Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows hp-7 Read online

  “And there was an argument… and I pulled my wand, and he pulled out his, and I had the Cruciatus Curse used on me by my brother’s best friend—and Albus was trying to stop him, and then all three of us were dueling, and the flashing lights and the bangs set her off, she couldn’t stand it—”

  The color was draining from Aberforth’s face as though he had suffered a mortal wound.

  “—and I think she wanted to help, but she didn’t really know what she was doing, and I don’t know which of us did it, it could have been any of us—and she was dead.”

  His voice broke on the last word and he dropped down into the nearest chair. Hermione’s face was wet with tears, and Ron was almost as pale as Aberforth. Harry felt nothing but revulsion: He wished he had not heard it, wished he could wash is mind clean of it.

  “I’m so… I’m so sorry,” Hermione whispered.

  “Gone,” croaked Aberforth. “Gone forever.”

  He wiped his nose on hiss cuff and cleared his throat.

  “’Course, Grindelwald scarpered. He had a bit of a track record already, back in his own country, and he didn’t want Ariana set to his account too. And Albus was free, wasn’t he? Free of the burden of his sister, free to become the greatest wizard of the—”

  “He was never free,” said Harry.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Aberforth.

  “Never,” said Harry. “The night that your brother died, he drank a potion that drove him out of his mind. He started screaming, pleading with someone who wasn’t there. ‘Don’t hurt them, please… hurt me instead.’”

  Ron and Hermione were staring at Harry. He had never gone into details about what had happened on the island on the lake: The events that had taken place after he and Dumbledore had returned to Hogwarts had eclipsed it so thoroughly.

  “He thought he was back there with you and Grindelwald, I know he did,” said Harry, remembering Dumbledore whispering, pleading.

  “He thought he was watching Grindelwald hurting you and Ariana… It was torture to him, if you’d seen him then, you wouldn’t say he was free.”

  Aberforth seemed lost in contemplation of his own knotted and veined hands. After a long pause he said. “How can you be sure, Potter, that my brother wasn’t more interested in the greater good than in you? How can you be sure you aren’t dispensable, just like my little sister?”

  A shard of ice seemed to pierce Harry’s heart.

  “I don’t believe it. Dumbledore loved Harry,” said Hermione.

  “Why didn’t he tell him to hide, then?” shot back Aberforth. “Why didn’t he say to him, ‘Take care of yourself, here’s how to survive’?”

  “Because,” said Harry before Hermione could answer, “sometimes you’ve got to think about more than your own safety! Sometimes you’ve got to think about the greater good! This is war!”

  “You’re seventeen, boy!”

  “I’m of age, and I’m going to keep fighting even if you’ve given up!”

  “Who says I’ve given up?”

  “The Order of the Phoenix is finished,” Harry repeated, “You-Know-Who’s won, it’s over, and anyone who’s pretending different’s kidding themselves.”

  “I don’t say I like it, but it’s the truth!”

  “No, it isn’t,” said Harry. “Your brother knew how to finish You-Know-Who and he passed the knowledge on to me. I’m going to keep going until I succeed—or I die. Don’t think I don’t know how this might end. I’ve known it for years.”

  He waited for Aberforth to jeer or to argue, but he did not. He merely moved.

  “We need to get into Hogwarts,” said Harry again. “If you can’t help us, we’ll wait till daybreak, leave you in peace, and try to find a way in ourselves. If you can help us—well, now would be a great time to mention it.”

  Aberforth remained fixed in his chair, gazing at Harry with the eye, that were so extraordinarily like his brother’s. At last he cleared his throat, got to his feet, walked around the little table, and approached the portrait of Ariana.

  “You know what to do,” he said.

  She smiled, turned, and walked away, not as people in portraits usually did, one of the sides of their frames, but along what seemed to be a long tunnel painted behind her. They watched her slight figure retreating until finally she was swallowed by the darkness.

  “Er—what—?” began Ron.

  “There’s only one way in now,” said Aberforth. “You must know they’ve got all the old secret passageways covered at both ends, Dementors all around the boundary walls, regular patrols inside the school from what my sources tell me. The place has never been so heavily guarded. How you expect to do anything once you get inside it, with Snape in charge and the Carrows as his deputies… well, that’s your lookout, isn’t it? You say you’re prepared to die.”

  “But what…?” said Hermione, frowning at Ariana’s picture.

  A tiny white dot reappeared at the end of the painted tunnel, and now Ariana was walking back toward them, growing bigger and bigger as she came. But there was somebody else with her now, someone taller than she was, who was limping along, looking excited. His hair was longer than Harry had ever seen. He appeared and torn. Larger and larger the two figures grew, until only their heads and shoulders filled the portrait. Then the whole thing swang forward on the wall like a little door, and the entrance to a real tunnel was revealed. And our of it, his hair overgrown, his face cut, his robes ripped, clambered the real Neville Longbottom, who gave a roar of delight, leapt down from the mantelpiece and yelled.

  “I knew you’d come! I knew it, Harry!”

  29. THE LOST DIADEM

  “Neville—what the—how—?”

  But Neville had spotted Ron and Hermione, and with yells of delight was hugging them too. The longer Harry looked at Neville, the worse he appeared: One of his eyes was swollen yellow and purple, there were gouge marks on his face, and his general air of unkemptness suggested that he had been living enough. Nevertheless, his battered visage shone with happiness as he let go of Hermione and said again, “I knew you’d come! Kept telling Seamus it was a matter of time!”

  “Neville, what’s happened to you?”

  “What? This?” Neville dismissed his injuries with a shake of the head. “This is nothing, Seamus is worse. You’ll see. Shall we get going then? Oh,” he turned to Aberforth, “Ab, there might be a couple more people on the way.”

  “Couple more?” repeated Aberforth ominously. “What d’you mean, a couple more, Longbottom? There’s a curfew and a Camwaulding Charm on the whole village!”

  “I know, that’s why they’ll be Apparating directly into the bar,” said Neville. “Just send them down the passage when they get here, will you? Thanks a lot.”

  Neville held out his hand to Hermione and helped her to climb up onto the mantelpiece and into the tunnel; Ron followed, then Neville. Harry addressed Aberforth.

  “I don’t know how to thank you. You’ve saved our lives twice.”

  “Look after ’em, then,” said Aberforth gruffly. “I might not be able to save ’em a third time.”

  Harry clambered up onto the mantelpiece and through the hole behind Ariana’s portrait. There were smooth stone steps on the other side: It looked as though the passageway had been there for years. Brass lamps hung from the walls and the earthy floor was worn and smooth; as they walked, their shadows rippled, fanlike, across the wall.

  “How long’s this been here?” Ron asked as they set off. “It isn’t on the Marauder’s Map, is it, Harry? I thought there were only seven passages in and out of school?”

  “They sealed off all of those before the start of the year,” said Neville. “There’s no chance of getting through any of them now, not with the curses over the entrances and Death Eaters and Dementors waiting at the exits.” He started walking backward, beaming, drinking them in. “Never mind that stuff… Is it true? Did you break into Gringotts? Did you escape on a dragon? It’s everywhere, everyone’s talking about
it, Terry Boot got beaten up by Carrow for yelling about it in the Great Hall at dinner!”

  “Yeah, it’s true,” said Harry.

  Neville laughed gleefully.

  “What did you do with the dragon?”

  “Released it into the wild,” said Ron. “Hermione was all for keeping it as a pet—”

  “Don’t exaggerate, Ron—”

  “But what have you been doing? People have been saying you’ve just been on the run, Harry, but I don’t think so. I think you’ve been up to something.”

  “You’re right,” said Harry, “but tell us about Hogwarts, Neville, we haven’t heard anything.”

  “It’s been… Well, it’s not really like Hogwarts anymore,” said Neville, the smile fading from his face as he spoke. “Do you know about the Carrows?”

  “Those two Death Eaters who teach here?”

  “They do more than teach,” said Neville. “They’re in charge of all discipline. They like punishment, the Carrows.”

  “Like Umbridge?”

  “Nah, they make her look tame. The other teachers are all supposed to refer us to the Carrows if we do anything wrong. They don’t, though, if they can avoid it. You can tell they all hate them as much as we do.”

  “Amycus, the bloke, he teaches what used to be Defense Against the Dark Arts, except now it’s just the Dark Arts. We’re supposed to practice the Cruciatus Curse on people who’ve earned detentions—”

  “What?”

  Harry, Ron, and Hermione’s united voices echoed up and down the passage.

  “Yeah,” said Neville. “That’s how I got this one,” he pointed at a particularly deep gash in his cheek, “I refused to do it. Some people are into it, though; Crabbe and Goyle love it. First time they’ve ever been top in anything, I expect.”

  “Alecto, Amycus’s sister, teaches Muggle Studies, which is compulsory for everyone. We’ve all got to listen to her explain how Muggles are like animals, stupid and dirty, and how they drive wizards into hiding by being vicious toward them, and how the natural order is being reestablished. I got this one,” he indicated another slash to his face, “for asking her how much Muggle blood she and her brother have got.”

  “Blimey, Neville,” said Ron, “there’s a time and a place for getting a smart mouth.”

  “You didn’t see her,” said Neville. “You wouldn’t have stood it either. The thing is, it helps when people stand up to them, it gives everyone hope. I used to notice that when you did it, Harry.”

  “But they’ve used you as a knife sharpener,” said Ron, winding slightly as they passed a lamp and Neville’s injuries were thrown into even greater relief.

  Neville shrugged.

  “Doesn’t matter. They don’t want to spill too much pure blood, so they’ll torture us a bit if we’re mouthy but they won’t actually kill us.”

  Harry did not know what was worse, the things that Neville was saying or the matter-of-fact tone in which he said them.

  “The only people in real danger are the ones whose friends and relatives on the outside are giving trouble. They get taken hostage. Old Xeno Lovegood was getting a bit too outspoken in The Quibbler, so they dragged Luna off the train on the way back for Christmas.”

  “Neville, she’s all right, we’ve seen her—”

  “Yeah, I know, she managed to get a message to me.”

  From his pocket he pulled a golden coin, and Harry recognized it as one of the fake Galleons that Dumbledore’s Army had used to send one another messages.

  “These have been great,” said Neville, beaming at Hermione. “The Carrows never rumbled how we were communicating, it drove them mad. We used to sneak out at night and put graffiti on the walls: Dumbledore’s Army, Still Recruiting, stuff like that. Snape hated it.”

  “You used to?” said Harry, who had noticed the past tense.

  “Well, it got more difficult as time went on,” said Neville. “We lost Luna at Christmas, and Ginny never came back after Easter, and the three of us were sort of the leaders. The Carrows seemed to know I was behind a lot of it, so they started coming down on me hard, and then Michael Corner went and got caught releasing a first-year they’d chained up, and they tortured him pretty badly. That scared people off.”

  “No kidding,” muttered Ron, as the passage began to slope upward.

  “Yeah, well, I couldn’t ask people to go through what Michael did, so we dropped those kinds of stunts. But we were still fighting, doing underground stuff, right up until a couple of weeks ago. That’s when they decided there was only one way to stop me, I suppose, and they went for Gran.”

  “They what?” said Harry, Ron, and Hermione together.

  “Yeah,” said Neville, panting a little now, because the passage was climbing so steeply, “well, you can see their thinking. It had worked really well, kidnapping kids to force their relatives to behave. I s’pose it was only a matter of time before they did it the other way around. Thing was,” he faced them, and Harry was astonished to see that he was grinning, “they bit off a bit more than they could chew with Gran. Little old witch living alone, they probably thought hey didn’t need to send anyone particularly powerful. Anyway,” Neville laughed, “Dawlish is still in St. Mungo’s and Gran’s on the run. She sent me a letter,” he clapped a hand to the breast pocket of his robes, “telling me she was proud of me, that I’m my parent’s son, and to keep it up.”

  “Cool,” said Ron.

  “Yeah,” said Neville happily. “Only thing was, once they realized they had no hold over me, they decided Hogwarts could do without me after all. I don’t know whether they were planning to kill me or send me to Azkaban, either way, I knew it was time to disappear.”

  “But,” said Ron, looking thoroughly confused, “aren’t—aren’t we heading straight back for Hogwarts?”

  “’Course,” said Neville. “You’ll see. We’re here.”

  They turned a corner and there ahead of them was the end of the passage. Another short flight of steps led to a door just like the one hidden behind Ariana’s portrait. Neville pushed it open and climbed through. As Harry followed, he heard Neville call out for unseen people:

  “Look who it is! Didn’t I tell you?”

  As Harry emerged into the room behind the passage, there were several screams and yells:

  “HARRY!”

  “It’s Potter, it’s POTTER!”

  “Ron!”

  “Hermione!”

  He had a confused impression of colored hangings, of lamps and many faces. The next moment, he, Ron, and Hermione were engulfed, hugged, pounded on the back, their hair ruffled, their hands shaken, by what seemed to be more than twenty people. They might have just won a Quidditch final.

  “Okay, okay, calm down!” Neville called, and as the crowd backed away, Harry was able to take in their surroundings.

  He did not recognize the dorm at all. It was enormous, and looked rather like the interior of a particularly sumptuous tree house, or perhaps a gigantic ship’s cabin. Multicolored hammocks were strung from the ceiling and from the balcony that ran around the dark wood-paneled and windowless walls, which were covered in bright tapestry hangings. Harry saw the gold Gryffindor lion, emblazoned on scarlet; the black badger of Hufflepuff, set against yellow; and the bronze eagle of Ravenclaw, on blue. The silver and green of Slytherin alone were absent. There were bulging bookcases, a few broomsticks propped against the walls, and in the corner, a large wood-cased wireless.

  “Where are we?”

  “Room of Requirement, of course!” said Neville. “Surpassed itself, hasn’t it? The Carrows were chasing me, and I knew I had just one chance for a hideout: I managed to get through the door and this is what I found! Well, it wasn’t exactly like this when I arrived, it was a load smaller, there was only one hammock and just Gryffindor hangings. But it’s expanded as more and more of the D.A. have arrived.”

  “And the Carrows can’t get in?” asked Harry, looking around for the door.

  “No,” said S
eamus Finnigan, whom Harry had not recognized until he spoke: Seamus’s face was bruised and puffy. “It’s a proper hideout, as long as one of us stays in here, they can’t get at us, the door won’t open. It’s all down to Neville. He really gets this room. You’ve got to ask for exactly what you need—like, “I don’t want any Carrow supporters to be able to get in’—and it’ll do it for you! You’ve just got to make sure you close the loopholes. Neville’s the man!”

  “It’s quite straightforward, really,” said Neville modestly. “I’d been in here about a day and a half, and getting really hungry, and wishing I could get something to eat, and that’s when the passage to Hog’s Head opened up. I went through it and met Aberforth. He’s been providing us with food, because for some reason, that’s the one thing the room doesn’t really do.

  “Yeah, well, food’s one of the five exceptions to Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration,” said Ron to general astonishment.

  “So we’ve been hiding out here for nearly two weeks,” said Seamus, “and it just makes more hammocks every time we need room, and it even sprouted a pretty good bathroom once girls started turning up—”

  “—and thought they’d quite like to wash, yes,” supplied Lavender Brown, whom Harry had not noticed until that point. Now that he looked around properly, he recognized many familiar faces. Both Patil twins were there, as were Terry Boot, Ernie Macmillan, Anthony Goldstein, and Michael Corner.

  “Tell us what you’ve been up to, though,” said Ernie. “There’ve been so many rumors, we’ve been trying to keep up with you on Potterwatch.” He pointed at the wireless. “You didn’t break into Gringotts?”

  “They did!” said Neville. “And the dragon’s true too!”