Jewel of the Harem: The Grindelwald Continuum Book One

Chapter 4: Dreamtime.

"She had been taught in her childhood that such dependence on magical arts was wrong. It was allowed to search for a glimpse of light in the darkness, and this she had done; but magic must not become a child's leading strings for walking."

--Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon.

A/N: Thanks to all the reviewers, esp..... Mara Jade, Chocagirl23, Peeler (oh, Colin will suffer later on!), SiriusWhite (ummm.... well, let's just say that Ginny never had her wand, shall we?), Angelic01, Rhys, HosistaA, Sky Is Blue, Nurvingiel, Clairvoyant Snake, Scott, Chrismery, Adam1, Magpie Poet, and Fleur 422.

The amount of research I did for this was not to be believed. Every detail was researched (not that that's a guarantee it's all correct, but the research was done!) If you really want to know more, email me. I've called the land of gods and immortals, which lay rather closer to the mortal world in 1566, the Dreamtime. (If you've read Irina's wonderful Morrigan trilogy, she calls pretty much the same idea, the Otherworld. As much as I try to be original, I'm sure I owe a lot to her! ;) ) The name comes from the Australian indigenous peoples, who believed that before the creation of the world we see, all of reality lay in the Dreamtime. My interpretation of 16th century Scottish magic is based on research (Ogham is the ancient Celtic alphabet and is based on tree magic) and, well, the time-honored tradition of making things up. The Ballad of Tam Lin is Childe Ballad #39 and are absolutely authentic to the exact area of sixteenth century Scotland where I put Hogwarts (south of Edinburgh and Leith. Yes, I know, this may not be exactly where JKR put Hogwarts. Ahem. But in MY little world... mwah ha.) This traditional song has been recorded by a lot of folkie musicians, like Steeleye Span, Anne Briggs, Frankie Armstrong, and the Watersons, so I figured it wouldn't be too farfetched to have the Weird Sisters do it. And yes, it will be a big plot point later on. BTW. Nothing you read is filler; it's all important,or will be. By the next chapter update, I will have a character list on another web page you can refer to in case you get confused by all that's thrown at you. (I certainly do sometimes!! And I'm writing it!)

Just to clarify things a bit, Ginny is halfway through her fifth year, and the rest are halfway through their sixth. Ginny is fifteen and will turn sixteen in two months; Draco is sixteen and will turn seventeen a few days after the events of this chapter. In some ways, they are far more mature than Muggle teenagers would be at the same age; and in some ways, too, much less so. And don't worry; Marie-France Tessier is NOT Draco's first cousin (they're third cousins once removed,) and this is NOT their love story; Ginny is his passion and obsession. But she's important. You'll understand when we get to the detailed flashback of Draco's past year, a couple of chapters from now. Now that's a chapter that will earn its R. ;)

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When Ginny had come home after being released from St. Mungo's the summer after her first year, she had been exhausted in body, sick in mind, sick in soul. If she even had a soul any longer, which she doubted. It had rained all that August, and she had spent a great deal of time sitting at the desk in her room and staring out at the gray dreary landscape. At last, she had taken to her bed, mumbling something about being ill. She understood later that she had been very ill indeed.

She'd had a strange Muggle flu that responded to no charm or potion. The mediwitch had told her parents, privately, that Ginny had no resistance left. Their frightened eyes had absorbed the unspoken truth. Their daughter might not survive. It was only after she'd recovered that Ginny understood how terribly afraid everyone had been for her, and it touched her. At least, to the degree that anything could touch her anymore. When Ginny had lain in her bed day after day, however, burning with a fever nothing could quench, everything had seemed blessedly calm. She'd floated on an untroubled sea, letting her very self drift away across the uncharted waters, forgetting both love and grief. She had floated very far.

She could actually feel the faintness of the silver thread that still connected her to land. It had frayed to the point of breaking, and there was a great light on the far shore. In the boat with her was a beautiful dark girl with an Egyptian ankh around her neck and a smile of such surpassingly sweetness that Ginny woke from dreams of it, long after, with tears upon her face.

Lady Death, Lady Death, she had whispered, take me with you, enfold me in your last long embrace, and we will sail to the shore where there is no darkness.

But the girl had only shaken her head.

Ginny had lived, of course, and returned to the greyness of the world, the world that was like dust and ashes in her mouth. She sometimes wondered if she would have come back at all if it hadn't been for Ron, who sat at her bedside all day and all night until her mother would pull him away and put him, protesting, to bed. Her brother's hand had held hers for hours upon hours, anchoring her almost against her will to the dreary earth. But she never forgot the endless peace of drifting, drifting towards the sweetness of death.

Traveling through the clock tower was just like that.

For a timeless stretch of time, Ginny floated bodiless through space.

Something formless seized at her and pulled the breath out of her lungs. The drifting peace vanished instantly. She struggled against the thing, panicked, flailing blindly in a void. "Let go! Let go!" she sobbed, wordlessly.

And then she hit a dreadfully hard, bumpy surface and skidded across it, coming to rest behind something very large. She lay still, her arms and legs splayed out, struggling for breath. Someone else was breathing loudly as well, gasping for each lungful of air. Ginny scrunched herself behind the thing and peered around it. Her own head seemed to be sloshing around in a sea of dizziness, and her bare feet burned with cold.

The other person was Hermione, lying still as death on the other side of a grass-covered mound. A tumulus, Ginny thought, like the ones in Ireland. It rose too abruptly from the earth to be entirely natural. The moon rode high in the night sky, but it was nearly at the full, spilling its cold white light across her friend's prone body. Hermione's eyes were closed and her eyebrows were shockingly dark against her pale face. Ron knelt next to her, shaking her by the shoulder.

"Come on, Hermione, wake up! You've got to wake up, you can't be-- oh please, you can't be--" His face was white, too, and his eyes were full of fear.

"Mmm," said Hermione.

"Sit up," said Ron, his voice shaky with relief.

"Can't." She fell back into his arms, her body limp. He shook her.

"Talk to me. Say something in that bossy voice of yours so I know you're alive."

"I am not-- bossy--"

"Tell me how we got here."

"Can't-- hurts--"

"Hermione!" Ron's voice grew sharp. "Come on, you know I'm just a stupid prat who doesn't understand this sort of thing. You need to explain it to me. "

"Magic wormhole." Hermione's voice grew stronger. "What Muggles call a time machine. Professor Moody found out about the Jewel of the Harem-- how the times were drawing together, and the great evil was at hand. He agreed to take us. We're--" She sat up slightly and looked about her. "We're here," she breathed. "It worked. Oh Ron, it worked!" But the effort of speaking started her coughing, and she closed her eyes again, leaning against him.

"Hermione, don't go out on me now," Ron said urgently. "Uh-- why isn't there a clock tower? I'm dumb and I don't understand."

"Because there isn't any clock tower until next year. Honestly, Ron! You never did read Hogwarts: A History, did you?"

"All right, if it worked, where are we?"

"Hogwarts... I think... it is the Forbidden Forest, isn't it?" she asked uncertainly.

"Far as I know." Ron shrugged. "This is the clearing, all right."

Ginny looked overhead, holding her head between her two hands in an attempt to control the wrenching vertigo that resulted. The oak trees surrounding her were all old beyond measuring, gnarled and twisted dark shapes. Surely such trees would have been marked out as a source of earth magic, and all the students would have seen the grove, or visited it with a Herbology class, or at least heard about it. The air was utterly fresh and cold and clean; she could hear the caw of ravens overhead, and the great trees around the clearing stood still and watchful. Something was different. Very different. Suddenly, she was sure that no place like this existed at the Hogwarts she knew. The knowledge made her feel as if something was creeping just beneath her skin, ready to strike. She squeezed her eyes closed briefly.

"We really did it," said Hermione. "And it's Yule, or nearly, it must be. I can feel the strength of the magic right now." She still leaned up against Ron, but Ginny had a rather strong feeling that it was from choice, not necessity. Her friend's eyes looked searchingly into those of her brother. "You were really that worried?"

"Well, yes," Ron said casually. Only Ginny, who knew him so well, saw the faint trembling of his hands. "Moody couldn't find a sixth for the team. We really can't afford to lose anyone else."

"I don't understand why it happened at all." Hermione's voice was very irritated, and Ginny thought she heard a faint thread of disappointment. Oh, Hermione, if you'd grown up with him you'd know what that tone of voice really means! "It felt as if something reached out towards us and sucked every bit of energy out of me, and it shouldn't have...It would be different if we hadn't been going into the past."

If we weren't-- what? Ginny sat bold upright and was rewarded by a spinning right in the center of the stomach that slumped her back to the ground.

"Yes, I know. 'The future splits into an infinite diverging series,'" Ron quoted in a sing-song voice. "'The human body, at its cellular level, attempts to split as well, to follow each of the possible futures. To travel any stretch beyond a few hours into the future is to court almost certain death. Backwards time travel, however, is a very different matter. According to Steven Hawking's theory of--'"

"All right, I believe you read the book." Hermione cuffed Ron lightly on the arm.

"You must feel better, you're hitting me. You abusive wench, you," said Ron, and then he leaned down and kissed her, slowly, lingeringly. Ginny looked away discreetly.

"Wench. Humph," sniffed Hermione.

"We're in the sixteenth century now. Didn't they use words like that?"

"We're supposed to talk to the people of 1566 as little as possible, remember?" Hermione sighed and leaned back against Ron. "I suppose I'm all right, really. I might have known I'd have the most problems with the trip. At least we all used the Portkey first. That helped, so the dislocation of space wasn't so bad."

1566. 1566. Ginny knew she needed to come out from behind the bramble bush, to tell them she was here, but everything she had heard seemed to be rooting her feet into the ground.

1566.

Over four hundred years in the past. It wasn't possible.

The parchment. The timelines. The weird drawings of inverted cones and hex-signs and mathematical equations.

But it couldn't be, it just couldn't. Ginny knew about time-turners; Hermione had explained them to her, but this was magic more forbidden than all the dark arts put together.

--but--

She understood, now, what they had all been keeping from her. Understood the whispered conferences in dark corners of the halls, the low murmuring in Hermione's room late at night when Ginny crept down the corridor and pressed her ear against the door, trying to hear; understood the blank faces they were forever turning to her, the conversations that stopped the instant she entered the room, the sheer weight of secrecy. And Professor Moody-- The very thought that a teacher had organized this thing made her blood run cold. How? When? Why?

And what was this mysterious thing they had mentioned, the Jewel of the Harem?

She focussed her ears. They were continuing to speak.

"Has anyone ever actually tried to go into the future?" Ron asked curiously.

"A few times. There was a horrible experiment some dark wizard or other did at the end of last summer. They sent house elves one day ahead." Hermione shuddered. "About half of them died."

"Who was it?" asked Ron.

"Let's just say that the Ministry of Magic brought Lucius Malfoy in for some friendly questioning."

Ron's eyebrows shot up almost to the roots of his dark red hair. "Really? Do you suppose--"

"They were never able to prove anything. I doubt they tried very hard."

They were silent for a moment, and Ginny was gathering her strength for another attempt at getting up when Hermione spoke again.

"Oh God," she said.

"What? Are you feeling worse?" asked Ron with a sudden catch in his voice.

"No. I know why it happened!"

Hermione leaped to her feet and stood unsteadily. "Harry! Neville! Professor!" she called in a voice filled with urgency.

Ginny heard the sound of footfalls on the frozen turf and, looking up, saw Neville running from the opposite direction, Professor Moody following them more slowly, stumping along on his pegleg. Harry followed him, moving very unsteadily and holding his head.

"We got through," Neville was saying excitedly. "All of us, we managed it! I don't mind telling you that I was a bit worried, I was pretty sure I'd never make it--"

Harry covered his face with his hands. "For the love of God, Neville, don't talk. My brains are coming out my ears as it is."

"Oh. I'm sorry." Neville wilted. "You know, whenever anyone tells me to shut up, I always shut up. Gran always said that I was very good at shutting up; she'd say, 'Neville, my dear boy, your capacities may be limited, but you certainly do know when to shut up,' and--"

"Everyone all right?" growled Professor Moody, leaning on a staff. He looked none too steady himself, and the bottom edge of his dark cloak swayed. They were all wearing the same kind of shapeless black cloak, Ginny realized, and they each carried a bulky cloth pack. Hermione was clutching onto hers, shaking her head repeatedly as if to clear it and trying to speak again.

"Professor--" she said shakily. "Listen to me, please, I just realized something--" Ron reached up to put a hand on her arm and she shook it off.

"She's in some sort of shock," he said with a hurt look.

"I am most certainly not in shock!" snapped Hermione.

"When you bring along a witch as brilliant as Miss Granger, you'd best listen to her," said Moody. "What is it?"

"The Malfoys and the Death Eaters are right behind us," she blurted. Neville jumped at least two feet in the air and Harry gripped his wand tightly. "No, I don't mean like that!" she added impatiently. "I don't mean they're here this minute. But they're coming after us. They have to be. I felt this-- awful loss of energy when I was going through, did any of you feel it too?"

The others looked at her, their anxious faces alternately concealed and revealed by the clouds scudding past the moon.

"Yes, I suppose I did," Harry finally said, "but that might have meant anything."

"I know what it means, what it has to mean." Hermione took a deep breath. "They're tracking us."

Moody nodded. "They're traveling on our time signature. Malfoy Manor has one of the four clock towers on the circuit; they can all be used, but it's only the Hogwarts tower a wizard could be tracked from. And that's what they did. We knew this might happen; our sources of information may not know all we could wish, but Lucius Malfoy's been trying to do the same thing we've been doing for over a year now. And you might just as well put those away," he added, glancing at the four wands drawn from their holsters. Their owners all stared at the grizzled professor as if he'd gone mad.

"They don't work here," Moody added, in slightly gentler tones.

"They don't-- what?" squeaked Neville.

"Go on. Try."

Neville looked as if he was rather beyond the ability to recall his own name, much less any spells, but at last he said "Lumos" in a quavering voice. Nothing happened.

"Out of the way," said Ron impatiently, pointing at a patch of dry leaves on the ground. "Incendio." They did not burst into flame. His face blanched. "Harry? I reckon there's something wrong with my wand. Try yours."

"All right," said Harry. "Something easy.. ah... Accio Hermione's backpack." The bag stayed on the ground.

"What's wrong?" asked Hermione. "Did time travel have some sort of effect on our wands? Or-- oh!" She put her hand to her mouth.

Moody shook his head. "Magic works in the context of a specific time and place. Don't know if you've all learned this yet, but Granger knows, I'd say. The matrix for these wands is over four hundred years in the future. A different world, really, and you'll learn that all too well-- a little book studying could never tell you how different it really is here. For one, wizards and witches in 16th century Scotland rarely use wands, and in the Ottoman Empire they don't know what they are. So yours don't work, and they won't work."

"Well then, what's the bloody point of doing anything?" Ron demanded angrily. "We can't stand against the Malfoys and the Death Eaters without wands!" He leaped to his feet none too steadily and placed himself in front of Hermione, as if to protect her from dangers lurking unseen behind every bush and tree. Moody held up a hand.

"If they're tracking us then they couldn't leave until after we'd started to go through the wormhole. So they started out behind us and they'll stay that way. Perhaps no more than an hour, but if we leave now we'll be all right. There's a carriage waiting for us just outside the grounds; I arranged for it when I was last here."

"In Hogsmeade?" asked Harry.

"Yes-- the only other way out is through the Forbidden Forest. And the Forest you know is an amusement park compared to the one that you see now, in 1566."

The night pressed in around them, and the trees seemed to leaning closer, listening. Moody looked at them all with keen eyes. "It isn't safe to stay even here too long. There's too much magic, and it isn't magic we know or understand; too close to the feast of Yule, too many eyes might be watching us, and not human eyes, either... We've got to leave. The Ban-Righ sails in three days at low tide from Leith, and we'd bloody well better be there." He turned around and began stumping off in the other direction almost before he'd finished speaking; Neville helped Harry, Ron, and Hermione up, one by one, and they followed along a winding path that led away from the clearing. Now was the moment to reveal herself. Ginny quailed at the thought of the shocked faces and furious questions. But there was nothing else for it. She stood.

The world tilted away from her feet so swiftly that she barely felt her head hit the ground, or the brambles scratching along her arm, as she fell into darkness.

Ginny awoke to a bitterly cold wind blowing through her hair, and she shivered deeply. She couldn't have been unconscious long or she'd have frozen to death, but there was no trace of Harry, Hermione, Ron, Neville, or Professor Moody. Slowly, she sat up. Her weakness and dizziness were gone, but she felt curiously empty and unformed. She looked around, now noticing things she hadn't seen before. The trees were black and bare and skeletal, but-- she blinked-- she could see larkspur and bluebonnets growing at the edge of a stream running through the edge of the clearing and into the woods. The gurgling sound of the water made Ginny realize how terribly thirsty she was. She walked to the stream and dipped her hands into it, slurping up the most delicious water she had ever tasted, rinsing her face and wiping it on her white cotton blouse. She'd drunk her fill before she realized that the water wasn't frozen, wasn't even particularly cold. The earth where she stood was warm, too. But when she took a few steps away from the edge of the forest, the rock-hard ground bit icily at her bare feet again.

Every one of the fine blonde hairs on her arms rose in a purely instinctive reaction of animal fear. The blood along one arm had dried, she saw now; she tried to wash it off, but scraping at the injured skin only made it sting unbearably. Ginny studied her blurred reflection in a still pool at one edge of the stream, trying desperately to find something familiar, something that might calm her a little. But she looked indescribably strange to herself, her face white and terrified. Then she saw what was behind her.

A curved stone wall loomed up to the midnight sky, surrounding a castle, and on the ramparts stood archers, their bows at the ready.

Ginny could hear her heart thumping, thumping, thumping through her chest. She forced herself to turn as slowly as she could, her hands raised in the air. The defenders of the walls wore some sort of leggings and leather jerkins, with lengths of differently colored plaid wrapped about them and held by silver pins. Their hair was long and dark, and their faces were very fair but without any expression at all. Then they let their arrows fly. The tock! sound seemed to reach her ears very, very slowly. She was so paralyzed by fear that she literally couldn't move a muscle, although she thought later that staying still was probably the smartest thing she could have done. The arrows passed so close to Ginny's head that she could feel a breath of air on each side of her hair. Then they lodged harmlessly in the ground.

The tallest archer raised her head; Ginny could already see that it was a woman. And although she could never remember quite seeing how, the huntress seemed to come down from the wall all at once, without taking any noticeable time in doing it. Then she was walking towards Ginny, perhaps ten yards away. Now, by a trick of the light, she seemed to have come from the grass-covered mound. A hollow hill, Ginny remembered. The domain of the faerie folk. Wish I'd paid attention in History of Magic class that day. Looking at her, Ginny felt the stirring of some magic so alien to her own that it set shivers down her back. I thought I was so clever at school, she thought wonderingly, but I really learned so little at Hogwarts. Spells and potions and wand-waving... but this... but this...

Ginny watched the woman, her brows knitting. The longer she stared, the more unclear the archer's appearance was. It was as if she moved in a nimbus of Confundus charms. At first Ginny thought she looked like Lady Death in her dream, or vision, or whatever it had been; then she didn't, and she was never able to make up her mind on that point.

When she was nearly face to face with Ginny, the woman stopped. The air before her shimmered and steadied. Her eyes were pools of blackness, and her dark hair streamed down her back beneath a long black veil. Her robes fell in dark folds with shimmers of crimson light. On her forehead was the full moon, painted blue.

She was the figure Ginny had seen in the Priestess card when she had done the Tarot reading in Professor Trelawney's office the day before.

"What do you here, Gwenhyfar?" she asked. Her voice was musical and deep, almost too deep for a woman.

Ginny gaped. The full moon shone overhead, and she was undoubtedly standing on a patch of grass in a forest. She could feel her stomach rumbling with hunger, and the bottoms of her bare feet were cold, a little sore from walking on the hard ground. She stepped away from the creek at the edge of the forest, and a wave of bitter cold hit her. She pinched the underside of her arm surreptitiously. It hurt. This was real. Real. Yet here she was talking to a woman from a Tarot card. "I--I came with my friends," she said stupidly.

"Ah." The woman regarded Ginny. She moved a little, her hair falling back slightly, and Ginny saw that it was fastened behind her with a black velvet band.

She ran through every magical category in her head, trying desperately to find something familiar, some peg to hang this woman on. Ginny knew that she wasn't a veela or a Norn or a cailleach, not a Valkyrie, nor a zombi. She'd never actually seen any of these beings except for a veela anyway, and that was only because Fleur Delacour had come from France to visit her brother Bill last summer holidays. But it was impossible, too, to get any sort of fix on her. The woman's face seemed to be constantly shifting and changing, as if her flesh were only a thin veil of matter fixed over what she really was, whatever that might be. One moment her hair was dark; the next it flashed gold, red, and even grey; her eyes glinted blue or green, and then were fathomless darkness again. "Who are you?" she finally asked.

"I have many names. But you may call me Rhiannon, when I take on this form for your eyes," said the woman, a faint smile upon her face. "That name will do as well as any other."

Ginny knitted her brow, dimly remembering a long-ago lesson. Rhiannon... that means "great queen" in some language or other, the old Cornish tongue maybe... "Are you the Queen of the Faerie Folk then, lady?"

"I have dominion over this place," Rhiannon said. "But beware of trusting what you see, Gwenhyfar. The eyes may be deceived."

"Why did you shoot at me?" Ginny asked flatly.

Rhiannon raised her eyebrows mockingly, as if this foolish mortal girl had just shown that she was utterly unaware of the proprieties of a conversation such as this-- although Ginny could never have said how, she knew that the woman was neither mortal nor human.

"You missed," Ginny continued, feeling a bit like a first-year Hogwarts student sticking her tongue out at Voldemort.

"Missed?" Rhiannon made a gesture with her hand, turning. An archer from the top of the ramparts let an arrow fly from his bow. Before Ginny could move or speak a word, she felt something whizzing past her and thudding into a tree, jerking back her head. She reached up to touch it gingerly. The arrow had gone through the center of her silver hoop earring, pinning her ear to the tree trunk. Her mouth opened and closed several times, but no words would come out. "When my people shoot, they do not miss," said Rhiannon, almost idly. She reached down with strong white hands-- as tall as Ginny was, the woman was a full head taller-- and pulled the earring free. "Come, walk with me." She started down the winding path that Harry, Hermione, Ron, Neville, and Moody had used, and Ginny followed her.

"Your friends have gone before you, unknowing," Rhiannon said in a tone that was almost conversational. "So what will you do now, Gwenhyfar?"

"I-- I don't know," said Ginny. "Why do you call me that?"

"It is your name."

"But--" Ginny couldn't seem to collect her thoughts; they lay scattered about her like spring leaves after a storm.

They turned a curve in the little path that wound about the tumulus, and the moon shone full on the castle behind the winding wall. Ginny gasped. "It's Hogwarts! But smaller, and not quite so-- it's the Hogwarts in the painting. The painting I saw. That's what it is! It really is 1566."

Rhiannon nodded. "As you would reckon the time."

A blessed feeling of relief swept over Ginny. "It's all right then! All I need to do is to find the headmaster, it's Nicolas Flamel now I think, and he'll know what to do. I can stay here until he can figure out some way of getting me back!" She started towards the great gate in the wall. But a single touch from Rhiannon held her back. The woman's hands were stronger than anything else she'd ever felt. When she looked up, she saw that the archers had their bows at the ready again, arrows pointed towards her.

"That way is closed to you," said Rhiannon.

Ginny stared at her incredulously. "You can't mean that. You can't."

"You have a very long road to travel, little Gwenhyfar, before you may return."

"But then where can I go, what can I do?" Ginny pled frantically.

"You shall do what you must do. You must walk the path fate has appointed to you, through fire and sword, snake and dragon's tooth." Rhiannon's voice grew even deeper than before. "Beware the king who is no king, Gwenhyfar, Gwenhyfar, for that which is whole cannot be divided..."

That almost sounds like what Professor Trelawney said to me, thought Ginny. Oh, none of this makes any sense at all! "I can't get into Hogwarts," she said, struggling to hold onto some scrap of logical thinking, "and I can't stay here. Does that mean that I have to find my friends?" Rhiannon's eyes on her were answer enough.

"But I can't!" burst out Ginny. "I can't, this is insane! I don't have anything to eat or anywhere to sleep or any shoes and I don't know the way, and I don't have my wand--" She caught at Rhiannon's hand. Normally, she would have died of shame at such an outburst, especially since she didn't trust the dark queen an inch, but nothing mattered in the face of the fear she felt. "I'm not even sixteen years old yet," she said brokenly. "I can't. I can't."

The lady's face was almost kindly. "Never name that well from which you will not drink, Gwenhyfar."

"If this matter so much then come with me. If you have the power, then take me where I need to go! You do, I know you do."

Rhiannon shook her head. "Even if I would walk this road with you, I could not. For my power has dwindled, dwindled. My followers have diminished. The world has been changing, Gwenhyfar, for a long time, at least as mortals would reckon it. The time of the great evil is at hand. Either our hope comes soon, or else all hope's end."

Ginny felt the frozen grass under her cheek; she had sunk to the ground and was crying. The dark queen watched steadily, no emotion upon her beautiful face. I'll just lie here and cry, Ginny thought. I really could. I could just cry and cry until I freeze to death and wild animals run out of the forest to eat me. I can't ever leave this spot again. I'll stay here until Draco Malfoy comes through that oak and--

Dragon's tooth!

Hermione had said that the Malfoys were right behind them, perhaps no more than an hour. That was what she had felt when she was traveling through the worlds, that sense of possession as he seized her and tracked her here. How long had she lain unconscious? Ginny's head jerked up wildly; she half expected to see Draco striding towards her that very moment, the familiar half-sneer on his face. The image stirred something in her that was part excitement, part fear. But-- and the thought struck her with pure loathing and terror-- his father would be with him. Of course he would. The familiar impotent rage went all through her. She hated Lucius Malfoy with all her heart and soul; if it hadn't been for him, she herself would never have been caught by the diary when she was only eleven years old; oh damn him, damn him for making her feel this way, beaten, afraid, lost.

Ginny simply cowered on the ground like a frightened animal for a long, long moment. A roe deer, perhaps, with great golden eyes, waiting for the predators to close in. And the dark huntress-queen Rhiannon stared down at her all the while. Her eyes were not scornful, not judging, not mocking; it could not really be said that they were anything. But still she stared.

At last, Ginny had cried through all the tears that were in her. There was a great exhausted peace in her chest now. Sniffling, she sat up, leaning against a tree. The trunk was very old, gnarled, and strong. She looked up at the brilliantly black velvet sky, wisps of clouds chasing each other across the moon.

All her life, she had been protected, cosseted, and sheltered. Her family had been unable to keep her from the evil that withered some part of her soul when she was barely twelve years old, but their efforts had only redoubled after that. They had wrapped her in cotton wool. And she knew, with a sudden, cold clarity, that it had not been wise. Life had now snatched her from their loving grasp, and she was not prepared.

Her brothers, her mother, her father, her beloved house at Ottery St-Catchpole. The white dimity curtains in her room, swaying in the gentle breeze from the window. Her narrow child's bed with its white lace coverlet. Waiting, waiting for her to return. But only the gods knew if she ever would. They lay further from her than if they were separated by all the seven seas.

She almost seemed to see all her family crowded in that room, waving at her. Her dear dumpy mother with an apron tied around her ample waist; her father, his thinning reddish hair sticking up in wisps, his glasses perpetually askew, his robes rumpled. Bill and Charlie, leaning up against the window with their arms folded; their faces filled with the kindly-uncle love of older brothers who had been half-grown when she was born. Percy looking at her uncertainly, itching to go back to writing something in a ledger, his priggishness somehow dear and familiar now. Fred and George smiling at her mischievously, all their miserable teasing of her and her fiery threats of revenge against them forgotten. Ron. Dearest to her, and closest to her heart. Oh gods, but that was where the iron bit. She wanted to fall into wild weeping at the thought that she was sundered from him now.

All waving at her. All retreating from her. How vast was the gulf that now separated her from them. If she tried to go to them, to grasp them as they faded, she would seize only a sea of formless sparkling memories, both bitter and sweet. So she looked at them, and loved them, and let them go. And the thought came to her that beneath all the well-meant smothering protectiveness she'd received from them was a mysterious core of herself, one buried so deeply that she had never called on it before.

Ginny took a deep breath and rose to her feet.

"What way can I take, lady?" she asked.

Rhiannon nodded slightly, as if Ginny had passed a test she hadn't even known she faced. "There are two paths," she said. "One is the King's High Road to the port of Leith, that which the Romans built. It winds all about the forest."

"That's the way they went, Harry and Ron and -- But I can't. I'll freeze to death," said Ginny.

"Then there is the forest road." Rhiannon turned and pointed a long white finger towards the massive trees. A path wound between two oaks and into the heart of an impenetrable darkness.

"But it's dangerous. Professor Moody said so. It isn't safe to go there even in my time, and now--" Ginny shuddered uncontrollably from merely looking at the dark trees. And perhaps a little, too, from her fleeting half-memory of only time she had ever been in the Forbidden Forest, the one that both was and was not what she saw now.

"Nothing within my forest will harm the pure of heart."

Ginny gave a short, bitter laugh when she heard that. The lady continued to speak.

"And the road lends wings to the feet of mortals, Gwenhyfar. But you must not stray from the path. And you must not look back. For that way lies the Dreamtime."

Ginny pretended she hadn't heard what Rhiannon had said. She stared into the darkness for a very long time.

"Wait," said Rhiannon. Ginny hadn't even realized that the lady was still there. "One gift for you I have."

"What?" Ginny asked ungraciously.

She took something from around her neck and fastened it about Ginny's. "You have a parchment in your pocket that is torn from the Kitap-an Düs, the Book of Dreams."

Slowly, Ginny drew it out. She would have been shocked that Rhiannon knew what was in her pocket, except that she felt curiously numb, as if nothing could shock her now.

"So what do I do with it?"

"Fold it into fours."

Ginny did so, and she felt Rhiannon reach up around her neck. The woman touched the necklace, or whatever it was, she had just given to Ginny. It popped open, and she saw that it was a silver locket with a chased engraving of a bird on its front. A pheonix, perhaps, or some sort of eagle, with a spray of laurel leaves in one claw and a quiver of arrows in the other. Rhiannon took the folded scrap of parchment and placed it inside, snapping it shut. "Now go," she said.

Ginny shivered, feeling the sudden cold wind that had sprung up. She tried not to think about it. Rhiannon's dark eyes were on her. Weighing. Measuring. Was she supposed to say something more?

"Uh--" Thank you were the words that came to mind, the ones her mother had taught her to say, but she didn't feel very thankful. Ginny tucked the locket beneath her shirt and hesitated just one more moment where she stood behind the elderberry bush, fearing to stay where she was, fearing even more to set out on the road. And in that moment, her pursuers came through the worlds and into the clearing.

Something alerted her; she couldn't have said what it was. Perhaps it was simply that even without her wand she still felt magic. A deep shiver of awareness. Ginny turned to see a line of black-cloaked figures materializing from thin air, one by one. They stepped gravely into the circular clearing. Run! screamed through her mind. Run! Yet her feet were frozen to the spot. Without her volition, her hand crept up to clutch the silver locket around her neck. One of her fingernails popped the catch, and she absently stroked the surface of the parchment, scarcely realizing what she was doing.

The tall figure at the head of the line lifted its head. A faint shimmer of ashy-blond hair, cruelly handsome features, flat, cold grey eyes. Lucius Malfoy. If there was ever a moment to leave, this was it; or at least that was what kept thrumming through her brain, but her legs didn't seem capable of obeying. The solemn, measured procession of the cloaked ones was hypnotizing her against her will. She dimly remembered snippets of conversation she'd overheard when nobody knew she was listening, and knew who they were, who they must be, although she'd never actually seen them before. The Death Eaters. Hermione had been absolutely right.

The cloaked one behind Lucius moved with such grace that Ginny simply watched its steps, almost like a dance in the cloud-flickered moonlight. She barely even realized how close it was getting to her. Then it stopped, held up a slender hand and turned. Its hood fell back completely. The moon shone down bright as daylight, giving an unearthly glow to the slanted silver eyes of Draco Malfoy.

He-- he couldn't possibly see me behind this bush, but he's looking at me! He knows I'm here! Ginny was suddenly sure of it, but she still couldn't move, couldn't leave the spot. He had captured her, and there was no escape.

Ad even as she stared at him, frozen, terrified, she realized that she saw something else-- someone else-- beside and behind Draco. But there was nothing there to see. A dizzying wave of darkness rushed over her. I've felt this before. Where, when?

The beginning of second year, she remembered. When she was on the Hogwarts train with Harry and Ron and Hermione, and the cloaked dementors had passed by her in the corridor. As those undead things had been, what she now saw, she knew, was no living man. It--he-- was a shadow of malice and darkness, looming behind Draco like the spectre of death itself. Her knees threatened to buckle. The forest lay behind her and there was no way of escape.

But there was, and even through her terror, she knew what it was. It was the only way.

Dropping the locket to swing on its chain, Ginny turned and ran as fast as she could in the other direction, keeping the massive trees between her and the Death Eaters. She had gone nearly a mile before it dawned on her. She had set her feet inexorably on the forest path that had terrified her so. There was no way out, now, but through.

********************************

All during the journey, he had held the jeweled book that held him to her; all through the worlds and times, he traced her by the silver cord that connected them. No matter how thin it stretched, he knew that he would not lose her. Draco had saved Ginny's life only two days before, however little he had meant to do it. He really had only clutched at her instinctively when she went over the balustrade on the night of the Yule Ball; he supposed that the reflexes of a Quidditch seeker had been to blame for that. But she would have died if not for his actions, and that tied them by a bond that could never be broken. Ah, it's more than that, a voice whispered in his head, but he ignored it. What about all those nights, hour after hour after hour, lying sleepless in your bed in the Slytherin dormitory after kicking out Xanthia or Milicent or Sadina, seeing Ginny Weasley's face luminous against the darkness in your mind's eye, and--

There seemed to be no way to shut the voice up as Draco floated through dimensionless space. Also, it had a penchant for run-on sentences.

Then he felt himself hitting something cold and hard, and smelled green grass as his face skidded across the earth.

Slowly, Draco picked himself up, glancing around him. Something about these trees looked familiar. The shape of them, and something about the way they grew, the way they leaned towards each other. He was in the Forbidden Forest, he'd swear to it. But it looked wilder, older, the trees more imposing. Darker, somehow. Of course it's darker, you twit. It's the middle of the night. But this clearing... he didn't recognize it, and he knew, with a sudden chill, that it could not exist in the forest he knew. He'd flown over it through far too many pre-dawn hours that fall to not be sure of that. He took a deep breath, savouring the sweetness of the air, more full of wild things and green things that the air of his day. We did it. We really did it. We're here, in the year 1566.

And the other black-cloaked figures moved to stand about him, seeming to come out of the hollow hill, one by one. He had led them all here, he realized; he had tracked Ginny Weasley to find this place, this time. Draco smiled slightly. Good. It was always good to be the leader; it set the tone well for the future of this entire endeavor.

But then there was no time to think about anything more, because the link between him and her was intensifying, and on the other side of the tumulus he saw her, closed his eyes and only saw her more intensely, as if she glowed white-hot in the moon-dappled darkness. Ginny was on the other side of a large bramble bush. She raised her head, like a deer scenting danger, and for an instant their eyes met. Hers held sheer terror.

"It's her," he said to his father, who was standing behind him. "Ginny Weasley. I see her, she's here."

Don't move, he whispered to her in his mind, almost gently. Don't run. What's the point, really? We've caught you. I've caught you. He wondered dimly if the rest were behind her somewhere in the darkness, where he couldn't see them, Potter and her brother and the mudblood and the rest. But it didn't matter. Only Ginny Weasley mattered.

He stood there, holding her with his eyes, and felt the Death Eaters mass behind him like an army of darkness. Oh, what a glorious feeling that was. He felt the shadowy presence of Lord Grindelwald whispering approval, giving strength. He felt the long muscles in his thighs tighten, readying themselves to move him forward, and the sinews in his hands clench in anticipation of feeling her wrists trapped within his encircling fingers.

Oh, you're mine. You're mine, he told Ginny silently.

"Now," he said aloud.

And even as he took the first step towards her, she turned and vanished into the forest.

Draco was startled at that, but the forward momentum of them all was too strong to halt. The wave of black-cloaked figures surged onto the path.

****************************************

Afterwards, Ginny was never able to piece together the voyage through the forest. It was a journey that took an eternity and no time at all. It ran through a land unlike any she had ever seen or known. But she thought that she had dreamed of it, perhaps, when she was most deeply descended into sleep. Later, all she could seem to bring to her mind, thinking of where it might be, was a fairy story her mother used to tell her before she closed her eyes in her narrow child's bed at night. "Once upon a time," the story began, "east of the sun and west of the moon..." That was where she had wandered. East of the sun, and west of the moon.

She'd been in the Forbidden Forest one year before, of course, in her own time --I won't think of that, I won't-- But even that had not been like this, nothing like this. Ginny shivered, and turned her face straight ahead. Just the way she had been taught to ride a broom when she'd first been learning in her backyard. "Don't look down," her brother Bill had said, "and you won't fall off." She began to sing the words of a song on the Weird Sisters' latest album, and the sound of her voice, so lost and scared at first, quickly strengthened.

"O I forbid you, maidens all,

That wear gold on your hair

To come or go by Edinburgh,

For young Tam Lin is there.

There's none that goes by forest road

But must leave him a pledge

Either their mantles of green

Or else their maidenhead.

Now gold rings you may buy

Green mantles you may spin

But if you lose your maindenhead,

You'll ne'er get that again."

Ginny snickered at the last verse. Oh, the trouble she'd gotten into at home when her mother heard her singing it, last summer! But the sound of her laughter was so strange in that forest, on that dark path winding ahead to greater darkness, that the very trees seemed to lean down and listen. She gulped and continued on.

Only the strength of Ginny's will kept her feet on the path, and her face from looking back. She was never sure if she was walking through this world or not. Often, she was sure she wasn't. It was not cold in the forest, and not warm. Her feet felt no stones beneath them, and no winter wind blew upon her face. There were times when she heard the faraway sound of singing, and saw rings of dancers with long silver hair holding hands around great bonfires. It seemed that she went down to them and sang more sweetly than she ever had before, and that she lay in the arms of one of them and heard the sighing of the sea beneath a bed of pine boughs. And then there were times when she seemed to be walking into the past, and through the day one year ago when she had been in the Forbidden Forest. Lost. Running away from her friends, the book clutched in her hands. Drawing closer and closer to the--

But then she blinked, and realized that she was only standing at the very edge of the path, one of her feet about to step into the forest. Rhiannon's words came back to her, ringing in her ears. You must not stray from the path. And you must not look back.

Ginny continued to walk, struggling to think about something logical, reasonable. What would Hermione think of at a time like this? The silver locket Rhiannon had given her. She forced her mind full of the locket, wondering what it really was. An amulet? Some sort of talisman? Her fingers went up to stroke the silver. The smooth surface felt oddly comforting.

Open the locket, a low voice whispered. . A male voice, and one of such strength that it might easily have been harsh, or perhaps that was only from the soft guttural accent, German, she thought it was. But a deliciously hypnotic voice, soothing, caressing. Her fingernail picked at the silver seam between the two halves. Then Ginny realized what she was doing, and yanked her hand away. She kept her eyes fixed resolutely on the path.

She walked on, and the sky and earth whispered to her in languages that no human had ever heard before. The vast net of branches above her head seemed to be weaving themselves into a pattern. It teased at her mind, because if she looked at it long enough it would surely turn into something that made sense. And the pattern became-- yes! she could see it now-- the web of spells binding the god Loki, as she had seen him in the portrait hall at Hogwarts, falling, falling eternally through fire, and she saw his face shimmering through what entrapped him...

--free me from my imprisonment, his voice whispered to her again, free me, free me, Gwenhyfar--

Ginny stood and stared for so long that she could almost feel the grass growing her feet. She woke from her trance with a start, and thought for a terrfied moment that she had been standing in that one spot for hours, days, years. She would not have been surprised to lift her hand and see fingernails grown to the point where they were curving all the way around her wrist.

She shook herself, and saw that she was only walking the path, which was worn down into a groove a foot or more below the level of the trees that stood like sentinels about it."Keep it together, Gwenhyfar Alvean Weasley," she chanted to herself over and over. "You've got to keep it together or you'll never get out of here." Ginny counted her breaths, the beats of her heart, the steps of her feet; she would not fall into dream. A sourceless silvery laughter mocked her, and she wondered if Rhiannon was its source. If in some strange way, perhaps this entire forest, so like and yet so unlike the one she knew, was woven about the dark lady.

********************************

Draco's first hint that something had gone badly wrong was the blurring of his vision and the prickly feeling in his mouth.

Strange-- I've never felt anything quite like this before, wonder what it could--

Then the dull shock splintered through him, and the next thing he knew, Draco was lying on the ground, flat on his back and rather dazed. "Try again, you fools, that's what I said," Lucius was snarling from somewhere to the right of him, and he saw that everyone else seemed to be sprawled on the ground as well. As soon as any of them attempted to move towards the forest path, they were rebuffed by an invisible force that carelessly tossed them back on the grass with the ease of a giant's hand. The younger Goyle in particular seemed to be having an extraordinarily hard time with figuring out what was going on and how to avoid it, and flew backwards over and over and again as Draco got to his feet.

Cautiously, he prodded at the air on the other side of the grassy hill with his hands, feeling a series of little shocks as he tested the boundaries. It seemed to be a wall of magic that was keeping them from getting any further into the Forbidden Forest, but what sort of magic that might be, Draco could not think. He had moved beneath a tree that blocked the moonlight utterly, and he pulled his wand from its holster beneath his robes. "Lumos," he murmured. Nothing happened. He blinked.

"Your wand won't work here." His father had come up behind him.

"What's this barrier? Is it responsible?" Draco very vaguely remembered hearing something of this sort in a History of Magic class. In earlier times, when preserving the balance of magic was of greater importance than it was now-- well, in his own time, he amended silently-- a greater spell or charm frequently canceled out a lesser one.

"No, it is not."

"Then why?" Why, the question that should never be asked of Lucius Malfoy. But if there was ever a time to make an exception to that rule, this was surely it.

"Most of our magic isn't the sort that can be done in this place and time. Wand magic in particular."

"You seriously mean that my wand won't work?" Draco asked incredulously.

"Isn't that what I just said?" Lucius answered impatiently, tapping at the invisible wall.

"But--" Draco was at an utter loss for words. His head was dreadfully dizzy and he shook it from side to side, trying to clear it. Something was missing, some indefinable, incredibly important thing, as if he'd suddenly lost an arm or a leg.

Several of the cloaked figures were gathering around them now, whispering urgently. "We can't get through," Draco heard Pettigrew say in low tones to Lucius Malfoy.

"Can't is not a word I wish to hear at the present moment," his father replied in the icy tones Draco knew so well.

Another figure came forward and felt out the boundaries of the magical wall with long, slightly gnarled fingers. Yet they were strangely elegant as well; the hands of a skilled craftsman, and they moved over the night air as if in the steps of a dance. Shimmering designs trailed after them-- circles, spirals, the twisted forms of snakes, strange wavelike and knotlike forms. Draco stared hard, but not at the designs. There was something very familiar about those hands. He'd seen them many, many times before, moving carefully, precisely, measuring ingredients, stirring a cauldron, adding a pinch of powder to some potion or other...

Oh, bloody hell, potions...

And even before the man spoke, Draco knew, with a queer sinking feeling at his heart, who he was.

"It's Ogham magic," Severus Snape said clearly.

"Well, break the spell, can't you? Isn't that the sort of thing you've spent the past year secretly studying?" Lucius asked impatiently.

Snape turned to Draco's father, and even in the fitful moonlight the motion of one raised dark eyebrow was clear on the Potion Master's face. "I'm afraid it isn't quite that simple."

"Why not?" asked Lucius through clenched teeth.

"Ogham does not derive from the mortal, nor the human. Its spells cannot be broken." Snape traced one of the serpent spirals with his forefinger, and it glowed red. "Just as I believed. We don't have a prayer of getting through this wall of spells. They're wrapped about the Ogham symbols, and the magic is contained in the trees of the forest themselves. They are not the trees we know."

Lucius was obviously struggling to control his temper, and despite the emotions tearing through him, Draco couldn't suppress a smirk. "Then explain to me," said Lucius in measured tones, "why my son saw Ginny Weasley vanish down that path not ten minutes ago. In all the research you've done, have you ever seen the answer to that simple question?"

Now there definitely a sardonic gleam in Snape's eyes. "Well, after all, Lucius, it is said that only gods, immortals, and the pure of heart may walk this path. That would rather tend to exclude any of us."

Lucius Malfoy swore a muffled oath under his breath and turned away from the forest path.

And all at once, Draco realized what had happened. "They're gone," he said. "Ginny Weasley and Lord Grindelwald both. I lost them as soon as I touched the Ogham wall." He took a deep breath. "They went through. Both of them. One after the other."

****************************************

At last, Ginny's feet were growing sore. She wondered dismally how long she had been walking. Will I ever find my way out? What if I can't? What if I'm just doomed to wander here forever until I die, or maybe I finally do get out and it's a hundred years later and everyone else is dead, or-- Ginny shivered as she remembered vague stories she'd heard in the Gryffindor common room when she was wandering around at three in the morning and couldn't sleep.

"He went into Aladdin's cave," Lavender would whisper to Parvati in the two big armchairs pulled up near the fire, "and was bewitched by the djinn."

"I heard that when they came out again it was a different century," Parvati would hiss back. "The dwarves trapped them in a web of hex symbols."

"I heard she never came out at all, and she's still there with the shining ones, and if you stand in front of the mirror at Yule and whisper "Bell Witch" three times, she reaches out and grabs you!"

And so on, and on, and on. Ginny had rolled her eyes at the time, and wondered if it were possible to tie Lavender and Parvati's tongues together into a knot. But now, everything had suffered a sea change. She stood still for a moment, taking deep breaths, trying not to fall into panic. I can get through this if I don't panic. All I need to do is to follow the path, after all.

She opened her eyes again.

The straight path stretching ahead of her had vanished. In its place was a crossroads, the four ways leading off in different directions. At its center was a great white standing stone.

Ginny burst into tears. But the stone and crossroads only seemed to be waiting silently, breath held, until she stopped crying and made her decision.

"But Gwen has kilted her green kirtle
A little above her knee,
And she has gone for Edinburgh
As fast as she can be. "

She didn't even realize that she had picked up the thread of Tam Lin exactly where she'd left off until she heard the sound of her own voice. But it calmed her a little; as always, the sound of the music she made herself strengthened her slightly. Ron used to love me singing this song, she thought, blinking more tears away. It was his favorite. Much later, Ginny would reflect on how different all their lives might have been if she hadn't started singing at that precise moment. But there is never any way to know what flows from the divergence of two roads in the Dreamtime.

"He took her by the milk-white hand
And by the grass-green sleeve
And laid her low down upon the flowers
And asked of her no leave--"

"Ginny?" said a drowsy voice. She broke off singing, glancing around wildy. There was no way to tell its source; it had come from the empty air, the sound lingering everywhere and nowhere.

It was, unmistakably, her brother's voice.

And there was something far ahead of her, vanishing behind a tree. Something almost like the shadow of carriage wheels.

Rhiannon's advice was forgotten. Ginny tore off into the forest as fast as she could run. "Ron!" she yelled. "Oh, where are you? I'm coming, wait for me!"

************************************************

Draco knelt in front of his mother at the side of the King's Road, rubbing Narcissa's hands together in his. They felt so cold, so bloodless. Her face was without expression. Draco was afraid that she'd had a bad journey through the clock tower, something similar to what had happened to him that first time, or perhaps the shock of the Ogham wall had affected her more seriously than the rest. But she would not speak to him or to anyone else, only shaking or nodding her head in response to questions. Silent as she always was, this was even worse than normal. Draco's heart turned over in his chest at the thought that she was suffering something dreadful in silence.

He hadn't looked at Snape since the moment when they recognized each other. It was no surprise to him that his potions master was a Death Eater, only dreary confirmation. It was yet another one of those pieces of information that he had known without being told. Their eyes had met, and Draco would have sworn that he saw the same expression mirrored in both pairs. A queer sort of expected disappointment. Each of them now knew a bit more about what path the other had chosen. Each had, in some corner of their minds, hoped for better.

Draco saw a shadow step between him and the moonlight, and glanced up to see the subject of his thoughts standing before him.

"She is all right, isn't she?" Snape asked impatiently.

"Yes," replied Narcissa in a clipped voice, rising to her feet."Perfectly."

Snape put his hands behind his back and began pacing along the winding path that led along the fringes of the forest they could not enter. Draco followed him. "So what now, Professor?" he asked, feeling strangely awkward with the familiar form of address. Of course, he didn't know what might be more appropriate, considering what he now knew. Esteemed Fellow Death Eater, maybe? Or have we progressed to first names, now that we both know just how far we've each fallen?

"Carriages are arranged for. We'll take the King's Road to Leith; I always felt that this might be necessary. Nothing passes through the Forbidden Forest now without the Lady's will and permission... neither of which we were ever likely to get."

"Arranged for?" Draco echoed.

"They've been summoned."

"I thought magic didn't work here."

Snape's look was rather cold, but then it always had been, for all that Draco knew he was the closest thing to a favorite the Hogwarts potion master was ever likely to have. "I sincerely hope you haven't been daydreaming through every History of Magic class, Mr. Malfoy."

"I certainly know they use magic in 1566, but--" began Draco in a defensive tone of voice.

"No, we use magic. They are magic. You might say that the witches and wizards you have known contain the art as a cup contains water, but those who hold the power today are themselves the vessel. It can be learned, but it's a vastly different art from what we study at Hogwarts."

"Really? How so?" If he could just concentrate on something besides this crushing sense of failure, even for a few moments--

"It's far more--" Snape halted and gestured a circle in the air"--organic, I suppose you might say. Closely related with the seasons and cycles of the year, the strength of the magic waxing and waning. I doubt we would have had this much trouble if it weren't so near to the feast of Yule, but then we couldn't have traveled through the clock tower at any other time. This sort of magic is tied up with the land, too, in a way unimaginable in our time."

"All of it? Really? You mean wherever in the world we go, it'll be like it is here?"

Snape shook his head. "No, no. The magical parts of the world have long since begun to retreat, to lose themselves in the mists. And of those that remain, many are guarded, as you saw. But this is one. A few still exist in Germany as well-- the Holy Roman Empire, they call it now-- and Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, of course,is another."

"That's where we're going," murmured Draco. "That's where the Jewel of the Harem is."

Snape began pacing again. "Yes, well, there'll be time enough for lessons later." He glanced from side to side, but there was only Narcissa, leaning tiredly against a tree a few hundred yards away. "Do you feel the Dark Lord's presence at all?" he asked in an undertone.

Draco reached out his mind to Grindelwald, as automatically as a man reaching to feel the fingers of his own hand, and with as much certainty that they would be there. When he felt nothing, it was like a amputation. "Nothing, " he said numbly. "He went through the Ogham wall, I'm sure he did."

Lucius Malfoy fell into step just behind them, murmuring something to Lestrange and Peter Pettigrew over his shoulder. "Ready to go? Good," his father said without preamble.

"But, we--" Draco stopped, at a loss for words. "We can't simply leave here without Lord Grindelwald." Or Ginny Weasley, he added silently.

"The Dark Lord will find us; he understands how dangerous it is for us to stay here one moment longer than absolutely necessary. I'm sure he had a purpose in entering the Forbidden Forest that we couldn't know." Lucius looked at his son sardonically. "Didn't he tell you?"

"No," mumbled Draco.

"As for Ginny Weasley, I believe we can do perfectly well without her-- Ah yes, I see that the carriages have arrived." The older man glanced upwards, toward the road.

"But-" began Draco.

"Into the coach." Lucius Malfoy's eyes were like chips of cold granite in the moonlight, and the slight wind whipped his silvery hair. Once again, his voice held the tone of command, and the unquestioned expectation that it would be obeyed.

Draco wondered when things had changed. It had been so long since he'd heard his father's voice that way, since he'd seen that hardness in his father's eyes. But the sight and the sound were so tied up with all the memories of his childhood that it was like seeing an unquiet ghost leap back to life. Gods, but how afraid he'd been of Lucius Malfoy once; it was a fear he seemed to have drunk in at his mother's breasts.

But he wasn't afraid anymore, he wasn't. What a contemptible emotion, after what Draco had seen that summer, and after what he knew, the truths he knew about his father, about all the Malfoys--

"Didn't you hear me?" the iron voice asked.

"I heard you," Draco replied, despising the tone of his own voice. "I'm going up, Father."

***************************************

In a badly sprung carriage rolling down the King's Road towards Leith, Ron's eyes opened, and he sat up suddenly.

At first, no-one noticed. Moody was talking to Neville in a low voice, and they were opening a black leather bag and turning over the contents of dried bunched herbs on the seat. Hermione was lying back with her eyes closed, her head on Ron's shoulder, trying to ignore the smell of stale dust and God-only-knows-how-many unwashed bodies that had pressed into the cushions before her. Harry was staring out one of the windows, his face expressionless. Although sharing the same ten cubic feet of air, the inhabitants of the coach were immured in their own private worlds. But then Hermione felt Ron's body stiffening all along her left side, and she sat up, too.

"What is it?" she asked.

"We have to stop the coach," he said.

"Stop the coach?" she repeated. "Whyever would you want to do that?"

"I heard Ginny. I heard her voice, she was calling me."

Hermione shrugged. "You were asleep, Ron. It was obviously a dream."

"That was no dream." He shook his head vehemently.

"But Ron," she said patiently, "I think I even heard you talking in your sleep. Believe me, you were dreaming."

"No, I wasn't!" he retorted, raising his voice a little. "Harry, listen to me, Ginny's here-- I'm not exactly sure where but I just heard her, maybe along the side of the road somewhere, and we need to stop!"

"Please, be reasonable," Hermione begged. "You couldn't have really heard Ginny, you know you couldn't. She certainly couldn't be in this coach, there's barely room enough for us, and nobody's voice out in the road could carry over the carriage wheels and the closed doors."

Harry turned his head towards Professor Moody and raised an eyebrow, questioningly. The older man shook his grizzled head.

"What? We're going to stop, aren't we?" Ron demanded.

"No," Harry said quietly.

"No? What do you mean, no?"

Harry and Moody exchanged glances, and Hermione lowered her eyes.

"What's going on? You're doing it again. You're exchanging signals, secret signals-- don't think I don't see you--"

"Ron, we're not doing anything, really we're not." Hermione attempted to lay a hand on his arm, but he shook it off, his face growing increasingly agitated.

"We've been through this before, Weasley," growled Moody. "We don't have the time or energy to start it up again."

Ron turned his face to the cold window briefly, struggling for control. "My sister's out there," he said. "You can't tell me you didn't hear her screaming. She said she was coming, she said to wait for her."

"Er, Ron," said Neville, seeming to realize what was going on for the first time. " I don't think any of us heard anything."

"But that's impossible." Ron's voice was growing hoarse. "I heard her, I heard her just as clearly as I hear you."

"Why don't you lie back and try to get a little more sleep," Hermione said coaxingly, pressing his hand.

"Don't patronize me. Don't you dare," snapped Ron at her.

"I know how you feel, Ron. Or I can guess," Harry said flatly. "But we're not stopping this coach. We can't. The Death Eaters could be right behind us, for all we know. Maybe this is even a trick of theirs."

"Right then," said Ron. He bit his lip. "Right. I see how it is."

There was a moment of silence.

Then Ron grabbed the inside handle of the moving coach and opened the door, jumping out onto the snow-covered road.

It took all four of them to wrestle him back inside.

"Let go of me!" he snarled, struggling to free himself from the eight restraining hands. "Let go!"

"I don't know-- how much longer I can-- hang on--" panted Neville, Ron's left ankle in his grasp. "Ow!" He did not quite manage to dodge the kick aimed at his head, and fell back against the cushions, whimpering. Hermione was trying to hang onto his wrists and began crying when he swore violently at her; he managed to get one hand free and pushed her to the floor. Harry tried to grab Ron's arms from behind to wrestle him down, but his best friend was using his greater size and strength to fight his way to the door again. "Quickly!" barked Moody at Neville.

"I'm trying, I'm trying-- oh, where is it--" Neville flipped frantically through the contents of the black leather bag. "Here it is!" He grabbed a packet wrapped in silver foil and pushed it at Moody with shaking hands. The older man shook a dry stream of crumbled grayish-green dried herbs into his gnarled palm and poked at them with a finger. They smoldered, sending up thin tendrils of smoke, and he shoved them under Ron's nose.

"Sersemletmek," he said in a harsh voice.

***********************

"Is he going to be all right?" Hermione asked tensely, pulling Ron's unconscious body up onto the seat. "Is he?"

"Oh, it's no different from a Stupefying charm, really," said Neville.

"But maybe that's the question we should be asking about Ron," said Harry thoughtfully. "I always wondered if he'd make it through this."

Her voice grew shrill. "What will you do if you don't think he can? You can't cut him loose now, you know you can't. I'll go with him if you do."

"Nobody's suggesting any such thing," said Harry.

"Will you do to him what you did to Ginny, a year ago?" Hermione wiped the tears from her eyes, impatiently. "It was a year ago today. Did you remember? I remembered. I never forgot what we had to do."

"What I had to do." Harry turned again so that only the line of his chin and cheekbone could be seen against the full moon shining through the window. "What I had to do, Hermione, your hands were kept clean. I made sure of that."

Hermione drew in her breath in a sharp hiss. "If you throw that in my face one more time, Harry James Potter, just once more--"

"What, Hermione? What will you do? Something worse than what's happened already, and what's going to happen?" He swung around towards her. They faced each other down, glaring. The silence dragged on and on, broken only by Neville's frightened breathing. Ron's head lolled on his chest, shaken back and forth with each jerky movement of the carriage, and even in this unnatural sleep his face was unbearably tense.

Moody thrust his grizzled head between them. "A very wise man once said something we would all be wise to heed," he said quietly. "'If we do not hang together, gentlemen, we will all assuredly hang separately.'" He allowed them all to digest his words for a moment. "You know what we fight," he continued. "You know what we face. I'm truly sorry that you have to carry the burden of this knowledge." Harry gave a very bitter, low laugh, and Moody continued as if he hadn't heard.

"It's more than any of you should have to handle, but I think you can handle it. Yes, even Ron. There are reasons why all four of you were chosen for this mission--and it's not the reason you think." He held up a hand, forestalling Hermione's objection. And after what was, for him, an unusually long speech, he turned back to Neville and began going over the dried herbs again.

Hermione gave Ron's hand a squeeze, knowing he couldn't feel it. His skin felt oddly alien, tainted somehow by the strange Turkish spell. "I hope I never have to do that again," Neville mumbled.

"But you will," said Harry from his vigil at the window of the coach, staring out unseeingly into the snowy small hours of the night. "You will." And he wondered if he, too, heard the last faint echoes of Ginny Weasley's despairing cry.

***************************************

They had been walking down the side of the path that led up to an embankment, and Draco tipped his head up to see, high above, three black carriages at road level, their black horses shifting restlessly in the traces. He sighed. Nothing to be done but to get into one of them, really, although he couldn't shake the vaguely sick feeling of failure, of being at a permanent disadvantage from the very beginning of this venture. A procession of black-cloaked figures was already filing up a path that wound round the embankment. He shifted the Kitap-an Dus under one arm and began to climb. Then he felt the heat seeping through the pages.

The edges of the book were glowing a fiery red. Draco sucked in his breath and grabbed it with shaking fingers, opening the book to one page and running his right hand over the tiny gems embedded in the parchment. He could feel the presence of Ginny as if she was within his own skin.

"Draco?" Lucius stopped as he was entering the first coach and called back to the retreating figure of his son far below.

Draco turned briefly. "I'm going in," he said, not loudly, but his words were carried up to the road on the cold night air.

"You're what?"

"Into the forest. To get them."

"You can't!"

In answer, Draco held up the glowing Book of Dreams. "I'll meet you on the King's Road, Father," he called.

"Just what the hell do you think you're playing at?" Lucius snarled.

But it was too late. Draco Malfoy had vanished through the Ogham wall, slipping through the spells as easily as the night itself. His father stared after him for a long time.

"Shall we go?" Snape asked, impatiently.

"He's mad," Lucius said at last. "We'll never see him again."

In answer, Snape leaned out the open carriage door and craned his neck up at the innkeeper's lads from the Lion and Thistle, who were sitting on the coachman's box. "We're not paying you lot to sit here all night," he said. The horses stamped and whinnied in fear at the strange harsh voice, their eyes rolling.

"Hist, lassie," one of the boys crooned, patting the neck of one of the mares.

"Horses be wiser than humans," the other said grimly, crossing himself.

"Eh, aye," the first said dreamily, a vague expression on his face."We must make all haste. So I hae been told. A gold piece at the end o' this journey, an we reach Leith in three days' time."

The second glanced back at the black-cloaked heads and shoulders, silhouetted against the window in the darkness within the coach. "For the dead travel fast," the innkeeper's son said in an undertone. Then he clicked his tongue and slapped the reins against the black horses' necks. The carriage wheels rolled their burdens away. Lucius Malfoy stared out the window unseeingly, thinking, thinking. And far below them, Draco began his journey through what he knew as the Forbidden Forest. And so it was. But it now contained the land that had, by his day, long retreated into the mists, into the shadow of a legend long forgotten. The Dreamtime.

**********************************

A/N: Review! Review! If you're not on the mailing list and you want to be, tell me! And YES!! Lots and lots more D/G contact in the next chapters. This one was just getting insanely long and I realized I couldn't post anything of the length it was becoming. NEXT chapter, he catches up to her and they're back together, I swear on a big stack of Bibles. Ooo, it's gonna be good. Wow, and what's going on with Harry, Ron, and Hermione? Tensions aplenty there. What happened a year ago in the Forbidden Forest, and what did Harry have to do to Ginny? (Next chapter...)What did Draco learn in the preceding summer about the secret past of the Malfoys, and why did it cause him to lose respect for his father? (Soon...)

The words of the second coachman ("for the dead travel fast") are from one of the creepiest movies ever made, F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu. I really picture Grindelwald as looking like Count Orlov, the undead German Dracula, but with more hair. Last year's Shadow of the Vampire was the fictional retelling of the making of that classic silent film. "An" was a 16th century way of saying "if"-- it's not "and" misspelled, btw.

You may notice that Snape is a bit mellower, but I think that slightly different aspects of his personality are revealed when he's around Draco. When Ginny remembers Lavender and Parvati talking about faerie abductions, Parvati is referring to the famous Bell Witch of Adams, Tennessee. I've been to the farm where her ghost supposedly still lives (or doesn't live, I guess,) it's about an hour from Nashville. The family that was originally haunted by the Bell Witch still lives there and gives tours of the haunted cave, and they show visitors a big scrapbook of ghost pictures. And yes, if you look in a mirror on Halloween night and say her name five times, well, they SAY she comes out to get you. That was the original source of the Candyman urban legend.