“This is it,” Harry said, trying to bring them inside the glow of his own astonished certainty, “This explains everything. The Deathly Hallows are real and I’ve got one—maybe two—”

He held up the Snitch.

“—and You-Know-Who’s chasing the third, but he doesn’t realize… he just thinks it’s a powerful wand—”

“Harry,” said Hermione, moving across to him and handing him back Lily’s letter, “I’m sorry, but I think you’ve got this wrong, all wrong.”

“But don’t you see? It all fits—”

“Not, it doesn’t,” she said. “It doesn’t. Harry, you’re just getting carried away. Please,” she said as she started to speak, “please just answer me this: If the Deathly Hallows really existed, and Dumbledore knew about them, knew that the person who possessed all of them would be master of Death—Harry, why wouldn’t he have told you? Why?”

He had his answer ready.

“But you said it, Hermione! You’ve got to find out about them for yourself! It’s a Quest!”

“But I only said that to try and persuade you to come to the Lovegoods’!” cried Hermione in exasperation. “I didn’t really believe it!”

Harry took no notice.

“Dumbledore usually let me find out stuff for myself. He let me try my strength, take risks. This feels like the kind of thing he’d do.”

“Harry, this isn’t a game, this isn’t practice! This is the real thing, and Dumbledore left you very clear instructions: Find and destroy the Horcruxes! That symbol doesn’t mean anything, forget the Deathly Hallows, we can’t afford to get sidetracked—”

Harry was barely listening to her. He was turning the Snitch over and over in his hands, half expecting it to break open, to reveal the Resurrection Stone, to prove to Hermione that he was right, that the Deathly Hallows were real.

She appealed to Ron.

“You don’t believe in this, do you?”

Harry looked up, Ron hesitated.

“I dunno… I mean… bits of it sort of fit together,” said Ron awkwardly, “But when you look at the whole thing…” He took a deep breath. “I think we’re supposed to get rid of Horcruxes, Harry. That’s what Dumbledore told us to do. Maybe… maybe we should forget about this Hallows business.”

“Thank you, Ron,” said Hermione. “I’ll take first watch.”

And she strode past Harry and sat down in the tent entrance bringing the action to a fierce full stop.

But Harry hardly slept that night. The idea of the Deathly Hallows had taken possession of him, and he could not rest while agitating thoughts whirled through his mind: the wand, the stone, and the Cloak, if he could just possess them all…

I open at the close… But what was the close? Why couldn’t he have the stone now? If only he had the stone, he could ask Dumbledore these questions in person… and Harry murmured words to the Snitch in the darkness, trying everything, even Parseltongue, but the golden ball would not open…

And the wand, the Elder Wand, where was that hidden? Where was Voldemort searching now? Harry wished his scar would burn and show him Voldemort’s thoughts, because for the first time ever, he and Voldemort were united in wanting the very same thing… Hermione would not like that idea, of course… But then, she did not believe… Xenophilius had been right, in a way… Limited, Narrow, Close-minded. The truth was that she was scared of the idea of the Deathly Hallows, especially of the Resurrection Stone… and Harry pressed his mouth again to the Snitch, kissing it, nearly swallowing it, but the cold metal did not yield…

It was nearly dawn when he remembered Luna, alone in a cell in Azkaban, surrounded by Dementors, and he suddenly felt ashamed of himself. He had forgotten all about her in his feverish contemplation of the Hallows. If only they could rescue her, but Dementors in those numbers would be virtually unassailable. Now he came to think about it, he had not tried casting a Patronus with the blackthorn wand… He must try that in the morning…

If only there was a way of getting a better wand…

And desire for the Elder Wand, the Deathstick, unbeatable, invincible, swallowed him once more…

They packed up the tent next morning and moved on through a dreary shower of rain. The downpour pursued them to the coast, where they pitched the tent that night, and persisted through the whole week, through sodden landscapes that Harry found bleak and depressing. He could think only of the Deathly Hallows. It was as though a flame had been lit inside him that nothing, not Hermione’s flat disbelief nor Ron’s persistent doubts, could extinguish. And yet the fiercer the longing for the Hallows burned inside him, the less joyful it made him. He blamed Ron and Hermione: Their determined indifference was as bad as the relentless rain for dampening his spirits, but neither could erode his certainty, which remained absolute. Harry’s belief in and longing for the Hallows consumed him so much that he felt isolated from the other two and their obsession with the Horcruxes.

“Obsession?” said Hermione in a low fierce voice, when Harry was careless enough to use the word one evening, after Hermione had told him off for his lack of interest in locating more Horcruxes. “We’re not the one with an obsession, Harry! We’re the ones trying to do what Dumbledore wanted us to do!”

But he was impervious to the veiled criticism. Dumbledore had left the sign of the Hallows for Hermione to decipher, and he had also, Harry remained convinced of it, left the Resurrection Stone hidden in the golden Snitch. Neither can live while the other survives… master of Death… Why didn’t Ron and Hermione understand?

“‘The last enemy shall be destroyed is death,’” Harry quoted calmly.

“I thought it was You-Know-Who we were supposed to be fighting?” Hermione retorted, and Harry gave up on her.

Even the mystery of the silver doe, which the other two insisted on discussing, seemed less important to Harry now, a vaguely interesting sideshow. The only other thing that mattered to him was that his scar had begun to prickle again, although he did all he could to hide this fact from the other two. He sought solitude whenever it happened, but was disappointed by what he saw. The visions he and Voldemort were sharing had changed in quality; they had become blurred, shifting as though they were moving in and out of focus. Harry was just able to make out the indistinct features of an object that looked like a skull, and something like a mountain that was more shadow than substance. Used to images sharp as reality, Harry was disconcerted by the change. He was worried that the connection between himself and Voldemort had been damaged, a connection that he both feared and, whatever he had told Hermione, prized. Somehow Harry connected these unsatisfying, vague images with the destruction of his wand, as if it was the blackthorn wand’s fault that he could no longer see into Voldemort’s mind as well as before.

As the weeks crept on, Harry could not help but notice, even through his new self-absorption, that Ron seemed to be taking charge. Perhaps because he was determined to make up for having walked out on them, perhaps because Harry’s descent into listlessness galvanized his dormant leadership qualities, Ron was the one now encouraging and exhorting the other two into action.

“Three Horcruxes left,” he kept saying. “We need a plan of action, come on! Where haven’t we looked? Let’s go through it again. The orphanage…”

Diagon Alley, Hogwarts, the Riddle House, Borgin and Burkes, Albania, every place that they knew Tom Riddle had ever lived or worked, visited or murdered, Ron and Hermione raked over them again, Harry joining in only to stop Hermione pestering him. He would have been happy to sit alone in silence, trying to read Voldemort’s thoughts, to find out more about the Elder Wand, but Ron insisted on journeying to ever more unlikely places simply, Harry was aware, to keep them moving.