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 visited. The 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 speculations.

"Yeah, let's go to Albania. Shouldn't take more than an afternoon to search an

entire country," said Ron sarcastically.

"There can't be anything there. He'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—"

"Didn't I ask you to stop say that?"

"Fine! The snake is usually with You-Know-Who—happy?"

"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 pointedly. Repressing a strong urge to throw something at him,

Harry plowed on, "I still reckon he might have hidden something at Hogwarts."

Hermione sighed.

"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

secrets. I'm telling you, if there was one place Vol—"

"Oi!"

"YOU-KNOW-WHO, then!" Harry shouted, goaded past endurance. "If there was

one place that was really important 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—"

"This is You-Know-Who we're talking about, right? Not you?" inquired Ron. He

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. “Forget Hogwarts.”

Without any other leads, they traveled into London and, hidden beneath the

Invisibility Cloak, search for the orphanage in which Voldemort had been raised.

Hermione stole into a library and discovered from their records that the place had been

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 822