“What did he want?” Mr. Weasley asked, looking around at Harry, Ron, and Hermione as Mrs. Weasley came hurrying back to them.
“To give us what Dumbledore left us,” said Harry. “They’ve only just released the contents of his will.”
Outside in the garden, over the dinner tables, the three objects Scrimgeour had given them were passed from hand to hand. Everyone exclaimed over the Deluminator and The Tales of Beedle the Bard and lamented the fact that Scrimgeour had refused to pass on the sword, but none of them could offer any suggestion as to why Dumbledore would have left Harry an old Snitch. As Mr. Weasley examined the Deluminator for the third or fourth time, Mrs. Weasley said tentatively, “Harry, dear, everyone’s awfully hungry, we didn’t like to start without you. . . . Shall I serve dinner now?”
They all ate rather hurriedly and then, after a hasty chorus of “Happy Birthday” and much gulping of cake, the party broke up. Hagrid, who was invited to the wedding the following day, but was far too bulky to sleep in the overstretched Burrow, left to set up a tent for himself in a neighboring field.
“Meet us upstairs,” Harry whispered to Hermione, while they helped Mrs. Weasley restore the garden to its normal state. “After everyone’s gone to bed.”
Up in the attic room, Ron examined his Deluminator, and Harry filled Hagrid’s mokeskin purse, not with gold, but with those items he most prized, apparently worthless though some of them were: the Marauder’s Map, the shard of Sirius’s enchanted mirror, and R.A.B.’s locket. He pulled the strings tight and slipped the purse around his neck, then sat holding the old Snitch and watching its wings flutter feebly. At last, Hermione tapped on the door and tiptoed inside.
“Muffliato,” she whispered, waving her wand in the direction of the stairs.
“Thought you didn’t approve of that spell?” said Ron.
“Times change,” said Hermione. “Now, show us that Deluminator.”
Ron obliged at once. Holding it up in front of him, he clicked it. The solitary lamp they had lit went out at once.
“The thing is,” whispered Hermione through the dark, “we could have achieved that with Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder.”
There was a small click, and the ball of light from the lamp flew back to the ceiling and illuminated them all once more.
“Still, it’s cool,” said Ron, a little defensively. “And from what they said, Dumbledore invented it himself!”
“I know, but surely he wouldn’t have singled you out in his will just to help us turn out the lights!”
“D’you think he knew the Ministry would confiscate his will and examine everything he’d left us?” asked Harry.
“Definitely,” said Hermione. “He couldn’t tell us in the will why he was leaving us these things, but that still doesn’t explain . . .”
“. . . why he couldn’t have given us a hint when he was alive?” asked Ron.
“Well, exactly,” said Hermione, now flicking through The Tales of Beedle the Bard. “If these things are important enough to pass on right under the nose of the Ministry, you’d think he’d have let us know why . . . unless he thought it was obvious?”
“Thought wrong, then, didn’t he?” said Ron. “I always said he was mental. Brilliant and everything, but cracked. Leaving Harry an old Snitch — what the hell was that about?”
“I’ve no idea,” said Hermione. “When Scrimgeour made you take it, Harry, I was so sure that something was going to happen!”
“Yeah, well,” said Harry, his pulse quickening as he raised the Snitch in his fingers. “I wasn’t going to try too hard in front of Scrimgeour, was I?”
“What do you mean?” asked Hermione.
“The Snitch I caught in my first ever Quidditch match?” said Harry. “Don’t you remember?”
Hermione looked simply bemused. Ron, however, gasped, pointing frantically from Harry to the Snitch and back again until he found his voice.
“That was the one you nearly swallowed!”
“Exactly,” said Harry, and with his heart beating fast, he pressed his mouth to the Snitch.
It did not open. Frustration and bitter disappointment welled up inside him: He lowered the golden sphere, but then Hermione cried out.
“Writing! There’s writing on it, quick, look!”
He nearly dropped the Snitch in surprise and excitement. Hermione was quite right. Engraved upon the smooth golden surface, where seconds before there had been nothing, were five words written in the thin, slanting handwriting that Harry recognized as Dumbledore’s:
I open at the close.
He had barely read them when the words vanished again.
“‘I open at the close . . .’ What’s that supposed to mean?”
Hermione and Ron shook their heads, looking blank.
“I open at the close . . . at the close . . . I open at the close . . .”
But no matter how often they repeated the words, with many different inflections, they were unable to wring any more meaning from them.
“And the sword,” said Ron finally, when they had at last abandoned their attempts to divine meaning in the Snitch’s inscription. “Why did he want Harry to have the sword?”
“And why couldn’t he just have told me?” Harry said quietly. “It was there, it was right there on the wall of his office during all our talks last year! If he wanted me to have it, why didn’t he just give it to me then?”
He felt as though he were sitting in an examination with a question he ought to have been able to answer in front of him, his brain slow and unresponsive. Was there something he had missed in the long talks with Dumbledore last year? Ought he to know what it all meant? Had Dumbledore expected him to understand?
“And as for this book,” said Hermione, “The Tales of Beedle the Bard . . . I’ve never even heard of them!”
“You’ve never heard of The Tales of Beedle the Bard?” said Ron incredulously. “You’re kidding, right?”
“No, I’m not!” said Hermione in surprise. “Do you know them, then?”