The supplementary rituals for the five of them were on the twenty-fourth of April.
He designed them from both sources simultaneously — the Black library and the Book of Ravenclaw used as two lenses on the same subject, the places where they agreed being the areas of highest confidence, the places where they disagreed being the areas that required his own judgment, which was now sufficient for the judgment to be worth making. The design took three weeks. He checked it against the ward theory work, the ritual theory notes, the specific individual magical profiles he had been building since third year in the dark-covered notebooks.
Then he checked it again.
The five supplementary rituals were not the same for each person. They were the same in structure and in intent — core deepening, the specific strengthening of the magical self at its most fundamental level — but different in the specific working required for each individual. Harry's and Ginny's was built around the particular quality of his magical core, which had the specific character of something that had been under pressure since before he was conscious and had developed, under that pressure, a kind of resilience that was not toughness but was something more interesting than toughness. Hermione's was built around the precision of her magical control, deepening the precision rather than the capacity, because her capacity was already significant and her precision was the gift worth extending. Neville's was built around the connection between his magic and living things, the specific frequency that made his herbology what it was, extending it to the broader register of magical interaction. Luna's was built around the specific quality of her perception, which Ron had understood since third year was not the eccentricity it appeared to be but the output of a kind of magical sensitivity that was simply operating in a register that most people could not access.
He conducted the five rituals individually, over five evenings. Each took approximately ninety minutes. Each was quiet — not dramatic, not the visible quality of the March ritual, but something deeper and more internal, the specific quality of something fundamental being worked on carefully.
When they were done, the five of them gathered in the Room of Requirements on the Friday evening — not by arrangement, simply because they all arrived there within twenty minutes of each other, which was how things went with this group by April — and sat around the fire. No training. No agenda. Simply: the room, the fire, the group.
Luna was looking at something in the space near the ceiling that the rest of them could not see. Neville was reading. Harry was watching the fire with the specific peaceful quality he had developed across the year, the quality of someone who had space inside himself that had not been there before. Hermione had her notebook open but was not writing in it — just holding it, the specific gesture of someone who was not working but was comfortable with the instruments of work nearby. Ginny was lying down on the floor looking at the ceiling with a blank expression.
Ron looked at the five of them and thought: this is the group in its final form. Whatever comes after — the summer, the last year, the conversation with Dumbledore about the specific shape of the final confrontation — this is what the five years have been building toward. Not the power. Not the rituals. This. Four people who are fully what they are, sitting in a room, after a year of becoming it.
He took a photograph.
Hermione looked up at the sound of the shutter. 'Were we being documented?'
'Yes,' he said.
She considered whether to object. She decided not to. She went back to her notebook, and the firelight was the specific quality of firelight in a room that had been used for good things, and outside the April sky was doing what it did when the year had turned past its darkest point and was moving toward something.
He looked at the photograph in the viewfinder.
He already knew where it went in the album.