Chocolate Enchantment

43: Another Meeting at the Burrow

Chapter 43: Another Meeting at The Burrow

Once she had finished up with Remus and Tonks, Hermione joined the boys upstairs where they worked on their dueling. She watched for a moment until Harry managed to trip Ron up and knock him flat on his back.

"Good job," she said when she was sure she wouldn't get hit by a stray hex.

Harry looked over at her, panting slightly from exertion. "Not good enough, though. I seriously doubt hexing Ron is going to be as difficult as hexing Death Eaters or hitting Voldemort with that curse you're working on."

Hermione considered for a moment, then decided to come clean. "Actually, I'm not the one working on the spell. Snape is." She saw the argument forming on their faces and didn't give them a chance to complain. "You know he has much more experience creating spells than I have. I know he said he's starting to get close on the second one, the one Harry will use. I hoped we could test them on the twins once we've got everything together. If identical twins don't share blood, who does?"

"Come on, Hermione, you left the most important spells we will cast in our whole lives up to Snape to create? What were you thinking?" Ron got off the floor and wiped his hands on his trousers.

"I was thinking that he was on our side and that he could create the spell faster and more accurately than anyone else we know."

"And how do you know that's true? I mean, he didn't warn us of the attack on those ships in the channel a few days back."

It had been Hermione's decision not to warn the Order about those, with Severus urging her to keep quiet. He had told her, but he was one of only two Death Eaters who knew about the attack in advance. As much as they wanted to warn someone, it simply wasn't safe. Instead, he had set off an alarm in the selected ships an hour before the attack, which forced most of the Muggles to vacate. It was the best they could do under the situation.

Unfortunately, there were still over forty dead, and nearly double that injured, though thousands of lives had been saved. It would be a long time before she forgot the guilt of that decision. "If Snape were keeping those kinds of things to himself, he would now be dead. The fact that he isn't dead means he's honoring his vow. Can we please drop it? We need to make some decision about the next Horcrux."

Ron grumbled under his breath, but didn't continue the conversation. He seemed utterly unconvinced, but walked over to the paper that listed everything they knew about Hufflepuff's cup. "I say it's in the school. No other location has come up, regardless of how many questions Fred and George have asked. He received an award for service to the school; it could be there, or maybe in the Slytherin dorms. I think we need to ask McGonagall, see if we can get in to search."

Hermione met Harry's eye, then turned back to Ron. "I'm with you. He won't have hidden it someplace totally innocuous, but somewhere that mattered to him. Your locations are spot on, and it feels right, that he would leave it at the school. He would have placed it when he came to interview with Dumbledore. Maybe that was the whole purpose of the meeting—to get him close enough to place the cup."

"Yeah. Dobby could probably get us in without McGonagall's permission, but I'd rather go about this the right way, in case we get caught. Filch is still on patrol, after all." Ron pulled a face at this.

"The next order of business is how we're going to get better at dueling," Hermione said. "Harry's right. We're all going to have to start dueling people who are significantly better than we are if we're going to improve more rapidly. I think we've learned all the curses we'll need, and we're doing well with silent spell casting, but we've got to get better and faster at it."