On Sunday morning I took the ring out of the desk in the Room for the first time in weeks. It had been in the bottom drawer since Easter, in a small wooden box, behind two locks and a charm that would have given anyone but me a nasty shock.
From the sofa, Hermione watched me undo the locks over the top of her book.
"You told Dumbledore you'd bring it 'maybe after,'" she said.
"I feel it has been enough time for a maybe after."
"You also told him the curse was gone." She marked her page. "So why is it still locked up like that? It's just a ring now."
"The ring is," I said. "I'm not sure the stone is. I've got an idea what it might be, but I'd like a second opinion before I say it out loud."
I did know what the stone was . The honest answer to how I knew would be I'd read about it in seven books that didn't exist here.
Hermione would have asked to borrow them.
"What sort of idea?" she asked.
"The sort that sounds mad. If Dumbledore says it first and it turns out to be wrong, he's the one who looks silly."
Hermione was already putting the book in her bag.
We went straight down to Dumbledore's office. I'd sent Dobby with a note at breakfast, so the gargoyle was already standing aside when we got there.
Dumbledore was sitting behind his desk with his hands folded and nothing in front of him at all. Fawkes was awake on his perch.
Phineas Nigellus had given up pretending to be asleep and was sitting forward in his frame.
Two chairs had been set out in front of the desk, and Hermione took the one nearer the door. I put the box down and opened the lid.
The ring sat on a square of old cloth. It was heavy and a bit ugly, with the black stone set in the top.
Dumbledore left his hands where they were. He took off his half-moon glasses and put them down next to the box.
"You have taken the curse off," he said.
"At Easter."
"And you know what this is."
"The Peverell coat of arms is cut into the stone," I said. "Voldemort knew that much. His family never stopped boasting about it. He didn't know what it meant, though, and I don't think he ever bothered to find out. I think I have. I wanted to hear you say it before I did."
Hermione looked up from the stone. "What does it mean?"
"It means," said Dumbledore, "that unless I am very much mistaken, Miss Granger, this is the Resurrection Stone."
"The what?"
He told her the story. Three brothers came to a river too dangerous to cross and used magic to build a bridge over it.
Death met them halfway, annoyed at losing three people he'd been counting on. He pretended to be impressed, and offered them each a prize.
"The eldest asked for a wand more powerful than any other," said Dumbledore. "The second asked for a way to bring back the dead, and Death gave him a stone from the riverbank. The youngest asked for something that would let him leave that place without Death following him. Death gave him, rather against his will, his own Cloak of Invisibility."
He kept his eyes on the stone while he said it. In the books, Dumbledore had borrowed the Cloak from my dad in the summer of 1981 to study it, and he'd still had it the night my parents died. He'd sent it back to me the Christmas I was eleven, with a note he hadn't signed.
"The second brother went home," Dumbledore went on, "and turned the stone three times in his hand. The girl he had meant to marry before she died appeared in front of him. But she was cold and unhappy, and always just out of his reach, as though there were a veil between them. She did not belong in this world any more. In the end, he killed himself so that he could be with her."
"He killed himself?"
"Wizarding stories for children are rarely gentle, Miss Granger."
"But it's a fairy tale," said Hermione. "Professor, you can't think it actually happened."
"I have spent a long time," said Dumbledore, "trying to decide how much of it did."
He'd skipped the end of the eldest brother's story, the bit where the brother boasts about his wand at an inn and has his throat cut in his sleep for it. The wand had been in Dumbledore's inside pocket since 1945, a few feet away from me.
With the Cloak in my trunk upstairs and the ring on the desk, I had two of the three. If the Archmage Essence was a system, this would have been a quest.
Deathly Hallows: 2/3 collected.
"Professor," said Hermione, "if it does what the story says, could you... could anyone actually use it? To see someone again?"
"Yes," said Dumbledore. "Or a shadow of them, which may not be the same thing."
His hand moved an inch towards the box. He put it in his lap instead.
"There is someone I would like to apologise to," he said. "I have wanted to for most of my life."
Ariana Dumbledore had been fourteen when she died, the age I was now, caught in a three-way duel between her brothers and Gellert Grindelwald. Nobody had ever found out whose curse hit her.
The Dumbledore I'd read about had found this ring and put it straight on, because of her, and the curse would have killed him a lot sooner if Snape hadn't been there.
Dumbledore put his glasses back on. Then he took out his wand, closed the lid of the box with the tip of it, and pushed the box back to me.
"I would like you to keep it, Harry," he said. "Somewhere safe. And I would be grateful if you did not tell me where."
"That's why I didn't bring it last Sunday," I said.
"Yes. I rather thought it might be."
"How did you know?" Hermione asked me. "You said Voldemort never found out what the crest meant. So how did you?"
That was the trouble with a girlfriend who wore Ravenclaw's diadem to breakfast. She heard the gaps in things.
"There's a book on wizarding families in the Room," I said. "It's got a page on the Peverells, with their crest at the top and a note underneath about the story. I already knew the ring was Peverell, so I put it together."
It was true, as far as it went. The Room had produced the book the first time I asked it for something on the Gaunts, back before Christmas. I'd just known what I was looking for before I opened it.
Hermione drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair.
"Fine," she said. "Professor, is there a copy of that story in the library?"
"The Tales of Beedle the Bard," said Dumbledore. "There is. But I would rather you borrowed mine."
He fetched it from a shelf behind his desk, a small, battered book with its leather cover rubbed almost smooth.
"It is in the original runes, I'm afraid," he said, "and it has been read a great deal."
Hermione took it in both hands.
"I'll bring it back," she said.
"Take your time, Miss Granger."
"There's one more thing, Professor," I said, as Hermione stood up. "The snake."
"Ah." Dumbledore sat down again. "I wondered when you would ask. She is with an old student of mine, in Dorset. He has a great deal of experience with creatures that nobody else wants."
"Which student?" asked Hermione.
"His name is Newt Scamander."
"The man who wrote Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them?" said Hermione. "That was one of our first-year books. He's still alive? He must be nearly a hundred."
"Ninety-eight," said Dumbledore. "And still a great deal better with dangerous creatures than he has ever been with people. He tells me that she is not entirely what she appears to be, and he has asked me to leave her with him for some time."
In my old life, the films had said Nagini was a woman once, a Maledictus whose blood curse turned her into a snake for good in the end, and people had spent years arguing about whether the films even counted.
I'd never made my mind up. If anyone alive could tell what was left of a person under twelve feet of scales, it was Newt Scamander.
"Then that's where she should be," I said.
Hermione waited until we were on one of the moving staircases, halfway back to the Room, with nobody else in earshot.
"Would you use it?" she asked. "The stone."
"No."
"Not even for your parents?"
"They'd only want to know if I was all right," I said. "I am. They don't need to come back to check."
Hermione put her hand over mine on the banister. The staircase swung round to a new landing with a grinding noise, and she kept it there until we reached the top.
Back in the Room, I put the box in the drawer and did both locks and the charm. If one look at the stone could move Dumbledore's hand an inch across his own desk, it could have a third lock.
Hermione was on the sofa with The Tales of Beedle the Bard on her knees and her notes on top of a runes dictionary.
She'd gone straight to the last story in the book. I sat down at the other end and pretended to read something about warding until she reached the third brother.
She stopped there and went back to the start of the paragraph.
"Harry," she said. "Invisibility cloaks wear out. The charms on them fade after a few years, even on the expensive ones. Yours was your father's, and it's still perfect."
"I know," I said. "I think it's the third brother's."
She closed the book on her finger.
"The Potters come from the Peverells," I told her. "Ignotus was the youngest brother. It was in the same book as the crest."
"So you've got two of them," she said. "The Cloak and the Stone."
"Looks like it."
"And the wand?"
"That one's not mine to tell you about."
***
For advanced chapters
P@treon : Eternal97