'Damn,' said Harry.
He stood before the stained-glass window, whose illustration of his family crest threw the shadow of a scarlet lion on the stone floor at his feet, and dappled the shoulders of his dark red robes with gold.
He had been pacing, but now he stood still, his hands knotted together. She had rarely seen him so overwhelmed.
'Godric…what is it?'
He paused, and looked at her. 'I have been to the battlefield,' he said. 'I did not want to tell Rowena but I have seen…terrible things.'
'Battle is terrible, you have always said so. And when Salazar does a thing, he never does it halfway.'
'He has raised up an army of monsters. Neither soldier nor sorcerer can stand against him.' Godric paused, pushing a piece of black hair back off his forehead. 'I have sent spies after him, but most never returned. Those who have tell me that all signs spell disaster.' He raised his eyes to her. 'Is it true that she yet does not want him dead?'
'She loves him.'
Godric winced. 'Still?'
'These things are not logical.' Helga sat forward in her chair. 'But it does not matter. I sincerely doubt that he can be killed. He would have to have a heart, for us to stop it beating.'
Godric shook his head. 'You know my views.'
'There is another way. We must turn his own powers against him.
Godric, you must promise me you will not go after him. Not until we are ready. No matter what he does. Promise me.'
But Godric was looking out the window, at a sunset made more scarlet by the tinted glass. 'I would not have thought it, even of him,' he said. 'Where has he kept so black a hatred these twenty-seven years?'
'Hate is only the other face of love,' she heard herself say, but Godric had turned as if he wanted to hear no more of this, and held out his hand to her.
'Come,' he said. 'What time we have to lose, we have lost already.'
Ginny turned over in bed, restlessly, her hands clutching the pillow.
Patterns of infinity danced like lightning behind her eyelids.
'I can too fight. I killed that guard.'
'Fleur killed that guard.'
'I killed it six times first!'
'But it wasn?t dead when you were finished with it. Ergo, she killed it.'
Harry, stomping along the corridor after Draco, sulked.
'Don?t sulk. For someone with all the grace and coordination of a pregnant wildebeest, you did great.'
Harry sulked more. 'I killed it.'
' Failure has gone to your head, Potter. You?ve got delusions of adequacy.'
'I wish you two would shut up,' said Fleur, in the dreamy sort of hopeful tone of voice of someone saying 'I wish I could win a free holiday in Majorca.' She shook her silvery head. 'You obviously cannot stand each other. Why do you bother talking at all?'
'Girls got a point,' said Draco, hopping over a wide gap between two broken paving stones, and turning to watch Harry follow after him. The corridor they had been following was narrowing and narrowing as they went farther on; it was beginning to become claustrophobic.
'Please. You love talking to me. Who else would put up with you?'
'You only put up with me because you have absolutely no choice,' said Draco, more easily that he felt. There was a stirring sense of uneasiness in his guts, and the worst part was that he wasn?t sure why — he wondered, not idly, how long it had been since he?d taken the Will-strengthening Potion Snape had given him.
'Shouldn?t we be out of the castle by now?' demanded Harry, glancing around as they turned a corner. The walls were incredibly dusty, as if no one had passed through these corridors in years.
'We are passing under the gardens,' said Fleur, sounding superior.
'It is better that way.'
Harry shook his head. 'Why is it better this way?'
'It is better,' Fleur said, 'because we will emerge in the center of the forest, which will be much safer. Harry! What a rude gesture to make at Draco behind his back. Oh, look, we are here, and — '
They had come to the end of the corridor, a dank low space that terminated in a large, iron-bound oak door with a square iron handle. Fleur took hold of it, pulled it toward her — and paused, a look of horror spreading over her face. She knelt down, running her fingers along the joins where the door met the wall. 'Oh, no,' she breathed.
Draco felt a prickle of anxiety race up his spine. 'What?'
Fleur turned to look at them, her face a mask of misery. 'Someone
'as sealed the door shut with adamantine.'
'Adamantine?' Draco knelt down next to her to examine the door.
She was right. He recognized the sealing around the edges of the door as the now-familiar white-blue glassy substance he was beginning to hate with a vengeance.
