Harry stood frozen in the middle of the clearing. The little voice in the back of his head told him to retaliate and to be quick about it. Yet somehow, he couldn’t move. Drawn to Hermione’s bent and twisted frame lying before him on the ground, Harry couldn’t take his eyes off of her. With her keen intellect and unwavering loyalty, she was easily one of the strongest among them. Never one to cower in the face of danger or to go down without a proper fight, it unnerved Harry to his very core to see her lying there now without the slightest hint of fire.
Ron leaned in carefully towards Hermione, and peering around the thick, brown tresses that hung loosely down the sides of her face, made eye contact with her. Her complexion, quite gray and punctuated only by the bright red outline of her tear-stained eyes, highlighted her once delicate, pink lips, now rigid and pale. Ron gazed at her with uncertainty and raised brow. His expression kindly asked what his mouth was unable to say. He wanted to know if she was all right and yet the look in his eyes said much more than that. Gingerly, she nodded and a wave of relief washed over Ron's face. Hermione lifted her eyes towards Harry, and giving him a reassuring nod, slowly moved. Unaware that he’d even stopped breathing, Harry expelled a lungful of air and felt the tension ease out of his shoulders.
"How very touching,” Voldemort responded disparagingly from across the clearing and the muscles in Harry’s shoulders tightened again.
“It hurts, doesn’t it Harry, to see the ones you love in pain?” observed the Dark Lord. “But then, that’s the problem with love, isn’t it? It makes you vulnerable…and weak.”
“He’s not weak!” Ginny willfully exclaimed. She kicked hard off of the ground, and thrashing about, tried to free herself from Malfoy’s grip.
He struggled to contain her; Malfoy’s twisted features and sweaty brow clearly reflecting his need to muster more strength than even he ever thought necessary. He grabbed her hard around the waist, and wrenching Ginny’s body inward, forced her feet to the ground.
“You need to show a little more respect!” he reprimanded. Malfoy seized Ginny's wrists and pinned them harshly against her chest.
Harry gripped the wand firmly in his hand, his nostrils flaring. He eyed Malfoy with piercing anger. Ron tried fiercely to get to his feet, a flurry of garbled words bottlenecking behind the gag in his mouth. Getting to one knee, he took the swift kick of Vincent Crabbe’s foot in his gut. Winded, Ron was sent toppling back down onto the ground.
Quite pleased with himself, Crabbe sniggered and Goyle gleefully joined in. They remained oblivious to Hermione’s cold, hard stare that suddenly thawed as she caught sight of her and Ron’s wands sticking out of the inside of their robes.
Harry raised his wand at Malfoy; Draco did the same and pointed it firmly at Ginny’s temple as if to say to Harry, “Try me." Harry loosened the grip slightly on his wand. He halted only a few inches away.
“What’s the matter Harry? Feeling vulnerable?” the Dark Lord mused. “Or are you just weak?”
“Weak?” Harry spit back. “You’re using my friends to get at me and I’m the one who’s weak? If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were afraid to face me alone.”
“And there it is,” proclaimed the Dark Lord, a slight smile crossing his wickedly pale face. “The infamous Potter bravado. You’ll want to be careful with that Harry, as I recall, it has never served your family well.”
Blistering anger scorched at Harry, engulfing his insides. The heat of it rose up the back of his neck and flushed across his face. Gripping his wand so firmly in his fist that he could have easily snapped it in half, Harry eyed Voldemort with contempt, fervently raised his wand, and unleashed another curse at the Dark Lord’s head. Tilting his head audaciously to one side, the curse tore past Voldemort. With a swish of his own wand, he sent a wisp of green light at Harry that quickly lassoed itself around his legs. Sharply, Voldemort yanked at the wand in his hand. Harry felt his feet pull out from under him and his body hit the cold, hard ground.
“And it would be a mistake on your part,” the Dark Lord noted, catching the fury in Harry’s eyes, “to misread my methods as weakness…unless of course, you’re in a hurry to watch your friends die?”
Reining in his temper for the moment, Harry looked at his three friends, thought better of it, and choked back his anger.
“Now, then…by my calculation, three remain,” Voldemort resumed. He referred to the Horcruxes yet to be discussed. " And that would bring us to the Cup...my most interesting tale by far,” the Dark Lord noted with undue pride, and he thundered arrogantly about. “It began with a most valuable piece of history that I had, shall we say, the good fortune of acquiring?”
“Don’t you mean stole?” Harry accused bitingly. The stream of light wrapped around his legs dissolved into thin air.
“I prefer to think of it Harry, as a stroke of good luck,” the Dark Lord cunningly replied.
“Tell that to Hepzibah Smith…” retorted Harry and he rose to his feet. “That’s right,” he added acknowledging the look of recognition in Voldemort’s eyes. “I know you killed her and then conveniently vanished with the cup belonging to Helga Hufflepuff and the golden locket that bore the mark of Slytherin.”
“Well done, Harry,” Voldemort spoke soberly, the hint of amusement no longer present behind his eyes."Dumbledore taught you well. Not that I would have expected anything less, mind you.”
It was obvious, thought Harry that the tide was beginning to turn; Voldemort, no longer exhibited a droll sense of wit, but became more serious and subdued.
“So there you were, in possession of two objects that were going to further your quest for immortality,” Harry added and he caught a glimpse of Ron and Hermione out of the corner of his eye. It was obvious that Hermione was trying to communicate something to Ron and he just wasn’t getting it.
“But let me guess,” Harry continued, prying his eyes away from them. “You decided that one of the objects ” the Cup ” would be of far greater use to you elsewhere. So, then you had to set to task finding another object,” surmised Harry. “But not just any object.”
And Dumbledore’s words jumped once again to the forefront of Harry’s mind. “Lord Voldemort liked to collect trophies ”, Dumbledore once said. “…and he preferred objects with a powerful magical history…objects worthy of the honor.”
“That’s when you approached Dumbledore about a teaching position at Hogwarts,” Harry concluded and he watched Ron and Hermione exchange a knowing look with one another, and then with Ginny. “Not because you wanted a job, but because you wanted to get your hands on the sword of Godric Gryffindor. But when you saw just how well protected it was in Dumbledore’s office, you decided to take the next best thing…the House Cup. The one object,” Harry proclaimed, “that would have allowed one-seventh of your soul to remain in the only place you had ever truly known happiness or was able to call home. It would basically ensure that a piece of you would remain at Hogwarts forever.”
“I would have expected better of you Harry!” the Dark Lord scathingly replied. “You, of all people, should have understood my need to remain here! After all, it is the only place that you, yourself, were able to call home as well!"
Because of you, Harry’s insides screamed, for he knew that if it had not been for Voldemort, Harry’s home ” the only home ” that he would have ever known would have been the one with his parents. But instead, Voldemort brutally murdered them and in so doing cast Harry into a lonely, loveless existence with the Dursley’s, the years of which were now beginning to fester inside of Harry. All that he lost out on ” all the joy and happiness of knowing his parents love firsthand ” was ripped once more from his life, this time by Voldemort’s callous and unfeeling words. He wanted to strike first, to cast the final blow against the Dark Lord at any cost. Harry raised his wand and prepared to do just that when he heard the purest, most tranquil sound; more beautiful than even the phoenix lament that Harry had heard that day in the hospital wing shortly after Dumbledore’s death. It was the sound of Ginny’s voice.
“Harry…”
His name was all she said, sounding neither fearful nor disapproving; just a familiar, safe voice breaking through the static clamoring in his head and pulling him back from the edge. Harry’s eyes drifted from Voldemort to Ginny, where she stood, still cloaked in Malfoy’s arms, a look upon her face as if to say, “do it if you must, but not on his terms."
Harry lowered his wand and from behind heard a distant murmur. Just above a whisper, it was even and steady. It grew in intensity, reaching a fevered pitch before becoming shrill and piercing. Voldemort was laughing at him.
“What’s so funny?” Harry asked weary of the disruption.
“Oh Harry, I can only assume by your actions that you are either unwilling to fight because of your allegiance to this young girl…” Voldemort chortled, haphazardly motioning towards Ginny. “Or because you sincerely doubt whether you have, in fact, destroyed all of the Horcruxes. So, tell me Harry…which is it?”
Harry stared at the Dark Lord for a moment, carefully choosing his words. While it was true that he felt a certain loyalty towards Ginny, Harry also knew that she had never once asked him not to fight. She was, quite simply, not selfish enough to expect anything less of him even if, deep down inside, she truly wished for things to be different. Of the Horcruxes, though, Harry could no longer be sure.
“Don’t bother to answer,” Voldemort replied in a rather dismissive tone. “I can see the flicker of doubt in your eyes.”
“Maybe it’s you, who’s not so sure,” answered Harry.
And like that, it hit him. The reason that Voldemort was so interested in retracing Harry’s steps was because the Dark Lord was hoping that he had missed the most valuable Horcrux of all ” the locket; the one piece that had been well insulated and more protected than any other. Harry recalled how he and Dumbledore had found it and his mind flashed back to that night in the cave.
They made their way along the jagged cliffs and came upon the icy, cold water where the fissures in the rock formed a tunnel leading into the cave. Passing through the antechamber and into the inner place where the great black lake sat, they traveled through a steady stream of Inferi, making their way to the island in the middle that housed the locket. Dumbledore drank from the basin lying there; an act that had ultimately allowed them to retrieve the locket resting at the bottom of it. Upon returning to Hogwarts, their triumph in acquiring yet another piece of Voldemort’s soul was then tragically cut short by the Dark Mark lingering precariously above the school as they arrived.
All of it led up to the unspeakable nightmare that managed to replay in Harry’s mind every day since ” Dumbledore’s death. The image was frozen in Harry’s mind, as if he were still beneath the Invisibility Cloak watching Professor Snape inflict the Killing Curse on his Headmaster and friend.
One of the hardest parts to accept that night, recalled Harry, came after Dumbledore’s death and the ensuing battle with the Death Eaters.
Kneeling beside Dumbledore’s discarded body on the front lawn of the school, Harry stumbled upon the locket they retrieved earlier that night in the cave. Having fallen from the Headmaster’s pocket it lay open on the ground and it was then that Harry discovered the awful truth…that the locket was, in fact, a fake.
This memory haunted him, almost as much ” if not more ” than that of Dumbledore’s death because it was Harry who forced Dumbledore to drink from the basin in the cave, an act that surely left the Headmaster weak and most likely unable to fight when he needed to most. Regardless of the fact that Dumbledore ordered him to do so, Harry could never quite shake the guilt he felt over what he’d done. Perhaps that is why he continued to carry the fake locket around with him, as a reminder, even now.
“Well, I guess there is only one way to know for sure,” Voldemort replied, and he called the young wizard’s bluff. “Tell me about the last two Horcruxes.”
“You mean, tell you about the locket,” Harry trumped, for he knew that this was burning foremost in the Dark Lord’s mind. “It meant a great deal to you, didn’t it…Tom?” Harry boldly asked. The Dark Lord hissed, his scarlet eyes growing redder. “Well, I imagine it would,” he added. “I mean, not only was it a treasured family heirloom that bore the mark of Salazar Slytherin, but more importantly, it was the last connection you had to your mother.”
The raw scent of electricity filled the air and a flash of green light rushed forth from the Dark Lord’s wand. Grazing Harry’s shoulder, the warning shot sailed past him and the visage of Voldemort’s eyes told Harry to proceed with extreme caution.
“It must have been rather difficult,” Harry continued, glimpsing slightly at the singed seam of his jacket. “Hearing Hepzibah Smith go on and on about how she paid an arm and a leg for it, knowing that your mother settled for so much less. Pity really,” Harry added with a touch of genuine remorse in his voice, “the way Burke took advantage of your mother like that. I hear he only paid her ten Galleons for the locket.”
The Dark Lord slashed his wand across the thin air lying between them and instantly Harry felt a sharp, stinging sensation burn across his face. It was as though he had been whipped. Harry flinched and quickly placed his hand to his face. His cheek felt warm and wet.
Withdrawing his hand slightly, Harry glimpsed at the crimson smear across his fingertips. He regarded Voldemort.
“But, in the end you made sure he paid,” added Harry and he gazed at his bloody fingers again. “Didn’t you?”
“Oh, yessss!” Voldemort spewed, his words sounding more snake-like all the time. “And the best part was that he never even saw it coming!" the Dark Lord rambled. He paced back and forth across the clearing like a caged animal. “No, he was too blinded by his own greed to notice when I slipped Helga Hufflepuff’s Cup into his possession…something I knew he couldn’t resist!”
Harry tenderly placed his hand against his face and spied Hermione again. She tried inconspicuously to gain his attention. Checking to be sure that the Dark Lord was none the wiser, Harry cautiously allowed his gaze to wander back towards her. Discreetly, she tilted her head towards Crabbe and Goyle, who were far too engrossed in the Dark Lord’s words to notice, and directed Harry’s eyes to the wands sticking out of their robes. Her own eyes, now expressive and wide signaled to the ropes binding her and Ron.
“So enthralled he was with the piece,” Voldemort carried on and he savored every detail. “That I scarcely doubt he even realized that it was slowly pulling him into madness.”
Harry nodded his head at Hermione. He shifted his gaze subtly towards Ginny, whose own eyes motioned towards Draco. Realizing that she had a plan of her own, Harry surveyed Malfoy who, paying considerable attention to the Dark Lord and quite unaware of what was about to come, absent-mindedly loosened his grip on Ginny’s wrists.
“So you added your own curse to the Cup before giving it to him,” Harry cited and he fixed his eyes again upon the Dark Lord.
“Quite!” Voldemort sharply replied.
“And that’s when you used the locket as a Horcrux,” noted Harry.
“Harry…you’re stalling,” the Dark Lord replied. He eyed the young wizard shrewdly.
Harry's heart alarmingly skipped a beat. He was sure that he and his friends had been found out.
“You know very well that I used the locket for that purpose," Voldemort added, seemingly unaware of their plan and Harry sighed with relief.
"The question is, were you able to find it and destroy it?”
The doubt in Voldemort’s eyes told Harry unequivocally that the Dark Lord thought not, suspecting instead that the young wizard was either too inexperienced in his knowledge of the Dark Arts to access the locket or simply not brave enough to wander into its cloister.
“You mean this?” Harry challenged, now drawing from his pocket the golden piece that he had carried with him since the day Dumbledore died.
The gloating smile displayed proudly upon Voldemort’s face vanished.
“Give me that…” Voldemort demanded speaking in a slow, deliberate manner, which indicated that he was holding back an enormous cyclone of anger, but only just.
“Come and get it,” Harry coaxed.
With that, Lord Voldemort flew at him malevolently. Harry grasped the locket firmly in the palm of his hand, dodged to his right, and hit the ground. Rolling onto his knees, he pointed his wand at Ron and Hermione. A jet of red light blasted towards them. Their cords split, dropping to the ground. Removing the gags and spinning on their heels, the two lurched towards Crabbe and Goyle for their exposed wands just as Ginny stomped on Malfoy’s foot. She sent the tip of her elbow into his gut, and wrenching forward, he groaned. His face met the hard, round knuckles of Ginny’s fist. Malfoy's nostrils gushed with blood.
Voldemort landed empty-handed, bellowed, and sent a wave of green light soaring at Harry. Flinging himself sideways, the curse just missed; Harry scrambled to his feet and quickly shot back a response. His spell sent the Dark Lord reeling backwards into a thicket.
“Incarcerate!” Harry yelled, and the thick, dense undergrowth of sticks began to braid themselves like rope tightly around Voldemort’s wrists and ankles.
Ron and Hermione snatched their wands. They faced off against Crabbe and Goyle who, stumbling backwards into one another, indiscriminately wielded curses at them. Weaving to her right, Hermione felt Goyle’s curse zip past her head, fluttering her thick mane of hair and Ron ducked to avoid the curse Crabbe threw at him.
“Stupefy!” Hermione yelled. She pointed her wand in retaliation at Goyle just as Ron aimed for Crabbe’s legs.
Ron watched as the large oaf fell, accidentally bumping Goyle out of the way of Hermione’s curse, on his way down. Slowly, Hermione turned her head towards Ron. She glared at him as if to say “Ronald!” in that exasperated voice he had grown quite accustomed to hearing. He sheepishly looked away.
Meanwhile, Malfoy grabbed hold of Ginny’s fiery red hair from behind and wrestled her to the ground. He straddled her torso, pinning her arms with his legs. Wiping away the excess blood dripping from his nose, Malfoy vindictively raised the back of his hand and smacked Ginny hard across the face.
Having witnessed his actions and red with anger, Ron started in hard towards Malfoy just as Crabbe and Goyle raised their wands again.
“Rictumsempra!” Goyle shouted aiming for Hermione as Crabbe yelled “Tarantallegra!” at Ron.
Hermione caught sight of Goyle out of the corner of her eye and quickly ducked. The curse drifted over her head and struck Crabbe just as he was getting to his feet again. Falling hard on his butt, Crabbe howled with laughter and pointed at Ron whose legs, hit by the curse, jerked about uncontrollably beneath him. Trying desperately to rush to his sister’s defense, Ron’s legs carried him everywhere else.
Ginny winced. She tasted the hint of blood forming on the corner of her mouth and scowled at Malfoy, who evidently going too far this time, flinched.
The familiar sound of Malfoy’s high-pitched scream suddenly echoed across the forest. Standing before the Dark Lord with his wand at the ready, Harry looked over his shoulder at them. Ginny, having used a nonverbal Levicorpus spell on Malfoy sent his body soaring high above the clearing. He dangled by one ankle in the air. With his platinum blond locks standing on end and the edges of his robe riding over his face, Malfoy flailed about, demanding in his most wimpish voice to be put right. Giny brushed away the dirt and got to her feet just as Crabbe took notice of Malfoy. He giggled hysterically at him.
Harry turned back towards Voldemort and the amused smile upon his face quickly faded. The Dark Lord cast off his wooden shackles.
“Incendio!” Lord Voldemort cried and the pieces of wood burst into flames. They chased Harry like tongues of fire.
Turning away, Harry rolled onto his back. He swiftly conjured an extinguishing spell and the flames diminished into tiny droplets of water that rained down innocently upon him.
Curse after curse flew at Harry from the Dark Lord’s wand. Digging his heels into the fresh dark loam, Harry pushed himself backwards on one elbow, and repelled the curses as he tried to get to his feet. He scrambled, the curses coming at him so hard and so fast, that Harry ran for cover. Following the young wizard with his lifeless eyes, Lord Voldemort directed another curse at Harry’s back. It sailed at Harry, who stumbled upon an overgrown, moss covered stump. Nearly hitting him, the curse struck a gray boulder sitting nearby. A mixture of rock and debris exploded over Harry’s head. He dashed past its remnants and found refuge behind a large tree. Out of breath and wincing slightly at the stitch that formed in his side, Harry waited.
“Give me the locket Harry,” repeated Voldemort. “Or she dies!”
Standing with his back pressed firmly against the trunk of the tree, Harry stiffened. He felt the bark gouge deeply into his back. Cautiously, Harry glanced around the enormous trunk and saw his worst fear realized. Voldemort now had Ginny in his grasp.
Footnote:
“Lord Voldemort liked to collect trophies, and he preferred objects with a powerful magical history…”**Page 504, Half-Blood Prince
“…objects worthy of the honor.”**Page 504, Half-Blood Prince