wordlessly at the place where he

wordlessly at the place where he thought Dumbledore's body must lie, however, he saw people beginning to move toward it.

“What're they all lookin’ at?” said Hagrid, as he and Harry approached the castle front, Fang keeping as close as he could to their ankles. “Wha's that lyin’ on

the grass?” Hagrid added sharply, heading now toward the foot of the Astronomy Tower, where a small crowd was congregating. “See it, Harry? Right at the foot of the

tower? Under where the Mark... blimey... yeh don’ think someone got thrown—?”

Hagrid fell silent, the thought apparently too horrible to express aloud. Harry walked alongside him, feeling the aches and pains in his face and his legs where the

various hexes of the last half hour had hit him, though in an oddly detached way, as though somebody near him was suffering them. What was real and inescapable was the

awful pressing feeling in his chest...

He and Hagrid moved, dreamlike, through the murmuring crowd to the very front, where the dumbstruck students and teachers had left a gap.

Harry heard Hagrid's moan of pain and shock, but he did not stop; he walked slowly forward until he reached the place where Dumbledore lay and crouched down beside him.

Harry had known there was no hope from the moment that the full Body-Bind Curse Dumbledore had placed upon him lifted, known that it could have happened only because

its caster was dead, but there was still no preparation for seeing him here, spread-eagled, broken: the greatest wizard Harry had ever, or would ever, meet.

Dumbledore's eyes were closed; but for the strange angle of his arms and legs, he might have been sleeping. Harry reached out, straightened the half-moon spectacles

upon the crooked nose, and wiped a trickle of blood from the mouth with his own sleeve. Then he gazed down at the wise old face and tried to absorb the enormous and

incomprehensible truth: that never again would Dumbledore speak to him, never again could he help...

The crowd murmured behind Harry. After what seemed like a long time, he became aware that he was kneeling upon something hard and looked down.

The locket they had managed to steal so many hours before had fallen out of Dumbledore's pocket. It had opened, perhaps due to the force with which it hit the ground.

And although he could not feel more shock or horror or sadness than he felt already, Harry knew, as he picked it up, that there was something wrong—

He turned the locket over in his hands. This was neither as large as the locket he remembered seeing in the Pensieve, nor were there any markings upon it, no sign of

the ornate S that was supposed to be Slytherin's mark. Moreover, there was nothing inside but for a scrap of folded parchment wedged tightly into the place where a

portrait should have been.

Automatically, without really thinking about what he was doing, Harry pulled out the fragment of parchment, opened it, and read by the light of the many wands that had

now been lit behind him:

To the Dark Lord

I know I will be dead long before you read this but I want you to know that it was I who dicovered your secret. I have stolen the real Horcrux and intend to destroy it

as soon as I can.

I face death in the hope that when you meet your match you will be mortal once more.

R.A.B.

Harry neither knew nor cared what the message meant. Only one thing mattered: this was not a Horcrux. Dumbledore had weakened himself by drinking that terrible potion

for nothing. Harry crumpled the parchment in his hand, and his eyes burned with tears as behind him Fang began to howl.