“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…”
This mantra seemed to pulse through Harry’s mind as he fell asleep at night, and his dreams were thick with cups, lockets and mysterious objects that he could not quite reach, though Dumbledore helpfully offered Harry a rope ladder that turned to snakes the moment he began to climb…
He had shown Hermione the note inside the locket the morning after Dumbledore’s death, and although she had not immediately recognised the initials as belonging to some obscure wizard about whom she had been reading, she had since been rushing off to the library a little more often than was strictly necessary for somebody who had no homework to do.
“No,” she said sadly, “I’ve been trying, Harry, but I haven’t found anything… there are a couple of reasonably well-known wizards with those initials—Rosalind Antigone Bungs… Rupert “Axebanger” Brookstanton… but they don’t seem to fit at all. Judging by that note, the person who stole the Horcrux knew Voldemort, and I can’t find a shred of evidence that Bungs or Axebanger ever had anything to do with him… no, actually, it’s about… well, Snape.”
She looked nervous even saying the name again.
“What about him?” asked Harry heavily, slumping back in his chair.
“Well, it’s just that I was sort of right about the Half-Blood Prince business,” she said tentatively.
“D’you have to rub it in, Hermione? How d’you think I feel about that now?”
“No—no—Harry, I didn’t mean that!” she said hastily, looking around to check that they were not being overheard. “It’s just that I was right about Eileen Prince once owning the book. You see… she was Snape’s mother!”
“I thought she wasn’t much of a looker,” said Ron.
Hermione ignored him.
“I was going through ihe rest of the old Prophets and there was a tiny announcement about Eileen Prince marrying a man called Tobias Snape, and then later an announcement saying that she’d given birth to a—”
“—murderer,” spat Harry.
“Well… yes,” said Hermione. “So… I was sort of right. Snape must have been proud of being “half a Prince”, you see? Tobias Snape was a Muggle from what it said in the Prophet—”
“Yeah, that fits,” said Harry. “He’d play up the pure-blood side so he could get in with Lucius Malfoy and the rest of them… he’s just like Voldemort. Pure-blood mother, Muggle father… ashamed of his parentage, trying to make himself feared using the Dark Arts, gave himself an impressive new name—Lord Voldemort—the Half-Blood Prince—how could Dumbledore have missed—?”