Chapter 78 — What We Had Chosen

Ginny returned with her mother a few minutes later. She sat beside Ron with one hand hidden inside her cardigan sleeve, and Dumbledore waited until Mrs Weasley had drawn up a chair before speaking.

‘You need rest. There will be questions when you’re ready, so we can understand how the diary reached you and what it made you do.’ He gave her time to look at him. ‘You are not being expelled, Ginny.’

Her shoulders dropped, then her eyes went towards Hermione’s screen. Dumbledore followed the look and said the remedy would be given as soon as the mandrakes were ready. What somebody had done through her did not become her choice because he had used her hands.

Mrs Weasley tightened her arm around her daughter. Ginny pressed her lips together, trying not to cry, while Dumbledore turned towards the rest of us.

‘The three of you did make some choices.’ Ron looked at me, and I said the Forest before the Headmaster needed to name it.

‘Among others,’ he agreed. ‘You had information, instructions to remain inside and a teacher already acting on what you brought her. You chose to leave a note in an empty hut and follow spiders into their nest.’

I told him going had been my idea. Harry said we had all gone, and Ron nodded, adding that he had thought it was rotten at the time and still followed us. Dumbledore accepted the distinction without appearing to find any of those facts amusing.

Fifty points would come from Gryffindor for the expedition. He would discuss further restrictions with McGonagall when everyone was well enough to attend, and I looked down at the blanket while the number settled. It stung, though several worse consequences had passed close enough for me to know what they sounded like.

‘The rescue is a separate matter,’ Dumbledore continued. ‘You sent word, found an entrance and acted when you believed a life was being lost. We will examine where our arrangements failed, including the failure to keep Ginny safe after we had been warned.’

Mrs Weasley looked directly at him. He met her eyes and promised her and Mr Weasley the fullest account they could establish, then turned back towards my bed.

‘I am also putting forward four names for the Special Award for Services to the School. Yours, Oswald, Harry and Ron, and Hermione’s.’ Ron sat straighter, staring at him as if he suspected there was another part of the sentence waiting to undo it.

‘An actual award? In the trophy room?’ he asked. Dumbledore confirmed both, and Ron looked towards the far wall with the expression he had worn when our new brooms arrived.

‘I’ll be polishing my own trophy.’ Ginny laughed quietly beside him. It was the first time I had heard her do that in what felt like months, and Mrs Weasley glanced down at her before looking back towards Dumbledore.

The citations would record what each of us had done. Hermione’s research, the route we had found and opened, the work of bringing everyone out: he named the parts, then my defeat of the basilisk and destruction of the diary. Luna’s help in recovering the evidence would be acknowledged as well.

I looked towards Hermione’s screen again. I wanted her awake to hear her own name and correct the wording if Dumbledore had missed something. Beside me, Ron’s excitement lasted until he remembered another person who ought to have been there.

He asked about Hagrid. The Ministry had received the report through its official channel, Dumbledore said, and his release had been authorised. McGonagall was seeking confirmation of the arrangements to bring him home.

He offered Ron a sheet of paper and suggested writing a welcome while we waited. Something from friends might be more pleasant to receive than another Ministry document. Ron accepted eagerly, and Mrs Weasley helped him and Ginny settle at the table by the window, still close enough for us to see them.

Fawkes shifted on the back of Dumbledore’s chair. I thanked the Headmaster for sending him, and Dumbledore looked at the bird before explaining that he had not.

‘He chose to go and took the hat with him. Fawkes often knows when help is needed before I do.’ Harry turned towards him, looking from his face to the phoenix.

Harry described what Riddle had said about Dumbledore being gone, and his own answer. He had believed the Headmaster knew more than Riddle did; that part had not been something he said merely to annoy him.

Dumbledore rested a finger against Fawkes’s breast. Trust mattered to the bird, he said, as did the person asking for help. There was no formula he could give us which would summon a phoenix every time we repeated the right sentence.

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I watched the bright eye above his hand. ‘I’d rather have had someone who could get the roof out of the way,’ I admitted, remembering Ron’s voice coming through the stone.

‘So would I.’ Dumbledore’s answer was immediate. ‘Filius reached you as quickly as he could. That does not make the delay less frightening from your side of it.’

I let my head rest back against the pillow. He had not asked me to believe the whole journey had happened as it ought to, which made it easier to hear what he had said.

Harry turned his wand between his palms, then set it on the blanket. Dumbledore waited, and I recognised the look on Harry’s face well enough to leave him room to find the question.

‘He speaks to snakes. So do I.’ Harry looked down at his wand. ‘The hat wanted to put me in Slytherin, and I asked it not to. Why did it want to in the first place?’

He asked how he could have an ability Riddle shared. Dumbledore considered him for a moment before saying he believed something might have passed between them on the night Harry received his scar: an imprint of magic, perhaps, which could explain a gift he had not inherited from his parents.

Harry’s hand went to his forehead. ‘He put it there?’ Dumbledore said he doubted Voldemort had intended anything of the kind, and there was still much about that night they did not understand.

‘Could it make me like him?’ Harry asked. I remembered Riddle describing how he had taught Ginny to fear the people who might help her, then Harry kneeling beside that same girl while a wand was pointed towards them.

‘You could have left Ginny when the snake came,’ I said. ‘You didn’t.’ Harry pointed out that I had not left either, and I told him that was the point. Speaking the same language as somebody did not mean wanting the same things.

He looked at his hands. ‘What if the hat knew something I didn’t?’ The question came quietly enough that I leaned closer to hear the end.

‘It probably did. It’s a very old hat.’ I looked at the blanket where the sword had nearly ended up earlier. ‘That doesn’t give it the rest of your life to decide for you.’

Dumbledore reminded him that he had asked for Gryffindor and the hat had listened. Belonging to a house still left him responsible for what he chose tomorrow; Slytherins had to make those choices too. Harry thought about it for a while, and the tightness in his shoulders eased without disappearing all at once.

I suggested starting tomorrow with something dull. He asked whether visiting me counted, and I said I had been thinking of practising catching something which was not trying to kill us.

‘I’d quite like that.’ He smiled, and Pomfrey arrived in time to tell him that eating came before either activity. Ron and Ginny had finished their letter, so Mrs Weasley took all three out, stopping beside my pillow to thank me again in a voice I found difficult to answer.

Dumbledore remained with permission for a few more minutes. His eyes followed mine to the wrapped diary, and he asked what was troubling me.

‘It nearly became a person.’ I waited, but he said nothing, so I went on. ‘Last year he needed Quirrell. This time there was a boy in a book, and by the end I could hit him. He had weight. Ginny was losing her life to give him that.’

I drew a careful breath. The potion was helping, though I could still feel the place where my ribs had broken. ‘If he made one of those, why wouldn’t he make another?’

Dumbledore’s expression changed very slightly. He called it a sensible question, which was less comforting than the answer I had hoped he might have ready.

‘I suspect there may be other objects,’ he said when I asked directly. ‘I don’t yet know how many, or where. This diary gives me evidence I did not have before.’

He had not called it an ordinary memory. I noticed that, and told him I needed to know what to look for if something similar could be left among a child’s schoolbooks.

‘And what to do when you find it, including whom to tell.’ He folded his hands. ‘There are qualities you share with the boy who made that diary, Oswald.’

I stared at him. ‘That is a spectacularly unpleasant thing to say to somebody in a hospital bed.’ He accepted the objection without withdrawing the comparison.

Curiosity, determination and a willingness to disregard rules were useful qualities, he said. They could also make a person very good at finding reasons not to listen when somebody stood in the way of what he intended to do.

I thought about Ron at the Forest’s edge. ‘I listened eventually.’ Dumbledore nodded and added that I had been willing to admit I was wrong, then reached towards the covered sword.

He lifted it with the edge well clear of my bed. A name ran along the blade beneath the red stones in its hilt, and I read it before asking the obvious question: Godric Gryffindor.

‘His sword,’ Dumbledore confirmed. ‘It answers a Gryffindor in need. You drew it.’ I looked at the metal which had saved my life, and at the arm I had nearly lost using it.

I asked whether that meant I was safe from becoming somebody awful. He said no object could promise it; the sword showed him what I had done when I was afraid and another person needed help. He found that more useful than a resemblance, and laid the blade back on the table.

I sat with his answer for a moment before returning to the diary. ‘We still need to know who put the book in Ginny’s hands.’ Pomfrey was moving between the beds, and I began explaining the incident at Flourish and Blotts before she could decide that my few minutes were finished.

‘Lucius Malfoy was holding a battered schoolbook. I saw him push it among the books Ginny was carrying.’ I described his remark about what her father could afford, and where Hagrid had been standing.

Dumbledore asked whether I had seen the diary itself go into the pile. I had not. It was tempting to improve the memory now that I knew what the little black volume had done, but I had seen a schoolbook in Lucius’s hand, not the hidden contents of it.

‘That’s all I actually saw,’ I said. ‘She had the diary afterwards.’ Dumbledore told me Ginny had so far described finding it among her school things, which made my account relevant without answering every question about how it arrived there.

I asked whether he thought Lucius was responsible. He said there was good reason to investigate him, and Pomfrey appeared at the foot of the bed to add that there was good reason to let me sleep.

Dumbledore stood and took custody of the wrapped diary, sword and fang. The hat went beside them on a tray which followed him out, and I watched until its last corner disappeared through the door. Knowing where the book had gone helped me close my eyes.