Jewel of the Harem: The Grindelwald Continuum Book One

Chapter 10.

A Vow Made to the Kindly Ones

Can you honestly say you don't love me?

--Scarlett to Ashley, GWTW

A/N: Yes, there's a little H/G in this chapter, for all you H/G shippers... (some R/Hr, too.) If you're NOT an H/G shipper (or an R/Hr shipper,) don't worry; just read it and you'll see where this is going. Wow. Dark chapter. Don't fret, we will be getting to the harem, I promise, and we will see Ginny as a harem slave doing the Dance of the Seven Veils among other interesting things, including Draco in cloth-of-gold pantaloons and a turban. It's all worked out... but don't forget that this is a truly epic-y epic. It's going to be longer than OotP, which is going to be longer than GoF. What can I say? That's just how I write. ;)

Infinite thanks to all the reviewers, especially: KittyLioness, Amanda, Libby (“your story is like fanfic crack” is now my favorite quote!), StarEyes (the greatest! as always,) 2Prongs2(I'm kicking myself about the Hasidic thing. Now that was just dumb. I know better. BUT, there IS a reason why I put rabbis in 16th century England, and it WILL be part of the plot later,) Kureneko Kashikoi, Morwyn, Kittylioness again (you guessed the quote!), Avada Kedavra, PhantomSoula, Waterlily12 (yes, Draco did end up with a foot fetish, didn't he?), Peeler (who guessed the Tolkien quote!,) Lady Touchstone (also guessed the Aladdin quote!), Mara Jade, Leanan Sidhe (another Tolkien quote guesser,)Yardchicken2, LilahP, Sydney Lynne (definitely gets the Best Review Prize,) Verbal Abuse, Jane Fairfax, Adhara, 1Adam, WednesdayBlue (we WILL be seeing more of Crabbe later, btw,)and Azzelya.

Everyone who guessed the quotes now has ten points, which can be... um... exchanged for valuable prizes in the sixty-third dimension. Maybe I could put the best quote-guessers in as minor characters once JOTH gets to the point where I'll need some OC's. And ten points in this chapter to whoever finds the Maya Angelou quote. Jennifer O. already did.

And YES! The JOTH movie is UP! The one, the only HP motion graphics fanfilm. Four and a half minutes.130 hours. (that's how long it took to make, counting everything....) Find it at:

http://www.nashvilleinsanity.com/myfilms/joththemovieindex.htm

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There were two series of events, now, that had taken place in the Hogwarts clock tower one year before on that winter's night in late 1995. It is perhaps not exactly correct to speak of which one actually happened, since they both happened. The path of possibilities simply diverged at one point, and Draco Malfoy lay sleeping next to Ginny Weasley with his arm around her waist in a hayloft in sixteenth century Scotland because of it. However, this does not accord with the way that the laws of objective reality have been laid down for mortals, whether magic or Muggle. The fact that the second version occurred-- the one where he had lured her into a place both real and unreal, created by her worst memory, and then stretched out his hand to save her from her final fate in it, although neither he nor she remembered it very clearly-- created repercussions that whispered through every thread of the web of worlds of gods and men. But the first version, the one that Harry and Hermione and Neville and Ron remembered, did not cease to exist because of it, and this was the one that had haunted Ginny's dreams since it happened.

Ginny had suffered through this nightmare many times before. There had been nights and nights on end in her narrow little bedroom in Ottery-St. Catchpole that summer when she woke gasping from it, heart pounding, sweat drying to a clammy gaze on her face and body. But every specific memory of it slipped through her fingers like oily smoke, fading into darkness. So, to her, the dream slammed into her afresh each time. Over and over again, she was caught in the loop of buried memory, the shape of the original events after she'd disappeared into the Book of Dreams on that winter's night one year before. And there was always something else strange about this dream, maybe because human memory is a strange thing at the best of times; maybe for some other reason that she remembered no more than she did the rest of it.. It was always haunted by a certain amount of knowledge that should not have been hers, that she had not been present for, nor experienced. She saw it through the eyes of her brother Ron, dearest to her always, confidant, hero, and dragonslayer of her childhood. She felt it through the mind of dear, stubborn Hermione, exasperating, infuriating, sweetly loved Hermione, the sister of her heart. She even knew certain things through Sirius Black, who had frightened her for years before she ever saw him, and Remus Lupin, whom she had always rather liked, and missed after he went away. But she knew nothing of what Harry thought or felt, the boy she believed she loved. He was, as he had always been, an enigma to her.

It happened in the short early evening of a day in midwinter one year before, when the last feeble rays of the sun spread low in the grey sky. It happened in the little twelve-sided room of the clock tower at the edge of the Forbidden Forest at Hogwarts. There were only three people who really knew the all of it, the thing that happened. And of those, one was a dark spirit that confided not in any man; one was Harry Potter, who told Professor Moody and then, for long after, kept his own counsel; and one was Ginny Weasley, who could tell no-one. In the end, all that really mattered was that it happened.

At one moment, Ginny stood before the opened Book of Dreams, her palm placed flat on its pages, the red glow flickering about her head in a nimbus. In the next, she had simply vanished. The air shimmered and popped, as if stretched too tightly, and then righted itself. Everyone in the clock tower stared in frozen horror at the space where she had been. It was that second, when nobody except Harry moved, that determined the course of what happened next.

Long afterwards, Hermione came close to driving Ron insane by endless discussions of how different everything might have been if only someone else had moved faster, or thought quicker, right after Ginny disappeared. The worst fight they'd ever had was after she'd dragged out maps, charts, and diagrams one evening, aided by an abacus. All it had taken was one too many repetitions of "Well, perhaps if you'd been a bit closer to Harry--" The door to Ron's room had ended up completely off its hinges, and proved remarkably difficult to replace.

No-one had even seen him scramble up from the floor where he'd fallen. Colin was running forward with his hands outstretched, Neville following, but neither could possibly reach him in time. Ron and Hermione both tried to grab at his arms but failed; Sirius wasn't quite close enough. Remus was still crouched sobbing on the floor, and caught at one of Harry's boots much too late. And so none of them proved to be a match for the reflexes of the youngest Seeker in a century. There was only time for one soft, helpless gasp of "No-- no--" from Hermione, and Harry turned his head briefly, an expression of profound sorrow on his face. Then he took a deep breath and jumped into the Book of Dreams after Ginny. Colin grabbed at his shoulder and Professor Moody grabbed at Colin; the younger boy staggered back, sinking to the floor, and Moody sank with him. In all the confusion that followed, it took everyone several moments to realize that the book had swallowed Harry instantly, leaving no trace.

She had lain on the floor of that musty, dim chamber for so long that if she had ever done anything else, ever been anywhere else, she couldn't clearly remember it. Ginny stared up at the ceiling that was lost in darkness. The last time, Harry had come to rescue her. He had touched her, had shaken her shoulders; his face had been white and frightened, and he had begged her to move, to wake, to not be dead. There were nights when she had lain awake in her narrow bed in the Gryffindor girls' dormitory and relived that memory a dozen times. But he would not come for her now. That sort of magic could only work once, and now she was left to the doom that had always been hers.

"Do you remember this, Ginny Weasley? Do you remember me?"

Ginny did not answer. Tom Riddle leaned closer to her.

"Do you remember what I said to you then?" he asked, his voice softer, but gritty and unpleasant. It sounded somehow grating, too, as if he had been buried for a very long time and his throat was filled with dirt and gravel and wriggling things that moved in the dark--

She turned her head away as his face came down to hers, clenching her teeth to keep from screaming. "Unripe fruit," she blurted. She hadn't planned to speak, but anything was better than hearing that voice again.

The dark spirit chuckled. Ginny wondered if tearing out her own eardrums might make her forget the sound of it. "Yes. Unripe fruit, my Gwenhyfar." Something moved and she saw it out of the corner of her eye. "And what else?"

It was his hand, long and white and skeletal, creeping along the ground like a giant spider. Coming closer to her. Tears dripped down her face; she could feel the wet track of them on her cheeks. "All things ripen, in time," she said.

"So they do." The fingers were within millimetres of her thigh, now. "So they do."

It was almost over. The circle had nearly reached its completion. And she was nearly fifteen now, not twelve, which made it even worse. There were things she understood now that she hadn't really grasped before, things about what he'd been trying to do the first time she was here, and Ginny thought that she would have happily had her mind wiped clean of everything else to be free of that knowledge. But what seemed so viciously unfair, so gratuitous, the rust on the razor that threatened the throat, was that she would have to watch him do this to her. And it seemed that she would. She couldn't seem to close her eyes, or turn her head away. As helpless as any rabbit caught in the stare of a striking snake, Ginny watched Tom Riddle reach down to finish what he'd begun in the Chamber of Secrets, almost three years before. But then she heard a voice in the distance, dim and muffled at first.

"Riddle! Get your--hands-- off her," said Harry breathlessly.

She could only stare dully at him. He looked real. Harry was panting slightly; stumbling towards then down the long corridor as he came out of the darkness at the far end of the chamber, past the pillars covered with writhing carved snakes. His hair, as always, was a spiky swirling dark mess, and his glasses were slipping down his face. But this was only a very convincing illusion, of course, some sort of weird defense mechanism that her mind had thrown up at the last moment. "This isn't real," Ginny whispered. "It can't be." But her lips weren't moving and the sound was frozen in her throat. It was exactly like the last time she'd been here two and a half years before, when she'd only been able to watch the sword and the phoenix and the battle with the basilisk; she herself had lain mute and paralyzed. She'd often wondered if anyone had ever realized that she'd seen and heard the entire thing. Dumbledore had, she thought, but she'd never asked.

Tom Riddle, or whoever the thing was, pulled his hand back in an almost lazy gesture. He leaned against the nearest pillar, an amused smile on his lips. "Well, Potter," he said softly, "it seems we've been here before..."

No! thought Ginny wildly. Oh, no... this is my fate and I can't escape it, I was mad to ever think I could, but Harry... I didn't know he'd use me to pull you in, to trap you... oh, Harry...

"Yes," Harry said slowly. "We have." He looked around the chamber. "I should have known. I should've realized that such powerful magic couldn't be got rid of so easily, that it would take more than slaying a basilisk and destroying a diary."

"There's no basilisk," said Tom Riddle. "Not this time. There's only you and me, and Ginny Weasley."

"No, there's only you and me. Stay away from Ginny. Leave her out of it."

"I'm afraid I can't."

"Let her go, you don't want her. Let her go and then fight me, if you've got the guts."

"I'm afraid it's not that simple, Potter," the dark spirit said. "Do you really believe that you came here simply to rescue the fair maiden? You've read too many fairy tales."

"The reason I'm here--" began Harry, and then stopped. "What's between Ginny and me, that's my business.You couldn't begin to understand why I'm here, why I have to be here--"

"Young love," the dark spirit sighed theatrically, putting a hand to his chest. "It's so touching. But you're the one who doesn't understand anything at all. You can't begin to comprehend what's really going on here, can you?"

Harry's fists clenched; Ginny could see his knuckles starting to go white. "Well, if you know so much, Riddle, why don't you tell me?"

"Oh, no." Something resembling a smile stretched Tom Riddle's lips. "Watching you stumble about in the dark is greatly preferable, from my point of view. Providing a glimpse of light here and there certainly adds a touch of spice, though.... You were sworn to powers beyond your comprehension before you were ever born, Potter, and you don't know anything about it. You're almost as much fun to manipulate as Draco Malfoy. Although not quite. He has so much more ambition than you. It makes the inevitable disaster a great deal more amusing to watch."

Harry blinked. "What the hell does Malfoy have to do with anything?"

"All in good time..." The spirit waved an insubstantial hand. "As diverting as this has been, the minutes are ticking away, Potter. The longer you wait, the faster life drains from Ginny Weasley. Just as it did last time. There's not much left in her, by now. So what are you going to do?"

In answer, Harry bent and picked her up. Ginny felt his arms around her, but very faintly, as if from a great distance, and then he slung her over one shoulder and started for the far end of the chamber. She watched incuriously as he ran into invisible barriers, over and over again. There seemed to be a circle of glass encasing them beneath the monkey-like statue of Salazar Slytherin and between the two largest snake pillars. A faraway sound kept repeating itself. He lowered her to the ground, cradling her head. She realized that it must have been hitting the unseen walls, but she hadn't felt a thing.

"We can't get out," said Harry, once he'd caught his breath.

"You're a bright one," said Tom Riddle. "In line for Head Boy year after next, are you?"

"Damn you, Riddle."

"Too late. And not very original, Potter."

She could still hear Harry's raspy breathing, and she dimly saw his head swivel as he examined every part of the chamber. It seemed to Ginny that she could nearly hear him thinking, although his mind was as much a blank to her as always. Hold on, she told herself over and over again. I've got to hold on... he'll find a way out, I know he will...

" Something isn't right here," Harry said at last. "I'm not sure what but-- I've already been here,I've already done this, almost three years ago. So how can any of this even be real?"

"It is more real than anything you have ever done, or anywhere you have ever been."

:"I don't understand," he muttered.

The dark spirit chuckled. "You never did, and you never will. Mortals are never very imaginative, but you're one of the worst I've ever seen. Strange, considering-- well, no need to bring that up quite yet."

"That doesn't make any sense at all. If you're really Tom Riddle, he was a-- well, a memory, a sort of ghost I suppose really. How could you have seen anything? How could you know anything? Are you Riddleat all, or are you really someone else? Something else?"

"Enough." The spirit held up one spectral hand. "This is beginning to bore me beyond endurance. Let's make an end of it. The end was always inevitable anyway, so why delay it any further?" He snapped his fingers. Something descended from the fathomless ceiling of the Chamber of Secrets, moving so slowly that it almost seemed to be floating on currents of air. Something that shone misty silver and gleamed with great rubies on its hilt, engraved with twisted designs, writhing like living things in the sourceless light. A sword. Slowly, slowly, it fell into Harry's outstretched right hand, and he shifted to support its weight.

"Godric Gryffindor's sword," he said dully.

"Exactly so." The other nodded.

Harry weighed it in his hand, experimentally, thrusting, dodging, and parrying as unconcernedly as if he was in fencing practice. Or at least it seemed that way to Ginny. She wondered what he was really doing, but it was extremely difficult to keep her mind on any one subject for very long. Then he swung suddenly at the air, just beyond the pillar, and the sword bounced back. He gave a little cry of pain as it turned in his hand.

"You can't get out that way," said Tom Riddle. He moved out from the shadow of the pillar and stood in the middle of the floor before Harry, within easy striking distance. "Well, Potter, as I said-- we've been here before."

Harry only stared at him. The passive figure waited; the dim chamber stood silent and watchful, and the steady drip-drip-dripping of water in some distant cavern marked each second of time.

At last, Tom Riddle, or whoever he really was, shook his head sadly. "You disappoint me, boy. How soft and weak you've grown. You had more courage when you were twelve and a half years old." He moved closer to Harry, green eyes glittering.

"You're trying to goad me," Harry said slowly. "You want me to attack you-- to prove that you're wrong-- but why?"

"What does it matter?"

"I don't know." Harry shook his head, biting his lip. "I don't know..."

The spirit advanced closer. " I see your thoughts, boy..." he whispered. "You're an easy one to read. I know what you'd like to do."

Harry's grip on the hilt of the silver sword tightened, his hands shaking slightly. Tom Riddle moved in swiftly, darting beneath his defenses as quickly as a striking snake, and Harry stepped backwards, bringing the sword down in an underhand motion and striking the other with the flat edge of it. He hissed and dropped to his knees, pulling Harry down with him. But Harry had always done well in the dueling club; Ginny remembered that now, vaguely; everything she saw and heard almost seemed to be happening through a mist that not only dulled the vision and muffled sounds, but stole the sharp edge of her thoughts. His reflexes were nearly faster than sight, and he moved to pin the spirit beneath him, one knee on Tom Riddle's chest, the point of the sword at his throat.

"Do you want to strike, Harry Potter?" he said, a strange smile on his face. "You know that you do. You believe that I deserve it, a thousand times over do I deserve it. So strike, and make an end of me. You have the sword and I am unarmed. Strike now."

Harry hesitated, holding the sword over Tom's neck. "But you're not real," he said. "Not really real, I mean. You're a dark spirit. How could you be killed by a sword?"

Ginny couldn't move her head, but from the angle where she lay she had a clear view of Tom Riddle's face. A flash of something very like fear passed over it. "Godric Gryffindor's sword," he said. "A weapon that carries great magic, and is older than you know. Other hands wielded it before his. It was a sword out of legend from the days before Hogwarts was ever founded..."

"But it's still a real sword," said Harry. "And you're not real. Not the same way." He continued to gaze into the darkness at the far end of the chamber, not relaxing the tip of the sword over Tom Riddle's neck, not bringing it down in the final blow. "I need to think," he muttered. There was a long pause. Then something strange happened; the spirit's face shifted and changed until it was no longer the sixteen-year old face of the boy who had once been Tom Riddle. It had become older and yet also more ageless, and much more inhuman. The nose seemed to have flattened and grown slits, and the eyes glinted red.

Harry blinked, his head tilted down towards the thing. "Now I know this isn't real. It's some sort of trick. You can't be Voldemort."

"And why not?" The voice was raspier now, and closer to an actual hiss. "You know what you see; what else can matter?"

"Because-- well, because Voldemort was destroyed.That's what everyone told me; Dumbledore told me, and he'd know better than anybody."

"What does any of that matter?" he repeated. "Tell me that, Harry Potter. For they may all say what they wish, but I am still lying before you now." The dark spirit's eyes flashed malice, madness, hatred. "I am the one who stole from you everything that should have been yours, boy. Were it not for me, you would have had a home. Were it not for me, you would have had a mother, a father; sisters and brothers, perhaps. You would have known your heritage; you would have taken your rightful place in the wizarding world from the day you were born. Instead, you endured ten years of living; no, surviving, in a cupboard under the stairs, at the mercy of the cruel and the sadistic, whose only claim upon you was a little random genetic material you happened to share. Unloved, unwelcomed, unwanted, you struggled and suffered ... ten years starved for human touch, human kindness... ten years that warped you in ways no-one else knows. They don't understand what those years did to you, do they, your friends, your teachers, your mentors? You've never told them. They've never guessed."

Slowly, Harry shook his head.

"And without me, none of it would ever have been..." The dark spirit's voice became as soft and caressing as the whispering coils of a giant snake, rubbing against each other, one by one, in darkness. "I am here, now. I am defenseless. Your greatest enemy. So why don't you let that sword fall? Why don't you strike me down as I deserve?"

Ginny could only catch a flash of Harry's green eyes from where she lay on the dirt floor, but there was something about the tilt of his head and the set of his jaw that she remembered seeing before. It had always meant that he'd set himself against something so stubbornly that nothing in the world could ever convince him to do it. "There are still too many things I don't understand," he finally said.

The dark spirit lay very still, and the silence stretched tight enough to snap. Then the Voldemort-thing spoke again.

"Your parents were braver, boy."

Harry's head whipped round. "What?"

"You heard what I said. Stupid, but brave."

"Don't say that--" From where she lay, Ginny could see the muscle in Harry's jaw jumping beneath the skin as his teeth gritted together.

"They should have known they couldn't escape. They certainly knew that you couldn't. Didn't you ever wonder why you survived my curse?" he asked softly. "It wasn't for the reason you think, I'll tell you that."

"I already know why! My mum gave her life for me. That's why I survived."

The dark spirit laughed, a high, thin, eerie sound. "She did no such thing. She gave up your life to me as she knew she must. Both of your parents did. Oh, they regretted it at the last moment and were stupid and sentimental enough to try to take it back. But it could not be taken back. They tried to change a bargain they had struck, you see, but it was too late..."

"You're-- you're lying," said Harry shakily. "Lying, lying--"

"Don't you want to know why? Don't you?" The spirit's voice was more seductive than ever, as smooth as silk stretched just a little too tightly across a bottomless abyss.

"I don't want to hear lies--"

"Oh, but this is the truth. This pact they made, you see, was with the Kindly Ones, those whom mortals call the Fates, or perhaps with the Endless themselves; I was never clear on that point. Their promise was made to those who cannot lie. Except maybe Loki... I was never too sure about him... At any rate, the reasons why they made it are old; far older than any living thing that walks the earth, or crawls through slimy seas, older than the oldest star, in fact. They were woven into the very fabric of laws made before this island of Britain ever rose from the Seven Seas, or this earth coalesced from a ball of flaming matter. The law of gravity is scarcely less binding. You should never have been born, Harry Potter... and you couldn't be allowed to live. This world, the one in which a thing like you walks, was never meant to be. Your parents knew it to be true..."

"I think you're mad, whatever you are," Harry whispered. "I don't understand a word of what you're on about. But I do know that my mum and dad would never have done that to me."

The laugh of the dark spirit was even more unpleasant this time; Ginny shuddered through every nerve of her body and prayed in a sort of sick desperation that it would stop, just stop, but it went on and on until she thought she would surely be crushed under the sheer weight of revulsion and horror.

"Why else do you think I said to Lily Potter, 'Stand aside, you silly girl'? Your mother knew that I didn't need to kill her,there was no reason to kill her, or your father either. Only you. You were the one who should not have been, and she knew it. She tried to save herself, at first-- I'm sure you didn't know that-- her own skin was more precious to her, until the very last moment. She always was selfish, Lily Potter, self-willed, headstrong, or she wouldn't have done such a stupid thing as permitting you to be born in the first place."

"Don't you dare say that about her-- you unclean, undead thing-- Voldemort or whoever you might actually be--" Harry's hand gripped the hilt of the sword even more tightly than before, and Ginny could see that its tip was beginning to shake, to move downwards, as if of its own accord.

"You should not have survived. And reality itself demands that the error be rectified. It would have done fourteen years ago, if your stupid cunt of a mother hadn't--"

The razor-sharp tip of the sword struck true. But Harry's hands were shaking so violently by this point that his aim was off, and he only slashed across the thing's shoulder. The blood that spilled out was cloudy, somehow billowy and insubstantial, and silver-colored. It rose about all three of them like the smoke of burnt mercury, until Ginny could hardly see the pair of them through it. The dark spirit lay waiting, his head thrown back, his neck exposed to the fatal blow like a lamb brought to the slaughter. Long moments passed.

Harry drew the sword back to his side, and his hand relaxed until its tip drooped to the floor. "No," he said.

The spirit lifted his head, looking at Harry incredulously. "What do you mean, no?"

"Something's wrong. I won't do this. You want it too much." He crossed the narrow end of the chamber, approaching Ginny again where she lay as he had left her on the floor.

"Where do you think you're going? You can't escape."

Harry didn't answer. Ginny felt him put one arm around her as he knelt down; the other brought the sword back up and the blade close to her throat. He was going to kill her, she thought quite calmly. That would break the bond. That was how he'd get them out of the Chamber of Secrets. She should have known that she could never get out of this room alive. Well, perhaps it was no more than she deserved. At least her death would be at his hands, and at that moment the thought did not disturb her too much.

"You fool!" The thing's voice rose to a frantic pitch. "What do you think you're doing? You wouldn't kill the girl, and anyway it wouldn't help you if you did; there are things happening here you can't possibly understand. You're playing with your own destruction, boy! You walk at the edge of an abyss. One wrong step will finish you."

"Maybe I am," said Harry, looking at the other evenly. "And maybe I do. But I'm going to find out what's real and what isn't." Then the sword descended in a rush of silver flame. But Ginny saw, just before closing her eyes against the blow that never came, that Harry had turned it on himself.

The world shattered into a million sparkling pieces and she was pulled through them, still feeling Harry's arm around her, holding her close to him. If this was dying, it wasn't so very bad. She could endure this. His face, after all, had been the last thing she'd seen. The sound of the dark spirit’s laughter went on and on, but it was growing fainter, as if it came from the other end of a tunnel they shot through at incredible speed. Soon, she wouldn't be able to hear it all. Death really wasn't so bad, she thought drowsily.

Then light and colour and sound came crashing back, all at once.

Someone was speaking hoarsely, repeating the same words over and over again. Yes, it was Neville's plaintive voice, saying, "I didn't know. I swear I didn't. I never would have done it if I'd known. She-- Professor Moody just told me to wait in the woods for her, to wait until she came after Harry, to make sure she got to the clock tower. But I didn't know. I certainly didn't think Colin Creevey would be with her. I swear I didn't. I--"

"We have to go in after her, after both of them!" Ron was yelling, as if from a great distance.

"No, don't you dare!" That was Hermione, sounding very shrill. "You saw what happened to Colin, and Professor Moody. I won't let you-- I won't--"

There was a dragging sound, and the other girl's whimpers. But Ginny couldn't seem to see anything. She forced her eyelids open; each one felt unbearably heavy. Ron was steadily advancing across the floor towards the table, where the book still lay open. Hermione had dug in her heels and was trying to stop him, but he was easily a foot taller than she and her slight extra weight barely slowed him down. The image was wildly slanted and very tiny, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. And it was rushing towards her with the speed of the Hogwarts train. She hit something horribly hard that knocked the breath out of her and the crazed motion came to a sudden, violent halt.

Ron's face went so white that Ginny could see each one of his freckles standing out clearly against his pale skin. Then he ran towards her in great, clumsy leaps and Hermione and Neville were running too, stumbling down to the floor where she lay, all their frightened faces crowding in on her.

"Ginny--"

"Harry--"

"Oh, Ginny--"

"Oh Harry, I thought you were dead!" That was Hermione, and out of the corner of her eye Ginny saw the other girl hug Harry fiercely, her lips and hands and arms trembling like leaves in a high wind..He looked past her with a vague expression on his face, as if he wasn't quite sure where or perhaps even who he was.

"I-- I'm fine, Hermione," he said, his voice distant. "But Ginny--"

"I'm all right, I'm here, I'm--" Ginny stopped when she realized that none of the words were actually coming out of her mouth. Then she heard Ron's quick indrawn breath, and Hermione's scream.

"Ginny, no! You can't be-- oh, please, you've got to be--"

"Get back. Give her air." That was Neville, although she hardly recognized the voice as his; there wasn't a trace of his normal stammering and stuttering. His fingers were at the pulse of her wrist, feeling skillfully for it. "Ginny--" and his voice broke a little, too. She saw his face moving above her, its rather foolish-looking roundness sterner, older somehow, set in determined lines. His hand slapped her face, lightly, then harder, so that she heard the crack against her cheek, but did not feel it.

"Stop it!" snarled Ron. "Stop hitting her, or I'll--"

"I'm trying to find out if she's going to live or die," Neville shot back. To the best of Ginny's knowledge, that marked the first time he had ever talked back to anyone on the planet. "Believe me. She'll live. But--" One of his fingers moved across her field of vision from left to right. She couldn't force her eyes to follow it. "I don't know what this is," he said. "It's almost as if she was in a trance."

Ginny could only see a sliver of the dark joists of the ceiling, now; they'd turned her over onto her back and she couldn't move a muscle. There was a long silence broken by hurried whispers, rustlings, movements she couldn't see. Remus Lupin moved at the corner of her vision, and she saw Professor Moody stir slightly, heard his harsh thread of a voice, scarcely above a hiss.

"Go-- to the clock face, you and Sirius. You've got to keep containment; you're the only ones who can. The Tenere spell's fraying-- I can feel our connection going--."

"We can't simply leave!" Remus argued in a furious low voice.

"If the pair of you don't go we'll lose everything we've worked so hard to set up-- Hurry!"

Their black cloaks swirled as their booted feet clattered up some interior set of stairs, and Ginny saw the professor slump back as if the effort of speaking had been almost too much for him. Ginny couldn't see Hermione, but she heard her whisper, her voice starting to grow ragged. "Colin's still unconscious, I can't get him out of it at all. God, Harry, what are we going to do?"

Ron was shaking her. Ginny thought that her head must be bobbing about unpleasantly, but she couldn't feel that, either. "Wake up," he said intensely, "wake up, Ginny, you've got to wake up. " She had never seen her brother cry, but there were tears at the edges of his lashes now. Then his face swam into a blur of color and motion before her.

"--almost lost her. We've got to pull her out of this. It's taking something from her-- I don't understand it, it's some sort of dark magic I suppose, but nothing we ever covered in class--" Hermione's high, frantic voice was babbling on and on; Ginny longed to tell her friend to shut up, but no words were coming out of her own mouth. She blacked out again, slipping into the warm darkness that awaited her. "Let me try," was the last thing she thought she heard.

"Ginny. Ginny... ginnyginnyginnyyyyy..." A soft low voice was calling her name, pulling her from the sweet dark comfort she floated in. It was so very peaceful here. So calm and quiet. There was no reason to come back. Except for that voice.

It was Harry's voice. Harry was calling her.

And so Ginny returned.

"Ginny. Come back. Come back to me, to us. We can't lose you... we can't... come back, Ginny..."

She opened her eyes. Harry was holding her; he was bent over her, his dear face close to hers, his hand caressing her brow. She tried to say something but it came out only as a long, deep, "ooooh." His emerald eyes lit up and he smiled, a tender, sweet smile, and then he hugged her close to him. There were no words, no thoughts even, to express her joy. Harry was worried over her. He would have cared it she'd died. He cared about her.

"You do love me," she whispered joyfully. "You do, you do!" His lips were so close to hers, and with all her strength she leaned up and kissed them. For a fleeting instant she felt his mouth against hers, startled, almost-but-not-quite responding. .

Then he stiffened, and his eyes flew wide with alarm. "Ginny," he whispered back, "what's the matter with you? You're still not yourself, you're not over what happened-- hush now, hush, it'll be all right--" He plucked her fingers from around his waist but she was laughing, crying, seizing hold of him as if her life depended on it, and at last he gave up and let her hold him as she wished.

"You do love me after all," she repeated in a thread of a voice, barely able to believe that these words were coming out of her mouth. Something strange was happening to her; her head was on fire and she couldn't feel her feet, and her heart was pounding so loudly that it seemed ready to burst out of her chest at any moment. He was right, she dimly realized. There was something terribly wrong with her still. But it didn't seem to matter. "You do. You do," she said again. "You must." Harry patted her lower back awkwardly, pressing a kiss to the top of her forehead. But in his eyes, both realization and fear were dawning, and she saw it even as she held him as tightly as she could.

"Harry," Ron finally said, "go and see to Professor Moody-- Neville, try Colin again-- go on, go--" But Ginny's fingers kept clutching at the glossy strands of his dark hair, and her brother had to pry them loose. He held his sister close, crooning to her gently as he'd done when they were children, while she stiffened and struggled and fought to get to Harry.

Both of them were sitting up, she saw, as Harry knelt next to them and spoke to them in low voices. She heard Moody's voice, the low, grating rasp.

"You made it through all right. I knew you would, Potter... I knew both of you would..."

His eyes had never been such a brilliant green. It took her a few moments to realize that he was blinking back tears. "I wouldn't have done it if I'd known," he said. Nearly the same words that Neville had said, Ginny thought.

"You wouldn't have gone in after Ginny Weasley?" the older man asked slyly.

"That's not what I meant and you know it! What the hell happened in there?" Harry demanded in a furious whisper.

"You were there." Moody's face had never looked more exhausted, more scarred and seamed, or more relentlessly inhuman, thought Ginny.He rose to a half-sitting position on one elbow, and even that small motion seemed to take a lot out of him. "Seems like that's the question I ought to ask you," he said.

"Don't play word games with me! You know, Professor. I don't know how but you do. You've known all along. You knew when you told me that I might have to go after Ginny no matter where she went, but I never would've thought--" Harry broke off, seemingly unable to speak further, controlling himself with obvious effort.

If Ginny had been able to wonder anything at all about these events, later on, she would certainly have wondered what might have happened if Harry had finished his sentence. He might have been able to hold onto his rage longer. And if he had, if he'd confronted Professor Moody then, everything that followed might have been entirely different.

But the sound that cut through the air then was so odd, so utterly unexpected, that Harry jerked his head round towards it, and even Ginny managed to lift her shoulders from the floor a little, peering round to its source.

Neville had raised his voice.

"Yes! I knew!" he was yelling at Colin, his face turning red. "I knew perfectly well that the clock tower was where we were headed. I had to get Ginny there! We didn't want you. But I couldn't figure out a way to get rid of you."

Colin looked at least as furious as the other boy. "You lured her here so she could be pulled into an evil book! Hasn't she had enough of that? What makes you think you deserveher?" He swept a hand at Ginny where she lay on the floor, barely able to raise her head. "Look at her! It's all your fault. I tried to save her-- you just worried about your own precious skin--"

"I did no such thing!" shouted Neville. "I saw what happened to you when you tried to grab the book. I knew Harry'd already gone in after her, so I stayed here, Creevey, trying to save your worthless hide. I should've known you wouldn't appreciate it."

"With those herbs of yours? You were probably trying to poison me." Colin looked at him scornfully. "You're no good, Longbottom. I always knew it. You shouldn't ever be allowed to touch Ginny again; shouldn't ever be allowed near her again."

Ron had been following the argument with one eye while comforting Hermione, but his head whipped round at this. "What? What do you mean, again? What have you been doing with my sister, Neville?"

"Things he shouldn't," Colin said smugly. "Why don't you ask him?"

"Oh, I intend to!" Ron's face had turned a very odd shade of purple that clashed badly with his hair.

"Ron," hissed Hermione, her eyes confused. "Have you gone absolutely mad? This isn't the time!" But Ginny felt the old cold dread seeping through her as she saw her brother striding furiously across the floor towards Neville. For Ron, it was always the time to tilt at windmills for her. She felt his confusion, his frustrated rage, his terror for her. It almost seemed that she could see his emotions, like ragged red lines vibrating around her brother's head. Something terrible would happen if Ron started fighting with Neville now. It would set a chain of events in motion that might never end. She tried to open her mouth, to warn him, but she could produce only a low croak.

A lot of confusion followed. Ginny could see nothing clearly from her position on the floor, and no matter how hard she tried she could do nothing more than wiggle her fingers and toes, weakly. She wasn't paralyzed, at least. There was shouting and swearing and swirling of cloaks; Ron's growl of rage rose clearly above the rest of the noise, and Neville's squeaky stuttering, as he seemed to have lost his burst of unexpected courage. Nobody but Ginny saw Colin cross the room swiftly and kneel down next to Professor Moody.

"Professor?" he said, quietly, urgently. "Professor, are you all right? Here-- let me help you sit up--"

Moody looked at the younger boy, and it seemed to Ginny that there was a strange sadness lingering in his eyes. Even the magical one."Mr. Creevey," he said in acknowledgement. "Yes. I'm all right."

"I'm sorry; I never would've wanted you to be knocked out by the book as well. I didn't realize you'd try to stop me."

"Couldn't let you go in there, I'm afraid."

"Maybe I shouldn't have tried. But I saw Ginny get pulled in, and I just couldn't help myself from going in after her. I'd do anything for her, you know..."

"Yes. I know."

The fight between Neville and Ron was still going full tilt, Ginny saw. Her brother was on top of the other boy and pummeling his head, and Harry was trying to get between them. Colin glanced in their direction, so she supposed that he must have seen it as well. "Professor," he said quickly, "look at them. Look at what Longbottom's doing. Starting a fight at a time like this, when we all need to pull together-- and the way he didn't go after Ginny, or even try to. I suppose it's not his fault really-- it's because of what happened to his parents and we all feel very sorry for him I'm sure, but-- well-- he's unstable, can't you see? He can't be trusted."

Moody's face looked as sad as anything Ginny had ever seen, now. "I see everything, Mr. Creevey," he said.

Colin seemed to gather together all his courage then, and he took a deep breath. "You don't need him."

The older man said nothing, but only looked at him. Ginny thought that he looked exactly as if he was watching the last act of a tragedy that he'd seen many, many times before.

"You need me."

"Do you know what you're saying?" Moody asked.

"I-- I know, Professor. I've been trying to find out about this thing all autumn long. I've listened whenever I've heard Harry and Ron and Hermione talking, and I've followed them wherever they went. They never saw me-- I've gotten quite good at not being seen. They're not as careful as they should be, either. I know that you're trying to find something called the Jewel of the Harem, and I know that it's a great secret. I know about the Kitap-an Düs. Well, not much about it, but I know that it's a book, this book. I know it was never meant for mortals to touch--"

Moody held up a hand. "Enough, Mr. Creevey.Enough."

"I'm sorry, I suppose I shouldn't have done it really, but I wanted to find out as much as I could. I want to help, I only want to help, that's all I want to do," Colin said breathlessly. "It's all I've been doing for months."

Moody sighed deeply. "You've been using it to keep your mind off things at home, haven't you?"

Colin's face went a little white, and he looked at the older man nervously, like a wild horse ready to shy at any moment.

"Yes. I know about your mother, you see..." Moody's voice was as close to being gentle as it could ever be, Ginny supposed.

"Then you know that this is the only thing that's been keeping me from--" Colin looked down at the floor, and then back up. "I'll do anything for you. For them. Anything.I'll help you any way I can. But you have to bring me in. Please. Please, let me. Let me join you. Let me be a part of this.."

Ginny caught her breath, for if ever a heart showed on a face, it was on Colin's at that moment. Yet something about it struck a chill into her. She had the same sudden, strange feeling she'd had when she thought she could actually see what Ron was thinking. Even as she lay on the floor, nearly paralyzed, feeling half alive, a sixth sense was sharpening. Colin was telling the truth, but he was not telling all of it. There was something dark about him, like a swirling nimbus of fog. Something... deceitful. Ginny desperately struggled to speak, to warn them all. But she could not make a sound.

"No," Moody said.

Colin's mouth actually dropped open. "No?" he managed to squeak.

"The answer's got to be no."

"But, I--" Colin stopped. "You don't know what'll happen if I don't," he finally said.

"What is to be, will be." How unimaginably old Professor Moody looked, with the marks of grief on his face. "There comes a time when one must go forward. There's no going back."

"No," Colin said slowly, wonderingly, as if he couldn't quite believe the word was real. "No." He got to his feet. "Well. I tried. Remember that."

Ron and Neville were still taking halfhearted swings at each other, and Hermione was wringing her hands to Harry. Apparently, she'd gotten him to separate them-- mostly. Her eyes were very big, and her lips trembled as she looked up at him. Hermione felt something for him, Ginny thought detachedly, something more than friendship, and had for some time. She could see it all around the other girl, wistful and hopeful and pink. But there was something very sad about this aura, too, because he had never even thought of her that way. Ginny didn't feel this from Harry, since he was still a blank wall to her. But she knew that Hermione knew it, and accepted it. Mostly.

One way or another, every one of them was distracted. So none of them even noticed Colin as he slipped out the door, except for Ginny. She felt a terrible wave of panic. This mustn't happen.

She gathered every ounce of her feeble strength and forced her lips apart. From the diaphragm. Get your air all the way down... the sound rides on a column of air... The earliest voice lessons she'd ever had came back to her now. Her stomach muscles clenched with the effort to produce sound, to force it past her vocal cords. . "Stop him," she croaked.

Every head snapped towards her. Ron simply dropped Neville on the floor, where he landed with a thud, and rushed over to her. "Ginny," he choked out. "Are you all right? I shouldn'tve left you-- I don't know what happened to me, I think I went a bit mad for a few minutes--"

Her nerveless fingers plucked at his sleeve. "Don't--let--Colin get away. I'm all right. Don't worry about-- me. He went-- out door. Down the stairs. Stop him. You have to." It became easier to speak after she started doing it, although the effort seemed to make her feel weaker than ever.

"He went out the door?" Ron leaped to his feet. "That little--"

Everyone in the room winced, instinctively, at the crashing sound that came from the flight of spiral stairs a few minutes later.

"Just what the hell did you think you were doing?" Ron demanded as he dragged Colin in by the feet.

"Professor Moody said he didn't want me here," Colin whined. "I thought leaving was the best thing I could do."

"We can't let him leave," blurted Hermione.

"What are we going to do?" Harry asked. "Keep him in the tower room forever?"

"I don't mean that," she said impatiently. "But, well--"

"He'll tell everyone," said Ron. "Colin can't keep his mouth shut, never could."

"He certainly kept it shut all autumn long about spying on us," Harry said.

"That was a bit different, don't you think? If you make one sound, my socks are going in your mouth. You little sneak..." Ron turned to glare at Colin, giving his ankles a shake. Her brother had never liked Colin Creevey. Ginny saw that with sudden clarity. Never trusted him.And not only because Colin had long been after her, the sister Ron protected and shielded from the demands of the world with everything that was in him. No. It was for some other reason, although Ginny doubted that Ron himself could have said what it was.

"I just don't see what we're supposed to do about it," said Harry. He glanced around the little room, only now seeming to realize that Moody wasn't there. "Why, where on earth did Professor Moody go?":

Hermione blinked up at them from the floor, where she knelt next to Ginny. "I don't know. I didn't even realize he was gone. We were all of us a bit distracted, I suppose. I imagine he went to that little room behind the clockface; you know the one, where Tenere was set up, to help them get containment."

"You know what we could do," said Ron in a low, intense voice. "We don't need to ask anyone. By the time Moody gets back here, it could be done."

"No, I don't know," said Harry.

"Yes, you do. You're the only one of us who's learned how to do it decently..."

"I can't." Harry's face went white. "You can't ask me to do that!"

"It would be safe enough, if you're as concerned about Colin as all that. I happen to know that he turned fifteen last month. And he seems to be in a physical state where he could handle it rather well, if all that squirming around he's doing is any indication."

"Why the hell is this the first thing everybody always seems to think of?" asked Harry in a low, furious hiss. "'Oh, let's see, who can we get to do this horrible thing? I know! Harry Potter! He's used to it.'"

"I'd do it if I could," said Ron. "You know I can't."

"You mean--" Neville wilted. "Oh. I know what you mean."

Hermione and Neville had been trying to get Ginny to sit upright as they all followed the argument, turning their eyes this way and that. The difference was that Ginny had no idea what they were talking about, and the two of them, she could tell, obviously did. "You've got to do it, Harry," Hermione suddenly said. "You've got to do it now. Who knows what Professor Moody's going to say if we wait to ask him? But we know that we can't let Colin out of here, knowing what he knows."

"So let me do it, while the pair of you keepyour hands clean." Harry's mouth twisted into a painful shape. "I've had a bellyful of this, Hermione..."

Ron, Harry, and Hermione glared at each other, and Ginny saw the deep maroon haze of a bitter argument of long standing, as sullen and thick as drying blood. Unfortunately, she also saw Ron's hands relax, letting go their tight grip of Colin's ankles. Colin took advantage of that moment to scramble up from the floor and head for the door again.

Ron made a flying leap and grabbed him; the sound was so very loud that Ginny winced, and wondered how on earth Professor Moody and the others could have failed to hear it, even where they were. Hermione looked up and drew her breath in. "There's someone out there," she said breathlessly. "Outside, I mean. They must've just walked across the fields; I can see them from the window."

"Who?" asked Ron, wrestling with Colin and finally sitting on him. "Neville, you might help me."

"I don't know, I think--" she ran to peer out the window. "Oh, God!"

"Who is it, Hermione?" said Ron, pinning Colin's arms under him with Neville's help.

"It's Draco Malfoy."

"What?" exclaimed Harry. "Are you sure?"

"He just threw the hood of his cloak back. I can see his hair." She looked back towards them. "He's trying the door."

"You knew he was coming here," Ron told Colin in a tone of voice that was nearly conversational. "You set it up with him. Didn't you. That's who you were going to meet a minute ago. You're betraying us by feeding information to Malfoy, who's sending it to his father. Aren't you."

"No," said Colin. "No, I swear I'm not!"

Ron turned to Harry as if he hadn't heard. "There. Is that enough evidence for you?"

"If Malfoy opens that door," said Hermione, "he will be up here in about two minutes. For God's sake, Harry!"

He turned to look at them, turning between them, and Ginny saw his eyes shift as he took in both of their pleading expressions. "I can't fight both of you," he said. Harry took a deep breath. He pointed his wand at Colin, who began to struggle wildly.

"No, Harry! You can't, you can't. I wouldn't betray you, I never would. Oh, please don't! Please don't! Please--"

"I'm sorry, Colin. I have to." Harry's hand was very steady, and so was his voice. "Obliviate."

The room was very silent, afterwards. There was only the sound of Hermione's frightened breathing. Although Ginny had the odd feeling that she could actually hear the very faint rattling of the ancient door handle as, far below, Draco Malfoy attempted to open it. She sensed his thoughts, as well, and that did surprise her. They were snarly and frustrated, and beneath that was a current of something running so deep that it seemed to have no bottom. Some of it was dark, but not all, and the patterns of his thoughts were so intricate that they had a strange almost-beauty of their own. She extended the sixth sense out as far as it would go, wanting to see more of what was going through his head. But he gave up and moved away then, heading across the snow-covered field, and she lost the connection. The last thing she caught from Draco Malfoy, however, was very clear. This place, the clock tower, was a refuge for him, and that was why he had come. It had nothing to do with Colin Creevey.

Colin stirred, and raised his head. His face was very blank. He looked up at Harry with a troubled expression. "Who are you?" he asked in a childlike voice.

"Oh God," said Harry. "What have I done?"

"He'll be all right," said Hermione. "You know he will. This part of it wears off. We just need to get him back to Gryffindor Tower without anyone seeing and put him to bed."

"What, do you want to get it over with as quickly as you can? Before Professor Moody gets back from wherever the hell they all went, so he doesn't find out? I'll tell him, you know." Harry glared at her.

Color rose swiftly in Hermione's cheeks. "How can you think I would try to lie to a teacher, Harry James Potter?"

"I'm not so sure of what you would do anymore as I once was, Hermione Tamara Granger." They faced each other like adversaries across the little twelve-sided floor. Although Ginny couldn't tell what Harry was really thinking any more than she ever had, she rather thought that if Hermione hadn't been a girl, Harry would have taken a swing at her. Colin kept looking up at both of them, his expression dreamy and vague. Ron had knelt down beside Ginny and was taking her hands in his and rubbing them. There was fear coming off him in waves; she could see it clearly. She was still barely able to sit up. And there they all were, in frozen tableau, when Moody came stumping back into the room. He stopped and looked at them all, a trifle sadly.

"Where are Sirius and Remus?" blurted Ron.

At the sound of her brother's voice, Ginny found her own, and remembered how frightened she'd been when she saw Sirius Black, convicted murderer, headed towards Harry. It seemed a thousand years distant, but the memory flooded back to her now. She plucked at the hem of Moody's robe, still unable to rise from the floor. "Professor, we need to get Harry out of here," she croaked. "Don't we?" she added a little uncertainly, when she saw everyone's face at her words. "Sirius Black-- must've found him. Been lurking around the castle I suppose--" She began coughing, exhausted from the effort of so much talking.

"No," Harry said quickly, "no, Ginny, it's all right. Sirius isn't what you think. He didn't kill anybody. I'll explain later, there's no time now." He turned toward Moody. "We-- I-- I had to--" He indicated Colin with a hand.

"Sirius and Remus are still working on the containment spell, " the older man said quietly. "We nearly lost it... I see what happened here. You don't need to tell me."

"It was our fault," said Hermione. "Harry didn't want to, but none of the rest of us could ever do Memory charms properly, it had to be him."

"He had to do it," said Ron. "We couldn't let Colin go, knowing what he knew. Hearing what he'd heard."

"Oh! And there's more. We saw Malfoy trying the door, down at the base of the tower! Colin must've arranged to meet him; why else would he be here? We had to do it, don't you see?" Hermione clasped her hands together, swirling towards Moody, her dark eyes pleading. "What choice did we have?"

"We'll never know, now," Moody said.

A chill spread through the room. It was as if they'd all felt the bitter cold of the midwinter night outside for the very first time. Nobody spoke, and Hermione looked down at her twisted hands.

"Ginny, Ginny, are you all right? Speak to me. Just say anything," Ron whispered to her urgently, rubbing her hands together harder. She could feel how shockingly cold they felt, to him.

"Yes," she managed to say.

"Draco Malfoy didn't come here to meet Colin Creevey," Moody said.

"What?" Ron jerked his head up and stared. "How can you know that, Professor?"

"Sirius and Remus have both seen young Malfoy here a dozen times or more, this autumn. He comes to the clock tower to be alone. The last thing he'd do is to meet anybody here. They both say they're good and sick and tired of having to hide whenever he shows up, not to mention picking up all the cigarette butts he leaves behind. And besides all that-- I know." The weight of all the knowledge that Moody carried was nearly crushing him, Ginny saw, an unbearably heavy load, layers and layers of ominous black. She could see no more. There were locked doors in his mind, and long shafts of blank corridors behind them.

"Oh," said Hermione in a very small voice. "But we had to do it anyway. Didn't we?" Her voice rose in pitch. "Didn't we?" she repeated.

"You did what's been given you to do," he replied. "Take him back to Gryffindor Tower, Granger. Use the Portkey. Weasley, Longbottom-- you go too. Not you," he said, holding out a hand to stop Harry as he turned to follow the rest.

Ron gave Ginny one last worried look. "I'll be back as soon as I can," he murmured. "You're going to be all right, Gin, I swear it!"

The sound of their footsteps died away, clattering down the stairs. Harry walked over the window and bent his head down, watching Ron, Hermione, and Neville half-leading, half-dragging Colin across the field to a secluded area at the edge of the Forbidden Forest. Hermione reached down to grasp something in the snow and bring it up to their joined hands. A tree branch, Ginny thought, although from that angle and height she couldn't be sure. Then they were gone. An internal Portkey, she thought dreamily.

Harry turned his head from the window, towards the older man. "Why did all of this have to happen?" He let out his breath in a long, shaky sigh. " Why was Ginny dragged into it? She can't be a part of this, you know she can't."

"There were things we had to know. Things only she could find out," said Moody.

"But it was more than that, too. I'm not sure why, but I know it was." Harry paused. "I feel so strange. Not like myself, somehow." He looked around the tower room. "It's something about this place, isn't it? It almost feels like people were never meant to be here. Like it isn't a place in the real world. How have they endured staying here for so long, Sirius, and Remus Lupin?"

"It's not always like this," said Moody. "What you sense has everything to do with the time of year. We're close to the great feast of Yule. The veil between the worlds is very thin, just now."

"I didn't think of that. I suppose it's the time, then, and this room, and the book, that damned book. It's making us all act absolutely mad. You saw what Ron did, and Colin-- Colin-- I'm never going to forget what he said. Or what I had to do." Harry's face twisted. "Don't tell me I didn't have to do it. Even if it's true, don't tell me. I think the only way I can stand it is if I can believe I didn't have any other choice."

"Some people believe that," said Moody. "For others, the power of choice is all they have. Even if it's just an illusion. Your parents were two of those."

"You-- know," whispered Harry, his voice filled with something like fear. "You know what happened down there, in the Chamber of Secrets. Don't you?"

Moody shook his grizzled head. "I know some. I don't know all. His voice was strangely gentle, almost caressing, as it could sometimes be. "What did Tom Riddle say to you, Harry?" He had a way of using your first name every once in a great while, too, Ginny thought. It seemed so much more meaningful that way than it did from people who called you that all the time. It made you want to please him, to bring that rare smile to his rocklike face.

"You know I saw him?"

"I knew he'd take that form to your eyes."

"Well, I don't know if taking the shape of Tom Riddle was for me, or for Ginny. He was goading me, mostly. I can't remember everything he said. It all seemed so unreal, somehow, and it still does. I think-- I think he wanted me to attack him. Doesn't seem to make any sense, but I could swear that's what he was trying to get me to do." Harry kept talking, and the low sound of his voice lulled Ginny into a sort of dream state. He was right, she thought vaguely. Nothing seemed very real. Not in the Chamber of Secrets, or wherever they'd really been, and not here. But this was important, even if it was increasingly hard to remember why. She tried to grasp onto what he was saying.

"--seemed to turn into Voldemort," said Harry. "But that's not even possible. Is it? And that's when--" his voice broke. "that's when he-- it-- started saying things about my parents. My mum especially. And that's when I did attack-- whatever that thing actually was."

Moody's face settled into lines of disappointment. "I had hoped you'd be able to hold out, Harry. But there are some things that are too much to ask of any human being." He hesitated. "How did the pair of you get out?"

"Well-- I had the sword, I told you about that. But I knew it was wrong to attack the thing with it, knew it as soon as I did it. I wasn't going to escape that way, either. I certainly wasn't going to hurt Ginny. So since I couldn't get out through anything I did to her, or to him-- the only option left was myself."

"That was a very brave thing to do, Harry."

He shook his head. "It wasn't. At least it didn't feel that way at the time. It's so strange, in there. Inside that book.Nothing feels real; your own actions don't feel real, their consequences don't feel real. Turning that sword on myself didn't have any sort of emotional content to it. It almost felt like doing maths; it was just a matter of figuring out a logical equation-- I knew it couldn't be real, so it couldn't hurt me. Physically, I mean."

"There are other ways of being hurt," Moody said.

"Don't I know it," Harry said, his voice dull and sad. "This was some sort of test. Wasn't it?"

Slowly, Moody nodded.

"That's the real reason why you got Sirius and Remus Lupin out of here-- they didn't have any part of it. We were the ones being tested. That's it, isn't it?"

"Yes, and no. The Tenere spell is a very tricky one and requires a good deal of maintenance; it was nearly broken by what happened. This clock tower needs to be kept in a space that isn't quite a part of Hogwarts, or of the outside world... or we could never have used the book as we did, and as we'll have to do. But there's more to it, as you said. Remus and Sirius need to stay in this clock tower nearly all the time, day in and day out, for the next year. They've gone through tests of their own, Harry, and there will be more. They couldn't be subjected to such a concentrated dose of power just now, not with so much time still to go before the final trials."

"But it was a test," repeated Harry, still staring out the window. "Well. I suppose we all failed. Especially me."

Moody's silence, it seemed to Ginny, was answer enough.

"It seems so unfair," Harry said at last.

"It is unfair," Moody replied. "But it isn't a game. It's a war."

Harry didn't answer. He walked back to the little table where the book lay. Ginny felt him reaching down to touch her hair. "Ginny," he murmured. "Shouldn't I get her back to the castle? Madam Pomfrey really ought to have a look at her. Strange, that I didn't think of that right away. I feel that nothing really seems to matter all that much, not her, or myself, or anyone else. But then everyone's been acting so strangely today. Is it some sort of side effect of being here, in this place, at this time? But then if it is--" Harry bit his lip. "It didn't stop Ron from being even more protective of Ginny than he usually is. Hermione, too."

"A place of such concentrated power," said Moody quietly, "has a way of bringing out what you really are. It pulls out whatever is essential about you, and burns away the rest."

Harry was still stroking Ginny's hair; she could feel the light touch of his fingers. "I've felt that way, sometimes, God knows," he said. "Cut off from every human feeling. Set apart from them. But I don't want to be, sometimes I'm so filled with longing not to be that it hurts me--" he touched the left side of his chest, lightly, "here. Almost more than I can stand. But does that mean I have to be?"

Moody stumped around the edge of the table, his limp more pronounced than ever. "There's a funny thing that happens in the Scandinavian countries, sometimes. Norway especially. It's called an ice-burn. Don't know if you've ever heard of it. Great sheets of ice form across the hilltops, far in the north, in their long winters. And when the sun's at its highest, during the long, long arctic days, the rays are concentrated by the ice. Works like a giant magnifying glass. In the spring-- once the ice melts-- the grass is all burned off the tops of the hills. It's a paradox."

"I don't understand."

"It's the ice that burns, don't you see? The very last thing you'd expect to burn anything. And yet it does." He put a gnarled hand on Harry's shoulder. "Sometimes we want a thing so much that the very intensity of the wanting keeps us from getting it... do you understand now?"

"Not really. But then, there are so many things I don't understand. I wouldn't know where to begin to ask about them." Harry sighed, turning to face him. "No, that's not true. What did the dark spirit mean when he talked about the pact my parents made? Will you tell me that?"

"If I can."

"I didn't really understand it at all. He-- it-- said it was a vow made to the Kindly Ones, or to the Immortals, and it was a part of laws so old that they were past human understanding. I think he said that they tried to change the bargain, but couldn't, and that's why I was supposed to die, why they died. He said that-- he said that this world was never meant to be. The one where a thing like me walked." Harry tried to laugh. "'A thing like me.' Does wonders for one's self-esteem, hearing that."

"If you know that, then there's no more I can tell you, Harry."

He let out his breath, slowly. "I suppose that's exactly what I expected to hear. I'm sorry that I couldn't-- show more self-control; I'm sorry I attacked the thing, at the end. What does that mean,that I did it?"

"Stop beating yourself with that particular stick, Harry. There are some things that can't be expected-- they're beyond human endurance. And you didn't do so badly as you might have done. If you'd destroyed that dark spirit as it wanted you to do, it would have been released into the world. And then things would be worse. The danger--" Moody ran a hand over his face. "The danger now is that it's been let in, partway. And there are those who will find a way to harness it for their own purposes."

"Like the Death Eaters? Like Lucius Malfoy?" Harry asked.

"Exactly so."

"What can we do?"

"We can continue to fight against the forces that oppose us as best we may," Moody said. "And we must find the Al-Juhara Haram, the Jewel of the Harem. On that, all depends. They know it too, you may be sure."

"I ought to find Draco Malfoy and find out what he knows," Harry muttered. "I don't need magic for that,I'll just pound his head into the ground for a few hours--"

Moody shook his head. "Draco Malfoy doesn't know anything."

He shrugged, looking rather unconvinced. "If you say so. Well, at least it's all over for now." He did not see the expression that crossed Moody's face when he said those words, but Ginny did. He bent down and held out a hand to her. "Do you think you can get up, Ginny?"

She tried to take it, tried to rise to her feet, but the floor buckled beneath her. "They're coming back," she said, the vision sudden, sharp, and unbearable. "They left Colin in his bed at Gryffindor Tower, and Neville with him, to make sure he'd be all right. Neville hates Colin but he said it was his responsibility, his burden to bear, and they knew he'd take care of him. Now Ron and Hermione are fighting, it's horrible, they're screaming at each other and their feelings are all red and black, like swords slashing I can feel it in my head--" She shuddered. "I can't turn it off!"

"What's she talking about?" demanded Harry.

"It's not over," said Moody.

"What do you mean?"

"A power was unlocked in her when she touched the book. It should have been released at the completion of the vision. But wholeness was broken when the dark spirit drew her in, and now the burden of Sight is more than she can bear. It was never meant to be taken into this mortal world."

"So that's why she's like this?" asked Harry.

"Yes. It's why we're losing containment, as well. And it will only get worse. Unless you help her. It's something only you can do, Harry..."

"Tell me, Professor, I'll do anything. She wouldn't have come to the tower at all today if it wasn't for me. I owe her that much."

Ginny knew that those words should have made her happy, but in truth she barely heard him. She clutched at her head, which suddenly felt as if it were about to burst. Moody's dark burden; the dread and worry coming from Sirius Black and Remus Lupin, somewhere near to them; red fringes of fear and anger from Ron and misery from Hermione as they approached the tower. And, far away, Colin's blankness, like running into a white wall. Neville's guilt, resentment, determination. A savage longing and pain and frustration, from Draco Malfoy. There were a thousand thousand voices in her head, rushing, sighing, whispering, screaming. And beneath those, darker threads, sinister plans, something slowly ripening in darkness like a monstrous charnel-house flower. "Make it stop," she whimpered. "Make it stop."

He knelt and grabbed at her hands; she had begun to scratch at her own face, as if she might tear the visions from behind it. "Ginny! Don't, don't. I'll make it stop, I will. Professor, for God's sake tell me what to do!"

"She must go back into the Book of Dreams and complete the circle of vision," said Moody.

"She-- she can't! You saw what happened the last time. I told you what happened."

"There's no other way. And it's worse than that, I'm afraid. Ginny Weasley can only form the connection through you."

"Oh God no," Harry said. And it sounded to Ginny as if he were praying. "Don't make me do this."

"It has to be. Maybe I shouldn't tell you this, Harry-- but in a small way this is itself a part of the vow your parents made."

Harry shrank away from the book as if it would pursue him on its own. Ginny thought she heard him mumble something, but she couldn't be sure; his jaws were clenched so hard that she didn't see how any sound could have gotten through them. But Moody advanced on him, backing him further against the little table.

"If they hadn't made that promise, they could have lived. If they'd given you up, they would have lived. Would you let their sacrifice be for nothing?"

Harry was silent for a long moment, chewing on one of his nails. Every one was bitten down to the quick. This one was going to start bleeding soon, Ginny thought. All of her thoughts seemed to be squeezed through a very small space, each one taking a long time to get to her brain.

"Damn you for making me do this to her." His voice was defeated.

Moody nodded as if he accepted the judgment, and had long known that both he and Harry were past salvation.

"But just tell me this," Harry continued. "Why can't you do it, if it has to be done?"

"If I could take this burden from you, I would. But I can't. Only you can do it. She can't take the book from any hands but yours."

"Why?" Harry burst out. "Why me? I'm only fifteen and a half years old and I feel like I'm a million. There's no goddamn end to what's demanded of me, ever. This is never going to end, is it? Why should it? It's been going on all my life. It is my life! But why, why is it always me?"

But Moody only looked at him steadily.

"You can't tell me," Harry said dully. "All right. I swore when I first got into this that I'd do whatever you told us to do, because I trusted you--" His face twisted.

"If I lose your trust over this, Harry," Moody said steadily, "it will be a very high price to pay. But I'll have to pay it. This must be done. Nobody else can do it. Do you see that?"

"I do," replied Harry. "I do see that it has to be done. And that makes it worse." He knelt down next to Ginny. She thought that she had never seen such sorrow on a human face. "I'm sorry, Ginny."

"Sorry?" she said. She'd only understood a little of what they'd been talking about, but there was a sick, dumb feeling in the pit of her stomach. Something awful was going to happen. But if Harry did it to her, it couldn't be awful. He wouldn't hurt her. Would he? Oh, I'm not thinking clearly at all. There's something horribly wrong with me...

"What's happening to her?" demanded Harry.

"She's drifting away. The weight of it all is too much for her; there's more power flowing through her than she knows, and she's crumpling under it." Moody looked very sad.

""I really do have to do this," Harry whispered. "Don't I?"

"Yes. And it'll be easier if you do it before they get back."

"I don't want easy. If I'm going to do this thing then I deserve to suffer for it. But I'll do it now. I have to." He stroked Ginny's hair, as her brother had done. "I'm sorry for everything," he repeated. "For what I am, for what you are. Maybe for what I've helped to make of you, Ginny; I don't know anymore."

She looked up at him, her eyes wide. His eyes were a very dark green, endless emerald mazes, and she felt herself becoming lost in them.

"Do you trust me?" he murmured.

"I trust you," Ginny said.

Still, he hesitated, holding his wand loosely in one hand, the Book of Dreams in the other. "Touch it," he finally said, holding it out to her. "It'll be all right this time, Ginny. Don't be afraid."

She held out her hand to it and felt the jewelled cover under her fingertips. Then she clutched it as hard she could. Something was going out of her mind. Some ability that had been too painful for her to hold. Her ties with all that had hurt her were loosening, letting go, and she was drifting free of them. She was no longer in the clock tower, but was walking through a wood with a tall, dark man who had spiky hair and fathomless eyes, whose cloak moved without wind, and whose skin was white as death. The trees stood round them like sentinels, still and watchful, and there was neither moon nor sun.

"What do you here, little Gwenhyfar, little dreamer?" he asked.

"I come to you, Lord Morpheus, because I would forget," she said, knowing who he was without knowing why.

"Would you forget both love and grief, joy and suffering, passion and pain?"

"I would."

The man-- or was it a boy, perhaps no more than her own age?-- stooped to pick up a handful of sand from the forest floor, and sifted it through his impossibly long white fingers. He was also called the Sandman, she remembered now. Mr. Sandman... sendme a dream... make him the sweetest that I've ever seen...

"Look well on what you would leave behind," he said.

She looked, and saw, as if through a glass, darkly, her body slumped on the floor of the clock tower. Her hands held the book in a death grip. Harry had leaped up from her side, and she heard, very dimly, feet running across the room. Then the sound of her brother's voice, ragged with rage and terror.

"What have you done to her?" he was snarling. "What's the matter with you-- you gave her the book again!" Hermione was screaming, Ginny thought. The entire thing was like a scene viewed through the wrong end of a telescope, impossibly distant compared to the one who walked by her side.

"I cannot give you what you would wish," he said. "You desire not forgetfulness alone, but oblivion. That is my sister's gift, not mine. And it is not yet your time for that, Gwenhyfar. But I will tell you the knowledge you came to seek, knowing it not." He leaned closer to her, and she saw the stars in his eyes, wheeling round and round in an endless spiral dance. "The treasure you seek can be found in Istanbul. At the heart of the palace in Topkapi it lies, beneath the dominion of knowledge, in the reign of he whom men called Süleyman the Magnificent."

"Why are you telling me this?" she asked.

"Because I must." His voice became filled with wonder. "I have not spoken so to any mortal in so long that it seems strange to me indeed, strange past all measuring or knowing..."

The air was beginning to ripple. Wave after wave of savagely red emotions were ripping and tearing at her. She could not stay where she was. They bound her too tightly to earth. The image of the Lord of Dreams at her side was wavering, becoming indistinct.

"But this weight is more than I can bear," she said. "I can't return to it."

"That is a thing I know. And so I will give you what gift I can." He stretched one hand to her, palm out. She looked at it, and saw that it had no lines at all. It was as blank as a white sky. She stretched out her own hand and fitted her fingers to his. There was a tremendous, painless jolt, and Ginny felt some unbearable thing burn out of her and disappear. "Farewell, Gwenhyfar," he said softly. "We will meet again, before time and times are done. For the Immortals are watching you now."

"Are you an Immortal?" she whispered. "Who or what are you, really?" Ginny stared at him. "You keep-- changing. One second you look so young, almost as young as I am, but then--"

"I am one of the Endless, little dreamer," he said, and his strange eyes were fixed on her. "And I am older than any man, or any god. I can feel no mortal emotion, neither love nor hatred, not sorrow or pity. But if I could, my Gwenhyfar, if I could... I believe I would pity you."

He bent, and placed a kiss on her brow. At the touch of his lips, his voice faded away.

There was a sound in her ears so unbearably loud that she began crying instantly, crouching her head down between her shoulders to try to escape it. Ron was growling harshly at such close range that it was unendurable, and Hermione was still screaming just as loudly as before; the sound was like red-hot needles through her skull. But it was growing fainter, and Ginny could hear the other girl's footsteps as she raced up some set of interior stairs, further towards the clockface.

Ginny forced her eyes open. She was back in the tower room. Her brother was doing his level best to pound Harry's head into the floor. The two boys rolled over and over, grappling for position, but Ron was much taller and stronger. Sheer muscle counted for more than reflexes in this particular situation, she could see. Oh, no-- no! She struggled to rise to her feet; she had to stop them. But she was still weak, a little sick, and her head throbbed with a dull ache; all her limbs felt sluggish and disconnected. Before she'd had time to do more than pull herself up to a standing position, swaying, holding onto the table, Hermione burst back into the room, closely followed by Remus Lupin and Sirius Black.

"Get the hell off him, you ungrateful little bastard!" growled Sirius Black, pulling her brother from Harry with one fluid motion and slamming him against the wall. "How dare you-- after all he's done for you-- what the fuck did you think you were doing, I ought to break every bone in your body, one by one, you--" His strength seemed almost inhuman to Ginny; he snarled in her brother's face and actually bared his teeth, and in that moment she was sure that they were all wrong and he was really a mass murderer after all. Her heart leapt to her throat and lodged there; she stumbled across the room, feeling as if there were ten-ton weights attached to each of her feet.

"Stop it," she begged, hating the terrified tremble in her voice. "You're hurting him. Stop!" He turned to her, eyes blazing, and she flinched, fully expecting to be struck down where she stood. "I'm getting out of here, and Ron too," she said as bravely as she could, "and I'm owling the Ministry to tell them where you are the second I get out this door!"

He stopped, gulped, and stood motionless, breathing hard. The maniacal light died out of his eyes, and for the first time he seemed to really see her. "Ginny. Ginny Weasley," he said. "You're his sister. Aren't you?" He reached out a tentative hand to her. She shrank away.

"You don't know," he said. "You-- you don't understand--"

"Don't touch me! Murderer! You may have fooled everybody else, but I know you for what you really are. Get away from my brother!" She made a wild grab for Ron.

"Sirius!" Remus Lupin said, softly, urgently. "Let go of him. Come on. There's been enough misery and violence tonight. We're none of us ourselves just now-- come on, let go of Ron--"

Sirius looked up at his other hand as if it just dawned on him that he was holding a boy against a wall with it. Slowly his fingers loosened. "I'm-- I'm sorry," he said, and then let Remus lead him away a little, one hand on his shoulder. "I just-- I saw that you were hurting Harry, and I couldn't let you do that, Ron. I didn't mean-- I don't think I'm myself tonight, just as Remus said--"

But Ron didn't even seem to hear; he was gaping at his sister. And then he had run to Ginny; his arms were about her so tightly that she could barely breathe; she felt his shuddering sobs against her. "I shouldn't have left you," he said over and over again. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

She took his head in her hands, forced him to look at her. "Ron," she said, an edge to her voice, "I'm all right." And she was, Ginny realized with some surprise. Her voice, although rusty, had come back to her, and she wasn't nearly as dizzy as she had been. " You didn't have to go off like that, really you didn't. I'm all right because of what Harry did, because of what he had to do. I had to go back into the book, and--I saw things." She struggled to put her fragmented memories into some sort of order.

Hermione had torn a strip from the bottom of her cloak and was pressing the cloth to Harry's face, her eyes wide with anxiety. His nose was bleeding and a purple bruise already puffed up the right side of his face. "Don't say a word!" she snapped at Ron when he glanced in her direction. "Not one word. Honestly, I think I'm checking you into St. Mungo's after all this is over. And Ginny, once and for all, Sirius Black is not a murderer. I'm not telling you again."

Ron flushed a bright red, and he mumbled something inaudible in Harry's general direction. Hermione glared such daggers at him that Ginny would almost have laughed, under other circumstances. But now she had something terribly important to say, and she didn't know if she could make herself heard; she still felt quite weak. An inarticulate noise came from her throat, and she tugged at Ron's sleeve. He looked down at her.

"I have to tell you what I saw," she whispered.

"What did you see, Ginny Weasley?" Moody asked her. Again, she thought, his voice was so very gentle. In spite of all she'd heard, and all she now knew, she couldn't help responding to it.

"I don't remember all of it," she said. "There was a tall dark-haired man with very white skin, he was both very young and very old, I think. And we walked and talked-- for hours and hours, it seemed like, but then again it might have been only a minute. I think--" Her brow screwed up in concentration. "I think he was called the Sandman. Does that make any sense?"

Moody nodded as if something had been confirmed. "Lord Morpheus. Oneiros. The King of the Dreaming.I know who it was you saw. What did he say to you?"

"A lot of things that didn't make much sense, and that I don't quite remember. Except-- oh, yes! He told me that he would give me the information I sought. 'The treasure you seek can be found in Istanbul,'" she quoted, parrotlike. "In Topkapi palace, beneath the dominion of knowledge. Yes, that was it. And he said it was in the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent."

Moody's eyes locked onto hers, and the magical one frightened her as much as it always had. Yet it fascinated her, too; it was like a twirling swirling world, filled with flashes of light and infinite colors, jewellike, unfathomable.... "You've done well, Ginny," he said. And for a moment, she was absurdly pleased. Then she shook herself; after everything she'd learned, everything she'd heard him say and seen him do to Harry! She glared at him, all her normal fear and shyness gone. She felt at least a dozen years older than the innocent hours before, when she'd first followed Harry through the snow to the clock tower.

"How could you make Harry do that?" she finally spat at him. She wished she had the nerve to really spit on him; she'd love to see it dripping off his ugly face, oh, it was better than he deserved, a thousand times better.

"He did what he had to do. Just as you did."

"But look what it's done to him. Look what it's done to--" she swept a hand at the room, at Harry and Ron and Hermione, even at Sirius and Remus. "To all of us. We'll never be the same after what we've all had to do tonight. Not Colin or Neville, either. None of us will."

"You won't," Moody agreed.

"But why? Why?" She was starting to get hysterical, she realized dimly.

"What must be, must be. That's all the answer I can give you." Nothing had ever looked so old, so tired, or so sad as Moody's face, thought Ginny. "That's all the answer there is."

"Well, it's not enough." She turned from him, staring unseeingly out the window. "I'll never forget this day. Never, as long as I live."

Harry cleared his throat. "Yes, you will."

In the end, it took both Remus and Sirius to hold Ron back, pinned against the wall. He'd already kicked Hermione in the knee when she tried to reason with him. She pulled the head of her cloak over her head and stood stony-faced against the door, but Ginny saw the tracks of the tears on her face. She herself could only seem to stare at Harry as he pulled out his wand and pointed it at her.

"What are you doing?" she asked stupidly.

"What I have to," he replied. "I'm sorry, Ginny."

She'd certainly been wrong about Moody's face being the saddest thing she'd ever seen. Harry's eyes alone carried such grief that it sent a pang of almost unbearable pain into her heart.

"I'm so, so sorry," Harry repeated, and then the flickering blue edge of the spell began creeping from the end of his wand, as if in slow motion. It reached out to her mind and touched it, spreading from neuron to neuron, synapse to synapse. The connections began to close down. She could feel it happening. Panic clawed at her.

"No..." she tried to whimper. "Don't, Harry, please, oh please don't..."

But his voice came to her ears then, his gentle, merciless, pitiless voice, and it was the last thing she heard before darkness rushed up to claim her.

"Obliviate."

It was very cold. Her feet was extremely wet. She was shivering.

There seemed to be no facts in the world besides these.

I can't think of my name, Ginny thought dreamily. The thought was not disturbing. L, I know it begins with an L...

And then there were the voices. She could hear those. They belonged to the people who were guiding her through a small back door in a great dark wall, one that went up and up to the night sky until she couldn't see the top of it no matter how far she craned her neck upwards. These people seemed pleasant, she thought. They were guiding her steps through the snow so that she didn't fall, and holding her arms gently. Now they were taking her into a warm close darkness lit by flickering torches stuck into the walls at intervals, up a winding spiral flight of back stairs, and watching her to make sure she didn't trip. Nice of them. But who were they?

"I'm horribly sorry about kicking you," the boy was saying. He had dark auburn hair, and it caught the glints from the floating lights on the walls. "I feel like I've been absolutely mad for the past few hours, like I've been going through a hideous nightmare and now I'm waking up. It's no excuse, but--"

"I understand," the girl said quickly. "Really, I do. I haven't been myself, either."

"I, um--" The boy cleared his throat. "I'm really very sorry about giving Harry that bloody nose, too. And I certainly didn't mean to break his jaw."

"I'm sure you didn't. And once we've all calmed down a little, I'm sure everything will be all right. I'm sure you'll understand that--"

The girl seemed to be awfully sure about a lot of things, thought Ginny.

"Let's not talk about it," the boy said, rather grimly.

"Honestly! You're not still blaming Harry, are you?"

"What did I just tell you that I didn't want to do?"

The floor was uneven just then, and Ginny stumbled; the boy caught her swiftly. She looked up at him and smiled. "You're awfully tall," she said. "I think I knew someone once who was tall, but I can't remember who."

"Oh God," he muttered.

"You look like you're about to cry. Don't cry," Ginny said. "I'll sing you a happy song, if you like. I like singing. I think."

He grasped her arm tightly, his face intense, turned towards her. "Ginny, it's me! It's me, your brother Ron! Don't you remember? Remember when I taught you to fly, and you kept falling off your toy broomstick? Wait, wait-- you can't have forgotten the day I found you at Platform 9 and 3/4, when we all thought you were lost! Or the time I beat up the bully at the playground for you, when you were five-- you've got to remember that--"

She thought briefly, then shook her head. "I don't know anybody named Ron." She peered at him. "Now you are crying."

"Stop it," the girl hissed. "You'll only confuse her. This part of it wears off, you know it does."

"Does it?" the boy said in a choked voice. "How do you know, Hermione?"

They went into a bathroom, and the boy waited outside the door. The girl helped her take off her trousers and sweater and black robes, and Ginny looked at them curiously, with no memory of ever having seen them before. Her fingers traced the gold and maroon lion crest on the sweater. It was pretty, she thought. Then the girl put a nightgown over her head, and Ginny obediently held her arms up for it. This girl looked like she was about to cry, too. But although she bit her lip, she said nothing. Ginny brushed her teeth with the toothbrush and tooth powder the girl gave her, and then followed her into a long, high-ceilinged room with four curtained beds.

"Thank God your mentally deficient roommates aren't here," the girl muttered. "I think if I had to hear one millisecond of giggling, I'd hex them all into sea slugs." She pulled back the covers for Ginny, who crawled between them. "Now sleep," she said, her voice catching a little. "Put your head down on the pillow and go to sleep, Ginny. Everything will be all right in the morning. I promise it will." Obediently, Ginny laid her head down, arranging her red-gold locks around her. She had pretty hair, she thought. She liked the color.

But she didn't go to sleep. The bedcurtains weren't quite closed, and she watched the girl and the boy through a crack in them. The sheer maroon material made a haze around the pair, like blood. They sat on the floor at the foot of the bed, and Ginny could see them quite clearly.

They were silent for a long time, and then the girl sighed.

"I think I want a Memory charm, too," she said.

"Really?" asked the boy.

"I'd like to forget everything about this night. It had to be, I know it had to be. But I wish I could forget it all."

"I don't." The boy's face was set into lines of bitterness. "I'd rather remember it. I learned a few things today..."

"What did you learn that you'd want to remember?" she asked.

"How bloody ruthless Harry can be," he replied.

"Ron! He only did what he had to do; how many times does everybody have to tell you that?"

"I think I've heard it enough times, thank you very much, Hermione." The boy sighed. "I know Harry did the right thing," he continued in a softer voice. "I do. Just like Moody did the right thing. But Moody wasn't my best friend..."

"Ron," said the girl, sounding shocked. "Do you really mean--"

"I don't know what I mean. I don't want to be in the same room with Harry for awhile, I know that.:" The boy was silent, and the sighing of the winds outside the thick walls almost lulled Ginny to sleep. Then he spoke again. "Right after it happened, and Ginny-- came out of it, for the second time, after we'd come back, remember that?"

"Of course I do."

"D'you know what I thought of doing?" the boy asked rhetorically. "I really thought of just grabbing Ginny and getting her out of there. I don't just mean the clock tower. I mean Hogwarts itself, anyplace that might ever remind her of what had happened again, or where Harry could get at her again. I wasn't going to wait for tomorrow's train; I think I was ready to just set off through the Forbidden Forest, to Hogsmeade. I suppose I wasn't very rational. But, wait--" he held up a hand, forestalling the girl's already opened mouth. "Let me tell you why. I don't need to hear again how Harry was the paragon of virtue and did what he did in the interests of saving the universe. I know that already, don't you see? And that's the worst part of the whole thing."

"You're not making a great deal of sense, Ron."

The boy shifted position so that he faced the girl, his knees pressed against hers, his eyes looking intently into hers. "What he did, it was the best thing for everybody. But it wasn't the best thing for my sister."

"He saved her from the Chamber of Secrets, or wherever that really was."

"But he didn't do it for her sake. Not entirely anyway. That's why he was able to send her back into the book afterwards, even though anything could have have happened to her. Maybe something even worse than returning to the Chamber, although I can't imagine what would be. And that Memory charm! God, Hermione, that could have been so dangerous. You know that's true, don't you?" When the girl didn't answer, he repeated "Don't you?"

"Ye--es," the girl admitted reluctantly. "You didn't seem to be too worried about Colin."

"I don't care about Colin Creevey! I doubt anybody would notice if he lost a few brain cells. And anyway, he's fifteen; Ginny's still fourteen. And the state she was in when Harry put the charm on her; what she'd just been through-- "

"But she's fine. We'd know by now if she wasn't. Here-- I'll prove it you."

Ginny hurriedly turned her head to the pillow when she heard the girl approach the bed, pulling the curtains back. But she kept her eyelids open a crack. The girl pulled out a wand and waved it over the bed with a brisk, businesslike gesture. "Corpus organica," she said, and a purplish light rose into the air. Ginny thought that it was pretty and sparkly. The girl must be magic; the boy as well, she supposed. Just like a fairy tale.

"See?" said the girl. "She's all right. She'll be all right."

"I suppose I knew that," the boy mumbled. "But it isn't the point. Absolutely anything might have happened, and as far as Harry was concerned, that fact just didn't carry any weight. For him, you see, the greater good was more important. It always will be."

"But-- now don't get angry with me, Ron--" the girl moved closer to him "-- but isn't that right? The greater good for the greater number?"

"Not for me," he said hoarsely. "I would have done what was best for Ginny. To hell with everyone else."

The girl looked down at her hands. "Really?"

"Well-- maybe not everyone else." The boy sighed, and put his head on the girl's knee. She stiffened for a moment, seemingly startled, and then put her hand on his head, smoothing his hair. In the faint light, it seemed very dark, but its fiery lights glinted under her fingers.

"The train trip tomorrow should be a joy," the girl finally said.

"I'd forgotten all about that. Harry's goingtoo, that's right. I know he told us why, I just can't seem to remember, right now... some sort of distant cousin his horrid relatives dug up?"

"Well, I don't think the Dursleys dug her up, or she wouldn't want to meet Harry over the Christmas hols. And she does. Insisted on it, in fact. Jane Ashpool was her name, I think he said. He's supposed to show her around that village where they live, or something. It never sounded to me like there was all that much to see, but there you are. I think he told me she was a third cousin twice removed, if I remember correctly. Much older than we are, but not old; a young widow, and very well off, I think. I imagine that's why the Dursleys are having her to stay. Or maybe--"

"Hermione, do you absolutely need to keep babbling like an idiot?" the boy snapped.

Even in the near-darkness, Ginny could see the girl recoil as if she'd been struck.

"I'm sorry," the boy immediately said. "I'm really, really sorry. I think I'll just have jumpers made embroidered with the words 'I'm Sorry' and wear them constantly; it'd be easier. I've apologized to you and Harry and Professor Moody and Colin and Neville and-- Ginny, even though she didn't understand who I was, or what I was saying--" His voice broke. "You know," he said after a moment, "I can't think what I'm going to say to her, tomorrow. Or any of the tomorrows after that. Maybe I won't say anything at all."

The girl tried to laugh. "I thought you wanted to drag her home and never let her out of your sight again."

The boy sat bolt upright. "Oh? See my feet not moving? See me not locking Ginny permanently in her room at the Burrow? See me in the girls' dormitory in Gryffindor Tower talking to you? Does any of this give you a clue, Hermione?"

"I'm sorry, too," she said, her voice gentler now.

"Yeah, well-- we're all sorry," said the boy. "But I've made my choice. Now I have to live with it." It seemed to Ginny that his face turned inward then, away from the girl and the outside world as well, and the night became very still.

The silence in the room stretched on and on. At some point, it became silence of a different sort. The boy looked up at the girl. She looked down at him. The distance between their lips closed. And he was kissing her, kissing her, shaking violently from head to foot as he did so, his hands entwined in her long brown hair and pulling her close to him almost roughly. After the first moment, she was kissing him too.

"Ron, Ron," she murmured against his mouth when they both came up for air, "what are we doing?"

"What do you think we're doing?" he asked, pressing her against the back of the bed.

"But your sister--"

"She's asleep," he said, his hands roaming over her shoulders, her breasts, her back, her legs, as desperately as if his life depended on memorizing her contours.

"But I--"

"Do you not want me to do this?"

"But you--we--I never knew that you even wanted-- you've never said anything since that stupid argument we had after the Yule Ball last year, never even--"

"Let me, Hermione," he said against her neck. "Please, please let me. I need this. So much. I feel like I've been drowning in death and disaster and horrible things and I-- maybe I'm half-crazy right now but, just let me do this, I'm begging you--"

"What do you want to do?" she whispered. "What do you want from me, Ron?"

"I just want to kiss you. Hold you. Hold onto you until all the demons go away. I wouldn't ask anything more." His voice faltered. "You didn't think I would, did you? I couldn't do that. I' m sure you've never even thought of me that way, Hermione. Just-- as a friend, just do this for me as a friend. That's all I ask."

"Really? Well--" She looked past him, a strangely abstracted frown on her face. She was a pretty girl, thought Ginny, with her intense dark eyes and full mouth, her heavy eyebrows and narrow pale face. She and the redheaded boy made a lovely couple. "Yes," she finally said. "But not here. Two of Ginny's roommates are staying over the hols; they could come back at any time. Come to my room." She held out a hand to him, and the boy shuddered all over as he took it. When he'd clasped it in his own, some of the look that had twisted his face faded away. Ginny hoped he could find some measure of peace. He seemed like such a nice boy.

Then she dropped her head to the pillow, and sleep rolled over her like a black curtain signaling the final act of a play.

In the morning, she had, as Hermione had predicted, a slight headache. Of course, she didn't remember that she'd heard Hermione say she would have it. She remembered nothing after the moment when she'd crouched in the tiny bell room of the clock tower with Neville and Colin by her side, watching Harry, Ron, and Hermione meet Professor Moody in the little twelve-sided room. And there was something strange about all her memories of that day, as if a mist overlaid them. Whenever she tried to remember why she'd followed Harry into the edges of the Forbidden Forest, or what the three of them had been doing in the clock tower in the first place, a headache began. So before the day was out, she'd already learned not to think about these things.

Colin didn't remember anything, either, when she questioned him at the breakfast table, and he got such a strange troubled look on his face that she stopped asking him about it. She saw him with Ivy Parkinson after lunch, and thought that was strange. Their heads were bent together as they walked towards the deserted Quidditch pitch, and she wondered what they were talking about. Ivy had something cupped in one hand. When she paused to whisper something to Colin, Ginny saw that it was a... rat? Odd. But it was really no business of hers. It made her wonder whatever had happened to that stupid pet rat Ron used to have, the one that had had such an irritating habit of winding up in her underwear drawer at home. She hadn't seen it in an awfully long time. But the thought brought on a headache so violent that she ended up having to go to Madam Pomfrey for a Naproxis potion.

That night, she went back to Ottery-St. Catchpole on a special late run of the Hogwarts Express, one that took students who'd stayed for the Yule Ball back to their homes for the remainder of the holidays. She spent the winter hols skating on the pond, hunting for the Yule log, decorating the tree, and helping her mother to bake Christmas cookies. Ron could never seem to look her straight in the face during those weeks at home, and gave her only mumbled answers when she tried to talk to him. Her head ached just a little all through the holidays, however, so she didn't talk much to him, or to anyone else.

But there was many and many a night that she woke in her narrow white bed, dripping with sweat, stifling a scream. Remembering nothing except hat she had been dreaming about the Chamber of Secrets. Again. Again, dangerous visions, she thought hazily each time she woke, trying desperately to grab at the receding edges of dream and memory. But she never could. Not with her conscious mind, at any rate; and so the wave of blocked memory subsided, lying in wait to drown her anew, on another night. For such is the curious loophole of human experience erased from the mind through a powerful Memory charm. It may be lost to consciousness, but it haunts the world of dreams with relentless fury. And so it did haunt Ginny Weasley, all that year. Night after night.

-- night after night--

--night after night--

-- night after--

..

Ginny woke with a gasp.

For several long moments, she could only concentrate on breathing-- in, out, in, out, just as she had learned to do when these nightmares first started haunting her. It always grounded her a little. Reminded her that it was only a dream, that she wasn't really trapped in the Chamber of Secrets, wasn't really twelve years old again, terrified and powerless and trapped again--

She blinked, glancing around the dark, high-ceilinged space. It was harder to anchor herself than usual. She wasn't in her little room at the Burrow in Ottery-St Catchpole. She wasn't in her maroon-curtained bed in her dormitory room in Gryffindor Tower, either. For a terrified moment, she had no idea where she was. Then she saw the irregular stacked shapes, and smelled the sweet hay all around her. Below her, she heard the faint shifting and snorting sounds of large animals, moving in their restless sleep. Cows.

A hayloft.

Scotland.

Not in her own time.

She was in the sixteenth century. 1566, to be precise.She was being dragged to the coast, to the port town of Leith, by Draco Malfoy. Who was lying next to her. She turned her head to see the outline of his slender body in the hay, one of the plaids half-wrapped around him, the glint of silver-blond hair in a ray of moonlight from the small high window. The shape of his nose and chin stood out clearly, and she saw his dark eyelashes against one high cheekbone, itself touched with silver by the nearly full moon. A wave of incredible relief swept over her. She did not stop to think why this was so.

Ginny lay back down next to him, suddenly and perversely wishing he were awake. Let him sneer at her; spar with her, look down his nose and smirk at her; anything, anything at all, so long as she didn't have to keep running over the dark half-memories of her dream. The dream that seemed as if it would never stop haunting her. God, but how far she'd sunk. Looking for comfort from Draco Malfoy! She sighed a little, in self-disgust, and he opened his eyes at the sound.

"You have a plot, Weasley, don't you," he said, his voice thick with sleep but still sounding amused.

"I'm sure I don't," she replied.

"Of course you do." He yawned hugely. "To keep me from getting a good night's sleep. First you gave me a taste, and now you're taking it away..."

"I don't remember giving you anything. Whatever do you mean?" Well, at least he was talking to her, even if he wasn't making any sense.

Draco looked at her very directly, with drowsy, half-open eyes. "'Sbeen a long time since I really slept. All the night through, I mean. Last night was the first time in... I don't know... ages..." His voice was vague and wandering, and she wondered if he was fully awake.

"I didn't mean to wake you, Malfoy. You're more pleasant by far when you're unconscious," she said. "I had a dream."

"A bad dream?"

"Yes." He was definitely still half asleep, Ginny thought.. He hadn't said anything nasty yet.

"What was it?"

There was no reason why she should tell him. He deserved no confidences from her. Not that she could clearly remember anything, anyway. It had been another Chamber of Secrets dream, and that was all she ever knew about those. Yet there was something about the hour of the night, the stillness of the loft where they lay, and the soft moonlight spilling in through the window that seemed to remove this time and place from the rest of the world. Perhaps neither of them was quite awake, either, and yet Ginny felt more awake than she ever did during the day. Suddenly, she knew that she would tell him.

"I've had it before. At least, I think I have. I can never really remember." She shuddered. "It's always to do with what happened in the Chamber of Secrets-- when I was there, I mean, when I was twelve years old. You-- you know about that, don't you, Malfoy?"

"Yes," Draco said, after a long hesitation. "I learned about it. Long after it happened. I heard things for years, but it wasn't until one year ago that I knew for sure, actually. I didn't know anything about it at the time, or when it was being-- planned." Ginny didn't reply. "Do you believe me?" he asked. It felt absurdly important that she did. "Do you?"

"I do," she said. "How did you finally find out?"

"It was at the Midwinter Party at Malfoy Manor, the day after Boxing Day, the one my mother arranges every year. I overheard my father talking about it to some guests." Draco set his teeth at that memory, and thought of Pansy, standing beside him as they'd listened in the old Roman hypocaust beneath the floors. Remembering her was not something he wanted to do while lying in a hayloft with Ginny Weasley at his side. He didn't know why that feeling had come to him so strongly, but it had.

"Sounds fun," said Ginny.

"Hmmph. Not really. It's always on my birthday and truthfully I think I would prefer some other sort of celebration."

"So your birthday's the day after tomorrow, Malfoy?"

"You've got it in one."

"And you'll be... seventeen?"

"Head of your class in Arithmancy, were you, Weasley?" His voice was amused, but Ginny thought that it also sounded distracted, somehow. "Yes, I'll be seventeen."

They were both silent for a little while. Ginny was thinking of vague rumors she'd heard about what happened to the children of inner circle Death Eaters on their seventeenth birthdays. Arthur Weasley heard things at the Ministry and talked about them sometimes with her mother, and she'd learned many things she shouldn't by listening at doors. But she didn't want to think about that; everything she'd heard on the subject was dark and frightening, and she didn't want to ruin the strange rapport that had sprung up between her and Draco. His face had become very grave, and that gave her a sudden chill. She wondered if it was because she remembered things she'd heard, but he was thinking about what he knew.

" I don't think we can manage a birthday cake, do you?" she asked hurriedly, aware of how dumb she sounded.

"Probably not," said Draco dryly. "I'm not even sure they have cake in the sixteenth century."

"Of course they do. Didn't someone say, 'Let them eat cake'?"

"You may be a pretty thing, Weasley, but ignorance is not. That was Marie Antoinette, in the French court. Eighteenth century."

Did Draco Malfoy just say I was... pretty? Oh, he couldn't have done. But-- Ginny was so flustered that it took her several moments to reply. "Oh. A Muggle court. I'm surprised you knew that," she said, rather lamely.

"The court was Muggle; the rebels weren't," said Draco. "Jean-Paul Marat was a very powerful wizard, and the Malfoys were heavily involved in the French Revolution. So the subject was worthy of a bit of my time and attention, I felt. Anyway-- you know what I'd like for my birthday?"

Ginny flushed pink for no reason whatsoever as she thought of what Draco Malfoy might, just possibly, like for his seventeenth birthday. "What?"

"A very long, very hot bath. And hopefully that's a present that'll come early."

She laughed. "I would, too. And I hope I don't have to wait for my birthday! It's not until the first of February."

"I'm the one who has to sleep next to you, Weasley, so I sincerely hope you don't have to wait that long, either."

A giggle escaped Ginny's mouth; she couldn't help it, and then he was laughing too. There was something weirdly comfortable about laughing with him. She realized that the cold terror of her dream had dimmed a little.

"Well-- anyway-- if you know something about it, Malfoy, then I don't have to explain the whole thing to you. I'm glad." Ginny didn't explain further. She knew, somehow, that he'd know what she meant.

Draco moved closer to her. In the moonlight, his eyes looked more silver than grey. "I want to know more about this dream. The one you keep having. Tell me, Weasley."

"It's never clear. I think I'm just reliving the Chamber of Secrets over and over again, though, after he-- Tom Riddle-- lured me down there. I don't know if you knew about that part. But then it's like I'm remembering something else, too, without ever being able to really remember it. It reminds me of what it was like right for me after it happened...." Her voice trailed off and there was silence, but it seemed an encouraging silence, somehow. Ginny was never exactly sure why, but she continued to talk. "At St. Mungo's, they said they didn't have even have a name for it, what I had. You know what they are. They've had Neville Longbottom's parents there all those years and all they can think of to do with them is put them in a padded room, I suppose they think they're easy to deal with because they never say or do anything, if the aides put them in one position they'll stay there for hours on end--"

"Longbottom's parents are catatonics?" Draco asked, shocked.

"Cat-a --- what?"

'It's-- that's what Muggles call that sort of state."

"How on earth--"

"Never mind that. I really didn't know," he said quietly. "I mean, I knew but I didn't--"

"You knew about it?" Ginny asked. She regretted the words as soon as they were out of her mouth.

He looked at her. "You know how I know, don't you?."

"Yes," she whispered. Then, "It was your father, wasn't it? The one who put the Cruciatus curse on them, I mean."

"Of course it was," he said.

The silence of the night curled around them, and far below Ginny heard a cow shift in its stall. She picked up the thread of the conversation as if she hadn't dropped it. "They said that Muggles did have a name for it, though. They called it post-traumatic stress syndrome. I sort of-- if something happens in exactly the wrong way, I mean something that reminds me of what happened in the Chamber of Secrets, with Tom Riddle, I panic. I re-live what happened to me then. Well, maybe not exactly that; it's more like I re-live my response to it, to what happened at the very end, when he.. when he..." She could not complete the sentence.

Draco's voice was very soft in the darkness, without a hint of its usual sarcastic sneering quality. "Will you tell me something, Weasley?"

"If I can."

"You don't know what I'm going to ask. But would you tell me anything I asked? Would you?"

"I-- I don't know. Try me," said Ginny.

"Did he-- Tom Riddle, I mean... " His voice trailed off and he was silent for so long that Ginny almost wondered if he had fallen back to sleep. But he hadn't, and eventually Draco spoke again.

"Did he rape you? Is that what he did?"

That was the question everyone had wanted to ask after it happened. That was the unspoken question hovering on almost everybody's lips and hiding in everyone's eyes, sometimes with a gush of sloppy pity, sometimes with badly concealed horror and distaste, and sometimes, incredibly, with an unhealthily prurient interest. Ginny had begun to judge the content of people's characters by what emotion lay behind their desire to know. But nobody ever actually asked, except for the doctors who examined her at St. Mungo's, and even they didn't do it in so many words. Her mother had held her tightly in her arms and cried, Ginny's own eyes dry; her father had moved to embrace her, then, seeing her slight, involuntary shrinking, he'd stepped back and patted her awkwardly on the shoulder. Knowing, perhaps, that she didn't want any man touching her, even one of those she loved. It had been a long time before she could let any of her brothers hug her again. Fred and George had been silent and sober around her for months at home, skirting her with the wariness of wild animals, watching her out of the corners of their twinned eyes until she left the room or they did. But even her family had never asked. The relief of finally hearing that question was unbelievable. She let out her breath in a long sigh.

"No." She thought Draco sighed too; was it in relief? Why should he care? "He-- couldn't do that, he wasn't exactly a real person. Not one you could touch, I mean. I suppose that he might have, if he could. But the most that ever happened was when-- well, Tom Riddle could sort of gather his powers together enough to be seen, when he wanted to, and at the very end, he did it enough so that he could touch me." As always, an involuntary shiver rippled through her at the memory. "It was right before Harry found the Chamber of Secrets and got me out." She fully expected to hear some sort of sneer at that. But Draco was silent, so she continued on. "I suppose it didn't really last very long, but it seemed to go on forever. All he did was reach out one hand and touch me, on my right hip, and then he ran his fingers all the way down my leg. It wasn't anything more than that. But even though he didn't-- do what you said--" She swallowed. "He did something worse."

"What was it?" asked the disembodied voice, gentle and low.

"He got inside my mind."

Draco didn't reply. She was oddly disappointed. What had she expected from him, after all?

Ginny was about to turn over and go back to sleep, or at least try to, when she felt something touching her arm. It was his hand. He fumbled for her fingers and pressed them tightly once he found them, encircling them with his. The feeling of that tentative hand was so shocking that she couldn't believe it belonged to him; maybe someone else had been lying in the hayloft the entire time and had decided to wait until right now to make their presence known. But no... it was Draco Malfoy's hand without a doubt, she felt the two newly healed little wounds on his wrist, the knobby knuckles and corded tendons, the long fingers with the faint scattering of fine hairs on their backs. It made her own hand feel small, which it definitely was not. Then it curled all the way around hers, cupping it, and Ginny felt that she could at last sleep

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