"Hello? Is anyone there? I swear, it's almost as if they didn't want to speak to Professor Snape…"
Hermione had hung up Phineas Nigellus Black's portrait in the living room of their assigned treehouse, rationalising that if the Death Eaters hadn't yet found the Muggle-Born Sanctuary after so long, then it was probably safe to assume its wards were impenetrable enough that a single portrait seeing the interior of their house wouldn't make much of a difference.
"Oi, you there, Weasley boy," Phineas Nigellus called, spotting Ron snoring away the afternoon on the sofa before him. "Wake up at once, I say! You are keeping the honourable headmaster waiting! Do not make me shout!"
The snot bubble hanging from Ron's nostril slowly inflated… then popped, startling him awake. He sat up, looking around blearily, searching for the sound that had woken him up.
"Up here, you dolt."
Ron rubbed his bleary eyes and looked up.
"The good headmaster is rather busy, so I suggest we make this quick," Phineas Nigellus said, his lip curling in distaste. "Call your little friends, would you? You have five minutes."
The problem was that Harry, Hermione and Sirius had gone off to bully the Malfoys into giving them back the Invisibility Cloak, hoping there was a chance Draco might have left it with them before going off and dying at the Dark Lady's hands.
"Wait, wait!" Ron said hurriedly. "The others aren't here, but I can talk!"
"Then I shall deliver Professor Snape's first message," Phineas Nigellus said drily. "He says you mustn't reveal to him the true nature of the Dark Lord's immortality."
Ron frowned. What was that supposed to mean? If Snape didn't know about the Horcruxes, then how in the world was he supposed to help them? Was this just some ploy to gain their trust?
"Okay," Ron said. "Then tell him we need help."
"What kind of help? Do try to be more precise," Phineas Nigellus said with a sigh. "I should like to make as few trips between my portraits as possible. It is a rather long walk, you see."
Ron's racked his brains. Snape didn't want to know about the Horcruxes, but according to Dumbledore's message in the diary, the collaborator did know about the Horcruxes, and Snape knew about the collaborator. He just needed to get them in touch with each other!
"The collaborator!" he blurted out. "We want to meet the collaborator!"
"Very well," Phineas Nigellus sighed.
The former headmaster walked out of his portrait's frame and vanished. Ron waited with bated breath as minutes passed, but after a while, he got hungry and went into the kitchen to grab himself something to snack on.
"There you are," Phineas Nigellus said witheringly as Ron walked beneath him. "Squirrely boy."
Ron froze, his cheeks bulging.
"Itsh Weashley," he mumbled, spitting salted sunflower seeds everywhere.
"I can see that," Phineas Nigellus said in disgust. "In any case, Professor Snape has told me to relay that the collaborator has agreed to meet you… ten minutes from now, at the Lockhart family home. That is all."
Ron's mind spun. He could Disapparate, all right… but Disapparition without a clear image of the destination in mind was rather difficult. Technically, a mental image wasn't even necessary to do it; all one really needed was the three D's… Destination, Determination, Deliberation.
Indeed, the magic of names was one of the deepest and most ancient branches of magic, yet it was also amongst the better understood of all magical disciplines, owing to the extent to which it had been studied.
That being the case, all Ron really needed was the destination's name: the Lockhart family home. In theory, knowing the name alone was enough to Disapparate; domiciles long inhabited by a single family were inextricably intertwined with that name, like the Weasleys and The Burrow, for instance. Without even knowing what it looked like, anyone could Apparate there, so long as they knew the name and were sufficiently determined.
…but the problem was that Disapparition was scary. Normal Disapparition was difficult enough, so to teleport to a place he had never seen, into what might be an ambush… Ron could already feel his determination swirling down the drain.
And now he had lost not one, but two D's, making Disapparition all but impossible.
"I don't suppose we could postpone?" Ron said desperately, looking up at Phineas Nigellus Black's portrait, but the man had already vanished. "Bloody hell…"
Disapparition was blocked within the Muggle-Born sanctuary, so it would take him at least twenty minutes to run to the stadium's outskirts, where the Malfoys had been banished, and where Harry and the others had gone to. By the time he arrived, the mysterious collaborator would have had time to leave twice over already… and that wasn't even counting the time it would take to run back to the Fairy Ring at the stadium's centre, the only way in or out of the sanctuary…
Ron had already caused Harry, Hermione, and Sirius more than enough trouble when they had believed You-Know-Who had captured him. It was time for him to prove that he, too, could carry his weight in this team… or at least, that's what he told himself as he clambered down the rope ladder to the ground.
The Fairy Ring wasn't far from here, and…
"Hermione?" he gasped. Up ahead, two girls were chatting as they wound their way back from the outskirts to the Sanctuary's heart. "Oleandra!"
Along the way to the Malfoys' new house, Hermione had overheard some Muggle-Borns chatting about the newly arrived Muggles' experiments in combining their technology with the Wizarding World's magic, so she had decided to leave retrieving the Invisibility Cloak to the boys and go and see what the Muggles were working on in the changing room that had been turned into a laboratory.
Unfortunately, she had arrived at a bad time and been turned away, and when Oleandra emerged from the neighbouring changing room, she had decided to walk her back to her home in an attempt to wheedle out what she knew of the experiments.
"Hi, Ron!" Hermione said brightly. "We were just…"
"Never mind that!" Ron said breathlessly. "Phineas…! Snape…! We have to go!"