- CHAPTER FIFTEEN -
The Badger's Den

With the knowledge that someone else was trying to reach the items before them, they redoubled their efforts to solve the Hufflepuff clue. Just when he could have used the extra help, Harry had become reluctant to ask anyone else to join them in their puzzling over it. There were people he trusted - Ginny, and Neville, and most of the rest of the DA - but the more people that knew, the more chance that their enemy would overhear and find out who was working against him. If Voldemort's agent found out that it was Harry who had beaten him to the first clue, then they might very well try to break into his dorm and search for the Gryffindor shield.

Come the second week of February, when the talk of almost everyone else in the school had turned to Valentine's Day, Harry and Ron were still sitting up late going over and over the rhyme. "Hard work will end what plot begins, and dig the secret out. Walk from the home of golden wins, but not quite in a shout," Harry recited. "Hard work will end what plot begins, and dig the secret out. Walk from the gome of holden wins, but not sh- Okay, I think I'm going to bed."

Ron was staring at him, a sugar quill dangling forgotten from his lips. "Harry! You're a genius!"

"I... am?" he said blankly.

"You've got it!" he exclaimed excitedly.

"Got what? Dyslexia?"

"Don't you see? Not quite in a shout! It's a word puzzle, like before with the 'shh, yield'. The letters are jumbled up. Not quite shout is south!"

Harry sat openmouthed for a long moment. Then he closed it with a snap. "Ron?"

"What?"

"I hate to tell you this, but I think Hermione is rubbing off on you."

Ron took that in for a beat. "Don't even joke about it."

Harry ran upstairs for his Invisibility Cloak, and they charged off in the direction of the trophy room.

"We should wait for Hermione, really," Ron huffed.

"We can't," said Harry reluctantly. "We can't waste any time, and we can't get into the girl's dorm to wake her up."

"I still don't see why they have alarms to keep us out, and yet they can wander in and out of our dorm any time they want," Ron grumbled resentfully.

"They obviously think we're less trustworthy than the girls."

"Huh. We're the ones who've had an Invisibility Cloak for five years and never even once tried to sneak into the girls' bathrooms."

"Quite right."

"And we still wouldn't, even if we actually knew where they were."

"Exactly."

In their eagerness to get to the trophy room, they very nearly ran straight into Filch. Apparently there was a detention going on; Ron sympathised with the poor sods forced to polish the awards by hand, until he realised who they were.

"That's Ferus, isn't it?" A self-righteous voice was complaining loudly that they shouldn't be here, because 'that greasy little Ravenclaw swot' was behind it all.

Harry smirked to himself. Good on you, Tiberius. It was good to know the Slytherin bullies' earlier victim wasn't taking things lying down - and was apparently smart enough to get out of a shared punishment, too.

"Serves them right. Tossers," Ron said, with great satisfaction. "I reckon you're right, you know, Harry. Ferus is such a slimy git, he could definitely be You-Know-Who's man on the inside. Did you know, Ginny says he's so stuck up, he won't even sit with the other Slytherins? Imagine anybody being so anti-Muggle they think Malfoy's too nice."

"We'd better get started before Filch catches us," Harry said. He used the Four-Point Spell to find south. "Have you got the rest of the clue?"

"By now I could recite it in my sleep, mate." Ron withdrew the rumpled page from his pocket anyway. "'The three of nines is where it ends' - that's the next bit. Any idea?"

"None. Let's just go south."

They headed down the passageway until they came to a dead end. There was a suit of armour in an alcove, but no amount of poking and prodding would get it to do anything.

"We must have overshot," Harry groaned.

Ron was busy examining the floor tiles. "Hey, look at these, Harry. It's a repeating pattern - every half dozen tiles, one of them's slightly set into the ground."

"You think it means something?"

He shrugged. "It's the only thing I can find that we could count."

They hastened back to the trophy room, while Harry mentally revised his nine-times table. He supposed he should be grateful to his junior school that they were so insistent on everybody learning them by heart instead of over-relying on calculators. Hogwarts didn't set aside time to teach any of the Muggle core subjects, but they marked for spelling and grammar and expected you to be able to do the maths in the exams, so he supposed primary schooling in the wizarding world must cover the same sort of basics.

They counted out twenty-seven of the inset tiles, and sure enough found there was a turn-off in the vicinity. Unfortunately, there were actually two, in opposite directions. "Which way?" asked Ron in a hushed whisper. They'd taken off the Cloak for ease of movement, which meant they had to be extra careful not to alert Filch to their presence.

"The next line is 'of sinister beware'." They eyed the two possible passages.

"The right one's got a gargoyle over it," Ron said doubtfully.

Harry shrugged. "Left, then?"

"I suppose."

They followed the left-hand passage. Ron had only taken about a dozen steps when he gave a sudden cry, and disappeared into the ground. Harry made a desperate lunge for him, and managed to grab his arm. Ron hung for a moment, suspended by Harry's hand and a fingertip grip, over what seemed to be a bottomless pit.

"Ron?" he said, after a second.

"Mm-hmm?" Ron answered mildly, sounding rather disconnected.

"I've just remembered."

"What?"

"You know the word 'sinister'?"

"Yes?"

"It used to be another word for 'left'."

"Ah."

"Uh-huh."

There was a slight pause. "Pull me up?" Ron suggested mildly.

"Right."

With a lot of tugging and a certain amount of swearing, Harry managed to rescue his friend from the pit. They both sat on the edge for a moment, trying to recover their breath.

"Next time we do this - no matter how urgent it is... let's bring Hermione," said Ron, with feeling.

They retraced their steps, and followed the other passage - rather more warily, this time. Harry was becoming increasingly lost. They were only a short distance away from the trophy room, and yet he couldn't remember ever seeing these corridors before. And how had no one fallen into that pit before in all this time? He wondered if this part of the castle was new... or rather, perhaps, old. Perhaps these passages had been sealed off or hidden for years, and had suddenly reappeared thanks to the Curse of Durand? In Hogwarts, anything could happen.

"'Look for the tree that never bends, and does not show the air'," Ron mumbled softly to himself as they walked. Harry looked around. The windows here were thin slits, and it was dark, but he could still see trees outside. None of them were immobile. Maybe they were looking for a statue?

"I don't see any unbending trees, Harry," Ron complained.

"Me neither."

Maybe they really should have waited until they could bring Hermione.

The passage came to a dead end, and Harry stared around helplessly. There was nothing here that even remotely resembled a tree, except for the ones outside. He glanced up at the ceiling, and saw nothing there but cracked and yellowing paint. Or was it supposed to look like that? When you were going by the wizarding world's version of good taste, absolutely anything was possible.

Stop admiring the decor, he berated himself, irritated. You're not going to find the answer written on the walls.

"Harry?" Ron said suddenly.

"Yeah?"

"Look at that wall behind you."

Harry turned to faced the end wall of the passageway. It was covered in a puzzlingly regular pattern of dark lines; he stepped closer, and realised that he was looking at an enormous genealogy chart. He mentally shaped the words, and blinked.

"A family tree?" he said incredulously.

"Oh, it gets worse," said Ron grimly. "I think 'does not show the air' is supposed to be a pun on 'heir'."

Harry digested that. "Wow."

"I know."

"What we're dealing with here is a sick, sick mind."

"Yeah." There was a rustle as Ron consulted his copy of the poem. "Okay. 'Observe the line'... 'press upon a noble soul'... I think what we have to do is trace the family line all the way down, and press the name of the person who's the actual heir."

"All right - give me a boost up, would you?" The family tree started right up at the top of the wall, well above both their heads. With some awkward fumbling he managed to help Ron support his feet so he could examine the top line. He supposed there wasn't much call for physically boosting other people in the wizarding world.

"Who's at the top?" Ron asked, arms beginning to quake a little with the effort of supporting him.

"I don't know, it's- Damn. We need to go right a bit. Can you?"

"Not easily!" They lurched a few steps to the side, and Harry reexamined the wall.

"Oh, wow! Hey! This is Helga Hufflepuff's family tree," he realised.

"We could have done with one of those for Slytherin in the second year," Ron observed, grunting a little with effort.

"Sorry, Ron, I'll get down in a minute." He was already trying to trace the line of succession through the tree. "The first child is the heir in wizard law, right, regardless of whether it's a boy or a girl?"

"Of course!" Ron agreed blankly, as if clueless that there could be any other way of deciding things. It was funny, Harry mused, how the wizard world could be so far ahead of the Muggles in some ways, and yet absolutely centuries behind in others.

"All right, I've tracked it down a bit. I think you can let go now." He kept his finger on the appropriate name as Ron gratefully lowered him down to the ground. "Okay, this is her great-grandson - oh, no, he didn't have any kids, so I guess it goes back up to the sister... And then her son... Hey, what does the dotted line mean?"

"Hmm? Oh. That means an illegitimate child," Ron explained, taking a look.

"So they'd be passed over for the heir?"

"Yeah. And the funny zigzags are Squibs. A lot of genealogies don't even show those."

There was a period of silence while Harry gradually traced the line straight down to near the floor.

"All right," he said finally. "So, by my estimation, the heir has to be this guy Algar Horkenthwip- Hang on." A thought suddenly struck him.

"Did you miss someone?"

"I'm just thinking." Harry was remembering Helga Hufflepuff's verse in the Sorting song. "This is Hufflepuff, remember? The witch who refused to reject absolutely anybody from the school, and thought things like loyalty were much more important than personality based stuff like how brave you are or whether you're pureblood."

"Yeah - so?" Ron frowned at him.

"So would she really cut off a family line just because they were illegitimate, or even for being Squibs? If Helga Hufflepuff was really that fair, then she'd surely make anybody her heir, no matter what their family circumstances."

Ron looked uncertain. "I don't know, Harry..."

"I'm going back up to that great-great-grandson." He traced the line down again, and this time reached a different conclusion. "Amalthea Branstone."

Ron gripped his arm. "What if you're wrong, Harry? Hufflepuff might have been fair, but an heir is a legal sort of thing. What if it is Horkenthwip?"

Harry bit his lip. "I think it's Branstone," he insisted.

"What if it's not?"

"I think it is," he said stubbornly.

Ron edged backwards. "Okay, fine. But you can stand over the pit this time."

"All right." Harry tensed up for a moment, then knelt down and pointed his wand-

"Wait!" Ron hustled over to kneel down beside him. He gave Harry a slightly sheepish grin. "Just in case you need someone to pull you out of the pit," he explained hastily.

Harry smiled back. "Okay. Thanks, Ron."

They both reached forward together, and prodded the name of Amalthea Branstone with their wands. There was a long, still silence... And then the floor began to peel away from underneath them.

Harry's heart lurched, but then he realised that the stones were melting away to reveal a sloping passageway, not a pit. He and Ron exchanged a glance, and cautiously began to descend. It was dark, but not dank and unpleasant like the route to the Chamber of Secrets, or even the Slytherin common room. This was a warm, dry, earthy darkness; not precisely welcoming, exactly, but... lived-in, like an animal's den. He hoped Helga Hufflepuff hadn't left any creatures of her own to keep Salazar's basilisk company.

Ron edged closer to him. "I'm not sure we should be down here, Harry."

Harry knew what he meant. While Gryffindor's study had exuded an instant aura of openness and welcome, this place felt... He didn't think it was hostile to them, really, but there was a definite sense that they were intruding. He stopped walking.

"Hello?" he said cautiously.

Ron gripped his arm. "Are you completely nuts?" he hissed. "What if something answers?"

Fortunately, nothing did. But Harry was sure his words were being weighed and taken in.

"Hello," he repeated. "We're Gryffindors. We don't mean to intrude. We came to ask for your help. The..." He wasn't sure whether to mention the Curse of Durand, or whether the listening darkness would even know what that meant. "The school is in danger, and we need the help of all the houses to protect it. Gryffindors have always counted Hufflepuffs as loyal friends; will you help us?"

There was a change in the tenor of the silence - then, abruptly, the light at the tip of both of their wands went out. Ron seized him again, in a death grip. Harry stood very still, hardly daring to breathe.

Something alarmingly large snuffled in the darkness ahead of them. Harry tried not to yelp as a huge, warm snout nudged up against his leg. Hot, surprisingly pleasant smelling breath brushed over him as he was thoroughly sniffed over. Next to him, Ron trembled but stood firm as he was given the same treatment. Then the creature withdrew.

After a moment, there was a small, faint plink.

Harry forced his jellied muscles to move again, and raised his wand. "Lumos!"

A few feet ahead of them in the tunnel was a tiny stone model of a badger, small enough to comfortably hold in the palm of his hand. It blinked up at the pair of them in a fairly friendly manner.

"Is that...?" Ron began.

"I think so." Harry knelt down very carefully, and held out his hand towards the badger. It stepped into it quite happily, and he found when he raised it that it felt uncommonly heavy for such a seemingly insubstantial thing. "Thank you for helping us," he said for good measure.

As soon as they reemerged from the tunnel it sealed up behind them, and unlike Gryffindor's study, Harry suspected that this one would not open for them again if they returned. Unless, perhaps, they brought a Hufflepuff.

He glanced across at his best friend. "Well, that's two down."

"Yeah. Piece of cake," said Ron, still trembling slightly.