The Girl Who Hid | ✓

|128| Mum & Dad

As the weeks dragged on, the weather grew colder and colder. We did not dare remain in any one area too long, so rather than staying in the south of England, where a hard ground frost was the worst of our worries, we continued to meander up and down the country, braving a mountainside, where sleet pounded the tent; a wide, flat marsh, where the tent was flooded with chill water; a tiny island in the middle of a Scottish loch, where snow half-buried the tent in the night.

We had already spotted Christmas trees twinkling from several sitting room windows before there came an evening when Harry resolved to suggest, again, what seemed to him the only unexplored avenue left to us. We had just eaten an unusually good meal: I had been to a supermarket under the Invisibility Cloak (scrupulously dropping the money into an open till as Hermione instructed), and Harry thought that we might be more persuadable than usual on a stomach full of spaghetti Bolognese and tinned pears.

Hermione and I were reading The Tales of Beedle the Bard along with Spellman's Syllabary, trying to figure out any hidden codes when Harry interrupted us.

"Hm?" I said, barely looking up from the children's book.

Harry cleared his throat and from the corner of my eye, I could see him awkwardly scratching his neck.

"I've been thinking —"

"Harry, could you help us with something?" Hermione spoke over him. My jaw slightly dropped a little at Hermione's disinterest. "Come look at this symbol," she pointed to the triangular eye with its pupil crossed with a vertical line.

"I never took Ancient Runes, Hermione."

"I know that, but it isn't a rune and it's not in the syllabary, either," Hermione said. "All along I thought it was a picture of an eye, but I don't think it is! It's been inked in, look, somebody's drawn it there, it isn't really part of the book. Think, have you ever seen it before?"

"No... No, wait a moment." Harry looked closer. "Isn't it the same symbol Luna's dad was wearing round his neck?"

"Well, that's what I thought too!" I said.

"Then it's Grindelwald's mark."

We stared at him, openmouthed.

"What?" we said.

"Krum told me..."

"Grindelwald's mark?"

Hermione looked from me to Harry to the weird symbol and back again. "I've never heard that Grindelwald had a mark. There's no mention of it in anything I've ever read about him."

"Well, like I say, Krum reckoned that symbol was carved on a wall at Durmstrang, and Grindelwald put it there."

"That's very odd," I looked up from the books. "If it's a symbol of Dark Magic, what's it doing in a book of children's stories?"

"Yeah, it is weird," said Harry. "And you'd think Scrimgeour would have recognized it. He was Minister, he ought to have been expert on Dark stuff."

"I know," Hermione said. "Perhaps he thought it was an eye, just like I did. All the other stories have little pictures over the titles."

Grabbing Spellman's Syllabary, I looked through all of the different triangles and eyes I could find, but nothing.

"Maisey? Hermione?"

Again, I looked up from the book to see Harry looking at us with another warry look.

"I've been thinking. I- I want to go to Godric's Hollow."

"Yes," Hermione said. "Yes, I've been wondering that too. I really think we'll have to."

"Did you hear me right?" he asked.