mirrorball

chapter eleven

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

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

"He wouldn't have hidden a Horcrux here," Harry said. 

This had been the group's only topic of conversation for the last day. Where were the other horcruxes? How could they destroy them? How long was it going to take? And with their food supply being constantly unknown and their sleep schedules completely thrown off, the group wasn't very patient with each other. Harry and Clara held the record of rows, but Ron was coming in close second with Harry. It seemed the only person unaffected was Hermione, whose worst outburst had been at Ron after he had walked in on her changing. He'd received a nice shout for that, though Clara thought it was more to do with embarrassment than a short temper.

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, traveling 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.

Autumn rolled over the countryside as they moved through it. They were now pitching the tent on mulches of fallen leaves. Natural mists joined those cast by the dementors: wind and rain added to their troubles. The fact that Hermione was getting better at identifying edible fungi could not altogether compensate for their continuing isolation, the lack of other people's company, or their total ignorance of what was going on in the war against Voldemort. 

"My mother," said Ron one night, as they sat in the tent on a riverbank in Wales, "can make good fear appear out of thin air." He prodded moodily at the lumps of charred gray fish on his plate. Clara glanced automatically at Ron's neck and saw, as she had expected, the golden chain of the Horcrux glinting there. She sighed.

"Your mother can't produce food out of thin air," said Hermione. "No one can. Food is one of the first of five Principal Exceptions to Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfigur—"

 "Oh, speak English, can't you?" Ron said, prising a fish bone out from between his teeth. 

"It's impossible to make good food out of nothing! You can summon it if you know where it is, you can transform it, you can increase the quantity if you've already got some— " 

"Well, don't bother increasing this, it's disgusting," said Ron. 

"Clara caught the fish and I did my best with it! I notice we're always the ones who end up sorting out the food, because we're girls, I suppose!" said Hermione, looking at Clara to join her side. 

"No, it's because you two are supposed to be the best at magic!" shot back Ron. Hermione jumped up and bits of roast pike slid off her tin plate onto the floor. "You can do the cooking tomorrow, Ron, you can find the ingredients and try and charm them into something worth eating, and I'll sit here and pull faces and moan and you can see how you— " 

"Shut up!" said Harry, leaping to his feet and holding up both hands. "Shut up now!" 

Hermione looked outraged. "How can you side with him, he hardly ever does the cook— " 

"Hermione, be quiet, I can hear someone!" He was listening hard, his hands still raised, warning them not to talk. "You cast the Muffliato charm over us, right?" he whispered to Clara.