Harry had been turning over Trelawney’s prophecy in his mind, wondering if maybe the true Dark Lord had nothing to do with Lord Voldemort at all. Born to those who have thrice defied him seemed to strongly invoke the Peverell brothers and the three Deathly Hallows—though Harry didn’t exactly see how Death could have marked him as an equal, which seemed to imply some sort of deliberate action on Death’s part.
This alone is the true Enemy, Harry thought. After this will come Professor
McGonagall, Mum and Dad, even Neville in his time, unless the wound in the world can be healed before then.
There was nothing Harry could do. Madam Pomfrey was already doing for Professor Quirrell what magic could do, and magic seemed strictly superior to Muggle techniques when it came to healing.
There was nothing Harry could do.
Nothing he could do.
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
Harry raised his hand, and knocked upon the door, in case the person there could no longer detect him.
“What is it?” came a strained voice from the infirmary room. “It’s me.”
There was a long pause. “Come in,” said that voice.
Harry slipped inside and closed the door behind him, and cast the Quieting Charm. He stood as far away from Professor Quirrell as he could, just in case his own magic was making the Professor feel uncomfortable. Though the sense of doom was fading, fading with each passing day. Professor Quirrell was lying back in his infirmary bed, only his head propped up by a pillow. A coverlet of cottony material, red with black stitching, covered him to his chest. A book hovered before his eyes, outlined in a pale glow which also surrounded a black cube lying by the bed. Not the Defense Professor’s own magic, then, but a device of some kind.
The book was Thinking Physics by Epstein, the same book Harry had lent to Draco a few months back. Harry had stopped fretting about its possible misuse several weeks earlier.
“This—” Professor Quirrell said, and coughed, it didn’t sound quite right. “This is a fascinating book… if I’d ever realized…” A laugh, mixed with another cough. “Why did I assume the Muggle arts… must not be mine? That they would be… of no use to me? Why did I never bother trying… to test it experimentally… as you would say? In case… my assumption… was wrong? It seems sheerly foolish of me… in retrospect…”
Harry was having more trouble speaking than Professor Quirrell was. Wordlessly, Harry reached into his pocket, and laid a kerchief on the floor; which he unfolded to reveal a small white pebble, smooth and round.
“What’s that?” said the Defense Professor.
“It’s a, it’s a, Transfigured, unicorn.”
Harry had checked the books, had learned that since he was too young to have sexual thoughts he would be able to approach a unicorn without fear. The same books had said nothing about unicorns being smart. Harry had already noticed that every intelligent magical species was at least partially humanoid, from merfolk to centaurs to giants, from elves to goblins to veela. All had essentially humanlike emotions, many were known to interbreed with humans. Harry had already reasoned out that magic didn’t create new intelligence but just changed the shape of genetically human beings. Unicorns were equinoid, were not even partially humanoid, didn’t talk, used no tools, they were almost certainly just magical horses. If it was right to eat a cow to feed yourself for a day, then it had to be right to drink a unicorn’s blood in order to stave off death for weeks. You couldn’t have it both ways.
So Harry had gone into the Forbidden Forest wearing his Cloak. He had searched the Grove of Unicorns until he saw her, a proud creature with a pure white coat and violet hair, with three blue blotches on her flank. Harry had gone over, and the sapphire eyes had stared at him inquisitively. Harry had tapped out the sequence 1–2–3 on the ground several times with his shoes. The unicorn had shown no sign of responding in kind. Harry had reached over, taken her hoof in his hand, and tapped the same sequence with the unicorn’s hoof. The unicorn had only looked at him curiously.
And something about feeding the unicorn the sleeping-potion-laced sugar cubes had still felt like murder.
That magic gives their existence a weight of meaning which no mere animal could possess… to slay something innocent to save oneself, that is a very grave sin. Those two phrases, from Professor McGonagall, from the centaur, had both run through Harry’s mind, over and over as the white unicorn had yawned, laid down on the ground, and closed its eyes for what would be the last time. The Transfiguration had lasted an hour, and Harry’s eyes had watered repeatedly as he worked. The unicorn’s death might not have come then, but it would come soon enough, and it was foreign to Harry’s nature to try to refuse responsibility of any kind. Harry would just have to hope that, if you didn’t kill the unicorn to save yourself, if you did it to help a friend, it would be acceptable in the end.
Professor Quirrell’s eyebrows had climbed toward his hairline. His voice was less soft, had something of his normal sharpness, as he said, “I forbid you from doing that again.”
“I wondered if you’d say that,” Harry said. He swallowed again. “But this unicorn is already, already doomed, so you might as well take it, Professor…”
“Why have you done this?”
If the Defense Professor really didn’t understand that, he was slower on the uptake than anyone Harry had ever met. “I kept thinking there was nothing I could do,” Harry said. “I got tired of thinking it.”
Professor Quirrell closed his eyes. His head leaned back into the pillow. “You were lucky,” the Defense Professor said in a soft voice, “that a unicorn in Transfigured form… did not set off the Hogwarts wards, as a strange creature… I shall have to… take this outside the grounds, to make use of it… but that can be managed. I shall tell them that I wish to look upon the lake… I will ask you to sustain the Transfiguration before you go, and it should last long enough, after that… and with my last strength, dispel whatever death-alarms were placed to watch over the herd… which, the unicorn being not yet dead, but only Transfigured, will not yet have triggered… you were very lucky, Mr. Potter.”
Harry nodded. He started to speak, then stopped again. Words seemed to stick in his throat once more.
You already calculated the expected utilities, if it works, if it goes wrong. You assigned probabilities, you multiplied, and then you threw out the answer and went with your new gut feeling, which was the same. So say it.
“Do you know,” Harry said unsteadily, “of any way at all, by which your life might be saved?”
The Defense Professor’s eyes opened. “Why… do you ask me that, boy?”
“There’s… a spell I heard of, a ritual—”
“Be silent,” said the Defense Professor.
An instant later a snake lay in the bed.
Even the snake’s eyes were dull.
It did not rise.
“Sspeak on,” hissed that snake, its flickering tongue its only motion.
“There is… there iss a ritual, I heard of from the sschoolmasster, by which he thinkss the Dark Lord might have lived on. It iss called—”and Harry stopped, as he realized that he did know how to say the word in Parseltongue. “Horcrux. It requiress a death, I have heard. But if you are dying in any casse, you might try to adapt the ritual, even at great rissk for the new sspell, sso that it can be done with a different ssacrifice. It would change the whole world, if you ssucceed—though I don't know anything about the sspell—the sschoolmasster thought it tore off a piece of ssoul, though I don't ssee how that could be true—”