Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows hp-7

by J. K. Rowling

  Dumbledore smiled at Harry, and Harry stared at him.

  “And you knew this? You knew—all along?”

  “I guessed. But my guesses have usually been good,” said Dumbledore happily, and they sat in silence for what seemed like a long time, while the creature behind them continued to whimper and tremble.

  “There’s more,” said Harry. “There’s more to it. Why did my wand break the wand he borrowed?”

  “As to that, I cannot be sure.”

  “Have a guess, then,” said Harry, and Dumbledore laughed.

  “What you must understand, Harry, is that you and Lord Voldemort have journeyed together into realms of magic hitherto unknown and untested. But here is what I think happened, and it is unprecedented, and no wandmaker could, I think, ever have predicted or explained it to Voldemort.

  “Without meaning to, as you now know, Lord Voldemort doubled the bond between you when he returned to a human form. A part of his soul was still attached to yours, and, thinking to strengthen himself, he took a part of your mother’s sacrifice into himself. If he could only have understood the precise and terrible power of that sacrifice, he would not, perhaps, have dared to touch your blood… But then, if he had been able to understand, he could not be Lord Voldemort, and might never have murdered at all.

  “Having ensured this two-fold connection, having wrapped your destinies together more securely than ever two wizards were joined in history, Voldemort proceeded to attack you with a wand that shared a core with yours. And now something very strange happened, as we know. The cores reacted in a way that Lord Voldemort, who never knew that your wand was a twin of his, had ever expected.

  “He was more afraid than you were that night, Harry. You had accepted, even embraced, the possibility of death, something Lord Voldemort has never been able to do. Your courage won, your wand overpowered his. And in doing so, something happened between those wands, something that echoed the relationship between their masters.

  “I believe that your wand imbibed some of the power and qualities of Voldemort’s wand that night, which is to say that it contained a little of Voldemort himself. So your wand recognized him when he pursued you, recognized a man who was both kin and mortal enemy, and it regurgitated some of his own magic against him, magic much more powerful than anything Lucius’s wand had ever performed. Your wand now contained the power of your enormous courage and of Voldemort’s own deadly skill: What chance did that poor stick of Lucius Malfoy’s stand?”

  “But if my wand was so powerful, how come Hermione was able to break it?” asked Harry.

  “My dear boy, its remarkable effects were directed only at Voldemort, who had tampered so ill-advisedly with the deepest laws of magic. Only toward him was that wand abnormally powerful. Otherwise it was a wand like any other… though a good one, I am sure,” Dumbledore finished kindly.

  Harry sat in thought for a long time, or perhaps seconds. It was very hard to be sure of things like time, here.

  “He killed me with your wand.”

  “He failed to kill you with my wand,” Dumbledore corrected Harry. “I think we can agree that you are not dead—though, of course,” he added, as if fearing he had been discourteous, “I do not minimize your sufferings, which I am sure were severe.”

  “I feel great at the moment, though,” said Harry, looking down at his clean, unblemished hands. “Where are we, exactly?”

  “Well, I was going to ask you that,” said Dumbledore, looking around. “Where would you say that we are?”

  Until Dumbledore had asked, Harry had not known. Now, however, he found that he had an answer ready to give.

  “It looks,” he said slowly, “like King’s Cross station. Except a lo cleaner and empty, and there are no trains as far as I can see.”

  “King’s Cross station!” Dumbledore was chuckling immoderately. “Good gracious, really?”

  “Well, where do you think we are?” asked Harry, a little defensively.

  “My dear boy, I have no idea. This is, as they say, your party.”

  Harry had no idea what this meant; Dumbledore was being infuriating. He glared at him, then remembered a much more pressing question than that of their current location.

  “The Deathly Hallows,” he said, and he was glad to see that the words wiped the smile from Dumbledore’s face.

  “Ah, yes,” he said. He even looked a little worried.

  “Well?”

  For the first time since Harry had met Dumbledore, he looked less than an old man, much less. He looked fleetingly like a small boy caught in wrongdoing.

  “Can you forgive me?” he said. “Can you forgive me for not trusting you? For not telling you? Harry, I only feared that you would fail as I had failed. I only dreaded that you would make my mistakes. I crave your pardon, Harry. I have known, for some time now, that you are the better man.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Harry, startled by Dumbledore’s tone, by the sudden tears in his eyes.

  “The Hallows, the Hallows,” murmured Dumbledore. “A desperate man’s dream!”

  “But they’re real!”

  “Real, and dangerous, and a lure for fools,” said Dumbledore. “And I was such a fool. But you know, don’t you? I have no secrets from you anymore. You know.”

  “What do I know?”

  Dumbledore turned his whole body to face Harry, and tears still sparkled in the brilliantly blue eyes.

  “Master of death, Harry, master of Death! Was I better, ultimately, than Voldemort?”

  “Of course you were,” said Harry. “Of course—how can you ask that? You never killed if you could avoid it!”

  “True, true,” said Dumbledore, and he was like a child seeking reassurance. “Yet I too sought a way to conquer death, Harry.”

  “Not the way he did,” said Harry. After all his anger at Dumbledore, how odd it was to sit here, beneath the high, vaulted ceiling, and defend Dumbledore from himself. “Hallows, not Horcruxes.”

  “Hallows,” murmured Dumbledore, “not Horcruxes. Precisely.”

  There was a pause. The creature behind them whimpered, but Harry no longer looked around.

  “Grindelwald was looking for them too?” he asked.

  Dumbledore closed his eyes for a moment and nodded.

  “It was the thing, above all, that drew us together,” he said quietly. “Two clever, arrogant boys with a shared obsession. He wanted to come to Godric’s Hollow, as I am sure you have guessed, because of the grave of Ignotus Peverell. He wanted to explore the place the third brother had died.”

  “So it’s true?” asked Harry. “All of it? The Peverell brothers—”

  “—were the three brothers of the tale,” said Dumbledore, nodding. “Oh yes, I think so. Whether they met Death on a lonely road… I think it more likely that the Peverell brothers were simply gifted, dangerous wizards who succeeded in creating those powerful objects. The story of them being Death’s own Hallows seems to me the sort of legend that might have sprung up around such creations.

  “The Cloak, as you know now, traveled down through the ages, father to son, mother to daughter, right down to Ignotus’s last living descendant, who was born, as Ignotus was, in the village of Godric’s Hollow.”

  Dumbledore smiled at Harry.

  “Me?”

  “You. You have guessed, I know, why the Cloak was in my possession on the night your parents died. James had showed it to me just a few days previously. It explained much of his undetected wrongdoing at school! I could hardly believe what I was seeing. I asked to borrow it, to examine it. I had long since given up my dream of uniting the Hallows, but I could not resist, could not help taking a closer look… It was a Cloak the likes of which I had never seen, immensely old, perfect in every respect… and then your father died, and I had two Hallows at last, all to myself!”

  His tone was unbearably bitter.

  “The Cloak wouldn’t have helped them survive, though,” Harry said quickly. “Voldemort knew where my
mum and dad were. The Cloak couldn’t have made them curse-proof.”

  “True,” sighed Dumbledore. “True.”

  Harry waited, but Dumbledore did not speak, so he prompted him.

  “So you’d given up looking for the Hallows when you saw the Cloak?”

  “Oh yes,” said Dumbledore faintly. It seemed that he forced himself to meet Harry’s eyes. “You know what happened. You know. You cannot despise me more than I despise myself.”

  “But I don’t despise you—”

  “Then you should,” said Dumbledore. He drew a deep breath. “You know the secret of my sister’s ill health, what those Muggles did, what she became. You know how my poor father sought revenge, and paid the price, died in Azkaban. You know how my mother gave up her own life to care for Ariana.

  “I resented it, Harry.”

  Dumbledore stated it baldly, coldly. He was looking now over the top of Harry’s head, into the distance.

  “I was gifted, I was brilliant. I wanted to escape. I wanted to shine. I wanted glory.

  “Do not misunderstand me,” he said, and pain crossed the face so that he looked ancient again. “I loved them, I loved my parents, I loved my brother and my sister, but I was selfish, Harry, more selfish than you, who are a remarkably selfless person, could possibly imagine.

  “So that, when my mother died, and I was left the responsibility of a damaged sister and a wayward brother, I returned to my village in anger and bitterness. Trapped and wasted, I thought! And then of course, he came…”

  Dumbledore looked directly into Harry’s eyes again.

  “Grindelwald. You cannot imagine how his ideas caught me, Harry, inflamed me. Muggles forced into subservience. We wizards triumphant. Grindelwald and I, the glorious young leaders of the revolution.

  “Oh, I had a few scruples. I assuaged my conscience with empty words. It would all be for the greater good, and any harm done would be repaid a hundredfold in benefits for wizards. Did I know, in my heart of hearts, what Gellert Grindelwald was? I think I did, but I closed my eyes. If the plans we were making came to fruition, all my dreams would come true.

  “And at the heart of our schemes, the Deathly Hallows! How they fascinated him, how they fascinated both of us! The unbeatable wand, the weapon that would lead us to power! The Resurrection Stone—to him, though I pretended not to know it, it meant an army of Inferi! To me, I confess, it meant the return of my parents, and the lifting of all responsibility from my shoulders.

  “And the Cloak… somehow, we never discussed the Cloak much, Harry. Both of us could conceal ourselves well enough without the Cloak, the true magic of which, of course, is that it can be used to protect and shield others as well as its owner. I thought that, if we ever found it, it might be useful in hiding Ariana, but our interest in the Cloak was mainly that it completed the trio, for the legend said that the man who had united all three objects would then be truly master of death, which we took to mean ‘invincible.’

  “Invincible masters of death, Grindelwald and Dumbledore! Two months of insanity, of cruel dreams, and neglect of the only two members of my family left to me.

  “And then… you know what happened. Reality returned in the form of my rough, unlettered, and infinitely more admirable brother. I did not want to hear the truths he shouted at me. I did not want to hear that I could not set forth and seek Hallows with a fragile and unstable sister in tow.

  “The argument became a fight. Grindelwald lost control. That which I had always sensed in him, though I pretended not to, now sprang into terrible being. And Ariana… after all my mother’s care and caution… lay dead upon the floor.”

  Dumbledore gave a little gasp and began to cry in earnest. Harry reached out and was glad to find that he could touch him: He gripped his arm tightly and Dumbledore gradually regained control.

  “Well, Grindelwald fled, as anyone but I could have predicted. He vanished, with his plans for seizing power, and his schemes for Muggle torture, and his dreams of the Deathly Hallows, dreams in which I had encouraged him and helped him. He ran, while I was left to bury my sister, and learn to live with my guilt and my terrible grief, the price of my shame.

  “Years passed. There were rumors about him. They said he had procured a wand of immense power. I, meanwhile, was offered the post of Minister of Magic, not once, but several times. Naturally, I refused. I had learned that I was not to be trusted with power.”

  “But you’d have been better, much better, than Fudge or Scimgeour!” burst out Harry.

  “Would I?” asked Dumbledore heavily. “I am not so sure. I had proven, as a very young man, that power was my weakness and my temptation. It is a curious thing, Harry, but perhaps those who are best suited to power are those who have never sought it. Those who, like you, have leadership thrust upon them, and take up the mantle because they must, and find to their own surprise that they wear it well.

  “I was safer at Hogwarts. I think I was a good teacher—”

  “You were the best—”

  “—you are very kind, Harry. But while I busied myself with the training of young wizards, Grindelwald was raising an army. They say he feared me, and perhaps he did, but less, I think, than I feared him.

  “Oh, not death,” said Dumbledore, in answer to Harry’s questioning look. “Not what he could do to me magically. I knew that we were evenly matched, perhaps that I was a shade more skillful. It was the truth I feared. You see, I never knew which of us, in that last, horrific fight, had actually cast the curse that killed my sister. You may call me cowardly: You would be right, Harry. I dreaded beyond all things the knowledge that it had been I who brought about her death, not merely through my arrogance and stupidity, but that I actually struck the blow that snuffed out her life.

  “I think he knew it, I think he knew what frightened me. I delayed meeting him until finally, it would have been too shameful to resist any longer. People were dying and he seemed unstoppable, and I had to do what I could.

  “Well, you know what happened next. I won the duel. I won the wand.”

  Another silence. Harry did not ask whether Dumbledore had ever found out who struck Ariana dead. He did not want to know, and even less did he want Dumbledore to have to tell him. At last he knew what Dumbledore would have seen when he looked in the mirror of Erised, and why Dumbledore had been so understanding of the fascination it had exercised over Harry.

  They sat in silence for a long time, and the whipmerings of the creature behind them barely disturbed Harry anymore.

  At last he said, “Grindelwald tried to stop Voldemort going after the wand. He lied, you know, pretended he had never had it.”

  Dumbledore nodded, looking down at his lap, tears still glittering on the crooked nose.

  “They say he showed remorse in later years, alone in his cell at Nurmengard. I hope that is true. I would like to think that he did feel the horror and shame of what he had done. Perhaps that lie to Voldemort was his attempt to make amends… to prevent Voldemort from taking the Hallow…”

  “…or maybe from breaking into your tomb?” suggested Harry, and Dumbledore dabbed his eyes.

  After another short pause Harry said, “You tried to use the Resurrection Stone.”

  Dumbledore nodded.

  “When I discovered it, after all those years, buried in the abandoned home of the Gaunts—the Hallow I had craved most of all, though in my youth I had wanted it for very different reasons—I lost my head, Harry. I quite forgot that I was not a Horcrux, that the ring was sure to carry a curse. I picked it up, and I put it on, and for a second I imagined that I was about to see Ariana, and my mother, and my father, and to tell them how very, very sorry, I was…

  “I was such a fool, Harry. After all those years I had learned nothing. I was unworthy to unite the Deathly Hallows, I had proved it time and again, and here was final proof.”

  “Why?” said Harry. “It was natural! You wanted to see them again. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Maybe a man in
a million could unite the Hallows, Harry. I was fit only to possess the meanest of them, the least extraordinary. I was fit to own the Elder Wand, and not boast of it, and not to kill with it. I was permitted to tame and use it, because I took it, not for gain, but to save others from it.

  “But the Cloak, I took out of vain curiousity, and so it could never have worked for me as it works for you, its true owners. The stone I would have used in an attempt to drag back those who are at peace, rather than enable my self-sacrifice, as you did. You are the worthy possessor of the Hallows.”

  Dumbledore patted Harry’s hand, and Harry looked up at the old man and smiled; he could not help himself. How could he remain angry with Dumbledore now?

  “Why did you have to make it so difficult?”

  Dumbledore’s smile was tremulous.

  “I am afraid I counted on Miss Granger to slow you up, Harry. I was afraid that your hot head might dominate your good heart. I was scared that, if presented outright with the facts about those tempting objects, you might seize the Hallows as I did, at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons. If you laid hands on them, I wanted you to possess them safely. You are the true master of death, because the true master does not seek to run away from Death. He accepts that he must die, and understands that there are far, far worse things in the living world than dying.”

  “And Voldemort never knew about the Hallows?”

  “I do not think so, because he did not recognize the Resurrection Stone he turned into a Horcrux. But even if he had known about them, Harry, I doubt that he would have been interested in any except the first. He would not think that he needed the Cloak, and as for the stone, whom would he want to bring back from the dead? He fears the dead. He does not love.”

  “But you expected him to go after the wand?”

  “I have been sure that he would try, ever since your wand beat Voldemort’s in the graveyard of Little Hangleton. At first, he was afraid that you had conquered him by superior skill. Once he had kidnapped Ollivander, however, he discovered the existence of the twin cores. He thought that explained everything. Yet the borrowed wand did no better against yours! So Voldemort, instead of asking himself what quality it was in you that had made your wand so strong, what gift you possessed that he did not, naturally set out to find the one wand that, they said, would beat any other. For him, the Elder Wand has become an obsession to rival his obsession with you. He believes that the Elder Wand removes his last weakness and makes him truly invincible. Poor Severus…”