"If your whole life turns out to be a lie, what will you do then?"
"If everything you knew turns out to be a hoax, what will you do then?"
Graciana Duerre Weasley, twin sister of Ron Weasley, is a troublemaker. Mischievous but a little introvert, bo...
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THE SHOCK OF LOSING Mad-Eye hung over the house in the days that followed; Grace kept expecting to see him stumping in through the back door like the other Order members, who passed in and out to relay news.
Grace felt that nothing but action would assuage her feelings of guilt and grief and that she ought to set out on her mission to find her answers and help Harry destroy Horcruxes as soon as possible.
Molly kept Grace, Harry, Ron and Hermione so busy with preparations for the wedding that they hardly had any time to think. The kindest explanation of this behavior would have been that Molly wanted to distract them all from thoughts of Mad-Eye and the terrors of their recent journey. After two days of nonstop cutlery cleaning, of color-matching favors, ribbons, and flowers, of de-gnoming the garden and helping Molly cook vast batches of canapés, however, Grace started to suspect her of a different motive. All the jobs she handed out seemed to keep her, Harry, Ron, and Hermione away from one another; she had not had a chance to speak to the three of them alone since the first night.
"I think Mum thinks that if she can stop the four of you getting together and planning, she'll be able to delay you leaving," Ginny told Grace in an undertone, as they laid the table for dinner on the third night since Mad-eye's death.
"And then what does she think's going to happen?" Grace muttered. "Someone else might kill off Voldemort while she's holding us here making vol-au-vents?"
She had spoken without thinking, and saw Ginny's face whiten.
"So it's true?" she said. "That's what you're trying to do?"
"I – not – I was joking," said Grace evasively.
Grace began setting up the table faster, determinedly not looking at Ginny. Both of them jumped as the door opened, and Arthur, Kingsley, and Bill walked in.
They were often joined by other Order members for dinner now, because the Burrow had replaced number twelve, Grimmauld Place as the headquarters. Arthur had explained that after the death of Dumbledore, their Secret-Keeper, each of the people to whom Dumbledore had confided Grimmauld Place's location had become a Secret-Keeper in turn.
"And as there are around twenty of us, that greatly dilutes the power of the Fidelius Charm. Twenty times as many opportunities for the Death Eaters to get the secret out of somebody. We can't expect it to hold much longer."
"But surely Snape will have told the Death Eaters the address by now?" asked Grace.
"Well, Mad-Eye set up a couple of curses against Snape in case he turns up there again. We hope they'll be strong enough both to keep him out and to bind his tongue if he tries to talk about the place, but we can't be sure. It would have been insane to keep using the place as headquarters now that its protection has become so shaky."
