Ron kicked a chair leg.

“What?” he snarled at Hermione. “I’m starving! All I’ve had since I bled half to death is a couple of toadstools!”

“You go and fight your way through the Dementors, then,” said Harry, stung.

“I would, but my arm’s in a sling, in case you hadn’t noticed!”

“That’s convenient.”

“And what’s that supposed to—?”

“Of course!” cried Hermione, clapping a hand to her forehead and startling both of them into silence. “Harry, give me the locket! Come on,” she said impatiently, clicking her fingers at him when he did not react, “the Horcrux, Harry, you’re still wearing it!”

She held out her hands, and Harry lifted the golden chain over his head. The moment it parted contact with Harry’s skin he felt free and oddly light. He had not even realized that he was clammy or that there was a heavy weight pressing on his stomach until both sensations lifted.

“Better?” asked Hermione.

“Yeah, loads better!”

“Harry,” she said, crouching down in front of him and using the kind of voice he associated with visiting the very sick, “you don’t think you’ve been possessed, do you?”

“What? No!” he said defensively, “I remember everything we’ve done while I’ve been wearing it. I wouldn’t know what I’d done if I’d been possessed, would I? Ginny told me there were times when she couldn’t remember anything.”

“Hmm,” said Hermione, looking down at the heavy locket. “Well, maybe we ought not to wear it. We can just keep it in the tent.”

“We are not leaving that Horcrux lying around,” Harry stated firmly. “If we lose it, if it gets stolen—”

“Oh, all right, all right,” said Hermione, and she placed it around her own neck and tucked it out of sight down the front of her shirt. “But we’ll take turns wearing it, so nobody keeps it on too long.”

“Great,” said Ron irritably, “and now we’ve sorted that out, can we please get some food?”

“Fine, but we’ll go somewhere else to find it,” said Hermione with half a glance at Harry. “There’s no point staying where we know Dementors are swooping around.”

In the end they settled down for the night in a far flung field belonging to a lonely farm, from which they had managed to obtain eggs and bread.

“It’s not stealing, is it?” asked Hermione in a troubled voice, as they devoured scrambled eggs on toast. “Not if I left some money under the chicken coo?”

Ron rolled his eyes and said, with his cheeks bulging, “Er-my-nee, ’oo worry ’oo much. ’Elax!”

And, indeed, it was much easier to relax when they were comfortably well fed. The argument about the Dementors was forgotten in laughter that night, and Harry felt cheerful, even hopeful, as he took the first of the three night watches.

This was their first encounter with the fact that a full stomach meant good spirits, an empty one, bickering and gloom. Harry was least surprised by this, because be had suffered periods of near starvation at the Dursleys’. Hermione bore up reasonably well on those nights when they managed to scavenge nothing but berries or stale biscuits, her temper perhaps a little shorter than usual and her silences dour. Ron, however, had always been used to three delicious meals a day, courtesy of his mother or of the Hogwarts house-elves, and hunger made him both unreasonable and irascible. Whenever lack of food coincided with Ron’s turn to wear the Horcrux, he became downright unpleasant.

“So where next?” was his constant refrain. He did not seem to have any ideas himself, but expected Harry and Hermione to come up with plans while he sat and brooded over the low food supplies. Accordingly Harry and Hermione spent fruitless hours trying to decide where they might find the other Horcruxes, and how to destroy the one they already got, their conversations becoming increasingly repetitive as they got no new information.

As Dumbledore had told Harry that be believed Voldemort had hidden the Horcruxes in places important to him, they kept reciting, in a sort of dreary litany, those locations they knew that Voldemort had lived or visited. The orphanage where he had been born and raised; Hogwarts, where he had been educated; Borgin and Burkes, where he had worked after completing school; then Albania, where he had spent his years of exile: These formed the basis of their speculations.

“Yeah, let’s go to Albania. Shouldn’t take more than an afternoon to search an entire country,” said Ron sarcastically.

“There can’t be anything there. He’d already made five of his Horcruxes before he went into exile, and Dumbledore was certain the snake is the sixth,” said Hermione. “We know the snake’s not in Albania, it’s usually with Vol—”

“Didn’t I ask you to stop say that?”

“Fine! The snake is usually with You-Know-Who—happy?”

“Not particularly.”

“I can’t see him hiding anything at Borgin and Burkes,” said Harry, who had made this point many times before, but said it again simply to break the nasty silence. “Borgin and Burke were experts at Dark objects, they would’ve recognized a Horcrux straightaway.”

Ron yawned pointedly. Repressing a strong urge to throw something at him, Harry plowed on, “I still reckon he might have hidden something at Hogwarts.”

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THE GOBLIN’S REVENGE	\|	Hermione sighed.

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