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?”
&
nbsp; 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 deer 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.
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