On Samhain night, keep the door shut and the fire lit. And if you hear hounds, don't look out.
old Somerset saying
On Samhain night, keep the door shut and the fire lit. And if you hear hounds, don't look out.
old Somerset saying
♫ Listen along
The Levels had flooded. There hadn't been a drop of rain all week. The Muggle forecast had said dry and bright, and been right. But at some point in the last few days the rhynes and ditches and drainage channels of the Somerset Levels had filled up and brimmed over, quietly, while Somerset slept. By the afternoon of the thirty-first of October the whole wide green flatness that Harry had looked out across from the churchyard at Ashcombe was gone. It was one great sheet of still grey water, stretching away for miles in every direction, with the tops of hedges and the crowns of willows poking up out of it here and there like drowned men's fingers.
And out of the middle of it, alone, rose the Tor.
It had looked strange enough before, a steep green cone set down on the flat land. Now it stood up out of the water, the way it must have done before anyone thought to drain the Levels.
It was an island again tonight. The roofless tower on its summit stood black against a sky the colour of a bruise.
"All Hallows," said Ginny quietly, beside him.
They were standing at the lychgate of St Aldhelm's. Behind them in the churchyard, and in the church, and spilling out over the lane, the Order of the Phoenix was making ready for war. Harry could hear it: voices, footsteps, the clank of George's crates being unloaded, and Charlie's dragons shifting and grumbling in the field behind the churchyard wall. In front of them the flood ran right up to the bottom of the lane, black and flat and perfectly still.
"Twenty-seven years," said Harry.
He hadn't meant to say it. Ginny simply took his hand.
Twenty-seven years ago tonight, in a small house in a village called Godric's Hollow, a man had come to the door, and Harry's father had told his mother to take Harry and run. He had no memory of it at all, except in dreams: a green light, and a high cold laugh, and a woman's voice begging. He'd spent most of his life trying not to think about what day it was when Hallowe'en came round. Mostly he managed it.
Tonight he was standing at the edge of a flood, looking at a door to the land of the dead.
"I know what he's going to try," said Ginny. "Tonight. I know what he'll say to you. Mum and Dad." She looked at him sideways. "Your mum and dad, I mean. Not mine. Mine are in the church arguing about the sandwiches."
Harry laughed despite himself.
"The deal still stands," said Ginny. "You tell me first. Before, not after. Whatever you're going to do, you tell me first."
"I know."
"Harry."
"I know, Gin," he said. "I'll tell you."
She squeezed his hand hard, once, and let it go.
The plan was Ron's.
It had been Ron's from the beginning, when he had sat down at the long table in the small dining room at Malfoy Manor in a lavender cardigan and a hairnet, taken out a quill, and started drawing on the back of a map of Somerset. He'd barely stopped since. He had moved everybody round in his head a thousand times: the Order, the Harpies, the Aurors, the dragons, the loyalists, the hostages, the hounds, the hill.
Tonight, in the vestry of St Aldhelm's church, with the map pinned to the wall and everybody who mattered crammed in round it, he went through it one last time.
It was a strange thing to watch: the strangest thing Harry had seen in a month that had not been short of them. A small, bent, white-haired old witch in pearls, peering at a map through her spectacles and rapping it with a wooden spoon she'd borrowed from Molly, giving orders to Minerva McGonagall.
The chalkboard in Grimmauld Place had been Quidditch. The map was chess. CASTLES, underlined, ran along both shores, and one of the castles was Professor McGonagall. KNIGHTS went right across the sky, and two of the knights were dragons. PAWNS sat over the White Spring, with four names under it, and one of the pawns was Ron. In the middle of the hill, over the cell, there were four more names. Above them he had written TAKEN, and then crossed it out. Harry looked for his own name for some time before he found it, a long way from the hill, tucked in behind a castle. Over it Ron had written KING.
"— and you'll take the east side, Professor, where the water's shallowest, because that's where they'll come ashore —"
"Yes, Mr Weasley," said McGonagall.
Across the vestry, Hermione caught Harry's eye and bit the inside of her cheek, hard.
"— and Charlie, you're up top with the dragons and the Harpies, you're keeping the hounds off everybody's heads —"
"Yes, Gran," said Charlie.
"— and nobody," said Ron, turning round and rapping the spoon on the table so hard that everyone jumped, "nobody lets Harry anywhere near the top of that hill. Understood? He wants Harry at the door at midnight. That's all he needs. So Harry stays down here, with Kingsley and the ground lot, and if he so much as looks at that path, somebody sits on him."
"I'll sit on him," said Ginny. "I've had plenty of practice."
Ron's borrowed face went the colour of his cardigan.
"I'll help," said Neville, and then, as everybody turned to look at him, "with the — the ordinary sort. Of sitting."
"I'm standing right here," said Harry.
"Good," said Ron. "Stay there."
He turned back to the map, and in the flickering candlelight of the vestry, for just a moment, Harry saw his best friend's face looking out through the old woman's features, frowning, anxious, completely determined. It didn't matter what body he was in. It never had.
"And the inside," said Ron, more quietly. He tapped a point on the far flank of the hill, where a thin blue line on the map came down from the slope into the water. "The White Spring. Water stair, west, like it said on the slate. That's the way in. The back door. Hermione, Parkinson, Luna, and me."
"You're not going inside," said Molly, from the back. "Ron. Look at you. You can barely manage the stairs at the Manor —"
"My body's in there, Mum."
"Ronald —"
"Some old woman's walking round in it, Mum," said Ron. "And the only way I get it back is if I'm stood right next to her when Hermione does the thing with the gates. So I'm going. I'll go slow. I'll take a stick. I'll have a sandwich first, if it makes you feel better. But I'm going."
Molly drew a breath to argue, and Arthur put a hand on her shoulder, and she let it out again.
"And the gates?" said Kingsley. He was standing by the vestry door in his borrowed young body, with the dragon tattoo on his forearm and his arms folded. He had become so entirely himself inside it that Harry hardly noticed the difference any more.
Hermione held up her small beaded bag.
"I've got the gates," she said.
Kingsley unfolded his arms.
"You've got the gates," said Kingsley.
"The gates of Malfoy Manor. Shrunk. They're in the bag." She looked round at all of them. "It's the only iron threshold we know works. I wasn't going to leave it behind."
In the corner of the vestry, Narcissa Malfoy made a small, strangled sound.
"I'll give them back," said Hermione.
On the way out of the vestry, George handed round a cardboard box labelled HANDS-FREE EARSʷ (PROTOTYPE) (DO NOT EAT). Inside were dozens of small flesh-coloured earpieces, one each. They were tuned, he said, to the Potterwatch frequency, and they worked both ways: Lee would be calling the whole thing from the vestry window with a pair of Omnioculars. "Try not to swear into them," George added. "Potterwatch never could afford a Censoring Charm, and half the country's going to be listening in. So's Mum."
Harry found Narcissa Malfoy at the far end of the churchyard, by the wall, watching the dragons.
The Welsh Green was asleep in the field beyond, curled round on itself like an enormous emerald cat. The other one wasn't. She was crouched at the edge of the field with her great dark head down between her claws, as close to the churchyard wall as she could get, making a low, unhappy sound in her throat.
"Charlie Weasley tells me she has never fought anything in her life," said Narcissa, without turning round.
"He says she's only coming because she doesn't want to be left on her own."
"Yes," said Narcissa. "He told me that too."
She had sat on the front steps of the Manor every night since, facing the gates. Everybody had seen her there, and everybody had politely looked the other way. Harry had no idea what to say about it now, either, so he said the first thing that came into his head.
"Apparently I tamed one once," he said.
Narcissa turned her head.
"In the books," said Harry. "The ones with the goblin. In volume three I've got a wand made out of a dragon's tooth, for services rendered in volume two, and Draco won't tell me what the services were. I think he's embarrassed for me."
Narcissa's gloved fingers tightened on the top of the wall.
"It was a Hungarian Horntail," she said at last. "It had been terrorising a village in the Carpathians, and everybody wanted it killed, and you went up the mountain on your own with a ham sandwich, because you had worked out that it was only lonely." Something moved at the corner of her mouth. "I read that one to him every night for a month. He cried at the sandwich."
Harry thought about a rocky enclosure at the edge of the Forbidden Forest, and a golden egg, and the smell of his own robes smouldering.
"For the record," he said, "I've met a Horntail. It didn't want a sandwich."
Narcissa Malfoy laughed.
It came out of her all at once, as though it had been waiting a long time behind a door and somebody had finally opened it: a real laugh, startled and helpless. She put her gloved hand over her mouth, and it went on coming anyway. Across the churchyard, Molly Weasley looked up from the sandwiches and stared.
"No," she said, when she could. "No, I don't suppose it did." Then she looked back at the dark dragon crouched against the wall, and her face went quiet again. "Bring him home, Mr Potter."
"He'll probably bring me home," said Harry. "He's annoying like that."
"Yes," said Narcissa Malfoy. "He gets that from me."
Percy Weasley had never enjoyed Hallowe'en.
It was disorderly. It involved costumes, and loud noises, and small children demanding things without appointments. He had spent most of his adult life hoping that one year it might simply not happen.
It was happening now. And Percy was standing on a hummock of dry ground at the foot of Glastonbury Tor, with a clipboard, looking at approximately four hundred Muggles.
"Druids," said Percy faintly.
"Real ones, I think," said his father beside him, radiant with delight. "Look at their robes, Percy. And that one's got a staff."
"Father, there are four hundred Muggles walking up that hill with lanterns."
"Samhain," said Arthur Weasley happily. "It's a festival, isn't it? They do it every year. They climb up to the tower and light candles and sing. There's a drum circle." He peered across the water. "And, unless I'm very much mistaken, a morris side."
"They cannot," said Percy, "be on the hill. In approximately one hour, the hill is going to open, and a pack of spectral hounds from the Otherworld is going to come out of it, followed by, Hermione believes, the dead."
"Oh, I shouldn't think they'd mind," said Arthur. "That's rather what they've come for."
Percy closed his eyes.
He had his Obliviators, every one the department could spare, and it was nowhere near enough. He did not have Gawain Robards, or the Aurors who had come over to the Order, quietly, one at a time. Hermione had pointed out that a splinter of a door was still a door, and that when the hill opened, the arch in the Death Chamber would open with it, in the middle of an empty Ministry. So Robards had taken his Aurors down to Level Nine that afternoon with a crate of George's nails. Percy had a map, and a schedule, and a colour-coded system of flags. And he had four hundred Muggles, a handful of druids, a drum circle, a morris side and a man dressed as a badger, and every one of them was going to see something tonight that the Statute of Secrecy had been specifically designed to prevent.
He opened his eyes and looked at his clipboard.
"Right," he said. "Mass Confundus on the lower paths. The badger first."
"Why the badger first?"
"Because," said Percy, "he's looking at us."
The hill opened as the moon rose above the Tor.
Harry was on the western shore with Kingsley and the ground forces, knee-deep in black water among the drowned hedges, with the whole bulk of the Tor between him and the opening. He didn't need to see it. It came up out of the ground and through the water and into the soles of their feet: a cold so deep and so sudden that it felt less like cold than like an absence, like a hole opening in the world. The flood around their legs went white in an instant, a great disc of frost racing out across the water from the foot of the Tor, and Harry heard the ice crack and groan as it spread. It closed round his shins like a hand, and he had to blast himself loose.
Then the baying began.
It came from inside the hill and all round it at once, from the slopes and the terraces and the dark, a long, falling, belling cry that went on and on. Underneath it, for the first time, Harry heard the horn clearly, and it sounded like the whole sky being torn in half.
And out of the flanks of the Tor, from openings Harry hadn't known were there, came the Wild Hunt.
White hounds first, pouring down the steep grassy slopes in rivers of pale light, too many to count, with their red ears flat and their mouths open. Their breath hung in the air behind them and didn't fade, and where they ran, the grass went grey. Behind them came the riders: tall pale figures on tall pale horses, so thin that Harry could see the hill through their ribs, whose hooves struck no sound from the ice and left no mark on it. Some of them carried spears. Some carried horns. Where their faces should have been there was only a smooth greyness, like a thumb pressed into wet clay, and as each one came out of the hill it swung that greyness along the shore, casting about the way a hound casts for a scent, until it came to the western shore, and Harry felt it find him. They came out in a long silent column, and wheeled, and spread out across the frozen Levels like smoke.
Then they went up.
They ran up into the sky as if there were a road there that only they could see, hounds and horses and riders together, climbing into the bruised dark over the Tor in a great spiral of white. Harry felt the cold of them pass overhead like a wind.
Beside him, Kingsley let out a long breath.
"Well," he said. "Charlie's turn."
♫ Listen along
Ginny Potter had played professional Quidditch for eight years, and in all that time she had never once seen the Holyhead Harpies take to the air in silence.
They did it tonight. The whole first team, every reserve, and a handful of retired players who had heard about it on Potterwatch and turned up at the churchyard that afternoon with their old brooms and asked what they could do. And Oliver Wood, who was not a Harpy and had not been asked, and who had arrived in his Puddlemere robes and informed Gwenog Jones that he had once played half a season with a broken arm and was not missing this. They rose off the flooded field behind St Aldhelm's in a single wordless wave of dark green robes, with one navy one in the middle of it, and Gwenog Jones at the head of them looked round at Ginny as they climbed and grinned like a wolf.
"Still suspended, Potter," she said. "Still fined."
"Worth every Knut, Captain."
"Try not to die. I haven't finished collecting."
Charlie's dragons were already up. The Welsh Green went first, sleek and emerald, beating hard for the Tor with Charlie flat on its neck. And beside it, huge and dark, with a long ridged tail and scales the colour of wet slate, came the shy one, which had turned out on closer acquaintance to be a Hebridean Black. She flew low and close to the Green, the way a younger sister keeps close to an older one in a crowd.
And round them, black-winged and silent, came the thestrals. They hadn't been sent for. They had arrived at the churchyard an hour after sunset, the whole herd from the Forest, and stood among the gravestones waiting. Hagrid had wept.
The Hunt came up to meet them over the Tor.
The hounds were everywhere: above, below, on every side, running on nothing through the dark with their pale bodies streaming frost and their red ears pinned back. Where they passed, the air went solid with cold. Her fingers froze to her broom handle. And under the cold there was something else, coming off them like heat off a forge: anger. Ginny felt it go past her and on down to the Levels, to the drained fields and the ruler-straight ditches, to the car park and the tea room at the foot of the Tor, and to four hundred people climbing it with lanterns on the one night of the year when the old people of this country had always shut their doors and left the milk out. There hadn't been milk on a doorstep in Somerset for a long time, and the Hunt remembered every night of it. Behind the hounds came the riders, faceless and silent, levelling long white spears.
Then Gwenog Jones put back her head and gave the Harpies' battle cry.
Ginny had heard it in changing rooms all her career, usually just before somebody got hurt. It was a witch's cackle: the one that has been coming down the chimneys of Muggle stories for centuries, high and long and gleeful and ear-splitting, the one children do on Hallowe'en in pointed paper hats without ever knowing where they learnt it. Every Harpy in the air took it up at once and flung it across the dark at the Wild Hunt. Far below, the Muggles with their lanterns heard it too. Percy's Mass Confundus was supposed to keep their eyes on the path. It didn't. They looked up, and saw what was making it.
"WITCHES!" somebody screamed, in pure delight, and the whole of the lower slopes of Glastonbury Tor began to cheer.
She dived.
She went down through them the way she'd go through a defensive line, low and fast and with no intention whatsoever of stopping, and she left anything clever for another day. She put a Blasting Curse into the first rider she met from close enough to touch, and it came apart like a snowman hit by a Bludger. She put a second into the horse. Then she was through, and turning, and the next one was coming at her.
Around her, the Harpies were doing the same. Gwenog Jones was going through the Hunt like a knife through cloth, with her Beaters on either side of her, and they weren't using wands at all: they were using their bats. It turned out that Wild Hunt hounds went a long way when you hit them properly with a Beater's bat, and that they didn't come back.
The riders were another matter. A spear took one of the reserves under the arm, and the frost went over her from the shoulder down, white as salt, and her hands opened on her broom. She fell. Something black and bony came up out of the dark beneath her, and she landed across its back, and the thestral turned without a sound and bore her away towards the churchyard.
And then the Hebridean Black arrived.
She had been hanging back, circling at the edge of it all, making small anxious noises. Then a rider went for Charlie on the Welsh Green, spear levelled, and she stopped being shy.
She opened her jaws and breathed out a column of fire as wide as a house, straight through the heart of the Hunt. The dark sky over the Tor lit up orange from one horizon to the other. Where the fire passed, the white hounds didn't burn. They simply went out, like candles, dozens at a time.
On the lower slopes the Muggles looked up, and gasped, and burst into applause all over again.
"Fireworks," Ginny heard someone shout, far below. "Oh, they've outdone themselves this year —"
On a hummock at the foot of the hill, one of Percy's Obliviators asked, a little nervously, whether they ought to do something about the witches. Percy looked up at the Holyhead Harpies, shrieking with laughter on their broomsticks against a burning sky, on Hallowe'en, over Glastonbury Tor.
"No," he said. "Nobody is ever going to believe them."
Across the water, behind the churchyard wall, George Weasley, who had been waiting all evening for exactly this, put a match to every crate of Weasleys' Wildfire Whiz-Bangs he had. Within a minute the sky over the Tor was full of dragons, and only two of them were real, and the lower slopes cheered every single one.
And at the vestry window, crouched over a wireless set with his scarf wound up to his ears, Lee Jordan was putting all of it out live on the Potterwatch frequency, to every kitchen in Britain and every ear on the Levels. "— and that's the Hebridean Black making her competitive debut, ladies and gentlemen, and I don't think the Wild Hunt had her in the scouting report. Harpies on the left, Harpies on the right, and Gwenog Jones has just hit a hound so hard it's gone into orbit —"
The White Spring came out of the flank of the Tor through a low stone arch half-buried in ivy, and ran down in a thin, bright trickle to the floodwater below. There was a wall behind the arch, of old rough stone, and in the wall there was no door. Luna had been here before, and had been told, very politely, not yet.
Luna put her hand flat against it.
"Hello there," she said. "Would you mind? We've come for some friends."
Hermione had been prepared for this. She'd heard about the chapel door from Theo, at some length. She had not quite been prepared for the wall to consider the request for a moment, with a faint grinding sound like somebody thinking, and then quietly fold back into the hillside like a curtain.
Behind it, a stone stair went down into the dark.
"Stairs," said Ron. "Course it's stairs."
He was leaning on a stick. His borrowed face under the white curls was grey with determination. He looked down the stairs into the blackness and set his jaw.
"Weasley," said Pansy, beside him. "How many stairs are there, would you say?"
"Doesn't matter."
"It does if you have to go down them in that."
"It doesn't matter," said Ron, "how many stairs there are."
There were three hundred and eighty, exactly as Draco's message had said, and Ron counted every single one of them out loud, in Philippa Thistlewood's thin, cracked, furious voice, all the way down. Pansy held his elbow the entire time and did not once let go. At step two hundred and twelve his left knee gave out altogether, and she said, "Ron —" and caught him, and held him up, and said, "Impossible menace, am I?" And Ron said, breathlessly, "Especially now," and she laughed quietly in the dark.
Hermione walked ahead of them with her wand lit and her heart going like a drum, and kept her eyes front, so that they wouldn't see her smiling.
At the bottom, when she looked back, the slit of night at the top of the stair had gone. The wall had folded itself shut behind them without a sound, and there was only the dark, and the long way down they had come.
♫ Listen along
The tunnels were cold and green and alive.
The walls were living rock, dark and damp and furred with grey lichen, and they were carved from floor to ceiling with long straight lines crossed by short strokes, running round and round and on and on into the dark. Roots came down through the roof, thick and twisted and grey. Some of them moved. And from somewhere below, faint and deep, there came a sound that Hermione felt more than heard: a long slow rhythm, like breathing, as if the hill itself were asleep and dreaming.
Luna led. She went without a light. She walked down the green tunnels humming softly under her breath, and at every fork she stopped, and tilted her head, and listened, and chose.
Twice, behind them, Hermione heard footsteps that stopped when they stopped. The first time she told herself it was the echo. The second time the hairs rose on her arms under her sleeves, all at once, the way they do when somebody stands too close behind you in a queue, and she turned with her wand up and lit the passage all the way back to the last bend. It was empty: roots, and carvings, and on the wet floor between their own boot prints, a line of small bare footprints with the toes pointing at her heels. They were still filling with water. Luna had stopped humming. She didn't start again.
"How do you know which way?" whispered Pansy.
"The walls are telling me," said Luna. "They're very chatty. It's all ledgers, mostly. Somebody traded a cow for a cure for warts in eleven hundred and something."
"Something?" said Hermione.
"It mumbles that bit," said Luna. "There's lichen on it." She turned left. "Theo's this way. I can hear him."
"You can hear him?"
"He's singing," said Luna.
He was. They heard it soon afterwards, faint, echoing down the green passage: a light, clear, slightly off-key tenor giving a spirited rendition of what Hermione eventually identified, with some disbelief, as the Hogwarts school song, to the tune of a Celestina Warbeck ballad.
"Oh, for heaven's sake," said Pansy.
And then round the next corner, in the middle of the passage between them and the singing, there was Ron.
The other Ron. The real one's body. Tall and long-limbed and freckled, with the red hair and the long nose and the jumper with the moth hole in the elbow, standing in the green gloom with his wand in his left hand. There were four violet-robed witches and wizards behind him. He'd heard them coming.
He looked at the small old woman in the lavender cardigan, leaning on her stick at the back of the little group. And Hermione saw something cross his face — Ron's face — that she had never seen on it before: a flicker of pure, bewildered recognition, the look of somebody catching sight of themselves in a mirror they hadn't known was there.
"Oi," said the old woman on the stick, in a cracked and furious quaver. "Thistlewood. That's mine." He jabbed the stick at his own body. "Look at the state of it. You've let my hair go. When did you last feed it? And that's my jumper. Mum made that jumper. Get your hands out of my pockets."
One of the violet robes laughed. He was still laughing when all four of them raised their wands, and Pansy Parkinson stepped forward, took the poker out of the inside of her coat, and hit him with it so hard that he went straight down and did not get up.
"I've been carrying this," she said, to the tunnel in general, "for three weeks."
It was short and it was ugly.
Hermione took two of them. She took no pleasure in it. She was still not quite well: there was a chill in her chest that had never entirely gone away, and her hands shook. But she had lain in a four-poster bed at Malfoy Manor for long enough, thinking about what she'd do the next time somebody tried to freeze her heart. She did most of it. Luna took the fourth, with a Stunning Spell so polite it was almost apologetic.
And Pansy went after Ron's body.
Philippa Thistlewood was seventy-three years old. She had been a very good witch once. But she had never in her life been six foot three, or twenty-eight, or quick, and she'd been wearing all three for weeks without getting used to any of them. She reached for her wand, and her borrowed hand was too big and too fast and overshot. Pansy came in under it with the poker, and touched it lightly to the back of her left hand.
It hissed. Philippa cried out and dropped the wand.
"That," said Pansy, "was for the hedge."
And then she hit her, quite hard, on the side of the head.
Ron's body folded up and went down on the tunnel floor in a long untidy heap of limbs. Pansy stood over it, breathing hard, with the poker in her hand.
"Parkinson," said the old woman on the stick, in an outraged quaver. "That's my head."
"It's her head, at the moment."
"It's going to be my head again in about five minutes!"
"Then you'll have something to remember me by," said Pansy.
Somewhere further down the passage, past the reach of the wand-light, something laughed. It was a small, pleased laugh, quite close, and it went on a moment longer than it should have, the way a child laughs at a joke it hasn't understood.
Then it stopped.
"Right," said Ron, very high. "Bloody hell. This place is creepy."
The roots across the doorway of the cell were the same grey-black as the rest, grown down from the rock above and into the rock below, too close together to put a hand through. There was a strange green light behind them. And behind the light, sitting on the floor, with their backs against the carved stone wall, were four men.
Hermione saw them all at once. Greg, huge and patient, with his hands folded. Blaise, flat on his back, with one arm flung across his face. Theo, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the chamber in his bottle-green velvet coat, now much the worse for wear, with his mouth open in the middle of the chorus.
And Draco.
He was sitting apart from the others, against the far wall, with his knees drawn up. He'd lost weight. His face was white and hollowed in the green light, and when they came round the corner he didn't look up at once.
Hermione didn't know what she'd expected. She'd lain awake at the Manor night after night thinking about what she'd say, and what he'd say. She'd imagined him relieved. She'd imagined him sardonic. She'd imagined, in the small hours of one particular morning, something she wasn't going to think about again in front of other people.
When he did look up, he looked only at her. His eyes went over her face, very fast, and down to her chest, where the frost had been. He took in all of her, the way you'd count something to make sure none of it was missing. And then something in his face gave way, just for a second, and he closed his eyes.
"Hello, Draco," said Hermione.
He opened them again.
"Granger?" he said. His voice was hoarse.
"Yes," said Hermione.
"You're late."
She reached into her beaded bag, and took out a slim hawthorn wand, which she had picked up off the frosted landing floor at Malfoy Manor and had not let out of her sight since. She held it out through the roots.
"You'll want this," she said.
He looked at it as though he had forgotten what it was for. Then he got up, and crossed the chamber, and took it from her hand. His fingers brushed hers through the roots. They were freezing.
He didn't let go straight away, and neither did she.
"Luna," said Theo.
He had stopped singing. He was on his feet, at the roots, with his hands wrapped round two of them. Theo, who performed everything, wasn't performing. In the green light he looked about fifteen, and helpless, and he was shining.
Luna came up to the roots on the other side. She reached into the pocket of her coat, and took out Theo's wand, silver-tipped, and held it up between them.
"I brought it," she said.
"I know," said Theo. "I knew you would. That's why I left it with you."
Luna passed the wand through the roots. Theo's fingers closed round it. He held on to it, and to her hand, for a moment. Then he let go, and turned round to the wall beside the doorway. There was a band of carving there, newer and sharper than the rest, the grooves still clean. He put his left hand flat against the stone.
"Right," said Theo Nott. "Everybody be quiet, please. This is the difficult bit."
He ran his fingers along the line of carving, reading. Everybody was quiet. Hermione could hear, from far overhead, the muffled boom of dragonfire, and under it, from far below, the deep rhythm of the hill breathing. As Theo read, the breathing changed. It caught, and held, like somebody listening at a door from the other side. Where his fingers had passed, the grooves in the stone were wet.
"It's all a contract," Theo said softly, as he read. "All of it. Terms and conditions. A hundred for a hundred, sealed at midnight, witnessed by the hill. And the hill keeps its word. It always has." His fingers moved on, and his voice went quieter. "The witnesses have signed underneath. There are an awful lot of them." He swallowed. "Some of the signatures are new." His finger stopped. "Here."
It was a single letter. A long vertical line, crossed by five short strokes, straight and level, like the rungs of a narrow ladder. It sat in the middle of the band of carving like a knot in a piece of wood.
"Ioho," said Hermione.
Theo turned round.
She hadn't meant to say it aloud. She had been reading the letter through the roots, over his shoulder, and the name had simply come out, the way an answer does when you've known it long enough to stop thinking about it.
Theo stared at her.
"How long?" he said.
"Four days to read your first message," said Hermione. "Nine to stop needing the primer." She hesitated. "Your mother's primer. Luna fetched it from the shop. I should have asked you first."
"Nine days," Theo repeated. He said it slowly, as though he wanted to be sure he'd heard it. "It took me eleven years."
From the floor, without taking his arm off his face, Blaise said, "For the record, Nott had a month, and I had a fortnight, and I'd like my ten Galleons."
"Draco had a week," said Greg.
Everybody looked at Draco. He was standing on the other side of the roots with his wand in his hand, and he wasn't looking at any of them. He was looking at Hermione the way he had looked at her once before, in the Black library, late one night, over a thin black book: as though she were a page in a language he had only just found out he could read. Hermione looked away first. It took her longer than it should have.
"The yew," said Theo, turning back to the wall. "Death's own tree. You find it in every churchyard in England, and nobody ever asks why." He lifted his wand. "One line through it. That's all. One line, and the contract's struck, and the circle's broken, and the hundred walk out of here." His hand was shaking. "Mother, if you're listening, I could really do with not making a mess of this."
He cut.
One clean stroke of the silver point, straight across the carved letter. It made a small sound, like a fingernail on glass.
Then the hill screamed.
It was a scream without a sound: a great shudder that went through the rock and the roots and the water and the air all at once, and through Hermione's bones and teeth, as if something vast and old had been cheated. The green light in the chamber flared blinding white and went out, and in the sudden pitch darkness Hermione heard the roots across the doorway groan, and crack, and draw back up into the rock like the fingers of a hand unclenching.
Someone lit a wand. Then another.
The roots were gone. The doorway was open.
And across the passage, in the other chamber, in the neat row on the stone floor where they had lain for months, four people were sitting up.
Pansy made a noise Hermione never heard her make again.
She was across the passage and into the far chamber before anyone could stop her, down on her knees on the stone beside the young woman at the end of the row: small and pale, with a cloud of dark curly hair, blinking in the wand-light like someone woken from a very long sleep. The young woman looked at her. Then her eyes went wide.
"Pans?" said Cassia Selwyn. Her voice was a croak. "Pansy? What are you doing here? Where are we? Why've you got a poker?"
Pansy put her arms round her cousin and held on.
"You rhymed cousin," she said, muffled, into Cassia's hair, "with dozen."
"It's a perfectly good rhyme."
"It's a dreadful rhyme. It's the worst rhyme in the history of the English language. I've kept it in my pocket since my birthday."
Behind Hermione, Blaise Zabini had sat up at last, and taken his arm off his face, and looked round.
"Mother's not here," he said, and all at once he sounded about nine years old, and in a great deal of trouble. "Is she?"
"She's on the east shore," said Hermione, "with Mrs Malfoy and Mrs Weasley."
Blaise closed his eyes.
"Then Merlin help the other side," he said.
Theo was still standing by the carved wall, with his wand in his hand, looking at the long clean line he'd cut across the yew-letter. He was pale, and there was blood at the corner of his eye again, the way there had been in the Atrium. He looked, Hermione thought, as though he had just walked across a very high wire and had only now, at the far end, looked down.
Luna walked across the chamber and stood in front of him.
"That was very good," she said.
Theo began to answer.
Luna put her hands on either side of his face, matter-of-factly, wiped the blood from the corner of his eye with her thumb, went up on her toes, and kissed him.
It was a brief kiss. When it was over she stepped back and looked at him with her head a little on one side, the way she'd looked at a thestral once, in a clearing full of silver birches.
"I've been wanting to do that since the vestry with the mothballs," she said. "I thought now was a good time. Everyone's busy."
Theo Nott, who had had something to say about absolutely everything since the night he swept into Grimmauld Place, stood in the middle of the hollow hill in his ruined velvet coat, with his mouth slightly open and his silver-pointed wand hanging forgotten from his fingers, and was entirely out of words.
"Oh, look," said Blaise. "He's speechless for once. Somebody write down the date." Greg found a bit of soot and wrote it on Draco's chart.
They did Ron in the tunnel.
There wasn't time to do it anywhere else. Hermione took the beaded bag off her shoulder, and put her arm into it up to the elbow, and pulled. Out came the gates of Malfoy Manor, no bigger than a matchbox, and then with a word much larger. Tall and black and ornate, with the wrought-iron serpents curling up the posts, they stood up in the green tunnel under the hill as if they'd always been there.
Greg carried Ron's body over and laid it down on the stone on one side of the gateway, with its limp left hand resting against the iron. It hissed.
"Careful, Goyle," said Ron. "I haven't got a spare."
The old woman with the stick stood on the other side.
"This is going to hurt," said Hermione. "I don't know how much."
"Just do it," said Ron, in Philippa Thistlewood's voice. He looked down across the threshold at his own long freckled body sprawled unconscious on the stone, with the moth-eaten jumper and the red hair and the bruise coming up on the side of its head where Pansy had hit it. "Merlin, I'm tall."
He put both of his small spotted lilac-nailed hands flat against the iron. It hissed under them. He didn't flinch.
In the ironwork above the lock, the stern black face twisted up out of the curlicues, looked round the tunnel at a great many strangers, and scowled.
"Draco," said Hermione. "It's your gate."
Draco put his palm flat against the iron. The face looked at him, at how thin he'd got, and softened, almost imperceptibly, and sank back into the iron.
"Now," said Hermione.
Greg and Draco swung the gates shut.
There was a sound like a great bell struck once, somewhere deep under them. A flash of cold white light filled the tunnel. The old woman at the gate arched her back, and cried out, and on the stone floor Ron's long body jerked once from head to foot, like somebody falling in a dream.
Then nothing.
On the stone floor, Ron Weasley opened his eyes.
He lay there, looking up at the carved green roof of the tunnel. After a moment he lifted one long freckled hand in front of his face and looked at it. He flexed the fingers. He turned it over.
He drew his knees up. He stretched his legs out. He drew them up again.
"Oh," said Ron Weasley, in his own voice, deep and rough and exactly right. "Oh, my knees. Oh, I love my knees. I'm never going to complain about my knees again as long as I live —"
Pansy was standing over him with the poker.
He looked up at her. She looked down at him, and did not, Hermione noticed, put the poker away.
"Well?" said Pansy. Her chin had come up. "It's your own voice now, Weasley."
Ron lay there, in his own body at last, with her bruise coming up on the side of his head.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "You were right."
Pansy blinked. Something went across her face, fast and startled, and she looked away.
"Say that again," she said.
"Don't push it, Parkinson," said Ron.
Ron got to his feet, all six foot three of him, and Hermione got to him. She had to go up on her toes to get her arms round his neck, the way she always had, and for once she didn't mind in the least. "You're enormous," she said, muffled, into his jumper. "I'd forgotten."
"I know," said Ron happily. "Isn't it brilliant?"
On the other side of the gate, an old woman was sitting on the tunnel floor in a lavender cardigan.
She was very small and very bent. She had put her spectacles on, with shaking hands, and was looking down at herself: at her spotted hands with their lilac nails, and the pearls, and the sensible shoes. She was crying without making any sound. After a moment her hand went to the locket at her throat and closed round it.
Luna knelt down beside her.
"Is that Edward?" she said gently.
Philippa Thistlewood looked at her.
"My son," she said. Her voice was very small. "He was an Auror. He was twenty-six. They said he'd be home for Christmas." She held the locket tight. "Edmund said —" She stopped. "He said I'd see him tonight. He said the door would open and he'd walk out of it, and he'd be twenty-six, and he'd be home —"
"I know," said Luna.
"I wanted it," whispered the old woman. "I wanted it so much."
"I know," said Luna again. She put her arm round the thin bent shoulders in the lavender cardigan, quite simply, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. "Everybody does. That's the trouble with it."
They went up by the water stair, all of them, the way the rescue party had come down. At the top the wall stood open again, as though it had never been anything else.
The sleepers came out of the deeper chambers as the roots let them go, in ones and twos, holding on to the carved walls and blinking in the wand-light like people woken in a strange house. Draco stood at the foot of the stair and counted them up it. Hermione watched his lips move, and watched him come to the end of the line and go on standing there, as if more might be along in a minute.
"Draco."
"Some of them didn't wake," he said. He kept his eyes on the dark passage. "Further in." He said it the way he'd have read out a column of figures. "There's a man in there still holding his reading glasses."
Behind him, Theo had a silk handkerchief pressed to the corner of his eye. He had gone further in to look, and he didn't argue.
What goes under the hill comes back changed, Hermione thought, or it doesn't come back at all. She had seen it once on a sampler in a museum, years ago, cross-stitched in faded red between a little house and a row of trees, and at the time she had thought it was rather sweet. Now it turned her stomach.
♫ Listen along
They came up out of the hill at twenty to midnight, into chaos.
Harry saw them come. He was on the western shore, ankle-deep in broken ice, back to back with Kingsley and fighting for his life. And through the smoke and the frost and the green and red flashes of spellfire he saw them come out of the flank of the Tor by the White Spring. Hermione first, and Pansy, and Luna, and then a long ragged line behind them of pale, blinking, stumbling people, dozens of them. Four who had been asleep for months. Four who had been in a cell since the Manor. And more behind them, many more, men and women Harry had never seen before. People who had been taken from their beds across Britain over the same weeks, a handful a night, from the kind of houses where no one reports anybody missing, their names ticked off one by one in a red-ink ledger, and who had been lying asleep in the chambers of the hollow hill, waiting for midnight. The ones nobody looks for.
And among them, at the back, in a ruined green velvet coat, and a camel-coloured one, and a flour-dusted jacket, and a plain dark one with a hawthorn wand in its sleeve: Theo, and Blaise, and Greg, and Draco. And last of all Ron, tall and red-haired and walking on his own two legs, slowly, because the old woman in the lavender cardigan on his arm could go no faster.
Harry didn't realise he'd stopped fighting until Kingsley hauled him bodily sideways out of the path of a curse.
"Focus, Harry."
"They're out. Kingsley, they're out —"
"I can see that. Well done, Mr Nott. Now focus, please, because I would like my body back."
The fight on the western shore had been going on for half an hour. It was the ugliest fight Harry had ever been in. The loyalists had come ashore across the frozen flood in a long dark line, all the members of the Remembrance Society who had not been swapped into officials' bodies, with the hounds running beside them. And at their head, in the bodies they had stolen, had come the changelings. The Head of Magical Law Enforcement. Two of the Wizengamot. Half the Minister's policy board. The Minister's Private Secretary. It was like fighting the Ministry of Magic itself, except that none of them fitted the bodies they were wearing. They aimed a fraction high and moved a fraction late, like men in borrowed coats, and once Harry had seen it he started putting his Stunners where they were about to be.
Not one of them came for Harry. Grieve didn't need him dragged up the hill; the door would only open for a Master who walked up it on his own. So they went for everybody else instead, and left Harry to work out how much of it he could stand to watch.
They would have got a great deal further if it hadn't been for Seamus. He had spent the start of the battle lying flat on the ice below the lower slopes with a satchel of Maintenance-issue blasting charges, setting them out in a long curving line, and when the loyalists started across the frozen flood towards the Muggles on the hill, he set off every one of them at once. The ice went up from one end of the shore to the other in a long white wall of spray, and came down again as forty feet of open black water between the people with lanterns and everybody who wanted to get at them.
"Controlled demolition!" Seamus bellowed, picking himself up off the ice with his eyebrows smoking. "Jaysus, Mary and Merlin, did you see that, Harry? Controlled! Not one druid!"
And in the middle of it all, tall and dark and unhurried, fighting like a man swinging a sledgehammer, was the Minister.
Kingsley had been trying to reach his own body since the fighting began.
It was, Harry thought afterwards, one of the most extraordinary things he had ever seen. A skinny young man with a shaved head and a green dragon tattooed on his forearm, fighting his way across a frozen flood towards a much larger, older, darker man who was wearing his face. Every spell the older man threw was enormous: vast walls of force, great sheets of fire, curses that split the ice. Every one of them was Kingsley's strength, the full deep well of it, and the young man couldn't hope to match any of them.
He didn't try to. He simply wasn't where the spells landed. He moved like water, sideways and back and round, and he never stopped moving closer. It was, Harry realised, the same way Kingsley had always fought: chess, Ron called it, patient and slow and endless. Only now he was playing against his own pieces, and he knew exactly how every one of them moved.
"He's very strong," said Kingsley, breathless, dodging a Blasting Curse that took a chunk the size of a car out of the ice beside him. "I'd forgotten how strong I was."
"Don't let it go to your head."
Behind them, Blaise Zabini had taken a wand off the first loyalist he met and climbed onto the top of a frozen hedge with it. He had spent the whole of his imprisonment lying flat on his back, and it turned out he had been saving himself. He was putting curses into the line of changelings with a great deal of venom and no visible effort, and offering odds between them. "Five to two the Minister."
"A Galleon on me," said Kingsley, ducking.
"Which one?" said Blaise.
And then Neville Longbottom came across the ice.
He came from the east, where the fighting had been heaviest. He was bleeding from a cut above one eye and his robes were torn to the knee and there was ice in his hair, and in his hand, glittering red and silver in the light of the burning sky, was the Sword of Gryffindor.
There was no time to ask. Harry found out afterwards what had been in McGonagall's hatbox: the Sorting Hat, which she had brought to Somerset on the grounds that you never knew. And he found out that Neville had put his hand into it on the eastern shore, at a moment when four hounds and two changelings had McGonagall pinned against a drowned oak, and pulled it out again with the sword in it. Nobody had been especially surprised.
Neville didn't use the edge. He knew exactly whose body that was. He came up behind it while it was busy throwing curses at a skinny young man with a dragon tattoo, turned the sword over in his hand, and swung the flat of the blade into the back of its head with the whole weight of his shoulders behind it.
The Minister for Magic went down on the ice like a felled tree.
"Sorry, Minister," said Neville, breathing hard, to Kingsley. "Couldn't think of anything else."
Kingsley looked at his own body lying face down on the frozen water, and at Neville standing over it with the sword. Then he threw back his shaven head and laughed, deep and slow, in a young man's voice.
"Mr Longbottom," he said, "I have been meaning to do that myself."
The Manor gates came out of Hermione's bag for the second time that night on the frozen flood, in the middle of a battle. Hermione knelt beside them with her hands shaking. Draco and Greg stood on either side, holding the iron. Harry, Neville and Ron stood round them with their wands out, keeping the hounds off.
Jonah Crisp's body stood on one side of the gateway, with Kingsley inside it. On the other lay the Minister for Magic, unconscious, with his palms pressed flat against the iron, and somebody else inside him.
"Now," said Hermione.
They swung the gates.
The bell. The light. The cry.
And Kingsley Shacklebolt got up off the ice in his own body and stood there at his full height in the burning dark. He looked down at his big hands. He put one of them up to his face and touched it, carefully, the way you'd touch something you had been afraid you'd broken.
Then he put his hand up to his left ear.
It was bare.
On the other side of the gate, a skinny young man with a shaved head and a green dragon on his forearm was sitting on the ice with his face in his hands, sobbing. Jonah Crisp: Margery Crisp's grandson, and the son of Thomas Crisp, the young Auror in the photograph above a candle in a chapel in Carkitt Market. He'd been wearing the Minister for Magic since the end of the summer.
Kingsley went over to him. He crouched down on the ice beside him, and waited, and after a moment Jonah Crisp looked up.
Wordlessly, he put his hand into the inside pocket of his robes, and took out something small, and held it out.
It was a single gold hoop earring.
"I kept it," said Jonah. His voice was thick. "I don't know why. I just — it didn't seem right. To throw it away. It was yours."
Kingsley took it. He looked at it lying in his big palm. Then he put it back in his ear, where it belonged.
"It was my grandmother's," he said gently. "Thank you for keeping it."
Six minutes to midnight.
The battle on the Levels was turning. The changelings were falling back across the ice. The Remembrance Society had begun to break; some of them were simply stopping, putting their wands down on the frozen water and sitting beside them, the way Owen Pritchard had sat bound in a chair at Mrs Zabini's table. Overhead, the Hebridean Black was chasing the last ragged skeins of the Hunt across the sky in great rolling billows of flame, while the Harpies whooped. On the eastern shore Harry could see Narcissa Malfoy and Molly Weasley, back to back in the middle of a circle of fallen loyalists, with their wands raised. A little way off, under a hat that had somehow survived the entire night, Mrs Zabini had dispensed with her wand altogether and was tying loyalists up with her little finger, three at a time.
When the last of the loyalists round them had put down their wands, the three women came across the ice to their sons.
Molly reached Ron first. She stopped a yard short of him and looked up, a long way up, at his own freckled face and his own red hair and the moth hole in the elbow of his own jumper. Then she took the front of the jumper in both fists, as if somebody might try to take him off her again, and pulled his head down, and held on.
Narcissa came more slowly. She stopped in front of Draco on the frozen water, straight-backed, and looked at the weight he'd lost, and for a moment she simply stood there. Then she reached up and turned down his collar where it had folded under, carefully, the way she must have done when he was small.
"You're thin," said Narcissa Malfoy.
"Mother." Draco caught her hand before she could take it away, and held it there against his collar. "I'm all right. I promise."
She didn't believe him. Harry could see that. But she let him hold her hand a moment longer, and then she took it back and laid it flat against his cheek, briefly, and stepped away.
Mrs Zabini came last. Behind her on the ice lay a long, neat row of loyalists, trussed in silver from shoulder to knee. She stopped in front of Blaise and looked at him: at the ruined camel coat, and the stubble, and the hollows under his cheekbones.
"I told them not to tell you," said Blaise.
"I had owls from half the Order, darling. Everybody told me." She took his face in both her ringed hands, and for a moment her own face did something Harry had never seen it do. Then it was smooth again, and she let go, and turned to address the whole of the frozen Levels. "Somebody," said Mrs Zabini, "feed him."
Behind her, one of the trussed loyalists whimpered. Blaise looked past his mother at the long silver row of them, and then back at Harry.
"I did say," he said, "we'd all be sorry."
The circle was broken. Most of the hundred were free. For the space of a breath, Harry let himself believe that was the end of it.
Harry turned, with the others, and looked up at the Tor.
At the top of the hill, in the black mouth of the roofless tower, something was shining.
It was tiny, at that distance. Two points of light. One long and pale and faint, like moonlight on bone. The other small and dark and round, and yet somehow shining all the same, the way a black stone shines when it's wet. They were set side by side in the archway of the tower, as if someone had laid them there with great care.
The Wand, and the Stone.
And between them, in the arch, the dark was beginning to crack.
All over the Levels, on both sides, faces turned up towards it. A thin line of white light appeared in the black mouth of the tower, from top to bottom, like the light under a door in a dark house. It widened. Against it, small and black and perfectly still, a man was standing beside the Wand and the Stone, leaning on a stick. The light went on widening. And from the other side of it, faint and far away and growing louder, came the sound of a great many voices, all talking at once.
"No," said Hermione. Her face had gone grey. "No. We broke it. We broke the circle. It can't — without the tithe, it shouldn't have enough to —"
"It hasn't," said Theo, white-faced, staring up at the tower. "Not enough to open it properly. But he's got two of the three. Death's own keys, Granger." He swallowed. "That's enough to break it." He gave a short, frightened laugh. "And we've just cheated it of a hundred souls in front of witnesses. It keeps its bargains to the letter. It's going to want paying."
The line of white light in the arch of the tower had become a gap. The gap had become a doorway.
And through the doorway, one by one, pale and quiet and slow, the dead began to walk out onto the hill.
The dead came out of the tower into the dark and started down the steep terraced slopes of the Tor in a long pale line: grey figures, faint as mist, walking the old spiral path that wound round and round the hill, as unhurried as people walking home.
Down on the lower slopes, where Percy's Confundus was wearing thin, the Muggles in fancy dress had stopped singing, with their lanterns in their hands. They stood in silence, watching the pale figures coming down the path towards them. One of the druids had dropped his staff. The man dressed as a badger had taken off his head.
All round Harry, the fighting was stopping.
He heard the spells die away, one by one, as people on both sides lowered their wands and turned and looked up at the hill. And then he heard the first of them start walking.
It was a loyalist, a stout grey-haired wizard Harry had Stunned twice already that night. He let his wand fall on the ice and set off across the frozen flood towards the foot of the path, with his arms held a little way out from his sides, the way you'd walk towards somebody getting off a train. Then there were more. In Harry's ear, on George's earpieces, it was happening all over the Levels and going out into every wireless in Britain: a name, and footsteps on the ice, and then another name. He heard Parvati say "Lavender," once, in a voice that broke in the middle, and saw her go past him at a run, and saw Seamus go after her and bring her down on the ice with both arms round her knees, and hang on while she fought him. He knew Andromeda's voice when it said Dora. Further down the shore, Narcissa Malfoy had her sister by both wrists.
"Cissy," said Andromeda. "Let go."
"No," said Narcissa.
The grey-haired wizard reached the hill first. A woman in a long, old-fashioned coat had come down to the last turn of the path to meet him, and he held out his hands to her, and she took them. The frost went over him from his fingertips to his shoulders in the time it took Harry to shout. He stayed on his feet. He stood there at the foot of the hill, white and still, with his hands held out, and the woman let go of them and walked on down the path as if he were a gatepost.
Harry saw Dean Thomas, a little way along the shore, staring up at a tall man walking down the path among the others: a man Dean had never met in his life and had known at once. And he saw Dean look down at his own hands.
Ron saw her go.
He had left her on a hummock at the edge of the ice, out of the way of the fighting, wrapped in a borrowed cloak with her stick across her knees, and gone for a crate of nails. When he turned round with it in his arms she was already out on the frozen flood, small and bent in her lavender cardigan, making her way towards the hill at the only pace she had. A long way up the path, among the pale walkers coming down, a young man in Auror's robes had stopped, and was looking out across the water.
"Madam Thistlewood!" Ron dropped the crate. He ran. He had been running on his own legs for less than an hour, and they had never felt so long or so slow. "Philippa! It's not him, it's the hill, it's —"
She heard him. She looked back over her shoulder, once, and he saw her face. He had worn it since the Forest. He had looked at it every morning in Narcissa Malfoy's mirrors. He had never once seen it look like this.
"He's twenty-six," she said. "Look at him, dear. He's still twenty-six."
Then she was off the ice and onto the hill, and the young Auror came down the last turn of the path to meet her, and she held out both her spotted hands with their lilac nails, and he took them.
The frost went over her like a sheet drawn up over a bed.
Ron got there a second after. He went down on his knees on the frozen grass beside her, on the knees he had been so pleased to have back, and she was cold all the way through and quite still, and smiling. The young man in the Auror's robes looked at Ron for a moment as though he would have liked to say thank you. Then he turned and walked on down the hill without her.
Ron stayed where he was. After a while he took off her spectacles, the way he had taken them off every night since the Forest, and folded them, and put them in his top pocket.
Then the door in the tower opened wider, and the hill sent out its second Hunt.
Harry felt it before he saw it, up through the ice and into his boots: the same hole-in-the-world cold as before, only deeper, as though something huge had drawn breath. The hounds that came out of the tower were bigger than the first lot, and whiter, and there were more of them than he could count, and the riders among them carried no spears at all. They didn't use the path. They poured down the terraced slopes on either side of it, round the slow pale line of the dead, and they didn't come for the Order.
They went for the lanterns.
On the lower slopes, Percy's Confundus broke. Harry heard it go, in his ear and across the water at once: four hundred people waking up together to what was coming down the hill at them, and screaming. The lanterns scattered. A woman fell, and was up again and running, and something white went over the place where she had been. The man dressed as a badger ran past the foot of the hill with a child under each arm. Percy was standing on his hummock with his wand in one hand and his clipboard in the other, shouting the names of his Obliviators into the dark one after another, and some of them were not answering.
"Charlie, can you —"
"They're done, Harry." Charlie's voice was hoarse in his ear. "Both of them. She's got nothing left. I'm putting her down before she falls down."
The Harpies were coming down out of the sky in twos and threes, frozen to their brooms. The Order was strung out along the shore with forty feet of open black water at its back, where Seamus had blown the ice, and the ice under its feet had begun to crack.
"Jordan." A new voice in the earpieces, dry and a long way off. "Robards. Level Nine. The writing on the arch has lit up, and the curtain's open, and something's coming through it. We're holding it." A pause, and behind it a sound Harry didn't want to think about. "For now."
Lee Jordan, who had commentated on the end of the world twice now without once running out of words, said, "Understood, sir," and then nothing at all. In every ear on the Levels, the frequency hissed.
And then, under the hiss, the earpieces carried one more voice. It came from far away, from under the hill, and it was not loud. It said one word.
Master.
And then Harry saw, a long way up the path, walking slowly down the hill among all the others, a young man with untidy black hair and round spectacles, with his hand in the hand of a young woman whose hair, even in the grey light of the dead, was red.
Everything in him stopped.
"Potter."
It was Draco. He was standing close beside him on the ice, and he was looking not at the hill but at Harry's face.
"You heard it," said Draco quietly. "It won't close. Not without its Master." He glanced up at the widening white doorway in the tower. "They aren't coming home. It sends them down to the people who loved them, and keeps whoever goes out to meet them, and it'll go on doing it all night, until the one it actually wants walks up the path." He looked at the two figures on the hill, and then, deliberately, away. "It's fishing."
Harry could feel the Cloak. He'd had it on him all night, folded in the inside pocket of his robes. Before tonight it had only ever felt like his dad's old cloak. It felt heavy now. It felt like something that had been waiting for this moment for a very long time.
Somebody had to walk up, and the door wanted its Master.
He turned round. Ginny was standing a few yards away on the ice, with her broom in her hand and frost in her hair and blood on her face. She had come down out of the sky the moment the dead appeared. She was looking at him, and she already knew. She'd known since the lychgate.
He went to her.
"I'm going up, Gin," he said. "And I don't think it shuts unless I go through it."
Something went across her face, fast and fierce, and he knew exactly what it was, because he had watched it come into her face before every match she had ever played. She was coming with him. Her hand tightened on her broom.
Then her other hand went to the front of her robes, low down, and stayed there, flat, the way you'd hold a stitch.
"You're hurt," said Harry.
"No." She didn't move her hand. She only looked at him, and waited, the way she waited on a broom for him to see a Snitch she'd seen a long time ago.
Harry looked at her hand. He looked at her face. And the whole of the Levels went quiet in his head, the hill and the dead and the Hunt and the screaming, all of it, until there was nothing left but her hand.
Twenty-seven years ago tonight, in a hallway in Godric's Hollow, his father had told his mother to take the baby and run.
"Gin," he said.
"I was going to tell you first," said Ginny. Her voice was quite steady. "Before. But there hasn't been the right time." She swallowed. "I'm not coming, Harry."
Ginny Weasley had never said that about anything in her life.
Her eyes had filled, and so had his. Neither of them said it. Harry had grown up without a father because of a door on a night like this one, and they both knew exactly what she was letting him walk towards, and who would be left standing at the bottom of the hill if he didn't come back.
Over her shoulder, Harry saw Draco. He had come up behind them across the ice, and he was looking at Ginny's hand, flat against the front of her robes. He looked at it for a long moment. Then he looked at Harry, and his face went calm, the way it did on a stakeout once he'd stopped arguing and started waiting. Harry didn't stop to ask what he was waiting for.
"You come back," said Ginny. She jabbed a finger past him at Draco. "Both of you. And if either of you comes down that hill without the other, I'll march you straight back up it myself, and you'll wish the Tor had kept you."
Harry went to promise, and found that he couldn't, not to her, not tonight. She saw that too.
She let the broom fall. She took her hand away from the front of her robes, and put both hands on either side of his face, and kissed him, hard, once. Then she let him go, and stepped back, and did not look away.
Harry turned towards the hill.
Draco was standing at the foot of the path, where the spiral track began to climb from the edge of the ice. He had his wand in his hand, and he was looking up the long pale slope to the tower at the top, where the white light was pouring out of the broken door.
Ron was coming after him across the ice, with Hermione at his side, still a little unsteady on legs he'd only had back for an hour, with Philippa Thistlewood's spectacles folded in his top pocket and a fistful of George's iron nails in each hand. He had the look on his face that he'd had at the bottom of every trapdoor and the top of every staircase Harry had ever gone down: white, and sick, and coming anyway.
Harry stepped off the ice and onto the hill beside Draco, and the Isle of Glass shut its door behind them.
It came up out of the frozen flood along the whole length of the shore between one breath and the next: a wall of something clear and hard and cold, like ice with nothing in it, rising out of the water higher than Harry could see. Frost ran up it in feathers. Ron walked straight into it with a crack, and the iron nails in his fists spat and went black. Hermione put her palm flat against it, and Harry saw her mouth say his name, and heard nothing at all.
He put both hands against the glass, and it was so cold it burned, and on the other side of it Ginny was standing on the ice with her hand on the front of her robes, looking at him. He pushed. He would have gone back through it if it had let him, and the hill knew it, and the glass didn't give by so much as a hair. It had what it wanted on this side.
Draco came and stood beside him. He wasn't looking at Harry. He was looking through the glass at Ginny, and Harry, turning, saw his face, and then saw Ginny see it. Whatever was in it, she read it at once. Her chin came up, and she gave Draco one short nod.
Ron had seen it too.
In Harry's ear, very close, Ron said, "Malfoy."
On the other side of the glass, Ron jerked his head at the lanterns on the lower slopes. "Somebody's got to keep goal at the bottom of this hill, or whatever comes out of that door goes straight through to them. So that's me." He looked at Draco through the frost. "You've been banging on about being his partner for five years, Malfoy. Go on, then. Be one."
It was, Harry realised, the first time he had ever heard Ron say Draco's name as though it were just a name.
"Weasley," said Draco.
"Don't get soppy," said Ron. Hermione had hold of his hand, Harry saw, so tightly that her knuckles had gone white and it must have hurt, and Ron looked down at her, and didn't take it away. Then he looked back up at the two of them. "Both of you," he said. "Back. Like she said."
Draco looked at Hermione then, just once, through the glass. Their eyes met, and held.
"It's my turn," said Harry. "You know it is."
"It is not your turn." Draco kept his eyes on the hill. "You did the Forest. Wandering off into the dark on your own to be noble is on a separate rota."
"Since when?"
"Since I made the chart."
"Nobody reads the chart, Malfoy."
"Then nobody's going to notice I've put us both down for tonight."
It surprised a laugh out of Harry, short and cracked, and the corner of Draco's mouth moved.
"Besides," said Draco. "I've read this one, Potter. The hero goes up the lighthouse on his own, and he nearly doesn't make it, and it's only in the last chapter that you find out he'd have been dead eleven times over if it wasn't for the goblin."
Harry looked up at the tower, and back, and Draco smirked at him.
"Snigg," he said.
"Somebody," said Draco, "has to be Snigg."