Hermione came down to breakfast on Sunday looking like she hadn't slept at all, which was fair, because she probably hadn't. She sat down next to me, poured herself some tea, and didn't drink it.
"We're going to the Room after this," she said, keeping her voice down.
I passed her the toast. "I hadn't forgotten."
Ron looked between us over his porridge. "Did you two have a row or something?"
"No," Hermione and I said at the same time, which didn't help.
After breakfast, we left Ron to his second bowl of porridge and went up to the seventh floor. I walked past the bare stretch of wall three times, and the door appeared.
Inside, the Room had kept the blackboard exactly the way we'd left it, with every box ticked except the snake's.
Hermione sat down at the table and folded her hands in front of her, which was what she did before an exam, or before telling someone off.
"You promised we'd talk about Dumbledore properly," she said.
"I know. We will." I took the chair across from her. "There's something I need to tell you first, though, and you're not going to like it."
"I already don't like it."
I'd spent most of the night working out how to say it, and in the end I just said it.
"I want to go back to Little Hangleton," I told her. "Soon. And finish it."
"Harry, we only got back from Gringotts last night." She put both hands flat on the table. "And we left that house alone at Easter for a reason."
"We left it alone because of the cup," I said. "If he'd worked out someone was onto him, he'd have had the cup guarded twice as hard. The cup's in my pocket now."
She looked at my pocket as if it might bite her. "And the snake?"
"She never leaves his side. And he's still a weak little body in a chair, with only Wormtail to look after him. Every day we wait, he gets a bit stronger."
"He's still You-Know-Who," she said. "Chair or no chair." She pulled her sleeves down over her hands. "And you were going to do it on your own?"
"No," I said. "That's the other part. I want to tell Dumbledore first."
That stopped her. She'd brought a roll of parchment in with her, and I was fairly sure it was a list of reasons to tell Dumbledore.
"Why now?" she asked. "You've been putting him off since Easter."
The honest answer was that I'd worked out a use for him. If Voldemort was finished and nobody knew how, I'd be explaining it to the Ministry on my own for the rest of my life.
"Because I want Wormtail alive," I said. "He's the only proof Sirius didn't do it, and the Ministry won't take that from a fourteen-year-old with a rat in a jar. They'll take it from Dumbledore."
"You're doing it for Sirius," Hermione said. Her voice had gone soft.
"Mostly," I said. "A bit for me as well. I'd quite like to have a godfather I can visit without bringing a dog biscuit."
That made her laugh, the first real laugh I'd heard from her all morning, and she reached across the table and squeezed my hand.
"Fine," she said. "We tell him. I'm still not happy about the Little Hangleton part, and I'm going to argue about it later."
She rolled the parchment back up and put it in her bag without reading out a single line of it.
There didn't seem much point in waiting, so we went straight down to the second floor.
Hermione kept half a step ahead of me on every flight of stairs, like she thought I might take a wrong turn on purpose.
Dumbledore's office was behind a stone gargoyle, and the gargoyle wanted a password.
"We should find Professor McGonagall," Hermione said. "She'll know it."
"Sherbet lemon," I tried first, because getting it right straight away would have looked a lot stranger.
The gargoyle didn't move.
"Cockroach Cluster," I told it, and it jumped aside.
"How did you know that?" Hermione asked.
"He likes sweets," I said. "Sherbet lemon was the password in second year, so after that I just went for the most disgusting one I could think of."
The spiral staircase carried us up, and I knocked on the door at the top. Dumbledore called us in like he'd been expecting us, which with Dumbledore might actually have been true.
His office was the way I remembered it, all spindly silver instruments puffing out little clouds of smoke, and old headmasters pretending to be asleep in their frames.
Fawkes was on his perch by the door. He turned his head right round to follow me across the room.
"Harry. Miss Granger." Dumbledore put down his quill. "Please, sit down. I must say I wasn't expecting a visit on a Sunday morning. Can I offer you a sherbet lemon?"
I took one. Hermione didn't. She sat down on the edge of her chair with her back very straight, and I took the chair next to hers and got the cup out of my pocket.
I let it go back to its proper size and put it on the desk between us.
Dumbledore leaned forward, and his hand came to rest flat on the desk, an inch from the cup.
"That," he said, "belonged to Helga Hufflepuff."
"It did," I said. "And until about midnight last night, it was a Horcrux."
It took most of an hour to tell him everything.
I told it the same way I'd told Hermione and Sirius, starting with the piece of Voldemort in my scar that I'd pulled out just before Christmas, the memories that had come with it, and the threads.
After that, I went through them one at a time, starting with the diary, because he already knew about that one.
When I got to the locket at Grimmauld Place, Phineas Nigellus opened one eye in his frame, and he stayed awake for the rest of it.
Dumbledore didn't interrupt. He asked questions when I stopped, and they were good ones, the kind I'd have asked.
How the soul orb worked, and whether Voldemort could feel the pieces going. How I'd got into the vault without the goblins noticing.
He asked to see the orb, so I showed him, just for a second, glowing over my hand, and Fawkes ruffled all his feathers up at once.
Dumbledore watched it until it faded. "I have seen a great deal of magic, Harry, and never anything quite like that," he said. "Magic that reaches into the soul is old, and it is seldom kind to the people who use it. I hope you are being careful."
"I am," I said.
When I got to the ring, he interrupted me for the first time.
"Marvolo Gaunt's ring," he said. "I have looked for that ring for a very long time, Harry. Do you have it?"
"Somewhere safe," I said.
"I would very much like to see it."
"I know," I said. "Maybe after."
I'd left it in a locked drawer in the Room on purpose. I'd taken the curse off it at Easter, so it couldn't hurt him anymore, but the curse had never really been the problem.
In the books, Dumbledore had seen the stone in that ring and put it on before he could stop himself, because he wanted to see his family again so badly.
The stone was still in it, and I wasn't putting it in front of him across a desk on a Sunday morning.
His eyes weren't twinkling at all. He took a sherbet lemon out of the bowl, turned it over in his fingers and put it down again without eating it.
"Six pieces of Tom Riddle's soul," he said. "Five of them in a single school year, by a fourth-year student. I have suspected since you brought me that diary that he had done something like this, but I never imagined there were so many."
"And it did not occur to you to come to me?" he went on. "Before you started pulling pieces of Voldemort out of your own head?"
"Would you have let me do any of it?"
He didn't answer straight away. Behind him, one of the silver instruments let out a small puff of smoke.
"No," he admitted. "I don't suppose I would."
"And were you ever going to tell me?" I asked. "About my scar? You said you'd suspected since the diary, so you must have wondered."
Hermione's head turned sharply towards him.
Dumbledore kept his eyes on me. He took his glasses off, and without them he looked a lot older than he usually did.
"It occurred to me a great many times," he said. "I told myself you were too young to carry it, and that I might be wrong. I would have told you one day." He rubbed his eyes. "I am not sure that day would have come as soon as it should have."
I'd expected to feel like I'd won something. I mostly just felt sorry for him.
Dumbledore put his glasses back on and glanced at the blue clip in Hermione's hair before he looked back at me.
"And now you want to go after the last one," he said. "The snake."
"And him," I said. "Now, while he's still stuck in that chair."
"Then I will be coming with you," Dumbledore said.
"I was hoping you'd say that," I replied. "Wormtail's in that house too. If you're the one who brings him in, the Ministry will have to listen."
Dumbledore pressed his fingertips together. "You've kept in touch with Sirius."
"All year."
"So I'd gathered. If Peter Pettigrew is in that house, I will make sure he arrives at the Ministry in one piece, and I will make sure Cornelius listens."
"Professor," Hermione said. It was the first thing she'd said since we sat down. "He's fourteen. You're really going to take him to fight You-Know-Who?"
"I would very much rather not," Dumbledore said. "But I am not sure anyone could stop him now, and I would far rather be beside him than hear about it afterwards."
Hermione pressed her lips together, and her hands tightened on the arms of her chair.
Dumbledore started to say something else, then, about how a wizard who'd gone to such lengths to avoid death wouldn't be simple to kill, and how perhaps we should take a few days and bring in a few people he trusted.
"It has to be me," I said. "I can get us into that house without anyone knowing we're coming, and the orb can deal with the snake and him at the same time. Nobody else can do either of those."
"And the timing?" he asked.
"This week, if we can," I said. "Before Wormtail gets him out of that chair."
"I would feel happier," Dumbledore said, "if Alastor came with us. There is no one I'd rather have beside me in a fight."
The real Alastor Moody was at the bottom of a trunk in his own office, which made that a bit awkward.
"No," I said.
It came out a bit faster than I'd meant it to, and Dumbledore's eyebrows went up.
I made myself slow down. "No one else. Someone in this castle put my name in the Goblet, Professor. Until we know who, I'd rather nobody else at Hogwarts heard about this. Just you."
"Do you suspect anyone?" Dumbledore asked.
"A few people," I said. "I'd rather not guess out loud in a room full of portraits."
Phineas Nigellus sniffed loudly from his frame.
The someone was the man he wanted to bring. Barty Crouch Junior would have a message on its way to Voldemort the second he found out, and if I exposed him now, Voldemort would know someone was coming before we'd even left. Barty could wait until afterwards.
Dumbledore took a while to answer. I'd counted eleven silver instruments on his desk by the time he did.
"Very well," he said at last. "Just the two of us."
"Three," said Hermione. "I'm coming." Her voice wobbled, and she lifted her chin and kept going. "I've been to the Gaunt house, and I know the village. And I'm not sitting in Gryffindor Tower waiting to find out if you're dead."
"Miss Granger," Dumbledore began.
"Professor, with respect, he's going to say no as well, and I'd rather argue with both of you at once and save time."
I didn't know what to say to that. Part of me wanted her as far away from that house as I could get her. The rest of me had heard her say "That's how this works" enough times this year to know she wasn't going to sit in the tower, whatever I said.
"Perhaps," Dumbledore said, "the two of you should discuss that, and come back to me tomorrow evening."
We walked back up to Gryffindor Tower without saying much.
The corridors were full of people heading out to the grounds in the sunshine, and a couple of second-years from Hufflepuff stopped talking when we went past and then started again, whispering, which happened about twice a day now.
On the seventh floor, Hermione stopped by the window and looked out at the lake.
"You didn't say no in there," she said, still watching the lake. "I was waiting for it the whole time. If you'd said it in front of him, Professor Dumbledore would have agreed with you, and that would have been the end of it. So either you're going to say it later, when it's just us, or you haven't decided."
I thought about the chair in that house, and the snake curled up next to it.
"I don't know yet," I said, which was the truth.
Hermione nodded. Then she held out her hand, and I took it. She kept running her thumb over my knuckles while she watched the lake, and neither of us went anywhere for a while.
*
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