The Deathly Hallows Read online

  ‘Nothing – nothing, my Lord!’

  ‘Such lies, Lucius …’

  The soft voice seemed to hiss on even after the cruel mouth had stopped moving. One or two of the wizards barely repressed a shudder as the hissing grew louder; something heavy could be heard sliding across the floor beneath the table.

  The huge snake emerged to climb slowly up Voldemort’s chair. It rose, seemingly endlessly, and came to rest across Voldemort’s shoulders: its neck the thickness of a man’s thigh; its eyes, with their vertical slits for pupils, unblinking. Voldemort stroked the creature absently with long, thin fingers, still looking at Lucius Malfoy.

  ‘Why do the Malfoys look so unhappy with their lot? Is my return, my rise to power, not the very thing they professed to desire for so many years?’

  ‘Of course, my Lord,’ said Lucius Malfoy. His hand shook as he wiped sweat from his upper lip. ‘We did desire it – we do.’

  To Malfoy’s left, his wife made an odd, stiff nod, her eyes averted from Voldemort and the snake. To his right, his son Draco, who had been gazing up at the inert body overhead, glanced quickly at Voldemort and away again, terrified to make eye contact.

  ‘My Lord,’ said a dark woman halfway down the table, her voice constricted with emotion, ‘it is an honour to have you here, in our family’s house. There can be no higher pleasure.’

  She sat beside her sister, as unlike her in looks, with her dark hair and heavily lidded eyes, as she was in bearing and demeanour; where Narcissa sat rigid and impassive, Bellatrix leaned towards Voldemort, for mere words could not demonstrate her longing for closeness.

  ‘No higher pleasure,’ repeated Voldemort, his head tilted a little to one side as he considered Bellatrix. ‘That means a great deal, Bellatrix, from you.’

  Her face flooded with colour; her eyes welled with tears of delight.

  ‘My Lord knows I speak nothing but the truth!’

  ‘No higher pleasure … even compared with the happy event that, I hear, has taken place in your family this week?’

  She stared at him, her lips parted, evidently confused.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean, my Lord.’

  ‘I’m talking about your niece, Bellatrix. And yours, Lucius and Narcissa. She has just married the werewolf, Remus Lupin. You must be so proud.’

  There was an eruption of jeering laughter from around the table. Many leaned forward to exchange gleeful looks; a few thumped the table with their fists. The great snake, disliking the disturbance, opened its mouth wide and hissed angrily, but the Death Eaters did not hear it, so jubilant were they at Bellatrix and the Malfoys’ humiliation. Bellatrix’s face, so recently flushed with happiness, had turned an ugly, blotchy red.

  ‘She is no niece of ours, my Lord,’ she cried over the outpouring of mirth. ‘We – Narcissa and I – have never set eyes on our sister since she married the Mudblood. This brat has nothing to do with either of us, nor any beast she marries.’

  ‘What say you, Draco?’ asked Voldemort, and though his voice was quiet, it carried clearly through the catcalls and jeers. ‘Will you babysit the cubs?’

  The hilarity mounted; Draco Malfoy looked in terror at his father, who was staring down into his own lap, then caught his mother’s eye. She shook her head almost imperceptibly, then resumed her own deadpan stare at the opposite wall.

  ‘Enough,’ said Voldemort, stroking the angry snake. ‘Enough.’

  And the laughter died at once.

  ‘Many of our oldest family trees become a little diseased over time,’ he said, as Bellatrix gazed at him, breathless and imploring. ‘You must prune yours, must you not, to keep it healthy? Cut away those parts that threaten the health of the rest.’

  ‘Yes, my Lord,’ whispered Bellatrix, and her eyes swam with tears of gratitude again. ‘At the first chance!’

  ‘You shall have it,’ said Voldemort. ‘And in your family, so in the world … we shall cut away the canker that infects us until only those of the true blood remain …’

  Voldemort raised Lucius Malfoy’s wand, pointed it directly at the slowly revolving figure suspended over the table and gave it a tiny flick. The figure came to life with a groan and began to struggle against invisible bonds.

  ‘Do you recognise our guest, Severus?’ asked Voldemort.

  Snape raised his eyes to the upside-down face. All of the Death Eaters were looking up at the captive now, as though they had been given permission to show curiosity. As she revolved to face the firelight, the woman said, in a cracked and terrified voice, ‘Severus! Help me!’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Snape, as the prisoner turned slowly away again.

  ‘And you, Draco?’ asked Voldemort, stroking the snake’s snout with his wand-free hand. Draco shook his head jerkily. Now that the woman had woken, he seemed unable to look at her any more.

  ‘But you would not have taken her classes,’ said Voldemort. ‘For those of you who do not know, we are joined here tonight by Charity Burbage who, until recently, taught at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.’

  There were small noises of comprehension around the table. A broad, hunched woman with pointed teeth cackled.

  ‘Yes … Professor Burbage taught the children of witches and wizards all about Muggles … how they are not so different from us …’

  One of the Death Eaters spat on the floor. Charity Burbage revolved to face Snape again.

  ‘Severus … please … please …’

  ‘Silence,’ said Voldemort, with another twitch of Malfoy’s wand, and Charity fell silent as if gagged. ‘Not content with corrupting and polluting the minds of wizarding children, last week Professor Burbage wrote an impassioned defence of Mudbloods in the Daily Prophet. Wizards, she says, must accept these thieves of their knowledge and magic. The dwindling of the pure-bloods is, says Professor Burbage, a most desirable circumstance … she would have us all mate with Muggles … or, no doubt, werewolves …’

  Nobody laughed this time: there was no mistaking the anger and contempt in Voldemort’s voice. For the third time, Charity Burbage revolved to face Snape. Tears were pouring from her eyes into her hair. Snape looked back at her, quite impassive, as she turned slowly away from him again.

  ‘Avada Kedavra.’

  The flash of green light illuminated every corner of the room. Charity fell, with a resounding crash, on to the table below, which trembled and creaked. Several of the Death Eaters leapt back in their chairs. Draco fell out of his on to the floor.

  ‘Dinner, Nagini,’ said Voldemort softly, and the great snake swayed and slithered from his shoulders on to the polished wood.

  — CHAPTER TWO —

  In Memoriam

  Harry was bleeding. Clutching his right hand in his left and swearing under his breath, he shouldered open his bedroom door. There was a crunch of breaking china: he had trodden on a cup of cold tea that had been sitting on the floor outside his bedroom door.

  ‘What the –?’

  He looked around; the landing of number four, Privet Drive, was deserted. Possibly the cup of tea was Dudley’s idea of a clever booby trap. Keeping his bleeding hand elevated, Harry scraped the fragments of cup together with the other hand and threw them into the already crammed bin just visible inside his bedroom door. Then he tramped across to the bathroom to run his finger under the tap.

  It was stupid, pointless, irritating beyond belief, that he still had four days left of being unable to perform magic … but he had to admit to himself that this jagged cut in his finger would have defeated him. He had never learned how to repair wounds and now he came to think of it – particularly in light of his immediate plans – this seemed a serious flaw in his magical education. Making a mental note to ask Hermione how it was done, he used a large wad of toilet paper to mop up as much of the tea as he could, before returning to his bedroom and slamming the door behind him.

  Harry had spent the morning completely emptying his school trunk for the first time since he had packed it six years ago. At
the start of the intervening school years, he had merely skimmed off the topmost three quarters of the contents and replaced or updated them, leaving a layer of general debris at the bottom – old quills, desiccated beetle eyes, single socks that no longer fitted. Minutes previously Harry had plunged his hand into this mulch, experienced a stabbing pain in the fourth finger of his right hand and withdrawn it to see a lot of blood.

  He now proceeded a little more cautiously. Kneeling down beside the trunk again, he groped around in the bottom and, after retrieving an old badge that flickered feebly between Support CEDRIC DIGGORY and POTTER STINKS, a cracked and worn-out Sneakoscope and a gold locket inside which a note signed ‘R.A.B.’ had been hidden, he finally discovered the sharp edge that had done the damage. He recognised it at once. It was a two-inch-long fragment of the enchanted mirror that his dead godfather, Sirius, had given him. Harry laid it aside and felt cautiously around the trunk for the rest, but nothing more remained of his godfather’s last gift except powdered glass, which clung to the deepest layer of debris like glittering grit.

  Harry sat up and examined the jagged piece on which he had cut himself, seeing nothing but his own bright green eye reflected back at him. Then he placed the fragment on top of that morning’s Daily Prophet, which lay unread on the bed, and attempted to stem the sudden upsurge of bitter memories, the stabs of regret and of longing the discovery of the broken mirror had occasioned, by attacking the rest of the rubbish in the trunk.

  It took another hour to empty it completely, throw away the useless items and sort the remainder in piles according to whether or not he would need them from now on. His school and Quidditch robes, cauldron, parchment, quills and most of his textbooks were piled in a corner, to be left behind. He wondered what his aunt and uncle would do with them; burn them in the dead of night, probably, as if they were the evidence of some dreadful crime. His Muggle clothing, Invisibility Cloak, potion-making kit, certain books, the photograph album Hagrid had once given him, a stack of letters and his wand had been repacked into an old rucksack. In a front pocket were the Marauder’s Map and the locket with the note signed ‘R.A.B.’ inside it. The locket was accorded this place of honour not because it was valuable – in all usual senses it was worthless – but because of what it had cost to attain it.

  This left a sizeable stack of newspapers sitting on his desk beside his snowy owl, Hedwig: one for each of the days Harry had spent at Privet Drive this summer.

  He got up off the floor, stretched and moved across to his desk. Hedwig made no movement as he began to flick through the newspapers, throwing them on to the rubbish pile one by one; the owl was asleep, or else faking; she was angry with Harry about the limited amount of time she was allowed out of her cage at the moment.

  As he neared the bottom of the pile of newspapers, Harry slowed down, searching for one particular edition which he knew had arrived shortly after he had returned to Privet Drive for the summer; he remembered that there had been a small mention on the front about the resignation of Charity Burbage, the Muggle Studies teacher at Hogwarts. At last he found it. Turning to page ten, he sank into his desk chair and reread the article he had been looking for.

  ALBUS DUMBLEDORE REMEMBERED by Elphias Doge

  I met Albus Dumbledore at the age of eleven, on our first day at Hogwarts. Our mutual attraction was undoubtedly due to the fact that we both felt ourselves to be outsiders. I had contracted dragon pox shortly before arriving at school, and while I was no longer contagious, my pockmarked visage and greenish hue did not encourage many to approach me. For his part, Albus had arrived at Hogwarts under the burden of unwanted notoriety. Scarcely a year previously, his father, Percival, had been convicted of a savage and well-publicised attack upon three young Muggles.

  Albus never attempted to deny that his father (who was to die in Azkaban) had committed this crime; on the contrary, when I plucked up courage to ask him, he assured me that he knew his father to be guilty. Beyond that, Dumbledore refused to speak of the sad business, though many attempted to make him do so. Some, indeed, were disposed to praise his father’s action and assumed that Albus, too, was a Muggle-hater. They could not have been more mistaken: as anybody who knew Albus would attest, he never revealed the remotest anti-Muggle tendency. Indeed, his determined support for Muggle rights gained him many enemies in subsequent years.

  In a matter of months, however, Albus’s own fame had begun to eclipse that of his father. By the end of his first year, he would never again be known as the son of a Muggle-hater, but as nothing more or less than the most brilliant student ever seen at the school. Those of us who were privileged to be his friends benefited from his example, not to mention his help and encouragement, with which he was always generous. He confessed to me in later life that he knew even then that his greatest pleasure lay in teaching.

  He not only won every prize of note that the school offered, he was soon in regular correspondence with the most notable magical names of the day, including Nicolas Flamel, the celebrated alchemist, Bathilda Bagshot, the noted historian, and Adalbert Waffling, the magical theoretician. Several of his papers found their way into learned publications such as Transfiguration Today, Challenges in Charming and The Practical Potioneer. Dumbledore’s future career seemed likely to be meteoric, and the only question that remained was when he would become Minister for Magic. Though it was often predicted in later years that he was on the point of taking the job, however, he never had Ministerial ambitions.

  Three years after we had started at Hogwarts Albus’s brother, Aberforth, arrived at school. They were not alike; Aberforth was never bookish and, unlike Albus, preferred to settle arguments by duelling rather than through reasoned discussion. However, it is quite wrong to suggest, as some have, that the brothers were not friends. They rubbed along as comfortably as two such different boys could do. In fairness to Aberforth, it must be admitted that living in Albus’s shadow cannot have been an altogether comfortable experience. Being continually outshone was an occupational hazard of being his friend and cannot have been any more pleasurable as a brother.

  When Albus and I left Hogwarts, we intended to take the then traditional tour of the world together, visiting and observing foreign wizards, before pursuing our separate careers. However, tragedy intervened. On the very eve of our trip, Albus’s mother, Kendra, died, leaving Albus the head, and sole breadwinner, of the family. I postponed my departure long enough to pay my respects at Kendra’s funeral, then left for what was now to be a solitary journey. With a younger brother and sister to care for, and little gold left to them, there could no longer be any question of Albus accompanying me.

  That was the period of our lives when we had least contact. I wrote to Albus, describing, perhaps insensitively, the wonders of my journey from narrow escapes from Chimaeras in Greece to the experiments of the Egyptian alchemists. His letters told me little of his day-to-day life, which I guessed to be frustratingly dull for such a brilliant wizard. Immersed in my own experiences, it was with horror that I heard, towards the end of my year’s travels, that yet another tragedy had struck the Dumbledores: the death of his sister, Ariana.

  Though Ariana had been in poor health for a long time, the blow, coming so soon after the loss of their mother, had a profound effect on both of her brothers. All those closest to Albus – and I count myself one of that lucky number – agree that Ariana’s death and Albus’s feeling of personal responsibility for it (though, of course, he was guiltless) left their mark upon him forever more.

  I returned home to find a young man who had experienced a much older person’s suffering. Albus was more reserved than before, and much less light-hearted. To add to his misery, the loss of Ariana had led, not to a renewed closeness between Albus and Aberforth, but to an estrangement. (In time this would lift – in later years they re-established, if not a close relationship, then certainly a cordial one.) However, he rarely spoke of his parents or of Ariana from then on, and his friends learned not to mention them.
r />   Other quills will describe the triumphs of the following years. Dumbledore’s innumerable contributions to the store of wizarding knowledge, including his discovery of the twelve uses of dragon’s blood, will benefit generations to come, as will the wisdom he displayed in the many judgements he made while Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot. They say, still, that no wizarding duel ever matched that between Dumbledore and Grindelwald in 1945. Those who witnessed it have written of the terror and the awe they felt as they watched these two extraordinary wizards do battle. Dumbledore’s triumph, and its consequences for the wizarding world, are considered a turning point in magical history to match the introduction of the International Statute of Secrecy or the downfall of He Who Must Not Be Named.

  Albus Dumbledore was never proud or vain; he could find something to value in anyone, however apparently insignificant or wretched, and I believe that his early losses endowed him with great humanity and sympathy. I shall miss his friendship more than I can say, but my loss is as nothing compared to the wizarding world’s. That he was the most inspiring and the best loved of all Hogwarts headmasters cannot be in question. He died as he lived: working always for the greater good and, to his last hour, as willing to stretch out a hand to a small boy with dragon pox as he was on the day that I met him.

  Harry finished reading but continued to gaze at the picture accompanying the obituary. Dumbledore was wearing his familiar, kindly smile, but as he peered over the top of his half-moon spectacles he gave the impression, even in newsprint, of X-raying Harry, whose sadness mingled with a sense of humiliation.

  He had thought he knew Dumbledore quite well, but ever since reading this obituary he had been forced to recognise that he had barely known him at all. Never once had he imagined Dumbledore’s childhood or youth; it was as though he had sprung into being as Harry had known him, venerable and silver-haired and old. The idea of a teenage Dumbledore was simply odd, like trying to imagine a stupid Hermione or a friendly Blast-Ended Skrewt.