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 could 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 wand 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.
18. 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 wand. 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 Batty, 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 leak
ing 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.
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