Harry had no idea what this meant; Dumbledore was being infuriating. He glared at him, then remembered a much more pressing question than that of their current location.
“The Deathly Hallows,” he said, and he was glad to see that the words wiped the smile from Dumbledore’s face.
“Ah, yes,” he said. He even looked a little worried.
“Well?”
For the first time since Harry had met Dumbledore, he looked less than an old man, much less. He looked fleetingly like a small boy caught in wrongdoing.
“Can you forgive me?” he said. “Can you forgive me for not trusting you? For not telling you? Harry, I only feared that you would fail as I had failed. I only dreaded that you would make my mistakes. I crave your pardon, Harry. I have known, for some time now, that you are the better man.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Harry, startled by Dumbledore’s tone, by the sudden tears in his eyes.
“The Hallows, the Hallows,” murmured Dumbledore. “A desperate man’s dream!”
“But they’re real!”
“Real, and dangerous, and a lure for fools,” said Dumbledore. “And I was such a fool. But you know, don’t you? I have no secrets from you anymore. You know.”
“What do I know?”
Dumbledore turned his whole body to face Harry, and tears still sparkled in the brilliantly blue eyes.
“Master of death, Harry, master of Death! Was I better, ultimately, than Voldemort?”
“Of course you were,” said Harry. “Of course — how can you ask that? You never killed if you could avoid it!”
“True, true,” said Dumbledore, and he was like a child seeking reassurance. “Yet I too sought a way to conquer death, Harry.”
“Not the way he did,” said Harry. After all his anger at Dumbledore, how odd it was to sit here, beneath the high, vaulted ceiling, and defend Dumbledore from himself. “Hallows, not Horcruxes.”
“Hallows,” murmured Dumbledore, “not Horcruxes. Precisely.”
There was a pause. The creature behind them whimpered, but Harry no longer looked around.
“Grindelwald was looking for them too?” he asked.
Dumbledore closed his eyes for a moment and nodded.
“It was the thing, above all, that drew us together,” he said quietly. “Two clever, arrogant boys with a shared obsession. He wanted to come to Godric’s Hollow, as I am sure you have guessed, because of the grave of Ignotus Peverell. He wanted to explore the place the third brother had died.”
“So it’s true?” asked Harry. “All of it? The Peverell brothers —”
“— were the three brothers of the tale,” said Dumbledore, nodding. “Oh yes, I think so. Whether they met Death on a lonely road . . . I think it more likely that the Peverell brothers were simply gifted, dangerous wizards who succeeded in creating those powerful objects. The story of them being Death’s own Hallows seems to me the sort of legend that might have sprung up around such creations.
“The Cloak, as you know now, traveled down through the ages, father to son, mother to daughter, right down to Ignotus’s last living descendant, who was born, as Ignotus was, in the village of Godric’s Hollow.”
Dumbledore smiled at Harry.
“Me?”
“You. You have guessed, I know, why the Cloak was in my possession on the night your parents died. James had showed it to me just a few days previously. It explained much of his undetected wrongdoing at school! I could hardly believe what I was seeing. I asked to borrow it, to examine it. I had long since given up my dream of uniting the Hallows, but I could not resist, could not help taking a closer look. . . . It was a Cloak the likes of which I had never seen, immensely old, perfect in every respect . . . and then your father died, and I had two Hallows at last, all to myself!”
His tone was unbearably bitter.
“The Cloak wouldn’t have helped them survive, though,” Harry said quickly. “Voldemort knew where my mum and dad were. The Cloak couldn’t have made them curse-proof.”
“True,” sighed Dumbledore. “True.”
Harry waited, but Dumbledore did not speak, so he prompted him.
“So you’d given up looking for the Hallows when you saw the Cloak?”
“Oh yes,” said Dumbledore faintly. It seemed that he forced himself to meet Harry’s eyes. “You know what happened. You know. You cannot despise me more than I despise myself.”
“But I don’t despise you —”
“Then you should,” said Dumbledore. He drew a deep breath. “You know the secret of my sister’s ill health, what those Muggles did, what she became. You know how my poor father sought revenge, and paid the price, died in Azkaban. You know how my mother gave up her own life to care for Ariana.
“I resented it, Harry.”
Dumbledore stated it baldly, coldly. He was looking now over the top of Harry’s head, into the distance.
“I was gifted, I was brilliant. I wanted to escape. I wanted to shine. I wanted glory.
“Do not misunderstand me,” he said, and pain crossed the face so that he looked ancient again. “I loved them. I loved my parents, I loved my brother and my sister, but I was selfish, Harry, more selfish than you, who are a remarkably selfless person, could possibly imagine.
“So that, when my mother died, and I was left the responsibility of a damaged sister and a wayward brother, I returned to my village in anger and bitterness. Trapped and wasted, I thought! And then, of course, he came. . . .”
Dumbledore looked directly into Harry’s eyes again.
“Grindelwald. You cannot imagine how his ideas caught me, Harry, inflamed me. Muggles forced into subservience. We wizards triumphant. Grindelwald and I, the glorious young leaders of the revolution.