And Harry was hurtling back out of those wide, tunnel-like pupils and Gregorovitch’s face was stricken with terror.

  ‘Who was the thief, Gregorovitch?’ said the high, cold voice.

  ‘I do not know, I never knew, a young man – no – please – PLEASE!’

  A scream that went on and on and then a burst of green light –

  ‘Harry!’

  He opened his eyes, panting, his forehead throbbing. He had passed out against the side of the tent; had slid sideways down the canvas and was sprawled on the ground. He looked up at Hermione, whose bushy hair obscured the tiny patch of sky visible through the dark branches high above them.

  ‘Dream,’ he said, sitting up quickly and attempting to meet Hermione’s glower with a look of innocence. ‘Must’ve dozed off, sorry.’

  ‘I know it was your scar! I can tell by the look on your face! You were looking into Vol—’

  ‘Don’t say his name!’ came Ron’s angry voice from the depths of the tent.

  ‘Fine,’ retorted Hermione. ‘You-Know-Who’s mind, then!’

  ‘I didn’t mean it to happen!’ Harry said. ‘It was a dream! Can you control what you dream about, Hermione?’

  ‘If you just learned to apply Occlumency –’

  But Harry was not interested in being told off; he wanted to discuss what he had just seen.

  ‘He’s found Gregorovitch, Hermione, and I think he’s killed him, but before he killed him he read Gregorovitch’s mind and I saw –’

  ‘I think I’d better take over the watch if you’re so tired you’re falling asleep,’ said Hermione coldly.

  ‘I can finish the watch!’

  ‘No, you’re obviously exhausted. Go and lie down.’

  She dropped down in the mouth of the tent, looking stubborn. Angry, but wishing to avoid a row, Harry ducked back inside.

  Ron’s still pale face was poking out from the lower bunk; Harry climbed into the one above him, lay down and looked up at the dark canvas ceiling. After several moments, Ron spoke in a voice so low that it would not carry to Hermione, huddled in the entrance.

  ‘What’s You-Know-Who doing?’

  Harry screwed up his eyes in the effort to remember every detail, then whispered into the darkness.

  ‘He found Gregorovitch. He had him tied up, he was torturing him.’

  ‘How’s Gregorovitch supposed to make him a new wand if he’s tied up?’

  ‘I dunno … it’s weird, isn’t it?’

  Harry closed his eyes, thinking of all he had seen and heard. The more he recalled, the less sense it made … Voldemort had said nothing about Harry’s wand, nothing about the twin cores, nothing about Gregorovitch making a new and more powerful wand to beat Harry’s …

  ‘He wanted something from Gregorovitch,’ Harry said, eyes still closed tight. ‘He asked him to hand it over, but Gregorovitch said it had been stolen from him … and then … then …’

  He remembered how he, as Voldemort, had seemed to hurtle through Gregorovitch’s eyes, into his memories …

  ‘He read Gregorovitch’s mind, and I saw this young bloke perched on a window sill, and he fired a curse at Gregorovitch and jumped out of sight. He stole it, he stole whatever You-Know-Who’s after. And I … I think I’ve seen him somewhere …’

  Harry wished he could have another glimpse of the laughing boy’s face. The theft had happened many years ago, according to Gregorovitch. Why did the young thief look familiar?

  The noises of the surrounding woods were muffled inside the tent; all Harry could hear was Ron’s breathing. After a while, Ron whispered, ‘Couldn’t you see what the thief was holding?’

  ‘No … it must’ve been something small.’

  ‘Harry?’

  The wooden slats of Ron’s bunk creaked as he repositioned himself in bed.

  ‘Harry, you don’t reckon You-Know-Who’s after something else to turn into a Horcrux?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Harry slowly. ‘Maybe. But wouldn’t it be dangerous for him to make another one? Didn’t Hermione say he had pushed his soul to the limit already?’

  ‘Yeah, but maybe he doesn’t know that.’

  ‘Yeah … maybe,’ said Harry.

  He had been sure that Voldemort had been looking for a way round the problem of the twin cores, sure that Voldemort sought a solution from the old wandmaker … and yet he had killed him, apparently without asking him a single question about wandlore.

  What was Voldemort trying to find? Why, with the Ministry of Magic and the wizarding world at his feet, was he far away, intent on the pursuit of an object that Gregorovitch had once owned, and which had been stolen by the unknown thief?

  Harry could still see the blond-haired youth’s face, it was merry, wild; there was a Fred and George-ish air of triumphant trickery about him. He had soared from the window sill like a bird, and Harry had seen him before, but he could not think where …

  With Gregorovitch dead, it was the merry-faced thief who was in danger now, and it was on him that Harry’s thoughts dwelled, as Ron’s snores began to rumble from the lower bunk and as he himself drifted slowly into sleep once more.

  — CHAPTER FIFTEEN —

  The Goblin’s Revenge

  Early next morning, before the other two were awake, Harry left the tent to search the woods around them for the oldest, most gnarled and resilient-looking tree he could find. There in its shadow he buried Mad-Eye Moody’s eye and marked the spot by gouging a small cross in the bark with his wand. It was not much, but Harry felt that Mad-Eye would have much preferred this to being stuck on Dolores Umbridge’s door. Then he returned to the tent to wait for the others to wake, and discuss what they were going to do next.

  Harry and Hermione felt that it was best not to stay anywhere too long, and Ron agreed, with the sole proviso that their next move took them within reach of a bacon sandwich. Hermione therefore removed the enchantments she had placed around the clearing, while Harry and Ron obliterated all the marks and impressions on the ground that might show they had camped there. Then they Disapparated to the outskirts of a small market town.

  Once they had pitched the tent in the shelter of a small copse of trees, and surrounded it with freshly cast defensive enchantments, Harry ventured out under the Invisibility Cloak to find sustenance. This, however, did not go as planned. He had barely entered the town when an unnatural chill, a descending mist and a sudden darkening of the skies made him freeze where he stood.

  ‘But you can make a brilliant Patronus!’ protested Ron, when Harry arrived back at the tent empty-handed, out of breath, and mouthing the single word ‘Dementors’.

  ‘I couldn’t … make one,’ he panted, clutching the stitch in his side. ‘Wouldn’t … come.’

  Their expressions of consternation and disappointment made Harry feel ashamed. It had been a nightmarish experience, seeing the Dementors gliding out of the mist in the distance and realising, as the paralysing cold choked his lungs and a distant screaming filled his ears, that he was not going to be able to protect himself. It had taken all Harry’s will power to uproot himself from the spot and run, leaving the eyeless Dementors to glide amongst the Muggles who might not be able to see them, but would assuredly feel the despair they cast wherever they went.

  ‘So we still haven’t got any food.’

  ‘Shut up, Ron,’ snapped Hermione. ‘Harry, what happened? Why do you think you couldn’t make your Patronus? You managed perfectly yesterday!’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He sat low in one of Perkins’s old armchairs, feeling more humiliated by the moment. He was afraid that something had gone wrong inside him. Yesterday seemed a long time ago: today he might have been thirteen years old again, the only one who collapsed on the Hogwarts Express.

  Ron kicked a chair leg.

  ‘What?’ he snarled at Hermione. ‘I’m starving! All I’ve had since I bled half to death is a couple of toadstools!’

  ‘You go and fight your way through the Dementors, then,’ said Harry, stung.

  ‘I would, but my arm’s in a sling, in case you hadn’t noticed!’

  ‘That’s convenient.’

  ‘And what’s that supposed to –?’

  ‘Of course!’ cried Hermione, clapping a hand to her forehead and startling both of them into silence. ‘Harry, give me the locket! Come on,’ she said impatiently, clicking her fingers at him when he did not react, ‘the Horcrux, Harry, you’re still wearing it!’

  She held out her hands and Harry lifted the golden chain over his head. The moment it parted contact with Harry’s skin he felt free and oddly light. He had not even realised that he was clammy, or that there was a heavy weight pressing on his stomach, until both sensations lifted.

  ‘Better?’ asked Hermione.

  ‘Yeah, loads better!’

  ‘Harry,’ she said, crouching down in front of him and using the kind of voice he associated with visiting the very sick, ‘you don’t think you’ve been possessed, do you?’

  ‘What? No!’ he said defensively. ‘I remember everything we’ve done while I’ve been wearing it. I wouldn’t know what I’d done if I’d been possessed, would I? Ginny told me there were times when she couldn’t remember anything.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Hermione, looking down at the heavy locket. ‘Well, maybe we ought not to wear it. We can just keep it in the tent.’

  ‘We are not leaving that Horcrux lying around,’ Harry stated firmly. ‘If we lose it, if it gets stolen –’

  ‘Oh, all right, all right,’ said Hermione, and she placed it around her own neck and tucked it out of sight down the front of her shirt. ‘But we’ll take turns wearing it, so nobody keeps it on too long.’

  ‘Great,’ said Ron irritably, ‘and now we’ve sorted that out, can we please get some food?’

  ‘Fine, but we’ll go somewhere else to find it,’ said Hermione, with half a glance at Harry. ‘There’s no point staying where we know Dementors are swooping around.’

  In the end they settled down for the night in a far-flung field belonging to a lonely farm, from which they had managed to obtain eggs and bread.

  ‘It’s not stealing, is it?’ asked Hermione in a troubled voice, as they devoured scrambled eggs on toast. ‘Not if I left some money under the chicken coop?’

  Ron rolled his eyes and said, with his cheeks bulging, ‘’Er-mynee, ’oo worry ’oo much. ’Elax!’

  And, indeed, it was much easier to relax when they were comfortably well fed: the argument about the Dementors was forgotten in laughter that night, and Harry felt cheerful, even hopeful, as he took the first of the three night watches.

  This was their first encounter with the fact that a full stomach meant good spirits; an empty one, bickering and gloom. Harry was the least surprised by this, because he had suffered periods of near starvation at the Dursleys’. Hermione bore up reasonably well on those nights when they managed to scavenge nothing but berries or stale biscuits, her temper perhaps a little shorter than usual and her silences rather dour. Ron, however, had always been used to three delicious meals a day, courtesy of his mother or of the Hogwarts house-elves, and hunger made him both unreasonable and irascible. Whenever lack of food coincided with Ron’s turn to wear the Horcrux, he became downright unpleasant.

  ‘So where next?’ was his constant refrain. He did not seem to have any ideas himself, but expected Harry and Hermione to come up with plans while he sat and brooded over the low food supplies. Accordingly, Harry and Hermione spent fruitless hours trying to decide where they might find the other Horcruxes, and how to destroy the one they had already got, their conversations becoming increasingly repetitive, as they had no new information.

  As Dumbledore had told Harry that he believed Voldemort had hidden the Horcruxes in places important to him, they kept reciting, in a sort of dreary litany, those locations they knew that Voldemort had lived in or visited. The orphanage where he had been born and raised, Hogwarts, where he had been educated, Borgin and Burkes, where he had worked after leaving school, then Albania, where he had spent his years of exile: these formed the basis of their speculations.

  ‘Yeah, let’s go to Albania. Shouldn’t take more than an afternoon to search an entire country,’ said Ron sarcastically.

  ‘There can’t be anything there. He’d already made five of his Horcruxes before he went into exile, and Dumbledore was certain the snake is the sixth,’ said Hermione. ‘We know the snake’s not in Albania, it’s usually with Vol—’

  ‘Didn’t I ask you to stop saying that?’

  ‘Fine! The snake is usually with You-Know-Who – happy?’

  ‘Not particularly.’

  ‘I can’t see him hiding anything at Borgin and Burkes,’ said Harry, who had made this point many times before, but said it again simply to break the nasty silence. ‘Borgin and Burke were experts on Dark objects, they would’ve recognised a Horcrux straight away.’

  Ron yawned pointedly. Repressing a strong urge to throw something at him, Harry ploughed on, ‘I still reckon he might have hidden something at Hogwarts.’

  Hermione sighed.

  ‘But Dumbledore would have found it, Harry!’

  Harry repeated the argument he kept bringing out in favour of this theory.

  ‘Dumbledore said in front of me that he never assumed he knew all of Hogwarts’ secrets. I’m telling you, if there was one place Vol—’

  ‘Oi!’

  ‘YOU-KNOW-WHO, then!’ Harry shouted, goaded past endurance. ‘If there was one place that was really important to You-Know-Who, it was Hogwarts!’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ scoffed Ron. ‘His school?’

  ‘Yeah, his school! It was his first real home, the place that meant he was special, it meant everything to him, and even after he left –’

  ‘This is You-Know-Who we’re talking about, right? Not you?’ enquired Ron. He was tugging at the chain of the Horcrux around his neck: Harry was visited by a desire to seize it and throttle him.

  ‘You told us that You-Know-Who asked Dumbledore to give him a job after he left,’ said Hermione.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Harry.

  ‘And Dumbledore thought he only wanted to come back to try and find something, probably another founder’s object, to make into another Horcrux?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Harry.

  ‘But he didn’t get the job, did he?’ said Hermione. ‘So he never got the chance to find a founder’s object there and hide it in the school!’

  ‘OK, then,’ said Harry, defeated. ‘Forget Hogwarts.’

  Without any other leads, they travelled into London and, hidden beneath the Invisibility Cloak, searched for the orphanage in which Voldemort had been raised. Hermione stole into a library and discovered from their records that the place had been demolished many years before. They visited its site and found a towerblock of offices.

  ‘We could try digging in the foundations?’ Hermione suggested half-heartedly.

  ‘He wouldn’t have hidden a Horcrux here,’ Harry said. He had known it all along: the orphanage had been the place Voldemort had been determined to escape from; he would never have hidden a part of his soul there. Dumbledore had shown Harry that Voldemort sought grandeur or mystique in his hiding places; this dismal, grey corner of London was as far removed as you could imagine from Hogwarts, or the Ministry or a building like Gringotts, the wizarding bank, with its golden doors and marble floors.

  Even without any new ideas, they continued to move through the countryside, pitching the tent in a different place each night for security. Every morning they made sure that they had removed all clues to their presence, then set off to find another lonely and secluded spot, travelling by Apparition to more woods, to the shadowy crevices of cliffs, to purple moors, gorse-covered mountainsides and, once, a sheltered and pebbly cove. Every twelve hours or so, they passed the Horcrux between them as though they were playing some perverse, slow-motion game of pass the parcel, where they dreaded the music stopping because the reward was twelve hours of increased fear and anxiety.

  Harry’s scar kept prickling. It happened most often, he noticed, when he was wearing the Horcrux. Sometimes he could not stop himself reacting to the pain.

  ‘What? What did you see?’ demanded Ron, whenever he noticed Harry wince.

  ‘A face,’ muttered Harry, every time. ‘The same face. The thief who stole from Gregorovitch.’

  And Ron would turn away, making no effort to hide his disappointment. Harry knew that Ron was hoping to hear news of his family, or of the rest of the Order of the Phoenix, but after all, he, Harry, was not a television aerial; he could only see what Voldemort was thinking at the time, not tune in to whatever took his fancy. Apparently Voldemort was dwelling endlessly on the unknown youth with the gleeful face, whose name and whereabouts, Harry felt sure, Voldemort knew no better than he did. As Harry’s scar continued to burn and the merry, blond-haired boy swam tantalisingly in his memory, he learned to suppress any sign of pain or discomfort, for the other two showed nothing but impatience at the mention of the thief. He could not entirely blame them, when they were so desperate for a lead on the Horcruxes.

  As the days stretched into weeks, Harry began to suspect that Ron and Hermione were having conversations without, and about, him. Several times they stopped talking abruptly when Harry entered the tent, and twice he came accidentally upon them, huddled a little distance away, heads together and talking fast; both times they fell silent when they realised he was approaching them and hastened to appear busy collecting wood or water.

  Harry could not help wondering whether they had only agreed to come on what now felt like a pointless and rambling journey because they thought he had some secret plan that they would learn in due course. Ron was making no effort to hide his bad mood, and Harry was starting to fear that Hermione, too, was disappointed by his poor leadership. In desperation he tried to think of further Horcrux locations, but the only one that continued to occur to him was Hogwarts, and as neither of the others thought this at all likely, he stopped suggesting it.