J. Rowling - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Hermione winced at the forced toughness in his voice.

“No,” she said reprovingly, folding up ihe newspaper. “They’re still looking for Snape, but no sign…”

“Of course there isn’t,” said Harry, who became angry every lime this subject cropped up. “They won’t find Snape till they find Voldemort, and seeing as they’ve never managed to do that in all this time…”

“I’m going to go to bed,” yawned Ginny. “I haven’t been sleeping that well since… well… I could do with some sleep.”

She kissed Harry (Ron looked away pointedly), waved al the other two and departed for the girls’ dormitories. The moment the door had closed behind her, Hermione leaned forwards towards Harry with a most Hermione-ish look on her face.

“Harry, I found something out this morning, in the library…”

“R.A.B.?” said Harry, sitting up straight.

He did not feel the way he had so often felt before, excited, curious, burning to get to the bottom of a mystery; he simply knew that the task of discovering the truth about the real Horcrux had to be completed before he could move a little further along the dark and winding path stretching ahead of him, the path that he and Dumbledore had set out upon together, and which he now knew he would have to journey alone. There might still be as many as four Horcruxes out there somewhere and each would need to be found and eliminated before there was even a possibility that Voldemort could be killed. He kept reciting their names to himself, as though by listing them he could bring them within reach: “the locket… the cup… the snake… something of Gryffindor’s or Ravenclaw’s… the locket… the cup… the snake… something of Gryffindor’s or Ravenclaw’s…”

This mantra seemed to pulse through Harry’s mind as he fell asleep at night, and his dreams were thick with cups, lockets and mysterious objects that he could not quite reach, though Dumbledore helpfully offered Harry a rope ladder that turned to snakes the moment he began to climb…

He had shown Hermione the note inside the locket the morning after Dumbledore’s death, and although she had not immediately recognised the initials as belonging to some obscure wizard about whom she had been reading, she had since been rushing off to the library a little more often than was strictly necessary for somebody who had no homework to do.

“No,” she said sadly, “I’ve been trying, Harry, but I haven’t found anything… there are a couple of reasonably well-known wizards with those initials—Rosalind Antigone Bungs… Rupert “Axebanger” Brookstanton… but they don’t seem to fit at all. Judging by that note, the person who stole the Horcrux knew Voldemort, and I can’t find a shred of evidence that Bungs or Axebanger ever had anything to do with him… no, actually, it’s about… well, Snape.”

She looked nervous even saying the name again.

“What about him?” asked Harry heavily, slumping back in his chair.

“Well, it’s just that I was sort of right about the Half-Blood Prince business,” she said tentatively.

“D’you have to rub it in, Hermione? How d’you think I feel about that now?”

“No—no—Harry, I didn’t mean that!” she said hastily, looking around to check that they were not being overheard. “It’s just that I was right about Eileen Prince once owning the book. You see… she was Snape’s mother!”

“I thought she wasn’t much of a looker,” said Ron.

Hermione ignored him.

“I was going through ihe rest of the old Prophets and there was a tiny announcement about Eileen Prince marrying a man called Tobias Snape, and then later an announcement saying that she’d given birth to a—”

“—murderer,” spat Harry.

“Well… yes,” said Hermione. “So… I was sort of right. Snape must have been proud of being “half a Prince”, you see? Tobias Snape was a Muggle from what it said in the Prophet—”

“Yeah, that fits,” said Harry. “He’d play up the pure-blood side so he could get in with Lucius Malfoy and the rest of them… he’s just like Voldemort. Pure-blood mother, Muggle father… ashamed of his parentage, trying to make himself feared using the Dark Arts, gave himself an impressive new name— Lord Voldemort—the Half-Blood Prince —how could Dumbledore have missed—?”

He broke off, looking out of the window. He could not stop himself dwelling upon Dumbledore’s inexcusable trust in Snape… but as Hermione had just inadvertently reminded him, he, Harry, had been taken in just the same… in spite of the increasing nastiness of those scribbled spells, he had refused to believe ill of the boy who had been so clever, who had helped him so much…

Helped him… it was an almost unendurable thought, now…

“I still don’t get why he didn’t turn you in for using that book,” said Ron. “He must’ve known where you were getting it ali from.”

“He knew,” said Harry bitterly. “He knew when I used Sec t umsempra . He didn’t really need Legilimency… he might even have known before then, with Slughorn talking about how brilliant I was at Potions… shouldn’t have left his old book in the bottom of that cupboard, should he?”

“But why didn’t he turn you in?”

“I don’t think he wanted to associate himself with that book,” said Hermione. “I don’t think Dumbledore would have liked it very much if he’d known. And even if Snape pretended it hadn’t been his, Slughorn would have recognised his writing at once. Anyway, the book was left in Snape’s old classroom, and I’ll bet Dumbledore knew his mother was called ‘Prince.’”

“I should’ve shown the book to Dumbledore,” said Harry. “All that time he was showing me how Voldemort was evil even when he was at school, and I had proof Snape was, too—”

“‘Evil’ is a strong word,” said Hermione quietly.

“You were the one who kept telling me the book was dangerous!”

“I’m trying to say, Harry, that you’re pulling too much blame on yourself. I thought the Prince seemed to have a nasty sense of humour, but I would never have guessed he was a potential killer…”

“None of us could’ve guessed Snape would… you know,” said Ron.

Silence fell between them, each of them lost in their own thoughts, but Harry was sure that they, like him, were thinking about the following morning, when Dumbledore’s body would be laid to rest. Harry had never attended a funeral before; there had been no body to bury when Sirius had died. He did not know what to expect and was a little worried about what he might see, about how he would feel. He wondered whether Dumbledore’s death would be more real to him once the funeral was over. Though he had moments when the horrible fact of it threatened to overwhelm him, there were blank stretches of numbness where, despite the fact that nobody was talking about anything else in the whole castle, he still found it difficult to believe that Dumbledore had really gone. Admittedly he had not, as he had with Sirius, looked desperately for some kind of loophole, some way that Dumbledore would come back… he felt in his pocket for the cold chain of the fake Horcrux, which he now carried with him everywhere, not as a talisman, but as a reminder of what it had cost and what remained still to do.

Harry rose early to pack the next day; the Hogwarts Express would be leaving an hour after the funeral. Downstairs he found the mood in the Great Hall subdued. Everybody was wearing their dress robes and no one seemed very hungry. Professor McGonagall had left the thronelike chair in the middle of the staff table empty. Hagrid’s chair was deserted too: Harry thought thai perhaps he had not been able to face breakfast; but Snape’s place had been unceremoniously filled by Rufus Scrimgeour. Harry avoided his yellowish eyes as they scanned the Hall; Harry had the uncomfortable feeling that Scrimgeour was looking for him. Among Scrimgeour’s entourage Harry spotted the red hair and horn-rimmed glasses of Percy Weasley. Ron gave no sign that he was aware of Percy, apart from stabbing pieces of kipper with unwonted venom.