When he looked at the others, he began to worry about Harry. His friend was walking along, his head held low, as though he were one of the zombies they had learned of from Professor Lupin, in their Defense Against the Dark Arts classes in their third year at Hogwarts. All of them looked bad, but Harry looked the worst of all. Looking up for a minute, his eyes met Ron’s, and Ron shuddered; there seemed to be no intelligence there, no life.

When they paused for a moment, Ron went over to Harry and took his pack off his back, opening it up. "Let’s divide this stuff up among ourselves, Draco, Hermione. I think Harry’s in a bad way."

Draco seemed to come back to himself, coming out of the fog he’d been in. "Not a bad idea, Weasel," he commented with a trace of his old sarcastic style. "Here, Harry, let’s have a look at you." Harry submitted, unresisting, to Draco’s examination, turning his head this way and that as Draco peered at him. Draco’s brow furrowed in worry. "Harry---Harry, are you all right? Can you hear me?"

At this, Harry seemed to remember where he was; all of a sudden he was more like his old self than he had been. "Ron," he whispered, his voice sounding raw and unused. "Draco---Hermione." He shook his head, and took off his glasses to wipe them with a rag from his pockets. "How long---how long have we been marching?" He looked around himself as though he were just waking up.

"Quite a few hours, Harry," said Hermione. "I don’t think we’re too far from Minas Morgul, but you looked like you were having trouble. Ron got us to stop. We’re going to take your pack for a while."

"Thanks, Hermione. This…thing…I’m carrying feels heavier and heavier. For quite a while, I didn’t even know where I was; I was staring into the wheel of fire again." Draco raised an eyebrow, and looked quite worried.

"Er, Harry---I’ve been wondering whether I should bring this up, but it seems to me that you’ve been changing. Are you sure that you’re still in command of yourself?" Ron looked at Draco in some surprise, as Draco went on: "No offense, but you’ve been putting me in mind of my dad, more and more. The way you treat Gollum, for instance."

"And what’s wrong with the way I treat him, Draco Malfoy?" snarled Harry. He straightened, giving Draco a piercing green-eyed stare. "He’s sworn to serve me, and if this job requires that I allow him to do it, I will, do you hear me?"

Ron wouldn’t have been much more surprised to see Professor Dumbledore kiss Professor McGonagall. This didn’t sound a bit like the Harry Potter he’d known for a long time. Draco looked at Harry, his eyes wide, and Hermione turned pale, exchanging a quick glance with Ron. We have got to have a long talk about Harry, and soon! thought Ron.

Draco was worried, but not cowed by Harry’s anger. "If you want to know, Harry, you’re changing, and I don’t like the way you’re changing. Cast your mind back to Hogwarts---remember Hogwarts? Dobby did a lot worse things to you, back at the beginning of your second year at school, but I’d have been shocked to see you treating him like dirt!"

Harry sneered at Draco. "Oh? Says the pot to the kettle! Who was it shook Gollum silly for speaking disrespectfully of Faramir and his men?"

Draco smiled his old, sarcastic smile. "Me. Tell me, Harry Potter---do you want to be like me?" His smile grew broader, and more mirthless. "You were nearly sorted into Slytherin, you know. Have you been getting---ambitious lately?"

Harry’s face twisted into a mirthless grin very like Draco’s. "Draco Malfoy, until you’ve borne this---this Hell-forged burden---that I bear, you don’t know the meaning of the word ‘ambition,’ and you’d best pray that you never find out! I see the wheel of fire before me, if I’m not trying hard to think of something else, and it offers me anything I want."

"We could take turns with the Ring, you know, Harry," offered Hermione. "Remember? We discussed it, back at Hogwarts." Harry whirled on her, his green eyes ablaze with madness.

"NO! Nobody touches the Ring but me, nobody, do you hear me?" he snarled, in a harsh voice totally unlike his usual tones. Before Ron or Draco could make a move, he slapped Hermione with every ounce of strength in his body, sending her flying backwards. She landed on her side, and rolled over to look up at him, shock and fear written on her face, which was reddening where Harry had hit her.

As one, Ron and Draco pulled out their wands. "Petrificus Totalus!" The spells hit Harry simultaneously, and he fell like a poleaxed steer, his eyes wide with shock. Ron ran over to Hermione’s side, nearly weeping, and knelt to see if she was all right. She was rubbing her cheek, and the look in her eyes combined shock and a bit of wonder.

"I’d have sooner expected Hagrid to make a pass at me than---than this," she murmured. "Gods above and below, what’s gotten into Harry?" She shook her head rather ruefully. "He’s a lot stronger than I realized." She grinned rather tremulously at Ron, who felt tears prickling at the corners of his eyes. Probing her teeth experimentally with her tongue, she nodded to herself. "Okay, at least none of them are loose, thank all the gods---what my parents would do if I came home minus half my teeth, I hate to think!"

Once he was sure Hermione would be all right, a blazing rage against Harry overwhelmed Ron; this was to his anger over what he had seen as Harry’s duplicity in entering the Triwizard Tournament as Hogwarts Castle was to the Burrow. Two swift strides, and Ron was by Harry’s side, snarling "Finite Incantatem!" As Harry came out from under the Petrification charm, Ron grabbed him by the front of his tunic, yanking him to his feet with strength he hadn’t known he had.

"Have you gone mad, Harry? Look what you just did!" raged Ron. "What has gotten into you, Harry Potter?" A sudden evil thought came into Ron’s mind. "Or---should I start calling you Harry Dursley? You’re acting a lot like a Dursley! Guess bad blood will out in the end, won’t it?" He sneered. "Even Dudley never did anything that low, from what you’ve told me!" He shook Harry with every ounce of force he had in him, making his head rock on his shoulders and his teeth rattle. His glasses nearly went flying.

Ron’s harsh words and actions seemed to pierce the fog that had engulfed Harry’s mind. He stared at Ron as though he were coming awake out of a nightmare. When he registered what Ron was saying, he looked past Ron at Hermione, and burst into wracking sobs. Tearing himself free from Ron’s grasp, he knelt by Hermione’s side. "Forgive me, Hermione! Oh, please forgive me! I couldn’t help myself!"

Hermione looked at him, consideringly, before asking: "What made you do that, anyway, Harry? Was it the Ring?"

Harry nodded, not quite daring to speak at first, then choking out: "When you mentioned taking It away from me, I---I think I went mad for a second or two. It was like you had turned into a little, creeping, twisted thing, slobbering and reaching out with your patty-paws for It---and I couldn’t bear the thought of anybody else touching It." He looked at his friends, his green eyes wide with fear. "If---if I can’t control myself---can I count on you to do---what’ll need to be done?"

Hermione patted his cheek. "Count on us, Harry. You’ve been a wonderful friend to have, and I understand about not being able to help yourself sometimes." She looked grim for a second. "At the same time, try to keep yourself under better control. You don’t know how close I came to pulling my wand out and hexing you a good one---I’d probably have done it, if Ron and Draco hadn’t beaten me to it." Numbly, Harry nodded. She got to her feet, and pulled him up. "Come on, we’ve got miles to make. Where is Gollum, anyway?"

Gollum had been at the edge of their little colloquy, and when things had gone bad, he had run and hidden himself. It took Hermione several minutes of gentle coaxing to lure him from his hidey-hole, and he capered with joy to see that things had calmed down. "Are we nicce again? Are we all friendses? Are thingss going well?" he asked, his lambent eyes going from one of the four friends to another. "Let’ss get going, nicce mageses and pretty girl, we’ve got mileses to go before we sleepss, yess, mileses to go before we sleepss!"

As they started off again, with Hermione in the lead, followed by a very hangdog Harry, and Ron and Draco in the back, Draco murmured: "I guess Robert Frost truly is a great poet---if even Gollum quotes him, he must be good!" Ron looked at Draco in weary wonder. Who but Draco Malfoy would think of poetry on the borderlands of Mordor? It was all Ron could do to even remember anything before their endless, weary death-march---the Burrow, his family, and Hogwarts were like dreams he had once had, dreams that dissolved into nothingness upon waking into the reality of their endless trek.

Some time later, they came around a bend and found themselves staring up at the city of Minas Morgul itself. It was the first man-built city that Ron had seen since leaving their own world---Moria had been built by dwarves---and it was not a pretty sight. It was glowing white, as Ron had expected, but not a nice, healthy white. It was the pale, phosphorescent white of decay, the white of a fish’s belly. There were endless windows in it, and Ron felt as though they were being watched from on high, although they heard no sound from the defiled city. He felt almost paralyzed, and it took great mental effort to lift one foot up and put it down, then the other, and continue moving forward. The others, he noticed with one corner of his mind, were having trouble as well, and even Gollum wasn’t finding it easy to go on. But, in the end, they had to do it.

They came to a bridge that over-arched a strange stream, that seemed to give off icy vapors that almost looked like steam in the light from the city. The bridge was carved with horrible shapes, human and animal, all twisted as though they had sprung from the mind of Voldemort himself, or of somebody much darker. On both sides of the stream there were meadows where strange flowers grew, luminescent and smelling slightly of decay. For a second, Ron wondered what Professor Sprout would have made of them.

Harry started stumbling forward, as though he planned to cross the bridge and enter the city. Ron and Draco leaped forward suddenly, and grabbed him. "No! Not that way!"

Gollum gibbered, hissing: "No, not that way, preciouss! Mussn’t go there, mussn’t go into the cccity! Bad, wicked, cruel peoples lives there, doesn’t they, gollum?" He pointed to a path that led up, through a gap in a stone wall, up toward the dark mountains. Harry struggled for an instant, then submitted to his friends’ hustling him along.

On and on they went, desperate to get out of eyeshot of the horrible city. Ron pushed himself onward with strength he hadn’t known he had. Every second they were in eyeshot of Minas Morgul, he expected something horrible to happen---some awful Thing or other to come out of the city after them.

Finally, some distance above the city, Harry flung himself to the ground. "I---I can’t go on any more," he gasped, his breath coming in sobs. "Forgive me, my friends, but I just can’t go on any farther!"

Ron glanced around. They were sheltered from eyeshot of Minas Morgul by a large outcropping of rock and some bushes. "It’s all right, Harry," he said, awkwardly patting his friend. "You can rest here for a while. We can all rest here; I’m not sure that any of us wouldn’t be better with a rest." At his words, the four from Hogwarts, along with Gollum, dropped to the ground, gasping for breath. Ron had not realized just how weary he was; every fiber of his body ached with weariness, and his feet hurt more than he would have believed possible.

Some unguessable time later, Ron felt the very rock shaking beneath him. Instantly, he was alert, his wand in his hand, and he noted that Hermione and Draco were just as on-edge as he was; both of them had their wands out and their free hands near their swords. Harry stirrred, and rose, his eyes blank.

From behind the mountains to the east came a red light, illuminating the whole valley with a ghastly rubeous glow. The rumbling in the earth that they had heard for some time grew incredibly loud. "Eruption!" snarled Draco, peering around. "That’s Mount Doom, or I’m Neville Longbottom!"

"That you certainly aren’t, Draco," answered Hermione, managing to grin even in the circumstances. "But look down at Minas Morgul, everybody!" Ron pulled himself up to the top of the sheltering outcrop, and stared down at Minas Morgul in horror. He felt, rather than saw, Draco and Hermione pulling themselves up beside him.

Below them, Minas Morgul seemed to be answering a call from Mordor. Lightning leaped up from the central tower, its blue flame spattering against the sullen, low-hanging clouds above. More bolts of lightning came from the hills surrounding the city, and then there was a horrible screeching sound that made all four Hogwarts students, and Gollum, clap their hands over their ears. It was like the scream of a dying horse, thought Ron, only a thousand times magnified and worse. Instinctively, the watchers ducked their heads.

As the terrible cry finally ended, Ron dared to raise his head, staring down at the horrible city. Minas Morgul’s gate, shaped like an awful mouth with gleaming teeth, was wide open, and an army was pouring out from it.

They came on in endless waves, all in black. First, Ron could see cavalry, hundreds upon hundreds of them, led by One far greater than the rest. He gasped. That looked very like the descriptions of the Black Riders, and he had heard, at Rivendell and elsewhere, that the very leader of the Nazgul, the Witch-King of Angmar, ruled in Minas Morgul. That had to be him---he fit the descriptions Ron had heard perfectly.

Suddenly, the Witch-King, if that was what he was, stopped and seemed to peer around. Ron could all but feel the fell rider’s regard, like the beam of a mighty searchlight such as Harry had described---Harry had seen such things, in a school field-trip to the Imperial War Museum, in exhibits that covered what Ron still thought of as the Grindelwald War.

Oh, gods, Harry! Ron slid down the outcrop, to see how Harry was. He found his friend shaking, holding his head. Looking up as Ron arrived, he ground out: "He’s---looking for me. I think…I think he senses the Ring!"

"Let’s try the Invisibility Cloak," said Ron. He had put it in his pack when they had divided their burden, and he now yanked it out and pulled it over himself and Harry. It did seem to help. As they crouched together under it, clutching tightly to each other for such comfort as it could give, Ron felt fear such as he had never known. Even the presence of the Balrog had not frightened him so, since Gandalf had been there and he had had enormous faith in Gandalf.

"Where are you? Where are you, Ron, Harry?" came Hermione’s voice. "Are you under the Invisibility Cloak?"

"Yeah, we are. It seems to help. Harry thinks that the Witch-King.---that big guy down there---can sense the Ring," Ron answered. "Get in under here with us!" Hermione came on in, huddling close, and Draco followed in a few minutes. It was terribly crowded with all four of them under the Cloak, but it was just big enough to conceal them.

Whether it was the Cloak counteracting the Ring’s call, or time constraints, the Witch-King quit looking around, spurring his horse on ahead to war. Ron could feel the terrible pressure inside his head abate, and he cautiously peered out from under the Cloak.

Below them, the armies still poured forth from Minas Morgul, and Ron trembled inside, fearing for the safety of their friends in the Fellowship, and for all the free peoples of Middle-earth. He knew little of how Muggles waged war, here or at home, but he couldn’t see how such an army as he had seen could be stopped by anything short of mighty magicks---and with Gandalf gone, he knew of almost nobody save Galadriel and Elrond who could wield magic and was not a thrall of Mordor. We’ve got to be successful, we’ve just got to! he thought.

That thought brought him back to Harry. Harry was sitting up, trembling uncontrollably. Draco was kneeling beside him, taking his pulse with a worried expression. "Mild shock, I think," he murmured. "If I had only completed mediwizard training! Still, we can do a little for you, Harry. Lie down!" Obediently, Harry lay down, and Draco spread his elven-cloak over him. Wordlessly, Hermione held out her cloak, and Draco accepted it with a nod, spreading it over Harry as well. "There. That should do for now, I think."

Harry drifted off to sleep, and Ron gathered Draco and Hermione to his side, a little way away. They could easily see Harry, and could keep watch from where they were, but they also were able to speak privately, at least if they kept their voices low. Unless there’s an Animagus nearby, thought Ron---but there seemed to be few animals of any sort there, even insects.

"Have you been noticing changes in Harry?" asked Draco, his narrow, clever face twisting with worry. "I’ve got to say, I don’t care for a lot of what I’ve been seeing. This little incident just now was only the icing on the cake; I’m not sure that he can be trusted with the Ring."

"I’ve been noticing things, too," murmured Hermione. Of itself, her hand rose to her cheek. "Even before---what happened---happened, he’s been changing, and not all the changes are for the better. The old Harry Potter, the one I knew back at Hogwarts, would never have let Gollum abase himself so totally. This one accepts it as his rightful due, and I think he enjoys it."

"Yes, that’s one of the things that reminded me of my father at his worst," nodded Draco. "My father used to take out his anger on the house-elves at Malfoy Manor, to the point where it actually broke some of their conditioning to serve masters. You all know Dobby, I take it---well, before Father got his claws on him, Dobby was a house-elf’s house-elf---proud to serve and willing to do anything for his masters. Now, he’s become one of the few free elves in history, simply because my father abused him past his breaking point."

"Harry’s not generally been abusive to Gollum," Ron had to admit. "If anything, Draco, you and I’ve been harder on the little wretch than he has." A ghost of a grin flitted across his face. "Kind of like the Auror trick that I read about in a book about the Grindelwald War, ‘Good Auror, Bad Auror.’ With us to be fierce and mean to him, and Harry and Hermione being nice---usually, at least---Gollum’s bonded to Harry and Hermione."

"Don’t I know it!" giggled Hermione. "Remember those rabbits?" They all three shared a long, quiet laugh at the way Hermione had played Gollum like a violin. Hermione went on, her dark eyes flicking around to make sure Gollum was not within earshot: "I don’t trust Gollum an inch, though. He has plans, plans of his own, and somehow I don’t think they were made with our welfare in mind---or with anything in his so-called mind but ‘the Precious for poor little Smeagol,’ if you know what I mean. I think that if we all caught our deaths from Purple Spotted Brainpox, he’d be perfectly happy."

"I think we can trust him not to betray us to the Enemy, at least," murmured Draco. "He knows just as well as we do that if the Enemy gets hold of the Ring, it’s curtains---for the free peoples, for everybody else, and especially for the one who dared to hold it for so long. At least, that’s how You-Know-Who would see it, and I don’t think that Sauron’s too different." Ron thought about it, and had to agree. Since the Triwizard Tournament, he had read up on the Dark Lord’s reign of terror in the Hogwarts library, and he knew that Voldemort was not one to react with tolerance to anybody else trying to keep something from him that he regarded as rightfully his.

"I think that if we have to, we can keep Harry under control with spells," said Hermione, giving Harry a worried look as he stirred under the cloaks. "The Ring soups-up his own magic, but only when he wears it. If we absolutely have to, we can overpower him and take it."

"That, Hermione, had better be an absolutely last resort," responded Draco solemnly. "The Ring does not treat those who take it with violence well. Fancy becoming Gollum---or Mrs. Gollum?" Hermione paled, and shook her head. Ron thought about being like Gollum, and felt sick inside. There are worse things than dying, and if You-Know-Who ever saw Gollum, he’d know it! he thought.

Harry stirred, and his eyes opened. "I feel a lot better now," he said rather muzzily, as his friends hurried to his side. "All I needed was rest, I think. I felt like putting the Ring on, but I knew that I mustn’t---I’m not nearly wizard enough yet, even with the Ring, to stand up against the Witch-King of Angmar."

"That makes sense, Harry," said Hermione, taking his wrist and timing his pulse as she had learned in Girl Scouts. "You’re getting better. This isn’t quite like normal shock; I think it was just a combination of being tired out and the proximity of that awful Black Rider." She cocked her head on one side, thinking. "Let me see---at Rivendell, I read about the Black Riders, and one of the side-effects of their proximity is fear. Get too close, and you come down with ‘Black Breath,’ which leeches the very life from you, slowly." She shook her head. "You know---I wonder if they’re somehow or other related to dementors? They do sound like dementors-times-a-hundred, don’t they?"

At last, when the armies had finally finished pouring out of Minas Morgul below them, the four friends rose and staggered on. Harry did look better for having rested; his color was better than Ron remembered seeing it in a long time. He thrust his hand into his tunic at one point, clutching something, but Ron didn’t think it was the Ring; he saw light escaping from within Harry’s clothes.

After a while, they found a set of stairs that wound up, up deep into the mountains. The stairs were steep, but manageable; Ron spared a thought for how much more trouble the hobbits would have had, with their shorter legs.

At first, the stairs seemed to have walls on either side, but gradually it widened out. Ron could not quite believe how high they went; on and on and on into the heights they toiled, and still there were more steps in front of them. Although it was getting dark, what with the mountains shutting off what light the sky offered, none of them tried a torch or a Lumos charm; they all knew that just because they hadn’t seen anybody watching didn’t mean that nobody was watching.

When the stairs came to an end, the travellers threw themselves down for another breather. "I wonder how high up we are? The air feels thin, somehow," murmured Hermione.

Ron had no idea how high up they were. All he knew was that if he never saw another staircase again in all his life, he’d be perfectly happy. The air did seem rather thin, now that Hermione had mentioned it. At least, his laboring lungs seemed to have to work harder than he would have expected after putting out the same amount of effort back in Britain. He wriggled his toes in his boots---thank the gods, he thought, for Hermione insisting that we buy and wear the best boots available! Bad boots, or other foot trouble, would have slowed them down considerably, and would have made the long trek agony after a while.

Draco muttered to himself, "I don’t know how high up we are. It feels higher than I ever remember going back in Britain, but that doesn't mean much. Britain’s not exactly known for mountains, not compared to, say, Switzerland. I was there once, but didn’t get near an Alp---dear pater was attending some sort of Death Eaters’ meeting there, and took me along as camouflage. Even the Aurors wouldn’t quite believe that he’d drag his thirteen-year-old son to a Death Eaters’ meeting---more fools they!"

After a bit of rest, they got to their feet, doing deep knee-bends to get the kinks out of their leg muscles. Gollum seemed very pleased to see that they still intended to go on. "Good, good! Masster and his friendses have now climbed the Straight Stair! Now comes the Winding Stair, yess, that comes next!" The four friends groaned in unison.

"How many bloody stairs have they got in this place, anyway?" moaned Draco, speaking for all his friends. "Who built them, anyway?"

"I’d bet that the Men of the West built them, long ago, after Sauron was overthrown temporarily. I don’t think Sauron would have bothered," murmured Hermione. Addressing Gollum, she went on: "How much farther is it to the top of this bloody pass?"

"Winding Stairses are longer, yess, but not sso ssteep," cackled Gollum. "Pretty girl and masster and their friendses will then get to a tunnel." He hissed softly to himself, in a language Ron couldn’t understand. "Once through the tunnel, we’re nearly at the top, O yes we are!"

Leaning on his staff, for all the world like an old, old man, Ron got to his feet. He felt as decrepit as though he were older than Professor Dumbledore---not that he expected to get to that age, or even to survive the trip. On one level, he had come to terms with his certainty that the quest they were on would end in their deaths, and, although he was at peace as regarded himself, he felt a brief rush of terrible sorrow for Harry, and Hermione---and even Draco Malfoy. "Onwards," he muttered, glad of the darkness so that his friends could not see his unmanly tears, "Let’s go! This is no place to linger!"

Up and up and up the four from Hogwarts climbed. Ron wondered, wearily, what Gollum ran on; the creature never seemed to truly tire, and he almost never seemed to eat. After clambering along a path at the edge of a cliff, they came to the Winding Stairs, which were on the side of the hill, and did not have walls on both sides. At one point, Ron looked back, and he could see the road to the city of Minas Morgul, stretching out far below them, shining with an unhealthy phosphorescence. He shuddered, and turned away, to continue with his friends.

When the stairs ended, Ron found himself standing on a level again, and for a second, he staggered; he had gotten so used to climbing the stairs that standing and walking on level ground felt slightly odd. Around them, Ron could see tall crags of stone, spearing into the sky like the fingers of a great deformed hand. To the east, he could see a cleft in the mountains, narrow and high-walled, with a finger of stone pointing skyward against the reddish haze.

He took another look. Was that a tower he saw, off on one side of that cleft? He wished bitterly for the Omniculars he had left behind at Hogwarts. "Look, you! Is that a tower I see?" He took Draco by the arm and pointed. Hermione peered along his arm, her big dark eyes narrowed with the effort to see. Harry took off his glasses, wiped them with a sigh, and put them back on, before he looked. When he saw what Ron had seen, Harry turned to Gollum with a very stern look on his face.

"That is a tower, or I’m my cousin Dudley Dursley!" he snapped. Making a long arm, he grabbed Gollum by the shoulder, drawing him close. "Answer me! Have you led us into a trap?" The others gathered around; Ron could see Draco fingering his wand, and Hermione looked, for a moment, remarkably like Professor McGonagall confronted with one of his brothers’ less-well-thought-out pranks.

"Yess, it is a tower," muttered Gollum. He could not quite look Harry in the eye. "No placceses not watched, not here they aren’t. But thiss may be leasst watched. Remember what we told you? He is worried, yess, but worried about armieses, about huge armieses, not four mages."

Harry sighed. "Well, what can’t be cured must be endured, as I would think Professor Dumbledore would say. It’s a long way off, and if they’re watching for full-scale armies, they might well not notice us. Besides," he smiled for a second, the smile that Ron dimly remembered from before their terrible journey, "we have the Cloak. We might well be able to sneak past them without them even seeing us." He shrugged his shoulders, a resigned look on his face. "In any case, let’s sit down for a bit and rest our legs. I, for one, am well and truly knackered."

They got out some food from their packs, and drank some water from their canteens, but went easy on it. Ron remembered what he had heard at Rivendell, that Mordor was a desert, and he didn’t much fancy being caught in such a place without water. An idea struck him.

"Hermione?" Hermione paused in her gnawing at a square of hard-baked bread to look at him questioningly. "Do you know of any spells for locating water in dry places?"

Hermione considered the question, putting her head on one side. "Not as such, although I’m sure such a thing exists. Perhaps a Location Charm might do the trick. If Hogwarts wasn’t in Britain, but somewhere in the desert, we’d probably have had to learn any such charms right off." She gave Ron a smile. "Professor Flitwick would know, of course---but we can’t ask him, can we?" Ron shook his head.

Harry looked around. "Gollum might know how to find water. Come to it, where is he?" He looked around, a worried expression on his face. "Smeagol! Where are you?"

"He’s off to find himself something to eat---he wouldn’t touch our food, and I’m not too sorry about that. We need every mouthful we’ve got, and if he can feed himself off things we can’t eat, more power to him!" murmured Draco. He yawned. "Gods, but I’m tired! I’d give my right arm for my bed at Hogwarts!"

Ron could see that Harry and Hermione were also sleepy. He, himself, was too keyed-up to sleep. "Why don’t you three take forty winks? I’ll put on the Cloak and keep guard over you. That way, if our Dear Little Friend comes back, I’ll be able to keep an eye on him. He’s up to something, if I’m any judge."

"Yes, he is," murmured Harry, as he lay back on the softer earth nearby. His voice muzzy with sleep, Harry went on: "He’s got some plan of his own. When we get to the border of Mordor itself, I rather expect him to try some trick or other. Till then, though, we’ve got to trust him. Gods, I wish Gandalf were here!"

Draco and Hermione were both asleep already. Hermione was curled up under her cloak, her head resting on her arm. Draco was tossing and turning, murmuring in his sleep. Ron slipped on the Invisibility Cloak and watched over his three friends. Harry and Draco had one thing more in common, he mused---they both seemed to have awful nightmares. Some of the things he could catch from Draco’s disjointed mumblings chilled him to the bone. Retreating up to the top of a nearby rock, Ron set himself to watch and wait. For some reason, he felt as keyed-up as if he’d been Ennervated, or drunk a glassful of Pepperup Potion.

Some time later, Gollum came slinking back. He seemed slightly startled to find the others asleep. Ron watched, not trusting him an inch, as he came closer. A shudder ran through the creature’s skinny body as he looked up toward the pass where they were to go, and Ron suddenly seemed to see him in a different way---an old, old hobbit, bowed and broken by a burden too great for him to bear, cursed to live on and on long past his time. He shook his head angrily. Feeling sorry for Gollum? What next, Ron, finding excuses for the Dark Lord? he thought.

Gollum came closer, and leaned down to look at Harry more closely, careful not to touch him---he apparently remembered what might happen if you startled Harry Potter out of his nightmares. A sudden wild urge to give Gollum a surprise hit Ron, and he crept off his perch, sneaking up behind Gollum.

When Ron goosed him, Gollum leaped into the air, squealing. He landed on his feet, whirling around to see Ron standing there grinning at him as he discreetly rolled up the Invisibility Cloak. "Ach, sss, you ssurprised us!" His unlovely features twisted in anger. "You ssneaked up on us ssomehow, nassty ssneak!"

This byplay awoke the others; they snapped awake, clutching for their wands. "What’s going on now?" grumbled Harry. "For once I wasn’t dreaming of the Wheel of Fire, and somebody has to awaken me!"

"Nassty mage ssneakss up on uss, yess, he sneakss up on uss and pokes us," whined Gollum. Draco gave Ron a quizzical look.

"Really? You goosed Gollum?" At Ron’s nod, Draco chuckled reluctantly. "Not a bad one, Weasel. You are Gred-and-Forge’s brother, though---and you’ve been remarkably good about that sort of thing. I suppose one prank after all this time isn’t too bad."

"In any case, we’re probably to the point where we can find our own way," said Harry. "Smeagol! I think you’ve kept your promise. If we can go on from here on our own, you can go where you want to, as long as it’s not to the servants of the Enemy."

"No, no, musst keep on guiding, guiding nice masster and pretty girl, and their friendses," hissed Gollum, giving Ron a very dirty look with his lambent eyes. "No resst, no food for poor Smeagol. Smeagol must go on farther with you, yess, he musst."

"So be it, then. Next stop, Torech Ungol!" With that, Harry moved off up the pass, and the others followed in his wake.