Hermione flushed at that. She couldn’t help it. In all her queries into ritual magic here, everyone said that Harry only ever cast personal magic alone, that to do otherwise would bring outsiders too close to his most intimate of energies. In group ritual he borrowed the magic of others, harnessed it with his own, but only fused with it on a restricted scale. This ritual, Harry had told her, would involve opening up his mind fully to tear Percy’s link to Hermione away, and nobody else was permitted to join.