The Daily Prophet
Notices
Madam P. Thistlewood (Wizengamot, retired) wishes it known that she will not be attending the Ministry Winter Ball this year, or any year, and would thank the organisers to stop asking.
December 2006
The Daily Prophet
Notices
Madam P. Thistlewood (Wizengamot, retired) wishes it known that she will not be attending the Ministry Winter Ball this year, or any year, and would thank the organisers to stop asking.
December 2006
♫ Listen along
The first thing Ron noticed was his knees. He'd never noticed his knees before. Twenty-eight years, and they'd never given him a minute's bother. They bent when he wanted them bent and straightened when he wanted them straight, and apart from one Bludger in fifth year, which Goyle still swore blind was an accident, they'd just got on with it, the way knees were supposed to.
These knees had opinions, and they were sharing them, like Mrs Black's portrait when somebody rang the doorbell.
He was flat on his back on something hard, in the dark, and the ache in his knees wasn't the normal sort. It was deep and grinding and settled in, as if it had been there for years and had no plans to leave. His hips were at it as well, and the small of his back. His mouth tasted bitter and sweetish, like one of Fred and George's early prototypes, the ones they'd tried out on him before they knew what they were doing, and his head was stuffed with wool. When he tried to sit up, something at the bottom of his spine creaked like the back gate at the Burrow, and he said, "Ow," out loud.
The voice that came out wasn't his.
It was a woman's voice. An old woman's voice, thin and quavery and posh: properly posh, the sort of voice that said luncheon and meant it. Ron lay in the dark and listened to it bounce off the stone walls.
"Oh, no," said the old woman's voice. "Oh, no."
He held a hand up an inch from his nose. There was a bit of grey light coming from somewhere high up, just about enough to see by, and it showed him a hand that definitely wasn't his. His was big and freckly. This one was small and thin and covered in brown spots, with knobbly knuckles and long pale fingers. It had a pearl ring on it the size of a Gobstone, and a gold wedding ring, and its nails were painted lilac. Not even a decent purple. Lilac.
He looked at it for a bit, in case it changed its mind. Then he looked down at the rest of himself.
He was wearing a cardigan. A purple one. Lavender, Hermione would have said, and then told him the difference. Under it was a blouse with a lacy collar done right up to the chin, and a locket on a thin gold chain. His legs were very thin, in thick brown stockings. His feet were very small, in the sort of shoes that only ever got called sensible by people who'd never had to run in them. And when he put his lilac-tipped hand up to his head, he found curls, tight little white ones, crimped like the edge of one of Mum's pies, and over the top of them, holding the whole lot down, a hairnet.
"Right," said Ron Weasley, in the voice of a seventy-three-year-old witch. "Right. Fine."
He lay back down on the stone floor, and stared up at the ceiling. "I said I'd write to Auntie Muriel on her birthday," he told it. "Write to her. Not turn into her." Then he began very quietly to swear. "Merlin's baggy Y-fronts," said the old woman's voice, with tremendous refinement, and went on from there.
It took him a while to put it together. But he'd woken up in some funny places in his life, not all of them after Seamus's birthday, and he'd learned that the trick was to stop panicking long enough to have a proper look round.
He was in a cell. A stone room smaller than his old bedroom at the Burrow, and that took some doing. A heavy wooden door, with a tiny barred window high up in it where the grey light was coming in. A narrow stone bench, which he had apparently fallen off. A bucket. He wasn't thinking about the bucket. No wand. He checked every pocket of the lavender cardigan twice. He found a lace handkerchief, a packet of Pepper Imps, which was the first good news all day, a small bottle of something labelled Dr Ubbly's Nightly Draught — Two Spoonfuls Only, nearly empty, and a pair of spectacles. When he put the spectacles on, the room swam into focus. When he took them off, it went back to soup.
"Brilliant," said Ron. "She's blind and all."
The last thing he remembered was the Forest. He remembered the white hounds pouring into the clearing, and the cold, and heaving Parkinson up onto a thestral she couldn't see. He was saving the yelp she'd made for later. He remembered turning round to go back for Harry, and a figure stepping out of the trees in front of him, small and old and grey, in a lavender cardigan. He remembered it putting its hand on his chest, gently, like somebody's nan.
And then nothing. Nothing at all until his knees.
He opened the locket round his neck. Inside, on one side, was a photograph of a young man in Auror robes, laughing, with his arm round a girl. On the other side, in tiny, faded, careful writing: Edward. 1971–1997.
Ron looked at the young man in the photograph, and at the girl under his arm. Ninety-seven. He'd spent the back end of ninety-seven in a tent with a wireless, listening out for names. Then he closed the locket.
"Sorry about your son, Madam Whoever-You-Are," he said quietly. "But you've nicked my body, and I want it back."
♫ Listen along
The guard came at about teatime, going by Ron's stomach.
He heard him coming a long way off: footsteps in a stone corridor, and the jingle of keys, and a man's voice humming something that might have been the Weird Sisters, if you were being kind. He had been lying on the bench for ages by then, eating Pepper Imps and having a think. He'd come up with loads of plans. Most of them needed a body that could run, or jump, or fight, or get up off the floor without making that noise, so he'd binned them.
He'd kept one.
The footsteps stopped outside his door. A shadow fell across the little barred window.
Ron let out a long, thin, rattling moan, clutched his chest with both lilac-tipped hands, and slid slowly off the stone bench onto the floor.
He'd seen Auntie Muriel do this at three family weddings, and every time it had got her the best seat at the table and a large sherry. He'd always secretly thought it was genius. He did it now with everything he'd got: the moan, the clutch, the slow collapse, and a small feeble flutter of one hand at the end.
"Madam Thistlewood?" The shadow at the window moved. The voice was young, and suddenly anxious. "Madam — oh, Merlin. Oh, Merlin, not on my shift —"
The key scraped in the lock. The door swung open. A young wizard in dark robes came in and bent over him, wand in one hand, reaching for Ron's wrist with the other to feel for a pulse.
Ron hit him over the head with the bucket.
It was, thank Merlin, empty. It went bong. The young wizard crumpled over sideways, and Ron snatched the wand out of his hand as he went down, and then lay there on the stone floor, wheezing like Errol after a long delivery, while the rest of his joints joined in with the knees.
"Sorry, mate," he told the unconscious guard. "Lovely bedside manner, though."
It took him nearly a minute to get up. He made the noise.
The corridor outside was long and low and lit by one manky torch. There were doors all along it, a dozen on either side, heavy and wooden, each with a small barred window. Ron went to the nearest one, stood on the toes of Madam Thistlewood's small sensible shoes, put her spectacles on, and had a look.
A man lay on the stone bench inside, fast asleep. He was about sixty, balding and plump, in shirtsleeves. Ron had never seen him before in his life. He went to the next door, and the next. They were all the same: sleepers, one to a cell, laid out with their hands folded on their chests like somebody had already been round with the lilies. A thin woman with grey hair. A heavy man with a drooping grey moustache. A mousy young wizard with ink-stained fingers.
The seventh cell had a young man in it. He was about twenty, skinny, with a shaved head and a tattoo of a small green dragon curling round his left forearm. He was asleep, like the rest, but he lay on his side, curled up, with one arm flung over his face, and as Ron watched, the arm twitched, and the young man muttered something in his sleep and turned over.
Ron looked down at the small bottle in his cardigan pocket. Dr Ubbly's Nightly Draught. Two spoonfuls only. Nearly empty. Somebody hadn't been sticking to her two spoonfuls. He thought about an old witch who couldn't get off to sleep without it, knocking it back every night for years until her body barely noticed it any more, and he reckoned he knew now why he'd woken up when nobody else had.
This lad in the seventh cell was nearer the surface than the others, too. Something in him was fighting it.
Ron pointed the stolen wand at the lock, and said "Alohomora," in the old woman's voice. The door swung open.
"Rennervate."
The young man woke up all at once, like Mad-Eye used to. One second he was asleep; the next he was sitting bolt upright on the bench with his back against the wall and his hands up, and his eyes — dark eyes, deep-set, very steady — were fixed on Ron in the doorway.
They looked at each other.
"Who are you?" said the young man. His voice was light and hoarse, with some West Country in it, but there was something slow and heavy underneath that belonged to somebody else entirely.
"Ron Weasley," said Ron.
The young man stared at him. He looked at the hairnet. He looked at the pearls. He looked at the tortoiseshell spectacles on the end of Ron's nose, and Ron stood there and let him.
"Ah," he said.
Then he looked down at his own hands. He turned them over slowly, and looked at the little green dragon on his forearm, and flexed the long thin fingers. When he looked up at Ron again, something had come into those dark eyes that Ron had seen once before, years ago, at the Dursleys', on the night they'd all turned into Harry.
"Kingsley Shacklebolt," he said.
Ron sat down hard on the floor. It wasn't the knees.
"Oh, thank Merlin," he said. "Oh, thank Merlin. Kingsley. You're — they've got you in a — you're about twelve —"
"Twenty, I think," said Kingsley. He was looking at his own arm the way Dad looked at a plug. "And I appear to have a tattoo." He looked up. "And you, Ron, appear to be wearing a hairnet."
"It came with the knees," said Ron.
Kingsley's borrowed face moved, slowly, into a smile. Then the Minister for Magic put his shaved head back against the cell wall and laughed. It was a young man's laugh, light and a bit cracked. But it went on and on, deep and slow and helpless, the way Kingsley's laugh always had, and then Ron was off as well, in a thin, quavering, wheezing old-lady cackle, sitting on the stone floor of a cell in the bowels of the Ministry with tears running down somebody else's face.
They had to leave the others.
"We can't carry twelve sleeping people up nine floors of the Ministry," said Kingsley, standing in the corridor in his borrowed tattoo, "and we can't wake them. I've tried." He had the wand from the second guard, who had come looking for the first. Kingsley had dealt with him so fast and so quietly that Ron, who'd been having a sit-down at the time, missed the whole thing. "We'll come back for them. Every one."
Ron looked back at all those doors and thought of Seamus at the chalkboard in Grimmauld Place, moaning about a corridor under Level Nine that Maintenance had been told to seal in August and then told to stay away from.
"Who are they?"
"The Head of Magical Law Enforcement. My Private Secretary. Two of the Wizengamot. Half my policy board." Kingsley looked down the long row of doors. "Not that I'd know one of them to look at. They're all wearing somebody else's face. But the guards call the roll every night, and I've chaired meetings with every name on it." He stopped at one door and looked through the window, and went on looking. It was the plump, balding man in shirtsleeves from the first cell.
"That one," he said. "We take that one."
"Why him?"
"Because unless I'm very much mistaken, that is not Owen Pritchard. That's Aldric Fawley. And Aldric Fawley is a hundred and six years old, and his body is being detained in a cellar somewhere unplottable, at the pleasure of a certain jilted fiancée. If your friend Miss Granger is half as clever as I remember, she'll want both halves in the same room."
Ron looked at him. "Cleverer," he said. "She's a nightmare, honestly. How do you know all that?"
"I've been lying on that bench for the best part of six weeks, Ron. Asleep, mostly. But not always." Kingsley's young face was grim. "They talk, the guards. They don't think the sleepers can hear them."
"Every night at ten," Kingsley went on, "the guards come round with a bottle and a spoon. Whoever's wearing you is only ever as far under as you are. Keep us deep, and they go about up there half asleep and do as they're told." He tapped his borrowed cheek. "I've never gone as deep as they think. I've had the spoonful in here more nights than not."
Ron looked through the little barred window at Aldric Fawley, fast asleep in somebody else's shirtsleeves. He thought of Fawley's own body walking out onto a lawn on Hampstead Heath in its nightshirt, like a sleepwalker, and turning to face west.
"So the one wearing you —"
"Has been rather more awake than anybody planned," said Kingsley. "Running my Ministry."
Ron's hand had found the little bottle in his cardigan pocket. Two spoonfuls only.
"And the old bat wearing me," he said. "She'll have been all there. The whole time. With my face on." He swallowed. "Harry'll have known, though. Won't he? He'd have known straight off."
Kingsley opened the door of the first cell, and didn't answer.
♫ Listen along
They carried Owen Pritchard's body between them. Well, Kingsley carried it, slung over one skinny shoulder like a sack of spuds, and Ron went in front with the wand and the moral support. They went up. The Atrium fireplaces would be watched, and Percy had never in his life gone home before eight.
It wasn't, Ron would think afterwards, the most dignified escape anybody had ever made from the Ministry of Magic, and he'd once been splinched leaving it. There were a lot of stairs. He had to stop on every landing. Twice he had to sit down. Once, on Level Six, they turned a corner straight into a pair of violet-robed Restitution Wardens, and Ron's mouth, which had always been quicker than the rest of him, got there first.
"Good evening," it said, in Madam Thistlewood's most refined quaver. "Madam Thistlewood. Formerly Thistlewood-Puddlemere. Of the Chudley Thistlewoods."
The nearer Warden frowned. "I've never heard of the Chudley Thistlewoods."
"No," said Ron darkly. "We don't like to talk about it. There was a relegation." He waved a lilac-tipped hand at Kingsley, who was standing very still with a sleeping man over his shoulder. "And this is my grandson, Tarquin. He carries my luggage."
Both Wardens looked at the luggage.
Kingsley used the moment. Ron had seen Kingsley fight before, years ago, and had thought at the time that it was like watching somebody really good at chess. Not as good as Ron, but good. He never seemed to hurry, and the move that beat you was never the one you'd been watching. He hadn't lost it. The body was different, skinny and young and unpractised, and the borrowed wand was wrong for his hand, and he was carrying a sleeping man over one shoulder. But the chess was exactly the same. Both Wardens were down and bound and silenced before either of them had fully raised a wand, and Kingsley hadn't even put Pritchard down.
"Show-off," wheezed Ron, leaning against the wall.
"I'm twenty," said Kingsley. "It's expected."
They came out on Level Two. The Ministry was dark and empty, except for one light still on at the end of a long corridor, behind a frosted glass door with gold lettering on it that said CHIEF CLERK TO THE WIZENGAMOT. Ron had never been so glad to have a brother with no life.
Ron didn't knock. He never had.
Percy Weasley was sitting at his desk with a quill in his hand and his spectacles on his nose, surrounded by teetering stacks of parchment. Same as ever. He looked up. Ron watched him take it in: a skinny lad with a shaved head and a dragon tattoo, with a wand in one hand and a bloke over his shoulder, and a little old witch in a hairnet, hanging off the doorframe, puffing.
He put down his quill, one finger at a time.
"Madam Thistlewood," he said, very carefully. "Good evening. I'm afraid the Wizengamot isn't sitting until —"
"Perce," said Ron. "It's me."
Percy stared at him.
"It's Ron. They swapped me. In the Forest. The old bat in the cardigan's got my body, and I've got hers, and she's got cataracts, Percy, I can't see a thing without these —"
"Madam," said Percy, rising slowly from his chair, his hand drifting towards his wand, "I shall have to ask you to put that in writing —"
"The scarf," said Ron. "The Tattle-Tea. George and me. Last Christmas." He took a breath. "Navy blue. Hand-knitted. Took you eleven months. It says WORLD'S GREATEST MINISTER down one end in gold thread, and it's got his face knitted into the other end, and it's been in the bottom drawer of your desk ever since because you've never once worked up the nerve to give it to him." He paused. "And there's a matching one. And you're wearing it."
Percy's hand flew to his collar.
He went red from the neck up, right into his hair, all in one go. It ran in the family.
"Nobody," he said faintly. "Nobody but you and George knows about that scarf."
"I know," said Ron. "It's been killing me since Christmas."
Percy looked down at the scarf round his own neck, and then at Ron, and the hairnet. Then he sat back down in his chair, quite suddenly. It was going round.
"Ronald," he said. "What on earth have you done to yourself?"
In the doorway, the young man with the dragon tattoo shifted the sleeping body to his other shoulder. "Black coffee, Percy," he said. "No sugar. Three times a day."
Percy's hand went back to his collar.
Every Chief Clerk to the Wizengamot since 1802, it turned out, had been provided with a private Floo connection for use in the event of a constitutional emergency. It appeared on no register. It connected to exactly one fireplace of the Clerk's choosing. Percy had held the post for six years and had never once used it. This was a man who'd spent an entire summer going on at Ron about the thickness of cauldron bottoms, and he'd never told a soul. Not even Audrey.
"It's for emergencies," he said stiffly, when Ron gaped at him. "Constitutional emergencies. The Minister for Magic has been replaced by an impostor, Ronald." He adjusted his spectacles. "I believe that qualifies."
He had set it to Malfoy Manor three days earlier. Just in case.
The great hall at Malfoy Manor was still wrecked. Nobody had had the heart to clear it. The chandelier lay where it had fallen in a glittering heap of broken crystal, and frost still clung in the corners where the sun didn't reach, and there were scorch marks up the walls and across the portraits.
Harry was sitting on the stairs when the fire in the small dining room flared green. He heard voices, and footsteps, and then Percy came out into the hall, followed by a thin young man with a shaved head carrying a heavy unconscious body over his shoulder, followed by a very small, very old witch in a lavender cardigan.
Harry was on his feet with his wand up before any of them had taken three steps.
So was Ginny, on the landing above. So was Luna, from the library door, with Theo's silver-pointed wand in her cardigan pocket. So was Pansy, from the top of the stairs, with the iron poker she still hadn't put down.
"Stop," said Harry.
They all stopped.
He hadn't slept, and had barely eaten. He had sat on the stairs of the house where Draco and his friends had been taken and gone over all of it in his head, and every moment of it had been the same moment: a hand held out on a landing, and his own hand putting a small black stone into it.
He was not going to do that again.
"Harry," said Percy. "Harry, it's all right. It's Ron. It's Ronald. He knew about the scarf."
"Everyone knows about the scarf, Percy."
"Nobody knows what the scarf says!"
Harry kept his wand on the old witch. She was small and bent, with white curls under a hairnet and a pair of spectacles slipping down her nose, and she was peering back at him over the top of them the way Mrs Figg used to when he'd trodden on a cat. He had seen that lavender cardigan before, between two birches in the Forest, while he was shouting for Ron.
"Harry," said the old woman. The voice was thin and cracked and very posh. "Mate. It's me."
Ron hadn't called him that once since the Forest. Harry was only noticing now.
"The last person who told me he was Ron," said Harry, very quietly, "walked out of that front door with four of my friends, and the Resurrection Stone." He took one step down the stairs. His wand stayed level. "So you'll forgive me if I don't take your word for it. If you're Ron, I'll apologise. If you're not, you're going to tell me where he is."
Percy had gone pale. The young man with the shaved head was watching Harry, and nodded once, to himself.
The old witch didn't look frightened. She looked, if anything, relieved.
"Good," she said. "Good. That's — yeah. That's right. You should." She swallowed. "Iron won't settle it, before you ask. I've thought about it. It'd burn anybody wearing her, not just me."
"Ginny?" said Harry, without looking round.
Ginny had come halfway down the stairs. She was staring at the old woman with her jaw set.
"Somebody's in there who doesn't belong," she said. "Same as when I hugged him goodbye." She pressed a hand to her forehead. "But I'd feel that whoever it was, Harry. It doesn't tell us who."
Harry's wand stayed exactly where it was.
And then Pansy Parkinson came down the stairs.
She came down slowly, past Ginny, past Harry, with the iron poker hanging at her side, and she stopped on the bottom step and looked at the small old woman in the lavender cardigan. The old woman looked back up at her. Something passed across the wrinkled face. Something familiar, and exasperated, and very, very tired.
"Parkinson," said the old woman. "You impossible menace."
Pansy went absolutely still.
It was the tone. Harry heard it too, and knew it at once, the way you know a voice through a wall. It was seventeen years of the same argument in three words: long past new material, thoroughly fed up, and with absolutely no intention of ever stopping.
"Say it again," said Pansy.
"Impossible menace." The old witch pushed her spectacles up her nose with one spotted, lilac-nailed finger. "Can I sit down? Nobody's offered me a seat all day."
Pansy's knuckles had gone white on the poker. Her voice, when it came, was very low.
"What did my cousin rhyme with cousin?"
The old woman sighed.
"Dozen," she said. "And Pansy with fancy, and then with chancy, and then with pansy, which isn't even a rhyme, Parkinson, it's the same word twice. And there was a whole verse about a hat."
Pansy made a sound. It was very small and it came out of her all at once, like something breaking, and she put her hand over her mouth. The iron poker slid out of her other hand and clattered on the marble floor.
"It's him," she said, through her fingers. "Potter. It's him."
Harry lowered his wand.
He didn't remember crossing the hall. He only remembered that he was suddenly standing in front of the old woman, and then he had his arms round her, round the thin bent shoulders in the lavender cardigan, and she smelled of lavender water and Pepper Imps and old lady, and he was holding on to his best friend so hard that his best friend said, into his shoulder, in a small indignant quaver:
"Mate. My hips."
On the stairs behind Ginny, George made a noise that was half a sob and half a laugh. "Can we keep him like this?" he said. "Just till Christmas?"
Kreacher had come up from the kitchens at the noise, with his arm in a sling. He took one look at the old woman, went away again, and came back with tea in the cup the Blacks had kept for tradesmen, which he presented to her with a deep and ceremonious bow.
Ron drank it with his little finger crooked.
Ron put down his cup and bent, creaking, to pick up Pansy's poker for her, and Pansy snatched it off the marble before his fingers got anywhere near it. "Iron, Weasley," she said. "For heaven's sake."
Then the young man with the shaved head stepped forward.
"Harry," he said. "It's Kingsley." He stood there in the wrecked hall with the unconscious body over his shoulder, and looked at Harry with those dark, deep, steady eyes.
Harry looked back. He found that his throat had closed up.
"The night everybody turned into me," said Harry. It came out hoarse. "You got to the Burrow and had your wand on Remus before you'd even said hello. What did you ask him?"
"What were the last words Albus Dumbledore spoke to the both of us?" said Kingsley Shacklebolt, in somebody else's light young West Country voice. "And Remus said, 'Harry is the best hope we have. Trust him.'" He shifted the weight on his shoulder. "I did, Harry. I still do."
Harry nodded. He couldn't speak.
"I'm told they've been using my face to make speeches," said Kingsley. "I'd quite like it back."
"If it makes you feel any better, Kings, they weren't very good speeches," said Harry, and found that he could talk again after all.
"Ow," said Hermione. "Oh — ow — oh, don't, Ron, don't, I've got a stitch, ow —"
She was lying in a great four-poster bed in the east wing, propped up on six pillows, grey in the face and all eyes, and thinner than Ron had ever seen her. She had only just woken up properly. Parvati had said she mustn't laugh.
She was laughing so hard she'd gone scarlet. Parvati had been dosing her with Pepperup Potion for the cold in her chest, and steam was coming out of her ears in little puffs.
Ron was sitting on the end of her bed in the lavender cardigan with his arms folded and his spectacles on, glaring at her. His feet didn't reach the floor. That was new.
"It's not funny."
"It's — oh — it's the hairnet —"
"I know about the hairnet, Hermione. I've seen the hairnet. I can't take it off, it's pinned on with about a hundred —"
"You look," gasped Hermione, "exactly like Auntie Muriel —"
"I did Auntie Muriel! That's how I got out! I did the heart attack!"
That finished her. She put both arms round her stomach and wept with laughter until Parvati came in and threatened to Stun her, and even then she didn't entirely stop.
It was ages before she could talk properly. When she could, she'd got her library face on.
"Both bodies," she said.
"What?"
"Kingsley said I'd want both halves in the same room. He's right." Hermione pushed herself up on her pillows, wincing. "Give me the book. The black one. On the table."
Ron gave it to her. It was the thin black-bound book from the Black library, Of the Hollow Folk, and Their Bargains. She leafed through to the page she'd marked, past a woodcut of something ragged with far too many elbows, pouring out of a hillside like smoke under a door, with the words The Sluagh, or Host beneath it. She turned that page quickly. Ron wished she'd been quicker. Then she read the marked page, and read it again.
"Two souls, and two bodies, and a threshold between them," she read aloud. "That's all it's ever needed." She looked up. "So that's what it'll need to undo it. Both bodies, at the same threshold, at the same time."
"And then what? You just — swap them back?"
"No. The Rite's gone. They took the folio. I don't know how to do it forwards, let alone backwards." Hermione's finger moved down the page. "But I don't think we need to. Look. The borrowed soul cannot abide cold iron. It burns. It wants out." She looked up at him. Her eyes were very bright. "So what happens if you put both bodies on a threshold, and they're both touching iron at the same moment, and there's nowhere else for the souls to go except —"
"— home," said Ron slowly.
"Home," said Hermione. "Each to its own."
"Where," said Ron, "in a house that shoes its horses in silver, are we going to find a threshold made of iron?"
Hermione didn't answer. She was looking out of the window. Ron followed her gaze, across the long silver lawns and down the drive, to where the tall black wrought-iron gates of Malfoy Manor stood in the moonlight, with the lane beyond.
The same gates a seventy-three-year-old witch had opened with his hand.
"Brilliant," said Ron.
The Prophet had it by breakfast. POTTER GANG SNATCHES PENSIONER, said the front page, over a photograph of Madam Philippa Thistlewood scowling at a garden party, and underneath it the Minister for Magic offered a thousand Galleons for her safe return. Ron read it in bed, in her spectacles. He said it was the most anybody had ever offered for him. Pansy said that according to her source on the news desk, the Minister had started at fifty.
They tried it first on Aldric Fawley. "I'd have gone first," said Ron, "only some old bat's run off with the rest of me."
Blaise's mother brought the other half herself. She arrived at the Manor gates at nine o'clock precisely, in a long black coat and a very large hat, with Owen Pritchard walking meekly beside her in Aldric Fawley's body. In the good wine cellar, she said, he had been perfectly charming company in a vague, sleepwalking sort of way: he did as he was told, and wept now and then without seeming to know why. Then last night, in the middle of a hand of piquet, he had woken up. He had put down his cards and asked her where he was, and then he had cried for his son, properly this time, and he had been teaching her Welsh ever since. It had been, Harry worked out, the first night that nobody came to his own body with a spoon of Dr Ubbly's.
She did not ask about her son. Harry saw her look at the wrecked hall, and at the scorch marks, and at the long empty gallery at the top of the stairs. He saw her face go smooth and pleasant and perfectly blank, and he remembered, with a small shiver, where Blaise had got it from.
Her eye fell on the skinny young man with the dragon on his forearm, and one pencilled eyebrow went up.
"Tarquin," said Ron, from his pouffe, before Kingsley could open his mouth. "My grandson. He carries the luggage."
"He has the look of it," said Mrs Zabini, and dismissed the Minister for Magic with a glance. "Well. Let's get on with it, then."
It took all morning to set up.
They laid Owen Pritchard's sleeping body on one side of the open gateway, with its hands stretched out on the gravel where the left-hand gate would close against them. Nobody had tried to wake it since the Ministry. "This is a man who sent back my Christmas present because I'd written Dear Aldric on the card," said Kingsley. "He can wake up once, in the right body."
Aldric Fawley's body stood on the other side, with Owen Pritchard's frightened, gentle eyes looking out of it, both hands pressed flat against the iron of the right-hand gate. It hissed where it touched him. He was trembling.
"It'll hurt," said Hermione. She was sitting in a wheeled Bath chair that Narcissa had produced from somewhere, wrapped in blankets, because Parvati had flatly refused to let her walk. "I don't know how much. I'm sorry."
"I know, cariad," said Owen Pritchard. He looked across the gateway at his own body, lying asleep on the gravel, and Harry saw his borrowed face work. "I've been thinking a great deal. In that cellar. About what Gareth would say, if he could see his old dad now." He shut his eyes. "I don't think he'd say very much at all. I think he'd just look at me."
"Now," said Hermione.
Harry and George swung both gates shut at once.
Nothing happened.
The gates met in the middle with a dull clang, the way any pair of gates might, and stood there. Owen Pritchard went on trembling with his hands pressed to the hissing iron. And in the ironwork above the lock, the stern black face that had looked down at all of them on the night they arrived twisted itself up out of the curlicues, looked at the two strangers holding its gates, and scowled.
"Oh," said Hermione, from the Bath chair, in a small, furious voice. "Oh, of course. It's a threshold. It only answers to the house."
Kingsley ran a hand over his shaved head and swore, fluently, in somebody else's accent. Then Narcissa Malfoy came down the front steps.
She had hardly said a word since they took Draco. She had spent most of it sitting on those steps in her grey silk, looking down the drive at these gates, and nobody had quite dared to ask her to stop. She crossed the gravel now without hurrying, past George and past Harry, and laid her bare palm flat against the iron.
The face in the ironwork looked at her.
"Yes," said Narcissa. "I know. They're with me."
The face looked at her a moment longer. Then it softened, almost imperceptibly, and sank back into the iron.
Narcissa stepped back. "Again," she said.
Harry and George swung the gates for the second time.
There was a sound like a great bell struck once, very deep, and a flash of cold white light that came from nowhere and everywhere. Harry felt it go through him, through his teeth and his bones, and he and George sprang away from the gates, in case either soul fancied a change of address. He saw the old man in the gateway arch his back, and cry out, and the sleeping body on the gravel convulse, once, like somebody woken by a bad dream.
Then silence.
Aldric Fawley opened his eyes.
He was a hundred and six years old, and he swayed. Kingsley caught him. Fawley looked round at all of them: at the Manor and the drive and the ring of wide-eyed faces, and at Mrs Zabini under her enormous hat, and his great beak of a nose went up.
"Violetta," he said, in a deep, cracked, thunderously affronted voice. "What in the name of Merlin's pants am I doing at Lucius Malfoy's gate?"
Mrs Zabini gave him the smile that had got her up the aisle seven times.
"Aldric, darling," she said. "Welcome back."
And on the gravel, on the other side of the gates, Owen Pritchard sat up in his own body, a small plump balding man of sixty-eight in his shirtsleeves. He looked down at his own hands, turning them over and over, and began, very quietly, to cry.
Kreacher, who had been watching from the front steps with his broken arm in a sling, went down to the kitchens afterwards and brought Aldric Fawley a cup of tea.
Aldric Fawley took one sip of it, and put it down.
"Black," he said. "Three sugars."
Pansy, standing at the back of the crowd, laughed so hard she had to sit down on the steps. Somebody owled Percy at the Ministry. He wrote back at once to say that he had never doubted it for a moment, and would they please keep the cup for Exhibit C.
Mrs Zabini did not go home.
She found Harry on the front steps that afternoon and stood beside him for a while, looking down the drive at the gates.
"I am told," she said, "that you intend to fetch my son."
"Yes."
"Good." She drew on her gloves. "When you go, Mr Potter, I am coming with you. I mention it now so that nobody wastes my time later by arguing."
Her trunks arrived from Belgravia before tea. There were nine of them. "Tarquin," said Mrs Zabini, and the Minister for Magic carried them up. That evening, passing the door of the small drawing room, Harry saw her sitting with Narcissa Malfoy on either side of the fire, playing piquet in complete silence. Neither of them was keeping score.
The hill was dark, and cold, and it had been dark and cold for three days.
Draco had worked that much out, at least. Three days. He was keeping a chart. He had started it on the first morning, on the smoothest stretch of floor he could find, in soot scraped off the bottom of the stew pot, and it had three columns. The first was meals. They came twice a day, bread and water and a pot of something that called itself stew, brought by a small, bent old woman in violet robes who looked only at the floor. The second was hounds. You could hear them from the cell, sometimes, far off in the tunnels, baying, and they ran at the same hours every night; Draco had the hours. The third column had only one entry, and he had underlined it twice. It was the number of steps it had taken to get from the great dark entrance under the hill to the cell they'd put him in. Three hundred and eighty, all of them down.
The cell wasn't a cell, exactly. It was a round chamber of dark, damp, living rock, deep in the heart of the hill, perhaps twenty feet across, lit by a faint greenish glow that came from nowhere and made everyone look drowned. There was no door. Across the only opening, instead of bars, grew roots: thick, twisted, grey-black roots, grown down out of the rock above and into the rock below, so close together you couldn't have put a hand between them. They were clammy to the touch. When you touched them, you heard something, very faintly, a long way down, as though a great way below you something very large had turned over in its sleep.
Nobody touched them much.
Through the roots, across a short passage, they could see another chamber. It was lit with the same drowned green, and in it, in a neat row on the stone floor, four people lay sleeping. Two young men. Two young women. One of them, the one on the end, had a cloud of dark curly hair and a small pointed chin, and every so often she frowned in her sleep and muttered something, and turned over.
"That's Cassia," said Draco, looking through the roots.
"Pansy's Cassia?" said Blaise.
"Pansy's Cassia." He watched her turn over in her sleep. "She's alive."
After that they mostly left Pansy out of it, and everybody else on the outside. It was easier that way.
Goyle was in a bad way at first.
He'd taken six curses on the stairs at the Manor, and the one meant for Kreacher had been made of the same stuff as the curse that had nearly stopped Hermione's heart. He lay on the stone floor of the chamber with his great chest rising and falling too fast and frost-burn spreading across his shoulders in white feathery lines, and he didn't complain once. He just lay there, and shivered, and apologised whenever he coughed.
Theo looked after him. He took off his bottle-green velvet coat, which he had not once removed since the Forest, and spread it over Goyle like a blanket, and sat beside him day and night with a strip torn from the silk lining soaked in water, bathing the frost-burns.
"Hold still, Gregory," he said, when Goyle tried to sit up. "I'm being tender. It's extremely rare, and I shan't do it twice, so for pity's sake enjoy it."
"Sorry," said Goyle.
"Stop apologising."
"Sorry."
"Gregory."
"Kreacher," said Goyle. "Did he get up?"
"Yes," said Draco.
Goyle turned his head and looked at him. "Call him, then."
Elves went where wizards couldn't. Every pure-blood child knew it, because every pure-blood child had once tried to hide from one. Draco had thought of it on the first night, and hadn't done it. The last he'd seen of Kreacher, over his shoulder on the way out, was a small bundle lying very still among the broken crystal, and if he called and nothing came, he would know.
"Kreacher," he said, to the dark. And then again, in his mother's voice, the one no elf had ever kept waiting: "Kreacher."
A long way off, outside the hill, there was a crack, small and flat: the sound of a house-elf arriving. Then another, and another, each one fainter, as though somebody were flinging himself at a shut door and being set down a little further off every time.
Then it stopped.
"He's outside," said Theo quietly. "The hill won't let him in. It was here before there were elves. He won't even remember where it put him."
Goyle lay back under the velvet coat and shut his eyes.
"He's alive, though," he said, and let Theo get on with it.
When the frost-burns had faded, Goyle sat up and ate two helpings of the stew, and Theo put his coat back on, brushed it down, went to the other side of the chamber and slept the clock round.
When he was awake, Theo reviewed the stew. He did it every evening, out loud and at some length, like a restaurant critic with a grudge. On the first night it was a Potage Tragique. On the second it was a Ragoût of Regret, served on a bed of further regret. On the third, something surfaced in it that nobody could put a name to. Blaise, who had been running a book on the contents, voided every bet, and Theo lay back on the stone and declared it a breach of the International Statute of Secrecy, on the grounds that no Muggle must ever be allowed to find out that wizards had eaten it. Blaise laughed until he wheezed. Goyle, who was on his second bowl, looked faintly hurt on the stew's behalf.
♫ Listen along
Theo started reading the walls on the fifth day.
He'd been looking at them from the start. Everybody had; there was nothing else to look at. The dark rock of the chamber was covered, floor to ceiling, in carvings: long straight vertical lines crossed with short strokes, hundreds and hundreds of them, running round and round the curved walls in bands, old and worn and furred with a faint grey lichen.
"Ogham," Theo had said, on the first day. "One of the rude ones." Then, quite out of character, he had left it there for four.
Now he got up, and went to the wall, and put his hand flat against it, and began to read.
He read for hours. He went round the whole chamber, very slowly, running his fingers along the grooves, muttering. Sometimes he stopped and went back. Sometimes he stood for a long time in one place without moving. Draco watched him and let him be. He'd known Theo nearly all his life. He had seen him amused by practically everything and bored by the rest, but he had never once seen him like this: completely, utterly absorbed.
"It's a ledger," Theo said at last.
He turned round. His face was pale in the green light.
"The walls. The whole hill, I think. It's a ledger." He touched the carvings. "Every bargain ever made under this hill. Every exchange. Going back —" he shook his head, "— I don't know how far. Further back than wands. Every child taken from a cradle and every changeling left behind in its place. Every soul traded for another. It's all written down. Every single one. It keeps accounts." He laughed, a little wildly. "It's Percy Weasley. The Otherworld is Percy Weasley."
"Theo," said Draco.
"And here." Theo went quickly round the wall to a place near the root-barred doorway and put his hand on a band of carving that looked newer than the rest, sharper, the grooves still clean. "This is ours. This is now. The tithe circle. A hundred for a hundred. The terms are written right here." He was running his finger along the lines, faster and faster. "The circle closes at midnight on All Hallows, when the last name is entered. And then it opens. The door. For the Master. And — oh." He stopped.
"Oh, what?"
"Oh, that's clever." Theo's finger had stopped on a single line. "It's writing. It's all just writing. The circle's a contract, and it's carved, and anything that's carved can be —" He turned round, his eyes blazing. "It can be uncarved. A line struck through. One stroke, in the right place, in the right tree-letter, before midnight, and the whole contract's void. The circle breaks. The hundred go free."
Goyle, who had been dozing against the wall, opened his eyes.
"Then do it," said Blaise.
"I can't."
"Why not?"
"Because," said Theo, "it has to be cut. Properly cut, with a stylus, a silver one, a runesmith's tool. You can't do it with a fingernail. You can't do it with a spoon." He looked down at his own empty hands. "And I haven't got one. I gave mine away."
Draco's sooty finger stopped halfway down his chart.
"To Luna," said Draco slowly.
"To Luna."
"That was also your wand," said Blaise.
"Yes," said Theo. "It seemed terribly romantic at the time."
Blaise put his head back against the wall and shut his eyes.
"You gave," he said, "the only useful tool any of us possessed, the one thing on Merlin's green earth that could get us out of this hill, to a woman who reads newspapers upside down to help with the crossword."
"Whereas yours," said Theo, "is in a drawer somewhere with a label on it. So is Gregory's." He spread his hands. "Mine, at least, is with somebody who likes me."
"Why?"
Theo sat down on the stone floor of the chamber, under the ledger of every bargain ever made in the hollow hills of Britain, and folded his hands in his lap. He looked, Draco thought, entirely serene.
"Because she reads everything upside down, Blaise," he said. "She'll bring it."
It was Draco who saw it.
He had been sitting under the wall with his eyes shut since the business with the stylus. Then he opened his eyes and sat up very straight.
"The slate," he said.
"What slate?"
"Ginevra's slate. The copy from the Death Chamber." Draco was already on his feet. "Luna said it would go on showing us what's there for as long as we had it, and we all watched the rice move. It's a plan of this floor, which means it's a plan of this room, and these walls are on it." He laid his hand flat on the curved rock beside the roots. "Anything carved into them is on it too. If somebody cuts something into this wall tonight, it'll be on that slate by the morning, in the bottom of Ginevra's handbag."
"Very small," said Theo.
"About the size of the rice. But it'll be there."
"I can't cut anything without a stylus, Draco. I did mention it."
"You said you couldn't cut the contract without one."
"That needs silver," said Theo, "and the right letter, and the right hand." He stopped. Then he was down on his knees, running his fingertips over the floor of the chamber, feeling for something. "A letter home only needs an edge."
Goyle got up. He went slowly round the chamber twice, looking at the floor, and then he knelt down by the roots, where the rock was cracked and broken, and worked his great fingers into a split in it, and pulled. A long sliver of black flint came up out of the floor with a noise like a tooth coming out. He wiped it on his trousers and handed it to Theo handle first, the way you'd hand somebody a knife.
Theo looked at Draco. "Well? What do we tell them?"
Draco thought about it. He thought about how small the letters would have to be, and how few of them, and about who would be bending over that slate on the other side. He thought about what they would need to see first, before they'd believe a single word of the rest.
"I'll write it," he said. "In English. Potter can barely read his own reports."
"Draco, it's a hill. It's kept its books in Ogham since before anybody here spoke English."
"Then it can make an exception." Draco held out his hand for the flint, and when Theo didn't give it to him, took it.
He cut the letters himself, kneeling at the foot of the wall in the green light with his back to the rest of them, in capitals as neat as he could make them with a sliver of stone. It took him most of an hour. Near the end, Theo came and looked over his shoulder, and read it, and stared at him.
"That's your message?" said Theo. "With the whole of the Otherworld on the other side of that wall?"
"He'll know it's me," said Draco, and sat back on his heels, as pleased as if he'd filed a report on time.
"It's also," said Goyle slowly, "the first thing the stew lady's going to see when she comes round that corner with the pot."
Nobody had thought of that. They were still thinking about it when they went to sleep.
They needn't have worried. In the morning the letters were gone. The rock where Draco had cut them was smooth and whole and furred with the same grey lichen as the rest of the wall, as though nobody had ever touched it. Theo went and laid his hand on the place. Then he moved it a foot to the left, to a single short stroke he'd cut there himself the night before, idly, while Draco was working, to see how the flint took the stone.
That was still there, as clean and sharp as if he'd cut it a minute ago.
"Oh, you snob," said Theo softly, to the wall. "It's a ledger. It keeps its own books, in its own hand, and anything in any other hand is graffiti. It's tidied the graffiti away overnight, like a very old and very fussy housekeeper." He turned round, his face alight. "It has to be Ogham. And how lovely that our hostess has walked past ten thousand lines of it twice a day and never read a word."
Blaise, who had followed all this from the floor with his arm over his eyes, lifted the arm.
"And who," he said, "is going to read it at the other end? Nobody out there can read Ogham, Theo."
Theo turned the flint over in his fingers.
"Granger asked me to teach her," he said. "In the kitchen at Grimmauld Place. I told her it had taken me eleven years." He tried the edge with his thumb. "Ten Galleons says she's reading it inside a week."
"Done," said Blaise at once. "I've seen your handwriting."
Theo cut the same message in a band of quick, cramped strokes beside the roots. Draco, who had taken most of an hour over his, timed him with his arms folded. It took four minutes.
"Theo," said Blaise from the floor, rather more quietly than usual. "The last time any of us saw Granger, she couldn't breathe."
Theo put the flint down.
"She's reading it," said Draco.
He said it to his chart, as flatly as an entry in a report, and went back to counting. Blaise looked at the back of his head for a while. Then he put his arm back over his eyes.
Hermione had asked for the slate as soon as she could sit up.
Ginny had propped it on the bedside table where she could see it from the pillows, and Hermione found that she looked at it more often than she looked at anything else. The four grains still lay in their neat row in the big chamber. But there were more of them every morning. They came in the night, a handful at a time, and were laid out in rows in the empty chambers along the passages, until the slate began to look like a dormitory; and by breakfast each one had its tick in the copied ledger, in the same careful red ink. Only the four in the smaller chamber across the passage never lay still. She knew which of those was which by now.
One afternoon there were marks on the wall of their chamber that hadn't been there that morning.
They were tiny, and very fresh, bright against the faint grey hatching that had always furred the walls on the slate: a short line of them cut along the inside of the curved wall, close to the roots. Hermione snatched up the magnifying glass she had borrowed from Narcissa's writing desk and held it over the slate, and her heart began to thump.
Long straight strokes, with short ones cut across them. She knew what it was. She had watched Theo teach Luna to write her name in it on a napkin, at dinner, the night of the raid.
She called for Harry. He came at a run, with Ginny behind him, and the two of them bent over the slate beside her and stared at the little line of scratches under the glass.
"It's Theo," said Ginny. "It's got to be. Malfoy would have written it in English."
"What does it say?" said Harry.
Hermione drew a breath to tell him.
"I don't know," she said. "I can't read it."
She had never said that in her life, about anything. It came out sounding like somebody else.
They stayed with her until the light went. When they had gone, Hermione sat on with the magnifying glass over the slate, looking at a message she couldn't read, from somebody she couldn't reach. Then she reached for a quill, and began to make a list.