176[@more@]“Why hide me though?” asked Ron.
“You’re supposed to be in bed with spattergrolt, Ron! They’ve kidnapped Luna because her father supported Harry! What would happen to your family if they knew you’re with him?”
“But what about your mum and dad?”
“They’re in Australia,” said Hermione, “They should be all right. They don’t know anything.”
“You’re a genius,” Ron repeated, looking awed.
Yeah, you are, Hermione,” agreed Harry fervently. “I don’t know what we’d do without you.”
She beamed, but became solemn at once.
“What about Luna?”
“Well, if they’re telling the truth and she’s still Alive ---“ began Ron. “Don’t say that, don’t say it!” squealed Hermione. “She must be alive, she must!” “Then she’ll be in Azkaban, I expect,” said Ron. “Whether she survives the place, though…Loads don’t…”
“She will,” said Harry. He could not bear to contemplate the alternative. “She’s tough, Luna, much tougher than you’d think. She’s probably teaching all the inmates about Wrackspurts and Nargles.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Hermione. She passed a hand over her eyes. “I’d feel so sorry for Xenophilius if ---“
“---if he hadn’t just tried to sell us to the Death Eaters, yeah,” said Ron. They put up the tent and retreated inside it, where Ron made them tea. After their narrow escape, the chilly, musty old place felt like home: safe, familiar, and friendly. “Oh, why did we go there?” groaned Hermione after a few minutes’ silence. “Harry, you were right, it was Godric’s Hollow all over again, a complete waste of time! The Deathly Hallows…such rubbish…although actually,” a sudden thought seemed to have struck her, “he might have made it all up, mightn’t he? He probably doesn’t believe in the Deathly Hallows at all, he just wanted to keep us talking until the Death Eaters arrived!”
“I don’t think so,” said Ron. “It’s a damn sight harder making stuff up when you’re under stress than you’d think. I found that out when the Snatchers caught me. It was much easier pretending to be Stan, because I knew a bit about him, than inventing a whole new person. Old Lovegood was under loads of pressure, trying to make sure we stayed put. I reckon he told us the truth, or what he thinks is the truth, just to keep us talking.”
“Well, I don’t suppose it matters,” sighed Hermione. “Even if he was being honest, I never heard such a lot of nonsense in all my life.”
“Hang on, though,” said Ron. “The Chamber of Secrets was supposed to be a myth, wasn’t it?”
“But the Deathly Hallows can’t exist, Ron!”
“You keep saying that, but one of them can,” said Ron. “Harry’s Invisibility Cloak ---“
“The Tale of the Three Brothers’ is a story,” said Hermione firmly. “A story about how humans are frightened of death. If surviving was as simple as hiding under the Invisibility Cloak, we’d have everything we need already!”
“I don’t know. We could do with an unbeatable wand,” said Harry, turning the blackthorn wand he so disliked over in his fingers.
“There’s no such thing, Harry!”
“You said there have been loads of wands --- the Deathstick and whatever they were called ---“
“All right, even if you want to kid yourself the Elder Wand’s real, what about the Resurrection Stone?” Her fingers sketched quotation marks around the name, and her tone dripped sarcasm. “No magic can raise the dead, and that’s that!”
“When my wand connected with You-Know-Who’s, it made my mum and dad
appear…and Cedric…”
“But they weren’t really back from the dead, were they?” said Hermione. “Those kind of ---of pale imitations aren’t the same as truly bringing someone back to life.” “But she, the girl in the tale, didn’t really come back, did she? The story says that once people are dead, they belong with the dead. But the second brother still got to see her and talk to her, didn’t he? He even lived with her for a while…”
He saw concern and something less easily definable in Hermione’s expression. Then, as she glanced at Ron, Harry realized that it was fear: He had scared her with his talk of living with dead people.
“So that Peverell bloke who’s buried in Godric’s Hollow,” he said hastily, trying to sound robustly sane, “you don’t know anything about him, then?”
“No,” she replied, looking relieved at the change of subject. “I looked him up after I saw the mark on his grave; if he’d been anyone famous or done anything important, I’m sure he’d be in one of our books. The only place I’ve managed to find the name ‘Peverell’ Is Nature’s Nobility: A Wizarding Genealogy. I borrowed it from Kreacher,” she explained as Ron raised his eyebrows. “It lists the pure-blood families that are now extinct in the male line. Apparently the Peverells were one of the earliest families to vanish.”
“Extinct in the male line?” repeated Ron.
“It means the name died out,” said Hermione, “centuries ago, in the case of the Peverells. They could still have descendents, though, they’d just be called something different.”
And then it came to Harry in one shining piece, the memory that had stirred at the sound of the name “Peverell”: a filthy old man brandishing an ugly ring in the face of a Ministry official, and he cried aloud, “Marvolo Gaunt!”
“Sorry said Ron and Hermione together.
“Marvolo Gaunt! You-Know-Who’s grandfather! In the Pensieve! With
Dumbledore! Marvolo Gaunt said he was descended from the Peverells!”
Ron and Hermione looked bewildered.
“The ring, the ring that became the Horcrux, Marvolo Gaunt said it had the Peverell coat of arms on it! I saw him waving it in the bloke from the Ministry’s face, he nearly shoved it up his nose!”
“The Peverell coat of arms?” said Hermione sharply. “Could you see what it looked like?”
“Not really,” said Harry, trying to remember. “There was nothing fancy on there, as far as I could see; maybe a few scratches. I only ever saw it really close up after it had been cracked open.”
Harry saw Hermione’s comprehension in the sudden widening of her eyes. Ron was looking from one to the other, astonished.
“Blimey…You reckon it was this sign again? The sign of the Hallows?
“Why not said Harry excitedly, “Marvolo Gaunt was an ignorant old git who lived like a pig, all he cared about was his ancestry. If that ring had been passed down through the centuries, he might not have known what it really was. There were no books in that house, and trust me, he wasn’t the type to read fairy tales to his kids. He’d have loved to think the scratches on the stone were a coat of arms, because as far as he was concerned,