‘We can’t go on like this!’ moaned Harry, rubbing his growling stomach. Behind him Ron said nothing.
Harry turned around. ‘Are you okay?’
Ron shrugged, his left hand hanging limp at his side. Drops of blood were dripping from the bandaged wound. It was obviously hurting Ron a lot.
Ron’s wrist had apparently been shattered when Stephen had shot him. Thankfully there was no worse damage but Ron’s wrist was still horribly painfully. Pain, no food and no sleep: not a good combination. Not to mention the recent depressing, painful events. Harry was beginning to worry about Ron. There was still danger of infection and Harry didn’t know what they were going to do if the wound grew any worse. He’d managed to get the bullet out (with a stick, and it hadn’t helped that Ron was yelling in his ear), and a few ripped scraps of cloth from his now ratty shirt was enough to wrap it up for a while. But only a while. And neither Harry nor Ron could afford to rip up their shirts completely because the weather was still cold and unpredictable.
Neither Harry nor Ron had slept the previous night. It had begun snowing once again and both of them had remembered that sleeping in the freezing snow could kill them. They didn’t want to take any chances. Both knew what the other had spent the night thinking: Why hadn’t they been able to save Hermione?
To Harry’s surprise, the pain from Hermione’s death was ten times worse than the pain he had felt when Sirius had died. Hermione was, simply, the sister he had never had. And he had failed her. Failed her completely. But Harry also realized that Ron was probably feeling worse than him. Ron had never had to face the death of a loved one, and now Hermione, the one he probably loved most, had died. In front of their eyes, she had been taken away. In the cruelest manner possible. Harry shook his head, trying to shake the thoughts that were filling it away but as soon as he tried to empty his mind, his grumbling stomach began to ache with hunger.
In their hurry to get out of Stephen’s shack, Harry and Ron had also forgotten the bag of food he had packed for them.
‘Could we stop for awhile, Harry?’ asked Ron, softly.
Harry looked at Ron and nodded. ‘Yeah, sure.’
They sat down where they were. Once again, the landscape was a flat, snow-covered area. There was no shelter anywhere except under the trees. But the trees were no protection from the cold. It was snowing lightly and the wind was blowing, chilling Harry and Ron to the bone. Their clothes were torn and tattered and extremely worn out. Harry suspected that they had walked a few miles since the previous night. He had no idea why they kept on walking or where they were going but it seemed the right thing to do. Sitting in one place wasn’t going to keep them alive and there was a chance that they would reach a town if they kept on walking.
For a few seconds neither Harry nor Ron spoke, but Harry soon found the silence unbearable, especially since there was absolutely nothing moving around them and it was beginning to feel like he and Ron were the only living things in the world. Harry wondered if he should talk about Hermione, that maybe talking about it would help, but he felt sick as Hermione’s name floated from the back of his mind (where he had pushed it earlier) to the front.
‘What will we do about food?’ murmured Harry.
‘There has to be a town nearby!’ said Ron as he carefully piled snow onto his broken wrist. ‘We’ve been walking for so long…’
Harry flopped down onto the snow, spread-eagle: he was already so cold that lying in the snow wasn’t going to have too much effect on him. ‘Maybe we should try to apparate.’
Ron looked at Harry. In the cold, his blue eyes looked like ice. ‘Where to?’
‘I don’t know! If I did we’d be there already,’ snapped Harry, frustrated. ‘The key to Apparition is to concentrate on your destination. Since we don’t know where we want to go, I have no clue if we can even Apparate, let alone where we’ll Apparate too!’
‘Sorry,’ said Ron, glaring at Harry.
‘We should have asked Stephen where the nearest town was.’
‘Right, and get a few more holes blown into our bodies,’ snorted Ron, angrily.
Harry lifted his head to look at Ron. ‘So, should we Apparate? It’s obvious that staying here is doing nothing except helping us argue.’
Ron shrugged. ‘If you say so, mate.’
Harry blinked. Ron hadn’t called him ‘mate’ for quite some time. Trudging through the wind and snow had not helped their friendship flourish and both boys had been irritated with the other for quite some time, even though neither of them had really mentioned it. Just like they hadn’t really mentioned Hermione since she had died.
Harry stood up and Ron followed, reluctantly pushing the snow off of his arm.
‘Maybe one of us should help the other, you know, side-along, so that we end up in the same place,’ said Harry.
Ron nodded. ‘You go ahead.’
Harry grabbed the forearm of Ron’s good hand and closed his eyes and concentrated on traveling a few miles forward, where ever that was. All he could see in his mind was blinding white snow. The familiar suffocating feeling of being squeezed tightly came over him.
In less than a moment the feeling vanished and Harry slowly opened his eyes, praying that something had happened and that they hadn’t gotten themselves splinched.
Harry’s heart fell as he opened his eyes. There was snow everywhere, just like before… exactly how he’d pictured it in his mind… there was nothing to tell them that they had even traveled a mile.
Next to him Ron gave a whoop of joy.
‘What’re you so happy about?’ muttered Harry without looking at Ron.
‘Turn around, stupid!’ yelled Ron joyfully.
Harry spun around and gasped. It worked! he thought joyfully.
It wasn’t a city or a village exactly, more like a group of houses: a neighborhood. But it was better than nothing. Harry and Ron hadn’t seen any real civilization since they had left Salem Town (they never considered Stephen to be a part of civilization after he practically blasted them out of his shack).
‘Shall we go check it out?’ asked Ron grinning in spite of his shattered wrist. He looked the happiest Harry had seen him look in days.
‘After you…’ replied Harry also feeling amazingly ecstatic.
They walked over to the small crowd of houses and looked around. It seemed to be a make-shift village. A small path cut through the snow and wove around the cottages. There was a small shop to one side that seemed to sell everything a person could need for a short stay in the wilderness: food, clothes and utensils. Harry’s mouth began watering instantly, when he read the word ‘food’, on the sign. Trying to ignore his stomach, Harry looked back at the many houses. On closer inspection Harry saw that the twenty-some cottages were all shabbily built: someone had made a quick job out of them. A few roughly chopped wooden boards hurriedly stuck together formed the walls of the houses. Not one of them had windows. The chimneys were lopsided and seemed in danger of collapsing. The entire neighborhood seemed in danger of being pushed over by the fierce northern wind that was blowing at the time.
‘How do people live here?’ wondered Ron, poking the finger of his good hand into a large hole in the wall of one of the houses.
‘What if people don’t live here?’ said Harry worriedly.
Ron looked at Harry and grinned mischievously. ‘If no one lives here we can steal all the food in that shop!’
Harry rolled his eyes but he couldn’t help thinking that it was a good idea. He was so hungry that even stealing seemed acceptable if no one was using the food when they stole it.
Another bitter wind blew around them and Harry pulled his coat closer to his body. ‘Well, let’s go knock on some doors before we steal anything to check if anyone’s around. We don’t want to be sent to death row for stealing!’
Harry regretted his choice of words as soon as they were out of his mouth. Hermione, dead, hanged… it all came back in a painful rush of memories. Harry glanced at Ron and saw that he too looked grief-stricken all of a sudden.
‘Anyways…’ started Harry but he couldn’t go on. Ron just nodded once and walked forward to bang on the door of the nearest cabin with his uninjured hand.
When no one came to the door, Harry and Ron moved to other houses, but to no avail. Either no one was living in the small village or no one was home.
Ron threw up his hands and groaned. ‘Now what?! We can’t leave without anything!’ he said frustrated. Harry heard his stomach grumbling and knew what that ‘anything’ was.
Harry sat down in the snow and shivered. ‘This is getting to be our normal routine—having no food.’
Ron continued to stomp around angrily. ‘No food and too much snow! If I had a wand—’
But Ron’s threat was cut off by a loud, deep yell. A gun-shot sounded. Harry didn’t have to look around to understand what was happening.
‘Oh, not again!’ he moaned, putting his head into his hands.
A group of large burly men was running towards Harry and Ron. Harry stood up and watched the men run nearer.
‘Any plans?’ Harry asked Ron.
‘Surrender?’ said Ron, lifting up his arms as a few more shots echoed through the air.
Harry raised his hand to give Ron a hefty blow to the head, mostly to knock some sense into him, but he was stopped short by a rifle being dug into his ribs.
‘Who’re you? And what are you doing here?’ said a stocky man, with blond hair and a maniacal look on his face, as he poked Harry with his rifle.
‘We’re nobody and we were looking for food… we weren’t going to steal anything! Just taste test!’ blurted Ron.
The man raised an eyebrow and poked Ron with the gun instead, while his comrades watched. ‘Were you, now?’
Another man stepped up, looking more dignified. ‘If I may ask,’ he began. ‘Who are you and what business do you have here?
Ron was busy stuttering so Harry spoke. ‘We’re just travelers and we were looking for some food but no one lives here.’
‘We live here!’ replied the gruff, gun-poking man. The other men nodded their agreement.
‘We didn’t know that,’ replied Harry. Ron nodded.
The gun-poker didn’t seem to want to believe their story but luckily for Harry and Ron, the dignified man seemed to be in charge.
‘I am Mr. Douglas Grant,’ he said, holding out a hand to shake. ‘I oversee the work going on in the Lynn Iron-Smelting Plant, near here.’
‘Lynn?’ asked Harry, shaking Grant’s hand.
Douglas Grant nodded. ‘Lynn is a town a jump, skip and a hop away from here. The town has established an iron smelting plant near here, where we work.’
‘The first Iron-Smelting Plant here,’ added the gruff man proudly. ‘Benjamin Jefferson, at your service.’
Harry shook Benjamin’s hand too while Ron just glared at the man for boring a hole in his back with a gun.
‘The smelters live here, in this village,’ said Grant, gesturing at the pack of roughly built houses. ‘It’s safer to put a plant up here, away from the town. And it helps the men concentrate on their work.’
Douglas Grant walked forward into the circle of houses and pulled the door open of the largest one.
‘Please come in,’ he said to Harry and Ron. To the rest of the men he called: ‘You’re dismissed! Take a break, men.’