Jewel of the Harem: The Grindelwald Continuum Book One

Chapter 11.

Yule.

I am a pilgrim, and a stranger

Travelling through this worrisome land

I've got a home in that distant city, oh Lord

And it's not made by man.

--Bill Monroe, I Am a Pilgrim

If today was Christmas Eve--

And tomorrow was Christmas Day

(Aow, wouldn't we have a time, baby?)

All I would need my little sweet rider just--

To pass the time away, uh-uh--

To pass the time away.

--Robert Johnson, Hellhound On My Trail.

A/N: Ahem. This chapter isn't anywhere near as extreme as things are going to get, but it does earn its R, and you'll know when. You have been warned. Little children should not be reading this.

Two quotes, wow! Snerk. Okay, I originally had delusions that I was going to start each chapter actually SET in the 16th century with a 16th century quote, but that fell by the wayside pretty fast. At least I'm picking quotes from OLD SONGS. Using Bill Monroe's material is not as farfetched as it might seem at first. Bluegrass music had its origins in British folk songs brought to the Appalachians by immigrants, and many of the earliest songs collected by Alan Lomax are virtually identical to the original Childe ballads, some of which were certainly around in the 16th century. And Robert Johnson, King of the Delta Blues, was himself greatly influenced by this early music, and in turn influenced it. In Chapter 12 or 13, some of this will actually begin to have relevance to our story. In the meantime, this musical digression has been brought to you by the key of C#.

Thanks to all the reviewers, especially: StarEyes, Essayel, Mara Jade, Kureneko Kashikoi, HazelEyes_18, singtoangels, Tien310, Kittylioness, Fleur422, magickfan47, Mara Jade again (ah, you should *love* Draco in this chapter!), Azzelya, waterlily12, JeaniytheScienceGuy, MrsBean, PhantomSoula, Wednesday Blue, Nina-na, Adhara (a cult? for me?? awww... that's so sweet!), Vireco, Avada Kedavra, Sydney Lynne (amazing review!!), supergirl48117, Verbal Abuse (oh, there's more about Jane Ashpool coming soon,) Peeler, chocagirl23, MistralCat, and Jane Valar. I know there are a couple I forgot to mention!

The review aspect that really surprised me this time was how many people noticed the Ginny-thinking-her-name-began-with-an-L thing and wondered if it was significant (not really,) but nobody seems to have picked up on Hermione's middle name (Tamara) which *is*. Maybe because Hermione seems to be awfully annoying in this fic. It wasn't planned that way. I just do what the characters tell me to do... ;)

BTW.My seminar proposal has been accepted at Nimbus 2003, so I will, after some dithering on the subject of a trip to Orlando right then, be going and speaking. Oo! Oo! You can find me on the official site with the list of presenters!!!

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Ginny Weasley snored. Just a bit. Her face creased into a frown when she slept, her cinnamon brows knitting together over her closed eyes. Her red-gold hair fell in witchy tangles over her white shoulders with their faint dusting of freckles; the white blouse had come unbuttoned a little and showed part of her chest and arm peeping above the plaid. What are you dreaming of, Ginny Weasley? wondered Draco. Where have you gone? It's as if you've retreated someplace nobody could ever touch, like a queen walking along a sea-wall and watching the waves crashing beyond you, in the far distance... He shifted position; his feet, tucked under him, were going to sleep. He had been watching her for a long time.

She stirred a little, making a small, whimpering noise, like a kitten. How strangely vulnerable she looked. How fragile. How very different from when she was awake. Her eyelashes fluttered, and for a moment her eyes opened, the gold irises fixed on him but not seeing him. "Is it morning?" she asked, her voice vague and wandering.

"No," he lied.

She took a restless breath. "S'Christmas morning... isn't it. Yule. It is. Mum... " Her mouth twisted into an odd shape. "Ron..."

"It's not time to get up yet," said Draco, his voice catching. "Sleep, Ginny. Go back to sleep." Obediently, she closed her eyes.

He had used her first name without thought, but he heard it pass his lips, and realized. He sat back on his heels, his eyes still on her, and remembered their secret conversation in the darkest part of the night. But only as a man might remember a dream. He wasn't entirely sure it had happened. Perhaps that hour itself had only been a dream. Still, Draco watched her, and thought of the brief glimpse of her golden eyes. And as he did so, a dark slow frightening wave of weakness washed through him. His left wrist tingled, and he scratched it absently; surely this strange feeling would stop in a moment. But it didn't end, it went on and on; and at last he realized that it was a tide, not a wave. It had swept over his head with all the implacability of an ocean. He was drowning.

She was closer to the surface of sleep, now. Mumbling, Ginny turned, her arms stretching out across the plaid, searching for something that was not there. Nature abhors a vacuum.

Leaning down to study her sleeping face, he felt something stronger than gravity pulling him. He lay down slowly, his head spinning, and found himself moving his body to match the curve of hers as best he could, knee to knee and chest to chest. It was not really a choice. No more than it would have been a reasoned decision to fill his lungs with air if he had swum up from the sandy bottom after being thrown into the sea. With the same lack of volition, as if responding to irresistible force, Draco's hands skimmed over her hair, her neck, her arms, the long lovely sinuous line of her waist and hips. Surely he was still sinking down through the hay, falling, falling, endlessly falling, and only she could anchor him to earth. Ginny murmured something, her head bobbing over her shoulders as if she'd been drugged. He remembered all the mead she'd drunk the night before. She shivered with cold and snuggled close to him. Then her hands went around him, clasping his lower back, and the tidal wave slammed into him with renewed force. The tips of her breasts touched his chest for an instant, the sensation vanishing before he'd begun to process it. He began moving against her, lightly, wanting to feel it again. After hesitating slightly she moved against him too, each movement oddly delayed and out of sync with the last. As if her body and mind were entirely separated, and he realized that they were. Her eyes were still shut; he was fairly sure that she didn't yet know what was going on, or even who he was; she moved in a dream, all unknowing.

Her blouse was slipping further from her shoulder. One of his fingers trailed lightly over the warm white flesh revealed against the plaid blanket, pushing the cotton material down as far as it would go without undoing any more buttons-- yet. His heart pounded, pounded, pounded in his chest, a relentless guilty drumbeat, until he was sure she'd wake from the sound of it alone. But she didn't. She moaned low in her throat and pushed herself up into his hands. Through the layers of cloth, her soft breasts nestled against his palms like doves. He rubbed his thumbs over her covered nipples, gently, gently, and felt them harden under his touch.

There was some reason why he shouldn't do this, Draco fuzzily remembered. Not that that made a damn bit of difference, whatever it might be. He was going to do it anyway.

A tiny voice in his head frantically struggled to make itself heard. You cannot. You may not. Ginny Weasley is not for you to touch.

You again? thought Draco. I could have sworn I'd got rid of you.

You never will. Just what do you think you're doing?

I'm only touching her! That's all I want. But I do want that, and it seems to me that she wants it too; she certainly isn't trying to stop me so far--

Wake her up and see how much she wants your hands on her then, mocked the voice.

A sort of baffled fury swept through him at the stubborn refusal of this little voice to shut up and go away. As if I'd give a single damn about anything you might have to say. What the hell are you even doing here? he snarled inwardly.

Highly interesting, said the ghost of Sigmund Freud, who had apparently joined the chorus. A battle between the id and the superego.

Both of you! Sod off. Get out of my head! She's my captive, my hostage, my sacred prisoner. Mine, mine, mine. Ginny Weasley belongs to me now. I'll do what I like with her.

You can't get rid of me that easily, said the voice, settling comfortably in for a long stay. I am the voice of your conscience, Draco Lukas Malfoy.

And I suppose, added Freud's ghost, since this is all taking place as a psychological event in your mind, that I am the voice of your logical thought processes. I would not recommend my removal, were it even possible.

I don't care what you are! If I want to touch her, then why shouldn't I? It's not as if I intend doing anything else to her.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, said the first voice. Oi! Freud! Help me out here.

Is Ginny Weasley's will in this matter likely to match your own? asked the ghost of Freud.

Ah. Draco mentally fiddled and fumbled. Well-- as to that--er--

Of course, Freud continued, I refrained from judging my patients' actions when I was alive; I will not begin to do it now. I only wish to remind you that there are some actions from which one cannot come back. Some paths, once started upon, forever dominate your destiny.

All right, thought Draco. If the pair of you want to play it that way... Look at how she's writhing; listen to those little moaning sounds she's making in the back of her throat, and I'm barely even laying a finger on her; do you really think I'm going to do anything she doesn't want me to do? I'm not Tom Riddle, or the ghost of Tom Riddle, or whatever the hell he was; I-- I can make her enjoy this as much as I will. I mean, I could, if I were planning to do anything more. That's an utterly hypothetical situation, of course.

Of course, mocked the voice.

Oh-- Draco groped for logic, and found very little. We're adrift in the sixteenth century, four hundred years from home. So what fucking difference does any of it make anyway?

The boy frames a crude yet compelling argument, admitted Freud.

Shut up, you-- you moral relativist! said the voice.

Wonderful, thought Draco. Different parts of my mind are now arguing with each other. Well, the pair of you can get on with that, and in the meantime, I'll--

No, no! cried the voice in desperation. There's every reason in the world why you shouldn't do anything to her, even if she did want it-- have you really forgotten? All the self-control you ever exerted because of her-- are you going to simply throw it all away?

No, but I--it's not the same as it was before, it's an entirely different thing, it's-- Draco's thoughts faltered.

His head was a series of little compartments, carefully arranged, ordered, separated. Each distinct from all the rest. And it had seemingly always been so, or at least for such a long time that he could no longer remember any other way. Whatever he'd thought of Ginny Weasley in the past year, in the darkest hours of the night when he stared up at the canopy of his bed in the Slytherin dormitory and set his teeth to keep from weeping out of sheer exhaustion, it was locked in one of these. It passed through his mind like a gem, calcified. A thing whole, entire, unto itself, not touching any other thing. Sometimes that year when he'd been disgusted with his father and filled with painful pity for his mother, when he had mad moments of wanting to walk out of Malfoy Manor with nothing but the clothes on his back and never have anything to do with it again, wash his hands of it, burn it to the ground and sow the earth with salt, the little room had threatened to burst its bonds. That was true. But it never had. That was nothing to do with what was happening now, nothing at all.

The pulse throbbed in her neck, a blue-veined tattoo beating beneath her white, white skin. Something was pulling him towards her neck, her jawline, her mouth, and in another instant he'd be tasting that flower-like skin, she was so close, so close. The usual compelling reasons why he shouldn't touch Ginny Weasley with a twenty-metre pole were tales twice-told, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Ginny shifted restlessly under his hands and made a noise that sounded like "Mmm." She was drifting up towards waking; not quite there yet, but soon. "Mmmm... Malfoy?" she murmured. "What--"

It jerked him back to his senses for an instant as the voices in his head never could have done, reminding him of who she was.

Who he was.

Where they were.

What he had been doing to her. What he had wanted to do to her. What he had, perhaps, been about to do to her...

His left wrist glowed red, and felt as if someone were sticking pins and needles in it . There were symbols dancing across his arm in intricate patterns and spirals and loops and whorls. He stared at them, then at her, with something like terror.

"What's happening to me?" Draco whispered. She whimpered again, low in her throat, still not awake, and reached out a hand to him. He pushed it away, moving to the edge of the plaid. It was horribly cold but it cleared his head a little, and he took deep breaths of the icy air, feeling the overwhelming sensations die down in him at last. The thing-- whatever it was-- had passed. At least for the moment. The red web of spells had stopped flickering around his wrist, and it no longer itched and stung.

She would wake any moment; he could see. Suddenly, Draco was rather afraid of being in the same hayloft with Ginny Weasley when she opened those golden eyes and turned them on him. He slipped down the ladder without a sound. It wasn't until he was on his way out the door and towards the kitchens that it dawned on him. For the second night in a row-- except when she'd briefly awoken him in the earliest hours of the morning, and the more he thought about that, the less sure he was that it had even happened-- he'd slept the entire night through. The delightful, almost-forgotten sensations of rest and refreshment flooded through him, every nerve and muscle and sinew relaxed and alert. He fought down a rather insane urge to skip, scowling at his feet. Apparently, his body was determined to betray him in every way it could; aside from this uncontrollable physical pull towards Ginny Weasley, it liked sleeping next to her. Don't get used to it, he snarled inwardly. Don't... Oh, I've got a bad feeling about this...

Ginny woke with a fuzzy, throbbing head and a tongue that seemed to have grown too big for her mouth. She sat up, squinting against the sunlight flooding in through the high window. So much for leaving at the crack of dawn! Apparently one could sleep amazingly well on a pile of hay in the freezing cold right next to one's worst enemy, who was hatching plots that, while obscure, might reasonably be expected to be evil. All that mead was undoubtedly to blame.

But when she glanced at the hollow in the hay next to her (and extraordinarily close to where she'd been lying, she couldn't help thinking) it was empty; touching the plaid that had covered him, it was cold. It was ridiculous to feel a little pang of fear. Draco Malfoy wasn't going to desert her; that was the last thing he'd do. He needed her... didn't he? A stinging blush covered her cheeks at the thought. She had dreamed strange dreams all through the night. There was no need to recall them. They were slipping past her at this point anyway, as dreams do.

Ginny crossed her feet under her, rubbing her eyes and yawning. She really had to think clearly right now. They were moving closer to Leith; undoubtedly they'd reach the port city by the next night, and she simply had to decide what she was going to do then. But part of her mind insisted on worrying about where Draco was, and the rest of it stubbornly kept unwinding in lazy loops back towards those dreams. One of them was dark and frightening, another Chamber of Secrets dream, and she certainly knew that wasn't real; but the other seemed altogether too real for her comfort.

She'd woken from the first-- she ran a hand through her tangled hair, trying to sort out the strands of memory-- and ended up right in the thick of the second, and that was the one that confused her the most. They'd talked, she and Draco Malfoy, and she'd told him about the dream. Told him about the Chamber of Secrets. Told him things she'd never told to anyone. But then, nobody had ever asked the questions he'd asked, either. And then she'd felt his hand curve around hers and she'd gone back to sleep. A frown creased her forehead. If it wasn't for that last, she might have believed it had really happened, since it did seem so very real; if it had been virtually anyone on the planet besides Draco Malfoy, she would have believed it. The confused impressions of the dream's details only became more disturbing after that. She must have imagined those. But they seemed so real, too...

Setting her teeth, Ginny pulled at a particularly stubborn knot in her hair. If only she had a comb! But she almost welcomed the pain; it brought her back to herself a little. She pulled one elbow up on her knees, still raking her head with her other hand. It seemed that it was becoming harder and harder to tell the difference between what was real and what wasn't. After all, she was living and eating and breathing in the sixteenth century, over four hundred years before her own time, a thought that made her dizzy each time it crossed her mind.

But maybe-- and the thought stilled her fingers through her hair-- maybe she was dreaming that, as well. Maybe none of this was actually happening. But if that was true, then how on earth did she know that anything was real? Perhaps she was actually sick in her bed in her room at the Burrow; she'd fallen into a fever and was dreaming all of these curious things. Perhaps-- and her hands fell into her lap-- she really was at St. Mungo's after all, and everything she thought she'd experienced since leaving the infirmary at Hogwarts three days ago was her own madness and illusion. Perhaps she'd never left St. Mungo's at all; she was still twelve and a half years old, about to wake up shivering and screaming in her narrow cot in the small hours of the morning, as she so often had. The night nurse would be coming to give her a sleeping draught; she'd swallow past the bitterness and stare unseeing into the darkness until oblivion claimed her again, and--

"Aren't you awake yet? It's almost eight o'clock! Hurry up and eat so we can leave."

Or maybe she had nothing to worry about after all, Ginny decided. If she was going to create an entire fantasy world, it would probably not have included Draco Malfoy throwing a piece of cheese at her head. She caught it, neatly, in her mouth.

"Growing up with house elves catering to your every whim did a world of good for your manners, I can see," she said.

He sat next to her, his face expressionless. It looked as if he were expending a good deal of energy in keeping it that way. "Bread?"

Ginny was sure he was about to throw that at her too; she put a hand up to forestall it. But Draco was holding it up to her instead, and their hands met in the middle. His fingers were very smooth and cold under hers. He jerked his hand back as if the mere contact had hurt him, and his face went blanker than ever.

They'd been nothing but dreams, Ginny decided as she ate her bread and cheese.

"How far are we from Melrose Abbey now?" he asked her when they were both finished eating and Ginny had wiped her fingers on her blouse, acutely aware of how dirty it was becoming.

"Not far," she said, picking up the little leather bag that looked like the old-fashioned canteen her father had always insisted on bringing on the camping trips. It sloshed as she moved it back and forth. "If-- Malfoy, is that mead?" She made a face at it.

"Small beer. After last night, I'm not letting you near mead again. I practically had to carry you up the ladder to the loft-- I wish you could've seen the state you were in."

"I don't remember it very well."

"I'm sure you don't," he said.

Ginny felt a little devil of impishness wiggling to the surface for some reason. "I suppose I'm lucky you didn't have your wicked way with me."

"How do you know I didn't?"

She looked up quickly. But when she did, she only found his face as smooth and bland as it was before. Her eyelashes lowered, and she peeped up through them just in time to catch the tiny smirk tugging at one corner of his mouth. Aha.

"Teasing over? Yes? Serious part of the conversation commencing?" Draco said. "You've walked this road before, so you tell me. Can we reach Leith today?"

"Today? No. What I was going to say was that it's not far, if you can take the main road."

"Well, we can't."

Ginny was dying to ask him why, but on second thought she didn't quite dare to push her luck. "Then there's a cart track."

"Correction, Weasley. There will be a cart track in four hundred years. Could they never afford new maps at your house?"

"If you'd let me finish, Malfoy," she said with exaggerated patience. "In our time, it's a historic road. There're signs all along it that say it used to be a cart track in the sixteenth century."

"How long will that take?" he asked.

"It's not so direct a route, but we ought to reach the abbey by nightfall."

He nodded curtly and started down the ladder, not even waiting to see if she followed him.

It's as if he just assumes that I will, she thought resentfully. That I don't have any choice. He's right, of course. Damn him anyway. But I suppose it's a waste of time to try that. One probably has to take a number and get in a queue to damn Draco Malfoy.

The track wound round the edge of the village, which seemed nearly deserted to Ginny on that morning. But it was Christmas, and the least busy time of the farmer's year besides, she thought. Everyone was probably celebrating. Opening presents, decorating Christmas trees... or did they have Christmas trees in the sixteenth century? The question became an absurdly important one to Ginny as she tried not to remember the great silver firs that Bill and Charlie and her father would always drag through the woods to the Burrow. It was a lovely day; she tried to concentrate on that, unusually so for Scotland in midwinter. The sun rose high in the brilliantly blue sky as they turned from the last barren fields and towards the path, which went through a long thicket of trees. Still, she was going to be cold; it wasn't as warm as it had been near the borderlands, across the river from the Dreamtime.

Lost in thought, she didn't realize how far Draco had moved ahead of her. He snapped his fingers and gestured her back towards him. When she didn't move fast enough for his taste, his dark blond brows knitted together into a scowl. "You'd better be able to keep up today; I'm not camping in the woods tonight, you know. That's why I got you those boots, Weasley." He started digging through a leather pack on his back. "It's here somewhere-- almost forgot about this-- For Merlin's sake, come here and hurry up about it!"

It's as if he's calling a dog. Except I'm sure he wouldn't bother being half so nasty to a dog, she thought, digging her fingernails into her palms. Oh! If I don't strangle him and leave his body on the cart track today it'll be a miracle. Except I'm sure I couldn't... he's so much stronger than he looks... and anyway, with that Hexensymbol bond, I can't. How unfortunate.

Ginny tipped a sulky and rebellious face up to him, and Draco smirked inwardly. Good, good... we're right back to the status quo, and this is exactly the way things need to be. Keep it up, Weasley. He pulled something from the pack, and she felt him arranging soft folds of cloth around her neck and draping them over her shoulders and back.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"I bought you a cloak this morning, when I was getting the food and the rest of the things," he said, fastening the clasp. "You're welcome."

"Wherever did you get it?"

"It belonged to that farm woman, Mistress Cochrane. She was happy enough to sell it to me; they don't see much silver around that village."

"Still, I'm rather surprised-- it is a nice one." It was of amazingly good quality, the wool thick and very soft, and a pretty hunter green in colour. Slytherin green. But that couldn't exactly have been deliberate on his part... could it? She wondered awkwardly if she should thank him.

"Well," Draco said idly, "it was her best. But then, women do have a dreadfully hard time saying no to me on any subject--"

"I was going to say thank you but I don't think I'll bother now. "

"Ah, the Weasleys, ever the paragons of graciousness. I must say, that color's much better on you than that horrible Gryffindor maroon." Draco peered at Ginny. "I've never seen anyone's face turn quite that shade of red before."

Ginny pushed past him and stomped ahead on the path. "I'll lead the way if you don't mind," she said, once she trusted herself to speak again. "I'm the one who knows where we're going, after all."

"But can I trust you, that's the question," mused Draco. "Who's to say you won't take me into the woods and leave me there?"

"But we're bonded to each other, so I'd have to be there with you! No, that's the last thing I'm going to do." Ginny crooked a finger at him, surprised to find that she wasn't nearly as angry as she pretended to be. Sparring with him like this was-- well, there was no other word for it-- rather fun. "I'll be your trusty Girl Guide, Malfoy."

"You'll be-- what?"

"It's a Muggle thing. I have to tell you everything, don't I? What would you do without me?" Ginny sighed dramatically and turned her back on him, moving ahead on the cart track. .

"Yes," Draco said softly, following her. "What would I do without you, Weasley?" She didn't turn; she couldn't hear him. "I was wrong," he continued. "That's the question, isn't it?"

They left the last edge of the cultivated fields, and the cart track wound ahead of them, the shadows of the trees falling across the ancient wheel-ruts. It snaked into the woods like a blackened, gaping maw, a road to the heart of an impenetrable darkness. Ginny shivered, even with the warm cloak over her shoulders, and did not know why. She forced herself to begin walking.

The day wore on. The pale, high winter sun glimpsed through the trees at intervals, steadily travelling across the sky. They stopped a few times, resting by the side of the track and eating some more of the food, splitting it evenly between them. He wondered aloud if her hair had ever actually been red, adding that it was now difficult to tell, since so much mud had been ground into it. She loudly pondered the likely existence of legions of house-elves at Malfoy Manor whose sole duty in life had been to follow him about with mirrors from babyhood onwards. He congratulated her on a correct guess, noting sadly that, quite obviously, no such amenity had ever been available at the Weasley residence. She spluttered briefly and then advised him to perform a certain action on himself. He raised his eyebrows and informed her that such services were generally rendered for him, further inquiring if she kissed her mother with that mouth. A shadow passed over her face, and the memories of her mother, her father, her brothers, and Christmases past caught at her unbearably, like little children dragging her back to someplace they wanted to visit again. He said nothing, but cut more slices of bread for her, and gave her almost the last of the small beer from the leather skin.

The shadows were just beginning to lengthen. Ginny was starting to feel the edgy tiredness of a long day spent walking outside. It had been so long, really, since she'd slept as deeply as she had the night before, and she wasn't used to it anymore. The strange part was that it was as if it had only whetted her appetite for more sleep. The afternoon was so silent and the air so still that she nearly started dozing on her feet. She began humming to herself to keep awake.

"That's Tam Lin," Draco said in her ear.

Blinking, she pulled herself up short. It was too late; she collided with him and felt his entire body stiffen briefly under his robes.

"Sorry," she said ungraciously.

"My fault," he said in a clipped voice, moving away from her. His black cloak swirled around him like the garb of a dancer, as it always did. She fully expected an insult, but he said no more for the moment. Wearily, Ginny thought that she probably deserved anything he'd say. Every jibe he had ever made about her gracelessness was true; compared to him she was clumsy and awkward and gawky, and his every movement emphasized it.

"I was surprised, that's all," he finally said. "I know that song. Didn't know you knew it."

"Tam Lin? I've always known it." She stepped over a patch of dead weeds in the middle of the track. "We should be coming up on another village soon, by the way. A very small one. Glen Rae, I think it's called."

"I've always wondered what it meant, that song," he said, pushing back the branches of a large bush that had almost overgrown the path. He had moved in front again and held them out for her so they didn't snap back in her face; Ginny saw that he looked tired and abstracted. But then, they'd been walking for nearly three solid days now.

"You know the story?" she asked.

"Well, I've heard the song. This girl-- Janet, or Jenny, or Gwen-- rides along a deserted path to the town even though everybody warns her against Tam Lin, who apparently hides out in the woods and nabs every female who passes by--"

Ginny rolled her eyes. "Yes, I can see why you'd relate to this song."

"I'm going to ignore that remark. Anyway, he seduces her, and then she learns that he's of the faerie folk, and no mortal man at all. She goes to the hollow hills to find him again. That's when it gets a bit complicated, doesn't it?" Draco asked.

She nodded. "There are so many different versions. Sometimes she finds out that he's a mortal man after all, the fairies' sacrifice to the gods; their sacred victim, in other words. Sometimes he really is one of the faerie folk. Gwen nearly always has to fight with the faerie queen to get her to agree to release Tam Lin; sometimes she has to trick her, or perform certain tasks. Sometimes she sings, I think..."

"I've heard that it's a variant on the myth of Orpheus," said Draco.

"You know about that?" Ginny raised her eyebrows.

"Of course. Orpheus went to the underworld to beg for the spirit of his lost love, Eurydice. He sang so beautifully that the very ghosts shed tears, and she was released."

"I don't think that story ended happily, did it?"

"Nope. Pluto warned him not to look back as he led her from hell, but he did."

"I remember that part," Ginny said reflectively. "I never understood it. It certainly made him out to be a bit thick, didn't it? If all he had to do was not look back, and he couldn't even manage that."

Draco shrugged. "I always wondered about that part of it too. Some variants of Tam Lin have the same storyline, you know; that Gwen almost had her lover out of the faerie country, and then she looked back to make sure he was following her. I think--" he hesitated. "I think it's a symbol standing in for something else, you know? It's a metaphor of the loved and the lost, not meant to be taken literally."

Ginny couldn't help it; she began giggling.

Draco's face flushed slightly, and took on a guarded expression. "What's so funny?"

"Nothing. Really, I wasn't laughing because I thought anything was funny. It's just-- I've never had a conversation like this with a boy before."

"Huh." He walked around a puddle in the middle of the path. "I suppose I've never had a conversation like this with a girl before, either."

"I don't imagine your girlfriends ever had to talk all that much." Ginny could have bitten her tongue off as soon as the words left her mouth; why make him think that she'd ever noticed anything so intimate about him as the girls he dated?

But he only laughed as well. "I've said it before and I'll say it again, Weasley-- nobody really knows how sharp that little tongue of yours is, do they?"

Then she flushed too; it was the closest either of them had come to talking about what had happened between them on the night of the Yule Ball at the top of the north tower. "Well, I didn't know you were so--" She fumbled for words.

"Clever?" He smirked. "Strange as it may seem to you, Weasley, I am more than a pretty face."

"You were never at the top of your classes that I heard of."

"Never was, never will be," said Draco carelessly. "I don't have the patience to grind for grades. I don't like learning things that don't interest me. I don't care for the plodding pace of scholasticism. I'll leave all those things to Granger, thank you very much, and I wish her joy of them."

"Same here," admitted Ginny. "I do all right in my classes, but I don't have the patience to study unless I like the subject. My penmanship's terrible. Sometimes I envy Muggles because they can use typewriters. And then I'm forever looking out the window and writing songs in my head or something. Hermione's always rabbiting on at me about that."

Draco shuddered. "A fate worse than death, indeed."

"I suppose Crabbe and Goyle are too dumb to care-- or were, when they were always hanging off you."

"Oh-- Goyle is, without a doubt. Crabbe never really said anything, so who knows?" He shrugged. "Sometimes I think he's not half so thick as he lets on."

"Anyway, it's funny, isn't it?" said Ginny. "I mean-- us having something in common, like that." Silence greeted her words. "I only meant--" she floundered, and finally had the sense to shut up.

She wished that she had Hermione's old time-turner. If only she could take back the last thirty seconds! But she seemed to have no shyness around him anymore, and looking back on it, she couldn't understand when it had left her, or where it had gone. The easy bantering between them had simply-- sprung up. How starved she was for the conversation of an intellectual equal; almost all the other girls and boys she knew seemed so small, so bound by little things, and Hermione had scarcely been speaking to her at all that year. For the moment, Ginny had been able to suspend the knowledge that it was Malfoy she was talking to this way. But now she glanced up at him almost fearfully; God knew what his reaction to what she'd said was going to be

Draco grabbed her wrist and pulled her into the shadow of a hedge. Well. That was unexpected. "Ox cart," he murmured, crouching down and motioning to her to follow him, cupping a hand over her ear as they slid to the ground together.

"Have you noticed anybody else on this path today? Besides us?" he asked her in a whisper.

She thought hard. "No."

"Neither have I."

The wheels kept monotonously rolling, rolling over the uneven gravel of the track.

"Wouldn't you think there'd be visitors to Melrose Abbey? Pilgrims, or worshippers, or just other travelers?" he finally asked.

"I suppose I would. Especially at Christmas. It is strange. Unless Mistress Cochrane really was right, and there's nothing left. But that shepherd, Jock, he said--"

"I think Jock's been in one too many games without a helmet," muttered Draco.

After what seemed like an eternity, the sound of wheels began to die away, and he pulled her to her feet. "There was a village here, you said? And it's pretty far from the high road, the King's Road?" he asked.

"Yes, very."

They walked a little further, and he seemed to be thinking. "All right," Draco said. "Let's see if we can find an inn. Get some dinner. Maybe somebody there will know."

Ginny tucked her legs beneath her at the small table pulled next to the fire. It crackled and leaped in the fireplace that took up almost the entire far wall of the Thistle and Lion. The inn was very small, but at least it was clean, the floors swept and tables scrubbed. Calling Glen Rae a village was probably giving it too much credit at that; it was a huddled collection of a few houses, the inn, and a smithy in a natural hollow between a hill and a small loch. The inn-keeper, a pleasant-faced lady, had explained that her husband had gone to market, and she and her daughter Mary had served them. Ginny had eaten hungrily of the rabbit stew, mashed turnips with butter, and fresh brown bread. Draco finished his half of the dried-apple tart and pushed the other half to her; she ate it without a word. She was drowsy and well-fed, drifting in the moment of the warmth and the fire and a companion who was, for the time at least, a pleasant one. The strange dark wave of feeling that had come over her when they first set out on the path seemed distant now. And the memories of Christmas dinners she'd known were both hurtful and sweet. She remembered that strange, snowy afternoon two days before Yule on the Hogwarts train of a year ago, how she'd longed for Christmas dinner then, for home, for the very pine wreath on the door of the Burrow. That train journey... and what had happened on it...

"What are you thinking about, Weasley?" Draco's voice broke the silence.

Ginny flushed slightly, and hoped he would think it was from the heat of the fire. When she spoke, she told only a part of her true thoughts. The rest of them, she decided, he simply didn't need to know. He probably didn't remember the events on the train last year anyway, the ones that had caught so stupidly hard at her memory, and undoubtedly slipped from his as soon as she was out of his sight.

"We'd be eating Christmas dinner about now, at home," she said. "Pulling crackers, maybe. The Yule log would be burning in the fireplace, and we'd be drinking eggnog."

"Hmmph." But he sounded almost wistful.

"Dad would get into his head to do odd things on Christmas afternoon, sometimes. There were years when we used to go to church."

"Muggle church! Did they let you in?"

She rolled her eyes. "They can't exactly bar people at the door, Malfoy. Even the year when Dad wore overalls and a big straw hat. We'd almost always go to the Catholic church in Ottery-St. Catchpole, Our Lady of Lourdes. I'd never really understand anything that was going on, but we'd watch everyone else, and sing when they sang, and sit when they sat. Sort of nice... I used to look up at the stained glass windows and imagine all sorts of things about the people on them. Then Percy would usually poke me for not paying attention and Ron would start making faces when he didn't think anybody was looking. The church would always smell of incense, and I liked that..." Ginny's words drifted off as she remembered, and she began playing with her hair again, absently trying to pull out tangles.

Their table felt very secluded, tucked into the corner as it was. Mary and the innkeeper had both disappeared somewhere, and there was only one other customer sitting at the furthest table from them. They seemed completely alone, and Ginny watched the flickering orange lights of the fire lend some color to Draco's face as he spoke in a low voice. She wasn't sure if he was talking to her or to himself. .

"I did like Yule, generally. I suppose because we never had it at home. Sometimes we'd go to the Tessiers, my cousins. They mostly lived in Lourdes, in the Pyrénées..."

"Oh... France?" Ginny asked.

"Geography's your specialty, isn't it, Weasley?" asked Draco, but there was no rancor in his voice. "Yes, Lourdes is in France."

"Is it on the coast?"

He gave an exaggerated sigh, and, pulling a pencil out of the leather bag, drew a map for her on the table. "All right, here's France. On the west we have Cherbourg and Le Havre; in the north, by the German border, is Valenciennes, there, in the middle of everything, is Paris, in the south is Marseilles, and along the Spanish border are the Pyrénées Mountains, bordering the Basque region. There's Lourdes. Nowhere near the ocean." He kept drawing lines on the table with the pencil, absently.

Ginny peered close. "St. Tropez. That's on the coast. You wrote 'Côte d'Azur.'" She stumbled over the unfamiliar words. "What's that?"

"Oh--" Color might have flooded his face, although the firelight made it hard to tell. "St. Tropez is a resort town. Lots of resort towns along that coast, in the south of France."

"For Muggles or wizards?"

"Some of both. A large number of Squibs wind up living there for some reason, if they're from rich families." His lips tightened.

"Who lived there that you knew?"

"No-one." Draco scratched the map out with the pencil until the nub broke. "No-one at all."

"So, do you speak French?" she persisted; his reaction to her last question had made her curious.

"I can," he said, turning to stare into the flames, cupping his chin in his hands.

"I'd love to hear it spoken. I don't think I ever have."

"Then kidnap a Frenchman sometime, Weasley."

"I thought you said you knew the language."

"I do," he said without turning his head to her. "But I swore almost a year ago that I would never speak it again. And I haven't, either, since that day."

"Oh." Ginny bent her head, feeling like a clumsy goat trampling on land that was preserved. "I'm sorry."

"There's nothing to be sorry about," said Draco. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Anyway. They were always good, those Yule celebrations. Except for last year, I suppose...."

"It wasn't-- good?" Ginny asked shyly, since he seemed to expect some sort of response from her.

He gave a short, humorless laugh. "Oh, I'd be lying if I said it didn't please me. I was-- well, given something I'd been wanting for years by then, I suppose you might say."

"By one of your relatives?"

One corner of Draco's mouth went up. "Well, not a close one. A very distant cousin. I don't think it was the sort of present I would have received otherwise."

"I don't understand."

"Don't you?" He turned to look at her sardonically, yet there was still an odd warmth in his voice when he spoke to her. "Are you really as innocent as you seem, Ginny Weasley?"

The conversation hadn't made much sense to her, but she found herself blushing anyway. Ginny cleared her throat. "Mine were always good as well. Except for two running. In my first year, I was being pulled into Tom Riddle's diary at Yule. I couldn't really bring myself to care about anyone or anything outside it." She'd never discussed that with anyone. But she felt as if Draco Malfoy had shared something with her, and she had a sudden impulse to return the favor as best she could.

"And your second year?" he asked.

"In my second year, well, it was a little hard to work up much enthusiasm for the holidays by then, considering the way the whole year had been going before that. I'd-- I'd been in hospital early that summer, you see. Then Mum and Dad dragged us all on a trip to Egypt."

"Egypt, really? I've never been. What did you see?"

Ginny rolled her eyes. "The inside of our hotel room, mostly. I was dragged out to smile for a few pictures and that was about it. I was ill for weeks with some sort of strange Muggle flu; our mediwitch thought I might have picked it up there. They didn't know if I'd live--"

Draco looked up at her, shocked. "It was that bad?"

"They couldn't find a cure for it. But I did pull through, and by September I was all right. I never could endure the taste of Pepper-Up Potion after that, though."

He looked away from her again, into the fire. "Yes..." he murmured. "I do remember thinking that you looked a bit pale that autumn term. Too thin, too small. You hadn't grown so tall yet, then. But I never heard anything about your being ill..."

"I asked Ron not to talk about it, Fred and George too. I just--" She shook her head. "I'd had enough of people noticing me. But why would you have heard, anyway?"

Draco didn't answer her directly. After a few moments, he said, "We didn't go to Lourdes that year, my third year, I remember. We went... somewhere else. To my mother's people, as we sometimes did."

"In Bavaria, right?"

He was sure she could see him stiffen, even under the voluminous black robe. Then he gave a rueful little laugh. "Yes, Weasley. In Bavaria. In Linz." What use was it to try to hide this from her anymore, the secret of his mother's Bavarian ancestry and his own? She already knew too much, and she didn't understand the significance of what she did know anyway. Later, he'd deal with it all later. "But we'd always come back after Boxing Day, wherever we went. Sometimes we'd travel again afterwards, too..."

"For your birthday," she said, a little absently.

"What?" He turned very suddenly on the wooden bench, facing her.

"Well-- your birthday's the day after Boxing Day, isn't it?"

"How did you know that?" he asked her. But even as the words left her lips, he knew how she knew, and what that meant; and by the look in her eyes, he could see that she knew it, too.

"That wasn't a dream," she breathed. "It really happened. We really talked in the middle of the night, and you asked me all those things, and I answered--- oh, I can't believe I didn't realize, I feel such a fool..." Her words trailed off; she began nervously running her hands through her hair again, over and over, pulling at the knots that were forming.

I really held your hand, Draco thought. I held it until you fell asleep. And then when I woke up, while you were still sleeping, I laid my hands on you, Ginny Weasley, on all of you. And I wanted to do more than that. You probably thought that was a dream as well... but I know it wasn't. Oh Gods, I know it wasn't.

"If that rat's nest on your head gets much worse," he said coldly, "you're going to have to cut it off and start afresh."

Ginny, jerked rudely from her thoughts, shot him a glare across the table. Having anything to do with him was a lot like playing with the magical sparklers Fred and George had been experimenting on all that year, the ones that might go off at any second and leave scorch marks all over your fingers. "Much you care, Malfoy."

"Don't think I do." He pushed himself back from the wooden bench and got up, walking over to the other side of the room. She stuffed the rest of his brown bread in her mouth, chewing defiantly. She wasn't precisely watching him, of course, but it was a very small room, and Ginny couldn't noticing that he paced back and forth for a few minutes, staring out of the window. Then he went up to the only other patron in the inn, a man with a leather peddler's pack next to him, his wares spread out on the table. The man was carving on a piece of wood, and Draco was speaking to him, Ginny thought. Resolutely, she turned her head away. He walked back and picked up the leather bag he'd been carrying, carefully tucking a small wrapped something into it.

Mary, the innkeeper's daughter, was bustling round her, clearing away cups and plates and napkins. Draco was now leaning on the far end of their table, and he laid a hand on the girl's arm. She tittered and looked at him vacantly. Ginny didn't really see any reason why every female in the sixteenth century had to melt into a giggly puddle when Draco Malfoy touched them, but then perhaps it was only Mary's amazement at seeing someone who actually had all their teeth. She pushed the bench back and went to stand by the fire. It was still quite easy to hear every word that was said.

"How far is it to Melrose from this village, girl?" he asked in his most imperious tone of voice. But there was a smirk in it, as well, and a certain quality that Ginny could only call insinuating. If she'd been Mary, Ginny thought, the entire stack of plates would have gone over his head.

She pursed her lips, considering. "'Appen two hours, no more, walking. But ye've no call to go there, none at all."

"Why not?"

"Why, there's naught left! The king's soldiers ran it over twenty years ago or more."

"That's just what Mistress Cochrane said," hissed Ginny, turning towards the table.

"Shh," Draco told her out of one side of his mouth. "Is there anywhere else to stay between there and here?"

"Nay, sir. We're too small for overnight guests; we dinna have rooms. Ye and yer laidy could sleep in the barn."

"No, we decidedly couldn't," he muttered. "So there's nowhere at all to stay there now?"

Mary wound a curl of raven-black hair over one finger in what seemed to be an unnecessarily coquettish manner. Maybe the hair was black, Ginny thought uncharitably. Or it could just be dirt. "I dinna say that; some building are still near to whole. But no Christian who fears for his soul will spend the night in Melrose Abbey now."

"Whyever not?" demanded Draco.

The girl put down the plates and leaned over the table, obviously all too willing to interrupt her duties for a little gossip. "When once the holy folk have left a kirk, the priests and nuns and lay-brothers and suchlike, the land begins to go back to the Old Ones. To those who are, and those who ever shall be." Her eyes went wide and round." 'Tis said that their spirits cry out from the Holy Spring that welled up at Melrose before ever stone was laid on stone there. Ghosts walk that place now, and worse than ghosts..." She paused dramatically, but Draco gave her no reaction.

"Very well," he finally said. "Run along now, Mary." He dropped a silver coin down the front of her bodice, and she giggled.

"If ye've a bit of time, sir," she said, moving closer to him and speaking in a lower voice, "I'd be happy to take ye up to the hayloft, before ye take yer leave." She smiled seductively up at Draco, and Ginny, watching out of the corner of one eye, was truly thankful for wizarding dental plans.

"Er-- no," he said. "I'm dreadfully sorry to have to decline your charming offer, but time and tide wait for no man, and we really must be leaving." He beckoned to Ginny. His face was as smooth and blank as an unwritten parchment. "Shall we go?" he asked, offering her his arm.

He's up to something, she thought. Whatever it is, I'm not letting him get away with it. Tucking her hand beneath his elbow, Ginny smiled to herself. She'd felt his slight jump. He obviously hadn't been expecting a lowly Weasley to dare to lay a finger on his aristocratic hide. She liked getting a rise out of him; she'd do that if she couldn't.... if she couldn't... The thought sputtered out and died. There was no way to finish it, so she did not.

"Charming offer?" she hissed as soon as they were out of the inn yard, dropping her hand.

"Yes," Draco drawled, the familiar, irritating half-smile on his face. He bit into the apple he was carrying and started chewing. "I thought it very charming."

"Don't let me keep you from taking advantage of any opportunities that come your way, Malfoy."

"Oh, I wouldn't. Not if I wanted to take advantage of them. Have a bite?" He offered the smooth, round cheek of the apple to her. She took a large bite and chewed it savagely.

They turned back onto the path, and the very air suddenly seemed to grow colder. The sun was just beginning to sink in the sky; in another two hours, perhaps, night would fall. The long fingers of the afternoon sun spread across the winter landscape, and the sky was a deep and brooding blue. What would this landscape look like, Ginny thought, once true darkness crept across it?

"So-- we're really going to Melrose," she said.

"We've been headed there all along," he said. "What else would we do?"

"But it sounds like there really is nothing there."

"You heard that innkeeper's daughter yourself; there's nowhere else to stay.."

"We could have slept in that hayloft at the Thistle and Lion," insisted Ginny.

"One night of that sort of thing was enough, thank you very much," said Draco.

"Really? I should think that arrangement would suit you to a T. All sorts of fringe benefits, apparently."

"Lord, Weasley, are you still on about that?" Draco asked impatiently. "What do you care, anyway?"

"I don't. You can shag every sixteenth-century tart who ever walked, for all I care--"

"The idea of catching every nasty Muggle disease under the sun doesn't appeal to me very much, for some reason. Also, I prefer girls who have--" Draco paused. "Teeth."

Ginny couldn't help it; she gave a great whoop of laughter, and soon he was laughing too. The comfortable balance between them was restored. For the moment, at least. Yet she still was uneasy for some unformed reason, and although she pushed the feeling down, it did not leave her again.

"I suppose we can sleep in the woods, if it comes to that," said Ginny.

"We won't have to sleep in the woods. She said there were still buildings there; we'll find some sort of bed."

The mere fact that Draco Malfoy had completed a sentence that contained the words "we" and "bed" was a very bad reason to blush, Ginny decided. She suddenly became very interested in the landscape that bordered the cart track, the writhing shapes of the bushes, the tortured limbs of the twisted trees. And then she gasped.

"Malfoy," she said suddenly, "I've seen this before."

"I should hope so. You're the one who's been leading us every step of the way. Are you sure you know where you're going?"

"Yes, yes." She waved an impatient hand at him. "I mean that there's something about this land that I've seen before. Not the land itself-- some sort of quality about it. I don't think it was the same in our time... not quite... We just passed a little pool, and further back was a spring. That old oak tree... And there!" She pointed at a collection of rocks by the side of the path. "A hammerstone. Malfoy, I know the sort of place we are. We're walking along a.." Her voice trailed off as she tried to remember the unfamiliar term.

"A Ley line," Draco finished.

"Yes, an ancient line of force. Of earth magic. How'd you know about Ley lines?"

He shrugged."One of my favorite books in the Hogwarts library explained them."

"The Old Straight Track?" she asked.

"Yes, that's exactly the one."

She smiled slightly, sidelong, and he felt himself warming to that smile despite himself. "So that's where that book was whenever Madam Pince told me someone else had it."

"I'm sure nobody else ever touched it. Snape used to go on by the hour about how desperately Hogwarts needed to offer a seventh-year concentration on things like that-- sites, and lines of magical power."

"You really like Snape, don't you?" she asked curiously. "I mean, it's not just sucking up for grades."

Draco rolled his eyes. "I don't suck up for grades. And anyway, in Potions, I don't need to. It interests me."

"I just don't see how you stand him. He's nasty and vicious and snarly and mean."

"He's generally trying to keep the vapid and the moronic from killing themselves by throwing together poisonous ingredients at random. You know, I read somewhere once that chewing on lead-based paint lowers the intelligence considerably. What d'you suppose they used to paint all the windowsills in Gryffindor House?"

"Ooh! I take that back; it's easy to see why you'd like him. Snape's you in twenty years!"

"Not at all. When I'm thirty-seven," said Draco, smirking, "I won't be wasting my brilliance stuck in a classroom, attempting to teach a bunch of--"

"No, because you'll be--" Ginny's voice faltered. The words that had so nearly sprung to her lips were walking in your father's footsteps, but she couldn't say them. They would have caused the conversation to take quite another turn, one she did not want to explore. She fell silent, concentrating on the path, and he did not speak again either.

There was perhaps one full day, now, before they'd reach Leith. And she still didn't know what he planned to do with her then, or what she might do to try to stop him. It seemed all too easy to forget this vital fact. But she must not. Draco Malfoy might amuse her, might vex and cheer and challenge her, but he was like a weapon that was destined to turn in her hand. He was his father's son. And she could never, never forget what his father had done to her. At that moment, the mere fact that she'd smiled at anyone who shared genetic material with Lucius Malfoy made her feel ill.

Lost in her thoughts, Ginny didn't realize where she was going until Draco put out a hand and stopped her.

"What is it?" she asked. His face seemed rather grim.

In answer, he pointed up, towards the sky, and Ginny's eyes followed his hand. They were standing at a four-way crossroads. In the center was a great white pillar of stone. It bore no marking of any kind.

"So you don't remember any of this from 1996," Draco sighed, stretching his legs out onto the path.

"Nope." Ginny took a bite of bread from the bag. They were sitting on the ground, trying to figure out which way to go. No clues were presenting themselves.

"But you did go this way. Did you pay any attention at all?"

"We did, and I did!" exclaimed Ginny. "But this crossroads wasn't here. It won't be, I mean."

"I suppose it was a bit much to expect everything to be the same in our day as it was four hundred years before," he admitted.

She chewed her bread, thoughtfully. "Malfoy, I think I know what this is."

"Planning to share your insight with me, are you?"

"I'll thank you not to snap at me. Remember when we were talking about Ley lines?"

"It was fifteen minutes ago," said Draco. "Of course I remember it."

"Well, this proves it. We have been on a Ley line; this path follows it." She looked up at the white pillar, colored orange in the sunset. "That's a standing stone."

"You're right, Weasley. I remember the photograph from that book." He sighed, leaning against a rock. "But that doesn't help us much, does it? It's not exactly pointing to anything."

"No," she said. Her face set into thoughtful lines. "But maybe we can learn something from it."

"If our wands worked, we might. Some sort of Revealing spell, maybe?"

Ginny shook her head. "I don't think, somehow, that it would do us any good even if they did work. This is such old magic. So different from anything we ever learned at Hogwarts. Hermione always used to yell at me for spending so much time with that book. She used to say that it didn't have any practical application." She fully expected to hear a jibe from him about Hermione after that, but he was silent.

"Earth-magic summoning..." he finally said. "I really don't know, Weasley."

"Well, don't you know any--" She bit her tongue and cut the sentence short.

"What?"

""Nothing."

"Hmmph. I think that 'nothing,' in this case, can be translated as, 'don't you know any accursed spells from the Dark Arts that might help us out of this jam, Malfoy?'" His voice was still light and teasing.

"Well-- do you?"

"No," he said.

She wondered what he meant by that. Did he mean that he didn't know enough Dark magic to know? Or did he mean that he did know enough to know that there weren't any Dark spells like that? His face was nearly inscrutable, but she caught the faintest hint of a smirk. Damn him. That was just like him. He'd leave her to wonder.

He was silent for several moments, and by the time he'd spoken again the dusk had gathered more closely around them, the white pillar glowing eerily in the gloom. "There's only one thing I can think of that's even close. The Erd-Spiegel..."

"What's that?"

"A sort of mirror that's buried in the ground with special incantations said over it. Then it's dug up years and years later; the longer you leave it in the earth, the more magic it soaks up."

"That's Bavarian magic, isn't it?"

Draco's answer was a very long time in coming. "Yes..." He hadn't realized what he was saying until he'd said it. His secrets were pouring out of him in dribs and drabs, but at that moment he couldn't seem to care very much. Maybe it was like cutting yourself badly in very warm water. You never felt a thing until the sharks had gathered. He pushed that image out of his mind. What did it matter anyway? He'd just have to see that she didn't get the chance to repeat anything he told her to anyone who would care. "But it's not exactly helpful in finding directions. A map, on the other hand--"

"Or a compass. Oh, I always hated the way Dad would make us find directions with a compass on camping trips. Wish we had one now, though," said Ginny.

"What is it? How does it work?"

"Well, it's the same basic idea as a Directional spell. Let's say this rock was the compass." Ginny picked up a smooth stone, laying it in her hand, and Draco peered close to see. "This line--" she traced it with her fingernail "-- is magnetic north. You line up a needle with it."

"So it tells you where to go?"

"Not exactly." Ginny grimaced. "It just tells you which way north is. That's not very useful if you don't know where you're going in the first place--" She smacked herself in the forehead. "Oh! I'm dumb as a sack of garden gnomes. The sun tells us which way is north, because it's setting right now in the west. So it's that way." She pointed to the horizon. "But the problem's still the same. I don't know exactly which way Melrose Abbey is."

"So we're back where we started," said Draco. "There has absolutely got to be a solution to this, Weasley. I refuse to believe that between us we can't figure something out."

"There is one thing," said Ginny slowly. "You did spontaneous magic as a child, right?"

"Yes, sometimes. It all stopped when I got to Hogwarts and started learning it properly, though."

"Me, too. I think it's the same with everyone. But I've read a bit about it, and it seems to me that it's--" she fumbled for words "-- related to the older magic in some way. It always seemed to happen when I was upset about something, was that how it worked with you?"

Draco nodded, not particularly wanting to elaborate on his memories of that point.

"And you really want to get out of these woods, don't you?" she asked hopefully.

"You can't possibly imagine how desperately I want to spend the night sleeping in a warm bed inside four walls instead of camping on the frozen ground."

"So you'd say you have strong emotions about finding out which way we need to go. So do I, Malfoy, believe me."

"I think I'm beginning to see what you're getting at. If we stand near the stone, or touch it--"

"It might give us some sort of clue as to which path we ought to take next." Ginny finished the sentence, smiling. "But I think you ought to try it alone. More than one of us-- well, I don't really know, but I think it might confuse the message, if there is one."

"Weasley, that was damn clever." Draco couldn't help smiling back at her; surely, he realized, it had to be one of the very few real smiles she had ever seen on his face. He realized with some surprise that he liked the way her mind worked. She was very clever indeed, but it was more than that; Granger was probably more clever than she, if it was only a question of that. Ginny Weasley saw the connections between things that others didn't see; her brain made intuitive leaps. She was creative, that was the word he was groping for. And he couldn't help thinking that her mind reminded him of his own.

Draco rose to his feet, walking slowly towards the standing stone, laying a hand on it. It was very, very cold. He moved his fingers up and down it, trying to find some pattern of energy, some patch that stood out from the rest, doing his best to keep his mind blank.

His left hand reached into the leather bag he carried before he realized he was doing it. The raised surface of the jewelled cover of the Kitap-an Düs was under his fingertips even though he didn't remember reaching for it. Absently, he stroked it, and his right hand felt along the surface of the standing stone, searching, searching. But his fingers has a sense of purpose now, one that his mind knew nothing about. He let his thoughts float free, and felt himself move into the state where magic might be made. This was the sort of state one actually had to learn to move past, when learning wand magic. It was too uncontrollable, and produced results that were too unpredictable. But he did remember it, feeling it again; it was exactly the way he always felt as a very small child just before spontaneous magic flowed through him. The only difference was that it felt far more powerful now. An almost painful prickling swept over his entire body, from his scalp to his toes; the little hairs raised and stiffened along his neck, his breath grew short, and his fingers pressed into the book and into the stone. Far away, he heard Ginny saying "Malfoy. Malfoy! Did you-- are you-- is it--" But all that mattered were the sensations coming through his fingertips, a current anchoring him to the twin sources of power, each a complement of the other. The stone had suddenly grown deadly cold, so cold that it actually felt hot; he wanted to snatch his hand away from the ice-burn of this cold, but he couldn't. The book was glowing hot; Draco was sure that if he could have seen it, the pages would have been white with their heat, and their edges sizzled along his fingers. Then, as suddenly as it had come, it was gone.

"Malfoy?" Ginny's voice quavered; when he turned to look at her, he saw that her face had turned a bit white. "You felt something, didn't you?"

"Yes," he said, his voice distant. He pointed to the left-hand path. "It's this way."

She followed him. "You sound so funny. Is everything all right?"

"It's all right."

"What happened?"

"Nothing," he said, and there was something in his voice that kept her from asking any more questions. He was glad, because he didn't feel up to the challenge of lying to her just yet. Ginny Weasley had a way of seeing too much, and of understanding more than was said. He did not want her to know that a message had come to him when he touched the Book of Dreams, every bit as clearly as if had actually spoken to him in words. Go to Melrose Abbey, Draco Lukas Malfoy. All will be made clear to you. The crooked paths will be laid straight. And you shall know what you must do next.

They walked for quite a long while without a word. Ginny could not bring herself to talk. She wanted to be within walls so badly that the longing was an actual physical pain. There was a strangely abstracted look on Draco Malfoy's face, as if he walked a thousand kilometres distant from her, running things over and over in his mind that he would not discuss. The sun was beginning to sink into the west when she finally spoke again, timidly.

"I suppose-- I suppose we really ought to start looking for someplace to sleep. Before it gets really dark."

"Whatever for?" he asked, his eyes fixed on the horizon.

"Well, I don't see any sign of Melrose Abbey. How can you be sure you even picked the right direction?"

"I'm sure," Draco said, his voice tinged with irritation, the first emotion he'd shown in hours. She was weirdly glad of it, in the way she'd often been glad of the little glowworm that served as a nightlight on her bedside table at home. When she'd woken night after night from hideous dreams, it had been a tiny bit of light in her darkness. The blank look on his face had been very unsettling to see. She'd felt an inexplicable warm little glow after they'd worked out the problem of the pillar together, but it was long gone now. It gave her a very cold feeling to think of how quickly and completely the Malfoy mask had dropped only a few minutes afterwards. Even his drawling sneer was preferable to that.

"How can you be sure? We could be stuck in the woods all night long!"

"We won't be. We're getting very close now," said Draco.

"But how do you know?" she persisted.

"I just do. Don't question me, Weasley."

"Don't tell me what to do, Malfoy."

His eyes darkened to an ominous grey. "I'll tell you what to do if I want to. Don't make me prove that I can."

She tossed her head. "Don't make me laugh."

"Oh, you-- Weasley, you want to know how I found out which way to go?" Draco threw up his hands. "Fine. I'll tell you. As I touched the stone, the Loch Ness monster descended from a cloud on the back of a flying haggis, surrounded by a choir of fairies playing bagpipes with everything but the chanter removed. That sounds rather like a stork with a nervous condition, by the way. They flew around me in a re-enactment of the winning moves in the famous Holyhead Harpies Quidditch match of 1347, and then they all sang a song extolling the virtues of Melrose Abbey Bed and Breakfast."

"Hmm. I didn't see them," said Ginny.

"Bad luck for you then. If you'd just happened to look up the sky at the right moment, you would have done."

"Well, what were the lyrics to the song, then?"

"I don't remember them all. It was a very long song," said Draco. "Something about French toast and hothouse strawberries served in bed by house-elves, moonlit hayrides, and Swedish massage. Oh, and on Christmas, all hot baths are twenty percent off."

"Really?" asked Ginny in the most innocent voice she could manage.

"No. That was sarcasm! You're hopeless."

She put her fists on her hips, arms akimbo. "Who are you calling hopeless?"

"I don't see anybody standing in front of me but you." He stepped in front of Ginny and blocked her path, fixing her with a glare that was meant to be cold and sinister. On the face of Lucius Malfoy, it was indeed. Spread across Draco Malfoy's sixteen-year-old and dirt-smudged features, however, it looked rather silly, and reminded Ginny of nothing so much as Percy Weasley at his most pompous. Perhaps during one of his patented tirades on cauldron thickness.

"Get out of my way," she said haughtily, tapping his chest with her forefinger.

He crossed his arms. "Make me."

Obviously, he didn't think she would. Or could. However, he had never seen Ginny pin Ron with a flying leg lock while wrestling in the back yard at home. At that moment, nothing could have pleased her so much as a knock-down, drag-out, no-holds-barred fight, hitting below the belt definitely permitted. If Malfoy had been one of her brothers, she wouldn't have hesitated a second. As it was, however... well...

Draco smirked at her with the most offensive expression he could manage, the one that always looked as if it could benefit from a long stay at the Copacabana Wizarding Prison for Small-Time, Yet Annoying Criminals. Hopeless, he mouthed in an exaggerated way.

She flung herself at him

"If I were you I really wouldn't--" was all he had time to say before Ginny sprang forward, preparing to hit him full in the chest.

She was never quite sure, afterwards, how he had done it, but Draco had sidestepped lightly and moved his hands into a strange position, and suddenly her center of gravity was changed; her arms and legs flailed, and she tumbled to the ground, rolling several metres away. He looked down at her. Every one of the shining hairs on his head was still in place. How on earth did he manage that?

"Care for a hand?" he asked kindly, bending down.

She stared at him, open-mouthed. "How did you do that, Malfoy? I can take every one of my brothers down that way!"

"Hmm. Well, the Yule holidays at the Weasley house must be a joy, indeed."

"How?"

Draco sat down next to her. "One of my many talents." It wasn't a smirk on his face this time, but a positive grin, showing all his white teeth-- good Lord, they're sharp! Ginny thought dazedly. They reminded her of a cat she'd had once that got mean, bit Ron, and had to be given away.

"Is it--" she paused.

He arched an eyebrow. "One of the Dark Arts?"

"I wasn't going to say that!" she protested hotly. She had been. For once, however, she had thought better of it at the last possible moment.

"Yes, you were."

Ginny shivered. A cold little wind had sprung up suddenly, and she wrapped her cloak around her. "I wasn't."

"Well, anyway, it's not. It's just one of the little tricks I know. That one's called the ashi-waza." Draco said no more, but a little almost-smile hovered around the edges of his lips.

How very like him that was, she thought. He told her just enough to create even more questions in her mind, but not enough to answer any of them. She sighed. Well, there was nothing to do but get up; the last thing she wanted to do was to sit around on the path while night was starting to fall. But even as she started shifting position, Draco pulled her back down, scrambling behind a tree and taking her with him.

"What--" she began to whisper.

He tapped a finger to her lips, shaking his head. Then he pointed ahead of them.

At first, all she noticed was that the path had been broadening and widening out without her noticing it; when she'd fallen, she must have tumbled into the lower bushes and trees right at the edge of the patch of forest. Ahead of them was scrub and low bracken, and then almost open country. Then she saw them. There was a ragged band of children creeping along the edge of a hill, all of them perhaps eight or ten years old, all, seemingly, boys. Dressed in what looked like rags and horribly dirty, they were not a prepossessing sight. The minutes ticked by as the two of them waited. Unfortunately, they seemed headed towards the widened cart track just ahead of Ginny and Draco..

"Oh, surely we can just--" she hissed.

"No, we can't," he said. "We're too close to the high road now, I don't much want anyone to see us... just wait."

She ground her teeth in frustration. "They're practically coming right for us!"

"Shh."

There was something strange about those children, thought Ginny, and it was more than the fact that by twentieth-century standards, they looked like poverty and disease-stricken street urchins. No, it was something about the expressions on their faces, something sly and furtive, as if they all knew they were about to do a forbidden thing. Now what did that remind her of? She rested her chin in her hands, remembering.

The Burrow was protected by wards, nowhere near such powerful ones as those about Hogwarts, of course, but strong enough to keep away the curious. Muggles who wandered onto the edges of their yard or the outskirts of the apple orchard or the little pond where they swam and boated in the summers would suddenly remember a dentist's appointment, or a doctor's visit, or simply feel a pressing need to be elsewhere. At least, that was the way it always worked on the adults. Muggle children, however, were frequently a different matter. The lines between magical and non-magical folk were not so strictly drawn then, and those who were sensitive often saw things they should not. Luckily, grownups had a very strong tendency to nod and smile indulgently when their children insisted that they'd seen a troll in their closet or a vampire under their window. And by the age of eleven or twelve, even the dreams of magic were gone.

Until then, however, there were groups of neighbourhood children who were forever daring each other to sneak onto the Weasley property. They never got further than the yard. But it was very annoying to see them tiptoeing about, sneaking onto the land they thought of as haunted and accursed. Sly smiles on their faces, whispering and giggling and poking at each other, looking exactly like... like...

These children, in the sixteenth century.

A deep wave of freezing cold rushed over her. All the uneasiness she'd been tamping down all day blossomed into terror, terror running through her, thrumming in her veins, turning her very blood to ice...

Ginny was running towards the broader part of the cart track before she even realized she was on her feet. "Get out of there!" she yelled, waving her arms at the children. "Go! Go! What do you think you're going to find? Don't you dare come here!"

They turned and gaped at her as one. She could see how wizened they were now, how small for their age, how stunted and sickly compared to the children of her own day. She towered over them all. And their faces were filled with fear.

Something hit the side of her face. She put her hand up and it came away smeared with blood. One of them had thrown a rock at her! She growled and advanced on them, too filled with rage to realize that she had no idea what she planned to do. "Cailleach!" shrieked one, and then the cry spread to the other children, their voices light and shrill as the cawing of gulls, floating back to her as they ran. "Cailleach... cailleach... cailleach..."

"Those sodding little brats!" Draco snarled behind her. "I ought to catch each one and take them and--" He stopped, seeing the side of her face.

Something icy cold and dark was pressed against her cheek, numbing it. The edge of his cloak, she realized, soaked in cold water from the spring they'd passed. Don't put that on me, she wanted to say. I don't trust water or land or sky or air here. I don't trust what's behind and I don't trust what's ahead... and staying here frightens me most of all...

"Stop it," she finally said, pushing his hand down.

His face darkened. "Have a scar then, if you like. It's all the same to me."

"Do you know what those children were saying, Malfoy?"

He shook his head. " 'Cailleach.' Gaelic, I suppose. But I don't know what the word means."

"I do." She gathered the cloak closer, hands up at her collarbone, staring out at the darkening land. "'Witch.'"

"Well--" He cleared his throat. "You are, you know."

Ginny turned on him, furious words bubbling up to her lips. But they died in her throat when her hand at her collarbone moved to touch the silver locket about her neck, hidden below her green cloak. It pulsed hot as a roaring flame. Each beat shifted and moved under the material until she thought that surely he must see it, must notice it, must--

Draco looked at her strangely. "You all right, Weasley?"

If she could, she would have run every step of the way back to the Thistle and Lion and crouched in the hayloft, shivering in her cloak and her plaids until the sun rose. She was like a child squeezing her eyes shut, terrified of the dark, praying that when she opened them again the lengthening shadows and the cruel darkness beyond would have disappeared. Only a child, longing to pull the covers over her head in her own dear familiar bed and hide, hide from all that lurked and waited for her. But she was lost on a dark road, far from home. She remembered the faces of the ragged children on the road to Melrose, and each hollow countenance took on a unique and horrible significance, like a sinister star marked out in the night sky.

"I'm all right," Ginny said. The locket throbbed beneath her fingers, giving her words the lie.

The path broadened out into true open country after they had walked a little more. It seemed a bit safer, somehow, than the tangled growth of small trees and underbrush in the forest. They'd be able to see anybody coming for a long, long way. The thought of sleeping in the hollow of one of the gentle hills was almost comforting.

"Malfoy," she said, "what if we just stayed out here?"

"Don't be ridiculous. We're almost to the abbey now."

"But-- but what if we're not?" She knew that they were.

He turned his head, and his brows were drawn down into a scowl. "Are you on about that again?" he asked coldly.

She did not try to soften her words to fit his mood, after that. He replied in kind. Something had changed between him and her. They returned to the same argument they'd been having before, but there was something rancorous about it now; the teasing atmosphere had gone completely. The dank sky had begun to drizzle a freezing rain, which chilled them both to the bone and did not help matters or tempers. I suppose it's the way we're doomed to talk to each other, anyhow. Might as well get used to it, Ginny thought resentfully. Why have I been kidding myself? He's Malfoy. I know him for what he is, and what he always has been. He's no different now from what he was when he tried to get that hippogriff executed, or when he sneered at Harry over Cedric being dead... not really... Sometimes I forget, that's all.

"I just don't think we should stop at Melrose," Ginny said.

"Oh, and why not?" he snarled back at her. "You haven't given me one decent reason yet!"

"Because-- well-- it just doesn't feel right!" she flung back at him. "There. I've said it. It feels all wrong to go there."

"That's your idea of a reasoned argument? It doesn't feel right?" He echoed incredulously.

Ginny set her jaw at a mutinous angle and refused to look at him. "Well-- no, it doesn't."

"And what sort of proof do you have?"

"It's not about proof. It's just-- a feeling," she said lamely, hating being at a disadvantage in this bitter argument with him. Hating him.

"Moronic, Weasley, even from you, and that's saying something," Draco sneered. "Oh, I've got a funny tingle in my little finger, so let's stand about in the rain until we freeze to death! Well, I've got a funny feeling as well. Let me tell you about it." He began walking faster, furiously, grabbing her wrist when he saw that she wasn't keeping up with him. "We're going to go to Melrose Abbey, and I'm going to get a bed from whoever's still there and sleep in a decently warm room without straw poking into my back all night or rain drizzling down onto my face, and you're going to like it! Or don't! It doesn't make the slightest bit of difference to me. I ought to make you sleep on the floor, in fact. Maybe I will."

Ginny wrenched her wrist away. "Don't touch me, Malfoy! Don't ever touch me."

He raked her with his eyes even as he stomped down the path, slowly, coolly, putting on an elaborate dumbshow of weighing her in the balance and finding her quite, quite wanting. "No fear of that, Weasley."

It was ridiculous for tears to be pricking the insides of her eyelashes. She was exhausted, afraid, and chilled to the bone. That was undoubtedly why. "That's the best news I've heard in ages," Ginny said, as acidly as she could. "But have you thought about one thing? You're bonded to me, and I'm bonded to you. If I don't choose to stay at Melrose, then you can't, either!"

Draco stopped in the middle of the path. "Don't even start in on playing that game with me. I'll tie you to a bed. I swear I will, and to hell with what all the other travellers think."

"I'd like to see you try!"

"Oh?" He turned to face her. "Be careful what you wish for, Weasley! You just might get it."

She turned to face him. "I'm not going and that's the end of it."

"You are going to Melrose Abbey, and you'll do anything else I want you to do as well. You do not have a choice."

"How dare you?" Ginny's eyes blazed gold fire. "I'll do what I choose and go where I please!"

"Listen, you-- you Weasley. This--" Draco spluttered for words "-- little expedition is not a democracy."

"I didn't think it was! I suppose it's a dictatorship and you're Il Duce or der Führer or whatever. Do you want me to salute?"

"I want you to go where I say go," he continued with decreasing coherence, "and stay when and where I say, stay. If I tell you to jump, all I want to hear out of you is, 'how high?' If I tell you we're going to spend the night somewhere, I want you to start arranging my blankets and warming my bed. And if I were to order you to--" But Draco's end to that sentence, whatever it was, remained unspoken, because in the next second his legs went out from under him and he landed arse-over-heels in the dirt.

She'd pushed him!

He struggled to a sitting position and glared up at her, unable to say a single word. Aside from having the breath knocked out of him, he certainly wasn't injured; he supposed that if such had been her intention, she wouldn't have been able to carry it out in the first place. But his pride felt as if it would never recover. That... dirty urchin, that Weasley, had dared to lay hands on him! The fragile truce that had lingered between them earlier in the day was instantly forgotten, and their odd moments of almost-closeness wiped away as if they had never been. Oh, she'd pay for this; even if he couldn't hurt her physically, there must be other ways. And she was laughing at him. Laughing!

"Oh! I'm sorry," Ginny said. "Really, I am. You just look so funny--" And she went off into a fresh transport of giggles. "I knew it," she finally said. "I knew that if I caught you off balance, I could do it. That's how I always got my brothers, you know. Want me to help you up, Malfoy?"

He ignored her proffered hand. Slowly, he rose to his feet. When she saw the look in his eyes, she flinched back a little, her own eyes growing wide and her lips trembling uncertainly. Was she frightened? Well she might be, he thought, but it was a little late for that now. Ginny reached out to brush the dirt off the back of his cloak, tentatively. He whirled on her almost faster than sight and seized her wrist with his left hand. It was her left one this time, the one he'd used to bond her to him, and he could feel the scratch where he had pricked her skin before turning the knife on his own wrist. She made no effort to pull away, but only continued looking at him with her wide golden eyes.

"You want to try that again, Weasley?" Draco asked softly.

She shook her head. He could see, now, that she was afraid of him. How lucky it was that she didn't know he couldn't hurt her, only that she couldn't hurt him. That weapon might be used with great subtlety; there was no need to stoop to crude threats. But she kept looking at him as if she couldn't look away; it made him think of a bird caught in the stare of a snake about to strike, and he suddenly didn't like it. He didn't want her to look at him that way. But she must.

She's my enemy. As I am hers. That's what I swore; those words are in the very Hexensymbol spell I wove. I can show her courtesy if I wish, I can speak with her pleasantly, if it pleases me, but my enemy, she will always be. The words thrummed over and over in Draco's head. They only seemed to be amplifying his anger, but in a different way, an indefinable way.

Anger was flooding him, but, still staring at her, he realized that something else had seeped into it as well. And the mixture of his rage with that indefinable emotion was a red agony, demanding some violent action for its purging. Yet the strangest thing of all was that actually hurting Ginny Weasley was the furthest thing from his mind. It wasn't simply that he knew he couldn't; he didn't want to. It was an impulse as sudden and inexplicable as the one that had made him understand he didn't want to see fear in her eyes when she looked at him. No. It was something else he wanted, and Draco struggled to understand what it was.

He wanted to seize her where she stood so stubbornly facing him in her filthy clothes and ridiculous snarl of red hair, as proud as any queen on a golden throne. He wanted to throw her down on the ground and grapple with her and feel her fighting him, wanted to roll over and over with her in the dirt until they were a breathless mass of tangled limbs, but he wasn't sure if he wanted her or himself to be the winner of that battle. He wanted to...

wanted to...

... wanted to tear her blouse and trousers and knickers off her and plunge into her smooth white body right there on the muddy cart track, over and over and over. He wanted to hear her moan and sigh and scream his name and urge him onwards, enveloping him like a velvet trap from which he could never escape. He wanted to feel the shivering sweet pain as she marked him with her fingernails, each uncontrollable vicious stripe clawing down his back as she shuddered for him, beneath him, because of him, around him, again and again and again. It was like a violent kick in the groin, this wanting, a sensation so savage that he couldn't have said if it was pleasure or pain the images forced him to feel. And the feelings themselves clawed at the inside of his head, a screaming red mass of fury. He gasped. All his muscles tightened, involuntarily. And Draco dropped Ginny's wrist.

It was as if a door had been slammed shut on something dark and terrible and hideously sweet. He became aware that he was covered in sweat, even though it was a cold day; that his head was pounding fiercely, that his breathing had grown heavy and his pulse unsteady. And that Ginny Weasley was still staring at him.

"Are you all right, Malfoy?" she asked.

Her voice was soft as a feather. Oh, why did it have to be so gentle and soft and light, when he himself contained such darkness? "Yes," Draco said, when he trusted himself to speak again. "We're going to Melrose. We-- we have to go. You do see that, Weasley, don't you?"

"I do," she whispered.

So they both behaved as if the true purpose of this journey was to reach Melrose Abbey, and perhaps, in a way, it was. The cart track wound around itself and began to lead up the side of a large hill. Neither of them spoke a word.

What the... hell just happened? was the only coherent thought Draco seemed able to come up with after several minutes of attempts. The answer wasn't springing to mind; he wasn't entirely sure that he even had a mind anymore, as it seemed to be falling past him in fragmented pieces. Some sort of temporary insanity? I was hearing voices this morning, after all. And where the hell were they when I needed them... He'd certainly felt as if he were going mad, holding her wrist, the vast sensory images of her streaking through him and leaving scorch marks behind them. But the possession had passed, and he felt sane again. Thoroughly exhausted, but sane. A thought struck him. This feeling was familiar; he'd experienced it before. It was the same as what had happened to him in the morning, only much more violent, much more intense. Whatever power was seizing him was growing stronger. And it worked through Ginny Weasley.

He glared at her, walking ahead of him, her eyes lowered, her profile as pure as carved ivory. How innocent she seemed. But was she? Was she? Could she have cast a spell on him; did she know scraps of wandless magic, too? Her seeming purity might be all deceit, like a spiderweb glimmering radiant in the moonlight to lure unwary flies. At that moment, he was sure it was.

"You're not getting me that way, Weasley," he murmured, his voice harsh.

But she turned towards him then, moving her shining head. The red-gold curls of her hair caught the very last rays of the setting sun so that she seemed wrapped in a nimbus of flame. "What?" she asked in a small voice.

"I didn't say anything." But she kept looking at him, warily, and his breath caught in his throat with something like pain. The wave went through him again. Not sexual desire, not this time, not the madness he had felt a few minutes before, but something entirely different. And possibly no less dangerous. He couldn't put a name to it, but his very bones felt it to their marrows. Fighting this, Draco thought with a sudden chill, might be harder than the other. But he would have to. The next couple of days would be like going into battle; that was the only way to think of them, the only way he might survive them. And the worst part of all was that the enemy was his own flesh.

Ginny kept watching him as keenly as she could from beneath lowered lashes. Her head was turned slightly to one side and she could only catch glimpses of him at the edge of her vision. It was the magic hour, twilight time, when shadows grew long and blue-grey and the very trees looked slightly unreal. In the long black cloak whipping about him from the slight wind, his pale hair glowing against the darkness, he looked like a figure out of nightmare. And she'd be spending the night with him. All alone. Don't be ridiculous, she argued with herself. There're sure to be other travelers there, at the abbey. And it's not as if anything happened anyway! He didn't hurt or threaten me after I pushed him; he didn't even say anything. He just-- looked at me. And a shudder went all through her. She began to talk, hurriedly.

"We're almost there," she said.

"I know," he answered.

"We're coming up the back way to the church itself, winding round it, away from the high road. This was called the Pilgrim's Way. It's much older than the other. According to the guidebook I read, it was here well before Roman times--"

They topped a ridge and she paused to catch her breath. Then she stopped and laid a hand on his. Draco jerked his head up at her, startled, and started to speak. But he fell silent when she pointed to the broad glen below.

There was a great stone structure beneath them, massive and ponderous, yet built with a fairy-like lightness. Stone itself has been carved and traced so that it seemed to flow like some marvelous liquid ice, arrested into arches and windows, cusps and curves. It lay utterly still and silent in that green glen. Like a sleeping princess awaiting the touch of a prince, Draco thought. But when he tilted his head ever so slightly to one side, to match Ginny's point of view, he saw that the great stone building had no roof. He took a few steps forward, down the crest of the hill on which they stood, and saw that some of the walls had caved in.. And stretching before it was an abandoned graveyard, the stones tipped at wildly yawing angles, overgrown with dead weeds and covered by the black and broken sticks of bushes that had sprouted on the untended graves.

Melrose Abbey lay in ruins.