"Great," said Ron irritably, "and now we've...
"Great," said Ron irritably, "and now we've sorted that out, can we please get some food?"
"Fine, but we'll go somewhere else to find it," said Hermione with half a glance at Harry"There's no point staying where we know dementors are swooping around
In the end they settled down for the night in a far flung field belonging to a lonely farm, from which they had managed to obtain eggs and bread
"It's not stealing, is it?" asked Hermione in a troubled voice, as they devoured scrambled eggs on toast"Not if I left some money under the chicken coo?"
Ron rolled his eyes and said, with his cheeks bulging, "Er-my-nee, 'oo worry 'oo much'Elax!"
And, indeed, it was much easier to relax when they were comfortably well fedThe argument about the dementors was forgotten in laughter that night, and Harry felt cheerful, even hopeful, as he took the first of the three night watches
This was their first encounter with the fact that a full stomach meant good spirits, an empty one, bickering and gloomHarry was least surprised by this, because be had suffered periods of near starvation at the Dursleys'Hermione bore up reasonably well on those nights when they managed to scavenge nothing but berries or stale biscuits, her temper chanel quilted bags perhaps a little shorter than usual and her silences dourRon, however, had always been used to three delicious meals a day, courtesy of his mother or of the Hogwarts house-elves, and hunger made him both unreasonable and irascibleWhenever lack of food coincided with Ron's turn to wear the Horcrux, he became downright unpleasant
"So where next?" was his constant refrainHe did not seem to have any ideas himself, but expected Harry and Hermione to come up with plans while he sat and brooded over the low food suppliesAccordingly Harry and Hermione spent fruitless hours trying to decide where they might find the other Horcruxes, and how to destroy the one they already got, their conversations becoming increasingly repetitive as they got no new information
As Dumbledore had told Harry that be believed Voldemort had hidden the Horcruxes in places important to him, they kept reciting, in a sort of dreary litany, those locations they knew that Voldemort had lived or visitedThe orphanage where he had been born and raised: Hogwarts, where he had been educated; Borgin and Burks, where he had worked after completing school; then Albania, where he had spent his years of exile: These formed the basis of their men's omega watch speculations
"Yeah, let's go to AlbaniaShouldn't take more than an afternoon to search an entire country," said Ron sarcastically
"There can't be anything thereHe'd already made five of his Horcruxes before he went into exile, and Dumbledore was certain the snake is the sixth," said Hermione"We know the snake's not in Albania, it's usually with Vol\a151"
"Didn't I ask you to stop say that?"
"Fine! The snake is usually with You-Know-Who\a151happy?"
"Not particularly
"I can't see him hiding anything at Borgin and Burkes said Harry, who had made this point many times before, but said it again simply to break the nasty silence"Borgin and Burke were experts at Dark objects, they would've recognized a Horcrux straightaway
Ron yawned pointedlyRepressing a strong urge to throw something at him, Harry plowed on, "I still reckon he might have hidden something at Hogwarts
"But Dumbledore would have found it, Harry!"
Harry repeated the argument he kept bringing out in favor of this theory
"Dumbledore said in front of me that he never assumed he knew all of Hogwart's secretsI'm telling you, if there was one place Vol\a151"
"Oi!"
"YOU-KNOW-WHO, then!" Harry shouted, goaded past endurance"If there was one place that was really important dolce and gabbana knock off to You-Know-Who, it was Hogwarts!"
"Oh, come on," scoffed Ron"His school?"
"Yeah, his school! It was his first real home, the place that meant he was special: it meant everything to him, and even after he left\a151"
"This is You-Know-Who we're talking about, right? Not you?" inquired RonHe was tugging at the chain of the Horcrux around his neck; Harry was visited by a desire to seize it and throttle him
"You told us that You-Know-Who asked Dumbledore to give him a job after he left," said Hermione
"That's right," said Harry
"And Dumbledore thought he only wanted to come back to try and find something, probably another founder's object, to make into another Horcrux?"
"Yeah," said Harry
"But he didn't get the job, did he?" said Hermione"So he never got the chance to find a founder's object there and hide it in the school!"
"Okay, then," said Harry, defeated
Without any other leads, they traveled into London and, hidden beneath the Invisibility Cloak, search for the orphanage in which Voldemort had been raisedHermione stole into a library and discovered from their records that the place had been demolished many years beforeThey visited its site and found a tower block of offices
"We could try digging in to dolce and gabbana handbag foundations?" Hermione suggested halfheartedly
"He wouldn't have hidden a Horcrux here," Harry saidHe had known it all alongThe orphanage had been the place Voldemort had been determined to escape; he would never have hidden a part of his soul thereDumbledore had shown Harry that Voldemort sought grandeur or mystique in his hiding places; this dismal gray corner of London was as far removed as you could imagine from Hogwarts of the Ministry or a building like Gringotts, the Wizarding banks, with its gilded doors and marble floors
Even without any new idea, they continued to move through the countryside, pitching the tent in a different place each night for securityEvery morning they made sure that they had removed all clues to their presence, then set off to find another lonely
and secluded spot, traveling by Apparition to more woods, to the shadowy crevices of cliffs, to purple moors, gorse-covered mountainsides, and once a sheltered and pebbly coveEvery twelve hours or so they passed the Horcrux between them as though they were playing some perverse, slow-motion game of pass-the-parcel, where they dreaded the music stopping because the reward was twelve hours of increased fear and anxiety
Harry's scare kept knock off chanel prickl