Головна

She closed her eyes and nodded.

  1. And then, out of nowhere, the pain in his scar peaked. As he clutched his forehead and closed his eyes, a voice screamed inside his head.
  2. Dumbledore closed the casket and placed the goblet carefully on top of it, where it would be clearly visible to everyone in the Hall.
  3. Dumbledore nodded.
  4. Dumbledore nodded. They smiled at each other.
  5. Harry nodded.
  6. Harry peered over the heads in front of him. The portrait seemed to be closed.
  7. He closed his eyes and turned the stone over in his hand three times.

"I had... no idea... He was flattering. He seemed to... understand... to sympathize..."

Yes, Harry thought. Tom Riddle would certainly have understood Helena Ravenclaw's desire to possess fabulous objects to which she had little right.

"Well, you weren't the first person Riddle wormed things out of," Harry muttered. "He could be charming when he wanted..."

So, Voldemort had managed to wheedle the location of the lost diadem out of the Gray Lady. He had traveled to that far-flung forest and retrieved the diadem from its hiding place, perhaps as soon as he left Hogwarts, before he even started work at Borgin and Burkes.

And wouldn't those secluded Albanian woods have seemed an excellent refuge when, so much later, Voldemort and needed a place to lie low, undisturbed, for ten long years?

But the diadem, once it became his precious Horcrux, had not been left in that lowly tree... No, the diadem had been returned secretly to its true home, and Voldemort must have put it there-

"-the night he asked for a job!" said Harry, finishing his thought.

"I beg your pardon?"

"He hid the diadem in the castle, the night he asked Dumbledore to let him teach!" said Harry. Saying it out loud enabled him to make sense of it all. "He must've hidden the diadem on his way up to, or down from, Dumbledore's office! But it was well worth trying to get the job-then he might've got the chance to nick Gryffindor's sword as well-thank you, thanks!"

Harry left her floating there, looking utterly bewildered. As he rounded the corner back into the entrance hall, he checked his watch. It was five minutes until midnight, and though he now knew what the last Horcrux was, he was no closer to discovering where it was...

Generations of students had failed to find the diadem; that suggested that it was not in Ravenclaw Tower-but if not there, where? What hiding place had Tom Riddle discovered inside Hogwarts Castle, that he believed would remain secret forever?

Lost in desperate speculation, Harry turned a corner, but he had taken only a few steps down the new corridor when the window to his left broke open with a deafening, shattering crash. As he leapt aside, a gigantic body flew in through the window and hit the opposite wall.



Harry caught sight of a pearly white figure drifting across the entrance hall below and yelled as loudly as he could over the clamor. | Hagrid stooped down, bestowed upon Harry a cursory and rib-cracking hug, then ran back to the shattered window.

The Ravenclaws were whispering amongst themselves, terrified. Then without warning, there came a series of loud bangs, as though somebody was firing a gun into the door. | Beneath the disbelief and anger, Harry heard a little strain of pride in her voice and affection for Minerva McGonagall gushed up inside him. | And he spat in her face. | Snape pretended not to have heard her. His eyes were still probing the air all about her, and he was moving gradually closer, with an air of hardly noticing what he was doing. | There were heavy footfalls behind them, and a great deal of puffing. Slughorn had just caught up. | They had just reached the door when Slughorn rumbled into speech. | Filch evidently thought Professor McGonagall had taken leave of her senses, but hobbled away, hunch-shouldered, muttering under his breath. | Ginny had been attempting, under cover of the reconciliation, to sneak upstairs too. | There was a smattering of applause. | But he broke off as Kingsley had stepped forward on the raised platform to address those who had remained behind. |

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