The Girl Who Hid | ✓

|116| Distractions

Per usual, I knew when Harry had visions. Not only was he in pain, but I could also feel the pain of the scar on my collarbone. Harry told me, Hermione, and Ron that he saw a vision of Voldemort questioning Ollivander, the wandmaker, about the wands Harry and I have.

But besides that, the shock of losing Mad-Eye hung over the house in the days that followed; I kept expecting to see him stumping in through the back door like the other Order members, who passed in and out to relay news. I felt that nothing but action would assuage my feelings of guilt and grief and that we ought to set out on our mission to find and destroy Horcruxes as soon as possible.

"Well, you two can't do anything about the" — Ron mouthed the word Horcruxes — "till you're seventeen. You've still got the Trace on you. And we can plan here as well as anywhere, can't we? Or," he dropped his voice to a whisper, "d'you reckon you already know where the You-Know-Whats are?"

"No," Harry admitted.

"I think Hermione's been doing a bit of research," I said. "She said she was saving it for when we were all together."

We were currently sitting at the breakfast table; Mr. Weasley and Bill had just left for work. Mrs. Weasley had gone upstairs to wake Hermione and Ginny, I couldn't sleep, so I had heard Harry and Ron creeping down the stairs and followed them.

"The Trace'll break on the thirty-first," said Harry. "That means we only need to stay here four days. Then we can —"

"Five days," Ron corrected him firmly. "We've got to stay for the wedding. They'll kill us if we miss it."

I understood "they" to mean Fleur and Mrs. Weasley.

"It's one extra day," said Ron, when Harry looked mutinous.

"Don't they realize how important —?"

" 'Course they don't," I said. "They haven't got a clue. And now you mention it, I wanted to talk to you about that. Mrs. Weasley has been trying to get it out of Hermione, Ron, and me. What we're off to do. She'll try you next, so brace yourself. Mr. Weasley and Lupin've both asked as well, but when we said Dumbledore told us not to tell anyone except them, they dropped it. Not Mrs. Weasley, though. She's determined."

My prediction came true within hours. Shortly before lunch, Mrs. Weasley detached Harry from us by asking him to help identify a lone man's sock that she thought might have come out of his rucksack.

From that moment on, Mrs. Weasley kept Harry, Ron, Hermione, and me so busy with preparations for the wedding that we hardly had any time to think. The kindest explanation of this behavior would have been that Mrs. Weasley wanted to distract us all from thoughts of Mad-Eye and the terrors of their recent journey. After two days of nonstop cutlery cleaning, of color-matching favors, ribbons, and flowers, of de-gnoming the garden and helping Mrs. Weasley cook vast batches of canapés, however, I started to suspect her of a different motive. All the jobs she handed out seemed to keep me, Harry, Ron, and Hermione away from one another; I had not had a chance to speak to them alone since the first night, when Harry had told us about Voldemort torturing Ollivander.

"I think Mum thinks that if she can stop the four of you getting together and planning, she'll be able to delay you leaving," Ginny told me in an undertone, as we laid the table for dinner on the third night since the journey.

"And then what does she think's going to happen?" I muttered. "Someone else might kill off Voldemort while she's holding us here making vol-au-vents?"

"So it's true?" she said, her face whitening. "That's really what you're trying to do?"

"I— not— I was joking," I said evasively.

I could tell how terrified Ginny had been. Throughout our time at Hogwarts together and my stay at the Burrow, we had gotten extremely close. She was the person I would miss the most, I loved her like a little sister and I knew she worried for me very much. Both of us jumped as the door opened, and Mr. Weasley, Kingsley, and Bill walked in.