed, "now's not the moment -"
"But Harry, it's an Erumpent horn! It's a Class B Tradeable Material and it's an extraordinary dangerous thing to have in a house!"
"How'd you know it's an Erumpent horn?" asked Ron, edging away from the horn as fast as he could, given the extreme clutter of the room.
"There's a description in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them! Mr. Lovegood, you need to get rid of it straightaway, don't you know it can explode at the slightest touch?"
"The Crumple Horned Snorkack" said Xenophilius very clearly, a mulish look upon his face, “is a shy and highly magical creature, and it's horn -"
"Mr. Lovegood. I recognize the grooved markings around the base, that's an Erumpent horn and it's incredibly dangerous - I don't know where you got it-"
"I bought it," said Xenophilius dogmatically. "Two weeks ago, from a delightful young wizard who knew my interest in the exquisite Snorkack. A Christmas surprise for my Luna. Now," he said, turning to Harry, "why exactly have you come here, Mr. Potter?"
"We need some help," said Harry, before Hermione could start again.
"Ah," said Xenophilius, "Help, Hmm."
His good eye moved again to Harry's scar. He seemed simultaneously terrified and mesmerized.
"Yes. The thing is ... helping Harry Potter ... rather dangerous..."
 
"Aren't you the one who keeps telling everyone it's their first duty to help Harry?" said Ron. "In that magazine of yours?"
Xenophilius glanced behind him at the concealed printing press, still banging and clattering beneath the tablecloth.
"Er - yes, I have expressed that view. however -"
"That's for everyone else to do, not you personally?" said Ron.
Xenophilius did not answer. He kept swallowing, his eyes darting between the three of them. Harry had the impression that he was undergoing some painful internal struggle.
"Where's Luna?" asked Hermione. "Let's see what she thinks."
Xenophilius gulped. He seemed to be steeling himself. Finally he said in a shaky voice difficult to hear over the noise of the printing press, "Luna is down at the stream, fishing for Freshwater Plimpies. She...she will like to see you. I'll go and call her and then - yes, very well. I shall try to help you."
He disappeared down the spiral staircase and they heard the front open and close. They looked at each other.
"Cowardly old wart," said Ron. "Luna's got ten times his guts."
"He's probably worried about what'll happen to them if the Death Eaters find out I was here" said Harry.
"Well, I agree with Ron, " said Hermione, "Awful old hypocrite, telling everyone else to help you and trying to worm our of it himself. And for heaven's sake keep away from that horn."
Harry crossed to the window on the far side of the room. He could see a stream, a thin, glittering ribbon lying far below them at the base of the hill. They were very high up; a bird fluttered past the window as he stared in the direction of the Burrow, now invisible beyond another line of hills. Ginny was over there somewhere. They were closer to each other today than they had been since Bill and Fleur's wedding, but she could have no idea he was gazing toward her now, thinking of her. He suppose he ought to be glad of it; anyone he came into contact with was in danger, Xenophilius's attitude proved that.
he turned away from the windows and his gaze fell upon another peculiar object standing upon the cluttered, curved slide board; a stone but of a beautiful but austere-looking witch wearing a most bizarre-looking headdress. Two objects that resembled golden ear trumpets curved out from the sides. A tiny pair of glittering blue wing was stuck to a leather strap that ran over the top of her head, while one of the orange radishes had been stuck to a second strap around her forehead.
"Look at this," said Harry.
"Fetching," said Ron. "Surprised he didn't hear that to the wedding."
They heard the front door close, and a moment later Xenophilius climbed back up the spiral staircase into the room, his thin legs now encase in Wellington boots, bearing a tray of ill-assorted teacups and a steaming teapot.
"Ah, you have spotted my pet invention," he said, shoving the tray into
 
Hermione's arms and joining Harry at the statue's side.
"Modeled, fittingly enough, upon the head of the beautiful Rowens Ravenclaw,
'Wit beyond measure is a man's greatest treasure!'"
He indicated the objects like ear trumpets.
"These are the Wrackpurt siphons - to remove all sources of distraction from the thinker's immediate area. Here, "he pointed out the tiny wings, "a billywig propeller, to induce an elevated frame of mind. Finally, "he pointed to the orange radish, "the dirigible Plum, so as to enhance the ability to accept the extraordinary."
Xenophilius strode back to the tea tray, which Hermione had managed to balance precariously on one of the cluttered side tables.
"May I offer you all an infusion of Gurdyroots?" said Xenophilius. "We make it ourselves." As he started to pour out the drink, which was as deeply purple as beetroot juice, he added, "Luna is down beyond Bottom Bridge, she is most excited that you are here She ought not to be too long, she has caught nearly enough Plumpies to make soup for all of us. Do sit down and help yourselves to sugar.
"Now," he remove a tottering pile of papers from an armchair and sat down, his Wellingtoned legs crossed, "how may I help you, Mr. Potter?"
"Well," said Harry, glancing at Hermione, who nodded encouragingly, "it's about that symbol you were wearing around your neck at Bill and Fleur's wedding, Mr. Lovegood. We wondered what it meant."
Xenophilius raised his eyebrows.
"Are you referring to the sign of the Deathly Hallows?"
Chapter Twenty-One
The Tale of the Three Brothers
Harry turned to look at Ron and Hermione. Neither of them seemed to have understood what Xenophilius had said either.
"The Deathly Hallows?"
"That's right," said Xenophilius. "You haven't heard of them? I'm not surprised. Very, very few wizards believe. Witness that knuckle-headed young man at your brother's wedding," he nodded at Ron, "who attacked me for sporting the symbol of a well-known Dark wizard! Such ignorance. There is nothing Dark about the Hallows – at least not in that crude sense. One simply uses the symbol to reveal oneself to other believers, in the hope that they might help one with the Quest."
He stirred several lumps of sugar into his Gurdyroot infusion and drank some.
"I'm sorry," said Harry, "I still don't really understand."
To be polite, he took a sip from his cup too, and almost gagged: The stuff was quite disgusting, as though someone had liquidized bogey-flavored Every Flavor Beans.
 
"Well, you see, believers seek the Deathly Hallows," said Xenophilius, smacking his lips in apparent appreciation of the Gurdyroot infusion.
"But what are the Deathly Hallows?" asked Hermione.
Xenophilius set aside his empty teacup.
"I assume that you are familiar with 'The Tale of the Three Brothers'?"
Harry said, "No," but Ron and Hermione both said, "Yes." Xenophilius nodded gravely.
"Well, well, Mr. Potter, the whole thing starts with 'The Tale of the Three Brothers' . . . I have a copy somewhere . . ."
He glanced vaguely around the room, at the piles of parchment and books, but Hermione said, "I've got a copy, Mr. Lovegood, I've got it right here."
And she pulled out The Tales of Beedle the Bard from the small, beaded bag.
"The original?" inquired Xenophilius sharply, and when she nodded, he said, "Well then, why don't you read it out aloud? Much the best way to make sure we all understand."
"Er. . . all right," said Hermione nervously. She opened the book, and Harry saw that the symbol they were investigating headed the top of the page as she gave a little cough, and began to read.
"'There were once three brothers who were traveling along a lonely, winding road at twilight –'"
"Midnight, our mum always told us," said Ron, who had stretched out, arms behind his head, to listen. Hermione shot him a look of annoyance.
"Sorry, I just think it's a bit spookier if it's midnight!" said Ron.
"Yeah, because we really need a bit more fear in our lives," said Harry before he could stop himself. Xenophilius did not seem to be paying much attention, but was staring out of the window at the sky. "Go on, Hermione."
"In time, the brothers reached a river too deep to wade through and too dangerous to swim across. However, these brothers were learned in the magical arts, and so they simply waved their wands and made a bridge appear across the treacherous water. They were halfway across it when they found their path blocked by a hooded figure.
"'And Death spoke to them –'"
"Sorry," interjected Harry, "but Death spoke to them?"
"It's a fairy tale, Harry!"
"Right, sorry. Go on."
"'And Death spoke to them. He was angry that he had been cheated out of the three new victims, for travelers usually drowned in the river. But Death was cunning. He pretended to congratulate the three brothers upon their magic, and said that each had earned a prize for having been clever enough to evade him.
"'So the oldest brother, who was a combative man, asked for a wand more powerful than any in existence: a wand that must always win duels for its owner, a wand worthy of a wizard who had conquered Death! So Death crossed to an elder tree on the banks of the river, fashioned a wand from a branch that hung there, and gave it to the oldest brother.
"'Then the second brother, who was an arrogant man, decided that he wanted to humiliate Death still further, and asked for the power to recall others from Death. So
 
Death picked up a stone from the riverbank and gave it to the second brother, and told him that the stone would have the power to bring back the dead.
"'And then Death asked the third and youngest brother what he would like. The youngest brother was the humblest and also the wisest of the brothers, and he did not trust Death. So he asked for something that would enable him to go forth from that place without being followed by Death. And Death, most unwillingly, handed over his own Cloak of Invisibility.'"
"Death's got an Invisibility Cloak?" Harry interrupted again.
"So he can sneak up on people," said Ron. "Sometimes he gets bored of running at them, flapping his arms and shrieking . . . sorry, Hermione."
"'Then Death stood aside and allowed the three brothers to continue on their way, and they did so talking with wonder of the adventure they had had and admiring Death's gifts.
"'In due course the brothers separated, each for his own destination.
"'The first brother traveled on for a week more, and reaching a distant village, sought out a fellow wizard with whom he had a quarrel. Naturally, with the Elder Wand as his weapon, he could not fail to win the duel that followed. Leaving his enemy dead upon the floor the oldest brother proceeded to an inn, where he boasted loudly of the powerful wand he had snatched from Death himself, and of how it made him invincible.
"'That very night, another wizard crept upon the oldest brother as he lay, wine-sodden upon his bed. The thief took the wand and for good measure, slit the oldest brother's throat.
"'And so Death took the first brother for his own.
"'Meanwhile, the second brother journeyed to his own home, where he lived alone. Here he took out the stone that had the power to recall the dead, and turned it thrice in his hand. To his amazement and his delight, the figure of the girl he had once hoped to marry, before her untimely death, appeared at once before him.
"'Yet she was sad and cold, separated from him as by a veil. Though she had returned to the mortal world, she did not truly belong there and suffered. Finally the second brother, driven mad with hopeless longing, killed himself so as to truly join her.
"'And so Death took the second brother from his own.
"'But though Death searched for the third brother for many years, he was never able to find him. It was only when he had attained a great age that the youngest brother finally took off the Cloak of Invisibility and gave it to his son. And the he greeted Death as an old friend, and went with him gladly, and, equals, they departed this life.'"
Hermione closed the book. It was a moment or two before Xenophilius seemed to realize that she had stopped reading; then he withdrew his gaze from the window and said: "Well, there you are."
"Sorry?" said Hermione, sounding confused.
"Those are the Deathly Hallows," said Xenophilius.
He picked up a quill from a packed table at his elbow, and pulled a torn piece of parchment from between more books.
"The Elder Wand," he said, and drew a straight vertical line upon the parchment. "The Resurrection Stone," he said, and added a circle on top of the line. "The Cloak of Invisibility," he finished, enclosing both line and circle in a triangle, to make the symbols that so intrigued Hermione. "Together," he said, "the Deathly Hallows."
 
"But there's no mention of the words 'Deathly Hallows' in the story," said Hermione.
"Well, of course not," said Xenophilius, maddeningly smug. "That is a children's tale, told to amuse rather than to instruct. Those of us who understand these matters, however, recognize that the ancient story refers to three objects, or Hallows, which, if united, will make the possessor master of Death."
There was a short silence in which Xenophilius glanced out of the window. Already the sun was low in the sky.
"Luna ought to have enough Plimpies soon," he said quietly.
"When you say 'master of Death' –"said Ron.
"Master," said Xenophilius, waving an airy hand. "Conqueror. Vanquisher. Whichever term you prefer."
"But then . . . do you mean . . ." said Hermione slowly, and Harry could tell that she was trying to keep any trace of skepticism out of her voice, "that you believe these objects – these Hallows – really exist?"
Xenophilius raised his eyebrows again.
"Well, of course."
"But," said Hermione, and Harry could hear her restraint starting to crack, "Mr. Lovegood, how can you possibly believe – ?"
"Luna has told me all about you, young lady," said Xenophilius. "You are, I gather, not unintelligent, but painfully limited. Narrow. Close-minded."
"Perhaps you ought to try on the hat, Hermione," said Ron, nodding toward the ludicrous headdress. His voice shook with the strain of not laughing.
"Mr. Lovegood," Hermione began again, "We all know that there are such things as Invisibility Cloaks. They are rare, but they exist. But –"
"Ah, but the Third Hallow is a true Cloak of Invisibility, Miss Granger! I mean to say, it is not a traveling cloak imbued with a Disillusionment Charm, or carrying a Bedazzling Hex, or else woven from Demiguise hair, which will hide one initially but fade with the years until it turns opaque. We are talking about a cloak that really and truly renders the wearer completely invisible, and endures eternally, giving constant and impenetrable concealment, no matter what spells are cast at it. How many cloaks have you ever seen like that, Miss Granger?"
Hermione opened her mouth to answer, then closed it again, looking more confused than ever. She, Harry and Ron glanced at one another, and Harry knew that they were all thinking the same thing. It so happened that a cloak exactly like the one Xenophilius had just described was in the room with them at that very moment.
"Exactly," said Xenophilius, as if he had defeated them all in reasoned argument. "None of you have ever seen such a thing. The possessor would be immeasurably rich, would he not?"
He glanced out of the window again. The sky was now tinged with the faintest trace of pink.
"All right," said Hermione, disconcerted. "Say the Cloak existed. . . what about that stone, Mr. Lovegood? The thing you call the Resurrection Stone?"
"What of it?"
"Well, how can that be real?"
"Prove that is not," said Xenophilius.
 
Hermione looked outraged.
"But that's – I'm sorry, but that's completely ridiculous! How can I possibly prove it doesn't exist? Do you expect me to get hold of – of all the pebbles in the world and test them? I mean, you could claim that anything's real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody's proved it doesn't exist!"
"Yes, you could," said Xenophilius. "I am glad to see that you are opening your mind a little."
"So the Elder Wand," said Harry quickly, before Hermione could retort, "you think that exists too?"
"Oh, well, in that case there is endless evidence," said Xenophilius. "The Elder Wand is the Hallow that is most easily traced, because of the way in which it passes from hand to hand."
"Which is what?" asked Harry.
"Which is that the possessor of the wand must capture it from its previous owner, if he is to be truly master of it," said Xenophilius. "Surely you have heard of the way the wand came to Egbert the Egregious, after his slaughter of Emeric the Evil? Of how Godelot died in his own cellar after his son, Hereward, took the wand from him? Of the dreadful Loxias, who took the wand from Baraabas Deverill, whom he had killed? The bloody trail of the Elder Wand is splattered across the pages of Wizarding history."
Harry glanced at Hermione. She was frowning at Xenophilius, but she did not contradict him.
"So where do you think the Elder Wand is now?" asked Ron.
"Alas, who knows?" said Xenophilius, as he gazed out of the window. "Who knows where the Elder Wand lies hidden? The trail goes cold with Arcus and Livius. Who can say which of them really defeated Loxias, and which took the wand? And who can say who may have defeated them? History, alas, does not tell us."
There was a pause. Finally Hermione asked stiffly, "Mr. Lovegood, does the Peverell family have anything to do with the Deathly Hallows?"
Xenophilius looked taken aback as something shifted in Harry's memory, but he could not locate it. Peverell. . . he had heard that name before. . .
"But you have been misleading me, young woman!" said Xenophilius, now sitting up much straighter in his chair and goggling at Hermione. "I thought you were new to the Hallows Quest! Many of us Questers believe that the Peverells have everything – everything! – to do with the Hallows!"
"Who are the Peverells?" asked Ron.
"That was the name on the grave with the mark on it, in Godric's Hollow," said Hermione, still watching Xenophilius. "Ignotus Peverell."
"Exactly!" said Xenophilius, his forefinger raised pedantically. "The sign of the Death Hallows on Ignotus's grave is conclusive proof!"
"Of what?" asked Ron.
"Why, that the three brothers in the story were actually the three Peverell brothers, Antioch, Cadmus and Ignotus! That they were the original owners of the Hallows!"
With another glance at the window he got to his feet, picked up the tray, and headed for the spiral staircase.
"You will stay for dinner?" he called, as he vanished downstairs again. "Everybody always requests our recipe for Freshwater Plimply soup."
 
"Probably to show the Poisoning Department at St. Mungo's," said Ron under his breath.
Harry waited until they could hear Xenophilius moving about in the kitchen downstairs before speaking.
"What do you think?" he asked Hermione.
"Oh, Harry," she said wearily, "it's a pile of utter rubbish. This can't be what the sign really means. This must just be his weird take on it. What a waste of time."
"I s'pose this is the man who brought us Crumple-Horned Snorkacks," said Ron.
"You didn't believe it either?" Harry asked him.
"Nah, that story's just one of those things you tell kids to teach them lessons, isn't it? 'Don't go looking for trouble, don't go pick fights, don't go messing around with stuff that's best left alone! Just keep your head down, mind your own business, and you'll be okay. Come to think of it," Ron added, "maybe that story's why elder wands are supposed to be unlucky."
"What are you talking about?"
"One of those superstitions, isn't it? 'May-born witches will marry Muggles.' 'Jinx by twilight, undone by midnight.' 'Wand of cider, never prosper.' You must have heard them. My mum's full of them."
"Harry and I were raised by Muggles," Hermione reminded him. "We were taught different superstitions." She sighed deeply as a rather pungent smell drifted up from the kitchen. The one good thing about her exasperation with Xenophilius was that it seemed to have made her forget that she was annoyed at Ron. "I think you're right," she told him. "It's just a morality tale, it's obvious which gift is best, which one you'd choose –"
The three of them spoke at the same time: Hermione said, "the Cloak," Ron said, "the wand," and Harry said, "the stone."
They looked at each other, half surprised, half amused.
"You're supposed to say the Cloak," Ron told Hermione, "but you wouldn't need to be invisible if you had the wand. An unbeatable wand, Hermione, come on!"
"We've already got an Invisibility Cloak," said Harry, "And it's helped us rather a lot, in
case you hadn't noticed!" said Hermione. "Whereas the wand would be bound to attract
trouble--"
"Only if you shouted about it," argued Ron. "Only if you were prat enough to go dancing
around waving it over your head, and singing, 'I've got an unbeatable want, come and
have a go if you think you're hard enough.' As long as you kept your trap shut --"
-Yes, but could you keep your trap shut?" said Hermione, looking skeptical. "You know
the only true thing he said to us was that there have been stories about extra-powerful
wands for hundreds of years."
"There have?" asked Harry.
Hermione looked exasperated: The expression was so endearingly familiar that Harry and
Ron grinned at each other.
"The Deathstick, the Wand of Destiny, they crop up under different names through the
centuries, usually in the possession of some Dark wizard who’s boasting about them.
Professor Binns mentioned some of them, but -- oh it's all nonsense. Wands are only as
powerful as the wizards who use them. Some wizards just like to boast that theirs are
bigger and better than other people's"
 
"But how do you know," said Harry, "that those wants -- the Deathstick, and the Wand of Destiny -- aren't the same want, surfacing over the centuries under different names?" "What if they're all really the Elder Wand, made by Death?" said Ron. Harry laughed: The strange idea that had occurred to him was after all, ridiculous. His wand, he reminded himself, had been of holly, not elder, and it had been made by Ollivander, whatever it had done that night Voldemort had pursued him across the skies and if it had been unbeatable, how could it have been broken? "So why would you take the stone?" Ron asked him. "Well, if you could bring people back, we could have Sirius...Mad-Eye...Dumbledore...my parents..." Neither Ron nor Hermione smiled.
"But according to Beedle the Bard, they wouldn't want to come back, would they?" said Harry, thinking about the tail they had just heard. "I don't suppose there have been loads of other stories about a stone that can raise the dead, have there?: he asked Hermione. "No," she replied sadly. "I don't think anyone except Mr. Lovegood could kid themselves that's possible. Beedle probably took the idea from the Sorcerer's Stone; you know, instead of a stone to make you immortal, a stone to reverse death." The smell from the kitchen was getting stronger. It was something like burning underpants. Harry wondered whether it would be possible to eat enough of whatever Xenophilius was cooking to spare his feelings.
"What about the Cloak, though?" said Ron slowly. "Don't you realize, he's right? I've got so used to Harry's Cloak and how good it is, I never stopped to think. I've never heard of one like Harry's. It's infallible. We've never been spotted under it --" "Of course not -- we're invisible when we're under it, Ron!"
"But all the stuff he said about other cloaks, and they're not exactly ten a Knut, you know, is true! It's never occurred to me before but I've heard stuff about charms wearing off cloaks when they get old, or them being ripped apart by spells so they've got holes, Harry's was owned by his dad, so it's not exactly new, is it, but it's just ... perfect!" "Yes, all right, but Ron, the stone..."
As they argued in whispers, Harry moved around the room, only half listening. Reaching the spiral stair, he raised his eyes absently to the next level and was distracted at once. His own face was looking back at him from the ceiling of the room above. After a moment's bewilderment, he realized that it was not a mirror, but a painting. Curious, he began to clime the stairs.
"Harry, what are you doing? I don't think you should look around when he's not here!" But Harry had already reached the next level. Luna had decorated her bedroom ceiling with five beautifully painted faces: Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny, and Neville. They were not moving as the portraits at Hogwarts moved, but there was a certain magic about them all the same. Harry thought they breathed. What appeared to be a fine golden chains wove around the pictures linking them together, but after examining them for a minute or so, Harry realized that the chains were actually one work repeated a thousand times in golden ink: friends... friends... friends...
Harry felt a great rush of affection for Luna. He looked around the room. There was a large photograph beside the bed, of a young Luna and a woman who looked very like her. They were hugging. Luna looked rather better-groomed in this picture than Harry had ever seen her in life. The picture was dusty. This struck Harry as slightly odd. He stared
 
around. Something was wrong. The pale blue carpet was also thick with dust. There were
no clothes in the wardrobe, whose doors stood ajar. The bed had a cold, unfriendly look,
as though it had not been slept in for weeks. A single cobweb stretched over the nearest
window across the blood red sky.
"What's wrong?" Hermione asked as Harry descended the staircase, but before he could
respond, Xenophilius reached the top of the stairs from the kitchen, now holding a tray
laden with bowls.
"Mr. Lovegood," said Harry. "Where's Luna?"
"Excuse me?"
"Where's Luna?"
Xenophilius halted on the top step.
"I -- I've already told you. She is down at the Botions Bridge fishing for Plimpies."
"So why have you only laid that tray for four?"
Xenophilius tried to speak, but no sound came out. The only noise was the continued
chugging of the printing press, and a slight rattle from the tray as Xenophilius's hands
shook.
"I don't think Luna's been here for weeks." said Harry. "Her clothes are gone, her bed
hasn't been slept in. Where is she? and why do you keep looking out of the window?"
Xenophilius dropped the tray. The bowls bounced and smashed Harry, Ron, and
Hermione drew their wands. Xenophilius froze his hand about to enter his pocket. At that
moment the printing press have a huge bank and numerous Quibblers came streaming
across the floor from underneath the tablecloth, the press fell silent at last. Hermione
stooped down and picked up one of the magazines, her wand still pointing at Mr.
Lovegood.
"Harry, look at this" He strode over to her as quickly as he could through all the clutter.
The front of the Quibbler carried his own picture, emblazoned with the words
"Undesirable Number One" and captioned with the reward money.
"The Quibbler's going for a new angle, then?: Harry asked coldly, his mind working very
fast. "Is that what you were doing when you went into the garden, Mr. Lovegood?
Sending an owl to the Ministry?
Xenophilius licked his lips
"They took my Luna," he whispered, "Because of what I've been writing. They took my
Luna and I don't know where she is, what they've done to her. But they might give her
back to me if I -- If I--"
"Hand over Harry?" Hermione finished for him.
"No deal." said Ron flatly. "Get out of the way, we're leaving."
Xenophilius looked ghastly, a century old, his lips drawn back into a dreadful leer.
"They will be here any moment. I must save Luna. I cannot lose Luna. You must not
leave."
He spread his arms in front of the staircase, and Harry had a sudden vision of his mother
doing the same thing in front of his crib.
"Don't make us hurt you," Harry said. "Get out of the way, Mr. Lovegood."
"HARRY!" Hermione screamed.
Figures on broomsticks were flying past the windows. As the three of them looked away
from him. Xenophilius drew his wand. Harry realized their mistake just in time. He
launched himself sideways, shoving Ron and Hermione out of harm's way as
 
Xenophilius's Stunning Spell soared across the room and hit the Erumpent horn.
There was a colossal explosion. The sound of it seemed to blow the room apart.
Fragments of wood and paper and rubble flew in all directions, along with an
impenetrable cloud of thick white dust. Harry flew through the air, then crashed to the
floor, unable to see as debris rained upon him, his arms over his head. He heard
Hermione's scream, Ron's yell, and a series of sickening metallic thuds which told him
that Xenophilius had been blasted off his feet and fallen backward down the spiral stairs.
Half buried in rubble, Harry tried to raise himself. He could barely breathe or see for dust.
Half of the ceiling had fall in and the end of Luna's bead was hanging through the hole.
The bust of Rowena Ravenclaw lay beside him with half its face missing fragments of
torn parchment were floating through the air, and most of the printing press lay on its side,
blocking the top of the staircase to the kitchen. Then another white shape moved close by,
and Hermione, coated in dust like a second statue, pressed his finger to her lips.
The door downstairs crashed open.
"Didn't I tell you there was no need to hurry, Travers?" said a rough voice. "Didn't I tell
you this nutter was just raving as usual?" There was a bang and a scream of pain from
Xenophilius.
"No...no...upstairs...Potter!"
"I told you last week Lovegood, we weren't coming back for anything less than some
solid information! Remember last week? When you wanted to swap your daughter for
that stupid bleeding headdress? And the week before" -- Another bang, another squeal --
"When you thought we'd give her back if you offered us proof there are Cumple" -- Bang
-- "Headed"--bang--"Snorkacks?"
"No -- no -- I beg of you!" sobbed Xenophilius. "It really is Potter, Really!"
"And now it turns out you only called us here to try and blow us up!" roared the Death
Eater, and there was a volley of bangs interspersed with squeals of agony from
Xenophilius.
"The place looks like it's about to fall in, Selwyn," said a cool second voice, echoing up
the mangled staircase. "The stairs are completely blocked. Could try clearing it? Might
bring the place down."
"You lying piece of filth." shouted the wizard named Selwyn.
"You have never seen Potter in your life, have you? Thought you'd lure us here to kill us,
did you? And you think you'll get your girl back like this?"
"I swear...I swear...Potter's upstairs!"
"Homenum revelio." said the voice at the foot of the stairs. Harry heard Hermione gasp,
and he had the odd sensation something was swooping low over him, immersing his body
in its shadow.
"There's someone up there all right, Selwyn," said the second man sharply.
"It's Potter, I tell you, it's Potter!" sobbed Xenophilius. "Please...please...give me Luna,
just let me have Luna..."
"You can have your little girl, Lovegood," said Selwyn, "if you get up those stairs and
bring me down Harry Potter. But if this is a plot, if it's a trick, if you've got an accomplice
waiting up there to ambush us, we'll see if we can spare a bit of your daughter for you to
bury."
Xenophilius gave a wail of fear and despair. There were scurryings and scrapings.
Xenophilius was trying to get through the debris on the stairs.
 
"Come on," Harry whispered, "we've got to get out of here."
He started to dig himself out under cover of all the noise Xenophilius was making on the
staircase. Ron was buried the deepest. Harry and Hermione climbed, as quietly as they
could, over all the wreckage to where he lay, trying to prise a heavy chest of drawers off
his legs. While Xenophilius banging and scraping drew nearer and nearer, Hermione
managed to free Ron with the use of a Hover Charm.
"All right." breathed Hermione, as the broken printing press blocking the top of the stairs
begin to tremble. Xenophilius was feet away from them. She was still white with dust.
"Do you trust me Harry?"
Harry nodded.
"Okay then." Hermione whispered. "give me the invisibility Cloak. Ron, you're going to
put it on."
"Me? But Harry --"
"Please, Ron! Harry, hold on tight to my hand, Ron grab my shoulder."
Harry held out his left hand. Ron vanished beneath the Cloak. The printing press blocking
the stairs was vibrating. Xenophilius was trying to shift it using a Hover Charm. Harry
did not know what Hermione was waiting for.
"Hold tight" she whispered. "Hold tight...any second..."
Xenophilius's paper-white face appeared over the top of the sideboard.
"Obliviate!" cried Hermione, pointing her want first into his face then at the floor beneath
them. "Deprimo!"
She had blasted a hole in the sitting room floor. They fell like boulders. Harry still
holding onto her hand for dear life, there was a scream from below, and he glimpsed two
men trying to get out of the way as vast quantities of rubble and broken furniture rained
all around them from the shattered ceiling. Hermione twisted in midair and thundering of
the collapsing house rang in Harry's ears as she dragged him once more into darkness.
Chapter Twenty-Two The Deathly Hallows
Harry fell, panting, onto grass and scrambled up at once. They seemed to have landed in the corner of a field at dusk; Hermione was already running in a circle around them, waving her wand.
“Protego Totalum…Salvio Hexia…”
“That treacherous old bleeder.” Ron panted, emerging from beneath the Invisibility Cloak and throwing it to Harry. “Hermione you’re a genius, a total genius. I can’t believe we got out of that.”
“Cave Inimicum…Didn’t I say it was an Frumpent horn, didn’t I tell him? And now his house has been blown apart!”
“Serves him right,” said Ron, examining his torn jeans and the cuts to his legs, “What’d you reckon they’ll do to him?”
“Oh I hope they don’t kill him!” groaned Hermione, “That’s why I wanted the Death Eaters to get a glimpse of Harry before we left, so they knew Xenophilius hadn’t been lying!”
 
“Why hide me though?” asked Ron.
“You’re supposed to be in bed with spattergrolt, Ron! They’ve kidnapped Luna because her father supported Harry! What would happen to your family if they knew you’re with him?”
“But what about your mum and dad?”
“They’re in Australia,” said Hermione, “They should be all right. They don’t know anything.”
“You’re a genius,” Ron repeated, looking awed.
Yeah, you are, Hermione,” agreed Harry fervently. “I don’t know what we’d do without you.”
She beamed, but became solemn at once.
“What about Luna?”
“Well, if they’re telling the truth and she’s still Alive ---“ began Ron.
“Don’t say that, don’t say it!” squealed Hermione. “She must be alive, she must!”
“Then she’ll be in Azkaban, I expect,” said Ron. “Whether she survives the place, though…Loads don’t…”
“She will,” said Harry. He could not bear to contemplate the alternative. “She’s tough, Luna, much tougher than you’d think. She’s probably teaching all the inmates about Wrackspurts and Nargles.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Hermione. She passed a hand over her eyes. “I’d feel so sorry for Xenophilius if ---“
“---if he hadn’t just tried to sell us to the Death Eaters, yeah,” said Ron.
They put up the tent and retreated inside it, where Ron made them tea. After their narrow escape, the chilly, musty old place felt like home: safe, familiar, and friendly.
“Oh, why did we go there?” groaned Hermione after a few minutes’ silence. “Harry, you were right, it was Godric’s Hollow all over again, a complete waste of time! The Deathly Hallows…such rubbish…although actually,” a sudden thought seemed to have struck her, “he might have made it all up, mightn’t he? He probably doesn’t believe in the Deathly Hallows at all, he just wanted to keep us talking until the Death Eaters arrived!”
“I don’t think so,” said Ron. “It’s a damn sight harder making stuff up when you’re under stress than you’d think. I found that out when the Snatchers caught me. It was much easier pretending to be Stan, because I knew a bit about him, than inventing a whole new person. Old Lovegood was under loads of pressure, trying to make sure we stayed put. I reckon he told us the truth, or what he thinks is the truth, just to keep us talking.”
“Well, I don’t suppose it matters,” sighed Hermione. “Even if he was being honest, I never heard such a lot of nonsense in all my life.”
“Hang on, though,” said Ron. “The Chamber of Secrets was supposed to be a myth, wasn’t it?”
“But the Deathly Hallows can’t exist, Ron!”
“You keep saying that, but one of them can,” said Ron. “Harry’s Invisibility Cloak ---“
“The Tale of the Three Brothers’ is a story,” said Hermione firmly. “A story about how humans are frightened of death. If surviving was as simple as hiding under the Invisibility Cloak, we’d have everything we need already!”
 
“I don’t know. We could do with an unbeatable wand,” said Harry, turning the blackthorn wand he so disliked over in his fingers.
“There’s no such thing, Harry!”
“You said there have been loads of wands --- the Deathstick and whatever they were called ---“
“All right, even if you want to kid yourself the Elder Wand’s real, what about the Resurrection Stone?” Her fingers sketched quotation marks around the name, and her tone dripped sarcasm. “No magic can raise the dead, and that’s that!”
“When my wand connected with You-Know-Who’s, it made my mum and dad appear…and Cedric…”
“But they weren’t really back from the dead, were they?” said Hermione. “Those kind of ---of pale imitations aren’t the same as truly bringing someone back to life.”
“But she, the girl in the tale, didn’t really come back, did she? The story says that once people are dead, they belong with the dead. But the second brother still got to see her and talk to her, didn’t he? He even lived with her for a while…”
He saw concern and something less easily definable in Hermione’s expression. Then, as she glanced at Ron, Harry realized that it was fear: He had scared her with his talk of living with dead people.
“So that Peverell bloke who’s buried in Godric’s Hollow,” he said hastily, trying to sound robustly sane, “you don’t know anything about him, then?”
“No,” she replied, looking relieved at the change of subject. “I looked him up after I saw the mark on his grave; if he’d been anyone famous or done anything important, I’m sure he’d be in one of our books. The only place I’ve managed to find the name ‘Peverell’ Is Nature’s Nobility: A Wizarding Genealogy. I borrowed it from Kreacher,” she explained as Ron raised his eyebrows. “It lists the pure-blood families that are now extinct in the male line. Apparently the Peverells were one of the earliest families to vanish.”
“Extinct in the male line?” repeated Ron.
“It means the name died out,” said Hermione, “centuries ago, in the case of the Peverells. They could still have descendents, though, they’d just be called something different.”
And then it came to Harry in one shining piece, the memory that had stirred at the sound of the name “Peverell”: a filthy old man brandishing an ugly ring in the face of a Ministry official, and he cried aloud, “Marvolo Gaunt!”
“Sorry said Ron and Hermione together.
“Marvolo Gaunt! You-Know-Who’s grandfather! In the Pensieve! With Dumbledore! Marvolo Gaunt said he was descended from the Peverells!”
Ron and Hermione looked bewildered.
“The ring, the ring that became the Horcrux, Marvolo Gaunt said it had the Peverell coat of arms on it! I saw him waving it in the bloke from the Ministry’s face, he nearly shoved it up his nose!”
“The Peverell coat of arms?” said Hermione sharply. “Could you see what it looked like?”
“Not really,” said Harry, trying to remember. “There was nothing fancy on there, as far as I could see; maybe a few scratches. I only ever saw it really close up after it had been cracked open.”
 
Harry saw Hermione’s comprehension in the sudden widening of her eyes. Ron was looking from one to the other, astonished.
“Blimey…You reckon it was this sign again? The sign of the Hallows?
“Why not said Harry excitedly, “Marvolo Gaunt was an ignorant old git who lived like a pig, all he cared about was his ancestry. If that ring had been passed down through the centuries, he might not have known what it really was. There were no books in that house, and trust me, he wasn’t the type to read fairy tales to his kids. He’d have loved to think the scratches on the stone were a coat of arms, because as far as he was concerned, having pure blood made you practically royal.”
“Yes…and that’s all very interesting,” said Hermione cautiously, “but Harry, if you’re thinking what I think you’re think ---“
“Well, why not? Why not? said Harry, abandoning caution. “It was a stone, wasn’t it?” He looked at Ron for support. “What if it was the Resurrection Stone?”
Ron’s mouth fell open.
“Blimey --- but would it still work if Dumbledore broke --- ?”
“Work? Work? Ron, it never worked! There’s no such thing as a Resurrection Stone!”
Hermione leapt to her feet, looking exasperated and angry. Harry you’re trying to fit everything into the Hallows story ---“
“Fit everything in?” he repeated. “Hermione, it fits of its own accord! I know the sign of the Deathly Hallows was on that stone! Gaunt said he was descended from the Peverells!”
“A minute ago you told us you never saw the mark on the stone properly!”
“Where’d you reckon the ring is now?” Ron asked Harry. “What did Dumbledore do with it after he broke it open?”
“But Harry’s imagination was racing ahead, far beyond Ron and Hermione’s…
Three objects, or Hallows, which, if united, will make the possessor master of Death…Master…Conqueror…Vanquisher…The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death…
And he saw himself, possessor of the Hallows, facing Voldemort, whose Horcruxes were no match…Neither can live while the other survives…Was this the answer? Hallows versus Horcruxes? Was there a way after all, to ensure that he was the one who triumphed? If he were the master of the Deathly Hallows, would he be safe?
“Harry?”
But he scarcely heard Hermione: He had pulled out his Invisibility Cloak and was running it through his fingers, the cloth supple as water, light as air. He had never seen anything to equal it in his nearly seven years in the Wizarding world. The Cloak was exactly what Xenophilius had described: A cloak that really and truly renders the wearer completely invisible, and endures eternally, giving constant and impenetrable concealment, no matter what spells are cast at it…
And then, with a gasp, he remembered—
“Dumbledore had my Cloak the night my parents died!”
His voice shook and he could feel the color in his face, but he did not care.
“My mum told Sirius that Dumbledore borrowed the Cloak! This is why! He wanted to examine it, because he thought it was the third Hallow! Ignotus Peverell is buried in Godric’s Hollow…” Harry was walking blindly around the tent, feeling as
 
though great new vistas of truth were opening all around him. “He’s my ancestor. I’m descended from the third brother! It all makes sense!”
“He felt armed in certainty, in his belief in the Hallows, as if the mere idea of possessing them was giving him protection, and he felt joyous as he turned back to the other two.
“Harry,” said Hermione again, but he was busy undoing the pouch around his neck, his fingers shaking hard.
“Read it,” he told her, pushing his mother’s letter into her hand. “Read it! Dumbledore had the Cloak, Hermione! Why else would he want it? He didn’t need a Cloak, he could perform a Disillusionment Charm so powerful that he made himself completely invisible without one!”
Something fell to the floor and rolled, glittering, under a chair: He had dislodged the Snitch when he pulled out the letter. He stooped to pick it up, and then the newly tapped spring of fabulous discoveries threw him another gift, and shock and wonder erupted inside him so that he shouted out.
“IT’S IN HERE! He left me the ring – it’s in the Snitch!”
“You --- you reckon?”
He could not understand why Ron looked taken aback. It was so obvious, so clear to Harry. Everything fit, everything…His Cloak was the third Hallow, and when he discovered how to open the Snitch he would have the second, and then all he needed to do was find the first Hallow, the Elder Wand, and then ---
But it was as though a curtain fell on a lit stage: All his excitement, all his hope and happiness were extinguished at a stroke, and he stood alone in the darkness, and the glorious spell was broken.
“That’s what he’s after.”
The change in his voice made Ron and Hermione look even more scared.
“You-Know-Who’s after the Elder Wand.”
He turned his back on their strained, incredulous faces. He knew it was the truth. It all made sense, Voldemort was not seeking a new wand; he was seeking an old wand, a very old wand indeed. Harry walked to the entrance of the tent, forgetting about Ron and Hermione as he looked out into the night, thinking…
Voldemort had been raised in a Muggle orphanage. Nobody could have told him The Tales of Beedle the Bard when he was a child, any more than Harry had heard them. Hardly any wizards believed in the Deathly Hallows. Was it likely that Voldemort knew about them?
Harry gazed into the darkness…If Voldemort had known about the Deathly Hallows, surely he would have sought them, done anything to possess them: three objects that made the possessor master of Death? If he had known about the Deathly Hallows, he might not have needed Horcruxes in the first place. Didn’t the simple fact that he had taken a Hallow, and turned it into a Horcrux, demonstrate that he did not know this last great Wizarding secret?
Which meant that Voldemort sought the Elder Wand without realizing its full power, without understanding that it was one of three…for the wand was the Hallow that could not be hidden, whose existence was best known…The bloody trail of the Elder Wand is splattered across the pages of Wizarding history…
 
Harry watched the cloudy sky, curves of smoke-gray and silver sliding over the face of the white moon. He felt lightheaded with amazement at his discoveries.
He turned back into the tent. It was a shock to see Ron and Hermione standing exactly where he had left them, Hermione still holding Lily’s letter, Ron at her side looking slightly anxious. Didn’t they realize how far they had traveled in the last few minutes?
“This is it?” Harry said, trying to bring them inside the glow of his own astonished certainty, “This explains everything. The Deathly Hallows are real and I’ve got one --- maybe two ---“
He held up the Snitch.
“--- and You-Know-Who’s chasing the third, but he doesn’t realize…he just thinks it’s a powerful wand ---“
“Harry,” said Hermione, moving across to him and handing him back Lily’s letter, “I’m sorry, but I think you’ve got this wrong, all wrong.”
“But don’t you see? It all fits ---“
“Not, it doesn’t,” she said. “It doesn’t. Harry, you’re just getting carried away. Please,” she said as she started to speak, “please just answer me this: If the Deathly Hallows really existed, and Dumbledore knew about them, knew that the person who possessed all of them would be master of Death --- Harry, why wouldn’t he have told you? Why?”
He had his answer ready.
“But you said it, Hermione! You’ve got to find out about them for yourself! It’s a Quest!”
“But I only said that to try and persuade you to come to the Lovegoods’!” cried Hermione in exasperation. “I didn’t really believe it!”
Harry took no notice.
“Dumbledore usually let me find out stuff for myself. He let me try my strength, take risks. This feels like the kind of thing he’d do.”
“Harry, this isn’t a game, this isn’t practice! This is the real thing, and Dumbledore left you very clear instructions: Find and destroy the Horcruxes! That symbol doesn’t mean anything, forget the Deathly Hallows, we can’t afford to get sidetracked ---“
Harry was barely listening to her. He was turning the Snitch over and over in his hands, half expecting it to break open, to reveal the Resurrection Stone, to prove to Hermione that he was right, that the Deathly Hallows were real.
She appealed to Ron.
“You don’t believe in this, do you?”
Harry looked up, Ron hesitated.
“I dunno…I mean…bits of it sort of fit together,” said Ron awkwardly, “But when you look at the whole thing…” He took a deep breath. “I think we’re supposed to get rid of Horcruxes, Harry. That’s what Dumbledore told us to do. Maybe…maybe we should forget about this Hallows business.”
“Thank you, Ron,” said Hermione. “I’ll take first watch.”
And she strode past Harry and sat down in the tent entrance bringing the action to a fierce full stop.
 
But Harry hardly slept that night. The idea of the Deathly Hallows had taken possession of him, and he could not rest while agitating thoughts whirled through his mind: the wand, the stone, and the Cloak, if he could just possess them all…
I open at the close…But what was the close? Why couldn’t he have the stone now? If only he had the stone, he could ask Dumbledore these questions in person…and Harry murmured words to the Snitch in the darkness, trying everything, even Parseltongue, but the golden ball would not open…
And the wand, the Elder Wand, where was that hidden? Where was Voldemort searching now? Harry wished his scar would burn and show him Voldemort’s thoughts, because for the first time ever, he and Voldemort were united in wanting the very same thing…Hermione would not like that idea, of course…But then, she did not believe….Xenophilius had been right, in a way…Limited, Narrow, Close-minded. The truth was that she was scared of the idea of the Deathly Hallows, especially of the Resurrection Stone…and Harry pressed his mouth again to the Snitch, kissing it, nearly swallowing it, but the cold medal did not yield…
It was nearly dawn when he remembered Luna, alone in a cell in Azkaban, surrounded by dementors, and he suddenly felt ashamed of himself. He had forgotten all about her in his feverish contemplation of the Hallows. If only they could rescue her, but dementors in those numbers would be virtually unassailable. Now he came to think about it, he had not tried casting a Patronus with the blackthorn wand…He must try that in the morning…
If only there was a way of getting a better wand…
And desire for the Elder Wand, the Deathstick, unbeatable, invincible, swallowed him once more…
They packed up the tent next morning and moved on through a dreary shower of rain. The downpour pursued them to the coast, where they pitched the tent that night, and persisted through the whole week, through sodden landscapes that Harry found bleak and depressing. He could think only of the Deathly Hallows. It was as though a flame had been lit inside him that nothing, not Hermione’s flat disbelief nor Ron’s persistent doubts, could extinguish. And yet the fiercer the longing for the Hallows burned inside him, the less joyful it made him. He blamed Ron and Hermione: Their determined indifference was as bad as the relentless rain for dampening his spirits, but neither could erode his certainty, which remained absolute. Harry’s belief in and longing for the Hallows consumed him so much that he felt isolated from the other two and their obsession with the Horcruxes.
“Obsession?” said Hermione in a low fierce voice, when Harry was careless enough to use the word one evening, after Hermione had told him off for his lack of interest in locating more Horcruxes. “We’re not the one with an obsession, Harry! We’re the ones trying to do what Dumbledore wanted us to do!”
But he was impervious to the veiled criticism. Dumbledore had left the sign of the Hallows for Hermione to decipher, and he had also, Harry remained convinced of it, left the Resurrection Stone hidden in the golden Snitch. Neither can live while the other survives…master of Death…Why didn’t Ron and Hermione understand?
“’The last enemy shall be destroyed is death,’” Harry quoted calmly.
“I thought it was You-Know-Who we were supposed to be fighting?” Hermione retorted, and Harry gave up on her.
 
Even the mystery of the silver doe, which the other two insisted on discussing, seemed less important to Harry now, a vaguely interesting sideshow. The only other thing that mattered to him was that his scar had begun to prickle again, although he did all he could to hide this fact from the other two. He sought solitude whenever it happened, but was disappointed by what he saw. The visions he and Voldemort were sharing had changed in quality; they had become blurred, shifting as though they were moving in and out of focus. Harry was just able to make out the indistinct features of an object that looked like a skull, and something like a mountain that was more shadow than substance. Used to images sharp as reality, Harry was disconcerted by the change. He was worried that the connection between himself and Voldemort had been damaged, a connection that he both feared and, whatever he had told Hermione, prized. Somehow Harry connected these unsatisfying, vague images with the destruction of his wand, as if it was the blackthorn wand’s fault that he could no longer see into Voldemort’s mind as well as before.
As the weeks crept on, Harry could not help but notice, even through his new self-absorption, that Ron seemed to be taking charge. Perhaps because he was determined to make up for having walked out on them, perhaps because Harry’s descent into listlessness galvanized his dormant leadership qualities, Ron was the one now encouraging and exhorting the other two into action.
“Three Horcruxes left,” he kept saying. “We need a plan of action, come on! Where haven’t we looked? Let’s go through it again. The orphanage…”
Diagon Alley, Hogwarts, the Riddle House, Borgin and Burkes, Albania, every place that they knew Tom Riddle had ever lived or worked, visited or murdered, Ron and Hermione raked over them again, Harry joining in only to stop Hermione pestering him. He would have been happy to sit alone in silence, trying to read Voldemort’s thoughts, to find out more about the Elder Wand, but Ron insisted on journeying to ever more unlikely places simply, Harry was aware, to keep them moving.
“You never know,” was Ron’s constant refrain. “Upper Flagley is a Wizarding village, he might’ve wanted to live there. Let’s go and have a poke around.”
These frequent forays into Wizarding territory brought them within occasional sight of Snatchers.
“Some of them are supposed to be as bad as Death Eaters,” said Ron. “The lot that got me were a bit pathetic, but Bill recons some of them are really dangerous. They said on Potterwatch ---“
“On what?” said Harry.
“Potterwatch, didn’t I tell you that’s what it was called? The program I keep trying to get on the radio, the only one that tells the truth about what’s going on! Nearly all of the programs are following You-Know-Who’s line, all except Potterwatch, I really want you to hear it, but it’s tricky tuning in…”
Ron spent evening after evening using his wand to beat out various rhythms on top of the wireless while the dials whirled. Occasionally they would catch snatches of advice on how to treat dragonpox, and once a few bars of “A Cauldron Full of Hot, Strong Love.” While he taped, Ron continued to try to hit on the correct password, muttering strings of random words under his breath.
“They’re normally something to do with the Order,” he told them. “Bill had a real knack for guessing them. I’m bound to get one in the end…”
 
“But not until March did luck favor Ron at last. Harry was sitting in the tent entrance, on guard duty, staring idly at a clump of grape hyacinths that had forced their way through the chilly ground, when Ron shouted excitedly from inside the tent.
“I’ve got it, I’ve got it! Password was ‘Albus’! Get in here, Harry.”
Roused for the first time in days from his contemplation of the Deathly Hallows, Harry hurried back inside the tent to find Ron and Hermione kneeling on the floor beside the little radio. Hermione, who had been polishing the sword of Gryffindor just for something to do, was sitting open-mouthed, staring at the tiny speaker, from which a most familiar voice was issuing.
“…apologize for our temporary absence from the airwaves, which was due to a number of house calls in our area by those charming Death Eaters.”
“But that’s Lee Jordan!” said Hermione.
“I know!” beamed Ron. “Cool, eh?”
“…now found ourselves another secure location,” Lee was saying, and I’m pleased to tell you that two of our regular contributors have joined me here this evening. Evening, boys!”
“Hi.”
“Evening, River.”
“’River’” that’s Lee,” Ron explained. “They’ve all got code names, but you can usually tell ---“
“Shh!” said Hermione.
“But before we hear from Royal and Romulus,” Lee went on, “let’s take a moment to report those deaths that the Wizarding Wireless Network News and Daily Prophet don’t think important enough to mention. It is with great regret that we inform our listeners of the murders of Ted Tonks and Dirk Cresswell.”
Harry felt a sick, swooping in his belly. He, Ron, and Hermione gazed at one another in horror.
“A goblin by the name of Gornuk was also killed. It is believed that Muggle-born Dean Thomas and a second goblin, both believed to have been traveling with Tonks, Cresswell, and Gornuk, may have escaped. If Dean is listening, or if anyone has any knowledge of his whereabouts, his parents and sisters are desperate for news.
“Meanwhile, in Gaddley, a Muggle family of five has been found dead in their home. Muggle authorities are attributing their deaths to a gas leak, but members of the Order of the Phoenix inform me that it was the Killing Curse --- more evidence, as if it were needed, of the fact that Muggle slaughter is becoming little more than a recreational sport under the new regime.
“Finally, we regret to inform our listeners that the remains of Bathilda Bagshot have been discovered in Godric’s Hollow. The evidence is that she died several months ago. The Order of the Phoenix informs us that her body showed unmistakable signs of injuries inflicted by Dark Magic.
“Listeners, I’d like to invite you now to join us in a minute’s silence in memory of Ted Tonks, Dirk Cresswell, Bathilda Bagshot, Gornuk, and the unnamed, but no less regretted, Muggles murdered by the Death Eaters.”
Silence fell, and Harry, Ron, and Hermione did not speak. Half of Harry yearned to hear more, half of him was afraid of what might come next. It was the first time he had felt fully connected to the outside world for a long time.
 
“Thank you,” said Lee’s voice. “And now we can return to regular contributor Royal, for an update on how the new Wizarding order is affecting the Muggle world.”
“Thanks, River,” said an unmistakable voice, deep, measured, reassuring.
“Kingsley!” burst out Ron.
“We know!” said Hermione, hushing him.
“Muggles remain ignorant of the source of their suffering as they continue to sustain heavy casualties,” said Kingsley. “However, we continue to hear truly inspirational stories of wizards and witches risking their own safety to protect Muggle friends and neighbors, often without the Muggles’ knowledge. I’d like to appeal to all our listeners to emulate their example, perhaps by casting a protective charm over any Muggle dwellings in your street. Many lives could be saved if such simple measures are taken.”
“And what would you say, Royal, to those listeners who reply that in these dangerous times, it should be ‘Wizards first’? asked Lee.
“I’d say that it’s one short step from ‘Wizards first’ to ‘Purebloods first,’ and then to ‘Death Eaters,’” replied Kingsley. “We’re all human, aren’t we? Every human life is worth the same, and worth saving.”
“Excellently put, Royal, and you’ve got my vote for Minister of Magic if we ever get out of this mess,” said Lee. “And now, over to Romulus for our popular feature ‘Pals of Potter.’”
“Thanks, River,” said another very familiar voice. Ron started to speak, but Hermione forestalled him in a whisper.
“We know it’s Lupin!”
“Romulus, do you maintain, as you have every time you’ve appeared on our program, that Harry Potter is still alive?”
“I do,” said Lupin firmly. “There is no doubt at all in my mind that his death would be proclaimed as widely as possible by the Death Eaters if it had happened, because it would strike a deadly blow at the morale of those resisting the new regime. ‘The Boy Who Lived’ remains a symbol of everything for which we are fighting: the triumph of good, the power of innocence, the need to keep resisting.”
A mixture of gratitude and shame welled up in Harry. Had Lupin forgiven him, then, for the terrible things he had said when they had last met?
“And what would you say to Harry if you knew he was listening, Romulus?”
“I’d tell him we’re all with him in spirit,” said Lupin, then hesitated slightly, “And I’d tell him to follow his instincts, which are good and nearly always right.”
Harry looked at Hermione, whose eyes were full of tears.
“Nearly always right,” she repeated.
“Oh, didn’t I tell you?” said Ron in surprise. “Bill told me Lupin’s living with Tonks again! And apparently she’s getting pretty big too…”
“…and our usual update on those friends of Harry Potter’s who are suffering for their allegiance?” Lee was saying.
“Well, as regular listeners will know, several of the more outspoken supporters of Harry Potter have now been imprisoned, including Xenophilius Lovegood, erstwhile editor of The Quibbler,” said Lupin.
“At least he’s still alive!” muttered Ron.
 
“We have also heard within the last few hours that Rubeus Hagrid” – all three of them gasped, and so nearly missed the rest of the sentence -- “well-known gamekeeper at Hogwarts School, has narrowly escaped arrest within the grounds of Hogwarts, where he is rumored to have hosted a ‘Support Harry Potter’ party in his house. However, Hagrid was not taken into custody, and is, we believe, on the run.”
“I suppose it helps, when escaping from Death Eaters, if you’ve got a sixteen-foot-high half brother?” asked Lee.
“It would tend to give you an edge,” agreed Lupin gravely. “May I just add that while we here at Potterwatch applaud Hagrid’s spirit, we would urge even the most devoted of Harry’s supporters against following Hagrid’s lead. ‘Support Harry Potter’ parties are unwise in the present climate.”
“Indeed they are, Romulus,” said Lee, “so we suggest that you continue to show your devotion to the man with the lightning scar by listening to Potterwatch! And now let’s move to news concerning the wizard who is proving just as elusive as Harry Potter. We like to refer to him as the Chief Death Eater, and here to give his views on some of the more insane rumors circulating about him, I’d like to introduce a new correspondent. Rodent?”
“’Rodent’?” said yet another familiar voice, and Harry, Ron, and Hermione cried out together:
“Fred!”
“No – is it George?”
“It’s Fred, I think,” said Ron, leaning in closer, as whichever twin it was said,
“I’m not being ‘Rodent,’ no way, I told you I wanted to be ‘Rapier’!”
“Oh, all right then, ‘Rapier,’ could you please give us your take on the various stories we’ve been hearing about the Chief Death Eater?”
“Yes, River, I can,” said Fred. “As our listeners will know, unless they’ve taken refuge at the bottom of a garden pond or somewhere similar, You-Know-Who’s strategy of remaining in the shadows is creating a nice little climate of panic. Mind you, if all the alleged sightings of him are genuine, we must have a good nineteen You-Know-Whos running around the place.”
“Which suits him, of course,” said Kingsley. “The air of mystery is creating more terror than actually showing himself.”
“Agreed,” said Fred. “So, people, let’s try and calm down a bit. Things are bad enough without inventing stuff as well. For instance, this new idea that You-Know-Who can kill people with a single glance from his eyes. That’s a basilisk, listeners. One simple test: Check whether the thing that’s glaring at you has got legs. If it has, it’s safe to look into its eyes, although if it really is You-Know-Who, that’s still likely to be the last thing you ever do.”
For the first time in weeks and weeks, Harry was laughing: He could feel the weight of tension leaving him.
“And the rumors that he keeps being sighted abroad?” asked Lee.
“Well, who wouldn’t want a nice little holiday after all the hard work he’s been putting in?” asked Fred. “Point is, people, don’t get lulled into a false sense of security, thinking he’s out of the country. Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t, but the fact remains he can move faster than Severus Snape confronted with shampoo when he wants to, so don’t
 
count on him being a long way away if you’re planning to take any risks. I never thought I’d hear myself say it, but safety first!”
“Thank you very much for those wise words, Rapier,” said Lee. ”Listeners, that brings us to the end of another Potterwatch. We don’t know when it will be possible to broadcast again, but you can be sure we shall be back. Keep twiddling those dials: The next password will be ‘Mad-Eye.’ Keep each other safe: Keep faith. Good night.”
The radio’s dial twirled and the lights behind the tuning panel went out. Harry, Ron, and Hermione were still beaming. Hearing familiar, friendly voices was an extraordinary tonic; Harry had become so used to their isolation he had nearly forgotten that other people were resisting Voldemort. It was like waking from a long sleep.
“Good, eh?” said Ron happily.
“Brilliant,” said Harry.
“It’s so brave of them,” sighed Hermione admiringly. “If they were found …”
“Well, they keep on the move, don’t they?” said Ron. “Like us.”
“But did you hear what Fred said?” asked Harry excitedly; now the broadcast was over, his thoughts turned around toward his all consuming obsession. “He’s abroad! He’s still looking for the Wand, I knew it!”
“Harry—“
“Come on, Hermione, why are you so determined not to admit it? Vol –“
“HARRY, NO!”
“—demort’s after the Elder Wand!”
“The name’s Taboo!” Ron bellowed, leaping to his feet as a loud crack sounded outside the tent. “I told you, Harry, I told you, we can’t say it anymore – we’ve got to put the protection back around us – quickly – it’s how they find –“
But Ron stopped talking, and Harry knew why. The Sneakoscope on the table had lit up and begun to spin; they could hear voices coming nearer and nearer: rough, excited voices. Ron pulled the Deluminator out of his pocket and clicked it: Their lamps went out.
“Come out of there with your hands up!” came a rasping voice through the darkness. “We know you’re in there! You’ve got half a dozen wands pointing at you and we don’t care who we curse!”
Chapter Twenty-Three Malfoy Manor
Harry looked around at the other two, now mere outlines in the darkness. He saw Hermione point her wand, set toward the outside, but into his face; there was a bang, a burst of white light, and he buckled in agony, unable to see. He could feel his face swelling rapidly under his hands as heavy footfalls surrounded him.
"Get up, vermin."
Unknown hands dragged Harry roughly off the ground, before he could stop them, someone had rummaged through his pockets and removed the blackthorn wand. Harry clutched at his excruciatingly painful face, which felt unrecognizable beneath his fingers, tight, swollen, and puffy as though he had suffered some violent allergic reaction. His
 
eyes had been reduced to slits through which he could barely see; his glasses fell off as he was bundled out of the tent: all he could make out were the blurred shapes of four or five people wrestling Ron and Hermione outside too.
"Get -- off - her!" Ron shouted. There was the unmistakable sound of knuckles hitting flesh: Ron grunted in pain and Hermione screamed, "No! Leave him alone, leave him alone!"
"Your boyfriend's going to have worse than that done to him if he's on my list," said the horribly familiar, rasping voice. "Delicious girl... what a treat . . . I do enjoy the softness of the skin. . . ."
Harry's stomach turned over. He knew who this was, Fenrit Greyback, the werewolf who was permitted to wear Death Eater robes in return for his hired savagery.
"Search the tent!" said another voice.
Harry was thrown face down onto the ground. A thud told him that Ron had been cast down beside him. They could hear footsteps and crashes; the men were pushing over chairs inside the tent as they searched.
"Now, let's see who we've got," said Greyback's gloating voice from overhead, and Harry was rolled over onto his back. A beam of wand light fell onto his face and Greyback laughed.
"I'll be needing butterbeer to wash this one down. What happened to you, ugly?"
Harry did not answer immediately.
"I said," repeated Greyback, and Harry received a blow to the diaphragm that made him double over in pain. "what happened to you?"
"Stung." Harry muttered. "Been Stung."
"Yeah, looks like it." said a second voice.
"What’s your name?" snarled Greyback.
"Dudley." said Harry.
"And your first name?"
"I -- Vernon. Vernon Dudley."
"Check the list, Scabior." said Greyback, and Harry head him move sideways to look down at Ron, instead. "And what about you, ginger?"
"Stan Shunpike." said Ron.
"Like 'ell you are." said the man called Scabior. "We know Stan Shunpike, 'e's put a bit of work our way."
There was another thud.
"I'b Bardy," said Ron, and Harry could tell that his mouth was full of blood. "Bardy Weasley."
"A Weasley?" rasped Greyback. "So you're related to blood traitors even if you're not a Mudblood. And lastly, your pretty little friend . . ." The relish in his voice made Harry's flesh crawl.
"Easy, Greyback." said Scabior over the jeering of the others.
"Oh, I'm not going to bite just yet. We'll see if she’s a bit quicker at remembering her name than Barny. Who are you, girly?
"Penelope Clearwater." said Hermione. She sounded terrified, but convincing.
"What's your blood status?"
"Half-Blood." said Hermione.
 
"Easy enough to check," said Scabior. "But the 'ole lot of 'em look like they could still be 'ogwarts age -"
"We'b lebt," said Ron.
"Left, 'ave you, ginger?" said Scabior. "And you decided to go camping? And you thought, just for a laugh, you'd use the Dark Lords name?"
"Nod a laugh," said Ron. "Aggiden."
"Accident?" There was more jeering laughter.
"You know who used to like using the Dark Lord's name, Weasley?" growled Greyback, "The Order of the Phoenix. Mean anything to you?"
"Doh."
"Well, they don't show the Dark Lord proper respect, so the name's been Tabooed. A few Order members have been tracked that way. We'll see. Bind them up with the other two prisoners!"
Someone yanked Harry up by the hair, dragged him a short way, pushed him down into a sitting position, then started binding him back-to-back with other people. Harry was still half blind, barely able to see anything through his puffed-up eyes. When at last the man tying then had walked away, Harry whispered to the other prisoners.
"Anyone still got a wand?"
"No." Said Ron and Hermione from either side of him.
"This is all my fault. I said the name. I'm sorry -"
"Harry?"
It was a new, but familiar voice. and it came from directly behind Harry, from the person tied to Hermione's left.
"Dean?"
"It is you! If they find out who they've got -! They're Snatchers, they're only looking for truants to sell for gold -"
"Not a bad little haul for one night." Greyback was saying, as a pair of hobnailed boots marched close by Harry and they heard more crashes from inside the tent. "A Mudblood, a runaway goblin, and these truants. You checked their names on the list yet, Scabior?" he roared.
"Yeah. There's no Vernon Dudley un 'ere, Greyback."
"Interesting," said Greyback. "That's interesting."
He crouched down beside Harry, who saw, through the infinitesimal gap left between his swollen eyelids, a face covered in matted gray hair and whiskers, with pointed brown teeth and sores in the corners of his mouth. Greyback smelled as he had done at the top of the tower where Dumbledore had died: of dirt, sweat, and blood.
"So you aren't wanted, then, Vernon? Or are you on that list under a different name? What house were you in at Hogwarts?"
"Slytherin," said Harry automatically.
"Funny 'ow they all thinks we wants to 'ear that." leered Scabior out of the shadows. "But none of 'em can tell us where the common room is."
"It's in the dungeons." said Harry clearly. "You enter through the wall. It's full of skulls and stuff and its under the lake, so the light's all green,"
There was a short pause.
 
"Well, well, looks like we really 'ave caught a little Slytherin." said Scabior. "Good for you, Vernon, 'cause there ain't a lot of Mudblood Slytherins. Who's your father?"
"He works at the Ministry," Harry lied. He knew that his whole story would collapse with the smallest investigation, but on the other hand, he only had until his face regained its usual appearance before the game was up in any case. "Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes."
"You know what, Greyback," said Scabior. "I think there is a Dudley in there."
Harry could barely breathe: Could luck, sheer luck, get them safely out of this?
"Well, well." said Greyback, and Harry could hear the tiniest note of trepidation in that callous voice, and knew that Greyback was wondering whether he had just indeed just attacked and bound the son of a Ministry Official. Harry's heart was pounding against the ropes around his ribs; he would not have been surprised to know that Greyback could see it. "If you're telling the truth, ugly, you've got nothing to fear from a trip to the Ministry. I expect your father'll reward us just for picking you up."
"But," said Harry, his mouth bone dry, "if you just let us -"
"Hey!" came a shout from inside the tent. "Look at this. Greyback!"
A dark figure came bustling toward them, and Harry saw a glint of silver to the light of their wands. They had found Gryffindor's sword.
"Ve-e-ery nice," said Greyback appreciatively, taking it from his companion. "Oh, very nice indeed. Looks goblin-made, that. Where did you get something like this?"
"It's my father's," Harry lied, hoping against hope that it was too dark for Greyback to see the name etched just below the hilt. "We borrowed it to cut firewood -"
"'ang on a minute, Greyback! Look at this, in the Prophet!"
As Scabior said it, Harry's scar, which was stretched tight across his distended forehead, burned savagely. More clearly than he could make out anything around him, he saw a towering building, a grim fortress, jet-black and forbidding: Voldemort's thoughts had suddenly become Razor-Sharp again; he was gliding toward the gigantic building with a sense of calmly euphoric purpose . . .
So close . . . So close . . . With a huge effort of will Harry closed his mind to Voldemort's thoughts, pulling himself back to where he sat, tied to Ron, Hermione, Dean, and Griphook in the darkness, listening to Greyback and Scabior.
"'Hermione Granger," Scabior was saying, "the Mudblood who is known to be traveling with 'arry Potter."
Harry's scar burned in the silence, but he made a supreme effort to keep himself present, nor to slip into Voldemort's mind. He heard the creak of Greyback's boots as he crouched down, in front of Hermione.
"you know what, little girly? This picture looks a hell of a lot like you."
"It isn't! It isn't me!"
Hermione's terrified squeak was as good as a confession.
"... known to be traveling with Harry Potter," repeated Greyback quietly.
A stillness had settled over the scene. Harry's scar was Exquisitely painful, but he struggled with all his strength against the pull of Voldemort's thoughts. It had never been so important to remain in his own right mind.
 
"Well, this changed things, doesn't it?" whispered Greyback. Nobody spoke: Harry sensed the gang of Snatchers watching, frozen, and felt Hermione's arm trembling against his. Greyback got up and took a couple of steps to where Harry sat, crouching down again to stare closely at his misshapen features.
"What's that on your forehead, Vernon?" he asked softly, his breath foul in Harry's nostrils as he pressed a filthy finger to the taught scar.
"Don't touch it! Harry yelled; he could not stop himself, he thought he might be sick from the pain of it.
"I thought you wore glasses, Potter?" breathed Greyback.
"I found glasses!" yelped one of the Snatchers skulking in the background. "There was glasses in the tent, Greyback, wait -"
And seconds later Harry's glasses had been rammed back onto his face. The Snatchers were closing in now, peering at him.
"It Is!" rasped Greyback. "We've caught Potter!"
They all took several steps backward, stunned by what they had done. Harry, still fighting to remain present in his own splitting head, could think of nothing to say. Fragmented visions were breaking across the surface of his mind -
--He was hiding around the high walls of the black fortress--
No, he was Harry, tied up and wandless, in grave danger--
--looking up, up to the topmost window, the highest tower--
He was Harry, and they were discussing his fate in low voices--
--Time to fly . . .
". . . To the Ministry?"
"To hell with the Ministry." growled Greyback. "They'll take the credit, and we won't get a look in. I say we take him straight to You-Know-Who."
"Will you summon 'im? 'ere?" said Scabior, sounding awed, terrified.
"No," snarled Greyback, "I haven't got -- they say he's using the Malfoy's place as a base. We'll take the boy there."
Harry thought he knew why Greyback was not calling Voldemort. The werewolf might be allowed to wear Death Eater robes when they wanted to use him, but only Voldemort's inner circle were branded with the Dark Mark: Greyback had not been granted this highest honor.
Harry’s scar seared again –
– and he rose into the night, flying straight up to the windows at the very top of the tower –
“. . . completely sure it’s him? ‘Cause if it ain’t, Greyback, we’re dead.”
“Who’s in charge here?” roared Greyback, covering his moment of inadequacy. “I say that’s Potter, and him plus his wand, that’s two hundred thousand Galleons right there! But if you’re too gutless to come along, any of you, it’s all for me, and with any luck, I’ll get the girl thrown in!”
– The window was the merest slit in the black rock, not big enough for a man to enter. . . . A skeletal figure was just visible through it, curled beneath a blanket. . . . Dead, or sleeping . . . ?
“All right!” said Scabior. “All right, we’re in! And what about the rest of ‘em, Greyback, what’ll we do with ‘em?”
 
“Might as well take the lot. We’ve got two Mudbloods, that’s another ten Galleons. Give me the sword as well. If they’re rubies, that’s another small fortune right there.”
The prisoners were dragged to their feet. Harry could hear Hermione’s breathing, fast and terrified.
“Grab hold and make it tight. I’ll do Potter!” said Greyback, seizing a fistful of Harry’s hair; Harry could feel his long yellow nails scratching his scalp. “On three! One – two – three –“
They Disapparated, pulling the prisoners with them. Harry struggled, trying to throw off Greyback’s hand, but it was hopeless: Ron and Hermione were squeezed tightly against him on either side; he could not separate from the group, and as the breath was squeezed out of him his scar seared more painfully still –
– as he forced himself through the slit of a window like a snake and landed, lightly as vapor inside the cell-like room –
The prisoners lurched into one another as they landed in a country lane. Harry’s eyes, still puffy, took a moment to acclimatize, then he saw a pair of wrought-iron gates at the foot of what looked like a long drive. He experienced the tiniest trickle of relief. The worst had not happened yet: Voldemort was not here. He was, Harry knew, for he was fighting to resist the vision, in some strange, fortresslike place, at the top of a tower. How long it would take Voldemort to get to this place, once he knew that Harry was here, was another matter. . . .
One of the Snatchers strode to the gates and shook them.
“How do we get in? They’re locked, Greyback, I can’t – blimey!”
He whipped his hands away in fright. The iron was contorting, twisting itself out of the abstract furls and coils into a frightening face, which spoke in a clanging, echoing voice. “State your purpose!”
“We’ve got Potter!” Greyback roared triumphantly. “We’ve captured Harry Potter!”
The gates swung open.
“Come on!” said Greyback to his men, and the prisoners were shunted through the gates and up the drive, between high hedges that muffled their footsteps. Harry saw a ghostly white shape above him, and realized it was an albino peacock. He stumbled and was dragged onto his feet by Greyback; now he was staggering along sideways, tied back-to-back to the four other prisoner. Closing his puffy eyes, he allowed the pain in his scar to overcome him for a moment, wanting to know what Voldemort was doing, whether he knew yet that Harry was caught. . . .
The emaciated figure stirred beneath its thin blanket and rolled over toward him, eyes opening in a skull of a face. . . . The frail man sat up, great sunken eyes fixed upon him, upon Voldemort, and then he smiled. Most of his teeth were gone. . . .
“So, you have come. I thought you would . . . one day. But your journey was pointless. I never had it.”
“You lie!”
As Voldemort’s anger throbbed inside him, Harry’s scar threatened to burst with pain, and he wrenched his mind back to his own body, fighting to remain present as the prisoners were pushed over gravel.
 
Light spilled out over all of them.
“What is this?” said a woman’s cold voice.
“We’re here to see He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named!” rasped Greyback.
“Who are you?”
“You know me!” There was resentment in the werewolf’s voice. “Fenrit Greyback! We’ve caught Harry Potter!”
Greyback seized Harry and dragged him around to face the light, forcing the other prisoners to shuffle around too.
“I know ‘es swollen, ma’am, but it’s ‘im!” piped up Scabior. “If you look a bit closer, you’ll see ‘is scar. And this ‘ere, see the girl? The Mudblood who’s been traveling around with ‘im, ma’am. There’s no doubt it’s ‘im, and we’ve got ‘is wand as well! ‘Ere, ma’am –“
Through his puffy eyelids Harry saw Narcissa Malfoy scrutinizing his swollen face. Scabior thrust the blackthorn wand at her. She raised her eyebrows.
“Bring them in,” she said.
Harry and the others were shoved and kicked up broad stone steps into a hallway lined with portraits.
“Follow me,” said Narcissa, leading the way across the hall. “My son, Draco, is home for his Easter holidays. If that is Harry Potter, he will know.”
The drawing room dazzled after the darkness outside; even with his eyes almost closed Harry could make out the wide proportions of the room. A crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling, more portraits against the dark purple walls. Two figures rose from chairs in front of an ornate marble fireplace as the prisoners were forced into the room by the Snatchers.
“What is this?”
The dreadfully familiar, drawling voice of Lucius Malfoy fell on Harry’s ears. He was panicking now. He could see no way out, and it was easier, as his fear mounted, to block out Voldemort’s thoughts, though his scar was still burning.
“They say they’ve got Potter,” said Narcissa’s cold voice. “Draco, come here.”
Harry did not dare look directly at Draco, but saw him obliquely; a figure slightly taller than he was, rising from an armchair, his face a pale and pointed blur beneath white-blond hair.
Greyback forced the prisoners to turn again so as to place Harry directly beneath the chandelier.
“Well, boy?” rasped the werewolf.
Harry was facing a mirror over the fireplace, a great gilded thing in an intricately scrolled frame. Through the slits of his eyes he saw his own reflection for the first time since leaving Grimmauld Place.
His face was huge, shiny, and pink, every feature distorted by Hermione’s jinx. His black hair reached his shoulders and there was a dark shadow around his jaw. Had he not known that it was he who stood there, he would have wondered who was wearing his glasses. He resolved not to speak, for his voice was sure to give him away; yet he still avoided eye contact with Draco as the latter approached.
“Well, Draco?” said Lucius Malfoy. He sounded avid. “Is it? Is it Harry Potter?”
“I can’t – I can’t be sure,” said Draco. He was keeping his distance from Greyback, and seemed as scared of looking at Harry as Harry was of looking at him.
 
“But look at him carefully, look! Come closer!”
Harry had never heard Lucius Malfoy so excited.
“Draco, if we are the ones who hand Potter over to the Dark Lord, everything will be forgiv –“
“Now, we won’t be forgetting who actually caught him, I hope Mr. Malfoy?” said Greyback menacingly.
“Of course not, of course not!” said Lucius impatiently. He approached Harry himself, came so close that Harry could see the usually languid, pale face in sharp detail even through his swollen eyes. With his face a puffy mask, Harry felt as though he was peering out from between the bars of a cage.
“What did you do to him?” Lucius asked Greyback. “How did he get into this state?”
“That wasn’t us.”
“Looks more like a Stinging Jinx to me,” said Lucius.
His gray eyes raked Harry’s forehead.
“There’s something there,” he whispered. “it could be the scar, stretched tight. . . .” Draco, come here, look properly! What do you think?”
Harry saw Draco’s face up close now, right beside his father’s. They were extraordinarily alike, except that while his father looked beside himself with excitement, Draco’s expression was full of reluctance, even fear.
“I don’t know,” he said, and he walked away toward the fireplace where his mother stood watching.
“We had better be certain, Lucius,” Narcissa called to her husband in her cold, clear voice. “Completely sure that it is Potter, before we summon the Dark Lord . . . They say this is his” – she was looking closely at the blackthorn wand – “but it does not resemble Ollivander’s description. . . . If we are mistaken, if we call the Dark Lord here for nothing . . . Remember what he did to Rowle and Dolohov?”
“What about the Mudblood, then?” growled Greyback. Harry was nearly thrown off his feet as the Snatchers forced the prisoners to swivel around again, so that the light fell on Hermione instead.
“Wait,” said Narcissa sharply. “Yes – yes, she was in Madam Malkin’s with Potter! I saw her picture in the Prophet! Look, Draco, isn’t it the Granger girl?”
“I . . . maybe . . . yeah.”
“But then, that’s the Weasley boy!” shouted Lucius, striding around the bound prisoners to face Ron. “It’s them, Potter’s friends – Draco, look at him, isn’t it Arthur Weasley’s son, what’s his name – ?”
“Yeah,” said Draco again, his back to the prisoners. “It could be.”
The drawing room door opened behind Harry. A woman spoke, and the sound of the voice wound Harry’s fear to an even higher pitch.
“What is this? What’s happened, Cissy?”
Bellatrix Lestrange walked slowly around the prisoners, and stopped on Harry’s right, staring at Hermione through her heavily lidded eyes,
“But surely,” she said quietly, “this is the Mudblood girl? This is Grander?”
“Yes, yes, it’s Granger!” cried Lucius, “And beside her, we think, Potter! Potter and his friends, caught at last!”
“Potter?” shrieked Bellatrix, and she backed away, the better to take in Harry.
 
“Are you sure? Well then, the Dark Lord must be informed at once!”
She dragged back her left sleeve: Harry saw the Dark Mark burned into the flesh of her arm, and knew that she was about to touch it, to summon her beloved master–
“I was about to call him!” said Lucius, and his hand actually closed upon Bellatrix’s wrist, preventing her from touching the Mark. “I shall summon him, Bella. Potter has been brought to my house, and it is therefore upon my authority –“
“Your authority!” she sneered, attempting to wrench her hand from his grasp. “You lost your authority when you lost your wand, Lucius! How dare you! Take your hands off me!”
“This is nothing to do with you, you did not capture the boy –“
“Begging your pardon, Mr. Malfoy,” interjected Greyback, “but it’s us that caught Potter, and it’s us that’ll be claiming the gold –“
“Gold!” laughed Bellatrix, still attempting to throw off her brother-in-law, her free hand groping in her pocket for her wand. “Take your gold, filthy scavenger, what do I want with gold? I seek only the honor of his – of –“
She stopped struggling, her dark eyes fixed upon something Harry could not see. Jubilant at her capitulation, Lucius threw her hand from him and ripped up his own sleeve –
“STOP!” shrieked Bellatrix, “Do not touch it, we shall all perish if the Dark Lord comes now!”
Lucius froze, his index finger hovering over his own Mark. Bellatrix strode out of Harry’s limited line of vision.
“What is that?” he heard her say.
“Sword,” grunted an out-of-sight Snatcher.
“Give it to me.”
“It’s not yours, missus, it’s mine, I reckon I found it.”
There was a bang and a flash of red light; Harry knew that the Snatcher had been Stunned. There was a roar of anger from his fellows: Scabior drew his wand.
“What d’you think you’re playing at, woman?”
“Stupefy!” she screamed, ”Stupefy!”
They were no match for her, even thought there were four of them against one of her: She was a witch, as Harry knew, with prodigious skill and no conscience. They fell where they stood, all except Greyback, who had been forced into a kneeling position, his arms outstretched. Out of the corners of his eyes Harry saw Bellatrix bearing down upon the werewolf, the sword of Gryffindor gripped tightly in her hand, her face waxen.
“Where did you get this sword?” she whispered to Greyback as she pulled his wand out of his unresisting grip.
“How dare you?” he snarled, his mouth the only thing that could move as he was forced to gaze up at her. He bared his pointed teeth. “Release me, woman!”
“Where did you find this sword?” she repeated, brandishing it in his face, “Snape sent it to my vault in Gringotts!”
“It was in their tent,” rasped Greyback. “Release me, I say!”
She waved her wand, and the werewolf sprang to his feet, but appeared too wary to approach her. He prowled behind an armchair, his filthy curved nails clutching its back.
“Draco, move this scum outside,” said Bellatrix, indicating the unconscious men. “If you haven’t got the guts to finish them, then leave them in the courtyard for me.”
 
“Don’t you dare speak to Draco like –“ said Narcissa furiously, but Bellatrix screamed.
“Be quiet! The situation is graver than you can possibly imagine, Cissy! We have a very serious problem!”
She stood, panting slightly, looking down at the sword, examining its hilt. Then she turned to look at the silent prisoners.
“If it is indeed Potter, he must not be harmed,” she muttered, more to herself than to the others. “The Dark Lord wishes to dispose of Potter himself. . . . But if he finds out . . . I must . . . I must know. . . .”
She turned back to her sister again.
“The prisoners must be placed in the cellar, while I think what to do!”
“This is my house, Bella, you don’t give orders in my –“
“Do it! You have no idea of the danger we’re in!” shrieked Bellatrix. She looked frightening, mad; a thin stream of fire issued from her wand and burned a hole in the carpet.
Narcissa hesitated for a moment, then addressed the werewolf.
“Take these prisoners down to the cellar, Greyback.”
“Wait,” said Bellatrix sharply. “All except. . . . except for the Mudblood.”
Greyback gave a grunt of pleasure.
“No!” shouted Ron. “You can have me, keep me!”
Bellatrix hit him across the face: the blow echoed around the room.
“If she dies under questioning, I’ll take you next,” she said. “Blood traitor is next to Mudblood in my book. Take them downstairs, Greyback, and make sure they are secure, but do nothing more to them – yet.”
She threw Greyback’s wand back to him, then took a short silver knife from under her robes. She cut Hermione free from the other prisoners, then dragged her by the hair into the middle of the room, while Greyback forced the rest of them to shuffle across to another door, into a dark passageway, his wand held out in front of him, projecting an invisible and irresistible force.
“Reckon she’ll let me have a bit of the girl when she’s finished with her?” Greyback crooned as he forced them along the corridor. “I’d say I’ll get a bite or two, wouldn’t you, ginger?”
Harry could feel Ron shaking. They were forced down a steep flight of stairs, still tied back-to-back and in danger of slipping and breaking their necks at any moment. At the bottom was a heavy door. Greyback unlocked it with a tap of his wand, then forced them into a dank and musty room and left them in total darkness. The echoing bang of the slammed cellar door had not died away before there was a terrible, drawn out scream from directly above them.
“HERMIONE!” Ron bellowed, and he started to writhe and struggle against the ropes tying them together, so that Harry staggered. “HERMIONE!”
“Be quiet!” Harry said. “Shut up. Ron, we need to work out a way –“
“HERMIONE! HERMIONE!”
“We need a plan, stop yelling – we need to get these ropes off –“
“Harry?” came a whisper through the darkness. “Ron? Is that you?”
Ron stopped shouting. There was a sound of movement close by them, then Harry saw a shadow moving closer.
 
“Harry? Ron?”
“Luna?”
“Yes, it’s me! Oh no, I didn’t want you to be caught!”
“Luna, can you help us get these ropes off?” said Harry.
“Oh yes, I expect so. . . . There’s an old nail we use if we need to break anything. . . . Just a moment . . .”
Hermione screamed again from overhead, and they could hear Bellatrix screaming too, but her words were inaudible, for Ron shouted again, “HERMIONE! HERMIONE!”
“Mr. Ollivander?” Harry could hear Luna saying. “Mr. Ollivander, have you got the nail? If you just move over a little bit . . . I think it was beside the water jug.”
She was back within seconds.
“You’ll need to stay still,” she said.
Harry could feel her digging at the rope’s tough fibers to work the knots free. From upstairs they heard Bellatrix’s voice.
“I’m going to ask you again! Where did you get this sword? Where?”
“We found it – we found it – PLEASE!” Hermione screamed again; Ron struggled harder than ever, and the rusty nail slipped onto Harry’s wrist.
“Ron, please stay still!” Luna whispered. “I can’t see what I’m doing –“
“My pocket!” said Ron, “In my pocket, there’s a Deluminator, and it’s full of light!”
A few seconds later, there was a click, and the luminescent spheres the Deluminator had sucked from the lamps in the tent flew into the cellar: Unable to rejoin their sources, they simply hung there, like tiny suns, flooding the underground room with light. Harry saw Luna, all eyes in her white face, and the motionless figure of Ollivander the wandmaker, curled up on the floor in the corner. Craning around, he caught sight of their fellow prisoners: Dean and Griphook the goblin, who seemed barely conscious, kept standing by the ropes that bound him to the humans.
“Oh, that’s much easier, thanks, Ron,” said Luna, and she began hacking at their bindings again. “Hello, Dean!”
From above came Bellatrix’s voice.
“You’re lying, filthy Mudblood, and I know it! You have been inside my vault at Gringotts! Tell the truth, tell the truth!”
Another terrible scream–
“HERMIONE!”
“What else did you take? What else have you got? Tel me the truth or, I swear, I shall run you through with this knife!”
“There!”
Harry felt the ropes fall away and turned, rubbing his wrists, to see Ron running around the cellar, looking up at the low ceiling, searching for a trapdoor. Dean, his face bruised and bloody, said “Thanks” to Luna and stood there, shivering, but Griphook sank onto the cellar floor, looking groggy and disoriented, many welts across his swarthy face.
Ron was now trying to Disapparate without a wand.
“There’s no way out, Ron,” said Luna, watching his fruitless efforts. “The cellar is completely escape-proof. I tried, at first. Mr. Ollivander has been here for a long time, he’s tried everything.”
 
Hermione was screaming again: The sound went through Harry like physical pain. Barely conscious of the fierce prickling of his scar, he too started to run around the cellar, feeling the walls for he hardly knew what, knowing in his heart that it was useless.
“What else did you take, what else? ANSWER ME! CRUCIO!”
Hermione’s screams echoed off the walls upstairs, Ron was half sobbing as he pounded the walls with his fists, and Harry in utter desperation seized Hagrid’s pouch from around his neck and groped inside it: He pulled out Dumbledore’s Snitch and shook it, hoping for he did not know what – nothing happened – he waved the broken halves of the phoenix wand, but they were lifeless – the mirror fragment fell sparkling to the floor, and he saw a gleam of brightest blue –
Dumbledore’s eye was gazing at him out of the mirror.
“Help us!” he yelled at it in mad desperation. “We’re in the cellar of Malfoy Manor, help us!”
The eye blinked and was gone.
Harry was not even sure that it had really been there. He tilted the shard of mirror this way and that, and saw nothing reflected there but the walls and ceiling of their prison, and upstairs Hermione was screaming worse than ever, and next to him Ron was bellowing, “HERMIONE! HERMIONE!”
“How did you get into my vault?” they heard Bellatrix scream. “Did that dirty little goblin in the cellar help you?”
“We only met him tonight!” Hermione sobbed. “We’ve never been inside your vault. . . . It isn’t the real sword! It’s a copy, just a copy!”
“A copy?” screeched Bellatrix. “Oh, a likely story!”
“But we can find out easily!” came Lucius’s voice. “Draco, fetch the goblin, he can tell us whether the sword is real or not!”
Harry dashed across the cellar to where Griphook was huddled on the floor.
“Griphook,” he whispered into the goblin’s pointed ear, “you must tell them that sword’s a fake, they mustn’t know it’s the real one, Griphook, please –“
He could hear someone scuttling own the cellar steps; next moment, Draco’s shaking voice spoke from behind the door.
“Stand back. Line up against the back wall. Don’t try anything, or I’ll kill you!”
They did as they were bidden; as the lock turned, Ron clicked the Deluminator and the lights whisked back into his pocket, restoring the cellar’s darkness. The door flew open; Malfoy marched inside, wand held out in front of him, pale and determined. He seized the little goblin by the arm and backed out again, dragging Griphook with him. The door slammed shut and at the same moment a loud crack echoed inside the cellar.
Ron clicked the Deluminator. Three balls of light flew back into the air from his pocket, revealing Dobby the house-elf, who had just Apparated into their midst.
“DOB – !”
Harry hit Ron on the arm to stop him shouting, and Ron looked terrified at his mistake. Footsteps crossed the ceiling overhead: Draco marching Griphook to Bellatrix.
Dobby’s enormous, tennis-ball shaped eyes were wide; he was trembling from his feet to the tips of his ears. He was back in the home of his old masters, and it was clear that he was petrified.
“Harry Potter,” he squeaked in the tiniest quiver of a voice, “Dobby has come to rescue you.”
 
“But how did you – ?”
An awful scream drowned Harry’s words: Hermione was being tortured again. He cut to the essentials.
“You can Disapparate out of this cellar?” he asked Dobby, who nodded, his ears flapping.
“And you can take humans with you?”
Dobby nodded again.
“Right. Dobby, I want you to grab Luna, Dean, and Mr. Ollivander, and take them – take them to –“
“Bill and Fleur’s,” said Ron. “Shell Cottage on the outskirts of Tinworth!”
The elf nodded for a third time.
“And then come back,” said Harry. “Can you do that, Dobby?”
“Of course, Harry Potter,” whispered the little elf. He hurried over to Mr. Ollivander, who appeared to be barely conscious. He took one of the wandmaker’s hands in his own, then held out the other to Luna and Dean, neither of whom moved.
“Harry, we want to help you!” Luna whispered.
“We can’t leave you here,” said Dean.
“Go, both of you! We’ll see you at Bill and Fleur’s.”
As Harry spoke, his scar burned worse than ever, and for a few seconds he looked down, not upon the wandmaker, but on another man who was just as old, just as thin, but laughing scornfully.
“Kill me, then. Voldemort, I welcome death! But my death will not bring you what you seek. . . . There is so much you do not understand. . .”
He felt Voldemort’s fury, but as Hermione screamed again he shut it out, returning to the cellar and the horror of his own present.
“Go!” Harry beseeched to Luna and Dean. “Go! We’ll follow, just go!”
They caught hold of the elf’s outstretched fingers. There was another loud crack, and Dobby, Luna, Dean, and Ollivander vanished.
“What was that?” shouted Lucius Malfoy from over their heads. “Did you hear that? What was that noise in the cellar?”
Harry and Ron stared at each other.
“Draco – no, call Wormtail! Make him go and check!”
Footsteps crossed the room overhead, then there was silence. Harry knew that the people in the drawing room were listening for more noises from the cellar.
“We’re going to have to try and tackle him,” he whispered to Ron. They had no choice: The moment anyone entered the room and saw the absence of three prisoners, they were lost. “Leave the lights on,” Harry added, and as they heard someone descending the steps outside the door, they backed against the wall on either side of it.
“Stand back,” came Wormtail’s voice. “Stand away from the door. I’m coming in.”
The door flew open. For a split second Wormtail gazed into the apparently empty cellar, ablaze with light from the three miniature suns floating in midair. Then Harry and Ron launched themselves upon him. Ron seized Wormtail’s wand arm and forced it upwards. Harry slapped a hand to his mouth, muffling his voice. Silently they struggled: Wormtail’s wand emitted sparks; his silver hand closed around Harry’s throat.
“What is it, Wormtail?” called Lucius Malfoy from above.
 
“Nothing!” Ron called back, in a passable imitation of Wormtail’s wheezy voice. “All fine!”
Harry could barely breathe.
“You’re going to kill me?” Harry choked, attempting to prise off the metal fingers. “After I saved your life? You owe me, Wormtail!”
The silver fingers slackened. Harry had not expected it: He wrenched himself free, astonished, keeping his hand over Wormtail’s mouth. He saw the ratlike man’s small watery eyes widen with fear and surprise: He seemed just as shocked as Harry at what his hand had done, at the tiny, merciful impulse it had betrayed, and he continued to struggle more powerfully, as though to undo that moment of weakness.
“And we’ll have that,” whispered Ron, tugging Wormtail’s wand from his other hand.
Wandless, helpless, Pettigrew’s pupils dilated in terror. His eyes had slid from Harry’s face to something else. His own silver fingers were moving inexorably toward his own throat.
“No –“
Without pausing to think, Harry tried to drag back the hand, but there was no stopping it. The silver tool that Voldemort had given his most cowardly servant had turned upon its disarmed and useless owner; Pettigrew was reaping his reward for his hesitation, his moment of pity; he was being strangled before their eyes.
“No!”
Ron had released Wormtail too, and together he and Harry tried to pull the crushing metal fingers from around Wormtail’s throat, but it was no use. Pettigrew was turning blue.
“Relashio!” said Ron, pointing the wand at the silver hand, but nothing happened; Pettigrew dropped to his knees, and at the same moment, Hermione gave a dreadful scream from overhead. Wormtail’s eyes rolled upward in his purple face; he gave a last twitch, and was still.
Harry and Ron looked at each other, then leaving Wormtail’s body on the floor behind them, ran up the stairs and back into the shadowy passageway leading to the drawing room. Cautiously they crept along it until they reached the drawing room door, which was ajar. Now they had a clear view of Bellatrix looking down at Griphook, who was holding Gryffindor’s sword in his long-fingered hands. Hermione was lying at Bellatrix’s feet. She was barely stirring.
“Well?” Bellatrix said to Griphook. “Is it the true sword?”
Harry waited, holding his breath, fighting against the prickling of his scar.
“No,” said Griphook. “It is a fake.”
“Are you sure?” panted Bellatrix. “Quite sure?”
“Yes,” said the goblin.
Relief broke across her face, all tension drained from it.
“Good,” she said, and with a casual flick of her wand she slashed another deep cut into the goblin’s face, and he dropped with a yell at her feet. She kicked him aside. “And now,” she said in a voice that burst with triumph, “we call the Dark Lord!”
And she pushed back her sleeve and touched her forefinger to the Dark Mark.
At once, Harry’s scar felt as though it had split open again. His true surroundings vanished: He was Voldemort, and the skeletal wizard before him was laughing
 
toothlessly at him; he was enraged at the summons he felt – he had warned them, he had told them to summon him for nothing less than Potter. If they were mistaken . . .
“Kill me, then!” demanded the old man. “You will not win, you cannot win! That wand will never, ever be yours –“
And Voldemort’s fury broke: A burst of green light filled the prison room and the frail old body was lifted from its hard bed and then fell back, lifeless, and Voldemort returned to the window, his wrath barely controllable. . . . They would suffer his retribution if they had no good reason for calling him back. . . .
“And I think,” said Bellatrix’s voice, “we can dispose of the Mudblood. Greyback, take her if you want her.”
“NOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
Ron had burst into the drawing room; Bellatrix looked around, shocked; she turned her wand to face Ron instead –
“Expelliarmus!” he roared, pointing Wormtail’s wand at Bellatrix, and hers flew into the air and was caught by Harry, who had sprinted after Ron. Lucius, Narcissa, Draco and Greyback wheeled about; Harry yelled, “Stupefy!” and Lucius Malfoy collapsed onto the hearth. Jets of light flew from Draco’s, Narcissa’s, and Greyback’s wands; Harry threw himself to the floor, rolling behind a sofa to avoid them.
“STOP OR SHE DIES!
Panting, Harry peered around the edge of the sofa. Bellatrix was supporting Hermione, who seemed to be unconscious, and was holding her short silver knife to Hermione’s throat.
“Drop your wands,” she whispered. “Drop them, or we’ll see exactly how filthy her blood is!”
Ron stood rigid, clutching Wormtail’s wand. Harry straightened up, still holding Bellatrix’s.
“I said, drop them!” she screeched, pressing the blade into Hermione’s throat: Harry saw beads of blood appear there.
“All right!” he shouted, and he dropped Bellatrix’s wand onto the floor at his feet, Ron did the same with Wormtail’s. Both raised their hands to shoulder height.
“Good!” she leered. “Draco, pick them up! The Dark Lord is coming, Harry Potter! Your death approaches!”
Harry knew it; his scar was bursting with the pain of it, and he could feel Voldemort flying through the sky from far away, over a dark and stormy sea, and soon he would be close enough to Apparate to them, and Harry could see no way out.
“Now,” said Bellatrix softly, as Draco hurried back to her with the wands. “Cissy, I think we ought to tie these little heroes up again, while Greyback takes care of Miss Mudblood. I am sure the Dark Lord will not begrudge you the girl, Greyback, after what you have done tonight.”
At the last word there was a peculiar grinding noise from above. All of them looked upward in time to see the crystal chandelier tremble; then, with a creak and an ominous jingling, it began to fall. Bellatrix was directly beneath it; dropping Hermione, she threw herself aside with a scream. The chandelier crashed to the floor in an explosion of crystal and chains, falling on top of Hermione and the goblin, who still clutched the sword of Gryffindor. Glittering shards of crystal flew in all directions; Draco doubled over, his hands covering his bloody face.
 
As Ron ran to pull Hermione out of the wreckage, Harry took the chance: He leapt over an armchair and wrested the three wands from Draco’s grip, pointed all of them at Greyback, and yelled, “Stupefy!” The werewolf was lifted off his feet by the triple spell, flew up to the ceiling and then smashed to the ground.
As Narcissa dragged Draco out of the way of further harm, Bellatrix sprang to her feet, her hair flying as she brandished the silver knife; but Narcissa had directed her wand at the doorway.
“Dobby!” she screamed and even Bellatrix froze. “You! You dropped the chandelier – ?”
The tiny elf trotted into the room, his shaking finger pointing at his old mistress.
“You must not hurt Harry Potter,” he squeaked.
“Kill him, Cissy!” shrieked Bellatrix, but there was another loud crack, and Narcissa’s wand too flew into the air and landed on the other side of the room.
“You dirty little monkey!” bawled Bellatrix. “How dare you take a witch’s wand, how dare you defy your masters?”
“Dobby has no master!” squealed the elf. “Dobby is a free elf, and Dobby has come to save Harry Potter and his friends!”
Harry’s scar was blinding him with pain. Dimly he knew that they had moments, seconds before Voldemort was with them.
“Ron, catch – and GO!” he yelled, throwing one of the wands to him; then he bent down to tug Griphook out from under the chandelier. Hoisting the groaning goblin, who still clung to the sword, over one shoulder, Harry seized Dobby’s hand and spun on the spot to Disapparate.
As he turned into darkness he caught one last view of the drawing room of the pale, frozen figures of Narcissa and Draco, of the streak of red that was Ron’s hair, and a blue of flying silver, as Bellatrix’s knife flew across the room at the place where he was vanishing –
Bill and Fleur’s . . . Shell Cottage . . . Bill and Fleur’s . . .
He had disappeared into the unknown; all he could do was repeat the name of the destination and hope that it would suffice to take him there. The pain in his forehead pierced him, and the weight of the goblin bore down upon him; he could feel the blade of Gryffindor’s sword bumping against his back: Dobby’s hand jerked in his; he wondered whether the elf was trying to take charge, to pull them in the right direction, and tried, by squeezing the fingers, to indicate that that was fine with them. . . .
And then they hit solid earth and smelled salty air. Harry fell to his knees, relinquished Dobby’s hand, and attempted to lower Griphook gently to the ground.
“Are you all right?” he said as the goblin stirred, but Griphook merely whimpered.
Harry squinted around through the darkness. There seemed to be a cottage a short way away under the wide starry sky, and he thought he saw movement outside it.
“Dobby, is this Shell Cottage?” he whispered, clutching the two wands he had brought from the Malfoys’, ready to fight if he needed to. “Have we come to the right place? Dobby?”
He looked around. The little elf stood feet from him.
“DOBBY!”
The elf swayed slightly, stars reflected in his wide, shining eyes. Together, he and Harry looked down at the silver hilt of the knife protruding from the elf’s heaving chest.
 
“Dobby – no – HELP!” Harry bellowed toward the cottage, toward the people moving there. “HELP!”
He did not know or care whether they were wizards or Muggles, friends or foes; all he cared about was that a dark stain was spreading across Dobby’s front, and that he had stretched out his own arms to Harry with a look of supplication. Harry caught him and laid him sideways on the cool grass.
“Dobby, no, don’t die, don’t die –“
The elf’s eyes found him, and his lips trembled with the effort to form words.
“Harry . . . Potter . . .”
And then with a little shudder the elf became quite still, and his eyes were nothing more than great glassy orbs, sprinkled with light from the stars they could not see.”
Chapter Twenty-Four The Wandmaker
It was like sinking into an old nightmare; for an instant Harry knelt again beside Dumbledore’s body at the foot of the tallest tower at Hogwarts, but in reality he was staring at a tiny body curled upon the grass, pierced by Bellatrix’s silver knife. Harry’s voice was still saying, “Dobby…Dobby…” even though he knew that the elf had gone where he could not call him back.
After a minute or so he realized that they had, after all, come to the right place, for here were Bill and Fleur, Dean and Luna, gathering around him as he knelt over the elf. “Hermione,” he said suddenly. “Where is she?”
“Ron’s taken her inside,” said Bill. “She’ll be all right.” Harry looked back down at Dobby. He stretched out a hand and pulled the sharp blade from the elf’s body, then dragged off his own jacket and covered Dobby in it like a blanket.
The sea was rushing against the rock somewhere nearby; Harry listened to it while the others talked, discussing matters in which he could take no interest, making decisions, Dean carried the injured Griphook into the house, Fleur hurrying with them; now Bill was really knowing what he was saying. As he did so, he gazed down at the tiny body, and his scar prickled and burned, and in one part of his mind, viewed as if from the wrong end of a long telescope, he saw Voldemort punishing those they had left behind at the Malfoy Manor. His rage was dreadful and yet Harry’s grief for Dobby seemed to diminish it, so that it became a distant storm that reached Harry from across a vast, silent ocean.
 
“I want to do it properly,” were the first words of which Harry was fully conscious of speaking. “Not by magic. Have you got a spade?” And shortly afterward he had set to work, alone, digging the grave in the place that Bill had shown him at the end of the garden, between bushes. He dug with a kind of fury, relishing the manual work, glorying in the non-magic of it, for every drop of his sweat and every blister felt like a gift to the elf who had saved their lives.
His scar burned, but he was master of the pain, he felt it, yet was apart from it. He had learned control at last, learned to shut his mind to Voldemort, the very thing Dumbledore had wanted him to learn from Snape. Just as Voldemort had not been able to possess Harry while Harry was consumed with grief for Sirius, so his thoughts could not penetrate Harry now while he mourned Dobby. Grief, it seemed, drove Voldemort out…though Dumbledore, of course, would have said that it was love.
On Harry dug, deeper and deeper into the hard, cold earth, subsuming his grief in sweat, denying the pain in his scar. In the darkness, with nothing but the sound of his own breath and the rushing sea to keep him company, the things that had happened at the Malfoys’ returned to him, the things he had heard came back to him, and understanding blossomed in the darkness…
The steady rhythm of his arms beat time with his thoughts. Hallows…Horcruxes…Hallows…Horcruxes…yet no longer burned with that weird, obsessive longing. Loss and fear had snuffed it out. He felt as though he had been slapped awake again.
Deeper and deeper Harry sank into the grave, and he knew where Voldemort had been tonight, and whom he had killed in the topmost cell of Nurmengard, and why…
And he thought of Wormtail, dead because of one small unconscious impulse of mercy…Dumbledore had foreseen that…How much more had he known?
Harry lost track of time. He knew only that the darkness had lightened a few degrees when he was rejoined by Ron and Dean. “How’s Hermione?” “Better,” said Ron. “Fleur’s looking after her.” Harry had his retort ready for when they asked him why he had not simply created a perfect grave with his wand, but he did not need it. They jumped down into the hole he had made with spades of their own and together they worked in silence until the hole seemed deep enough.
Harry wrapped the elf more snuggly in his jacket. Ron sat on the edge of the grave and stripped off his shoes and socks, which he placed on the elf’s bare feet. Dean produced a woolen hat, which Harry placed carefully upon Dobby’s head, muffling his batlike ears. “We should close his eyes.”
Harry had not heard the others coming through the darkness. Bill was wearing a traveling cloak, Fleur a large white apron, from the pocket of which protruded a bottle of what Harry recognized to be Skele-Gro. Hermione was wrapped in a borrowed dressing gown, pale and unsteady on her feet; Ron put an arm around her when she reached him. Luna, who was huddled in one of Fleur’s coats, crouched down and placed her fingers tenderly upon each of the elf’s eyelids, sliding them over his glassy stare. “There,” she said softly. “Now he could be sleeping.”
Harry placed the elf into the grave, arranged his tiny limbs so that he might have been resting, then climbed out and gazed for the last time upon the little body. He forced himself not to break down as he remembered Dumbledore’s funeral, and the rows and rows of golden chairs, and the Minister of Magic in the front row, the recitation of
 
Dumbledore’s achievements, the stateliness of the white marble tomb. He felt that Dobby deserved just as grand a funeral, and yet here the elf lay between bushes in a roughly dug hole. “I think we ought to say something,” piped up Luna. “I’ll go first, shall I?”
And as everybody looked at her, she addressed the dead elf at the bottom of the grave. “Thank you so much Dobby for rescuing me from that cellar. It’s so unfair that you had to die when you were so good and brave. I’ll always remember what you did for us. I hope you’re happy now.”
She turned and looked expectingly at Ron, who cleared his throat and said in a thick voice, “yeah…thanks Dobby.” “Thanks,” muttered Dean. Harry swallowed. “Good bye Dobby,” he said It was all he could manage, but Luna had said it all for him. Bill raised his wand, and the pile of earth beside the grave rose up into the air and fell neatly upon it, a small, reddish mound. “D’ya mind if I stay here a moment?” He asked the others.
They murmured words he did not catch; he felt gentle pats upon his back, and then they all traipsed back toward the cottage, leaving Harry alone beside the elf.
He looked around: There were a number of large white stones, smoothed by the sea, marking the edge of the flower beds. He picked up one of the largest and laid it, pillowlike, over the place where Dobby’s head now rested. He then felt in his pocket for a wand. There were two in there. He had forgotten, lost track; he could not now remember whose wands these were; he seemed to remember wrenching them out of someone’s hand. He selected the shorter of the two, which felt friendlier in his hand, and pointed it at the rock.
Slowly, under his murmured instruction, deep cuts appeared upon the rock’s surface. He knew that Hermione could have done it more neatly, and probably more quickly, but he wanted to mark the spot as he had wanted to dig the grave. When Harry stood up again, the stone read: HERE LIES DOBBY, A FREE ELF.
He looked at his handiwork for a few more seconds, then walked away, his scar still prickling a little, and his mind full of those things that had come to him in the grave, ideas that had taken shape in the darkness, ideas both fascinating and terrible.
They were all sitting in the living room when he entered the little hall, their attention focused upon Bill, who was talking. The room was light-colored, pretty, with a small fire of driftwood burning brightly in the fireplace. Harry did not want to drop mud upon the carpet, so he stood in the doorway, listening.
“…lucky that Ginny’s on holiday. If she’d been at Hogwarts they could have taken her before we reached her. Now we know she’s safe too.” He looked around and saw Harry standing there. “I’ve been getting them all out of the Burrow,” he explained. “Moved them to Muriel’s. The Death Eaters know Ron’s with you now, they’re bound to target the family –don’t apologize,” he added at the sight of Harry’s expression. “It was always a matter of time, Dad’s been saying so for months. We’re the biggest blood traitor family there is.”
“How are they protected?” asked Harry. “Fidelius Charm. Dad’s Secret-Keeper. And we’ve done it on this cottage too; I’m Secret-Keeper here. None of us can go to work, but that’s hardly the most important thing now. Once Ollivander and Griphook are well enough, we’ll move them to Muriel’s too. There isn’t much room here, but she’s got
 
plenty. Griphook’s legs are on the mend. Fleur’s given him Skele-Gro-we could probably move them in an hour or—“
“No,” Harry said and Bill looked startled. “I need both of them here. I need to talk to them. It’s important.” He heard the authority of his own voice, the conviction, the voice of purpose that had come to him as he dug Dobby’s grave. All of their faces were turned toward him looking puzzled.
“I’m going to wash,” Harry told Bill looking down at his hands still covered with mud and Dobby’s blood. “Then I’ll need to see them, straight away.” He walked into the little kitchen, to the basin beneath a window overlooking the sea. Dawn was breaking over the horizon, shell pink and faintly gold, as he washed, again following the train of thought that had come to him in the dark garden…
Dobby would never be able to tell them who had sent him to the cellar, but Harry knew what he had seen. A piercing blue eye had looked out of the mirror fragment, and then help had come. Help will always be given at Hogwarts to those who ask for it.
Harry dried his hands, impervious to the beauty of the scene outside the window and to the murmuring of the others in the sitting room. He looked out over the ocean and felt closer, this dawn, than ever before, closer to the heart of it all.
And still his scar prickled, and he knew that Voldemort was getting there too. Harry understood and yet did not understand. His instinct was telling him one thing, his brain quite another. The Dumbledore in Harry’s head smiled, surveying Harry over the tips of his fingers, pressed together as if in prayer.
You gave Ron the Deluminator…You understood him…You gave him a way back…
And you understood Wormtail too…You knew there was a bit of regret there, somewhere…
And if you knew them…What did you know about me, Dumbledore?
Am I meant to know but not to seek? Did you know how hard I’d feel that? Is that why you made it this difficult? So I’d have time to work that out?
Harry stood quite still, eyes glazed, watching the place where a bright gold ray of dazzling sun was rising over the horizon. Then he looked down at his clean hands and was momentarily surprised to see the cloth he was holding in them. He set it down and returned to the hall, and as he did so, he felt his scar pulse angrily, and then flashed across his mind, swift as the reflection of a dragonfly over water, the outline of a building he knew extremely well.
Bill and Fleur were standing at the foot of the stairs.
“I need to speak to Griphook and Ollivander,” Harry said.
“No,” said Fleur. “You will ‘ave to wait, ‘Arry. Zey are both too tired –”
“I’m sorry,” he said without heat, “but it can’t wait. I need to talk to them now. Privately – and separately. It’s urgent.”
“Harry, what the hell’s going on?” asked Bill. “You turn up here with a dead house-elf and a half-conscious goblin, Hermione looks as though she’s been tortured, and Ron’s just refused to tell me anything –”
“We can’t tell you what we’re doing,” said Harry flatly. “You’re in the Order, Bill, you know Dumbledore left us a mission. We’re not supposed to talk about it to anyone else.”
 
Fleur made an impatient noise, but Bill did not look at her; he was staring at Harry. His deeply scarred face was hard to read. Finally, Bill said, “All right. Who do you want to talk to first?”
Harry hesitated. He knew what hung on his decision. There was hardly any time left; now was the moment to decide: Horcruxes or Hallows?
“Griphook,” Harry said. “I’ll speak to Griphook first.”
His heart was racing as if he had been sprinting and had just cleared an enormous obstacle.
“Up here, then,” said Bill, leading the way.
Harry had walked up several steps before stopping and looking back.
“I need you two as well!” he called to Ron and Hermione, who had been skulking, half concealed, in the doorway of the sitting room.
They both moved into the light, looking oddly relieved.
“How are you?” Harry asked Hermione. “You were amazing – coming up with that story when she was hurting you like that –”
Hermione gave a weak smile as Ron gave her a one-armed squeeze.
“What are we doing now, Harry?” he asked.
“You’ll see. Come on.”
Harry, Ron, and Hermione followed Bill up the steep stairs onto a small landing. Three doors led off it.
“In here,” said Bill, opening the door into his and Fleur’s room, it too had a view of the sea, now flecked with gold in the sunrise. Harry moved to the window, turned his back on the spectacular view, and waited, his arms folded, his scar prickling. Hermione took the chair beside the dressing table; Ron sat on the arm.
Bill reappeared, carrying the little goblin, whom he set down carefully upon the bed. Griphook grunted thanks, and Bill left, closing the door upon them all.
“I’m sorry to take you out of bed,” said Harry. “How are your legs?”
“Painful,” replied the goblin. “But mending.”
He was still clutching the sword of Gryffindor, and wore a strange look: half truculent, half intrigued. Harry noted the goblin’s sallow skin, his long thin fingers, his black eyes. Fleur had removed his shoes: His long feet were dirty. He was larger than a house-elf, but not by much. His domed head was much bigger than a human’s.
“You probably don’t remember –” Harry began.
“—that I was the goblin who showed you to your vault, the first time you ever visited Gringotts?” said Griphook. “I remember, Harry Potter. Even amongst goblins, you are very famous.”
Harry and the goblin looked at each other, sizing each other up. Harry’s scar was still prickling. He wanted to get through this interview with Griphook quickly, and at the same time was afraid of making a false move. While he tried to decide on the best way to approach his request, the goblin broke the silence.
“You buried the elf,” he said, sounding unexpectedly rancorous. “I watched you from the window of the bedroom next door.”
“Yes,” said Harry.
Griphook looked at him out of the corners of his slanting black eyes.
“You are an unusual wizard, Harry Potter.”
“In what way?” asked Harry, rubbing his scar absently.
 
“You dug the grave.”
“So?”
Griphook did not answer. Harry rather thought he was being sneered at for acting like a Muggle, but it did not matter to him whether Griphook approved of Dobby’s grave or not. He gathered himself for the attack.
“Griphook, I need to ask –”
“You also rescued a goblin.”
“What?”
“You brought me here. Saved me.”
“Well, I take it you’re not sorry?” said Harry a little impatiently.
“No, Harry Potter,” said Griphook, and with one finger he twisted the thin black beard upon his chin, “but you are a very odd wizard.”
“Right,” said Harry. “Well, I need some help, Griphook, and you can give it to me.”
The goblin made no sign of encouragement, but continued to frown at Harry as though he had never seen anything like him.
“I need to break into a Gringotts vault.”
Harry had not meant to say it so badly: the words were forced from him as pain shot through his lightning scar and he saw, again, the outline of Hogwarts. He closed his mind firmly. He needed to deal with Griphook first. Ron and Hermione were staring at Harry as though he had gone mad.
“Harry –” said Hermione, but she was cut off by Griphook.
“Break into a Gringotts vault?” repeated the goblin, wincing a little as he shifted his position upon the bed. “It is impossible.”
“No, it isn’t,” Ron contradicted him. “It’s been done.”
“Yeah,” said Harry. “The same day I first met you, Griphook. My birthday, seven years ago.”
“The vault in question was empty at the time,” snapped the goblin, and Harry understood that even though Griphook had let Gringotts, he was offended at the idea of its defenses being breached. “Its protection was minimal.”
“Well, the vault we need to get into isn’t empty, and I’m guessing its protection will be pretty powerful,” said Harry. “It belongs to the Lestranges.”
He saw Hermione and Ron look at each other, astonished, but there would be time enough to explain after Griphook had given his answer.
“You have no chance,” said Griphook flatly. “No chance at all. If you seek beneath our floors, a treasure that was never yours –”
“Thief, you have been warned, beware – yeah, I know, I remember,” said Harry. “But I’m not trying to get myself any treasure, I’m not trying to take anything for personal gain. Can you believe that?”
The goblin looked slantwise at Harry, and the lightning scar on Harry’s forehead prickled, but he ignored it, refusing to acknowledge its pain or its invitation.
“If there was a wizard of whom I would believe that they did not seek personal gain,” said Griphook finally, “it would be you, Harry Potter. Goblins and elves are not used to the protection or the respect that you have shown this night. Not from wand-carriers.”
 
“Wand-carriers,” repeated Harry: The phrase fell oddly upon his ears as his scar prickled, as Voldemort turned his thoughts northward, and as Harry burned to question Ollivander next door.
“The right to carry a wand,” said the goblin quietly, “has long been contested between wizards and goblins.”
“Well, goblins can do magic without wands,” said Ron.
“That is immaterial! Wizards refuse to share the secrets of wand-lore with other magical beings, they deny us the possibility of extending our powers!”
“Well, goblins won’t share any of their magic either,” said Ron. “You won’t tell us how to make swords and armor the way you do. Goblins know how to work metal in a way wizards have never –”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Harry, noting Griphook’s rising color. “This isn’t about wizards versus goblins or any other sort of magical creature –”
Griphook gave a nasty laugh.
“But it is, it is precisely that! As the Dark Lord becomes ever more powerful, your race is set still more firmly above mine! Gringotts falls under Wizarding rule, house-elves are slaughtered, and who amongst the wand-carriers protests?”
“We do!” said Hermione. She had sat up straight, her eyes bright. “We protest! And I’m hunted quite as much as any goblin or elf, Griphook! I’m a Mudblood!”
“Don’t call yourself –” Ron muttered.
“Why shouldn’t I?” said Hermione. “Mudblood, and proud of it! I’ve got no higher position under this new order than you have, Griphook! It was me they chose to torture, back at the Malfoys!”
As she spoke, she pulled aside the neck of the dressing gown to reveal the thin cut Bellatrix had made, scarlet against her throat.
“Did you know that it was Harry who set Dobby free?” she asked. “Did you know that we’ve wanted elves to be freed for years?” (Ron fidgeted uncomfortably on the arm of Hermione’s chair.) “You can’t want You-Know-Who defeated more than we do, Griphook!”
The goblin gazed at Hermione with the same curiousity he had shown Harry.
“What do you seek within the Lestranges’ vault?” he asked abruptly. “The sword that lies inside it is a fake. This is the real one.” He looked from one to the other of them. “I think that you already know this. You asked me to lie for you back there.”
“But the fake sword isn’t the only thing in that vault, is it?” asked Harry. “Perhaps you’ve seen other things in there?”
His heart was pounding harder than ever. He redoubled his efforts to ignore the pulsing of his scar.
The goblin twisted his beard around his finger again.
“It is against our code to speak of the secrets of Gringotts. We are the guardians of fabulous treasures. We have a duty to the objects placed in our care, which were, so often, wrought by our fingers.”
The goblin stroked the sword, and his black eyes roved from Harry to Hermione to Ron and then back again.
“So young,” he said finally, “to be fighting so many.”
“Will you help us?” said Harry. “We haven’t got a hope of breaking in without a goblin’s help. You’re our one chance.”
 
“I shall . . . think about it,” said Griphook maddeningly.
“But –” Ron started angrily; Hermione nudged him in the ribs.
“Thank you,” said Harry.
The goblin bowed his great domed head in acknowledgement, then flexed his short legs.
“I think,” he said, settling himself ostentatiously upon Bill and Fleur’s bed, “that the Skele-Gro has finished its work. I may be able to sleep at last. Forgive me. . . .”
“Yeah, of course,” said Harry, but before leaving the room he leaned forward and took the sword of Gryffindor from beside the goblin. Griphook did not protest, but Harry thought he saw resentment in the goblin’s eyes as he closed the door upon him.
“Little git,” whispered Ron. “He’s enjoying keeping us hanging.”
“Harry,” whispered Hermione, pulling them both away from the door, into the middle of the still-dark landing, “are you saying what I think you’re saying? Are you saying there’s a Horcrux in the Lestranges vault?”
“Yes,” said Harry. “Bellatrix was terrified when she thought we’d been in there, she was beside herself. Why? What did she think we’d seen, what else did she think we might have taken? Something she was petrified You-Know-Who would find out about.”
“But I thought we were looking for places You-Know-Who’s been, places he’s done something important?” said Ron, looking baffled. “Was he ever inside the Lestranges’ vault?”
“I don’t know whether he was ever inside Gringotts,” said Harry. “He never had gold there when he was younger, because nobody left him anything. He would have seen the bank from the outside, though, the first time he ever went to Diagon Alley.”
Harry’s scar throbbed, but he ignored it; he wanted Ron and Hermione to understand about Gringotts before they spoke to Ollivander.
“I think he would have envied anyone who had a key to a Gringotts vault. I think he’d have seen it as a real symbol of belonging to the Wizarding world. And don’t forget, he trusted Bellatrix and her husband. They were his most devoted servants before he fell, and they went looking for him after he vanished. He said it night he came back, I heard him.”
Harry rubbed his scar.
“I don’t think he’d have told Bellatrix it was a Horcrux, though. He never told Lucius Malfoy the truth about the diary. He probably told her it was a treasured possession and asked her to place it in her vault. The safest place in the world for anything you want to hide, Hagrid told me. . . except for Hogwarts.”
When Harry had finished speaking, Ron shook his head.
“You really understand him.”
“Bits of him,” said Harry. “Bits . . . I just wish I’d understood Dumbledore as much. But we’ll see. Come on – Ollivander now.”
Ron and Hermione looked bewildered but very impressed as they followed him across the little landing and knocked upon the door opposite Bill and Fleur’s. A weak “Come in!” answered them.
The wandmaker was lying on the twin bed farthest from the window. He had been held in the cellar for more than a year, and tortured, Harry knew, on at least one occasion. He was emaciated, the bones of his face sticking out sharply against the yellowish skin. His great silver eyes seemed vast in their sunken sockets. The hands that lay upon the
 
blanket could have belonged to a skeleton. Harry sat down on the empty bed, beside Ron and Hermione. The rising sun was not visible here. The room faced the cliff-top garden and the freshly dug grave.
“Mr. Ollivander, I’m sorry to disturb you,” Harry said.
“My dear boy,” Ollivander’s voice was feeble. “You rescued us, I thought we would die in that place, I can never thank you . . . never thank you . . . enough.”
“We were glad to do it.”
Harry’s scar throbbed. He knew, he was certain, that there was hardly any time left in which to beat Voldemort to his goal, or else to attempt to thwart him. He felt a flutter of panic . . . yet he had made his decision when he chose to speak to Griphook first. Feigning a calm he did not feel, he groped in the pouch around his neck and took out the two halves of his broken wand.
“Mr. Ollivander, I need some help.”
“Anything. Anything.” Said the wandmaker weakly.
“Can you mend this? Is it possible?”
Ollivander held out a trembling hand, and Harry placed the two barely connected halves in his palm.
“Holly and phoenix feather,” said Ollivander in a tremulous voice. “Eleven inches. Nice and supple.”
“Yes,” said Harry. “Can you -- ?”
“No,” whispered Ollivander. “I am sorry, very sorry, but a wand that has suffered this degree of damage cannot be repaired by any means that I know of.”
Harry had been braced to hear it, but it was a blow nevertheless. He took the wand halves back and replaced them in the pouch around his neck. Ollivander stared at the place where the shattered wand had vanished, and did not look away until Harry had taken from his pocket the two wands he had brought from the Malfoys’.
“Can you identify these?” Harry asked.
The wandmaker took the first of the wands and held it close to his faded eyes, rolling it between his knobble-knuckled fingers, flexing it slightly.
“Walnut and dragon heartstring,” he said. “Twelve-and-three-quarter inches. Unyielding. This wand belonged to Bellatrix Lestrange.”
“And this one?”
Ollivander performed the same examination.
“Hawthorn and unicorn hair. Ten inches precisely. Reasonably springy. This was the wand of Draco Malfoy.”
“Was?” repeated Harry. “Isn’t it still his?”
“Perhaps not. If you took it –”
“—I did – ”
“—then it may be yours. Of course, the manner of taking matters. Much also depends upon the wand itself. In general, however, where a wand has been won, its allegiance will change.”
There was a silence in the room, except for the distant rushing of the sea.
“You talk about wands like they’ve got feelings,” said Harry, “like they can think for themselves.”
“The wand chooses the wizard,” said Ollivander. “That much has always been clear to those of us who have studied wandlore.”
 
“A person can still use a wand that hasn’t chosen them, though?” asked Harry.
“Oh yes, if you are any wizard at all you will be able to channel your magic through almost any instrument. The best results, however, must always come where there is the strongest affinity between wizard and wand. These connections are complex. An initial attraction, and then a mutual quest for experience, the wand learning from the wizard, the wizard from the wand.”
The sea gushed forward and backward; it was a mournful sound.
“I took this wand from Draco Malfoy by force,” said Harry. “Can I use it safely?”
“I think so. Subtle laws govern wand ownership, but the conquered wand will usually bend its will to its new master.”
“So I should use this one?” said Ron, pulling Wormtail’s wand out of his pocket and handing it to Ollivander.
“Chestnut and dragon heartstring. Nine-and-a-quarter inches. Brittle. I was forced to make this shortly after my kidnapping, for Peter Pettigrew. Yes, if you won it, it is more likely to do your bidding, and do it well, than another wand.”
“And this holds true for all wands, does it?” asked Harry.
“I think so,” replied Ollivander, his protuberant eyes upon Harry’s face. “You ask deep questions, Mr. Potter. Wandlore is a complex and mysterious branch of magic.”
“So, it isn’t necessary to kill the previous owner to take the possession of a wand?” asked Harry.
Ollivander swallowed.
“Necessary? No, I should not say that it is necessary to kill.”
“There are legends, though,” said Harry, and as his heart rate quickened, the pain in his scar became more intense; he was sure that Voldemort has decided to put his idea into action. “Legends about a wand – or wands – that have been passed from hand to hand by murder.”
Ollivander turned pale. Against the snowy pillow he was light gray, and his eyes were enormous, bloodshot, and bulging with what looked like fear.
“Only one wand, I think,” he whispered.
“And You-Know-Who is interested in it, isn’t he?” asked Harry.
“I – how?” croaked Ollivander, and he looked appealingly at Ron and Hermione for help. “How do you know this?”
“He wanted you to tell him how to overcome the connection between our wands,” said Harry.
Ollivander looked terrified.
“He tortured me, you must understand that! The Cruciatus Curse, I – I had no choice but to tell him what I knew, what I guessed!”
“I understand,” said Harry. “You told him about the twin cores? You said he just had to borrow another wizard’s wand?”
Ollivander looked horrified, transfixed, by the amount that Harry knew. He nodded slowly.
“But it didn’t work,” Harry went on. “Mine still beat the borrowed wand. Do you know why that is?”
Ollivander shook his head slowly as he had just nodded.
 
“I had . . . never heard of such a thing. Your wand performed something unique that night. The connection of the twin cores is incredibly rare, yet why your wand would have snapped the borrowed wand, I do not know. . . .
“We were talking about the other wand, the wand that changes hands by murder. When You-Know-Who realized my wand had done something strange, he came back and asked about that other wand, didn’t he?”
“How do you know this?”
Harry did not answer.
“Yes, he asked,” whispered Ollivander. “He wanted to know everything I could tell him about the wand variously known as the Deathstick, the Wand of Destiny, or the Elder Wand.”
Harry glanced sideways at Hermione. She looked flaggergasted.
“The Dark Lord,” said Ollivander in hushed and frightened tones, “had always been happy with the wand I made him – yes and phoenix feather, thirteen-and-a-half inches. – until he discovered the connection of the twin cores. Now he seeks another, more powerful wand, as the only way to conquer yours.”
“But he’ll know soon, if he doesn’t already, that mine’s broken beyond repair,” said Harry quietly.
“No!” said Hermione, sounding frightened. “He can’t know that, Harry, how could he --?”
“Priori Incantatem,” said Harry. “We left your wand and the blackthorn wand at the Malfoys’, Hermione. If they examine them properly, make them re-create the spells they’ve cast lately, they’d see that yours broke mine, they’ll see that you tried and failed to mend it, and they’ll realize that I’ve been using the blackthorn one ever since.”
The little color she had regained since their arrival had drained from her face. Ron gave Harry a reproachful look, and said, “Let’s not worry about that now ---”
But Mr. Ollivander intervened.
“The Dark Lord no longer seeks the Elder Wand only for your destruction, Mr. Potter. He is determined to possess it because he believes it will make him truly invulnerable.”
“And will it?”
“The owner of the Elder Wand must always fear attack,” said Ollivander, “but the idea of the Dark Lord in possession of the Deathstick is, I must admit . . . formidable.”
Harry was suddenly reminded of how unsure, when they first met, of how much he like Ollivander. Even now, having been tortured and imprisoned by Voldemort, the idea of the Dark Wizard in possession of this wand seemed to enthrall him as much as it repulsed him.
“You – you really think this wand exists, then, Mr. Ollivander?” asked Hermione.
“Oh yes,” said Ollivander. “Yes, it is perfectly possible to trace the wand’s course through history. There are gaps, of, course, and long ones, where it vanishes from view, temporarily lost or hidden; but always it resurfaces. It has certain identifying characteristics that those who are learned in wandlore recognize. There are written accounts, some of them obscure, that I and other wandmakers have made it our business to study. They have the ring of authenticity.”
“So you – you don’t think it can be a fairy tale or a myth?” Hermione asked hopefully.
 
“No,” said Ollivander. “Whether it needs to pass by murder, I do not know. Its history is bloody, but that may be simply due to the fact that it is such a desirable object, and arouses such passions in wizards. Immensely powerful, dangerous in the wrong hands, and an object of incredible fascination to all of us who study the power of wands.”
“Mr. Ollivander,” said Harry, “you told You-Know-Who that Gregorovitch had the Elder Wand, didn’t you?”
Ollivander turned, if possible, even paler. He looked ghostly as he gulped.
“But how – how do you -- ?”
“Never mind how I know it,” said Harry, closing his eyes momentarily as his scar burned and he saw, for mere seconds, a vision of the main street in Hogsmeade, still dark, because it was so much farther north. “You told You-Know-Who that Gregorovitch had the wand?”
“It was a rumor,” whispered Ollivander. “A rumor, years and years ago, long before you were born I believe Gregorovitch himself started it. You can see how good it would be for business; that he was studying and duplicating the qualities of the Elder Wand!”
“Yes, I can see that,” said Harry. He stood up. “Mr. Ollivander, one last thing, and then we’ll let you get some rest. What do you know about the Deathly Hallows?”
“The – the what?” asked the wandmaker, looking utterly bewildered.
“The Deathly Hallows.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about. Is this still something to do with wands?”
Harry looked into the sunken face and believed that Ollivander was not acting. He did not know about the Hallows.
“Thank you,” said Harry. “Thank you very much. We’ll leave you to get some rest now.”
Ollivander looked stricken.
“He was torturing me!” he gasped. “The Cruciatus Curse . . . you have no idea. . . .”
“I do,” said Harry, “I really do. Please get some rest. Thank you for telling me all of this.”
He led Ron and Hermione down the staircase. Harry caught glimpses of Bill, Fleur, Luna, and Dean sitting at the table in the kitchen, cups of tea in front of them. They all looked up at Harry as he appeared in the doorway, but he merely nodded to them and continued into the garden, Ron and Hermione behind him. The reddish mound of earth that covered Dobby lay ahead, and Harry walked back to it, as the pain in his head built more and more powerfully. It was a huge effort now to close down the visions that were forcing themselves upon him, but he knew that he would have to resist only a little longer. He would yield very soon, because he needed to know that his theory was right. He must make only one more short effort, so that he could explain to Ron and Hermione.
“Gregorovitch had the Elder Wand a long time ago,” he said, “I saw You-Know-Who trying to find him. When he tracked him down, he found that Gregorovitch didn’t have it anymore: It was stolen from him by Grindelwald. How Grindelwald found out that Gregorovitch had it, I don’t know – but if Gregorovitch was stupid enough to spread the rumor, it can’t have been that difficult.”
 
Voldemort was at the gates of Hogwarts; Harry could see him standing there, and see too the lamp bobbing in the pre-dawn, coming closer and closer.
“And Grindelwald used the Elder Wand to become powerful. And at the height of his power, when Dumbledore knew he was the only one who could stop him, he dueled Grindelwald and beat him, and he took the Elder Wand.”
“Dumbledore had the Elder Wand?” said Ron. “But then – where is it now?”
“At Hogwarts,” said Harry, fighting to remain with them in the cliff-top garden.
“But then, let’s go!” said Ron urgently. “Harry, let’s go and get it before he does!”
“It’s too late for that,” said Harry. He could not help himself, but clutched his head, trying to help it resist. “He knows where it is. He’s there now.”
“Harry!” Ron said furiously. “How long have you known this – why have we been wasting time? Why did you talk to Griphook first? We could have gone – we could still go –”
“No,” said Harry, and he sank to his knees in the grass. “Hermione’s right. Dumbledore didn’t want me to have it. He didn’t want me to take it. He wanted me to get the Horcruxes.”
“The unbeatable wand, Harry!” moaned Ron.
“I’m not supposed to . . . I’m supposed to get the Horcruxes. . . .”
And now everything was cool and dark: The sun was barely visible over the horizon as he glided alongside Snape, up through the grounds toward the lake.
“I shall join you in the castle shortly,” he said in his high, cold voice. “Leave me now.”
Snape bowed and set off back up the path, his black cloak billowing behind him. Harry walked slowly, waiting for Snape’s figure to disappear. It would not do for Snape, or indeed anyone else, to see where he was going. But there were no lights in the castle windows, and he could conceal himself . . . and in a second he had cast upon himself a Disillusionment Charm that hid him even from his own eyes.
And he walked on, around the edge of the lake, taking in the outlines of the beloved castle, his first kingdom, his birthright. . . .
And here it was, beside the lake, reflected in the dark waters. The white marble tomb, an unnecessary blot on the familiar landscape. He felt again that rush of controlled euphoria, that heady sense of purpose in destruction. He raised the old yew wand: How fitting that this would be its last great act.
The tomb split open from head to foot. The shrouded figure was as long as thin as it had been in life. He raised the wand again.
The wrappings fell open. The face was translucent, pale, sunken, yet almost perfectly preserved. They had left his spectacles on the crooked nose: He felt amused derision. Dumbledore’s hands were folded upon his chest, and there it lay, clutched beneath them, buried with him.
Had the old fool imagined that marble or death would protect the wand? Had he thought that the Dark Lord would be scared to violate his tomb? The spiderlike hand swooped and pulled the wand from Dumbledore’s grasp, and as he took it, a shower of sparks flew from its tip, sparkling over the corpse of its last owner, ready to serve a new master at last.
 
Chapter Twenty-Five Shell Cottage
Bill and Fleur's cottage stood alone on a cliff overlooking the sea, its walls embedded with shells and whitewashed. It was a lonely and beautiful place. Wherever Harry went inside the tiny cottage or its garden, he could hear the constant ebb and flow of the sea, like the breathing of some great, slumbering creature. He spent much of the next few days making excuses to escape the crowded cottage, craving the cliff-top view of open sky and wide, empty sea, and the feel of cold, salty wind on his face. The enormity of his decision not to race Voldemort to the wand still scared Harry. He could not remember, ever before, choosing /not/ to act. He was full of doubts, doubts that Ron could not help voicing whenever they were together.
"What if Dumbledore wanted us to work out the symbol in time to get the wand?" "What if working out what the symbol meant made you 'worthy' to get the Hallows?" "Harry, if that really is the Elder Wand, how the hell are we supposed to finish off You-Know-Who?"
Harry had no answers: There were moments when he wondered whether it had been outright madness not to try to prevent Voldemort breaking open the tomb. He could not even explain satisfactorily why he had decided against it: Every time he tried to reconstruct the internal arguments that had led to his decision, they sounded feebler to him.
The odd thing was that Hermione's support made him feel just as confused as Ron's doubts. Now forced to accept that the Elder Wand was real, she maintained that it was an evil object, and that the way Voldemort had taken possession of it was repellent, not to be considered.
"You could never have done that, Harry," she said again and again. "You couldn't have broken into Dumbledore's grave."
But the idea of Dumbledore's corpse frightened Harry much less than the possibility that he might have misunderstood the living Dumbledore's intentions. He felt that he was still groping in the dark; he had chosen his path but kept looking back, wondering whether he had misread the signs, whether he should not have taken the other way. From time to time, anger at Dumbledore crashed over him again, powerful as the waves slamming themselves against the cliff beneath the cottage, anger that Dumbledore had not explained before he died.
"But /is/ he dead?" said Ron, three days after they had arrived at the cottage. Harry had been staring out over the wall that separated the cottage garden from the cliff when Ron and Hermione had found him; he wished they had not, having no wish to join in with their argument.
"Yes, he is. Ron, /please" don't start that again!"
"Look at the facts, Hermione," said Ron, speaking across Harry, who continued to gaze at the horizon. "The solve doe. The sword. The eye Harry saw in the mirror --"
 
"Harry admits he could have imagined the eye! Don't you, Harry?"
"I could have," said Harry without looking at her.
"But you don't thing you did, do you?" asked Ron.
"No, I don't," said Harry.
"There you go!" said Ron quickly, before Hermione could carry on. "If it wasn't
Dumbledore, explain how Dobby knew we were in the cellar, Hermione?"
"I can't -- but can you explain how Dumbledore sent him to us if he's lying in a tomb at
Hogwarts?"
"I dunno, it could've been his ghost!"
"Dumbledore wouldn't come back as a ghost," said Harry. There was little about
Dumbledore he was sure of now, but he knew that much. "He would have gone on."
"What d'you mean, 'gone on'?" asked Ron, but before Harry could say any more, a voice
behind them said, "'Arry?"
Fleur had come out of the cottage, her long silver hair flying in the breeze.
"'Arry, Grip'ook would like to speak to you. 'E eez in ze smallest bedroom, 'e says 'e does
not want to be over'eard."
Her dislike of the goblin sending her to deliver messages was clear; she looked irritable
as she walked back around the house.
Griphook was waiting for them, as Fleur had said, in the tiniest of the cottage's three
bedrooms, in which Hermione and Luna slept by night. He had drawn the red cotton
curtains against the bright, cloudy sky, which gave the room a fiery glow at odds with the
rest of the airy, light cottage.
"I have reached my decision, Harry Potter," said the goblin, who was sitting cross-legged
in a low chair, drumming its arms with his spindly fingers. "Though the goblins of
Gringotts will consider it base treachery, I have decided to help you --"
"That's great!" said Harry, relief surging through him. "Griphook, thank you, we're really
--"
"-- in return," said the goblin firmly, "for payment."
Slightly taken aback, Harry hesitated.
"How much do you want? I've got gold."
"Not gold," said Griphook. "I have gold."
His black eyes glittered; there were no whites to his eyes.
"I want the sword. The sword of Godric Gryffindor."
Harry's spirits plummeted.
"You can't have that," he said. "I'm sorry."
"Then," said the goblin softly, "we have a problem."
"We can give you something else," said Ron eagerly. "I'll bet the Lestranges have got
loads of stuff, you can take your pick once we get into the vault."
He had said the wrong thing. Griphook flushed angrily.
"I am not a thief, boy! I am not trying to procure treasures to which I have no right!"
"The sword's ours --"
"it is not," said the goblin.
"We're Gryffindors, and it was Godric Gryffindor's --"
"And before it was Gryffindor's, whose was it?" demanded the goblin, sitting up straight.
"No one's," said Ron. "It was made for him, wasn't it?"
 
"No!" cried the goblin, bristling with anger as he pointed a long finger at Ron. "Wizarding arrogance again! That sword was Ragnuk the First's, taken from him by
Godric Gryffindor! It is a 	 	 , a masterpiece of goblinwork! It belongs
with the gobl___. The sword is the price of my hire, take it or leave it!"
Griphook glared at them. Harry glanced at the other ____, then said, "We need to discuss
this, Griphook, if that's all right. Could you give us a few minutes?"
The goblin nodded, looking sour.
Downstairs in the empty sitting room, Harry walked to the fireplace, brow furrowed,
trying to think what to do. Behind him, Ron said, "He's having a laugh. We can't let him
have that sword."
"It is true?" Harry asked Hermione. "Was the sword stolen by Gryffindor?"
"I don't know," she said hopelessly. "Wizarding history often skates over what the
wizards have done to other magical races, but there's no account that I know of that says
Gryffindor stole the sword."
"It'll be one of those goblin stories," said Ron, "about how the wizards are always trying
to get one over on them. I suppose we should think ourselves lucky he hasn't asked for
one of our wands."
"Goblins have got good reason to dislike wizards, Ron." said Hermione. "They've been
treated brutally in the past."
"Goblins aren't exactly fluffy little bunnies, though, are they?" said Ron. "They've killed
plenty of us. They've fought dirty too."
"But arguing with Griphook about whose race is most underhanded and violent isn't
going to make him more likely to help us, is it?"
There was a pause while they tried to think of a way around the problem. Harry looked
out of the window at Dobby's grave. Luna was arranging sea lavender in a jam jar beside
the headstone.
"Okay," said Ron, and Harry turned back to face him, "how's this? We tell Griphook we
need the sword until we get inside the 	 and then he can have it. There's a fake in
these, isn't there? We switch them, and give him the fake."
"Ron, he'd know the difference better than we would!" said Hermione. "He's the only one
who realized there had been a swap!"
"Yeah, but we could _ca_per before he realizes --"
He quailed beneath the look Hermione was giving him.
"That," she said quietly, "is despicable. Ask for his help, then double-cross him? And you
wonder why goblins don't like wizards, Ron?"
Ron's ears had turned red.
"All right, all right! It was the only thing I could think of! What's your solution, then?"
"We need to offer him something else, something just as valuable."
"Brilliant, I'll go and get one of our ancient goblin-made swords and you can gift wrap
it."
Silence fell between them again. Harry was sure that the goblin would accept nothing but
the sword, even if they had something as valuable to offer him. Yet the sword was their
one, indispensable weapon against the Horcruxes.
He closed his eyes for a moment or two and listened to the rush of the sea. The idea that
Gryffindor might have stolen the sword was unpleasant to him: He had always been
 
proud to be a Gryffindor; Gryffindor had been the champion of Muggle-borns, the wizard
who had clashed with the pureblood-loving Slytherin....
"Maybe he's lying," Harry said, opening his eyes again. "Griphook. Maybe Gryffindor
didn't take the sword. How do we know the goblin version of history's right?"
"Does it make a difference?" asked Hermione.
"Changes how I feel about it," said Harry.
He took a deep breath.
"We'll tell him he can have the sword after he's helped us get into that vault -- but we'll be
careful to avoid telling him exactly /when/ he can have it."
A grin spread slowly across Ron's face. Hermione, however, looked alarmed.
"Harry, we can't --"
"He can have it," Harry went on, "after we've used it on all of the Horcruxes. I'll make
sure he gets it then. I'll keep my word."
"But that could be years!" said Hermione.
"I know that, but /he/ needn't. I won't be lying... really."
Harry met her eyes with a mixture of defiance and shame. He remembered the words that
had been engraved over the gateway to Nurmengard: FOR THE GREATER GOOD. He
pushed the idea away. What choice did they have?
"I don't like it," said Hermione.
"Nor do I, much," Harry admitted.
"Well, I think it's genius," said Ron, standing up again. "Let's go and tell him."
Back in the smallest bedroom, Harry made the offer, careful to phrase it so as not to give
any definite time for the handover of the sword. Hermione frowned at the floor while he
was speaking; he felt irritated at her, afraid that she might give the game away. However,
Griphook had eyes for nobody but Harry.
"I have your word, Harry Potter, that you will give me the sword of Gryffindor if I help
you?"
"Yes," said Harry.
"Then shake," said the goblin, holding out his hand.
Harry took it and shook. He wondered whether those black eyes saw any misgivings in
his own. Then Griphook relinquished him, clapped his hands together, and said, "So. We
begin!"
It was like planning to break into the Ministry all over again. They settled to work in the
smallest bedroom, which was kept, according to Griphook's preference, in semidarkness.
"I have visited the Lestranges' vault only once," Griphook told them, "on the occasion I
was told to place inside it the false sword. It is one of the most ancient chambers. The
oldest Wizarding families store their treasures at the deepest level, where the vaults are
largest and best protected...."
They remained shut in the cupboardlike room for hours at a time. Slowly the days
stretched into weeks. There was problem after problem to overcome, not least of which
was that their store of Polyjuice Potion was greatly depleted.
"There's really only enough left for one of us," said Hermione, tilting the thick mudlike
potion against the lamplight.
"That'll be enough," said Harry, who was examining Griphook's hand-drawn map of the
deepest passageways.
 
The other inhabitants of Shell Cottage could hardly fail to notice that something was
going on now that Harry, Ron and Hermione only emerged for mealtimes. Nobody asked
questions, although Harry often felt Bill's eyes on the three of them at the table,
thoughtful, concerned.
The longer they spent together, the more Harry realized that he did not much like the
goblin. Griphook was unexpectedly bloodthirsty, laughed at the idea of pain in lesser
creatures and seemed to relish the possibility that they might have to hurt other wizards to
reach the Lestranges' vault. Harry could tell that his distaste was shared by the other two,
but they did not discuss it. They needed Griphook.
The goblin ate only grudgingly with the rest of them. Even after his legs had mended, he
continued to request trays of food in his room, like the still-frail Ollivander, until Bill
(following an angry outburst from Fleur) went upstairs to tell him that the arrangement
could not continue. Thereafter Griphook joined them at the overcrowded table, although
he refused to eat the same food, insisting, instead, on lumps of raw meat, roots, and
various fungi.
Harry felt responsible: It was, after all, he who had insisted that the goblin remain at Shell
Cottage so that he could question him; his fault that the whole Weasley family had been
driven into hiding, that Bill, Fred, George, and Mr. Weasley could no longer work.
"I'm sorry," he told Fleur, one blustery April evening as he helped her prepare dinner. "I
never meant you to have to deal with all of this."
She had just set some knives to work, chipping up steaks for Griphook and Bill, who had
preferred his meat bloody ever since he had been attacked by Greyback. While the knives
sliced behind her, her somewhat irritable expression softened.
"'Arry, you saved my sister's life, I do not forget."
This was not, strictly speaking, true, but Harry decided against reminding her that
Gabrielle had never been in real danger.
"Anyway," Fleur went on, pointing her want at a pot of sauce on the stove, which began
to bubble at once, "Mr. Ollivander leaves for Muriel's zis evening. Zat will make zings
easier. Ze goblin," she scowled a little at the mention of him, "can move downstairs, and
you, Ron, and Dean can take zat room."
"We don't mind sleeping in the living room," said Harry, who knew that Griphook would
thing poorly of having to sleep on the sofa; keeping Griphook happy was essential to
their plans. "Don't worry about us." And when she tried to protest he went on, "We'll be
off your hands soon too, Ron, Hermione, and I. We won't need to be here much longer."
"But, what do you mean?" she said, frowning at him, her wand pointing at the casserole
dish now suspended in midair. "Of course you must not leave, you are safe 'ere!"
She looked rather like Mrs. Weasley as she said it, and he was glad that the back door
opened at that moment. Luna and Dean entered, their hair damp from the rain outside and
their arms full of driftwood.
"... and tiny little ears," Luna was saying, "a bit like hippo's, Daddy says, only purple and
hairy. And if you want to call them, you have to hum; they prefer a waltz, nothing too
fast...."
Looking uncomfortable, Dean shrugged at Harry as he passed, following Luna into the
combined dining and sitting room where Ron and Hermione were laying the dinner table.
Seizing the chance to escape Fleur's questions, Harry grabbed two jugs of pumpkin juice
and followed them.
 
"... and if you ever come to our house I'll be able to show you the horn, Daddy wrote to
me about it but I haven't seen it yet, because the Death Eaters took me from the Hogwarts
Express and I never got home for Christmas," Luna was saying, as she and Dean relit the
fire.
"Luna, we told you," Hermione called over to her. "That horn exploded. It came from an
Erumpent, not a Crumple-Horned Snorkack --"
"No, it was definitely a Snorkack horn," said Luna serenely, "Daddy told me. It will
probably have re-formed by now, they mend themselves, you know."
Hermione shook her head and continued laying down forks as Bill appeared, leading Mr.
Ollivander down the stairs. The wandmaker still looked exceptionally frail, and he clung
to Bill's arm as the latter supported him, carrying a large suitcase.
"I'm going to miss you, Mr. Ollivander," said Luna, approaching the old man.
"And I you, my dear," said Ollivander, patting her on the shoulder.
"You were an inexpressible comfort to me in that terrible place."
"So, au revoir, Mr. Ollivander," said Fleur, kissing him on both cheeks. "And I wonder
whezzer you could oblige me by delivering a package to Bill's Auntie Murie!? I never
returned 'er tiara."
"It will be an honor," said Ollivander with a little bow, "the very least I can do in return
for your generous hospitality."
Fleur drew out a worn velvet case, which she opened to show the wandmaker. The tiara
sat glittering and twinkling in the light from the low-hanging lamp.
"Moonstones and diamonds," said Griphook, who had sidled into the room without Harry
noticing. "Made by goblins, I think?"
"And paid for by wizards," said Bill quietly, and the goblin shot him a look that was both
furtive and challenging.
A strong wind gusted against the cottage windows as Bill and Ollivander set off into the
night. The rest of them squeezed in around the table; elbow to elbow and with barely
enough room to move, they started to eat. The fire crackled and popped in the grate
beside them. Fleur, Harry noticed, was merely playing with her food; she glanced at the
window every few minutes; however, Bill returned before they had finished their first
course, his long hair tangled by the wind.
"Everything's fine," he told Fleur. "Ollivander settled in, Mum and Dad say hello. Ginny
sends you all her love, Fred and George are driving Muriel up the wall, they're still
operating an Owl-Order business out of her back room. It cheered her up to have her tiara
back, though. She said she thought we'd stolen it."
"Ah, she eez charmant, your aunt," said Fleur crossly, waving her wand and causing the
dirty plates to rise and form a stack in midair. She caught them and marched out of the
room.
"Daddy's made a tiara," piped up Luna, "Well, more of a crown, really."
Ron caught Harry's eye and grinned; Harry knew that he was remembering the ludicrous
headdress they had seen on their visit to Xenophilius.
"Yes, he's trying to re-create the lost diadem of Ravenclaw. He thinks he's identified most
of the main elements now. Adding the billywig wings really made a difference --"
There was a bang on the front door. Everyone's head turned toward it. Fleur came
running out of the kitchen, looking frightened; Bill jumped to his feed, his wand pointing
 
at the door; Harry, Ron, and Hermione did the same. Silently Griphook slipped beneath
the table, out of sight.
"Who is it?" Bill called.
"It is I, Remus John Lupin!" called a voice over the howling wind. Harry experienced a
thrill of fear; what had happened? "I am a werewolf, married to Nymphadora Tonks, and
you, the Secret-Keeper of Shell Cottage, told me the address and bade me come in an
emergency!"
"Lupin," muttered Bill, and he ran to the door and wrenched it open.
Lupin fell over the threshold. He was white-faced, wrapped in a traveling cloak, his
graying hair windswept. He straightened up, looked around the room, making sure of
who was there, then cried aloud, "It's a boy! We've named him Ted, after Dora's father!"
Hermione shrieked.
"Wha --? Tonks -- Tonks has had the baby?"
"Yes, yes, she's had the baby!" shouted Lupin. All around the table came cries of delight,
sighs of relief: Hermione and Fleur both squealed, "Congratulations!" and Ron said,
"Blimey, a baby!" as if he had never heard of such a thing before.
"Yes -- yes -- a boy," said Lupin again, who seemed dazed by his own happiness. He
strode around the table and hugged Harry; the scene in the basement of Grimmauld Place
might never have happened.
"You'll be godfather?" he said as he released Harry.
"M-me?" stammered Harry.
"You, yes, of course -- Dora quite agrees, no one better --"
"I -- yeah -- blimey --"
Harry felt overwhelmed, astonished, delighted; now Bill was hurrying to fetch wine, and
Fleur was persuading Lupin to join them for a drink.
"I can't stay long, I must get back," said Lupin, beaming around at them all: He looked
years younger than Harry had ever seen him. "Thank you, thank you, Bill"
Bill had soon filled all of their goblets, they stood and raised them high in a toast.
"To Teddy Remus Lupin," said Lupin, "a great wizard in the making!"
"'Oo does 'e look like?" Fleur inquired.
"I think he looks like Dora, but she thinks he is like me. Not much hair. It looked black
when he was born, but I swear it's turned ginger in the hour since. Probably blond by the
time I get back. Andromeda says Tonks's hair started changing color the day that she was
born." He drained his goblet. "Oh, go on then, just one more," he added, beaming, as Bill
made to fill it again.
The wind buffeted the little cottage and the fire leapt and crackled, and Bill was soon
opening another bottle of wine. Lupin's news seemed to have taken them out of
themselves, removed them for a while from their state of siege: Tidings of new life were
exhilarating. Only the goblin seemed untouched by the suddenly festive atmosphere, and
after a while he slunk back to the bedroom he now occupied alone. Harry thought he was
the only one who had noticed this, until he saw Bill's eyes following the goblin up the
stairs.
"No... no... I really must get back," said Lupin at last, declining yet another goblet of
wine. He got to his feet and pulled his traveling cloak back around himself.
"Good-bye, good-bye -- I'll try and bring some pictures in a few day's time -- they'll all be
so glad to know that I've seen you --"
 
He fastened his cloak and made his farewells, hugging the women and grasping hands
with the men, then, still beaming, returned into the wild night.
"Godfather, Harry!" said Bill as they walked into the kitchen together, helping clear the
table. "A real honor! Congratulations!"
As Harry set down the empty goblets he was carrying, Bill pulled the door behind him
closed, shutting out the still-voluble voices of the others, who were continuing to
celebrate even in Lupin's absence.
"I wanted a private word, actually, Harry. It hasn't been easy to get an opportunity with
the cottage this full of people."
Bill hesitated.
"Harry, you're planning something with Griphook."
It was a statement, not a question, and Harry did not bother to deny it. He merely looked
at Bill, waiting.
"I know goblins," said Bill. "I've worked for Gringotts ever since I left Hogwarts. As far
as there can be friendship between wizards and goblins, I have goblin friends -- or, at
least, goblins I know well, and like." Again, Bill hesitated.
"Harry, what do you want from Griphook, and what have you promised him in return?"
"I can't tell you that," said Harry. "Sorry, Bill."
The kitchen door opened behind them; Fleur was trying to bring through more empty
goblets.
"Wait," Bill told her, "Just a moment."
She backed out and he closed the door again.
"Then I have to say this," Bill went on. "If you have struck any kind of bargain with
Griphook, and most particularly if that bargain involves treasure, you must be
exceptionally careful. Goblin notions of ownership, payment, and repayment are not the
same as human ones."
Harry felt a slight squirm of discomfort, as though a small snake had stirred inside him.
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"We are talking about a different breed of being," said Bill. "Dealings between wizards
and goblins have been fraught for centuries -- but you'll know all that from History of
Magic. There has been fault on both sides, I would never claim that wizards have been
innocent. However, there is a belief among some goblins, and those at Gringotts are
perhaps most prone to it, that wizards cannot be trusted in matters of gold and treasure,
that they have no respect for goblin ownership."
"I respect --" Harry began, but Bill shook his head.
"You don't understand, Harry, nobody could understand unless they have lived with
goblins. To a goblin, the rightful and true master of any object is the maker, not the
purchaser. All goblin made objects are, in goblin eyes, rightfully theirs."
"But it was bought --"
"-- then they would consider it rented by the one who had paid the money. They have,
however, great difficulty with the idea of goblin-made objects passing from wizard to
wizard. You saw Griphook's face when the tiara passed under his eyes. He disapproves. I
believe he thinks, as do the fiercest of his kind, that it ought to have been returned to the
goblins once the original purchaser died. They consider our habit of keeping goblin-made
objects, passing them from wizard to wizard without further payment, little more than
theft."
 
Harry had an ominous feeling now; he wondered whether Bill guessed more than he was
letting on.
"All I am saying," said Bill, setting his hand on the door back into the sitting room, "is to
be very careful what you promise goblins, Harry. It would be less dangerous to break into
Gringotts than to renege on a promise to a goblin."
"Right," said Harry as Bill opened the door, "yeah. Thanks. I'll bear that in mind."
As he followed Bill back to the others a wry thought came to him, born no doubt of the
wine he had drunk. He seemed set on 	 to become just as reckless a godfather to
Teddy Lupin as Sirius Black had been to him.