Official Fine Print: Nope. Not mine. The brainchildren of the mighty pen of JK Rowling. Just playing with them. Honest.
Here With Me
Chapter 28
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The following morning was quite thankfully a Sunday; and while Hermione had her usual strict schedule of reading, revising and getting ahead on her homework planned, even she could allow herself the rare luxury of a lie in with only one day of classes this week. They left for the Burrow day after tomorrow, and Christmas was the next day. She poked her head out of the curtains of Harry's bed to find a silence so deep it seemed almost unnatural. Even Ron wasn't honking away in the next bed; he appeared too completely relaxed to snore. Or perhaps he was dreaming of Luna… If that worked, Luna'd have won herself the undying admiration of four other boys as well. Outside the window the snow fell on thickly, obscuring the sky.
She pulled the curtain closed again and snuggled back into the warm comfort that was Harry behind her. He'd been spooned against her back when she moved; now as she settled herself into him carefully, seeking out exactly the right alignment for maximum heat transfer, his arm closed around her and he made a small, unconscious sound of relief. Hermione fitted her own arm over his, sealing the bargain of their contentment.
Bloody school rules.
She could entirely see the reason for them if you were Lavender Brown and Cormac McLaggen and the whole point of the exercise was figuring out who you could do it with and what you were actually doing and what other people thought about it you doing it. She'd listened to enough of Lavender's end of things to know she was trying out as many boys as she could so that she wouldn't regret things when she settled down to just one. At least her ultimate goal was semi-admirable, although it made Hermione's head spin to think of doing it that way.
She felt very differently (and quite sure) about what she was doing with Harry, and she was deeply regretting now the idea of returning to the more normal confines of a sixth year relationship. She knew the logic of it, could hear exactly the words the adults in charge of them might use if they were to speak of it (which she dearly hoped they weren't, but felt had to have been inevitable, at least between Professor Dumbledore and Professor McGonagall. Her skin crept at the thought.)
Was it normal, though, to be their age and to know such uncertainty about what the future held for you? At least it was uncertainty on her part; Harry had the fairly inevitable shadow of Voldemort's hatred hanging over him still. She knew that he thought it inescapable and she felt sure that knowledge still colored everything he did now. Part of her, the part that was now settling her spine slightly more insinuatingly against his chest and allowing her hips to shift back into his, was increasingly sure that they would have found themselves together like this one way or another even without the opportunity being his dream keeper had afforded. A clock was ticking ever more insistently over his head; it seemed only right somehow to drown out the sound with something more.
His lips had come to slow life on the back of her neck and every nerve in her body was awaking underneath them, running a relay race to tell each other that he was awake, that he was touching her there, and there and there. She could feel the evidence of his wanting her both in every touch and his steadily growing presence against the small of her back. As much as she loved the wicked private humor that had sprung up between them, there were equally times like this when the very idea of laughing at that sensation seemed irretrievably distant and juvenile now. It had begun to strike her on such occasions as too incredibly precious to waste a moment of him even to laughter, when the future might equally hold the eternal absence of him against her there, like that.
She rolled over in his arms then and tried to tell him so, how singular and lovely and irreplaceable every inch of skin, every thrum of pulse, every instinctual movement and sound he made was to her. It was hell to think of losing him, ever; it would be heaven to be able to simply give herself over to him without imagining the bitter taste of loss one day upon her lips. She lived now to sense for that moment when the rest of his preoccupations all fell away from him as they came together, when she managed to draw him so certainly into their private cocoon of touch that the only thing he really cared about was where the next one would come and what it would feel like and how he could mimic its sensation back for her.
Harry had proved surprisingly adept at that; she wondered if they were usual or not, if the slow, slow dance they'd begun to favor lately to draw each other out was something that everyone did, or not. She had nothing to compare it to, wanted nothing to compare it to, felt certain nothing ever could. She knew somehow it would be held against her to think that way, chalked up to her youth. She shoved violently away the knowledge of how she would be counseled to set those memories aside if anything happened to him; to move on, accept what else life had to offer. How could she? How could anyone? Would they tell Molly Weasley to do that if Arthur died now? Age was an indicator of maturity in all but the heart; hers felt as if it had grown well past her numerical years, stretched and full of him.
Had any part of Lily's love left in Harry been born of the certain knowledge that James was already dead? Had it been any different to give up her own life for her young son knowing that? Hermione thought it diminished nothing from the gift of it but brought her suddenly closer to Lily and the decision she had made, closer to understanding why exactly her love had been so destructive to Voldemort as it suffused through Harry's veins. Perhaps it was not after all the magic of her love alone; a mother's love for her child, but by extension the equally old magic that was a family, love made flesh and whole.
It must have taken tremendous faith in magic itself to believe Harry would be protected without her, and tremendous love for James for Lily to follow him even into death and in doing so leave Harry to that precious protection. If any one of the parts of the triangle had been less strong, might the magic have failed?
The thought brought a new, more electric urgency to her need to join with him somehow, her imperative need for that sense of being whole he brought with him. And being Harry, her lovely Harry; when her movements became almost blind and frantic against him with all her wild thoughts of love and loss lurching around her brain, allowed his own mind shut down and instead of questioning her simply took up his part in their coupling, stilling and soothing her with the strength and weight and insistent movement she craved.
She had never felt quite this way before. She was neither truly the instigator nor the aggressor, because both of those indicated a degree of self control she couldn't begin to claim and he was meeting her every move. There were vague, half-formed notions of claiming him, marking him indelibly as her own before they were forced further apart, of burning herself into his memory so that there were no possible questions left unanswered when it came to how she felt. She spurred him on; pinned firmly against the bed by the desperately controlled rocking of his hips and caged by the arms on which he balanced himself above her she could still manage the use of both her lips and fingers. She touched and stroked every particularly responsive or sensitive stretch of skin she knew or could find over and over, in tandem and then counterpoint to each other, lips and fingers, fingers and lips until he was almost as far gone as she was, his breath coming in fast, tender sobs against her neck.
He found his voice when she had thought it long gone, the sound of his words like the sweetest, most perfect pressure placed with perfect rhythm in just the perfect place.
"Hermione," he begged softly, his head hanging close to her ear. "please, what? Tell me… I want to…anything… let me… tell me what… you need."
"That," she told him; bearing down to hold herself together just when everything inside her gave way. "Just that," she whispered back into his neck, feeling the pounding of his heart in the vein beneath her lips. "You," she said, and he was just as lost as she, and it was beyond everything to be able to hold him safe while he fell too, because she knew it was never going to be quite that way again.
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There were thankfully now only two more nights before they left for the Burrow, and only one full day of classes. The nights were some of the loneliest of Harry's life; endless, miserable toss-and-turn affairs free of bad dreams mostly because they were free of sleep. He could not get comfortable without Hermione. The bed was too big now, too cold; too empty by far and his pillow still smelled like her. It was maddening. The day of classes was marginally better, mostly because he slept though it.
Since it was something of a secret that Harry was being allowed to the Burrow for Christmas in the first place he wasn't allowed to join the other students in their leave taking or on the Express. In the interest of not being entirely obvious about revealing his holiday location to the Death Eaters, Ron and Ginny were to take the train and be picked up in Kings Cross, while Harry and Hermione were set to portkey in that evening. This last was only because Harry had insisted on Hermione remaining there with him; he'd had to point out that the two of them were a pretty well known fact now amongst the Slytherins most likely to report home to Death Eater parents and they could no longer act as thought it didn't matter. She was as good a target alone without him now as with; there was less safety in separation then ever before. He was significantly less forthcoming about revealing his secondary reason, which was that he bloody well wasn't going to spend the whole day stuck here alone without her.
So it was that Ron made his good byes with a grin at the thought of what the two of them could get up to in a day mostly alone in the castle, and joined the throng heading out into the still falling snow to Hogsmeade with Luna and Ginny. It took Harry's returned grin and Hermione's subtle thumbs up for him to realize his opportunities were almost as bright.
They turned together to climb the stairs, but their thoughts must have been a beacon entirely too evident because they found Dumbledore before them with a face rather tired and serious for the start of holidays and a request that they join him in his office.
Harry felt his cautious happiness pricked, and settled back to earth.
Once settled in Dumbledore's rooms and having refused lemon drops and accepted hot cocoa, they were treated to the issue at hand. It left them both reeling.
"I know it would be kinder to save this talk for after the holidays," Dumbledore began, "but I have had to learn some hard lessons these last few years, and one of them has proved to be that much as it saddens me, it does not benefit either of us to be kind to you, Harry."
"No," said Harry, remembering the results of Dumbledore's past kindnesses. "I reckon not."
"I have spoken to both of you separately about the connection of the window awakening and the second prophecy, but it is time, I think, for us all to put our heads together to good use. Have you come to any conclusions, either of you, of what it is the prophecy refers to?"
Hermione, as was her nature, jumped to the challenge with a line by line exposition.
"'When the wheel of life spins once more a lion scarred by death itself will rise, who speaks the language of snakes and bears the fangs of a dragon.' That's Harry, isn't it? A Gryffindor for the lion, and his scar coming from surviving the Avada Kedavra. He's a parselmouth, and Charlie sent him the dragon fang this summer."
"It says fangs," pointed out Harry hopefully, "and I've only got the one. Maybe it's not me."
Dumbledore and Hermione both shot him a long look and he sighed, waving her on.
"'He will follow its path to begin his journey and he will strike down an immortal evil where it lies five times, but the sixth time he will find it within himself.' 'Its path' must mean the window, surely. It's turning, slower than the earth butstill clearly moving with time, and the riddle the sorting hat told us talked about how it was 'Obscured from those who seek in wrath, But waiting on the righteous path.' I took that to mean it had been hidden from those who sought to use the events unfolding there to do evil things, but if you went looking for honest reasons you'd find it. Only, that didn't happen. Or did it?"
Harry reckoned that Hermione confused was one of the world's cuter things; the sheer rareness of it and the little furrow between her eyes…
She kicked his ankle hard enough to put an end to that thought.
"Ow. How would I know?"
"You were just the one who did it, after all," she told him.
"Well, I was more hacked off than anything the first time, and then it was just a window, wasn't it? It didn't really show us anything until the spell hit it when we were fighting off Voldemort."
"And there was the difference, Harry," Dumbledore pointed out. "The first time you were indeed wrathful, although not without good intentions, and you weren't actually seeking it. Clearly, though, you or something about you was the trigger to uncovering it. The next time, you were using a spell intended not to kill but to banish evil. Had Voldemort not been malicious, the spell you choose would have been harmless. It was a righteous choice, and it connected and reacted with an obscure timespell. We have accepted that this returned the window to normal but I wonder if we aren't making a rather large assumption. How do we know if the window ever revealed such secrets before? Was it moving when it was hidden so long ago, or did you in fact actually set it motion?"
Hermione's eyes glowed; clearly that particular thought had not occurred to her before.
"It just says 'He will follow its path to begin his journey.' It might well not have been moving at all before then! But what does that mean? And what about the part where 'he will strike down an immortal evil where it lies five times, but the sixth time he will find it within himself.' Is Voldemort an 'immortal evil' because he didn't truly die when he tried to kill Harry? Do the five times mean the five years he's been here at Hogwarts, and the sixth this year when Voldemort possessed him?"
It was here Dumbledore let out a sigh of his own.
"Alas, I wish it were, Hermione, but I have become increasingly certain it is not, tempting though that explanation is. I'm afraid the answer is a far darker thing, and puts Harry back at the beginning of his journey rather than nearing the end."
Harry felt as if he'd been punched. One of Vernon's particularly vicious sucker punches; unexpected and below the belt. His stomach lurched, and his brain screamed 'No way! I am NOT starting this all over!'"
"How?" was what he managed to get out. They both looked at him somewhat anxiously and Dumbledore's hand twitched, refilling his cocoa.
"The answer lies in the history and science of magic. It is not, as you know, simply wand waving and wish fulfillment. There is a responsibility that comes with this greater gift we are allowed, and without upholding that responsibility we are a long way from being any better than the Muggles that so out number us; indeed we would be lower and baser by far," he said thoughtfully. He sat back in his ancient, creaking chair and steepled his fingers in his beard beneath his chin. Harry got the feeling for a moment or two that he was seeing another room entirely, or recalling another conversation. Or both.
"We have the capacity to do wonderful things, but I myself believe our numbers are shrinking and our world is in turmoil because we have responded to the fear of those who do not understand us with fear ourselves. Throughout history the witch hunts, the dunkings and beatings and burnings, the outright killing of innocent witches and wizards because their abilities were either feared or envied, has caused us not to seek to explain ourselves but to turn inside ourselves like wounded children, to shut ourselves amongst our own kind and let the feelings fester. It is there Grindelwald and Voldemort have found their footholds amongst us."
Holy hell, thought Harry. That made frightening sense, even to him. He'd never associated himself or his magic with that particular part of history. He'd learned it in Muggle school after all; History of Magic at Hogwarts focused on magical uprisings, Goblin rebellions and the like. It skirted the issues Dumbledore raised here entirely. To be hated, hunted, killed because you were magical… he knew the Wizarding world hid itself because the Muggles feared and didn't understand magic, but he'd forgotten all about the history between them before the separation had occurred. It made sense - sad, twisted sense, but sense none the less - of some of the pureblood hatred of Muggles. Not just for the differences between them now, but the fear and mistrust of the past.
"I believe," said Dumbledore, "that Voldemort long ago set out on a path so wicked and twisted that were it left undiscovered and uncorrected, it would surely mean either the end of our world or magic on earth as we know it. It took intelligence and power to uncover what he needed; and great evil and resolve to carry out. And because of the prophecy that foretold the birth of one who could put an end to it, you, Harry, became a part of it. I still maintain it could have just as well been Neville or in fact could have meant another altogether, and it is important you understand that, Harry. It was not the force of magic at work that night; it was the will and choice of a magical man. There is a difference."
Splitting hairs, as far as Harry was concerned. Greasy ones, since it was Snape that clued Voldemort in to it.
"When Lord Voldemort descended on your parents' house that night, Harry, he had not been Tom Riddle in a very long while. He was no longer human, a precious gift we bear along with our magic. He had cast that gift aside, rendered it along with his soul. He entered your house with only a shred of his own soul left, and he meant to use killing you that night to ensure what he perceived to be true immortality."
Harry was lost. He saw that Hermione was rapt, but confused as well.
"There is a creation of dark magic so perverse you will not find its name in any book in Hogwarts, Hermione. Not even in the restricted section. Much as they have with Voldemort himself, wizards sought to deny its existence by refusing to acknowledge it or speak its name. And like all attempts to hide from evil, it has come back to haunt us with a vengeance. It is called a horcrux, and I fear Voldemort has made not just one, but six of them."
"What is it then, some sort of weapon? And why does he need six of them?" Harry asked, uncertain he actually wanted there to be an answer.
"And what sort of weapon," mused Hermione, "ensures immortality? What kind of weapon can never be turned on its creator?"
"The kind that is nothing less than its creator. A horcrux is a truly accursed object. The wizard who creates it uses the premeditated evil of the murder of another to rip apart his own soul. At the moment of separation, the torn portion is pulled from the body and implanted within a prepared vessel. The hiding place can be anything; hollow or solid, large or small, valuable as gold or apparently worthless as an old, used book."
Harry stomach took another hit; he knew.
"That wasn't a memory of Tom Riddle I fought with in the Chamber," he choked out. "It was really him."
Dumbledore nodded grimly, but his eyes were watching Harry avidly now. "Yes. Exactly my thought, Harry. I have been puzzling away at the magic of that for years now, and a horcrux is the only true answer that accounts for it. A journal could be cursed, but a curse alone could not have forced Miss Weasley to undertake all that she did, or brought you face to face with the young man you fought. The way that you described him in such detail made me sure he was no mere memory. It was more than likely the very first horcrux he made. Ginny Weasley was possessed by a portion of the soul of Lord Voldemort as surely as you were, Harry, and he walked among us all that time without our knowing."
Harry felt cold and dizzy by turns as his mind tried to accept and integrate this new information; Hermione's warm hand creeping into his own amongst the folds of his robes was the only thing that grounded him.
"But it was so different, with Ginny…"
"There are several important events that account for that difference, Harry. When you first met Lord Voldemort in the back of Professor Quirrell's head, what you saw there was a type of possession as well. It was a parasitic relationship; Voldemort's unembodied soul was living off Professor Quirrell, and his one goal at that time was to regain a body of his own. He sought the Philosopher's Stone not for immortality, which he had already achieved, but to use it to regain his strength and a corporeal body with it. Your touch was his undoing from his host, but his soul fled unharmed.
What you met in the Chamber was indeed Lord Voldemort, Harry, but a different portion of him. It was the true Lord Voldemort in Quirrell's head; the portion of his soul that fled his mortally wounded body the night the killing curse rebounded from you to him. It later took up residence in Quirrell during his wanderings in Albania and came back here with him. What you saw in the Chamber was a portion of his soul torn from himself years before and stored within the pages of the diary. A horcruxed soul is not a true soul; it is nothing more than a portion of a true soul's essence.
It is possible for a mad and powerful wizard to make a cheat at Godliness by tearing his soul through murder, but only love has been blessed by our creator as a source of true life; only two souls coming together in the act of procreation can create a new soul amongst us. The hope and intent of that, I am sure, was to nurture that soul's creation in what is best about us, our one true image of that creating force. Unselfish love for another. In violating that, Voldemort has set all that created us against himself.
"But Harry destroyed it; the book and the image of Riddle that went with it," Hermione said slowly. "Was that a portion of Voldemort's soul he destroyed?"
Dumbledore nodded gravely.
"You told me he had to do it six more times in the hospital wing. Face off with Voldemort. But you just said he made six horcruxes; wouldn't that mean five more soul pieces?"
"Voldemort has always respected power above all. I am just guessing, based on the fact that he survived the destruction of the diary without further repercussions, that he made more than one. We are tossing off numbers here as if they are just that; numbers. Ripping apart one's very soul is a terrible thing. In their limited history that we know of, no one has ever done it more than once. Tom Riddle was never content to do just what had been done before. It is my suspicion, based in part on Professor Forthecomb's prophecy; that he sought to achieve the highly potent magical number of seven."
Harry tried to do the math on that and failed miserably. No matter what he did he was off by one.
"I don't…" he started, but Hermione squeaked and clasped his hand so tightly his fingers numbed.
"He is the seventh, isn't he? Voldemort himself! He had to start with something to split from; if he wanted to end up with seven he had to tear off six pieces!" Her pleasure in solving the problem turned abruptly to horror, however, after her mind took the next logical step. "That means he killed six people, doesn't it? For nothing more than…"
There was silence between the three of them for a moment as they each reflected on the waste of six lives, six innocent souls lost for that.
"How does it…" Hermione's voice trailed off, as though she found it almost too distasteful to ask, and Harry knew then what she was asking.
Dumbledore knew as well. "I told you that no man can create a soul alone; nor can he recreate one. It is what it is, what it was created to be. It wishes to be whole; it can not leave this world for any other if it is not. Regardless of the judgment of good or wicked, which is never truly ours to make, a soul must be whole to go on anywhere. A horcrux creates a false immortality by insuring the horcruxed soul can not leave the bounds of this earth even if the body it was born to is destroyed. It wanders, seeking to reunite with its missing piece. In Voldemort's case, the goal was never to unite the missing pieces, but to scatter them around widely to make sure that no matter what happened to his body, there would always be a fragment of his soul left to ensure Voldemort need not face death."
He turned on Harry then, his blue eyes boring in without the intrusion of his magic behind them, underscoring the obvious intention of the whole conversation. "Know this, Harry. Commit it to your memory and never forget it. That is how badly the mighty Lord Voldemort fears death. Enough to shred his soul to try and keep it at bay. That is why when you embraced death as preferable to sharing your body with him in the Department of Mysteries you were able to drive him from you. He is terrified of something you could accept with grace and equanimity because he was never loved as you were, can never hope to be loved as you are now. You may be just a boy, although I think we three know you to be more than that now, but you are far from defenseless against him."
"But if the prophecy he believes in says 'and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives,'" Harry asked, "what does that have to do with horcruxing himself? If he's made himself immortal I can't kill him, so what's he so bloody mad about? He's had my blood, he's got his body back, he can touch me… what more does he need? Why can't he live while I survive?"
"Because he is not truly immortal, Harry. It is but a corruption of life, and he knows it. Horcruxes are nothing more than objects with fragments of soul hidden within. They are dark, destructive things, but with only a pale imitation of their creator's power. That is one reason why Ginny's experience of being possessed was more like a persistent imperius curse than the more physical possession you knew.
Voldemort can still be defeated if each of his horcruxes, how ever many there truly are, are destroyed first. I do not mean to make that sound easy; even if we knew where to find them destroying them is not, as you discovered with the diary, an easy thing. You had the potent magic of the basilisks' fang to hand; without it the tale might have ended quite differently. But there is a beautiful symmetry to being destroyed by the very beast he commanded, too. Never forget to look for that circle closing around you, Harry, for that is where the magic lies. That's the surest sign you are acting with the power of both magic and creation itself behind you, and with it you can not fail."
"You mean I'm meant to find and destroy at least six horcruxes before I can finally confront him?" Harry asked numbly.
"Five now, for I think that we have agreed here you have quite probably destroyed one, and he himself is the seventh portion."
"Professor," Hermione questioned, "when the first prophecy says Harry will 'strike down an immortal evil where it lies five times, but the sixth time he will find it within himself.' What does that mean? It says 'only if the lion can vanquish his own darkness will his seventh strike save him. If he cannot, the pretender has won, and by all that is sacred in this world magic must die.'"
"I believe it means just what you think it means, dear girl," Dumbledore informed her. "And I confess to being at a loss either to entirely explain it, or yet what to do about it. But I think we have wrestled with enough of the worlds problems for the moment; the magic of this coming holiday is the reminder that it is not ultimately up to us after all. We are but grains of sand in a cosmic sea, loved and set adrift. If we remain true to our purpose and the eternal truths that created us, all will be well in the end. We always have the choice to believe that our choices matter."
Harry's head hurt, and none of this last was helping; he was less adrift in a cosmic sea than drowning in it.
"Erm, thank you," he said, because 'thanks a bloody heap you raving great loon,' just seemed rude.
Dumbledore's mercurial mood was seemingly blown in yet another direction by some gusty cosmic breeze, and he smiled with an almost child-like glee.
"Before you go," he informed them, "I confess that I thought it best that after our conversation you two kept yourselves busy until it was time for your portkey. I thought some nice exercise might do you both good and keep you out of, well keep you occupied, shall we say. So I have taken the liberty of hiding your Christmas gifts somewhere inside the castle at the end of a trail of clues. Nothing like a good treasure hunt, is there? You can work together, but I promise you it's not in any of the broom closets or supply stores. Off you go, then, Happy Christmas!"
"Happy Christmas," they chorused dazedly, and made their way down the revolving staircase. They made it as far as the staircase above the Entrance hall before they were both laughing so hard they had to hold each other up, and sat instead on the top step across from the window.
"You would've thought we'd never find anything funny again after all that," Hermione managed, and Harry thought that her eyes were especially beautiful when she laughed, warm and brown and inviting. "How does he do it?"
"By being a barmy great daft totally mental mad gormless twit," he informed her, but he was still grinning helplessly himself. "And not altogether bad in the legilmency department either, I suppose."
The thick snow outside gave the window an eerie, muffled sort of look, but its faint keening sound still occasionally wailed on.
"D'you hear it?" he asked her, suddenly realizing they had never discussed that part of it. "It spooks the hell out of me, that sound."
"No," she admitted, and he could see the faint hunger in her eyes that meant she wanted to know something. "I haven't yet. I've never been in the hall like this before when it was so quiet, though. Do you hear it now?"
He nodded, and watched while she closed her eyes intently. He could see her begin to grow frustrated after a bit, and her eyelids twitched restlessly. He thought she was about to give up and searched quickly for a way to describe what to listen for, wondering if she'd know what he meant by whale song. It struck him only another moment on what a totally mad, mentally deficient twit HE was capable of being the other way round; just he never liked to do the whole legilmens thing himself didn't mean it couldn't come in handy.
He gathered up the sound and pushed it at her, gently but insistently. Her eyes flew abruptly open, wide and delighted.
"It says different things to different people!" she exclaimed.
That would make the three of them completely mental then. There must be something in the pumpkin juice; he half wondered if the house elves were less happy than they let on and getting even their own way.
"What do you mean?" he asked. "What did you hear?"
"When I was listening, it sounded like an old record player on the wrong speed, very slow and haaaaarrrrrrddddd tooooooo understand," she said, demonstrating. "It's so soft and low it's just on the verge of being able to be heard at all, but it was still distinctly words or sounds meant to have meaning, they didn't feel random in the least. And there was more than one voice in mine, sort of like you were in a room full of people with several conversations going on in the background. But when you gave me your bit it all sounded different. Yours was just one sound, over and over. No wonder it freaks you out. Absolutely fascinating. I wonder what it means?"
The stairs beneath them abruptly pulled a girls' dorm maneuver and turned into a slide, swooshing them down and dumping them breathlessly at the bottom before changing innocently back.
"No idea," Harry found himself laughing and light-hearted again, almost against his will. Bloody Dumbledore. "But I reckon we're meant to get on with our treasure hunt and that was our first clue."
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