Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows hp-7 Page 25

  What was Voldemort trying to find? Why, with the Ministry of Magic and the Wizarding world at his feet, was he far away, intent on the pursuit of an object that Gregorovitch had once owned, and which had been stolen by the unknown thief?

  Harry could still see the blond-haired youth’s face; it was merry, wild; there was a Fred and George-ish air of triumphant trickery about him. He had soared from the windowsill like a bird, and Harry had seen him before, but he could not think where…

  With Gregorovitch dead, it was the merry-faced thief who was in danger now, and it was on him that Harry’s thoughts dwelled, as Ron’s snores began to rumble from the lower bunk and as he himself drifted slowly into sleep once more.

  15. THE GOBLIN’S REVENGE

  Early next morning, before the other two were awake, Harry left the tent to search the woods around them for the oldest, most gnarled, and resilient-looking tree he could find. There in its shadows he buried Mad-Eye Moody’s eye and marked the spot by gouging a small cross in the bark with his wand. It was not much, but Harry felt that Mad-Eye would have much preferred this to being stuck on Dolores Umbridge’s door. Then he returned to the tent to wait for the others to wake, and discuss what they were going to do next.

  Harry and Hermione felt that it was best not to stay anywhere too long, and Ron agreed, with the sole proviso that their next move took them within reach of a bacon sandwich. Hermione therefore removed the enchantments she had placed around the clearing, while Harry and Ron obliterated all the marks and impressions on the ground that might show they had camped there. Then they Disapparated to the outskirts of a small market town.

  Once they had pitched the tent in the shelter of a small copse of trees and surrounded it with freshly cast defensive enchantments, Harry ventured out under the Invisibility Cloak to find sustenance. This, however, did not go as planned. He had barely entered the town when an unnatural chill, a descending mist, and a sudden darkening of the skies made him freeze where he stood.

  “But you can make a brilliant Patronus!” protested Ron, when Harry arrived back at the tent empty handed, out of breath, and mouthing the single word, Dementors.

  “I couldn’t… make one,” he panted, clutching the stitch in his side. “Wouldn’t… come.”

  Their expressions of consternation and disappointment made Harry feel ashamed. It had been a nightmarish experience, seeing the Dementors gliding out of the must in the distance and realizing, as the paralyzing cold choked his lungs and a distant screaming filled his ears, that he was not going to be able to protect himself. It had taken all Harry’s willpower to uproot himself from the spot and run, leaving the eyeless Dementors to glide amongst the Muggles who might not be able to see them, but would assuredly feel the despair they cast wherever they went.

  “So we still haven’t got any food.”

  “Shut up, Ron,” snapped Hermione. “Harry, what happened? Why do you think you couldn’t make your Patronus? You managed perfectly yesterday!”

  “I don’t know.”

  He sat low in one of Perkins’s old armchairs, feeling more humiliated by the moment. He was afraid that something had gone wrong inside him. Yesterday seemed a long time ago: Today he might have been thirteen years old again, the only one who collapsed on the Hogwarts Express.

  Ron kicked a chair leg.

  “What?” he snarled at Hermione. “I’m starving! All I’ve had since I bled half to death is a couple of toadstools!”

  “You go and fight your way through the Dementors, then,” said Harry, stung.

  “I would, but my arm’s in a sling, in case you hadn’t noticed!”

  “That’s convenient.”

  “And what’s that supposed to—?”

  “Of course!” cried Hermione, clapping a hand to her forehead and startling both of them into silence. “Harry, give me the locket! Come on,” she said impatiently, clicking her fingers at him when he did not react, “the Horcrux, Harry, you’re still wearing it!”

  She held out her hands, and Harry lifted the golden chain over his head. The moment it parted contact with Harry’s skin he felt free and oddly light. He had not even realized that he was clammy or that there was a heavy weight pressing on his stomach until both sensations lifted.

  “Better?” asked Hermione.

  “Yeah, loads better!”

  “Harry,” she said, crouching down in front of him and using the kind of voice he associated with visiting the very sick, “you don’t think you’ve been possessed, do you?”

  “What? No!” he said defensively, “I remember everything we’ve done while I’ve been wearing it. I wouldn’t know what I’d done if I’d been possessed, would I? Ginny told me there were times when she couldn’t remember anything.”

  “Hmm,” said Hermione, looking down at the heavy locket. “Well, maybe we ought not to wear it. We can just keep it in the tent.”

  “We are not leaving that Horcrux lying around,” Harry stated firmly. “If we lose it, if it gets stolen—”

  “Oh, all right, all right,” said Hermione, and she placed it around her own neck and tucked it out of sight down the front of her shirt. “But we’ll take turns wearing it, so nobody keeps it on too long.”

  “Great,” said Ron irritably, “and now we’ve sorted that out, can we please get some food?”

  “Fine, but we’ll go somewhere else to find it,” said Hermione with half a glance at Harry. “There’s no point staying where we know Dementors are swooping around.”

  In the end they settled down for the night in a far flung field belonging to a lonely farm, from which they had managed to obtain eggs and bread.

  “It’s not stealing, is it?” asked Hermione in a troubled voice, as they devoured scrambled eggs on toast. “Not if I left some money under the chicken coo?”

  Ron rolled his eyes and said, with his cheeks bulging, “Er-my-nee, ’oo worry ’oo much. ’Elax!”

  And, indeed, it was much easier to relax when they were comfortably well fed. The argument about the Dementors was forgotten in laughter that night, and Harry felt cheerful, even hopeful, as he took the first of the three night watches.

  This was their first encounter with the fact that a full stomach meant good spirits, an empty one, bickering and gloom. Harry was least surprised by this, because be had suffered periods of near starvation at the Dursleys’. Hermione bore up reasonably well on those nights when they managed to scavenge nothing but berries or stale biscuits, her temper perhaps a little shorter than usual and her silences dour. Ron, however, had always been used to three delicious meals a day, courtesy of his mother or of the Hogwarts house-elves, and hunger made him both unreasonable and irascible. Whenever lack of food coincided with Ron’s turn to wear the Horcrux, he became downright unpleasant.

  “So where next?” was his constant refrain. He did not seem to have any ideas himself, but expected Harry and Hermione to come up with plans while he sat and brooded over the low food supplies. Accordingly Harry and Hermione spent fruitless hours trying to decide where they might find the other Horcruxes, and how to destroy the one they already got, their conversations becoming increasingly repetitive as they got no new information.

  As Dumbledore had told Harry that be believed Voldemort had hidden the Horcruxes in places important to him, they kept reciting, in a sort of dreary litany, those locations they knew that Voldemort had lived or visited. The orphanage where he had been born and raised; Hogwarts, where he had been educated; Borgin and Burkes, where he had worked after completing school; then Albania, where he had spent his years of exile: These formed the basis of their speculations.

  “Yeah, let’s go to Albania. Shouldn’t take more than an afternoon to search an entire country,” said Ron sarcastically.

  “There can’t be anything there. He’d already made five of his Horcruxes before he went into exile, and Dumbledore was certain the snake is the sixth,” said Hermione. “We know the snake’s not in Albania, it’s usually with Vol—”

  “Didn�
�t I ask you to stop say that?”

  “Fine! The snake is usually with You-Know-Who—happy?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “I can’t see him hiding anything at Borgin and Burkes,” said Harry, who had made this point many times before, but said it again simply to break the nasty silence. “Borgin and Burke were experts at Dark objects, they would’ve recognized a Horcrux straightaway.”

  Ron yawned pointedly. Repressing a strong urge to throw something at him, Harry plowed on, “I still reckon he might have hidden something at Hogwarts.”

  Hermione sighed.

  “But Dumbledore would have found it, Harry!”

  Harry repeated the argument he kept bringing out in favor of this theory.

  “Dumbledore said in front of me that he never assumed he knew all of Hogwarts secrets. I’m telling you, if there was one place Vol—”

  “Oi!”

  “YOU-KNOW-WHO, then!” Harry shouted, goaded past endurance. “If there was one place that was really important to You-Know-Who, it was Hogwarts!”

  “Oh, come on,” scoffed Ron. “His school?”

  “Yeah, his school! It was his first real home, the place that meant he was special: it meant everything to him, and even after he left—”

  “This is You-Know-Who we’re talking about, right? Not you?” inquired Ron. He was tugging at the chain of the Horcrux around his neck; Harry was visited by a desire to seize it and throttle him.

  “You told us that You-Know-Who asked Dumbledore to give him a job after he left,” said Hermione.

  “That’s right,” said Harry.

  “And Dumbledore thought he only wanted to come back to try and find something, probably another founder’s object, to make into another Horcrux?”

  “Yeah,” said Harry.

  “But he didn’t get the job, did he?” said Hermione. “So he never got the chance to find a founder’s object there and hide it in the school!”

  “Okay, then,” said Harry, defeated. “Forget Hogwarts.”

  Without any other leads, they traveled into London and, hidden beneath the Invisibility Cloak, search for the orphanage in which Voldemort had been raised. Hermione stole into a library and discovered from their records that the place had been demolished many years before. They visited its site and found a tower block of offices.

  “We could try digging in to foundations?” Hermione suggested halfheartedly.

  “He wouldn’t have hidden a Horcrux here,” Harry said. He had known it all along. The orphanage had been the place Voldemort had been determined to escape; he would never have hidden a part of his soul there. Dumbledore had shown Harry that Voldemort sought grandeur or mystique in his hiding places; this dismal gray corner of London was as far removed as you could imagine from Hogwarts of the Ministry or a building like Gringotts, the Wizarding banks, with its gilded doors and marble floors.

  Even without any new idea, they continued to move through the countryside, pitching the tent in a different place each night for security. Every morning they made sure that they had removed all clues to their presence, then set off to find another lonely and secluded spot, traveling by Apparition to more woods, to the shadowy crevices of cliffs, to purple moors, gorse-covered mountainsides, and once a sheltered and pebbly cove. Every twelve hours or so they passed the Horcrux between them as though they were playing some perverse, slow-motion game of pass-the-parcel, where they dreaded the music stopping because the reward was twelve hours of increased fear and anxiety.

  Harry’s scar kept prickling. It happened most often, he noticed, when he was wearing the Horcrux. Sometimes he could not stop himself reacting to the pain.

  “What? What did you see?” demanded Ron, whenever he noticed Harry wince.

  “A face,” muttered Harry, every time. “The same face. The thief who stole from Gregorovitch.”

  And Ron would turn away, making no effort to hide his disappointment. Harry knew that Ron was hoping to bear news of his family or the rest of the Order of the Phoenix, but after all, he, Harry, was not a television aerial; he could only see what Voldemort was thinking at the time, not tune in to whatever took his fancy. Apparently Voldemort was dwelling endlessly on the unknown youth with the gleeful face, whose name and whereabouts, Harry felt sure, Voldemort knew no better than he did. As Harry’s scar continued to burn and the merry, blond-haired boy swam tantalizingly in his memory, he learned to suppress any sign of pain or discomfort, for the other two showed nothing but impatience at the mention of the thief. He could not entirely blame them, when they were so desperate for a lean on the Horcruxes.

  As the days stretched into weeks, Harry began to suspect that Ron and Hermione were having conversations without, and about, him. Several times they stopped talking abruptly when Harry entered the tent, and twice he came accidentally upon them, huddled a little distance away, heads together and talking fast; both times they fell silent when they realized he was approaching them and hastened to appear busy collecting wood or water.

  Harry could not help wondering whether they had only agreed to come on what now felt like a pointless and rambling journey because they thought he had some secret plan that they would learn in due course. Ron was making no effort to hide his bad mood, and Harry was starting to fear that Hermione too was disappointed by his poor leadership. In desperation he tried to think of further Horcrux locations, but the only one that continued to occur to him was Hogwarts, and as neither of the others thought this at all likely, he stopped suggesting it.

  Autumn rolled over the countryside as they moved through it. They were now pitching the tent on mulches of fallen leaves. Natural mists joined those cast by the Dementors; wind and rain added to their troubles. The fact that Hermione was getting better at identifying edible fungi could not altogether compensate for their continuing isolation, the lack of other people’s company, or their total ignorance of what was going on in the war against Voldemort.

  “My mother,” said Ron on night, as they sat in the tent on a riverbank in Wales, “can make good food appear out of thin air.”

  He prodded moodily at the lumps of charred gray fish on his plate. Harry glanced automatically at Ron’s neck and saw, as he has expected, the golden chain of the Horcrux glinting there. He managed to fight down the impulse to swear at Ron, whose attitude would, he knew, improve slightly when the time came to take off the locket.

  “Your mother can’t produce food out of thin air,” said Hermione, “no one can. Food is the first of the five Principal Exceptions to Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfigura—”

  “Oh, speak English, can’t you?” Ron said, prising a fish out from between his teeth.

  “It’s impossible to make good food out of nothing! You can Summon it if you know where it is, you can transform it, you can increase the quantity if you’ve already got some—”

  “Well, don’t bother increasing this, it’s disgusting,” said Ron.

  “Harry caught the fish and I did my best with it! I notice I’m always the one who ends up sorting out the food, because I’m a girl, I suppose!”

  “No, it’s because you’re supposed to be the best at magic!” shot back Ron.

  Hermione jumped up and bits of roast pike slid off her tin plate onto the floor.

  “You can do the cooking tomorrow, Ron, you can find the ingredients and try and charm them into something worth eating, and I’ll sit here and pull faces and moan and you can see you—”

  “Shut up!” said Harry, leaping to his feet and holding up both hands. “Shut up now!”

  Hermione looked outraged.

  “How can you side with him, he hardly ever does the cook—”

  “Hermione, be quiet, I can hear someone!”

  He was listening hard, his hands still raised, warning them not to talk. Then, over the rush and gush of the dark river beside them, he heard voices again. He looked around at the Sneakoscope. It was not moving.

  “You cast the Muffliato charm over us, right?” he whispered to Hermi
one.

  “I did everything,” she whispered back, “Muffliato, Muggle-Repelling and Disillusionment Charms, all of it. They shouldn’t be able to hear of see us, whoever they are.”

  Heavy scuffing and scraping noises, plus the sound of dislodged stones and twigs, told them that several people were clambering down the steep, wooded slope that descended to the narrow bank where they had pitched the tent. They drew their wands, waiting. The enchantments they had cast around themselves ought to be sufficient, in the near total darkness, to shield them from the notice of Muggles and normal witches and wizards. If these were Death Eaters, then perhaps their defenses were about to be tested by Dark Magic for the first time.

  The voices became louder but no more intelligible as the group of men reached the bank. Harry estimated that their owners were fewer than twenty feet away, but the cascading river made it impossible to tell for sure. Hermione snatched up the beaded bag and started to rummage; after a moment she drew out three Extendible Ears and threw one each to Harry and Ron, who hastily inserted the ends of the flesh-colored strings into their ears and fed the other ends out of the tent entrance.

  Within seconds Harry heard a weary male voice.

  “There ought to be a few salmon in here, or d’you reckon it’s too early in the season? Accio Salmon!”

  There were several distinct splashes and then the slapping sounds of fish against flesh. Somebody grunted appreciatively. Harry pressed the Extendable Ear deeper into his own: Over the murmur of the river he could make out more voices, but they were not speaking English or any human language he had ever heard. It was a rough and unmelodious tongue, a string of rattling, guttural noises, and there seemed to be two speakers, one with a slightly lower, slower voice than the other.

  A fire danced into life on the other side of the canvas, large shadows passed between tent and flames. The delicious smell of baking salmon wafted tantalizingly in their direction. Then came the clinking of cutlery on plates, and the first man spoke again.

  “Here, Griphook, Gornuk.”