Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Chapters 1–7

The hallway was large, dimly lit, and sumptuously decorated, with a magnificent carpet covering most of the stone floor.

Illumination came from a roaring fire beneath a handsome marble mantelpiece surmounted by a gilded mirror.

The interest around the table sharpened palpably: Some stiffened, others fidgeted, all gazing at Snape and Voldemort.

“Yes—my Lord, that is true—but you know, as Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, Thicknesse has regular contact not only with the Minister himself, but also with the Heads of all the other Ministry departments. It will, I think, be easy now that we have such a high-ranking official under our control, to subjugate the others, and then they can all work together to bring Scrimgeour down.”

“The Order is eschewing any form of transport that is controlled or regulated by the Ministry; they mistrust everything to do with the place.”

She shook her head almost imperceptibly, then resumed her own deadpan stare at the opposite wall.

“And in your family, so in the world...we shall cut away the canker that infects us until only those of the true blood remain....”

Not content with corrupting and polluting the minds of Wizarding children, last week Professor Burbage wrote an impassioned defense of Mudbloods in the Daily Prophet. Wizards, she says, must accept these thieves of their knowledge and magic.

At the start of the intervening school years, he had merely skimmed off the topmost three quarters of the contents and replaced or updated them, leaving a layer of general debris at the bottom—old quills, desiccated beetle eyes, single socks that no longer fit.

His Muggle clothing, Invisibility Cloak, potion-making kit, certain books, the photograph album Hagrid had once given him, a stack of letters, and his wand had been repacked into an old rucksack.

I had contracted dragon pox shortly before arriving at school, and while I was no longer contagious, my pockmarked visage and greenish hue did not encourage many to approach me.

Never once had he imagined Dumbledore’s childhood or youth; it was as though he had sprung into being as Harry had known him, venerable and silver-haired and old.

He had never thought to ask Dumbledore about his past. No doubt it would have felt strange, impertinent even, but after all, it had been common knowledge that Dumbledore had taken part in that legendary duel with Grindelwald, and Harry had not thought to ask Dumbledore what that had been like, nor about any of his other famous achievements.

“He had brains,” she concedes, “although many now question whether he could really take full credit for all of his supposed achievements. As I reveal in chapter sixteen, Ivor Dillonsby claims he had already discovered eight uses of dragon’s blood when Dumbledore ‘borrowed’ his papers.”

“Oh, now, I’m glad you mentioned Grindelwald,” says Skeeter with a tantalizing smile.

Revulsion and fury rose in him like vomit; he balled up the newspaper and threw it, with all his force, at the wall, where it joined the rest of the rubbish heaped around his overflowing bin.

“Can’t do it,” said Hestia tersely.

He swung his right arm upward to shake Harry’s hand, but at the last moment seemed unable to face it, and merely closed his fist and began swinging it backward and forward like a metronome.

Harry picked up Hedwig’s cage, his Firebolt, and his rucksack, gave his unnaturally tidy bedroom one last sweeping look, and then made his ungainly way back downstairs to the hall, where he deposited cage, broomstick, and bag near the foot of the stairs.

Dominating the scene was Hagrid, wearing a helmet and goggles and sitting astride an enormous motorbike with a black sidecar attached.

...Mr. Weasley, kind-faced, balding, his spectacles a little awry...

“Now, your mother’s charm will only break under two conditions: when you come of age, or”—Moody gestured around the pristine kitchen—“you no longer call this place home. You and your aunt and uncle are going your separate ways tonight, in the full understanding that you’re never going to live together again, correct?”

“I told them you’d take it like this,” said Hermione with a hint of complacency.

“Well, none of us really fancy it, Harry,” said Fred earnestly. “Imagine if something went wrong and we were stuck as specky, scrawny gits forever.”

He watched as his six doppelgangers rummaged in the sacks, pulling out sets of clothes, putting on glasses, stuffing their own things away.

There was a deafening bang and the sidecar broke away from the bike completely: Harry sped forward, propelled by the impetus of the bike’s flight, then the sidecar began to lose height—

Mrs. Weasley had staunched his bleeding now, and by the lamplight Harry saw a clean, gaping hole where George’s ear had been.

Mrs. Weasley ran forward, but the hug Bill bestowed upon her was perfunctory.

They all stood looking at each other. Harry could not quite comprehend it. Mad-Eye dead; it could not be...Mad-Eye, so tough, so brave, the consummate survivor...

He felt beleaguered and blackmailed: Did they think he did not know what they had done for him, didn’t they understand that it was for precisely that reason that he wanted to go now, before they had to suffer any more on his behalf?

Harry felt that nothing but action would assuage his feelings of guilt and grief and that he ought to set out on his mission to find and destroy Horcruxes as soon as possible.

He handed her back the single sock he was supposed to be identifying, which was patterned with golden bulrushes.

She swallowed and then said imploringly, “I can’t believe Dumbledore would have been angry, it’s not as though we’re going to use the information to make a Horcrux, is it?”

“Yes,” said Hermione, now turning the fragile pages as if examining rotting entrails, “because it warns Dark wizards how strong they have to make the enchantments on them. From all that I’ve read, what Harry did to Riddle’s diary was one of the few really foolproof ways of destroying a Horcrux.”

The chickens had been shut away, the yard had been swept, and the nearby garden had been pruned, plucked, and generally spruced up, although Harry, who liked it in its overgrown state, thought that it looked rather forlorn without its usual contingent of capering gnomes.

The Delacours, it soon transpired, were helpful, pleasant guests.

Reveling in the removal of his Trace, Harry sent Ron’s possessions flying around the room, causing Pigwidgeon to wake up and flutter excitedly around his cage.

A desk stood facing the open window, which looked out over the orchard where he and Ginny had once played two-a-side Quidditch with Ron and Hermione, and which now housed a large, pearly white marquee.

“So why have you decided to let us have our things now? Can’t think of a pretext to keep them?”

If you were not very close to Dumbledore, how do you account for the fact that he remembered you in his will? He made exceptionally few personal bequests.

The vast majority of his possessions—his private library, his magical instruments, and other personal effects—were left to Hogwarts.

As he looked, a tear splashed onto the embossed symbols.

As Scrimgeour pulled out the tiny, walnut-sized golden ball, its silver wings fluttered rather feebly, and Harry could not help feeling a definite sense of anticlimax.

Hermione looked simply bemused.

“I open at the close...at the close...I open at the close...”
But no matter how often they repeated the words, with many different inflections, they were unable to wring any more meaning from them.