Jewel of the Harem: The Grindelwald Continuum Book One

.Chapter 9.

Hex.

So you have to ask yourself, what kind of person are you? Are you the kind of person who believes in signs, in miracles? Or do you believe that people just get lucky? Is it possible that nothing happens by coincidence?

--Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) to brother Merrill Hess (Joaquin Phoenix) in M. Night Shyamalan's Signs.

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A/N: Thanks to all the reviewers, especially: Divajen2001, Kittylioness, Merytaten-Ra ( I loved The Perilous Gard--the shepherd is a little like Randall, come to think of it!), Sydney Lynne (as always, a wonderful review!), Arian Beck, Kureneko Kashikoi, Mika Weasley (great insights!), Indnbridge, Avada Kedavra, Keeperofthemoon, Fleur422 (hope the midterms went well,) ivy99, Melissa (amazing review, hon, read her fics if you haven't already!), 1adam (G&D Do USA, Chapter 4, is 1/2 done!), raindrop, divajen03 (see? the magic chant worked,) anonymous 0123, Marie2682, and Katja, whose reviews always make me think.

This is a looooooooong chapter, and a lot happens in it. I thought about splitting it up into two but could never find a good place to do it, so I decided not to. Feed your cat, turn off your cell phone, and then settle in with a nice hot cup of tea, cocoa, or Jack Daniels... (Oh, if you're over 21, I mean, of course!@!) When the POV's begin switching, I've indicated it by a line of ellipses instead of italics, because I think that reading pages of italics can just get annoying. Also, some readers have been wondering, why Grindelwald? Fair question. This chapter begins to explain why Voldemort just wouldn't do. We start to see the historical background of the Malfoy's evil plots, which makes them a whole lot more disturbing. I have maps drawn up of the American magical communities hinted at in Ginny's memory of Professor Binns' class. Lots and lots of them, but they're in the third book, so I didn't want to get into them too much now!

I made up the Old High Bavarian language. It's based on a combination of Old High Norse, Swedish, Finnish, and Old English. What else... yes, the rabbis are laying out the same Tarot card arrangement that Ginny did in Professor Trelawney's test in Chapter Two. They are Ashkenazi Hasidics, who actually might have done this in the sixteenth century. A golem is a Frankenstein kind of creature created by a rabbi. Ten points to whoever finds the Tolkien quote... and the Disney's Aladdin quote.

VERY VERY VERY IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: The beta version of the JOTH fanfilm is UP on the web!!!!!!!!!! YAY! Yes, y'all, it's the first HP fanfilm of its type ever made, and has a snippet at the end of what I GUARANTEE is the only HP fandom 3D animation. There's only one way to get the special sneak preview before the link goes public...

Join the Yahoo group Pillar of Fire, which the lovely RoseFay kindly invited me to join as a featured author. It will now be the place to discuss JOTH, as well as the fics of a couple of other tremendously talented writers. You'll get to read new chapters of JOTH before the general public does, and also find out about more fanfilms-to-be! AND... rightnow it's the only place to get the link to "JOTH: The Movie." I need YOUR input on it!

Find it and join it at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PillarOfFire

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With a gasp, Ginny sat up. The first light of dawn was stealing through the window.

She rubbed her head, trying to clear it. She'd been dreaming about the Chamber of Secrets again, or was trapped in a memory about it, which was perhaps even worse. Ginny wondered with dread if she was going to go back to the way she'd been during second year, when she'd struggled against nightmares several times a week. And always, always, stuck at the same point. Tom Riddle touching her. Chuckling. Running his undead hands down her thigh. The worst part was that she always felt there was more after that, but could never dredge any of it up from her mind. Over and over again, she would run into a blank wall. A convulsive shudder went all through her at the memory, and she moved closer to the body behind hers, heard a sleepy grunt, felt the arms tighten around her. A real person. Warm, comforting, solid. Oh God, but that felt good--

Then she remembered that Draco Malfoy was holding her, and scowled in self-disgust.

It was very cold at the edge of the cloak, without his extra warmth. Her teeth actually began to chatter. He made an annoyed noise and reached out for her. She edged further from him until she was half lying on the bare ground. "You'll never get away from me," he mumbled, eyes still tightly shut. Ginny decided that she did not want to begin the day by getting him any more hacked off at her than absolutely necessary. Gritting her teeth, she moved back into the circle of his arms, and with another mumble Draco turned over and went back to sleep, pulling her with him. Her head slipped forward onto the back of his neck; the very thought of this sort of nearness was an irritant, but she was too exhausted to move another inch away from him, and Ginny felt herself falling, irresistibly, back into dream.

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"In April 1945, Berlin was a city under siege." Professor Binns' voice was, as always, monotonous and grey. He had reached a sort of nadir that always seemed to come about three-quarters of the way through the class, when the drone of his voice had dropped to its lowest point. Nearly everyone was asleep; Ginny dimly heard actual snoring sounds from several classmates behind her. The flat grey voice went on and on, lulling her to drowsiness; why hadn't she fallen asleep, too? She was scribbling notes and chords under her desk on a scrap of parchment. Oh, yes-- it had been part of a song for Harry, something very melancholy in E minor. She'd played it on guitar a few times and never finished it.

"Soviet and American troops moved in on either side of the beleaguered city in a pincer formation. The Muggle military was not, of course, aware of the Baba Yaga forces, nor of the American wizarding tribes' coalition. In any event, the fate of Hitler's thousand year Reich-- which, in its totality, had lasted only twelve-- was, as far as the Muggle world was concerned, long since sealed."

Was this a memory, or a dream? Ginny thought that it seemed to be getting harder to tell the two apart, lately. Yet she was reliving this dry-as-dust lecture from the spring rather than controlling it, and she couldn't shake the feeling that there was a reason she'd been brought here.

"The First Reich, of course, refers to the reign of the legendary Charlemagne, although we may be permitted to doubt that the date of the formation of the so-called Holy Roman Empire may literally be traced to the redoubtable 'Slaughterer of Saxons.' In addition--" It was no use; she really had gone to sleep at this point, and was awakened only by Colin poking her with a quill.

"You dropped this," he whispered, handing her back the parchment, a strange look on his face of longing and loathing intermixed.

"Thanks," she'd said with a careless yawn.

"As Karl Dietrich Bracher so trenchantly noted in his seminal work, The German Dictatorship," the professor droned on, "Hitler was the only one who could have brought these ideas to their terrible logical fruition in the Third Reich. And the remarkable point here is that there is an eerie consistency, a stunning sameness, between his earliest and his latest expressed political ideas. Both his first and last recorded political statements, for example, expressed his pathological anti-Semitism, which along with a sweeping Lebensraum philosophy and a Führer dictatorship formed the triumvirate core of his philosophy, both personal and political." The class was going off again, but it perked up at the ghost professor's next words.

"But what Muggles fail to understand-- the missing key to their studies of National Socialism, and perhaps the reason for their unending fascination with Adolf Hitler, the neverending stream of their books, papers, studies, and film and television programmes-- is the vital role of Lord Grindelwald."

There was an undercurrent of mumbling sweeping through the room, and every student was fully awake. Ginny had heard of this phenomenon happening only once before in the modern era, the time in her first year when Hermione had asked about the Chamber of Secrets, but she preferred not to think about that. Behind her, Colin was raising his hand. "Please, Professor, but isn't that the dark Bavarian wizard defeated by Professor Dumbledore in 1945?"

Binns blinked, seemingly amazed at an actual question from a member of the class. "Mr. Creevey. Yes. That's precisely who he is. But it's important not to allow sensational events to overwhelm a thorough grounding in the historical facts required to understand them." Heads began dropping once again. But Ginny's interest had been caught, and now she understood her memory of that day on the Hogwarts Express, when Ron had given her the Dumbledore card. That was how she knew about Lord Grindelwald!

"In the final days of the Third Reich, for example, Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels spread reports of the so-called 'miracle weapons' that were to turn the tide of the war in Germany's favor. Muggle historians generally dismiss these as fanciful tales created to lull the German people, similar to the propaganda film Kohlberg, but we, the magical community, know that they were not. Although the precise nature of these weapons is still unknown, we do know that they did exist, and were under the control of Lord Grindelwald. If he had not been defeated when he was, the tide of the war would have turned indeed, and we would be living in a vastly different world today. Only the defeat of Grindelwald prevented that from happening. When Hitler learned of this event, it was then, and only then, that he committed suicide in the bunker."

There was a silence in the room while Professor Binns fussily cleaned his glasses, but it was not the usual sort of silence. Ginny had been thinking about that different world, and she wondered now if everyone else had been doing the same thing. Colin had raised his hand again. "Professor?" he asked.

The ghost stared at him in utter astonishment, the glasses forgotten. Ginny had never been quite sure why he wore them anyway. "Mr. Creevey?" he asked in a tone of incredulity. "Do you have another question?"

"Yes, sir, I was wondering about something-- wasn't there a faction of British fascists as well?"

"Yes, there was; there were led by Sir Oswald Moseley..." The professor' s voice trailed off, and what he said next sounded unusually tentative, quite unlike his normal droning surety. "There are certain events that do-- well, they rather do tend to make one wonder how the tide of history might otherwise have turned. They remind one of the road not taken, the road that might have led into a greater darkness. If the British Fascists had formed a stronger political force, for example; if Neville Chamberlain had continued as the Muggle Prime Minster, rather than being replaced by Winston Churchill. Or if the Treaty of Versailles, with all its humiliating conditions, had not been forced on Germany in 1919.One can reach as far back as one wishes to do. If Sultan Süleyman's troops had not been turned back at the Danube in 1566, and the Ottoman Empire had conquered Austria and Bavaria, as it planned to do. If King Arthur had not defeated the Saxons, driving them from the shores of Britain for a crucial fifty years. If the ancient Bavarian magical families had been able to unite against Grindelwald when he first appeared-- such as the von Drachens. If, er, either they or the mythical king in fact ever existed, and were not simply figures from the mists of legend--" Professor Binns caught himself, and looked almost disapprovingly at the attentive class. "However, we are here to deal with solid facts, not wild speculation. To return to our main point. Josef and Magda Goebbels had six children, and their names were Helmut, Helga, Hilde, Hölde, Hedda, and--"

Ginny had lost interest again at that point, so she remembered no more. Colin's eyes on her had been making her feel uncomfortable, and she'd started working on the song again under the desk, wondering if she ought to go to a diminished fifth after the first refrain.

-- she was nine years old, seeing Fred and George off for their first year at the Hogwarts Express, and she'd gotten separated from her parents in the confusion and crush of students, packages, trunks, cats, owls, hugging, laughing, and crying. She wasn't going to cry; she was much too old for that. But she was starting to get that sick lost feeling in her stomach; everyone seemed so tall and large and bustling, it was before she shot up like a weed a few years later, and she felt so small, so overwhelmed. "Mum, Mum," Ginny called in a quavering voice, looking around and around the crowded station, not seeing so much as a glimpse of red hair. Her throat was growing tight and there was a hot feeling behind her eyes, but she would not cry--

And then Ron was there, sweeping her up in an embrace. She'd clung to him and let the tears fall, and he didn't tease her, as Fred and George would have done, or told her stiffly that she was a big girl now, do dry up, as Percy would have said. "I'll always find you, Gin," Ron had said, his face in her hair. "No matter where you go. Come on, let's get you a lemon ice, I've got a few sickles I've been saving out of my allowance--"

And then she woke up, gasping, heart pounding. The room was icy, but there was a layer of sweat sticking her hair to her forehead, and her hands were clammy. The sun peeped over the horizon; she'd slept for perhaps an hour. Draco Malfoy lay next to her, breathing evenly, still deeply asleep. Ginny moved away a little, watching him narrowly. She rubbed her head. The dreams went together somehow and formed a meaning, she was sure of it.

Well, she knew who Lord Grindelwald was, now, and what he had done. He sounded worse than Voldemort had ever been, and it made her blood run cold to think that he had so nearly touched her in her vision of the Chamber of Secrets-- or was that what had happened? It was hopeless to try to shake that memory into a recognizable form; it just kept slipping through her mind like oiled sand in an hourglass. It was impossible to remember exactly what Draco Malfoy had done, either, but she was sure he'd had something to do with Grindelwald. That shouldn't have been a surprise. Biting her lip, she carefully eased a corner of the plaid off him. He lay on his back, shirt unbuttoned, one arm thrown over his forehead, one stretched out by his side. There were no marks on them that she could see. But, of course-- her mind spun-- the Dark Mark of the skull and snake had been Voldemort's. He was gone, and it would be impossible for him to ever return, as far as she'd heard. If the Malfoys were now serving Grindelwald, which certainly seemed logical enough, God only knew what sort of mark he'd put on them, or where it might be.

Ginny didn't realize that her hand had crept up towards the silver locket until she felt the cool smoothness of it on her fingers. She rubbed it lightly, feeling the sense of calm it always gave her, and then saw the faint red glow out of the corner of her eye. The book that lay by the side of the cloak, partially under Draco's head, was glowing. The one he'd been carrying when he caught her. The Kitap-an Düs. Now where had she heard that name before? A thought struck Ginny. When she'd been lying in the Hogwarts hospital wing a few days earlier, Neville had said something about Moody's book having gone missing. Everyone had certainly gotten upset enough at the news for it to be important; was this where it had ended up? She gasped and looked down at what she held.

"What a moron I am," she said aloud. Her whisper sounded like a shout in the still little hut.

Draco had found her in the Dreamtime only after she'd opened the locket. And the Death Eaters had tracked her through the clock tower after she'd touched the parchment. Lord Grindelwald had somehow gone into the mysterious book, and the parchment was from the book; Rhiannon had told her so. She couldn't imagine why it had taken her so long to piece the puzzle together. Ginny was tempted to tear the necklace off and throw it out the window. But her hands moved up and then stilled. That might be even worse. What if the locket was somehow protecting her and everyone else from the parchment, as long as she didn't open it? Rhiannon had given it to her, after all, and the fairy queen had seemed, if not precisely helpful, at least benign.

She rested her head in her hands. So she'd remembered about Grindelwald, but why had she dreamed about Ron? It was a memory of a time when she'd been afraid and lost, and he'd found her. Did that mean that he was going to find her now? But then why had she felt so terrified when she awoke, as if she'd received a warning?

"He found me..." she whispered slowly. "I was never really sure how he did, and then he said he'd always find me... always..."

And at last, she understood. Her brother would find her in Leith. But this time, she would be with Draco Malfoy. That was why he'd been so smug earlier, and that was why he wasn't going to let her get away from him. He planned to use her to get to Ron, Harry, Hermione, and the rest.

She could not allow that to happen.

There was no time to waste. Quite apart from that, Ginny knew she would lose her nerve if she hesitated at all.. She sprang up from the ground in one quick movement, winding the length of plaid around her shoulders. Staring at the book pillowed under Draco's restless head, she did hesitate for a few moments, wondering if she dared try to take it. He said something under his breath in a language she didn't know and reached out across the cloak, his dark lashes fluttering on his cheeks. No. She had to get out of there.

Ginny stole across the dirt floor as noiselessly as she could, picking each foot up and bringing it down as carefully as she'd learned how to do when wandering through Gryffindor Tower during all those restless nights of that year. Draco was tossing from side to side now, mumbling, and she hurried as much as she dared. He somehow didn't strike her as a very heavy sleeper. She was nearly out the door when she heard him speak again, no more than a whisper.

"...Ginny?"

Hearing her first name from Draco Malfoy, the word she had never heard from him in waking life, stopped her in her tracks. She jerked round and stared at him in shock before realizing that he was talking in his sleep and had no idea what he was saying. Unfortunately, that extra second was her undoing.

The warmth he'd held was gone, and the hair that smelled of leaves and dirt and a faint breath of flowers was no longer in his face. An icy chill was creeping into his chest, dragging him from the blissful haven of sleep. Sleep. It had been so long since he'd slept like this, peacefully, deeply, breathing as evenly as a child. Draco sat up, rubbing his eyes, every nerve on edge, trying to figure out what had gone missing. He looked blearily around the tiny room. If he ever got back to Hogwarts, nobody was ever going to hear about the night he had been forced to sleep in an abandoned cattle byre with a Weasley.

-- a Weasley--

--Ginny Weasley--

--whose bright red-gold hair was disappearing out the door. Draco leaped to his feet without a sound. Herback was turned to him, and she didn't see him coming until he'd slammed her up against the wall.

"You sodding deceitful bitch!"

It went downhill from there.

Ginny had grown up in a house with six brothers, a father who'd served in the Royal Navy, and a mother who occasionally turned a convenient deaf ear, but she'd never heard anything like the violent cursing that poured from the lips of Draco Malfoy after that. She thought later that it was really amazingly unexpected, the contrast between his snotty overbred refinement most of the time and -- well, it seemed almost funny when she reflected on it after the fact. At the time, though, she flinched in terror, and then struggled and spat at him in fury, to hide her fear.

Finally, he was almost calm, and that frightened her most of all. "I told you not to do this," he said.

"I hate you," she said. "I always have. You should have known I'd try to escape from you."

Draco shook his head. "You're going to be very, very sorry." There was no noticeable inflection in his voice.

Ginny was amazed that her legs were still holding her upright, but she managed to keep her voice steady. "I'm not afraid of you."

"Then you're a fool, Weasley. You should be."

"What can you do to me?" she asked defiantly, aware, once again, that the wiser course of action might well consist of keeping her mouth closed.. "Your wand doesn't work, I already know that. You can't keep me near you every single second. And you have to keep me walking, so I don't see how you can, well--" Ginny fell silent too late; it was definitely smarter not to give him any ideas in that direction. He was looking at her quietly, and she had already figured out that, like Ron, he concealed his worst rages under a calm exterior. Strange, that he should have anything in common with her brother.

Draco had swiftly run through every method of keeping Ginny Weasley from escape before she ever pointed out the fatal flaws in them. But there was one way she did not know about. It might be dangerous to try it..And it could be even riskier to let her know that he knew it. He struggled to keep hold of himself.. If she pushed him any further he wouldn't care what he did, and that must not happen. He was not going to let her tempt him into this, he wasn't, hewasn't--

"We've wasted enough time," was all he said, and then he turned away from her and started shaking out the wool cloak where it had lain on the ground, looking displeased when he saw smudges of dirt on it, brushing them off with flicks of his fingernails. When she didn't move, Draco frowned at her. "Well? Are you ready? Let's go."

He had never, Ginny thought, looked more arrogant. She realized much later that she should have shut up then. But his face was so deadly calm, and he seemed so sure that he didn't even have to say anything more to her, that he had her sufficiently cowed and she would now come along quietly.

"I'll do it again, the first chance I get," she said. "And you can't stop me, Malfoy."

And those were the words that pushed him over the edge; the faint warning voice in his head was thoroughly drowned out by a red tide of anger and fear. "No, you won't," he said.

"What do you mean?"

He didn't answer. Keeping tight hold of one of her wrists, he felt through his pockets with his left hand, found nothing, and finally picked up the Kitap-an Düs and tried flipping it open to a blank parchment. To Draco's surprise, the pages now parted without resistance. Perhaps the book had responded to his need, which did make sense, after all. The pen was still attached on its little cord, too. Not the materials he had seen used to do this before, but he would simply have to make do. She would see that he was far from powerless, wand or no wand. She would learn what it meant to defy him, a Malfoy and--although she would never know it, of course-- a von Drachen. Draco pulled the little knife from its sheath at his belt, and once Ginny saw it coming towards her, she began to struggle wildly.

"Hold still and this won't hurt any more than it has to," he said.

"You're going to kill me," she whispered.

"Dry up, Weasley."

While she was still deciding what to do-- was this the moment to gather all her strength and leap at him, or should she remain quiet and lull him into a false sense of security?-- Ginny felt a sharp prick at her wrist, and Draco's hand pulled her arm over the page. Then he turned the knife on his own wrist, just beneath a newly healed wound, and scratched his skin deeply. Their blood dripped and ran together onto the parchment. She was so surprised he'd done the same thing to himself that she didn't even try to get away, only stared at the tiny rubies on the tassel at the end of the pen as he dipped its nib in the little red pool.

The broad scratches that he made across the page hypnotized her, stars and flowers, crescents and hearts and half-moons, faceted things she remembered from Arithmancy class, other symbols she had never seen, couldn't guess the meaning of. They intertwined and danced in sparkling patterns, pregnant with magic. And above them Draco intoned strange words in a low, melodic voice. Some of them she understood, and some of them seemed to be in a language she had dreamed once, long ago.

"Binda fláráor undirfurull víf sjálf holdr mit bond brjóta. Bind this deceitful girl to me with a bond that cannot be broken. Han on minun fjandmaor, häntä vihollinen spretta. She is my enemy and I am hers, but first to last we will not be divided. Polveutua kaupa eior kestää me, tru, jälkisäädös ei olla skilja. Er--" Draco was silent for a few moments, desperately trying to remember what came next. And he'd thought his German was bad. He really had to do something about his language skills at some point.

"Helsa dem dar osomi..." His voice trailed off and he bit his lip, sincerely hoping that he was saying what he thought he was. "I summon the old gods... the tivar aldin to witness that she is my fangi heilagr. This vow I will fulfill until I release her, or death takes me, or the world end."

The sound of his voice alternating between English and the strange language was lulling her into a very calm state. She watched dreamily, knowing that her eerie relaxation was surely an effect of whatever spell he was casting over her, not particularly caring. The symbols on the page rose into the air and hung in a red web over their bare hands and arms. A prickly sensation spread through Ginny's wrist, and she rubbed it, thinking vaguely that it only hurt a little. Draco's face sharpened even further in the ruby light from below, waiting, hesitating, then willing the final conclusion with every scrap of magical power that had ever been in him. The moment froze in the air, suspended until the last syllable of recorded time, and the waves of power rippling out from it in a seismic shock wave penetrated to the furthest reaches of the worlds of gods and men.

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Ron clamped his right hand over his left wrist and gasped in pain. The four of them stood in the yard of a small inn off the high road, stamping their feet to keep warm and tucking their hands beneath the plain dark travelling robes they wore, the ones that made them look enough like any sixteenth century group of travellers to avoid anything more than the stares of the idle and the curious. The watery winter sun illuminated the bare sweeping drive and a chill north wind blew the last leaves of the autumn across the gravel; they could all plainly see that they'd been the only guests the night before. So Ron's sudden intake of breath was very loud in the still air, and the others turned to look at him, their eyes cautious.

"What is it, Ron?" Hermione asked softly.

"Nothing," he said. "Nothing at all.It'll be jolly to travel decently again, won't it? Wish they'd had this closer to Hogwarts. Can't wait until we get started."Harry nodded, his gaze on the horizon, carefully avoiding the overbright eyes of his friend. Hermione looked at him narrowly, but said nothing. Professor Moody was still arguing with the drivers of a large red carriage.

"Sorry," said the first driver.

"Very sorry," agreed the second, picking at his teeth with a straw.

"But as Ye Olde Knight Carriage provides the most luxurious and convenient transportation available for the stranded witch or wizard, currently offering service to the coast--"

"Lice-free beds--"

"Mulled wine--"

"Eels baked in pastry cases--"

"Bear-baiting available on alternate Thursdays--"

"Bonnie Doll Tearsheet, positively guaranteed pox-free--"

"And a seven-handed flying gleek game that's been on since 1363--"

"We have found that identification is necessary."

"If we weren't wizards," Moody growled, seeming to be having trouble keeping a tight rein on his temper, "we couldn't have summoned you, now could we?"

One driver looked at the other.

"He has a point, Dobbins," the first observed.

"But, God's toenail, Cocksley, if we picked up every dubious bit of riffraff, our standards would simply-- erggh!" Moody had apparently decided to employ a more powerful argument, one which involved picking the hapless Dobbins up by the scruff of the neck and holding him several inches off the ground.

"You know, I have a feeling that this is going to be resolved in our favour," said Hermione.

"Yeah," Harry said, still staring over the horizon. "Moody's persuasive when he wants to be, isn't he?"

A few minutes passed, during which Ron kept rubbing his wrist. At last, Moody turned to crook a finger at them. "Right then," Ron said briskly, heading for the carriage, the others following him. Harry gave him a sidelong glance as he passed; they both hesitated, but neither spoke. Neville was already boarding, holding the large black bag. They all paused in the entrance of the carriage while an argument about where they were to sit was hashed out, although it didn't last long, as Dobbins seemed to be meekly agreeing to every stipulation Moody made by this point.

"Yes, yes," he finally said, his voice rather hoarse. "First-class accommodations, of course. Right this way." After several moments of coughing punctuated by irate glares from Moody, the coachman muttered, "Frog in my throat-- ever so sorry-- do apologize-- "

"Slippery elm infusion," Neville said suddenly.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Well-- er--that is, for a sore throat, that's what's generally recommended--"Neville rather seemed to be back-pedalling now, his round face a bit horrified at his own presumption.

"A leechwizard!" said Cocksley with delight. "I should have known."

"Should've known from the bag," agreed Dobbins.

"Uh--" he stammered. "Yes. Of course.A leechwizard. That's exactly what I am."

"There's a little marshlight lamp in back we use for the mulled ale. If you would be so kind as to come with me, my esteemed sir, Cocksley will be happy to be of service to your learned friends--" Still talking, Dobbins steered Neville towards a hallway of the carriage. The round-faced boy looked rather terrified, but clutched onto the black herbal bag with determination.

"Actually, " he began in a squeaky but determined voice, "a decoction's generally thought to be more useful in a situation of this sort. You need the twigs, you see, as well as the--"

Moody was deep in conversation with a lantern-jawed wizard sitting in the front, one who held a basket that kept meowing and shaking ominously, so Harry, Ron, and Hermione followed Cocksley, filing towards the back. The coach was much bigger on the inside than the outside. They walked down hallways branching off corridors and paintings on the walls with eyes that moved to follow them, room after room barred by heavy doors of some curiously carved dark wood, and flickering torches stuck into sconces on the walls. Harry collapsed onto an ornately carved tester bed with stiffly brocaded curtains when they finally reached their compartment, giving a long sigh.

"Are you all right, Harry?" Hermione asked uncertainly.

"Fine," he said thickly, reaching for the embroidered coverlet. "Just need a nap-- haven't been-- sleeping well, lately--" and his eyes closed as his head hit the goosedown pillow.

"I suppose he must've been tired," said Hermione, still looking at him and biting her lip as if awaiting some clue. "He didn't even stop to take his glasses off-- where are you going, Ron?" She followed him to the doorway and out into the corridor, laying a hand on his wrist. He snatched it away, and she gave a little cry of surprise. "What is it?"

"Nothing." Ron avoided her gaze.

"Is it-- oh Ron, did you hear something again --" Hermione hesitated "-- the way you did before, I mean? In the coach?Something about-- Ginny?"

"Why should you care if I did?" Ron asked in a too-pleasant voice. "You didn't believe me the last time. I suppose I'm lucky really that all of you only knocked me out cold. Surprised you didn't throw me out by the side of the road."

"Oh, don't talk like that!" she whispered. "Please, please don't. We just-- we didn't know what else to do, really we didn't. I'm sorry. So terribly sorry."

"Nothing to be sorry about," Ron said, the unnatural smile still stretching his lips. "Is that the seven-handed gleek room over there? I'd rather like to try it, maybe they need another player--"

He made as if to go, but she held him fast, looking intently up into his face. "Ron," she said. "I believed you."

His mouth twisted and trembled slightly, his dark brown eyes going wide. "You did?"

"I mean, I believed that you thought what you said was true. I believe that you really did think you heard Ginny."

"Oh." A smooth, blank veil dropped over Ron's face again. "Go sit with Harry, Hermione. He doesn't look well." He turned and left her staring after him as he disappeared down the corridor and knocked at a door. Some of the other doors were open as well, she now saw. There was a room with musicians on a raised dais playing an intricate air on lute, harp, and virginals; the music was very melancholy and it spread slowly over her as she kept looking at the place where Ron had been. Shrieks of laughter came from the room he'd disappeared into; they hadn't quite closed the door all the way and she caught a glimpse of witches in farthingales and a deck of playing cards flying through the air on little golden wings. Across the hall was a room with one large, long table, and seated at that were several sober-faced Hasidic rabbis in fur hats and long black caftans, murmuring something in Hebrew as they pored over a deck of Cabbalic Tarot cards laid out before them in Daath formation.. A troll-like golem guarding the door gave her an evil look and murmured something about goyische shiksa. Hermione hurried back down the corridor to their own compartment.

She walked into the withdrawing room as quietly as she could, but Harry sat up as soon as she crossed the threshold.

"I'm sorry," she said, standing at the door to the attached bedroom "I didn't mean to wake you."

He rubbed his face and ran a hand through his hair, making it stand on end in spiky black strands. "S'allright. I can't sleep through anything these days. A mouse coming into the room probably would've woken me."

Hermione sat on the edge of the bed. "You haven't really slept well in a long time, have you?" she asked.

"No." Harry leaned back against the enormous wooden headboard, which was carved with grapes and goddesses. They all began giggling, but stopped at a stern look from Hermione. "Not for the past year, really."

She looked down at her hands. "I didn't realise it had gone on for that long."

"Well, it's not as if you sleep in the Gryffindor boys' dormitory." He cocked one raven eyebrow at her and smiled mischievously. "Or do you, ever, Hermione?"

It was a very convincing smile, she thought. Only someone like her, who remembered what his real smiles had once looked like, would not be fooled. "No," she said primly. "I certainly don't." They both giggled for a moment, and then sobered. Harry sighed, taking off his glasses for a moment and rubbing his eyes.

"I just-- I'll sleep for awhile, a few hours maybe, and then just when it seems like it's getting good, I'll wake up," he said.

"Harry, why didn't you tell Madam Pomfrey? Or me?I would've found something for you, some sort of sleeping potion."

He shook his head. "Those can cause more problems than they solve, just like the Muggle ones."

"Well, if I'd just known about it, I'm sure I could've found some sort of solution--"

"No, Hermione." Harry folded his arms, meeting her eyes with a stubborn look that she knew all too well.

"Honestly, you're as bad as Ron sometimes," she said. That brought on an awkward silence.

"What happened to him this morning?" Harry finally asked. "Something did, didn't it?"

Hermione shook her head. "He wouldn't tell me."

"It's something to do with Ginny, isn't it?"

"I think so."

Harry drew his knees up and propped his elbows on them; the gesture made him look very young and vulnerable, like a child sick in bed, and contrasted oddly with the expression on his face, which had hardened in some indefinable way. "But it can't be true, can it, Hermione? He couldn't have heard Ginny. She can't possibly be here."

"No, she can't," Hermione immediately said. "It's simply not possible. We needed-- months of preparation. Anybody who wasn't prepared the way we were wouldn't have been able to go through the clock tower. They would have been stranded at Hogwarts."

"Then why do you think he keeps hearing her? Or seeing her? Or whatever it is."

Hermione hesitated for a long time before speaking again. "Guilt."

They sat on the bed like two figures in a statuary display; moving far less, in fact, than statues at Hogwarts would have done. It was very dim behind the nearly drawn curtains in the great bed; Hermione could hardly see Harry's face, and when she heard his voice, she could only think that it sounded like a man murmuring something to himself, without much thought that anyone else might be listening.

"That's when it really started. My not being able to sleep. Right after it happened, and I had to-- well, you know what I'm talking about."

Unsure what to say to this, Hermione simply nodded.

"I used to slip out of the room without waking anyone else up-- got pretty good at it, in fact-- and get my Firebolt, and fly over the Forbidden Forest for hours on end, until I saw the sun rise, and then I'd always head back. You know the strangest part of all?"

"No, of course I don't."

"You know who I'd sometimes see?" Harry asked rhetorically. "Malfoy. I don't think he ever saw me, though."

Hermione swallowed. "Really?"

"Yeah, it was the oddest thing, too. Sometimes I'd pretend we were playing Seeker against each other in a Quidditch match, and it got to be a sort of game in itself, to see how closely I could track him without his noticing me. Sometimes it was really weird-- almost like he was responding to my moves without actually knowing I was there, making them."

"Well, maybe he did see you after all."

"He never said anything about it if he did," Harry said musingly. "Still, that would be just like him, wouldn't it? Keeping that knowledge to himself for some evil reason or other."

"You know, Harry," Hermione said slowly, "what happened on the train at the end of fourth year, well, it was pretty terrible. I understand it better now than I did at the time. A Muggle might say things like what Malfoy said then, but not actually mean them. For us-- magical folk, I mean-- I suppose it was more like making a vow, but...." Her voice trailed off. "Still, it's been a long time since he really had anything to even say to any of us. It honestly doesn't seem that Malfoy's been as bad in the past year and a half or so..."

"The hell he hasn't." Black eyebrows came down over green eyes in a scowl, and Harry's mouth hardened. "He's been waiting, that's all. Biding his time. For this. He was trained for this, he was raised for this. Good Lord, he was born for this, wasn't he?"

"I suppose you're right," sighedHermione. "Do you really think he's here? With his father, and the Death Eaters, I mean?"

Harry shrugged. "Who can say? Moody certainly seems to think so. But they can't find us, can they?"

"Not while we're under the Gizli-Sÿr spell. At least--" She left the end of the sentence hanging.

"What?"

"Well, there is a loophole in it. I found one, that is, when I was researching it in the Hogwarts library once."

"Why didn't you tell me before?" he demanded, sitting bolt upright and hitting his head on a particularly ornately carved goddess, who sniffed at him and went to hide behind a carved urn.

"I didn't think it was important, before. And I researched every spell that I knew we'd use or that would be used on us; I wasn't going to put you to sleep by telling you everything. The way the Gizli-Sÿr spell works is that the recipient is made invisible to pursuers of evil intent," said Hermione, sounding, as she so often did, as if she'd swallowed the dictionary. "It originated with the nomadic tribes that originally wandered the Turkish steppes, and they say it was the secret to Genghis Khan's success. And it's a very powerful charm; better than Secret-Keeper, really. The Malfoys and the Death Eaters could be in the next compartment on this carriage, and they'd never find us. The problem, though, is that-- well, it's a bit difficult to explain in layman's terms, but strong emotional states directed at persons with whom an emotional bond has already been formed can reveal the location of the parties involved."

"Maybe I'd understand this better if I'd got more sleep."

"Honestly, it's very simple," sighed Hermione. "We're friends, aren't we? Close friends?"

"I should hope so. You're sitting on my bed."

"Well, let's say that you were put under Gizli-Sÿr, but I wasn't. While you're under it, you're hidden from anyone who's trying to find you if their intent is to harm you. But let's say that you were-- oh, I don't know-- worried about where I was, or something. Let's say that you heard something awful happened to me. So you came after me, to try to find me. "

"I'd hope I would," said Harry. "Because--" he hesitated just a second too long before speaking again, but Hermione, caught up in her explanation, failed to notice "-- well, because we're friends."

"Exactly! You've already formed an emotional bond with me, and I with you."

"Nice to know."

"Honestly, Harry! Do let me finish. Anyway, you'd be in a distraught emotional state if you thought that something bad had happened to me. And if you actually found me, there'd be a sort of aura that you'd give off. If your enemies were watching for it, they could use it to track you."

"Oh. I see."

Neither of them said a word for a moment.

"You've got to make up with Ron, you know, Harry," Hermione said suddenly. "You've simply got to."

"It's hardly a question of that. He's the one who won't talk to me."

"It's precisely a question of that. We can't have this happen before we've even properly started the journey. We've got three months aboard ship to deal with! How are we ever to manage if the two of you won't even--"

Harry held up a hand. "Believe it or not, I get the point, Hermione."

"Well, then why don't you take the first step and tell him to stop being so stupid about this! Not that he's any worse than you are. But he won't listen to me." She put her hands on her hips, glaring at him.

"Well, I would-- I mean I could," Harry said. "If it was about anything but--"He cleared his throat. "Ginny."

"Nuncheon! Nuncheon!"A large tin cart was rolled loudly and rather haphazardly into the room by a flustered witch wearing a shawl that had at least fifty pins stuck into it, apparently at random. "Let's see..." she muttered under her breath "...oh dear me, I'm all at sixes and sevens today, lambs... there's eel pie, mutton with mustard, calves' foot jelly. Braised porpoise... savory meat custard... metheglin... marzipan... cold apple tart...although you seem to be of a melancholic disposition, dearie, I shouldn't recommend that."

"Any tea?" asked Harry, shutting his mouth quickly at a violent jab in the ribs from Hermione.

"Tea wasn't introduced to the British isles until the eighteenth century," she said under her breath. "I'm not terribly hungry.... Is there bread and butter?"

"Let me see... let me see..." The witch drew out a tray of manchet bread with curls of yellow butter on it.

"Any jam?" asked Hermione.

"No, dearie, no jam today. It's every other day. "

"So there'll be jam tomorrow?" asked Hermione.

"Well, not precisely. There was jam yesterday,and there will be jam tomorrow, but there's never any jam today."

"But surely," insisted Hermione, "it must at some time get round to jam today?"

"I think I've heard this argument somewhere before," said Harry through bites of bread.

"Hullo," said Ron, dropping down onto the edge of the bed. "Saving any of that for me? What a pig you are."

Harry grinned at him, and, once again, the grin almost looked real. "You can have all of it. We've been waiting for you."

Ron managed to stuff the entire half-loaf in his mouth at once. "Come on," he said around it. "Great lazy git. Out of bed with you. They need two more at the gleek table to make up a full hand."

As they all walked out of the room together, Hermione studied the smiles of her two friends, and listened to their laughter. Almost normal, she thought. Almost right. It's enough. It has to be enough.

Ron slipped an arm around her waist. "Missed me?" he whispered.

"Dreadfully."

He kissed her cheek, lightly, quickly. And the kiss was almost what it should have been. But she looked at his eyes, and shivered. She had always been able to read him, before. She was no longer sure that she could. There was something opaque about him, now.

"Are you cold, Hermione?" asked Harry, seeing her rubbing her arms.

"No. It's nothing. Only a goose walking over my grave." She clutched her cloak tighter around herself, feeling the chill creeping into the very marrow of her bones and running through her veins.

..................................................................................................................................................................................

Blood dripped from Lucius Malfoy's arm into the crucible at the centre of the table. The room was cramped, low, and dark; the fitful torches in the wall-sconces illuminated the tops of the heads of those huddled around the black table, throwing everything else into impenetrable shadow. His silver-blond hair shone with a white fire, and beneath it, in snatches of blue witchfire from the flame beneath the bubbling crucible, his handsome face with its one drooping eyelid was utterly impassive. Sometimes that light touched Snape's harsh, craggy face as he bent over the mixture, murmuring low, guttural words in Turkish; sometimes, too, it glanced across Pansy's wide eyes as she hugged her arms over her thin chest and sobbed. Narcissa, at the other end of the table, sat still as a robed statue, her face in darkness. The sound of the girl's crying went on and on, and at last the older woman said, "Be quiet, Pansy." Her smoothly accented voice was as soft as always, but something about it shut Pansy up instantly. She sniffed, ran the back of her hand across her nose, and was silent. The very air was clotted with magic, and as all of them waited, the stillness stretched tight enough to snap, the tension was nearly unbearable. But at last, a thick column of smoke rolled upwards from the crucible, and the four gave a collective sigh.

Snape's voice was harsh as if from long disuse, but oddly melodic too, weaving itself through the streams of magical smoke. "Has the bond of blood been made?"

There was a brief pause. Then Lucius spoke, his voice sounding disembodied. "Yes... the connection has been made."

"With whom has the connection been made?"

"With my son. With Draco."

"And what do you see?"

Silence.

"What do you see, Lucius Gabriel Malfoy?"

"I see nothing..." His voice was beginning to wander.

"Let me try," Pansy begged. "Please, let me, I know I could do it."

"Shut your mouth, you silly girl," said Snape, in a voice that could conceivably have been more polite. Narcissa shook her head at Pansy, laying a long white finger across the girl's lips, and she sank back into her chair with a sullen look on her face.

"I see nothing," Lucius continued. "But--" a shudder rippled through him "-- I feel all."

The other three started forward, Pansy gripping the edge of the table in her hands.

"And what is it that you feel?" Snape asked.

The other man's voice became wandering. "Ah, see... she has slept in his arms, and now she has awoken. She has run from him, and he has captured her. And now... now..." His face twisted with something very like fear. "What has he done?" he breathed. "Gods, but what has Draco done?"

"What--" began Pansy.

"Shh," said Narcissa.

"He has bonded her to him," Lucius whispered, "with a bond like no other. He has invoked magic that my son was never meant to wield. He has opened a door forbidden to mortals, and the Immortals will never let him rest now. May the gods help us all." The last tendrils of the thick black smoke spread through the room at his final words. Then they thinned and went out.

The torches flickered and held steady at a greater brightness. The four at the table blinked at one another, as if they themselves had been released from a spell, and in a way, of course, they had.

"I had hoped," said Lucius, "that the Kurmasy charm would tell us where he was. "

"Well, it didn't," said Snape, carefully packing away the crucible in a small black box. "Turkish magic is very unpredictable, and it seldom works in precisely the manner one expects. I did warn you about that."

He sighed. "What the hell was it that we did find out?"

Snape shrugged. "I'm not sure. But I believe that wherever Draco is-- and I do have my theories as to where that might be-- he's used magic that should be past his powers. That's what you felt, Lucius."

"Should be?"

"Well, it obviously wasn't. I do wonder why not. But it bolsters my theory that he has Ginny Weasley with him. If he used the spell on her..." He let the words trail off.

"That might explain it," Lucius finished. "That damn Weasley bitch.... But at the very least it gives me a better idea of how to proceed."

"Where do you think he is, Lucius?" Snape asked curiously as they walked to the door, Narcissa ahead of them.

"I don't think. If Ginny Weasley is with him, I know. He's taking her to the coast. Using her as bait to trap her brother."

"You're really so sure that's it?"

Lucius nodded.

"Why?"

"Because that's what I would do if I were in his shoes," Lucius said softly. "And there isn't one thought in my son's head that I didn't put there." The smile on his perfectly chiselled face was very cold, and did not reach his eyes. "Draco is my creation, Severus. No more. No less. But you'd never forget that, would you?"

Snape did not answer.

As they went through the receiving room to the small private refectory, Pansy, who had lingered behind, plucked at Lucius's arm. "Please--could I talk to you? For a moment?"

He looked down at her feverishly bright eyes, and the trembling of her thin body. "All right," he said.

They sat in oaken chairs pulled upto a massive clothes press in a bedroom at one side, and she looked down at her hands, seemingly reluctant to begin. "Pansy," he finally said, "they are serving nuncheon. The fame of sixteenth century Ye Olde Night Carriage nuncheons was still a topic of discussion in certain circles in 1995, I do assure you. And I am rather hungry; the Kurmasy spell is a demanding one. What did you want to say to me?"

She was silent for another moment. "Is it true?" she burst out. "Did he form a bond with her? A magical bond?"

Lucius hesitated and then nodded. "Yes, Pansy.My son has bonded with Ginny Weasley. We don't know the nature of this bond yet, but it was a powerful one."

"But then--" she gulped, twisted her hands together, looked quickly up at him and then away, "then he'll never bond with me!"

He sighed. "Not in the same way. No."

Her pretty face twisted unpleasantly. "You're telling me that everything we've planned for the past four years has simply been swept away? By that redheaded bitch?"

"We must make other plans. It isn't the end of the world, Pansy."

"But what is there for me to do now? This was what I'd been working for, hoping for, all this time! I did everything you told me to do. I kept Draco from doing what you didn't want him to do. I've helped you every way I can. And now-- and now--" She brought a hand up to her face, angrily wiping away tears.

Lucius held her chin between thumb and forefinger, clucking his tongue against his teeth. "Pansy, Pansy, Pansy," he said chidingly. "Do you think I'm going to throw you aside now that this has happened? Plans will be modified. That's all. You're still the only one besides Severus who understands anything about sixteenth century magic; you've studied it for over a year. YoThat's invaluable. You're still our only link with the Hogwarts of our day, through Ivy. You're still a vital member of the team."

"But I can't be--what we planned. We have to use Ginny Weasley."

"Well, we certainly can't dispose of her as soon as we originally hoped to do. But that will come in time, too."

"You never really wanted to use me in the first place," she said sullenly. "You wanted Marie-France Tessier, you know you did."

"Pansy--" and the grip on her chin grew tighter, drawing a little gasp from her "--we agreed to never mention that woman's name again."

"You're hurting me, Lucius, please, let go--"

"Don't you remember when we agreed? In St. Tropez?"

"Yes. Yes, of course, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry--"

"I value you, Pansy. I need you. You know I do," he murmured, his other hand caressing the back of her neck, moving lower. "But you, in turn, must continue to support me. This agreement we have... for our mutual benefit... that's how it works."

She looked up at him, tears trembling on the bottoms of her black lashes. "You're going to get rid of me," she said.

"Pansy, you're simply being illogical now," Lucius said, impatience edging his voice. "You need to curb your tendency towards wild imaginings. I've warned you about this before."

"I'm sorry," she repeated in a whisper.

He moved closer to her. "I know how difficult this is," he said in a voice that was almost tender, and she shivered, feeling his hot breath against her cheek. "Believe me, I do. But I need you. You really are invaluable to me, my dear." He paused. "There are services that only you can perform for me..."

"Listen," Pansy said suddenly. "Please, listen to me, Lucius, do listen. Let me try to find them. Let me go ahead of the carriage on my own, to Leith, and find them for you. I know spells to keep them there. Please, please let me try. I can find thembefore the bond becomes too strong and we can break it then, I know we can--" Her hands clutched onto the edge of the table, and Lucius stilled her frantic fingers with his own.

"I couldn't find out where they were. You certainly can't," he replied, his voice becoming steely. "And a bond this powerful cannot be broken in that way, not the way you think. Hasn't it dawned on you yet that this is going to get worse before it gets better? It's got to occur to Draco at some point to strengthen the bond with Ginny Weasley even further. And since a bond this strong could only be flesh to flesh in the first place, there's only one way to do that. You do know what I'm talking about, don't you?"

Pansy gave a sound that was somewhere between a sniffle and a gasp. "Him--with her? He wouldn't, he wouldn't."

"This isn't romance, Pansy. It's power. I know the way his mind works. He'll do it."

In answer, she only stared at the intricate carvings of the wood-paneled walls, her eyes unseeing, her lips moving slightly without forming coherent words.

"I don't need this sort of thing from you right now," Lucius continued, his icy grey eyes boring into hers. "You're either my ally, or my enemy. There are no other choices."

"I could never be your enemy," she said in a low voice. "You must know that."

"Then you can't fail me now, Pansy. You can't. Because I won't permit it. Do you understand me?"

She nodded.

"Good."

After he left, she walked slowly back to the dank little room and sat at the table, staring into space for a few moments, her fists clenching and unclenching. Then she collected herself, and briskly gathered the ingredients she needed, carefully noting the exact position of Snape's collections of little boxes and bags. What she'd taken would never be missed. At least, not until it was too late. When the carriage halted briefly a few minutes later to take on new passengers, she slipped out a side door. Then, running lightly and quickly, she leaped down the embankment that paralleled the King's Road and began making her way to Leith.

..............................................................................................................................................................................

The actions of those touched by Draco Malfoy's decision were coalescing, taking form and shape, becoming an interconnected web whose every strand shivered to the movements of every other. And past, present, and future were all one to the connections that were now forming. So it was that at the Hogwarts of midwinter 1995, Ivy sat bolt upright, gasping into the darkness of the nearly deserted Slytherin girls' dormitory. The clock struck two, and the tolling of its bell sounded unnaturally long and low in her ears. Next to her, Colin Creevey moaned something under his breath and grabbed at her; making a face, she pushed his hand off her waist. He sat up, blinking

"Mum?" he asked drowsily.

Ivy rolled her eyes. "Colin, I do wish you'd stop calling me that. It's creepy."

"Calling you what?"

"Oh-- never mind." She moved restlessly, her hair flowing about her like dark water with glints of red in it. "Something's happened. Something to do with Pansy."

"What is it?" whispered Colin.

Ivy shook her head. "I don't know..."

"Do you think-- do you think we have to do anything yet? Is it time, I mean?"

"No..." But her voice was vague, and she kept staring into the darkness as if willing it to provide some clue.

"Then do come and lie back down, won't you, Ivy?" His hands pulled at her nightgown, and, knowing what he wanted, she let him do as he wished, gazing up at the ceiling until he was finished. But he kept stroking her face timidly with his hands, afterwards, and finally she pushed him away and lay awake for a long time, trying to think of what to do now. The soft sobbing sounds he was making weren't helping, but she was used to those. No wonder he wasn't Sorted into Slytherin, she thought. He'd never make it here. Brave but brittle, that's Colin. I suppose he was smashed to pieces inside,and nothing and no-one can ever make him whole again.

...........................................................................................................................................................................................

Across the barren winter fields that lay at the edge of the Forbidden Forest, in the high room of the clock tower, Sirius Black sat on the edge of one of the two cot beds, gazing down at the sleeping face of Remus Lupin. It was a face too vulnerable, with its short folded upper lip and delicate thin nose. A face too easily hurt by the world. A face he watched often in sleep, although the other man never knew it. The long dark eyelashes fluttered across the tips of his cheekbones, back and forth, back and forth. "Are you dreaming, Remus?" Sirius murmured. "What is it that you dream of, when you've retreated into that private place called sleep? How I wish that I didn't have to wake you... but I do." He reached out to shake his friend's shoulder, lightly.

"Huh--what?" Remus started up and looked about frantically. "What is it? What time is it? What's going on? Is it morning already?"

"No, no. Two o'clock, maybe."

"What on earth did you wake me up for, then?" Remus flopped back onto the cot with a sigh. "If you knew how exhausting it was to get the communications web in order, not that you would, because I did most of it..."

"You were grinding your teeth again. You know I can't sleep through that."

"You can't sleep through anything. So that's why you woke me up? This is all part of a diabolical plot to turn me into a zombie as well as a werewolf, isn't it?

"Oh, I lie awake at night dreaming up those. But no--this is something else." Sirius crossed the little five-sided room and tapped the center of the table with his wand. A network of interconnected red lines sprang to life, a shimmering image of a twelve-sided geometric figure at its center. "Look."

Remus bent over the table, the eerie scarlet light picking out the shadows and planes in his face from below. "Damn."

There was an elaborate web of glowing strands, woven over and under and between each other like an intricately embroidered magic carpet. But only two of them had twisted together, forming a spiral rope.

"You know what I've never understood?" Sirius asked rhetorically. "I've never understood why we have to keep track of so damn many strands when we're only tracking the vital signs of five people. And you know what else? I really don't see what we're supposed to do if something does go wrong, we can't exactly skip off to the sixteenth century ourselves--"

"Give it a rest, Sirius. I'm trying to concentrate." Remus frowned. "That's odd... really, really odd..."

"Whose are they?"

"Ginny Weasley and one of the Death Eater crew; their signatures are very distinct. It's a Malfoy...wait... it's Draco Malfoy. What the hell is this? We never set up the Tracking spell to include any of them!"

Sirius peered closer. "No, we didn't, but there they are nonetheless. When do you think this happened?"

"There's no telling. Time is running differently for them than for us; that's all I know, though I would guess that it's faster. An hour in our world might well be a day in theirs."

"So we don't even know if this is something that already has happened, or is still going to happen. Well, wait-- all of it's already happened, since we're looking at events in the sixteenth century--" Sirius rubbed his face. "I'm getting a headache. This reminds me of that classic paradox-- you know, if you went back in time and killed your grandfather, would it keep you from ever being born in the first place? And in that case, you couldn't very well have gone back in time and killed him. But if you didn't, then you were born. And--"

Remus leaned closer to the Draco and Ginny strands, shuddering. "Oh, God! Do you realize what this means? They've-- um--"

"Well, I don't know exactly what the expressive phrase 'um' might cover in this case, but something's happened between them, I'm afraid."

"Sweet, innocent little Ginny, and that --that spawn-of-evil Malfoy whelp--"

"She's not exactly little," Sirius pointed out. "Not too far under six foot."

"That's not the point, and you know it!"

"Wasn't aware you cared about her personally. Is there something I should know?"

Remus sighed. "I've always felt something for that girl. Oh, not like that!" he added impatiently. "I'm old enough to be her father, and anyway it's not that sort of feeling. She reminds me of a daughter I might have had... there's something about her face. A funny, lost look, too young and too old at the same time. I've always believed that if I could only sit down and talk to her, I might understand what it meant. I just feel that it would be important... I feel that I could help her. I feel--"

"You feel too bloody much, Remus," said Sirius. "That's your problem."

The other man's face tightened as if he had been slapped. "There's nothing more we can do right now," he said. "Might as well go back to bed."

The silence in the darkened room was very tense.

"Remus," Sirius finally said. "Are you awake?"

"No. I'm talking in my sleep."

"I'm--" He cleared his throat. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said what I did. I don't mean to make things harder for you, there's no excuse for that."

"Oh, don't worry about that," Remus murmured. "Everything that's on right now... it's like an ocean, and your little comment is one drop of water, long lost in the overflow."

Sirius laughed. "I always did love your poetry, you know. Are you still writing any?"

"No. These are not poetic times." There was a brief pause. "This would all be a lot easier if we could share the load with someone else."

"Yes, I'm afraid it's going to be too much for the two of us. We already know that Albus is doing all he can do as it is."

"Neville might have--"

"But I can see why Alistair wanted him to go with them. And no, Remus, we could not use Colin Creevey, so don't say it."

"I still don't see why."

"I don't trust the little bastard. Never have, never will."

"Sirius!"

"Remus--" he sighed. "I don't think I can explain this properly. All I can tell you is that spending twelve years in Azkaban taught me a few things about the darker side of humannature, I should hope. And I don't trust that boy. There's something essentially wrong about him."

"You don't know about the tragedy, do you?" Remus's voice was very soft in the darkness.

"Tragedy? No. Never heard a thing. What was it?"

"Well, almost nobody knows. Albus, of course, and a few of the professors, but the news never spread to the students. But I don't suppose it does any harm to tell you now. His mother died, nearly a year ago. That's why he's here over Christmas hols. Dennis went to stay with some cousins, I think, but Colin said they reminded him too much of her, so he didn't go."

"She-- died? How did it happen?" asked Sirius.

"Cancer, I think. But--" Remus didn't finish the sentence.

"There's more to it, isn't there?"

"That I won't tell you. It's his secret to guard or give away, and so far he hasn't told anyone at all. I do feel a great deal of sympathy for him, though."

"There you go again, spouting off about those damn feelings of yours," said Sirius, but his voice was almost affectionate. "I'm sorry, Remus, but Colin Creevey is just-- well, he rates about where Draco Malfoy does, in my book."

"You're trying to give me nightmares, aren't you?" Remus groaned.

"Shut up and go to sleep."

But neither man slept for a long time, as both stared at the glowing red web of spells woven in, out, under, over, through and among themselves and each other, the twisted strands that represented Ginny Weasley and Draco Malfoy beating, together, like the heart of a double helix.

......................................................................................................................................................................................

"They're never happy with the way it turns out," said Clotho, her foot working her spinning wheel, her graceful, pretty hands running the twisted threads evenly from the spindle. Her long golden hair fell over her lovely face, which was a composite of every lustful dream of man since Australopithecus Afarensis first left the trees and walked upright.

"They're not," agreed Atropos, measuring the finished cloth and wielding a very sharp pair of scissors with a practiced eye. She was older than the hills, bent almost double over her work, her nose and chin nearly meeting as they poked out of a nest of wrinkles. Her hands were gnarled and twisted beyond human imagining, and the flash of her eyes from their web of withered lines was like lightning. "Don't you think so, sister?"

"Knit one, purl two..." said Lachesis, the tips of her knitting needles flashing in intricate patterns. "Gracious, now I've dropped a stitch... I suppose you're right. Nothing's ever good enough for mortals. The cloth isn't the right pattern, or there isn't enough of it... too long, too short; too plain, too loosely woven, and always, always, cut off too soon." She was matronly and motherly with a large, comfortable bosom, the softest of laps, and the sweetest of smiles; every line of her called to mind hearth, home, loving hands, a taking-in, an enveloping, anencircling.

"Some of the Immortals aren't any better," giggled Clotho. The other two shot disapproving glares at her. But then, she was the Maiden, and tended to be flighty.

There they sat at their work, cutting, knitting, and spinning the lives of men, the three Fates, they who had been known as the Norns, the Triple Goddess of the British Isles, Morgaine, Vivian, and Niniane, the Maid, the Mother, and the Crone, Diana, Mary, and Florence, and the Three Gwenhyfars of King Arthur, among other names. They waited.

The Dreamtime has no space, no dimension, and no size. Yet it is infinite, which is a mystery. On the other hand, this is pretty consistent with the way quantum mechanics describes the universe before the Big Bang, but then Stephen Hawking may not entirely understand the matter, either. All gods that have ever been, or will ever be, are contained within its walls. Or perhaps they contain it. And among them brood the Immortals, the Endless, older than any gods that ever were. Or perhaps men and women dream them, and after humanity, they will be cease to be. Until the Big Crunch, nobody can say.

At any rate, in some dimensionless space within the heart of a great twelve-faced ruby jewel, below the serene faces of his kinswomen, the Fates, the god Loki was chained by a red web of symbols and spells to a bleak promontory of rock on the floor of a vast cave. Or perhaps the ruby itself contained the Dreamtime. This is not a point on which mortals can be clear. The titanic snake Nidhogg wound around the roots of Yggradsil, the World-Tree above him, and dripped an eternal supply of venom. Day after day, the preternatural poison ate away the trickster god's stomach down the backbone, and night after night, his immortal healing powers renewed his flesh. The agony was horrific. Yet even eternal torment has its ebb tides.

In the dimension that mortals have found convenient to call reality, Draco Malfoy wove a Hexensymbol with magic that should have been past his powers. Shape by shape and line by line, it drifted through the World-Tree and matched the flickering red nimbus that bound Loki. Magic above called to magic below, and a great shrilling cry shimmered the air, its waves spreading to the jagged peaks of the mountains of pain in the far distance. The network of spells dimmed to barely visible lines, like the embers of a banked fire.

"You have called me, Draco Lukas Malfoy," whispered Loki. "I come." Then he stretched himself from head to toe, taking on mortal form as he did so, and his powerful muscles rippled beneath his satiny skin. He winced. "A thousand years spent lying on a rock can give you such a crick in the neck!"

"You've only got forty-eight earthly hours," said Lady Death from her perch on a nearby rock, her kohl-rimmed eyes watching him. "And first you have to find them. Don't you think you should hurry up?"

"I'm trying to pick exactly the right outfit," the trickster god called back at her, throwing various bundles of cloth, fur, feathers, lycra, and naugahyde from a Louis Quince wardrobe he'd conjured up, every mahogany inch of which would have caused a twentieth century antique dealer to die of ecstasy. "Mortals are easily impressed by appearances, as I recall."

Death ran a hand through her lustrous black hair. "It's better to look good than to feel good, but don't you think you're taking this a little far?"

"I need your advice," Loki said engagingly. "You're the only one of us who walks through the mortal world anymore. Well, except for dreary old Dream, trolling for girlfriends. I trust your judgment."

"You can't wheedle me," she grumbled.

"I can't! Not even... a little?" Loki cocked his head and smiled at her, and the eternal flames he fell through danced around his face and lit his slanted eyes. The glimpse of that smile had been luring mortals to join him in his fall since the beginning of time; it was the precise curve of the lips and tilt of the head that had caused Eve to bite the apple, and even immortals were not entirely immune to it.

"Well... maybe a little. But, damn it, Loki! You shouldn't be doing this. Yes, I know you can, but you shouldn't. Let Desire and Despair play these kinds of games; they're not for us."

"But I'm the Prince of Darkness. I like games." Loki skipped his preternatural fingers across the rows of hangers. "How about this?"

In a rather theatrical puff of smoke, the Father of Lies was dressed as an eighteenth century French courtier, complete with knee breeches, cascades of ruffles, an enormous white wig, powder, and patches. "Apres moi, le deluge," he declaimed with a dramatic gesture.

"Wrong century," she said. "Try again."

"How about this?" With another puff, Loki was attired in slick black vatleathers and mirrorshades. Cyberimplants ran down his left arm, and as he flicked his hand, experimentally, razors sprouted from his fingernails.

"That's even worse."

The god pouted. "I like this one."

"Yeah, it would be great, if you were trying to find them in the year 2164."

"All right! All right."The smoke billowed, then cleared, revealing Loki wrapped in an uncured animal skin and holding a wooden spear with a flint tip.

"Way too far in the other direction," said Lady Death. "You're deliberately being difficult now, you know that?"

Puff. He turned from side to side, wearing a white polyester leisure suit unbuttoned to the waist, a mass of gold chains around his neck, and go-go boots.

"Too Saturday Night Fever."

Puff. Loki clamped his teeth around a pipe, adjusted his robe, and wiggled his toes in a pair of fuzzy plaid slippers.

"Too Hugh Hefner."

Puff. Loki tilted the black top on his head, blinked one mascara'ed eye, and stroked the stiletto in his hand with a wicked grin.

"Too Clockwork Orange. Look, are you serious about this or not?"

In answer, Loki waved his hands, and smoke trailed from his fingertips. When it cleared, he stood before her in a crimson doubletwith bolstered and slashed sleeves, revealing an intricately embroidered linen shirt beneath. His outer coat of heavy silk swung ashe pirouetted, revealing a fur lining, and his scarlet hose were garded with red velvet. He put a hand to his heart, sighing theatrically. "Fair maid, thou prick'st me to the heart!" Lady Death put a hand over her lips to hide her smile, but her eyes danced with merriment.

"Stop," said a low, menacing voice, and the Immortals glanced round to see Rhiannon, who had suddenly appeared behind them. The dark robes of the fairy queen shimmered with folds of orange light, and the crescent moon on her brow burned violet. "Do not interfere, my cousin!" she said warningly to Lady Death, her fathomless dark eyes blazing."I call the Fates to hear my case against him."

"Well, dearie, it's not quite that simple," said Atropos, laying out a length of purple cloth on a rock and squinting at it.

"They're here? It's like Old Home Week," remarked Lady Death.

"When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning, and in rain." Lachesis put her knitting away in a shopping bag and met Loki's gaze fondly, but implacably.

"What the hell is this?" he demanded.

"Macbeth."

"I have called the three Fates to be my judges." Rhiannon's brows knitted together, and she strode before the stone platform. . "Tell my brother that this cannot be done, this meddling in the affairs of mortals."

"Pot--kettle- black!" sputtered Loki. "You gave that mortal girl one of the lockets."

"I was only-- well-- the mortal boy already has the book. It is too late to return them to innocence now."

"Oh. I see," said Loki. "Nice to know you're not above a spot of moral relativism when it suits you, sis."

"Do not presume to judge me, you who are faithless, accursed, and cast out from heaven!"

"You say that like it's a bad thing..." the god mused.

Rhiannon whirled on the circle of the three Fates, who were watching the pair appraisingly. "Would you allow him to bring chaos on all the worlds? For that is what will happen."

Loki conjured a mirror and adjusted the short sword hanging from his belt. "Look, can I just make one point here? Cousin Death, for example--"

"You have failed to plan out a well-reasoned defense, I see," said Rhiannon.

"Don't stop me; I'm on a roll. I want to ask you something. What do your actions accomplish, my lady of decay and darkness, of tombs and catacombs, of endings? What is your purpose?"

"Well-- I have a job to do, and I do it." Lady Death shrugged. "Listen, even as we're sitting here, I'm there for them, these mortal beings, in hospitals and prisons and abbatoirs, in cars, in planes, on battlefields, for those that die together, and those that die alone. For some folks, death is a release. And for others, it's an abomination, a terrible thing. I've been blessed and cursed, sworn at and prayed to, blasphemed and worshipped, reviled and exalted..I've been called evil; but I'm not, and good; but I'm not. And in the end, I'm there for all of them."

"And you, my sister?" Loki turned to Rhiannon. "What about you?"

The fairy queen glared at him but held her ground. "I am the preserver of sacred things, and the warrior for sacred peoples. Stonehenge was mine, and the tumuli of Ireland; I built the cliff dwellings of the Anasazi, and the sacred hoop of the Lakota encircled me. But my vision and my wisdom have long been forgotten, and my power is dwindling. I am not surprised that you would overrun me, for that has been the function of this mortal world for long and long, and you have always been overfond of mortals. But I will keep my realm in this world, or perish trying."

"Well, as judges, I don't think we have to explain anything," said Clotho. "But you know what we do anyway, and what we are. We spin--"

"And weave--" added Lachesis, picking up her knitting bag again.

"And cut--" cackled Atropos, wielding her scissors over a particularly ragged edge of cloth that represented several dozen inhabitants of a high-rise on Hong Kong killed in a typhoon.

"The lives of mortal men," Clotho finished. "Mostly, we keep it to ourselves, no matter what John Edwards says. Although I do have my sources at the National Enquirer."

"I fail to see the point," said Rhiannon.

""It is the point!" Loki replied. "We all do what we're given to do, what we're appointed to do. And chaos is what I do; it's my modus operandi, the essence of my godhood, or-- well, fallen-angelhood, or whatever you want to call it. Trouble's my name, trouble's my game, if you want to talk about fate and predestination and other dreary things."

"Apparently you have learned nothing from your imprisonment," said his sister. "Trapped eternally here within the spells of the Jewel, and it is your own fault. Was it worth it?"

"Mm, well, it certainly seemed so at the time. And eternally?" Loki's slanted eyes gleamed with what might quite properly be termed devilish glee.

"Well, until the fall of the gods, at any rate."

"Perhaps. But, my sister, you have forgotten one thing."

"And what is that, my brother?"

'It's nearly the feast of midwinter, of Yule, when the veils between the worlds grow thin.. And this mortal, this Draco Malfoy, has invoked my name. He has wielded the magic I gave to man, which no man should now remember. All of you know the rules. I have forty-eight hours. And I'm going to make them count."

Atropos gave a long, long sigh. "He's right," she said.

"What?" demanded Rhiannon."You cannot mean that you will let him do this thing!"

"Dearie," said Lachesis, "it isn't a question of letting him. You know the Dreamtime's law as well as we do."

Rhiannon turned on Lady Death, her eyes flashing, but before her lips could form the first word the Immortal held up her hand. "I'm just here to give advice on clothes, cousin. Leave me out of it."

The fairy queen turned, muttering, her dark hair writhing fiery gold. "I'll wager that if Lord Morpheus were here, he could--"

"Ah yes. Where is Dream?" Loki purred.

Lady Death hesitated. "Well, actually, he didn't want to come, he's kind of..."

"What?"

"Sulking."

"Ha! I knew it." Loki tilted his flat velvet cap and adjusted its plume.

Her face became pensive. "But seriously, do you think you've thought this whole thing through, Loki?"

"Not you, too! Don't try to talk me out of this," he warned. "This time, it's the mortals who have set fate in motion. A fate that even touches us."

"They have meddled in what they should not!" Rhiannon put in.

"You know, the two of you just agreed on something," said Lady Death. "Did you realize that?"

"The last time this happened," said Atropos. "the continents were shaped differently."

"Us agreeing on something or mortals shaping the fate of immortals?" asked Loki.

"Well, both, actually."

"See!" the trickster god crowed. "Desperate times call for desperate measures."

Rhiannon sighed, and suddenly looked deflated. She was no longer an avenging goddess, but a sad, simple woman, veiled and robed in black. "I suppose you will tell me next that they are only doing as they were given to do, these mortals. Gwenhyfar Weasley and Draco Malfoy."

"No," said Loki quietly, all mockery gone from his voice for the moment. "That's the difference between them and us. They have a choice."

She turned to go, laying her hand on the trunk of the World-Tree. She bent her head towards Loki. "This is a day I will not forget, my brother," she said, and then she was gone.

"Well!" said Loki, cheerfully. "She always knows how to put a damper on things, doesn't she?" He adjusted the ruffles round one wrist and dismissed the mirror with a snap of his fingers. "It's been real, but time to start moseying... places to go... people to see.. "

"So what are you planning to do with these mortals, hon?" asked Clotho.

"Ever watched 'Let's Make a Deal,' auntie?" Loki asked, a smirk on his face.

"Oh merciful heavens, don't tell me you're on that buying-souls-from-mortals kick again. One would think you'd have learned your lesson with Faust," said Lachesis.

"I don't want their souls," Loki said impatiently. "I never want anybody's soul! These stupid mortals keep insisting on giving them to me. It never seems to occur to them to wonder what I'm supposed to do with them."

"Make a patchwork quilt?" suggested Lady Death.

"I'm not even going to dignify that one with an answer. You sound like Delirium."

Death drew her knees up to her chin and put her crossed arms on them, broodingly. "I like them. The mortals, I mean."

"Who's your favorite?" Loki asked. "Draco's mine. He's like a blindfolded tightrope walker swaying over the abyss of his own destruction. It's fun to watch."

"Mmm... Ginny. There's something about her eyes. It's very strange to see that look in a mortal's eyes. You can see that she's been through the darkness, and the fear, and now she knows. But she doesn't know she knows. Not yet. She's sweet."

"Isn't she!" purred Loki.

"Merciful heavens, I don't trust that look in your eye," fussed Lachesis.

"I wish you'd quit saying that, auntie. The heavens aren't merciful at all; you know that. And neither am I."

"I have never understood why mortals believe that any of us should be merciful," said Atropos. The crone looked up from her flashing scissors cutting the cloth of destiny. " We are as we are. Death is death. Chaos is chaos. Fate is fate. The fates themselves must follow that path, even if leads us to our own doom."

"Do immortals have a doom?" wondered Clotho. "That doesn't sound right."

"Reality itself has a doom," said Loki softly. "Ragnarok.Götterdammerung. Armageddon.The fall of gods and men. And us too, my kinswomen; that means us, too. We will fall at the very end, Last as we were First, and then Night will come. There was a mortal once who told the secrets of the elves, who named me Iarwain ben-Adar, oldest and fatherless. And so I am. But even I have an end." He touched the trunk of Yggdrassil with one glowing finger and was absorbed into its bark, as instantly as a drop of water into thirsty earth. His last words drifted back to the gathered circle of Immortals. "See you in the pictures, folks..." And then, like a breath of wind, he vanished from sight.

........................................................................................................................................................................................

Wind puffed in from the window of the hut in the borderlands of sixteenth century Scotland, where the flap of oiled animal skin was barely holding, and blew the scarlet mist away. There was no visible trace of the spell. It might never have been. Ginny let out a long breath that she hadn't even realised she'd been holding. And the world went on from that suspended moment.

Draco closed the book and tucked it into a pocket of his cloak. "I don't suppose there's any oatcake left?" he asked Ginny politely.

"No. We finished it last night. There's a well outside though, for water."

He let her walk ahead of him without a trace of worry in his smooth, pale face. She pumped the rusty well handle and let the icy water gush over her hands; splashing it on her face, she felt no lingering traces of enchantment. The grey eyes looked back at her blandly. He was definitely up to something. The part about being bound by this spell, whatever it was, until death or the end of the world was less than reassuring. But she felt oddly unworried, almost elated, as if she'd drunk a bottle of Ogden's Old Firewhiskey all by herself. After running wet hands through his glossy hair-- which really did look much neater than it had any right to do after a night spent sleeping on the ground; Ginny knew that her own hair probably looked as if rats had been making nests in it-- Draco pointed to the ragged band of trees at the edge of the clearing.

"Go on," he said. "Run."

Her breathing quickened, and she stayed where she was, eyeing him warily.

"I know you want to. Go ahead. Try." He folded his arms and leaned against the side of the hut.

It was a trick. A trap. It had to be. But the longing to escape swept over her, and before she even knew that she had started to move, Ginny was running towards the open field.

Draco let her get about a hundred metres away from him before holding up his right hand in an almost lazy motion. The red network of symbols shimmered on his wrist, briefly. Ginny stopped in her tracks, staggered, and clutched at her throat, struggling to breathe. He gestured her back towards him, and she followed with as little resistance as a fish being reeled in on a line. But her eyes were wide, wild, and fiercely golden, blazing at him with fury. When she could speak again, she gasped, "What-- the fuck did you-- do to me, Malfoy?"

"Such language, Weasley. Do you eat with that mouth?"

"Don't you dare to-- lecture me, you--"

"I suppose there's no harm in your knowing," he said, beginning to walk along the river against the rising sun, motioning for her to follow him. "You really might as well. There's certainly nothing you can do about it." Draco looked back to make sure she was keeping up. "I bound you to me with a Hexensymbol."

"A what?"

"I knew you wouldn't know what it was. A Hexensymbol.It's Bavarian magic." He snickered at her blank look, feeling exceptionally pleased with himself. "You don't know anything, do you, Weasley? Typical."

"Well, if you know so much, why don't you tell me?" She didn't really think he would, but her ears were alert for any scrap of information he might let fall.

"It isn't taught at Hogwarts, of course," Draco said idly. "There's an icy patch right there, watch for it-- Binns mentions it a little in History of Magic class, I think, but I doubt even Granger could stay awake long enough to take notes on that. And he doesn't know much. Such a plebian, Binns is, in life and death alike. No-one knows, no-one remembers... except the highest class of purebloods, which would rather let the Weasleys out."

"If you think I'm going to rise to your bait, I'm not."

"But it's so amusing. Your face turns so red and your cheeks get all blotchy; I know exactly what you're thinking about me. You're the most transparent thing. It's rather fun to watch."

"Ooh--" She spluttered and finally fell silent. They walked on for several hours without saying another word.

The sun rose higher and higher, and Ginny's stomach gnawed emptily at itself. Little black spots were starting to dance in front of her eyes by the time Draco raised his hand for a halt. She started for the river without thinking, and he pulled her back. "Don't drink of the water, remember?" He cocked his head to one side. "I hear water running further up towards the road though; it must be a spring. Come on."

They stole across the grassy field, moving from rock to rock as quietly as they could. The land seemed to be growing more populated. Twice, Draco grabbed her hand and pulled her down to the ground as an oxcart rumbled down the high road in the distance, and Ginny once saw a smudge of smoke rising on the horizon that surely had to mean a house. If she could only get him to take her where there were people-- and he'd have to, sooner or later, if they were going to get to Leith... But then what? Why should anyone help her, and why would anyone believe her story anyway? Only Ron and her friends, and they were exactly the ones she had to try to avoid, even as Draco tried to find them. It all seemed fairly hopeless.

There was a small pond in a ragged circle of trees, spring-fed. "Are you sure this is all right?" Ginny asked suspiciously.

Draco shrugged. "It would be flowing into that river, not out of it. But if you want to go thirsty that's your lookout." He was already kneeling to scoop up water. Ginny did the same, gritting her teeth against the bitter cold and wondering how on earth he managed to look so elegant while drinking out of his cupped hands.

He sat propped against the trunk of one of the little trees, elbows on his knees, staring into the distance. "I do wish we had something to eat," he muttered.

"I wish you wouldn't talk about it," said Ginny. "That only makes it worse."

"Putting a Hexensymbol bond on you hasn't made you shut up, I see."

"Was it supposed to?"

"I don't normally share information with my victims," said Draco in his most irritating drawl, hoping she couldn't tell that he didn't have the faintest idea.

"Or food."

"I told you. There isn't any. Why don't you come up with some?"

Ginny smiled at him. "Actually, I think I will." She poked through some fallen sticks on the ground. "Nothing's the right shape... Maybe if you let me use your knife, I could--"

"No."

"Are you afraid?" She could have bitten her tongue as soon as the words were out of her mouth, but he only laughed.

"You really don't know anything, do you?" One corner of his mouth went up in a smirk, and he pressed his little knife into her hand.

"It wouldn't do any good, I don't have anything to use for a line anyway." It felt so strange, holding something that belonged to him, that he'd worn at his belt, next to his body. She tried to give it back to him, but Draco shook his head.

"You know what you'd really like to do with that knife."

"I don't know what you're talking about." She did.

"Come off it, Weasley, you'd like to cut my black heart out. Go ahead. Try it."

A queasy feeling rippled through her. Ginny shook her head.

"Typical. Too many scruples, like all Gryffindors." There was definitely an amused smile on his face; she couldn't begin to imagine what sort of sick game he was playing now, but she was determined not to be drawn into it. "All right, what do I have to do to set you off? I'll start by insulting your family. Let's see. Your brothers are slack-jawed trogdolytes, your father has the ambition of a lobotomized Cornish pixie, and your mother-- Ah, I see that the Weasley temper breeds true after all, so never mind that."

Draco sat still and watched Ginny swipe the knife across his wrist, very lightly. It would have left no more than the faintest scratch, if that. However, just before the blade touched his skin, it turned violently in her hand. She gave a little shriek and dropped it.

"There's a Protection spell on it, isn't there?" Ginny sucked on the stinging ends of her fingers.

"Not at all. If you've damaged this--" Draco examined the blade critically before sliding it back into its sheath. "It's nothing to do with the knife. As long as you're under the Hexensymbol bond, you couldn't hurt me if you tried."

Ginny groaned; she might have guessed. "Well, why didn't you just tell me then? Why'd you have to put me through all that?"

"A demonstration always hammers one's point home more firmly, I feel. And that's quite apart from the fact that baiting you is so much fun."

Her hands were clenched so tightly that her nails were making little half-moons in her palms. I will not let him see how much he gets to me. I won't, I won't, I won't... I'll behave as if nothing's happened; he won't expect that... Kneeling by the edge of the pond, she peered into it, got up and walked around it, and finally settled on a spot where the water was deepest. She squinted down at the water, rolled up her sleeves, and slipped her hands down into it, wincing at the cold.

"Also, I was rather curious to see how far you'd go. You disappoint me, Weasley," Draco said softly. "I expected you to aim for a much more... vital part of me."

A blushing, stammered answer would be a triumph for him, she knew. Ginny forced herself to meet his eyes with a level stare. "It's a bit hard to aim at something that small, isn't it?"

"Touchè," he said, inclining his head to her.

"I'm not like you, Malfoy. Hurting other people doesn't give me any pleasure, no matter who they are or how much I hate them."

Draco could think of no answer to that.

"What are you doing?" he asked after several minutes of silence.

"Getting lunch," she replied.

"You're going to freeze," Draco said. Ginny hid her feelings well, better than he'd expected, he was forced to admit. Only the faint trembling of her shoulders and the tightly compressed line of her lips betrayed that she was in a tearing temper, but he could tell. He settled back to watch her struggle to keep her emotions from showing on her face. It was highly entertaining.

"Shh," she said almost without moving her lips, sitting perfectly motionless. Then her hands made a sudden grab and she yanked them out of the water. Something was flopping between them. "Hit it with a rock or something, quick!"

"Hit it with a rock?" Draco repeated, staring dubiously at the little pike.

"Haven't you ever caught fish before?"

"Fish comes in a package from a shop. Or at least that's what I suppose. I never questioned the house elves about it."

Ginny turned back to the pond, muttering something that sounded remarkably like "useless." He chose to ignore it.

She caught another trout and a perch before stopping. "My hands are getting too cold," she said, tucking them beneath her arms. "That water's close to freezing; it's only the spring that keeps it from icing over, I suppose. Malfoy, I really do need your knife now."

"You know, Weasley, I just don't care for that idea."

"If you don't want me using it, then you clean the fish." Oh, how she wished she had a picture of his face when he heard her say that.

"Can't you do something else?" he asked, looking at the fish with mingled distaste and hunger.

"I suppose I could just spit them," she sighed. It really seemed to Draco that she shoved the little fish onto the bare branches she found with rather more force than necessary.

"Are you going to do anything to help me at all?" Ginny asked as she fed the driest small sticks she could find to the fire she'd started with the flint and goldstone from the hut. Draco sat back against the trunk of the one of the trees, watching her.

"But you're doing such a good job," he said without moving. "Why should I?"

"I don't know why I would expect you to. You've been waited on hand and foot all your life, I'm sure."

Lazily, he nodded.

"Oh! You--" There was no adequate way to finish the sentence, so she didn't. Maybe she should use the wettest wood she could find so the fire would smoke, and they'd be found! But no. Once again, Ginny remembered that she might well be jumping from the frying pan into the fire if she did that.

"Tell you what, Weasley. I'll wash the dishes."

That comment didn't even deserve a reply, she decided.

After eating, they both felt much better. Ginny stripped the last bit of trout from the bones with her teeth and wiped her hands on some dead leaves, deciding that where there was life, there was hope. Perhaps there was some way to break the Hexensymbol bond once they were in Leith, and then she could escape and find her brother. She racked her brains again to recall any scrap of information about Bavarian magic but could remember nothing beyond a very vague memory of a fairy tale about three sisters who climbed the glass mountain in their golden slippers. From the wizarding edition of Grimm's fairy tales, she thought it was...

"Weasley, you're a very useful captive, I must say." An all-too-familiar drawling voice interrupted her thoughts.

She glared at Draco Malfoy. "No thanks to you."

"Oh, I agree. It was a compliment."

She looked up with a grudging smile. What a perverse wretch he was, but how-- well-- amusing he could be, sometimes. When he wanted to.

"So, er," he said with elaborate casualness, "I suppose you've always done a great deal of fishing at the Weasley hovel, to supplement the meager family table?"

"Nope."

"You and your brothers ran barefoot out onto the road with strings of fish for sale to the local yokels every morning. That's it, isn't it? You brought in a few extra sickles that way, so you could afford a dress. Unfortunately, you were all obliged to take turns wearing it."

"Afraid not."

"Wait, wait, I've figured it out now. Rubbish Bin-St. Wanker, or whatever the name is of that dreadful bucolic village you're from, had a free public library. So on the days when it was your go at the dress, you had a chance to read the story of the golden fish, and you kept trying to catch it, hoping to be able to afford shoes."

"Cold as a stepmother's breast."

He glared at her. She was barely able to choke back her laughter.

"What's so funny?"

"Oh, Malfoy!" she snorted. "You're dying to ask me how I know all these things but you're too stubborn and stiffnecked to bring yourself to do it. I can tell by that stuck-up look on your face."

"I couldn't possibly care less," he said, his voice as lofty as he could make it. But she wouldn't stop giggling, and finally he shot her a glare that should have stopped dragons in their tracks. She laughed harder.

"All right, Weasley, have it your way. Fine.I'll bite. How do you know?"

She pulled her arms over her knees and crossed them under the plaid for warmth, moving closer to the fire. "My father takes-- used to take me camping."

"Camping? You mean... the sort of thing everyone does at the Quidditch World Cup?"

"Well, not exactly." Ginny remembered the morning two years before when her father had met her and Ron at the Hogwarts train station just outside the school with a great pack on his back, two tents rolled up, and truly boundless enthusiasm. "It all started when he dragged Ron and me on a backpacking trip from Hogsmeade to Leith. It was the same time of year, too; he picked us up at the start of the Christmas hols. And Dad wanted everything to be authentic, or at least that's what he said, so we had to use what Muggles use." Ginny shuddered at the memory of the cold, wet, hard ground and stiff, cramped dawn risings, but the expression of incredulous distaste on Draco's face nearly set her laughing again. "When you put up the tents and went into them, they were-- well, just tents. We had to start fires with flint and steel, and I learned how to do it with goldstone as well. Dad wanted us to 'live off the land,' too; that's how I learned to fish like that, but it didn't last too long. Dad kept having to put Memory charms on irate landowners. The authentic Muggle freeze-dried camping food wasn't much of an improvement, though."

Wait," said Draco. "You said that it's how it all started. You mean you did this more than once?"

"All my brothers started coming up with desperately important engagements on the weekends, but I wanted to go. It was-- well-- sort of nice. It was just Dad and me--" A lump rose in her throat so suddenly that she didn't have time to catch it, and she turned away, pretending to cough.

"Being dragged repeatedly out into the middle of nowhere and forced to camp like a Muggle. Sounds like a clear-cut case for calling child protection services if I ever heard of one," he murmured, but there was no conviction in his voice.

Ginny nodded, still not trusting herself to speak. It was impossible to imagine anything more humiliating than breaking down in front of Draco Malfoy. Perhaps he hadn't noticed. No, he noticed everything.

"Cheer up, Weasley. It's all coming in useful now. I must say, you're behaving well," he said magnanimously. "Catching fish, cooking lunch, not trying to escape..."

"It doesn't seem that it would do any good to try."

He laughed softly. "You're right about that."

Ginny's heart leaped. He seemed to be in such a strange mood now; teasing, affable, almost good-natured, maybe she could use it to her own advantage. Perhaps she could draw him out. Get information from him. But she did need to be careful; who knew how long this pleasantness would last? And once it ended-- Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

"Oh?" she asked carefully. "Is that so? Binding spells are sixth year, aren't they? I don't know anything about them."

"There's no Binding spell they know or teach at Hogwarts nearly as powerful as this one." His eyes looked over her head as he spoke, not seeming to really see her, and she realized that he was picking up the conversation they'd had earlier as if there had been no break in it. "Bavarian magic carries the most ancient and concentrated powers that have ever existed on this earth."

Ginny thought hard. A few scraps of information she'd seen in the back of the dustiest books in the Hogwarts library when she was doing research for Hermione were starting to come back to her now. "It doesn't rely on wands, does it?"

"It's entirely wandless. It dates from well before the time when witches and wizards needed props like wands, you see. The forces of this magic are bred deep into the blood of its carriers." His voice was unbearably smug.

"Well, why do you have it? Malfoy doesn't sound like a very Bavarian name to me!"

He flashed a grin back at her, and she caught a glimpse of extremely white, extremely sharp teeth. But he didn't say another word. It was such a Malfoy thing to do, she thought. Draco knew something she didn't, and preferred to keep the knowledge to himself, enjoying it the more because it was secret. It was a characteristic that would not have been out of place in a very great criminal. Which was, she supposed, fitting enough.

She had no idea of the turmoil in his head at that moment, as his bland face gave no clue. He'd almost told her the reason, and he had no idea why it had seemed so natural for that secret to come so close to simply tumbling from his lips. The sorrowful face of Narcissa Malfoy shaped in his mind's eye, reproaching him without words, as she so often did in the flesh. He had almost slipped. Why in the hell did this always seem to happen to him in the presence of Ginny Weasley? Never again, Mother.Never.

"So what does this Hexensymbol do, anyway?" Ginny asked a little nervously. Those grey eyes of his really didn't seem to blink. But then they did, slowly, fixed on hers, as if he were trying to pull her even deeper under his spell.

"It bonds you to me, irrevocably. The tie is unbreakable. You become what is known as a fangti heliagr, sworn in the power of the old gods, Donar and Loki and Wotan."

"A what?"

"A sacred prisoner, and you can't escape me unless I release you. Which isn't going to happen until-- well, let's just say that you'd better have something interesting to do while you wait."

"What weird language is that?" asked Ginny belligerently, trying to ignore the implications of his last words.

"It's Old High Bavarian. The language of the most secret spells, and of real power. Much more powerful than that stupid Latin they teach us at Hogwarts."

Deep shivers of some unnamable emotion went all through Ginny. "I'll bet there isn't any such thing. I'll bet you were just making it up as you went along." She could hear how hopelessly silly she sounded.

"Don't you wish."

"Well, prove it then. Say something else in it."

"Now is not the proper time." Draco hoped that he sounded remote and mysterious and menacing. In actual fact, he had run through nearly all of the ancient Bavarian language he knew with that Hexensymbol spell.

"Well, do another spell then. I'll bet you don't know anymore. "

"This power is not to be used lightly." He also remembered a pat-a-cake charm that was used to cheer up babies. That was about it. Damn Ginny Weasley, she was right. "Is there any fish left?"

"I was saving it for later."

"Give it to me." His voice was sharper than he'd meant it to be; well, if it frightened her, that was all to the good. She was his captive; he was her captor, that was it, the alpha and omega of the situation, world without end, amen. Ginny tossed him the last piece and Draco ate it hungrily, wishing there were more, biting his lip in his haste. He pressed two fingers to it, swearing under his breath.

"What is it?"

"Nothing."

"Oh-- you're bleeding." She had crossed the space between them in an instant.

"It's nothing, really. I bit my lip yesterday, that's all, and it opened again." Had it actually been only yesterday, that journey through the Hogwarts clock tower to Malfoy Manor? Must've been, he realized, or the day before, perhaps, although it felt more like an eternity.

Ginny was running her fingers over his lower lip, knitting her brows together. "Ooh, that's nasty," she said. "It'll leave a scar if you're not careful." He felt the cool smoothness of her skin, the brush of her hair against his neck when she bent to look at the wound, and then, as she straightened and her upper body touched the length of his chest for an instant, that was not all he felt.

"I said I'll be all right!" Draco's voice was very harsh. "What the hell do you care, anyway?"

"Don't know what came over me, Malfoy." She yanked her hand back as if the touch of his lips had burned her fingertips. "Ron fell down on a cement step and bit his lip through when he was five; he's still got the scar, so I suppose I just-- oh, never mind what I just! It's your lookout entirely. If you bleed to death you're out of my hair. Didn't the spell say something about 'until death takes me'?"

"Point well taken, Weasley," he said, getting up. "You can just walk ahead of me for the rest of the day."

"I thought I couldn't hurt you if I tried," she said mockingly.

"I'll be damned if I'll trust you behind me anyway." He looked at her as she moved in front of him; her face was perfectly smooth and expressionless, but that meant nothing, there could be any number of plans behind it. There was no reason for her to be as innocent as she seemed, perhaps not in any sense of the word. When she'd run her fingers along his lips and pressed herself close to him for a fleeting instant, had she known exactly what she was doing?

Her face took on a strange, wary expression, and Draco realized that he'd been staring at her too long. He gave her a little push. Thank Merlin for black robes. Voluminous, concealing black robes.

The general mood for the rest of the afternoon was a decidedly sullen one. The sun slipped lower and lower in the sky, and Ginny began wondering where in the world they were going to sleep, or how they'd get any more food. Draco hadn't said a word for hours and his silence was making her nervous. The river would only run parallel to the road for so long; it would veer up to it soon, and God only knew what he planned to do then. Her feet were extremely cold and wet, and her lips and cheeks were growing chapped from the cold wind. She tried to hide her head within a hood she made of the plaid as best she could, feeling her own breath inside the wool warm her a little, trying not to think of when they'd have to leave the relative warmth of the magical borderland by the stream.

As the rays of the sun lengthened to the early evening of winter, he suddenly turned and pulled her behind a tree, putting a finger to her lips. Another oxcart laden high with sheep's hides was rolling down the high road. They were closer to it than they had been; soon, she knew, traveling by the river would offer no protection from the eyes of anyone who might be watching. Smudges of smoke rose on the horizon, and when Ginny looked hard she saw the outlines of small buildings gathered in a sort of rough circle. Draco leaned down to her until his lips touched her ear.

"You've been here before. What is that?"

"We're on the edge of Melrose Abbey land. I suppose it's a village connected to it."

The sound of rolling wheels went on and on. Draco sank down on a rock, motioning for her to do the same, and they waited. He propped his head in his hands and bit his lip, staring out at the road, seemingly unaware of her. Ginny studied his profile, wondering if she dared use this opportunity to try to get any more information out of him. The little she'd learned when he was actually talking to her had only whetted her appetite for more, and there wasn't much time. If she remembered correctly, it was a journey of perhaps one or two more days to Leith, and the coast. If she could find Ron before Malfoy did; if she could slip away from him and join her brother and the rest before her captor figured out she was gone, and, above all, if she could figure out how to break the Hexensymbol bond... It all added up to far too many ifs. If only she were in sixth year, for example, so that she would have learned about Binding spells already.

Ginny thought hard but could only dredge up a very vague memory of being in the room during part of the time Harry, Ron, and Hermione spent studying for a test. How to cast Binding spells, what sort of herbs to use in order to strengthen them. Rosemary and tansy, she thought. Not much help there. How to avoid them... well, it was too late for that... different types... none of them like this one, of course. They didn't tend to be very strong magic, not the ones taught at Hogwarts, at least. She thought she did remember something about Hermione mentioning Polyjuice potion. A French unicorn in 1153 had been put under a Binding spell so that it couldn't escape greedy villagers in the Pyrenees who were trying to steal its horn, but it had drunk Polyjuice and turned into a bird that had flown away... Perhaps Binding spells were confused if people were in different bodies. Not that that was much help, either. And anyway it was the Hexensymbol spell that she needed to learn more about. The project seemed unlikely to get very far if Draco Malfoy wouldn't even talk to her. The savage scowl on his face did rather tend to discourage conversation. But an idea was shaping in her mind. A risky one, to be sure, but if there was ever a time to throw caution to the winds, this was it.

"I'm tired," she said in a whiny voice.

He didn't answer her.

"My feet hurt."

A little muscle jumped in his cheek, just above his jaw.

"And I'm so, so hungry!"

At last, Draco turned towards her. "If I had a needle and thread, Weasley, I swear I would sew your lips together."

That seemed less than a promising start, but at least he was talking to her now. Time to put the second part of the plan into action.

"I do wish I had some water, just to wash with." Ginny rubbed the plaid on her face, thinking that it was an exercise in futility if there ever was one. In truth, she did feel unbearably grimy, and was having a very hard time banishing visions of steaming tubs from her mind. "How did I ever get myself into such a mess?"

"Lack of soap and water, I should think. Good Lord, Weasley, how do you keep your grades up if you can't manage better deductive reasoning than that?"

"I don't mean that," she said, struggling to keep her voice plaintive. "I mean, well, everything. I just don't understand how it all went so wrong."

"Yes, well, you wouldn't."

She clenched her hands to keep from punching him, wishing she were dressed in fluffy pink ruffles. It was hard to be demure and innocent in a piece of dirty plaid. "If I'd been a bit more clever I suppose it might never have come to this."

"You're probably right about that." His voice was softening a little and becoming more arrogant at the same time, which was not a pleasant combination to hear. But it might mean that her plan was working.

"I suppose you think you're clever," Ginny said, with what she hoped was just the right amount of resentment in her voice.

"I don't think, Weasley. I know." There was a definite smirk playing around the edges of his lips. Well, it was now or never. Ginny thought for a moment of the best way to phrase her next sentence. Fluttering eyelashes and a breathless, "Oh, how wonderful you are! I'm sure I could never think of the things you do with my teeny-tiny brain!", or some such, were probably a bit too obvious. If she hoped to fool Draco Malfoy, she would have to be subtler than that.

"I never would have thought of anything like the Hexensymbol spell. They don't teach it at Hogwarts; it's just as you said."

He gave a noncommital grunt.

She paused to give her next words maximum effect. "But I think Harry did mention something about a collection of new spells that Hagrid heard about. Got from a French trader down at the Three Broomsticks, or something. I think they were thrown in free as part of a trade involving a cockatrice egg. Is that where you learned it?"

That did make him turn and glare at her, she thought with some satisfaction and perhaps a little fear. "You've absolutely got to be joking. If you seriously think that I've ever learned anything from that moronic clod Hagrid--"

Now she had to be careful, had to pull him in subtly, slowly. "But I don't see where else you could have learned it. Very esoteric knowledge, isn't it? Not the sort of thing that I'd think even--" she faltered, she had been going to say Death Eaters, but on second thought she didn't feel quite brave enough for that--"your father might know."

"He doesn't," Draco said shortly.

"Well, where else but from Hagrid then? Come on, Malfoy, have I figured out your deepest, darkest secret?" She smiled at him coyly.

She could actually hear him grinding his teeth together, and she wondered for a brief instant if this was really such a good idea. "Don't be ridiculous," he said. "The greatest regret of my life is that I have to suffer through Care of Magical Creatures class with that-- that unevolved hominid, I can't believe he even manages to walk upright--"

"It's nothing to be ashamed of." "Ginny forced herself to laugh airily. "I won't tell, I promise. Why, Harry and Ron and Hermione are down at his hut all the time. You should all coordinate your visits. He's lovely to talk to, isn't he? I do every so often, you know; he's wonderful to pour your troubles out to. So understanding, so sympathetic, so--"

"I didn't learn how to cast a Hexensymbol from that dumb overgrown oaf!" Draco snarled. "How the hell can you be stupid enough to think that he'd know anything like that? I learned it from the source, Weasley, not that you'd understand that, from Linz. Last summer on the von Drachen estate--" He stopped. His face went even whiter than usual as he realized what he had said.

"The von Drachen estate?" she repeated, not understanding. "That's-- you mean that's a real place?"

He didn't answer her.

"But I thought it was like Camelot, or the fairy country. That's what everyone always said-- if it ever actually existed, it certainly doesn't now. How on earth did you get there, and--" A thought struck her. "The von Drachens, does that mean that they're real too? I always heard that they were only part of a myth, nobody knows if they ever were real."

He had turned mostly away from her, hands thrust into the pockets of his cloak, and he seemed to be struggling to control himself. She saw something almost like fear on his face.

"Do your mother's people know the von Drachens? Your mother is German, isn't she, or Austrian? No-- Bavarian."

"How did you know that?" Draco demanded, turning on her so sharply that she gave a little cry of fright.

"I--I don't know," she stammered. "Harry and Hermione were talking about it once and I overheard them, maybe."

"Maybe! What else did you hear, and what else do you know?"

"Nothing, I don't know anything!" It felt literally true, just then.

He let her cry for several minutes. She was brave, he knew--stupidly brave, stubbornly and idiotically brave-- but six hours of stumbling through the cold had undoubtedly worn her down a little. Her mind would be making pictures of what he planned to do next; that was a very effective technique, he knew. As he waited for her sobs to stop, Draco hardened his resolve. The soil of a man's heart is stonier. He plants what he can, and tends it.... where had he heard that? From his father?Well, it didn't matter now. Once she had calmed down a little, he spoke again, his voice very calm and even.

"You were making a fool of me, weren't you? No, don't bother to answer, I know it. You were trying to draw me out, to get me to say something you could use, to bring back to your little friends and that damn brother of yours. Pity you'll never have the chance." He grinned wolfishly at the quick indrawn catch in her breath. "Well, I'm the fool for thinking you were one, I suppose. You're too clever by half, Ginny Weasley." Draco paused.

"So you want to talk, do you?" he asked softly. "Here's your chance. And you'll wish you had more to say before we're through."

"I don't know what you mean," said Ginny.

"You will." He turned towards her, and his voice became brisk and businesslike. "We're getting close to villages now, and soon there'll be a lot of other people around. I'm not going to wait any longer to find out what I need to know."

"But I don't know anything."

He leaned closer to her, and she shrank back against the tree trunk that was behind her. "Weasley, I think we've already established that you're no fool."

"What are you talking about?"

"There are certain things I need to find out. And I doubt you're going to be too eager to share them. Well, we have to get over that barrier somehow..."

"What do you want me to do?"

"I'll ask you questions, and you'll answer them truthfully."

"But what--" oh God, she shouldn't be asking this question, but she couldn't seem to help herself "--what are you going to do to me?"

Draco shrugged. "If you tell me the truth, I won't do anything to you. If you lie to me..."

It was cowardly of her, she knew, but she was glad he hadn't finished the sentence.

So the interrogation began. Ginny swallowed shakily, wishing that she had kept her mouth shut in the first place. But maybe that had very little to do with it. She should have known that this moment would come, and really, she thought dismally, she had known it. Calm, she had to stay calm, it was her only hope. She would tell the truth as long as she could, and she would lie when she must. She had certainly had enough practice in that in the past three and a half years.

"Did you ever hear your brother, Potter, and Granger talking about their plans?" he asked.

"No, I never did."

"Nothing at all?" He raised an eyebrow in disbelief.

"Well, sometimes I'd overhear scraps of things, but that's all. Nothing that ever made any sense."

"But you did know, eventually," Draco said.

"Not until very late. I never knew anything while the plans were actually being made."

"Was anyone else present besides those three, when you listened to them?"

She hesitated. "Neville Longbottom."

"Where did you listen to them? Was it in the Gryffindor common room?"

"Yes."

"In the halls?"

"Yes."

"Between classes?"

"Yes."

This for twenty minutes. Where did Harry, Ron, and Hermione go; what teachers did they see outside class, how early in the morning did they get up and did they meet to talk before breakfast, how late at night did they go sleep, and did they sneak off anywhere before that? .Had she meant to overhear them? Had she been spying on them?

Ginny knew almost nothing but was honest about what she did know. Perhaps, she thought, she should have pretended to be completely ignorant of everything, but she doubted she could pull that off convincingly. Draco already knew too much anyway. She'd only overheard vague hints that had made her curious, she said; she'd run from Pansy, Colin, Crabbe, and Goyle when they were chasing her, and had followed Hermione in hopes of finding some help. His questions were monotonous and seemed trivial. She actually felt herself beginning to relax a bit. Perhaps she'd been jumping at shadows her own mind had created.

"So when did you first learn that they were planning to go back in time, to use the clock tower?" he asked. "And when did you know about the Jewel of the Harem?"

Ginny felt a little ripple of unease. They were headed into dangerous territory now. She decided that there was nothing to be gained by lying about this; she might as well not start that until she had to. "I saw them outside in the gardens, the rose gardens I mean. Neville had taken me out for a walk, you see, and we ended up next to them without even realizing it." Maybe the key to getting through this ordeal would be to add as many extraneous details as possible, so that Draco would get good and sick and tired of listening to her talk. "It was so warm that night, so we were sitting on one of those stone benches, and he was showing me a rose, 'Maiden's Blush' it was called. And then--"

Draco sighed in exasperation. "When was this, Weasley?"

"Two nights ago, or maybe three." She swallowed. "The night of the Yule Ball."

"How did you find out what they were planning?" he asked, his face still expressionless.

"We-- Neville and I-- stumbled on Harry, Ron, and Hermione talking about timelines, or something. It didn't make any sense to me then."

"But you did learn more. How?"

"When we both heard about it, you and I, I mean. When we heard Dumbledore and Moody and Fudge talking, that was the first time I ever really knew anything. You remember, Malfoy. When we were on the North Tower..." It was very hard to keep her voice steady then. The memory flashed back to her, and it seemed so impossible, as if it had happened between different people in another life. The Draco Malfoy who interrogated her now could not have been the same one who bent her back across the stone bench at the top of the tower and pulled her lips up to his as if his life depended on it.

"All right, " he said. "Never mind that. I don't think you know enough about their plans to make much difference one way or the other." His words should have been reassuring. They were not. Something had changed, she realized. The trivial atmosphere was gone; there was something building up in the air now, like an electric charge, and her mouth began to grow dry.

"I told you I didn't know anything important," she managed to say.

"Oh, but you do." He paused just long enough for her to begin to feel really afraid. "Where have you and your brother planned to meet?"

"We haven't."

"Don't you remember when you told me earlier today you were going to meet someone?" he asked almost chidingly. "Someone in Leith, wasn't it?"

Her mind didn't seem to be working very effectively; it was as if the cold had crept into its workings. Ginny realized for the first time how very cold it was, and how damp; the icy chill was creeping into every crevice of her.

Draco leaned closer to her. She stared back at him. His eyes were utterly without human emotion, she thought. There was nothing human in them to which she might appeal; they might as well have been glittering grey gems. She didn't know that he was doing his best imitation of Lucius Malfoy. "You can make this easy," he said. "Or you can make it hard."

"It wasn't a plan," she said, amazed that her spine was still holding her upright. "There wasn't a meeting place, either."

Draco took her chin briefly between his thumb and forefinger and forced her to look at him. "Weasley, Weasley," he said in a purr, husky and menacing. "Don't make me get this information out of you. You know I can, don't you?"

She was so cold, so very cold, and the stupid weak tears threatened to spill over her lashes again. "You don't understand," Ginny said, speaking so rapidly that her words tripped over each other. "It isn't like you think, we didn't arrange anything beforehand, it's just that we have a sort of bond, we always have, I feel that I'll be able to find Ron, when the time comes, or he'll find me, that's all."

"How?"

"I--I don't know," she stammered.

"Some sort of magic? It's got to be wandless. How did you learn it? Did you take lessons from Moody? Were you lying about being on the outside of all the plans this year?"

"No, I swear I didn't! I never spoke to Professor Moody when I didn't have to, for class or something. It's just, I don't know, something between a brother and a sister I suppose. But maybe I'm wrong," she added hastily. "I'll bet I am. I bet I won't be able to find him at all."

"Oh yes, you will, and you do know how, and you're going to tell me!"

She drew back from the look on his face, her breath catching, and her right hand went up to clutch at the locket as if by the same instinct that drove her heart to beat. He saw her do it, saw the silver flash of the thing that was shaped a little like an oval and a little like a star.

"That's it," he said. "Isn't it.It's that locket; it's actually a talisman."

"No! No, it isn't, it's just jewelry, I swear it is!" Ginny could feel the pulses of heat through her hand; the locket had picked that exact moment to begin glowing, which rather gave the lie to her statement. And of course, Draco saw it too.

"You're lying, and you're not even doing it very well, Weasley. Where did you get it?"

"I--I--"

"Tell me how it works and tell me now." He stepped closer to her, face flushed from his excitement, hair falling over one eye, the other a savage, brilliant silver.

"I don't know," she said. "I swear I don't."

"You do."

Silence.

He kept staring at her, willing her to tell him. He knew what he'd have to do if she didn't, and it was a door he did not want to open. Suddenly, he didn't know if he was even capable of it. Gods, but what a time to realize that; it was like feeling your wand turn on you in the middle of a duel.

The one eye that she could see became almost pleading, although whether the emotion was turned on her or himself, Ginny could not tell. He looked much younger in that instant, almost like a child begging not to be dragged to some fearful place. But he still kept pushing her up against the tree until she felt the rough thick bark against her lower back, the sensation dim through the terror coursing in her veins. There were several large bushes massed around the trunk of the tree, and, in his haste, Draco pushed past the flexible branch of one with his shoulder. It snapped back and hit him in the mouth. He gave a muffled cry of pain, and Ginny saw that the wound just below his lip had opened again. Then she did something so strange that the action seemed to come from somewhere outside herself.

Ginny reached up and pressed her fingers against his lips, staunching the drops of blood that were starting to well up. He jerked back as if her hands were on fire. Then he seized her upper arm, a strange and almost frightened expression on his face, and his fingers encircled it tightly.

What she said might be true. There were vague things he remembered from their shared vision in the Hogwarts clock tower, the one he could never quite recall in any detail, and he certainly knew that her brother and the rest of the Trio had been ignoring her for months. Maybe they really hadn't told her, and perhaps they truly hadn't arranged to meet her. Oh, how he longed to leave it at that. But he couldn't; it was weakness to want to, he must force himself through this failing of his will. He didn't say another word, but only took a very deep breath and grabbed her other arm too, feelingvaguely sick as he thought about what he could do to her, if he wished. The knowledge of how to do these things-- if he decided to do them-- was an unbearable load in his mind, stinking, rotten, but also hard and unyielding. Remembering what he knew about them was like biting down on cold iron. But although he'd stumbled upon the edges of them and overheard the beginnings of them, he'd never actually done them, or even witnessed them very clearly. He'd watched his father perform interrogations before, but Lucius Malfoy had never had to dirty his hands with this part of it. There were only visions glimpsed in a split second out of the corner of one's eye through the crack of a steel door that was not supposed to be open, or perhaps the faint sounds of moans and sighs and screams abruptly cut off, rising from some dungeon far below. And then, a silence that was even worse.

But his father had done these things in the beginning, Draco was sure of it. And soon, the same thing would be demanded of him. He must harden himself to this. She didn't respect his powers enough, didn't really fear him-- well, after this, she would. There is only one way to make sure that human beings, whether Muggle or wizard, are doing your will and not their own. How often Lucius Malfoy had said that. You must make them suffer.

The hopeless expression on her face was so naked, so unbearable to see. She knew what was coming, now. Her eyes searched his own for some trace of humanity or mercy or even animal pity that might hold his hand from this. Those eyes. Those enormous molten-gold eyes, so soft, so desperate. He would have to watch that expression change to horror, to pain. And finally they'd be numbed, glazed, reflecting only his own cruelty. I don't want to do this. I don't. Oh Gods, I'm so weak!

"Weasley, I could make you tell me," he whispered. "I could hurt you in places that don't show and wouldn't leave scars. I know how. I don't mean with Cruciatus either, I don't need that. I could break you from the inside out and no-one would ever see where I laid a hand on you. I could get the truth out of you, I could. I could."

"You can't get out of me what I don't know," she said in the steadiest voice she could manage. Her heart was beating rapidly, thready and uneven, and it seemed that she could actually taste her fear, sharp and metallic.

"I can't be sure," Draco said, his own voice uneven. "There's only one way to be sure..."

He was never sure, himself, what he would have done, or even what he had planned to do. But while he held her arms, hesitating at the threshold of some terrible and irrevocable thing, his hands flew backwards as if repelled by some tremendous force. The tips of his fingers were hot and he wrung them in pain. Then he understood, in a flash, what that meant.

There really was terror in his eyes then, but they were turned inward, like mirrors facing each other in an endless funhouse maze. He stared at her for another moment and then tucked his hands under his cloak. "I can't do this," he muttered, and Ginny knew he wasn't talking to her.

The silence dragged on and on. The shadows of the trees had grown very long; it was far too late to even think about getting to Melrose Abbey that day. She hadn't realized how long they'd been sitting there. But something felt--- over, as if they'd lurched past the fear and the terror, not gracefully, but they had done it. '

"I really don't know any more, " Ginny finally said. "I don't."

"I'm not asking you anything more," he said, his voice dull.

More silence.

"Malfoy?" she said tentatively. "Shouldn't we, uh-- keep going, then, try to find somewhere to sleep in the village?"

He didn't respond.

"Um-- Malfoy?"

Then he did turn to her. "You're right. Come on. Maybe we can ask at a farmhouse." He reached out a hand to help her up, sucking in his breath when he saw the purple marks on her wrists. "Bruises.I didn't mean-- I don't see how that--"

"Oh, those." Ginny cleared her throat. "They're my own fault. They're from this morning, when I kept trying to twist away from you; I suppose I shouldn't have."

"Oh, I see." Draco took a deep breath, and said words that he had never said before in his life to anyone except his mother. "No, it was still my fault. I'm sorry." The words felt very strange on his lips, but for some reason he didn't regret them. "I'm sorry for everything," he said again, testing them, trying to analyse how they felt. She was looking at him in shock.

"Well-- that particular thing wasn't really your fault," was all she could think of to say. "That's all I meant."

His mouth went up in a cynical smirk. "One less stain on my blackened soul, Weasley? But even I can't tell the difference."

"I suppose not," Ginny said awkwardly, unable to look at Draco.

Yet he kept standing, staring at Ginny Weasley. His captive, his hostage, but how empty the words were, now. In his anger and fear, he had invoked the old gods to weave a spell that was more powerful than anything he had ever known. He was now bonded to her so strongly that she could never escape. But neither, he feared, could he. Have a care what you pray for; you will certainly be given that... He had learned, unwillingly, that the knife of the Hexensymbol cut both ways. For even as she could never harm him now, neither could he hurt her. Well, there was nothing to do but bash on regardless.

"Look, Weasley, we've got two more days of travel to the coast. We really ought to try to refrain from killing each other until we get there. And right now I'm as hungry as hell and I suppose you must be too."

She nodded. "And I am tired. I mean, that part was true."

"So am I. Nothing could make me happier than being inside four walls again, even if we actually have to sleep with cows. So."Draco stood up and held out his hand. "Truce?"

Ginny shook it. "Truce."

"There's only one more thing," he said as they headed out into the open field towards the village.

"What?" She felt light and unafraid, almost... pithed. As if all her screaming fear had been pulled to the surface and then drawn right out of her, leaving a not unpleasant empty space. She'd seen the worst that Draco Malfoy had to offer, and she'd survived. At least she hoped it was the worst.

"Your hair. It's much too conspicuous."

"What do you want me to do, cut it off?"

"Of course not. But it ought to be hidden. If anyone sees that bright red, they'll remember it."

She shrugged. "If you want me to tie it up or something, I will."

"I'll do it. I want to make sure it's done right." He walked behind her and she felt his hands lifting her hair. Then, for what seemed like a very long time, she felt nothing at all.

"What's taking so long?"

"I want to make sure none of it shows."

Ginny shifted her eyes to the rear without moving any other muscle in her face by so much as a millimetre. It was a valuable trick she'd learned during that past year. If she did it just right, she could eavesdrop on nearby conversations without anyone suspecting that she was even paying attention.

Draco Malfoy was running his right hand through the length of her hair, slowly, caressingly, lifting the red-gold strands up so that they glinted in the rays of the setting sun. For the briefest instant, his eyes closed, and he rubbed a strand between thumb and forefinger, brushing it across his face. His other hand held up the hair near her scalp, so that no pulling sensation would betray what he was doing, and he kept his fingers carefully away from her skin. If she hadn't sneaked a look, she never would have guessed.

The choked gasp that came from Ginny's throat was very loud in the icy winter air.

All she could seem to think was that he really did blink, after all. It made him look more human. There was nothing to say, so she said nothing, and neither did he. But he did do something strange. Very gently, he arranged the plaid around her head in a hood, tucking every strand of her hair under it and pulling the wool over her forehead, so that even her eyes were shadowed. Then he laid his fingers briefly on her cheek, as if by accident. That lasted no more than half a second, but she kept feeling the touch of the cold fingers long after he took them away.

They sat at the far end of a long wooden table set up on trestles in the great room of the main farmhouse. "Don't say a word to anyone," Draco had warned as they approached a back door of the large, low brick and stone house, and Ginny had nodded. Waves of tiredness were starting to sweep over her, and all she could think of was food, a little water to wash, and sleep. They'd moved as inconspicuously as they could through the fields and small village, past barns and byres and stables, and by the time they reached the building she was nearly asleep on her feet.

The room was very dirty, with a packed earth floor, but it was decked with wreaths of holly and ivy and a good fire roared at one end of it. The food was plain and coarse, but there was plenty of it-- dark rye bread and cheese, porridge, salt herring, stewed apples, a dish of beans, and to drink, something that tasted sweet and very strong, mead, Ginny thought. She drank it quickly, before eating anything, and it went straight to her head. Everything seemed to have diminished to the simplest sensations. She was warm; her numbed fingers and toes were thawing, and her stomach was full; there was no room in her head for thoughts beyond those.

Ginny drank even more mead from her earthenware cup and her head felt dizzier than ever. The entire scene was starting to look very distant, as if seen underwater. The long table seemed to be full of people who kept sitting down and getting up. The way they spoke was so strange that she missed most of the words, and she let the hubbub of talk wash over her, rising and falling. She swayed on the wooden bench where she sat and fell against Draco's shoulder; he pushed her gently back to a sitting position. He was talking to some of the people sitting next to him, and she saw him address words to a fat, cheerful woman in a folded linen cap and dirty apron, but it all seemed so very small and distant, as if glimpsed through a telescope at the top of the Astronomy tower.

"What?" Ginny blinked up at Draco.

In answer, he pulled her to her feet. "I know you're exhausted, Weasley. Come on, though, I think you'll be glad to see this."

"I'm -- perfectly fine--" A yawn came in the middle of the sentence and threatened to split her face in half. Stumbling over her own feet, she let Draco lead her to the far end of the room. This side seemed to serve as a kitchen. Here was the fire, as well as what looked like an oven, roasting spits, barrels, buckets of water, and dishes on shelves. The woman Ginny had noticed earlier was bustling about in front of a cauldron over the fire, and as the two of them approached, she ladled out steaming water from it into a large basin. Draco inclined his head.

"I thank you, Mistress Cochrane."

She shook her head and made a tsk-tsk sound with her teeth, motioning Ginny to a stool in the corner. "And what were ye thinking,to bring her on such a long journey in midwinter? Why, the lass looks fair froze and a bit half-witted too, if ye'll pardon my saying so."

Ginny was too tired to even take offense at this. She tried to wind the loose ends of the plaid around her; it only occurred to her now that her white blouse and black trousers must look odd indeed. The woman's jolly red face and curly black hair peeping out from beneath the cap were blurring into each other, and Ginny collapsed on the wooden stool gratefully. Mistress Cochrane-- if such was her name, and Draco always seemed to have a way of finding out those things-- hummed to herself, singing snatches of a song that had something to do with a Yule log, and the inadvisability of maidens venturing out on their own on Christmas Eve. Why, that's what it is! thoughtGinny. I lost all track of time, but it's nearly Yule. At home Mum would be baking gingerbread cookies; Fred and George would be enchanting them to dance about and jump into the icing, and Mum would shake a wooden spoon at them and say, You'll be the death of me yet--

"Ye should have more care for yer kinswoman," Mistress Cochrane huffed, placing the basin of water between the two.

Ginny almost came awake at that. What did you tell her? she mouthed at Draco.

"That you were my cousin," he murmured out of one side of his mouth, smirking when she scowled at him. "Would you rather I told her we were married? Or perhaps illicit lovers running away together? Hmm, maybe I should have said that I picked you up by the side of the road, where I found you plying your wares..."

She made a face at him. Pig, she mouthed back.

"We're going to Leith, and I thought we'd stay the night tomorrow at Melrose Abbey," Draco said, testing the temperature of the water with a finger.

"Melrose?" The farmwife stared at them both. "But why? There's almost nothing left. It was all overrun by the king's troops ten years ago or more; all the monks are gone, the nuns too, and it's mostly ruins now. We do well enough here, wi' the farm, but it's nothing to what this village was once, wi' all the wealth of Melrose behind it."

"There-- there was a shepherd, down by the river, perhaps four hours' journey from here," ventured Ginny. "He said we could get a travelers' bed with the nuns."

"Aye, that would be Jock, t'poor lad," sighedMistress Cochrane. "Naught but thruppence in the shilling. Pixy-mazed, folk like to say who believe in that sort of thing." She turned at a raucous yell from the table. "I canna be in three places at once!" she bellowed, headed towards the other end of the room with a pie-pan in her hands. .

Draco and Ginny exchanged glances. "You do know how to pick the reliable sources, don't you, Weasley?" he murmured. She glared at him and reached for one of the rags soaking in the basin of steaming water.

"Wait," he said. "It's too hot still."

They were both very silent, feeling the dreamy tiredness that comes after a long day spent in the open. The steam from the basin of hot water rose between them and curtained them in a tiny world in one corner of the farm kitchen. After several minutes, Draco looked at Ginny as if he couldn't imagine where her quest for cleanliness should start.

"Your face is horribly dirty," he said.

"So is yours."

"Impossible. Malfoys don't have dirty faces." But he was smirking as he said it, and an answering smile curved her lips.

"Maybe it's a good thing there isn't a mirror," Ginny said ruefully.

"Tell you what. You wash mine, and I'll wash yours. That way, we'll be sure not to miss any spots."

"All right," she said.

Draco dipped one of the rags in the basin and ran it over her face, watching Ginny emerge pink and clean. He felt the shape of her features under his fingers, and his movements became slower and more caressing in nature. He realized that she was mimicking his movements, seemingly without even realizing she was doing so. Where he washed her face, she washed his. Even as he touched her, she touched him, and the motions of their hands fused into something like a dance.

There was a mysterious quality to her face, and he couldn't decide if it was an attractive one or not; his mind kept worrying the question over and over again. He had never been close enough to her to analyse it before. She wasn't pretty in the way all the girls he'd pursued and won that year were pretty. Her features were not tiny and delicate. The cheekbones were high, the jaw very square, the nose strong and straight, the forehead well defined over her long eyebrows. They were a very deep cinnamon, as were her eyelashes over her golden eyes. The shifting planes of her face made it into a piece of living sculpture. No, she wasn't pretty,he thought again, not pretty at all, she was...

... beautiful.

Without a word, he drew her feet up onto the wooden stool he sat on.

"What are you doing?" she asked a little nervously.

"Your feet are dirty as well," he said simply.

Draco held her feet together over the basin and laved them with the cloth, trailing it over her ankles and toes. His head was bent over them and he seemed utterly absorbed. "You'll get some calluses from all this, I'm afraid," he murmured.

Ginny watched him, her throat tightening for some reason she couldn't have explained. This was the strangest thing that had happened yet. He was certainly taking his time, gently rubbing each toe to pinkness, one hand firmly behind an ankle, one moving over the arch of her instep with exquisite slowness.

"The Japanese believed that there was a link to every other part of the body in the foot," he was saying now.

"How on earth would you know that?"

"You'd be surprised at what I know. There's a spot that, properly touched, cures headaches, I think it was right here--" Ginny felt a patch of skin just below her big toe being rubbed.

"I don't have a headache."

"But you might, and then it would be a very useful piece of knowledge to have. Never pass up a chance to expand your knowledge, Weasley."

"My knowledge is expansive enough."

Draco cocked his head up at her, one eyebrow raised. His face was warm ivory with a faint blush of red in his cheeks from the steaming basin. "Is it?"

Ginny blushed, too.

"Below the ankle is the pressure point for fatigue," he continued, sounding for all the world as if he was reading from a textbook. Ginny giggled.

"I didn't realize I was so amusing."

"You sound like Hermione."

"All the gods together forbid." Draco rubbed the tendons of her ankles, and she did feel oddly refreshed. Not that she'd ever tell him that. But a small sigh escaped her lips, and her eyes half-closed, her body relaxing against the smoke-blackened wall.

"And there's a spot that's a bit hard to find..."

"What's it for?"

He didn't answer. "Here. Right here... Yes, that's it." His voice had grown soft and low. His index finger slipped into the soft curve above her heel and massaged it in tiny circles, gently yet firmly.

Ginny gasped. A stab of some indefinable sensation shot through her. It was gone so quickly that she couldn't be sure she had even experienced it. But her body was still quivering when he dried her feet with a length of sackcloth.

"Did you bother to find out where we're going to sleep?" she asked.

"Yes," Draco answered. He turned away from her briefly to take an armful of thick blankets from the farmwife, smiling as he did so. She dimpled outrageously and giggled at him.

"I got you some shoes as well." He bent his head over her feet, lacing a pair of shapeless leather boots onto them. They were actually a reasonable fit.

"How'd you get those?"

He grinned up at her. "My stunning personal charm."

Ginny rolled her eyes.

"And a little silver."

"Oh," she said awkwardly. "I didn't want you to spend-- I mean, I'll pay you back."

"It was only a few sickles. We'll add it to your debts." Draco reached out a hand and pulled her to her feet. "Those certainly do seem to be mounting up, don't they, Weasley?"

They walked back to the barn together, close but not touching. The winter's night wrapped silence around them as they moved, their breaths puffing out into the frigid air. A strange timidity had risen between them.

"What do you suppose we'll do if there really is nothing left at Melrose Abbey?" she asked.

He shrugged. "Dunno. Sleep rough in the ruins, I suppose. We'll be in Leith by the day after tomorrow."

"I suppose we will. So where are we sleeping tonight, anyway?"

They had reached a large barn, and he opened a side door for her. "The most luxurious arrangements I could devise."

"We're with the pigs, aren't we?"

"Honestly, Weasley..." Draco helped her up a rickety ladder at one side. "Pigs don't sleep in a barn; even I know that. Don't slip. You'd probably fall to your death if you did."

Up and up they climbed into a hayloft filled with sweet-smelling straw. Ginny tromped out some of the top layer and arranged the blankets around them. The silence became absolute, and the world was bounded by the scratchy ocean of hay and the stiff wool plaids that Mistress Cochrane had given them. They rolled into the depression in the hay so that they lay very close together, back to back, but it might have been by accident. His warmth spread all through her and she held her breath, oddly disappointed.

Then she felt something slung across her body, pulling her close, and recognized his hand. She did not say a word, but turned to face him, seeing his eyes searching hers, grave and remote. The strangest feeling spread through her then; that this was a continuation of that night at the top of the North tower so few nights ago, that there was nothing in the world but him and her; that this moment was a moment entirely separated from everything else that had ever been between them. Except that on the night of the Yule Ball, she had been past thinking. And now, there were all too many thoughts. A trapped sob vibrated in her throat and escaped through her parted mouth. Draco Malfoy was going to kiss her. And she wanted him to do it. The awful knowledge flashed through her head and she accepted its judgment. She wanted to melt against his mouth, feel his hands sliding across her, exploring her, touching and taking from her; sink into the quicksand of him and never rise to the surface again.....

Maybe this entire thing was a lot simpler than it seemed. She was some sort of natural slut underneath all her shyness, always had been, and Malfoy was doing nothing but pulling her true nature out of her. No, no! This could only be a reaction from that horrible Disinhibio potion that Colin had tricked her into drinking. But if it never ended, if the aftereffects lingered with her always, what was the difference? She looked up at him pleadingly, all her self-torturing thoughts in her eyes.

"What's that look for?"

"Nothing. It's nothing." She tried to turn away, but he was holding her shoulders firmly.

Draco scanned her face as if searching for some clue. A question formed in his mind. He asked it only with his eyes. She read its message correctly.

"No!" She struggled to hold onto some semblance of pride.

He examined her flushed face. "Liar. You obviously do want it. If you could see how you're holding your lips..." He couldn't believe that he'd even thought about asking permission. Malfoys didn't... ask. They didn't need to.

"Don't flatter yourself, " she said, aware that she was echoing his own words from the day before.

"So you mean that you'd take anyone right now," he purred at her. "Is that what you're trying to say?"

Ginny reddened with humiliation and rage, their truce forgotten. "I'd rather kiss anyone at all but you."

"But no-one else seems to be here." A smirk spread over his face. "And I just happen to be handy. How convenient."

"Oh no it's not," she said grimly, sitting up in the hay. "Don't you dare touch me, Draco Malfoy."

Draco shook his head, amused. It was far too easy to bait her, really. "You silly, silly girl. Do you still think you can get away from me?" His eyes were glittering and heat rose in his cheeks to match hers. Seeing how his face had changed, Ginny quailed, her unwilling desire battling with a rising fear of him. If she screamed, nobody would hear her. Even if they did, she doubted anyone would come to her rescue. Her eyes were drawn to his hands, moving towards her body-- towards her legs-- one long white hand was reaching for her thigh and in another moment it would touch her-- it was like-- like--

"No!" she screamed, kicking wildly. There was such terror in her eyes that Draco knew it couldn't be for his actions alone; they were glazed, unseeing, turned inward at some awful memory. "Don't touch me, don't you dare touch me!" Ginny cried over and over again, writhing and striking out in such a paroxysm of rage that he was genuinely afraid she'd hurt herself. Finally, he reached to capture her arms and tuck them under his own; she had begun to scratch at her own face with her nails and to claw at her upper right thigh.

She was all elbows, wrists, ankles, flailing so wildly that her hands and feet and knees struck him over and over again as he tried to grasp hold of her. Without meaning to, he was reasonably sure. Or maybe not.A few of the blows he narrowly dodged would have caused him to lose all interest in what he'd wanted to do. Concentrate on that, Draco thought grimly. She is... a cage of bones. A trap.A drowning place.

"Shh, shh," he said, over and over again. "Shh, Weasley, shh. I was only--" he stopped; what had he been planning to do? "--teasing," he finished lamely. "I never would have done if I thought you'd go mental on me. Stop it, stop, stop." Draco was never sure what else he said, only that he kept holding her tightly and repeating calming words, soothing words, whispering in her ear, brushing her hair back from her forehead. That finally seemed to calm her. The frantic movements of her arms and legs stilled, and she listened to his low melodic words. At last, she spoke in a scratchy, hoarse voice, exhausted with her screams and sobs.

"Let go of me, Malfoy."

"Only if you've stopped hurting yourself."

"What do you care?"

"Well, I need you to be able to keep walking. It's still a long way to Leith."

She scowled, and tried to pull away. He held her fast, trying to keep her from moving without feeling her body under his hands. A doomed project.

"Just another moment. What the hell was all that about? You scared me to death."

She looked at him levelly. "So you do care," she said, her voice mocking.

"I'm stuck with you all the way to the coast," Draco said through gritted teeth. "If you have a nervous breakdown, or whatever that was--"

"It's nothing," Ginny interrupted. "It's just... something that used to happen to me, years ago. I thought I was completely over those by now. But I' m sure it wouldn't have happened again if you hadn't come at me like that!"

"I didn't mean anything by it. I didn't know you'd take it that way."

"Oh, so you mean girls usually love it when you attack them?"

"I didn't attack you! Merlin, I didn't do anything to you at all."

She turned away. "But you would've."

"No, I-- look, I don't know what I would have done. But I did stop, didn't I?"

"What do you want, an Order of the Phoenix medal because you didn't rape me?"

"No!" he exclaimed. "Weasley, you're the most exasperating, irritating, annoying--" She flinched back, and he remembered how much her fit, or whatever it was, had frightened him. If he couldn't get her to Leith, his plan didn't have a prayer. His voice became gentler. "I never meant for you to take it that way. I never thought you would. It was all a joke, really, nothing more."

"That's all?"

"Just a laugh, I swear. I was-- well, trying to get a rise out of you, I suppose, and I took it too far. I've never seen a girl take it that way before and it threw me for a bit of a loop."

No, thought Ginny, he hadn't. The girls he knew were smiling and self-possessed. Arrogant, even, in their knowledge of boys and what they wanted and how they treated girls who skillfully played the game. And there she was, clumsy, blundering, a bull in a china shop, all her fear and rage and memory just centimetres below the surface, always. He hadn't meant a thing by what he'd done. He hadn't wanted to kiss her. She should have known. Once again, her own desires had betrayed her. Ginny turned back to him, forcing a smile to her face.

"Sorry about that, Malfoy. Hope this won't hurt the lovely hostage-terrorist relationship we have going."

"Not at all, Weasley." Draco's voice grew drowsy. "Couldn't ask for a better captive, really.Now go to sleep."

She had been promising herself that the instant he rolled away from her and she pulled a blanket over her head, she could cry at last. But it didn't work that way. The knot of unshed tears moved down into her chest and stayed there, and she curled up around it, dragging it after her into her dreams.

Ginny... Ginny... ginnyginnyginnyginnyyy.... The repetition of her name, like a voice calling after her as she fell down a rabbit hole of memory. Harry's voice.

A/N: Remember, that Yahoo group's at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PillarOfFire

Yup, in the very next chapter, we're finally going to find out what Harry had to do to Ginny a year ago, why Ron can never quite forgive him for it, and a little more about why Colin went bad -- not to mention the whole truth about what Tom Riddle did to her in the Chamber of Secrets. We'll also find out more about Draco's secret, and why he doesn't seem to want anyone to know that his mother is a von Drachen. When Draco thinks of the quote and can't remember its source, it's from Stephen King's Pet Sematary. (As we'll see in future chapters, Draco's spent a lot of time in his family's libraries; I think the Malfoys have a few of Stephen King's works. My theory is that he recently announced he wasn't writing any more books because he has to fill too many backorders for the wizarding community.) When Draco remembers Lucius Malfoy's quote about human suffering, it's a paraphrase of what O'Brien says to Winston Smith in 1984 while he's being tortured in the Ministry of Love. The information about the farmhouse and the village is based on, well, lots of research, mostly done at the University of Minnesota libraries. The details about Loki's imprisonment are from Norse mythology. Lady Death's words about her role are partly paraphrased from Neil Gaiman.