The last word caught in his throat, but Professor Sprout completed the sentence for him.
“Good-bye.”
“Well said,” squeaked Professor Flitwick. “Well said indeed! Our students should pay tribute, it is fitting. We can arrange transport home afterward.”
“Seconded,” barked Professor Sprout.
“I suppose… yes…” said Slughorn in a rather agitated voice, while Hagrid let out a strangled sob of assent.
“He’s coming,” said Professor McGonagall suddenly, gazing down into the grounds. “The Minister… and by the looks of it he’s brought a delegation…”
“Can I leave, Professor?” said Harry at once.
He had no desire at all to see, or be interrogated by Rufus Scrimgeour tonight.
“You may,” said Professor McGonagall. “And quickly.”
She strode toward the door and held it open for him. He sped down the spiral staircase and off along the deserted corridor; he had left his Invisibility Cloak at the top of the Astronomy Tower, but it did not matter; there was nobody in the corridors to see him pass, not even Filch, Mrs. Norris, or Peeves. He did not meet another soul until he turned into the passage leading to the Gryffindor common room.
“Is it true?” whispered the Fat Lady as he approached her. “It is really true? Dumbledore—dead?”
“Yes,” said Harry.
She let out a wail and, without waiting for the password, swung forward to admit him.
As Harry had suspected it would be, the common room was jam-packed. The room fell silent as he climbed through the portrait hole. He saw Dean and Seamus sitting in a group nearby: This meant that the dormitory must be empty, or nearly so. Without speaking to anybody, without making eye contact at all, Harry walked straight across the room and through the door to the boys’ dormitories.
As he had hoped, Ron was waiting for him, still fully dressed, sitting on his bed. Harry sat down on his own four-poster and for a moment, they simply stared at each other.
“They’re talking about closing the school,” said Harry.
“Lupin said they would,” said Ron.
There was a pause.
“So?” said Ron in a very low voice, as though he thought the furniture might be listening in. “Did you find one? Did you get it? A—a Horcrux?”
Harry shook his head. All that had taken place around that black lake seemed like an old nightmare now; had it really happened, and only hours ago?
“You didn’t get it?” said Ron, looking crestfallen. “It wasn’t there?”
“No,” said Harry. “Someone had already taken it and left a fake in its place.”
“Already taken—?”
Wordlessly, Harry pulled the fake locket from his pocket, opened it, and passed it to Ron. The full story could wait… It did not matter tonight… nothing mattered except the end, the end of their pointless adventure, the end of Dumbledore’s life…
“R. A. B.,” whispered Ron, “but who was that?”
“Dunno,” said Harry, lying back on his bed fully clothed and staring blankly upwards. He felt no curiosity at all about R. A. B.: He doubted that he would ever feel curious again. As he lay there, he became aware suddenly that the grounds were silent. Fawkes had stopped singing.
And he knew, without knowing how he knew it, that the phoenix had gone, had left Hogwarts for good, just as Dumbledore had left the school, had left the world… had left Harry.
30. THE WHITE TOMB
All lessons were suspended, all examinations postponed. Some students were hurried away from Hogwarts by their parents over the next couple of days—the Patil twins were gone before breakfast on the morning following Dumbledore’s death and Zacharias Smith was escorted from the castle by his haughty-looking father. Seamus Finnigan, on the other hand, refused point-blank to accompany his mother home; they had a shouting match in the Entrance Hall which was resolved when she agreed that he could remain behind for the funeral. She had difficulty in finding a bed in Hogsmeade, Seamus told Harry and Ron, for wizards and witches were pouring into the village, preparing to pay their last respects to Durnbledore.
Some excitement was caused among the younger students, who had never seen it before, when a powder-blue carriage the size of a house, pulled by a dozen giant winged palominos, came soaring out of the sky in the late afternoon before the funeral and landed on the edge of the Forest. Harry watched from a window as a gigantic and handsome olive-skinned, black-haired woman descended the carriage steps and threw herself into the waiting Hagrid’s arms. Meanwhile a delegation of Ministry officials, including the Minister for Magic himself, was being accommodated within the castle. Harry was diligently avoiding contact with any of them; he was sure that, sooner or later, he would be asked again to account for Dumbledore’s last excursion from Hogwarts.
Harry, Ron, Hermione and Ginny were spending all of their time together. The beautiful weather seemed to mock them; Harry could imagine how it would have been if Durnbledore had not died, and they had had this time together at the very end of the year, Ginny’s examinations finished, the pressure of homework lifted… and hour by hour, he put off saying the thing that he knew he must say, doing what he knew it was right to do, because it was too hard to forgo his best source of comfort.
They visited the hospital wing twice a day: Neville had been discharged, but Bill remained under Madam Pomfrey’s care. His scars were as bad as ever; in truth, he now bore a distinct resemblance to Mad-Eye Moody, though thankfully with both eyes and legs, but in personality he seemed just the same as ever. All that appeared to have changed was that he now had a great liking for very rare steaks.
“…so eet ees lucky ’e is marrying me,” said Fleur happily, plumping up Bill’s pillows, “because ze British overcook their meat, I ’ave always said this.”
“I suppose I’m just going to have to accept that he really is going to marry her,” sighed Ginny later that evening, as she, Harry, Ron and Hermione sat beside the open window of the Gryffindor common room, looking out over the twilit grounds.
“She’s not that bad,” said Harry. “Ugly, though,” he added hastily, as Ginny raised her eyebrows, and she let out a reluctant giggle.
“Well, I suppose if Mum can stand it, I can.”
“Anyone else we know died?” Ron asked Hermione, who was perusing the Evening Prophet.
Hermione winced at the forced toughness in his voice.
“No,” she said reprovingly, folding up ihe newspaper. “They’re still looking for Snape, but no sign…”
“Of course there isn’t,” said Harry, who became angry every lime this subject cropped up. “They won’t find Snape till they find Voldemort, and seeing as they’ve never managed to do that in all this time…”
“I’m going to go to bed,” yawned Ginny. “I haven’t been sleeping that well since… well… I could do with some sleep.”
She kissed Harry (Ron looked away pointedly), waved al the other two and departed for the girls’ dormitories. The moment the door had closed behind her, Hermione leaned forwards towards Harry with a most Hermione-ish look on her face.
“Harry, I found something out this morning, in the library…”
“R. A. B.?” said Harry, sitting up straight.
He did not feel the way he had so often felt before, excited, curious, burning to get to the bottom of a mystery; he simply knew that the task of discovering the truth about the real Horcrux had to be completed before he could move a little further along the dark and winding path stretching ahead of him, the path that he and Dumbledore had set out upon together, and which he now knew he would have to journey alone. There might still be as many as four Horcruxes out there somewhere and each would need to be found and eliminated before there was even a possibility that Voldemort could be killed. He kept reciting their names to himself, as though by listing them he could bring them within reach: “the locket… the cup… the snake… something of Gryffindor’s or Ravenclaw’s… the locket… the cup… the snake… something of Gryffindor’s or Ravenclaw’s…”