Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

15

Chapter 15—The Goblin’s Revenge

Summary

Harry wakes early the next day, finds an old tree and buries Moody’s eye at the base of it, marking the bark with his wand. On waking the others, Harry and Hermione decide that they should not stay anywhere too long, and Ron agrees, provided their next stop is near food. They Apparate to the outskirts of a small town, pitch their tent and put up enchantments, then Harry heads in under the Cloak to find food. On the edge of town, he is confronted with dementors and has to run back—he couldn’t summon his Patronus. Hermione and Ron are puzzled by this, and Ron begins to complain that they haven’t got any food. Harry feels guilty and ashamed, and Ron begins to go off at him for his failure. Hermione stops the argument, telling Harry to take off the locket. Once he does, he feels instantly better. Hermione asks Harry if he’s been possessed by the thing, but he knows he hasn’t—he remembers everything they’ve done. He won’t leave the locket lying around in the tent, so Hermione suggests that they take it in turns.

They move on to a farm and take some eggs and bread there. (Hermione leaves some money under the chicken coop and worries that it’s stealing.) The trio come to realize that a lack of food makes them all far more irritable and angry. Harry understands the problem given his upbringing, and Hermione manages to keep herself in check, but Ron doesn’t do well without three square meals a day. When he hasn’t eaten and is also wearing the locket, it’s a perfect storm. He keeps asking Harry and Hermione what they have to do next, offering no ideas himself. They go over the information left by Dumbledore, the possibility that Voldemort hid the Horcruxes in places important to him. Hermione figures that there won’t be one in Albania (where he spent his exile) because he’d already made most of the his Horcruxes by that point, and Nagini is always with him. Harry figures there won’t be one at Borgin and Burke (where he worked after leaving school) because they’d have known a Horcrux when they saw one. Harry believes that he hid something at Hogwarts, but Hermione thinks Dumbledore would have found it. Harry is insistent on this point, explaining that Hogwarts was a home to Voldemort. Ron makes a nasty comment about this being You-Know-Who they’re talking about, not Harry; the locket is getting to him. Hermione is still adamant that Tom Riddle never found an object at the school to use, and Harry is forced to give up.

The trio head to London and try to find Riddle’s old orphanage, but it’s been turned into block of office buildings. Harry hadn’t expected a Horcrux to be there anyway, as Voldemort had wanted to escape the place. They keep moving each night, and covering their tracks when they leave. They pass the locket between each other every twelve hours. Harry’s scar keeps prickling, worse when he’s wearing the Horcrux. Ron keeps asking him what he sees any time he winces, and Harry keeps telling him that he sees the face of the man who stole the locket from Gregorovitch. Hermione and Ron appear to be talking about Harry behind his back, and he begins to suspect that they assumed he had some secret plan that he would reveal once they were away from everyone else. He thinks that they’re disappointed in his leadership. The summer turns to autumn, and one night Ron makes a comment about how his mother can make good food out of air. (He’s wearing the locket.) Hermione argues, pointing out that you can’t make food out of nothing, you can only summon it, transform it, or increase it. When Ron says rude things about their meal of fish, Hermione goes off on him for the fact that she’s had to do all the cooking probably because she’s a girl—Ron counters that she does it because she’s supposed to be the best at magic out of the three of them. She tells Ron that tomorrow he can do the cooking and she’ll complain about it, when Harry tells her to shut up: he hears someone.

The Sneakoscope isn’t going off, and Hermione assures Harry that she cast all the necessary charms, so whoever is speaking shouldn’t be able to see or hear them. The newcomers head down to the River, but they can’t hear what they’re saying. Hermione hands out Extendable Ears to make it easier. The other are getting fish from the river, and not all of them are speaking English. A fire appears, and once the trio hear their names (two of them are Griphook and Gornuk), they realize that some of them are goblins. The other three are men—who turn out to be Ted Tonks, Dean Thomas, and Dirk Cresswell. Dirk was on his way to Azkaban, but he thinks that the guy taking him there (Dawlish) was Confunded and he managed to escape. Ted asks about the goblins, seeing as he most wizards assume they’re on Voldemort’s side. The goblins inform him that they have no sides here; this is a wizards’ war. They fled because Gringotts is no longer under sole control of the goblins, and they refused to be commanded by wizards.