Pride

With new animals at the Burrow came new chores. Ginny had the enviable task of taking care of the chickens. She let them out of the coop, threw some seeds at them, and let them roam around as she collected the eggs. She only had to clean the coop once a week. 

The sheep were adorable. They were all white with long ears, sort of like a rabbit, and thick, curly wool that was growing in dense after their spring shearing. Fred and George were assigned to them, which mainly consisted of setting them loose in a meadow. 

Ron and Harry were given the pigs. 

To be fair, the pigs were adorable too. There was a huge boar who mostly laid around when he wasn’t trying to break down the fence of his pen. The sow usually minded her own business, and that of her piglets. The piglets were the best. Cute little spots, cute little oinks. Except when Ron picked one up, then they started to squeal like they were being slaughtered.

The pigs were herded to the orchard each morning to root around, and after that Ron and Harry had to shovel out all their droppings, lay out fresh straw, and cart the manure to the compost heap his mum was trying to establish. Altogether, it wasn’t that much work, and any one of them could have probably taken care of all the animals, but it was loud and messy. Ron worried about when the piglets were fully grown. Pigs needed a lot of food. 

As Ron heaved his last pitchfork of pig manure, he caught sight of two large green eyes watching him from between slats of the fence.

“Dobby?”

“Dobby is only watching Master Weasley,” the house-elf said, ducking down. Ron’s mum had found some clothes from when one of his siblings was a toddler to outfit Dobby in, just a shirt and shorts for now, and Dobby tugged at the hem of his shirt nervously.

“Just call me Ron,” he said. “It’s going to get confusing if you call us all Weasley, and no one here is your master. You don’t have masters anymore.”

Dobby’s eyes started to water. “Master Harry said the same thing.”

“Just Harry, Dobby,” Harry said, walking towards them, covered in mud. He looked down at his pants when he noticed them staring. “I was knocked over.”

“Dobby can clean Master—”

“Harry.”

“Dobby can clean M—Harry’s clothes!”

“You’re supposed to be resting,” Harry said.

“Dobby has never rested a day in his life!”

“You have a new life now,” Ron said, climbing over the fence. “It’s only been a few weeks.”

“It’s been over a month!” Dobby cried. Harry grabbed his hands before he could start beating himself.

“I don’t like when you hurt yourself,” Harry said. “How would you feel if one of us started doing that?”

Dobby began crying harder. 

Ron and Harry looked at each other, not sure what to do to make Dobby feel better. 

“Mum wants us to weed the garden today, since it’s our turn,” Ron said. “You can keep a lookout for any gnomes if you want.”

Dobby nodded enthusiastically, wiping his face off on his shirt, and they headed for the garden.

No one was entirely sure what to do with Dobby. He had been freed from the Malfoys, but he had experienced so many bad things while with them, and felt so many bad things about himself, that he had no path forward. After having met Dobby, and learning more intimately what the life of a house-elf was like, his parents weren’t very interested in binding one to the family, or exploiting Dobby in any way. Dobby himself seemed to think that being asked to keep his own space and himself clean—he had panicked when he was offered Bill and Charlie’s old bedroom and was now residing in the attic with the ghoul—was not enough work for him. He often trailed one of them around while they were doing their own chores, trying to intervene in small ways that sometimes ended in disaster. So he was asked to simply observe, to learn what daily life at the Burrow was like, until he was well enough to be assigned a more robust list of chores for which he would be paid a small amount. 

For now, Ron and Harry crawled through the garden, pulling up tiny weeds before they turned into bigger issues, and Dobby dutifully stood sentinel for any invading gnomes.

It was a hot day and it was getting to everyone. Fred and George were making their usual racket, Ginny was whining about cleaning her room, Percy was shouting at people to be quiet and slamming his door, their dad was in his parents’ bedroom behind layers of silencing charms, Scabbers had got into the pigs’ mash and had been detained in his cage, and their mum was taking her annoyance out on the rug the fine grains had got trapped in, beating it out in the garden. 

Ron and Harry were pushing their way through their History of Magic essay on seventeenth century witch executions.

“We could find a ghost to ask about this,” Harry said, scratching another sentence out. 

“I need a break,” Ron said, just as someone else slammed a door. “Let’s walk down to the village.”

Abandoning their essays, Ron and Harry got dressed in muggle clothes, found the muggle money Harry had hidden away, and left after telling Ron’s mum where they were going. On most days someone else would have weaseled their way into coming along, but everyone was too preoccupied with their own irritation to pay much attention. They were free. 

The Burrow was several miles outside of Ottery St. Catchpole, and without magic it took an hour or two to get there. They walked through the garden and the fields, into the woods that blocked the harsh summer sun, through another field, over fences, finally finding the back road that would lead them out of the countryside and to the main road that took them over the river and into the village. 

Ottery St. Catchpole was fairly quaint. Ron could imagine some magical families living in town. Perhaps not his own family, or the Lovegoods, but the Diggorys could pull it off. There were quiet streets lined with terraced houses, which Harry called two-up two-down, constructed with weathered brick. There were a few cottages that stood alone, with older people working in their gardens wearing wide-brimmed hats and wielding shears. 

A tributary of the river wove through the village, and they walked along this creek until they found a weir, a circular void that part of the creek flowed into. It was hidden behind an old factory. When they walked back to the street, they saw someone had converted the factory into a pub. 

They ventured into the village center, where Ron pulled Harry towards the smell of fish and chips. They had been walking for a long time, so they ordered food and sat outside to eat it, dodging questions about where their parents were. 

Once they were done with their meal, the boys went back to exploring the village. They passed an old church, which Harry thought might house some ghosts—he cited the Fat Friar and the ghostly nuns as proof some witches and wizards had been part of the same group that demonized them—but Ron dragged him away. A few blocks later they found an old cemetery. 

After some debate, they decided to walk through. It was clear it hadn’t been used in a very long time. The headstones were broken, the edges worn smooth by decades and centuries of rain. The ground was rocky and uneven, with patches of weeds and moss. It was quiet, save for the occasional passing of cars on the nearby streets.

“Where do you want to go next?” Ron asked, giving the cemetery another look around. There wasn’t much to see.

“What’s that?” Harry asked, pointing.

There was something faint and silvery near one of the headstones, like mist creeping out of a grave. Cautiously, the two boys approached. Ron wished he had his wand with him, and felt stupid for leaving it on his bed.

They rounded the headstone and found a ghost.

The man sat with his back against the headstone. Ron looked through him to see the name. Lewis Page. He wore a tunic that was belted down with a wide sash. A saber hung at his side, and he had a long rifle across his knees. Ron didn’t have to guess how the man had died. Half of his head was missing.

“More hooligans,” the man muttered to himself. His voice was cold and empty, vastly different from the friendly ghosts at Hogwarts. “Rest in peace, they say. There is no peace, not for those like me…”

“Excuse me, sir?” Harry asked tentatively.

The man ignored him and continued talking to himself, making snide comments about them.

“We can hear you,” Ron finally said. “We’re looking right at you.”

“Are you Lewis Page?” Harry asked. “Is this your grave?”

Finally, the man realized he was being addressed.

He jumped up in alarm, the gun fitting readily in his hands. Its ghostly barrel swiped through Ron. He shuddered and took a step back.

“Who are you?” the man demanded. “How is this possible?”

“We’re wizards,” Ron said. “Only people with magic can see ghosts. Some animals can too.”

“Wizards?” 

The man grew more agitated, scared even.

“You must have magic too,” Harry said gently. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be a ghost.”

This was the wrong thing to say. The two boys hadn’t realized how terrified a ghost in a muggle cemetery would be of magic. Ron looked at the headstone again, and saw the man had died sometime in the 1600s. Lewis Page, if that was who the man was, began rambling about witches, demons, familiars, threatening them with burnings and hangings. Their modern muggle clothes made them appear even more eccentric to Page. At one point he tried to decapitate Harry with his ghost sword. It didn’t work, of course, but it was incredibly rude to even try.

Lewis Page’s story came out piecemeal. He had been a Royalist soldier for Charles, the king in exile. His sister had been accused of witchcraft, by Page himself. She had laughed when the village tried to burn her. She vanished, taking her husband and children with her, leaving the rest of her family to face the village’s wrath. Page threw himself into soldiering, as a cavalryman. During a skirmish their horses went wild. Page was shot, but before he died he saw his sister watching him from across the field, laughing.

“What was her name?” Ron asked. 

“Temperance,” the man spat. “Temperance Graves.”

Ron and Harry left the cemetery shortly after. Lewis Page had little rationality left, and it seemed cruel to anger him with more questions. Ron sort of wished they hadn’t talked to him at all. He had never met such a hostile ghost. Even Peeves for all of his pranks wasn’t trying to actually hurt anyone. The thought of Lewis Page as a poltergeist was horrifying.

“He must have been a squib,” Harry said as they walked back down the street. It was getting late, and Ron knew they had to start for home soon. “He had to have some magic in him to stick around as a ghost.”

“Yeah,” Ron said. He was unsettled by the entire experience. While they had a first hand account from someone who had lived through the bloody years of the witch trials, the man was clearly suffering. He wasn’t floating around in Hogwarts having fun with students. He was alone in a graveyard, his only company his memories, and his rage.

“I wish there was something we could do for him,” Harry said, frowning. 

“I don’t know,” Ron said, kicking a pebble. “Most of the ghosts we meet want to be around. Or they did when they first died.”

The boys were silent for a while. They walked out of the village and back to the road that would lead them home.

“Maybe he has some living relatives,” Harry suggested. “They could help him, I don’t know, come to terms with things?”

“Maybe,” Ron said doubtfully. 

Hours later Ron and Harry had solemnly finished their essays. It was clear to both of them that actual witches and wizards weren’t the only victims of the witch trials; many muggles had been killed, many impacted by the executions of their friends, families, neighbors. The witches and wizards—though fewer in number, men had been accused of witchcraft as well—didn’t merely laugh as the muggles tried to burn them alive. Many still died, too young to use magic, poorly educated, or ignorant of their magical heritage. Some survivors took their revenge on the muggles that harmed them.

Magic was a terrible, evil thing to the muggles back then. Their idea of what magic was had been profoundly incorrect. Just as wrong as some magical people were about muggles.

At dinner Ron pushed food around his plate, drawing worried looks from Harry. Ron smiled weakly at him.

“Is there a Graves family?” Harry asked the table.

Ron’s dad frowned in thought. “The name sounds familiar…”

“The Weird Sisters!” Ginny piped up, bouncing in her chair. “He’s in the band!”

“Why do you ask?” his dad said, looking up from his Evening Prophet. 

“We found a ghost today,” Ron said. “We were wondering if there was anyone living who’d like to meet him.”

“A ghost?” his mum asked, eyeing them. “Where were you two today?”

“Just in the village!” Ron said hastily. Harry pretended to be busy eating, and Ron sighed, resigned to being interrogated. 

One July morning, Ron’s mum finally let Dobby try his hand at making breakfast for the family. She watched him like a hawk, ready to intervene if he tried to shut his ears in the oven or burn his hands on the stovetop.

Errol crashed through the window.

Everyone lifted their plates as he skidded to a stop on the table. Ron’s dad divested the owl of the post, and Errol scrambled back up, fluffed his feathers, and laboriously took off again. Though both Hermes and Hedwig had both been offered to carry the daily post, Ron’s parents had turned them down. It gave Errol something to do, at least, and the old grey owl seemed fine with it, if a little scattered. 

“What’s that, dad?” Fred asked, pointing his fork at the thick envelope their dad held. 

“Not sure,” he said, opening it. “It’s from the Daily Proph—”

Their dad froze as he read the letter. 

“What is it, dear?” their mother asked, turning away from the stove. Dobby was plating the food, levitating it to the table. 

Their dad silently handed the letter over to her. She looked it over then stumbled back, groping for a chair.

“My word,” she breathed, sitting heavily. She set the letter down with shaking hands. George snatched it up, and him and Fred read it together.

“You didn’t tell me you entered,” their mum said faintly. 

Color rose in their dad’s face. “I didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up.”

“We won!” George shouted, jumping out of his seat.

“Won what?” Ron asked.

“We did it!” Fred shouted. “Well done, dad!”

“Let me see that,” Percy said, taking the letter away from George, who didn’t seem to want to give it up. Percy’s face paled. “Well.”

“Give me that,” Ginny said, lunging over the table to grab the letter. 

“What's going on?” Ron demanded.

“We won! We won!” Fred chanted, pulling Ron out of his chair and swinging him around. He turned desperately to Harry, who was just as baffled as Ginny latched onto him and began shaking him while shrieking in joy. 

“We’ve won the Daily Prophet Grand Prize Galleon Draw,” their mum said, openly weeping. “Seven hundred galleons.”

Fred finally released him to dance around with George. Ron slumped in his seat, stunned. “Seven hundred galleons, bloody hell.”

His dad cleared his throat. “Well, we have been wanting to take you children to visit one of your brothers…”

“Dear, we should really discuss this,” their mum said, dabbing her cheeks with her apron. Dobby was standing next to her, looking around at everyone and smiling, a little confused. 

“Molly, we can afford it now!”

“Egypt!” George said.

“Romania!” Fred said. 

“Atlantis!” Ginny said. 

“We should invest,” Percy suggested.

“I…I don’t know,” Ron said, unable to think of anything he wanted. He really missed Charlie and Bill. He’d love to see either of them. He looked at Harry for help, but Harry was beaming at everyone, elated by their good fortune. 

“We’ll talk about it,” their mum repeated, summoning the letter to herself and folding it back up again. “Now, Dobby’s made us a lovely breakfast. Let’s not have it go to waste!”

The next few days were madness. After many arguments and a few shouting matches, the holiday had been agreed to. Owls were sent out to Charlie and Bill. Their dad had to put in a time off request and pass his open cases on to his assistant. Permits had to be filed with the Egyptian Ministry for wands and portkeys. There was a frantic rush to get all their summer homework done, which was mostly Ginny, Fred, and George as Ron, Harry, and Percy had done theirs right away. Arrangements had to be made for house sitting, which Dobby insisted he was able to do. They weren’t scheduled to leave for a few weeks, so there was time to make sure the pigs, chickens, sheep, owls, duck, rat, and ghoul would all be cared for. Some of the money went towards renting a jarvey to keep the gnomes in check. 

After tempers had cooled, and enough suggestions of what to do with the money were shot down, the household settled into general high spirits. Ron had never gone abroad before. The furthest was Hogwarts. Harry had never been on a holiday at all, since the muggles he had lived with always made him stay at home, either by himself or with an elderly neighbor across the street. 

Dobby spent his days proving he was capable of handling the Burrow on his own. With his house-elf magic, he made it look easy. Still, no one wanted him to be left alone and unprotected. Lucius Malfoy had been livid since the loss of one of his house-elves. No one knew Dobby lived at the Burrow, and it was best if it stayed that way. The only local family Ron’s parents would trust with the information were the Lovegoods, but Xenophilius had taken Luna on one of his expeditions for the entire summer. 

Bill saved them with a list of protective spells for the Burrow, and once Dobby learned of their concerns he demonstrated the barrier he had put up at King’s Cross, which could keep most witches and wizards at bay. He also promised to flee if his safety was at risk, to find them in Egypt if he had to. 

Ron’s excitement grew with each passing day. He packed and repacked his things, he and Harry stayed up late imagining all the places they would see. Mummies and tombs featured heavily; they didn’t know much else about Egypt.

Itineraries were made and remade. The permits were approved. They were ready to go. 

“If he gets to bring Scabbers, I get to bring Custard!”

“Scabbers is ill!” Ron snapped, holding his rat close to his chest. Sure, Scabbers was useless, and he slept a lot, but Ron still cared about him. Scabbers needed daily care. Dobby didn’t need to look after a sick rat on top of everything else.

“Where is Custard?” their dad asked wearily. They were in the garden, their luggage shrunken and stuffed in their robes. The portkey was taking them to the grounds of the Egyptian Ministry, located under the ruins of the Serapeum of Alexandria.

“Custard!”

“Quack!”

Custard flew over the garden, from the direction of the pond, and into Ginny’s waiting arms. 

“You best make sure that duck behaves herself,” their mum said warningly, “or she’s flying straight back home!”

“Yes, mum!”

“Alright, everyone, gather round,” their dad said, holding up a small doll that looked sort of like a gnome. If they smiled, and had normal proportions, and bright green hair, and soulless eyes. 

“Five, four, three, two—”

Ron held Scabbers tightly as he felt the unmistakable tug of a portkey, tearing him away from the Burrow in a dizzying whirlwind of color. 

He landed next to Harry, Scabbers squeaking in fright, on a cool stone floor. He patted Scabbers soothingly, looking over Harry to see if he was alright. Only them and his parents had landed on their feet. He saw his dad tuck the strange doll away in his robes, while Percy helped Ginny stand and the twins climbed to their feet. Custard shook herself off and waddled back to Ginny.

“You are the Weasleys?”

A man with dark skin in white, pleated robes approached, smiling.

“My name is Anouar Labib, let me be the first to welcome you to Magical Egypt!”

Labib shook their dad’s hand, bowed his head to their mum, and then led them to an official behind a desk who checked in their wands. The other permits were reviewed, as well as a list of magical locations under direct Ministry oversight, places where muggle tourists frequented as well as ones known only to the magical community.

Ron looked around, not paying any attention to the adults. The floor was tiled in patterns of red, cream, and gold. The walls were decorated with multicolored geometric designs that twisted oddly as he looked at them. The ceiling was a complex arabesque of interlocking vines and flowers from which light shone. There were recesses with various statues on display, people with animal heads that watched them with sharp eyes. Plenty of people were moving around, coming in through fireplaces and side corridors, some in muggle clothing that wouldn’t be out of place in Britain, others in light robes of linen, some in white like their greeter, others in black, or stripes, or moving with designs. There were brightly patterned scarves draped over heads or wrapped as turbans, hammered amulets, filigree collars in gold and silver, rings and other jewelry set with lapis lazuli, carnelian, black sardonyx, turquoise…

“Mum! Dad!”

Ron turned to see his oldest brother Bill hurrying towards them with a wide grin. Charlie was right next to him. Both were tan compared to the normal Weasley pastiness, and were more freckled than ever. Bill had kept growing out his hair, which he now kept back in a tail. Charlie had cut his nearly to the scalp, likely having been burned off by one of his charges. Between the two of them they’d probably skinned an entire dragon for their clothes.

Their mum spun around and ran to her eldest sons, Ministry officials and procedures forgotten, and everyone else chased after.

“You must be Harry,” Charlie said, shaking Harry’s hand. “Nice to finally meet you. Mum’s told me all about you.”

Harry looked stunned by this information.

“Nice to see you again, Harry,” Bill said, smiling warmly at him. 

Harry made an inarticulate noise and nodded. Ron narrowed his eyes at him, wondering what was going on. 

Charlie had recently apparated in, and once he had his own Ministry business sorted, they headed out of the Egyptian Ministry building and into the muggle world.

The first thing Ron noticed was how hot it was. The second thing was how muggy it was. It was like breathing through a sponge. He glanced at Harry, whose glasses had fogged up. 

Bill turned to look at his struggling family in their British robes, which were perfectly fine for summer in Devon.

Smiling a little, he cast a few cooling charms over them. “Sorry, forgot to warn you. Takes a bit of getting used to.”

“How can you stand wearing that?” Ron said, pointing accusingly to Bill’s thick dragonhide jacket. 

“Magic,” Bill said, flashing a smile. He turned to Harry, amused, and spelled his glasses impervious. The fog cleared away immediately. 

“Thanks,” Harry mumbled, taking off his glasses to look at them.

“No problem. Let’s head to the hotel, shall we?”

The exit they had taken was through a series of dimly lit catacombs. These let out into the Serapeum ruins, where parts of the Library of Alexandria’s collection had been stored. Much like the library, the temple had been destroyed. A Roman column rose up from the ruins, flanked by two granite sphinxes. A few muggle tourists were wandering around, but Bill assured them the magic around the Ministry’s headquarters would keep them from noticing their abrupt appearance. 

With promises to return to explore the ruins later, and the library preserved far below ground, Bill led them down to a busy street lined with towering muggle buildings which Harry told Ron were probably flats. Everything was grey, dusty red, dark cream. Desert colors. The sun glared at them, and Ron fought the urge to take off his robes completely. It was better to wear them than have to carry them in his arms for however long their walk was. 

They got to their hotel, which looked similar to the other buildings except for the glass-fronted lobby and foreigners going through the doors. Bill handled everything, talking to the employees in a mix of English and Arabic, which Bill told them he had been learning. He had also been learning Egyptian, a dead language. No one was quite sure how it was meant to be spoken, but a muggle religious group in Egypt used a language descended from it. It was mostly used in their religious texts and not spoken by many, but it gave an idea of what Egyptian had sounded like.

The hotel room was a surprise. The Ministry had specially designated rooms for visitors. Instead of the kind of room Harry had described muggles usually having, there was a large living area, a kitchen, and enough rooms for Percy and Ginny to have their own, while the twins, their parents, and Ron and Harry shared. Charlie would be staying at Bill’s flat. Somehow, from all the windows they could look across the Mediterranean Sea. 

They spent that first day exploring muggle Alexandria. They walked along the water and saw some people fishing. They got lost in a marketplace, where the twins had to be pulled away from haggling. They marveled at mosques, palaces, citadels. It was a huge city to explore, with both modern and ancient structures. Ron thought they could spend their entire month on holiday there, but there was so much more of Egypt to see, and they could always come back. 

They ate liver sandwiches with peppers and tahini, stewed fava beans, dense cakes with hazelnuts, jumped on trams, chose which fish they wanted grilled and sauteed in tomatoes, onions, cilantro, and fragrant spices. They did get a lot of looks as a group, their red hair honestly stood out anywhere, but people were very nice.

At the end of the day, Ron collapsed onto his bed exhausted, exhilarated, watching colorful lights shine off the sea as he fell asleep.

“Are you sure you should have brought Scabbers with?” Charlie asked him. “He’s looking a bit peaky.”

Ron looked down at Scabbers, who was safely riding in his pocket. Scabbers had been getting grey around the whiskers, and Ron was very worried about him. He didn’t want Scabbers to be alone when…if anything happened. 

Bill had flown them on a carpet from Alexandria to the Giza Necropolis, where the famous pyramid complex stood. They caught the dusty sight of Cairo across the Nile, and Custard had flown off to have her own riparian adventure, with a stern warning to avoid any crocodiles and to stick with other ducks. If anything happened, she could find them again, or make her own way home. 

“Yeah,” Ron said, scratching Scabbers’ head with a finger. “He’s never seen a pyramid before. It’s a once in a lifetime chance for him.”

Charlie gave him a small smile. “I understand. Make sure he has plenty of water.”

They saw lines of cars, a parking lot filled with tour buses, the smog hovering about the capital city, crowds of muggle tourists, taxis, men running at taxis, people riding camels. The pictures Ron had seen hadn’t accurately portrayed how crowded with living people a necropolis would be. The city of Giza had grown up right next to it. Bill told them they could see the pyramids from fast food restaurants. 

“It makes sense,” Harry said, looking down at the Great Sphinx as they passed overhead, the muggles below oblivious. “We have cemeteries right in the middle of towns. They wouldn’t want to bury their pharaohs far out in the desert.”

“Harry’s right,” Bill said, looking back at them. “The big pyramid is for Khufu, who had a palace in Memphis. That’s a little south from here. People connected to the royal family were buried in the cemeteries.”

“Y-yeah,” Harry said, looking off to the side. “Um, are we landing?”

The carpet had begun a gradual descent. Ron could just make out a ring of runes placed surprisingly close to the Great Pyramid. They landed inside of it, and the carpet rolled itself up in anticipation of its next trip. 

“Gather round everyone,” Ron’s dad said. “Need a picture for the Daily Prophet! They’re writing an article about us.”

Being the shortest, Ron and Harry were in the front with Ginny and their mum. Scabbers climbed onto his shoulder, and Ron felt a pang of sadness when he noticed how light his rat had got. Tamping it down, he put his arms around Harry and Ginny and smiled as his dad set the timer on the camera, running back just in time for the flash.

They spent some time exploring the Giza Necropolis. The pyramids were impressive, and Ron’s dad talked about how remarkable muggles were for having built them without magic, even thousands of years in the past. They looked at the Great Sphinx and its missing nose. Fred and George crawled into one of the tunnels some treasure hunters had dug into it, and came out complaining how dusty and hot it was. 

The pyramids had long since been plundered, the mummies and sarcophagi of the royal families stolen or lost at sea, parts of the bodies used in medieval medicine and experiments. All that was left inside were the empty chambers of the ancient, packed with tourists.

“The really exciting stuff is down river,” Bill told them after they finished exploring. “The tombs the muggles have never discovered, and will never discover while the Ministry and Gringotts control the sites.”

“There aren’t any ghosts here,” Harry said thoughtfully. 

“We met one in a cemetery recently,” Ron explained. “We think he was a squib. Weren’t any of the pharaohs magical?”

“They had witches and wizards,” Bill confirmed, “not that they used those terms. But remaining as a ghost went against their beliefs. A lot of the magic we find in tombs is specifically to make sure people stay dead. When it fails is when we have problems. Or if some British wizard mucked it up somehow when trying to steal the treasures.”

Just as they were getting back on the carpet, Harry froze.

“What is it?” Ron asked, turning to look at whatever Harry was staring at. He didn’t see anything except the various funerary structures, sand, and people.

“I thought I saw a dog,” Harry said, frowning. “A big, black dog.”

“There are a lot of stray dogs around here,” Bill said, also looking. “It was probably just scavenging. Don’t worry about it.”

Harry nodded, a confused look on his face, but when Ron pulled on his sleeve he sat on the carpet with the rest of them. As they flew over the packed streets of Giza, towards where they were staying near the river that night, Ron watched Harry’s expression smooth away and they forgot about stray dogs. 

Having a birthday during the school year was a bit rubbish. It wasn’t as fun when one had classes all day. Their mum still sent Ron, Fred, and George cakes, but Ron envied Harry, Ginny, and Percy. They all got parties.

Not Harry, so much, not when Ron saw how happy the attention made him. Harry had never got parties or presents with the Dursleys. They had a lot of years to make up for.

On Harry’s birthday they were staying in Mit-Rahineh, where the ancient city and capital of the Old Kingdom, Men-nefer, lay in ruin. They had been exploring the rest of the Memphite Necropolis, south of the Great Pyramid at Giza, for several days.

The stepped pyramid of Djoser, the world’s oldest known pyramid, was closed to muggle visitors. Ron saw why when a two-headed skeleton glowing green lunged for him.

Harry knocked him to the ground and Bill rushed over, chanting in an unfamiliar tongue that made the air around the skeleton shudder. Bill didn’t use his wand, but instead a curved object that looked made of ivory. He slashed it through the air. The skeleton collapsed in a pile of bones.

“What the bloody hell was that?” Ron asked, dusting himself off.

“A muggle that broke in,” Bill said. “Cursed by the ancient necromancers for daring to enter the tomb, their bones reanimated to defend it.”

“That was brilliant,” Harry said, staring in awe at the bones. “What was that thing you used?”

Bill held it out for them to look at. “It’s a hippopotamus tusk, one of the three man-eating creatures the Ancient Egyptians feared. They called it a birth tusk, but it’s essentially a wand. The old sorcerers thought that when they did magic they were literally carving ma’at, or order, into the chaotic world. Channeling the will of their gods.”

“Wicked,” Ron said. “Was that Egyptian you spoke?”

“It was,” Bill said with a smile. “A spell from the Book of Coming Forth By Day. You might know it as the Book of the Dead.”

“So it’s necromancy?” Ron asked.

“Not in the way you’re thinking of,” Bill said. “As I mentioned the other day, the Ancient Egyptians were concerned with keeping people dead. Death was sort of a second life, where your soul went through trials in the underworld and, in the end, your heart was weighed by the gods to see if you could enter the afterlife.”

“So instead of raising the dead they…put them down?” Harry asked.

“Exactly. Let’s see what else they’ve got in store for us.”

After their encounter with the multi-headed skeletons, Bill had everyone carve their own sheno, cartouches. They had to work out their own names in hieroglyphs and chisel the symbols into oval amulets. Bill explained that these often worked as barriers to the old spells they might come across, as they were meant to ward off curses.

“It can be symbolic,” Bill said, trying to explain how to read hieroglyphs. It was confusing because it was a very old written language. Sometimes the hieroglyphs represented a sound, sometimes the actual image used. They could be stacked together, read left-to-right or right-to-left. Ron ended up with a circle with a dot in it, which represented the sun, over a squiggly line that looked like water. He was lucky he had such a short name. Harry got a falcon and some reeds.

That evening they had a dinner of thick, garlicky green soup with tender bits of lamb, served with flatbread, then cakes with almonds, flavored with rose water.

Ron was nervous when it was time to give Harry the present he had put together. He’d asked his mum for help, and it had taken them ages to get all the owls back. 

He handed Harry an album he’d found in a second-hand store, a green that almost matched the color of his eyes.

“Me and mum wrote to all of their old school friends,” he explained as Harry opened the cover. Harry paused, staring at the first picture. It was of his parents standing together in the snow. “I asked McGonagall for help…and, well…Happy birthday.”

He had waited until they were back in their room, not wanting an audience for this. As Harry looked at each picture, pictures of his parents and their friends, even a few from when Harry was a baby, he began to silently cry.

When he was done, he closed the album and set it aside. Ron moved to sit next to him, putting an arm around his shoulders.

“Thank you,” Harry said quietly, twisting to hug Ron. “You’re…you’re the best friend I could’ve ever hoped for. Thank you.”