We left at six o'clock on the first Saturday of the Easter holidays, while most of Gryffindor Tower was still asleep.
Hermione was already waiting in the common room when I came down. She had a list in her hand and a bag on her shoulder that was nearly as big as she was.
"What's in that?" I asked.
"Dittany. Bandages. A Pepper-Up Potion I borrowed from Madam Pomfrey's cupboard, which I'm going to put back. Spare socks." She checked the list. "And sandwiches."
"Sandwiches," I said.
"We might be there a while." She hitched the bag higher on her shoulder. "Nobody fights evil properly on an empty stomach."
I couldn't argue with that. I took her hand, put the Infinity up around both of us, and elf-Apparated us out of the castle.
Little Hangleton looked exactly how I'd always pictured it, which was a strange thing to think about a real place.
We came out on a narrow lane at the edge of the village, with tall hedges on both sides and the church tower poking up over the rooftops below us.
On the far side of the valley, up on its hill, sat the Riddle house, with half its windows boarded up.
So Operation Lord of the Rings had a dark tower after all. One does not simply walk into the Riddle house, and today we weren't even trying.
I could feel him in there through his thread, much clearer than it ever felt from Hogwarts. Nagini's thread was right next to his.
Down at the bottom of that hill, behind the church, I could just make out the graveyard.
In June, if I let things go the way they were supposed to, I'd be standing in that graveyard with a Portkey in my hand and Cedric dead on the grass next to me. I had other plans for June.
"Harry?" Hermione was watching me. "Are you all right?"
"Yeah," I said. "Just looking."
She followed my eyes to the house on the hill and went quiet. Her hand tightened on mine.
"He's in there," she said. "Isn't he?"
"Him and the snake," I said.
"And he can't feel us?"
"Not a chance. He's got no idea we exist." I thought about that. "Okay, he knows I exist. He's just got no idea I'm here."
The Gaunt house was about a mile away, up a dark, overgrown path through the trees. I'd landed us that far off on purpose, in case Voldemort had put something on the place to catch anyone Apparating in.
If I hadn't been following the thread, I'd have walked straight past it. Most people would have. There was a charm on the whole place that made your eyes want to slide off it and look at something else.
It was barely a house anymore. The roof had fallen in at one end. The walls were green with moss, and nettles grew taller than Hermione all round the front.
Hanging on the door, by a rusty nail, was something long and grey that had probably been a snake once.
"Lovely," Hermione said.
"Family home," I said. "The Gaunts weren't big on decorating."
The thread pulled hard now, straight towards the middle of the house. I stopped at the edge of the nettles and took a closer look.
The Archmage Essence doesn't make magic visible, exactly. It's more that I can feel what it's doing.
And the Gaunt house was full of it, layer after layer of old spells, all of them nasty. There was a curse on the door that would rot your hand off, and a trap under the floor that would bring the roof down on anyone who stepped in the wrong place.
The ring had its own curse as well, but that one could wait until the soul was out of it.
Voldemort had been thorough. You had to give him that.
Luckily, I'd spent the last five months reading every book the Room could find me, including a lot that hadn't seen daylight in centuries.
"Stay right next to me," I told Hermione.
"I wasn't planning on wandering off," she said.
I started on the door. I ran the tip of my wand slowly down the frame until I found where the rot curse was anchored, right under the nail with the dead snake on it. A few careful passes and a muttered countercurse later, a sickly green glow seeped out of the wood, gathered round the end of my wand and fizzled out.
The roof trap took longer, because I wanted to be sure I'd got all of it, and because it would have been really embarrassing to come all this way and die to a trap in the first room of the dungeon.
Hermione watched the whole thing from right behind my shoulder and asked questions under her breath the entire time, so she wouldn't put me off. How could I tell where one spell stopped and the next one started? Was there a book, and could she borrow it? Most of my answers were "I can feel it."
"That's not an answer," she whispered, the fourth time. "That's Divination."
When I was done, I pushed the door open. It fell off its hinges and landed in the nettles with a soft thump.
"Sorry," I said to the house.
Inside, it smelled of damp and mould. There was one room downstairs, with a fireplace full of dead leaves and a floor of uneven boards. The thread led to a spot in front of the fireplace.
I knelt down. One of the boards had been cut differently from the others. When I lifted it with my wand, there was a little hollow underneath, and in the hollow was a small wooden box gone soft with damp.
I moved back about three feet and opened the box from there with my wand.
The ring sat on a scrap of black cloth inside: a heavy gold band, a bit dented, with a big black stone set in the top. It was the kind of thing you'd find at the bottom of a drawer at your gran's house. The air around it was freezing, though.
"That's it?" Hermione asked.
"That's it," I said.
She leaned over my shoulder for a better look, then a little further. Then she let go of my hand, stepped past me and started reaching down into the hollow, slowly, like someone sleepwalking.
I caught her wrist.
"Rule number one," I said.
Hermione blinked at her own hand. When I let go, she snatched it back so fast she stumbled into me.
"I didn't..." She stared at the box. "I wasn't even thinking about it. I just wanted to look at it, and then I wanted to hold it."
"It's meant to do that," I said. "He wanted whoever found it to put it on."
"Then why doesn't it work on you?"
It did, a bit. Some of the pull was Voldemort's doing, and some of it came from the stone itself, which wanted me to think about the people I'd lost.
But the people it was pulling me towards were the original Harry's parents, and I'd never really known them. Whoever I'd lost before I woke up in this body, I couldn't even remember. It didn't have much to work with.
"I've got a very boring personality," I said.
She moved right up against my side and shoved both hands deep in her pockets. "Just do it. Please. I don't like it."
"Neither do I," I said.
The Infinity stopped things from reaching us. It couldn't do anything about a pull that worked on what you wanted, which was why I'd been watching Hermione's hands the whole time instead of the ring.
I didn't wait for the ring to try anything else. I pointed my wand at the hollow and pulled the soul orb into being over it.
After the locket, I wasn't giving any of them time for a speech. The piece in the ring barely got a scream out before the orb swallowed it. The room stopped being freezing, and I felt another thread snap.
"Five down," I said.
"Good," Hermione said. Her voice came out higher than usual.
The curse on the ring itself was still there, though. Getting rid of the soul didn't get rid of that. I could feel it sitting in the gold, the kind that would blacken your hand and kill you fast if you put the ring on. Even Snape at his best would only have slowed it down.
It took me a few minutes to work out where it ended and the ring began, and a few more to get it out without breaking anything.
When I was done, I picked the ring up.
Hermione grabbed my sleeve. "How do you know it's safe?"
"Because I just spent ten minutes making sure," I said. "It's just a ring now."
She didn't look convinced, but she let go of my sleeve.
I turned it over in my fingers. On the black stone, faint and scratched, was the sign of the Deathly Hallows: a triangle, with a circle inside it and a line down the middle.
Turn the Resurrection Stone three times in your hand, and the people you'd lost would come back, sort of, for a little while.
In the books, Dumbledore had put this ring on because he wanted to see his family again, and it had as good as killed him.
With the Cloak in my trunk, that made two Hallows out of three. The third one was in Dumbledore's pocket.
Two out of three wasn't bad.
I wasn't going to put it on. I also wasn't going to leave it in a hole under the floor for someone else to find.
I wrapped it in the black cloth, put a couple of strong charms on it, and slipped it into my pocket.
"What are you going to do with it?" Hermione asked.
"Keep it somewhere safe for now," I said. "It's a Gaunt family heirloom with a lot of nasty history. I want a good look at it before I decide anything."
When we got back down to the lane, Hermione stopped and looked across the valley at the Riddle house again.
"If he's in there, Wormtail's in there too," she said. "You said he can't even get out of his chair without him." She chewed her lip. "Sirius would give anything to know that."
"He would," I said.
"You can't tell him, though." She was already shaking her head. "Not yet. He'd come straight here, wouldn't he? On his own, as a dog, with no plan at all."
"Probably before I'd finished the sentence," I said. "And if Wormtail goes missing, Voldemort knows someone's onto him. He doesn't know anyone's after his Horcruxes. If he works it out, he'll have the cup guarded twice as hard and keep Nagini wrapped round him day and night."
"So we leave Wormtail where he is." Hermione frowned at the house. "Sirius is shut up in that awful house with Kreacher, and Wormtail's sitting right there."
"It isn't fair," I said.
"When this is over, he's going in front of the Wizengamot." She was still looking at the house. "With Sirius watching."
"Yeah," I said.
She took my hand again. Hers was still shaking a little.
We didn't go straight back. There was an old stile at the end of the lane, and Hermione sat down on it, opened her enormous bag and handed me a cheese sandwich.
"You actually brought sandwiches to a Horcrux hunt," I said.
"And you're eating one," she said.
Fair point. We sat there and ate them, looking down at the church and the rooftops while the village woke up. A milk float hummed along the road below us, and somewhere a dog started barking at it.
It was a weird way to spend a Saturday, a mile from Voldemort with a cheese sandwich in my hand, and it was still one of the nicest mornings I'd had all year.
"I nearly picked it up," Hermione said after a while. She wasn't looking at me. "If you hadn't been there, I would have."
"You snapped out of it the second I grabbed your wrist," I said. "Most people would have tried to fight me for it."
"That's not very comforting."
"It's meant to be," I said. "You're the cleverest person I know, and it still nearly got you. That's how strong it was."
She thought about that for a bit and leaned her head on my shoulder.
"Next time," she said, "I'm staying three feet back."
Before I took us back, I got rid of the mud and the bits of nettle on both of us. We were in the castle by half past eight, less than three hours after we'd left.
Hermione went to sneak the Pepper-Up Potion back into Madam Pomfrey's cupboard, and I went down to breakfast and saved her a seat.
Nobody looked at me twice. Ron, who'd woken up to an empty bed next to his, asked if Hermione had dragged me off to the library again. I said she had, and he went back to his porridge.
Hermione had just sat down when the post brought Mrs Weasley's Easter eggs. Mine was huge and filled with homemade toffee. Hermione's was exactly the same size.
Hers was supposed to be about the size of a chicken's egg this year, courtesy of Rita Skeeter. I looked at it for a second, then at mine.
"What?" Hermione said.
"Nothing," I said. "It's a nice egg."
She squinted at me and broke a piece off. "You're very odd sometimes."
"So I've been told," I said.
That evening, in the Room, Hermione drew a big tick in the box next to the ring and stood back to look at the board.
There were only two boxes left without ticks: the cup, with GRINGOTTS (HARD) still written next to it, and the snake, with an arrow pointing at a stick figure with devil horns.
"Five down," she said, and turned round, still holding the chalk. "So it's afterwards now."
"It is," I said.
"You said we'd talk about telling Dumbledore."
"I did say that."
"So let's talk about it." She folded her arms. "That's five pieces of You-Know-Who's soul gone, and I nearly picked up a cursed ring this morning. If anyone should know about this, it's Professor Dumbledore."
I couldn't really argue with any of that.
"Let me work out how to tell him without him locking me in a tower for my own safety," I said.
Hermione pointed the chalk at me. "That's not a no."
"It's not a no."
She let it go, for now. I'd have bet my ten Galleons she'd bring it up again within three days.
"Then I suppose," she said, "we'd better start thinking about Gringotts."
"Heist arc," I said.
"We are not robbing a bank."
"Course not. Just one vault in it."
Hermione turned back to the board and underlined HARD twice.
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