Jewel of the Harem: The Grindelwald Continuum Book One

Chapter 17.

Choices.

O, Death
O, Death
Won't you spare me over til another year
Well what is this that I can't see
With ice cold hands takin' hold of me
Well I am death, none can excel
I'll open the door to heaven or hell
Whoa, death someone would pray
Could you wait to call me another day
The children prayed, the preacher preached
Time and mercy is out of your reach
--Ralph Stanley, O Death

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT:

The original recording of O Death (by Ralph Stanley, one of the Grand Old Men of Americana. wait a minute! moment of silence for Johnny Cash) is simply the creepiest thing. Here's what I did. I provided a link to a page that has a sample of that recording, then to one that *I* did of the same verse. Yeah, yeah. Don't look so scared. I'm a professional, you know. ;)

Ralph Stanley's O Death

My version.

There were undoubtedly better ways to handle this, but with the way I did it, it'll ask you to download it. It's not a large file. If you've always wanted to hear me sing, this is your big chance. ;)

A/N: Thanks to all the reviewers, especially:

Mara Jade, kirankaur, moonlite (yup, that was Lady Death in the corridor,) Alej, Sare, Anonimka, Emily Luvlee (yes, it was a good review!), Tien310, Adred Lightfoot, Pasunchica, goodgirlsbadboys, ari stottle, PhantomSoula, Burcu, SwaummyJs06, DracoEater (yup, not only American, but Nashville-ian,) waterlily12, Sydney Lynne, Starrysummer, Elsila, FairyGal, Athena, ElenaTwilight, Rachel Satowsky, ElenaTwilight again! Yay!, Genuine, lilyenye11, Betz, Verbal Abuse, Neekerbreeker, agoobwza, and MalkavianKirieCroiff. Thanks to the great betas Essayel, who always catches my non-Brit spellings, and Fatema, and the wondrous artist StarEyes.

There is fabulous art for this chapter!! Click on the links. There have been so many problems with accessing it from Yahoo that it's all uploaded to my Earthlink server now. Hopefully all the difficulties people have had will be OVER.
Sorry this took so long, btw, and thanks to everyone for their patience. I had some severe file problems and couldn't work on it for awhile.When I couldn't, though, I wrote a long challenge for the Smutty Classroom Yahoo group. And it, for a change of pace, is Harry/Myrtle. (Oh, don't look at me like that!) The R version is at: http://www.astronomytower.org/authors/anise/MC.html. Read it and you'll see.

There's a magical item mentioned in this chapter, BTW, that is both historically accurate and from canon (CoS.) There's also the long-promised highly-inspired-by-Pulp-Fiction scene near the end, and a Godfather quote. See if you can find all of them!

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December 1996

The wind whickered through the upper branches of the great trees, but it did not touch the vast calm forest floor. The trees were too huge to permit tangled undergrowth at their roots, and the mossy green march was interrupted only by their giant trunks. Row upon row they stood, like sentinels, just faintly visible, receding into the misty distance. Sirius Black walked the path that wound around them and through the Forbidden Forest. He only wished that he could transform; he'd reach the castle far quicker. But it was too dangerous to try it-- not here, not now. The hours of the long winter's night must be passing as he endlessly walked; it had to be dawn by now, but he could see neither moon nor sun. There was only the eerie light that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. But he'd known that would happen, traversing the forest by night. Occasionally he heard the rustle of stealthy movement behind him, as of something moving quietly, but not quietly enough to avoid being heard. Something that perhaps wanted to be heard. Several times he whirled around, hand going automatically to the knife at his belt, only to see the darkly massed shapes of great trees standing in silent ranks behind him.

Nothing had happened yet, but that fact only seemed to set his nerves further on edge. Sirius hadn't thought he feared much, anymore. And he didn't. Not external dangers anyway. Twelve years in Azkaban had a way of burning those sorts of fears out of a man. But it was fearful to walk the Forbidden Forest by night in a way that had nothing to do with ordinary fear, and he could tell that he was penetrating further and further towards the heart of it. There were great waves of darkness that crossed the path, tidal sweeps in between the brief floods of cold light from the half-full moon. Sometimes it was as if the very air shimmered on the next bend of the path, dissolving into nothingness when Sirius rushed forward and his hands stretched out to touch it. He stopped doing that rather soon.

And that was when he saw that something moved ahead of him; something or someone, that was. A person, he was more sure of that as time passed, and one that he could almost see. As the path wound more and more deeply inward, the figure sharpened, and he knew all at once who it was. And he saw the tall figure of a woman next to him, willowy but sturdy, moving with a distinctive combination of grace and power. A long rope of dark red hair swung nearly to her waist. It was Marie-France Tessier, the woman Remus had been kissing earlier with such hunger and such need. The woman who was walking beside his friend now.

"What in the hell--" he whispered, and then raised his voice. "Hey! You! Tessier! What do you think you're doing?"

That was what decided him, he realized later. If it had been Remus alone, Sirius might have caught up with him—or maybe not; that last argument still smarted. But his heart wouldn’t have leapt to his throat. He wouldn’t have run, shouting. He wouldn’t have felt a pulse of ugly anger shoot through him at the thought of what that bitch could possibly be doing. How did she get in the forest at all when he'd clearly seen Remus leave her back in Hogsmeade, and why was she there? It all seemed part of a labyrinthine plan suddenly, and she a beautiful spider plotting to trap his friend in the most evil of webs. He wouldn’t have stumbled over a loose deadfall of branches at the edge of the path and been brought to his knees, still struggling to catch the elusive figures moving just ahead of him. And he wouldn’t have realized that in his attempt to grasp hold of them, he’d left the path entirely.

In retrospect, it was so easy to see how unwise this had been. Of course, thought Sirius later, that could probably be said about most of the decisions that he had ever made. But by the time the truth slammed into him-- the figures were illusions, it had been some sort of trick, he had done something monumentally stupid, exactly what he and Remus had been warned against-- it was far too late. He had been tired, he had been angry; he had not been thinking, he had been half looking forward to another argument with Remus.The impenetrable forest stretched into darkness ahead of him, mocking his reasons. The path was lost.

After a few minutes of searching, Sirius found something that resembled a path. It wasn't real. When he turned his head sharply, it wavered into mist and then steadied again. He'd been warned about this as well. But there was nothing to do except follow it, and hope that he might find a way out. The main thing was to stay calm. To avoid reacting to what he might see and hear, and to get sucked no further in. He tried to think logically, and to remember what he knew about the predicament he'd landed in.

This was the real reason why students weren’t permitted in the Forbidden Forest, not in the heart of it anyway. Harry and his friends had always believed they’d been breaking the rules by going on their little excursions as they’d done throughout their years at Hogwarts, but in truth they hadn’t been, and Dumbledore had often said mildly that he didn’t see any reason to enlighten them. “Nothing curbs such restless spirits from a greater rebellion so thoroughly as the belief that they are engaging in a smaller one,” he’d said. Their expeditions to centaurs and giant spiders, as dangerous as they had indeed been, had never touched on the edges of the true dangers. For few indeed had ever witnessed those, and come back to tell the tale. Sirius certainly knew that he hadn’t. As Filch had been fond of saying in dark tones, the Marauders between them had succeeded in breaking 678,576.5 school rules during their years at Hogwarts, all of which he’d kept documented in an expanding parchment in a special section of the dungeons—and those were only the infractions he’d known about. But even they had never explored the hidden heart of the Forbidden Forest.

First, there were the illusions. He’d heard about those. They were expected if you were stupid enough to end up walking in the middle of the forest by night. The soft sound of singing wafted to his ears as he doggedly trudged the path. He knew it was an illusory path, but as his options didn’t seem to be very broad at the moment he thought he’d better stick to it. It was very sweet, high singing.

Tam Lin went awalking one bright morning
Across the hills so green
And he cared nothing for where he'd go
Nor nothing for where he'd been

And he's passed over the little foot bridge
And down to Carterhall
With steps so wide he passes by
you'd think he owned it all

The temptation was too much. It was pulling and plucking at his mind like a corporeal force. Surely it couldn’t hurt to simply turn his head and see where the song was coming from. Surely that couldn't matter.

There were rings of dancers beneath the great trees, holding hands around a fire that crackled red and orange and purple. A sacred fire.

So swiftly did the waters flow
as he came down beside
And you must go and greet him there
for now's no time to hide

One of the dancers turned her head to look at him. Her hair was wavy and golden and swayed to her waist, and she wore a garland of flowers on her hair. Summer flowers, although outside the forest—and he struggled to hold onto this knowledge of the outer world that seemed less real with every passing moment—it was winter still.

“Will you come down to us, Sirius Marcus Black?” she asked, and her voice was like the ringing of bells.

“I will not, Lady,” he said, and resolutely kept his eyes on the path.

“Are you sure?” Her voice was mocking, now. “Will you not join with me, my Lord of the Dance, my Year-King?” She favored him with a sidelong look from her deep blue eyes. She looked like someone he could almost remember, like a figure from a forgotten dream. “Will you not come to me, and forget both love and grief? Dance with me, and I will give you your desire…”

The fairy woman was truly beautiful when she said these words, and her slim lush white body shimmered through the gossamer dress she wore, which seemed woven of moonbeams and starlight. He understood what she offered. And he was seized with a sudden ferocious lust, hot and thick, that coiled in his belly and dragged him down like an anchor on a chain. All his solitary days in Azkaban and celibate nights since his escape congealed like a glut of dark blood and rushed through him; ah God, how had he stood them so long, how had he kept the control he had fought so hard for? But there was no need to keep it now… she offered release, relief; she would lie beneath him and he would drive into her and she would accept the sum total of his longing and grief and desperation and need, all boiled to fever pitch and kept stoppered up for so long, so long--

He had actually taken another step off the path before coming to his senses.

“Don’t think you’ll get me so easily,” he growled. “Don’t you know what I’ve already resisted?”

“Ah yes,” said the woman. “I know.” And strangely she laughed. “Would I have been harder to resist if I took a different form? For such is the nature of Desire.” And she changed into a slender young man with a curling nimbus of silver hair touched by fire, still laughing.

“Hard to say,” said Sirius, continuing on the path, refusing to look back.

“Or after twelve years in Azkaban, would you have taken anything?” mused the man, keeping up with Sirius along the path without seeming to actually do anything so plebian as walking.

“I've held out so far. Maybe, though. You never know what's going to make you give in,” Sirius agreed. “But it does have to be human.”

“Ah yes,” sighed the man. “Good to know you do have your standards.” Then he winked out like a will o’ the wisp, still laughing.

A little later, Sirius was sure he saw a stag run noiselessly into the forest ahead of him and vanish into a grove of oak trees. The trees were so ancient and gnarled that he knew the centaurs would have marked them out as holy and venerable, did they exist in the real world. So that was a valuable clue, and Sirius decided not to be fooled by what he had seen. But then the stag turned back and looked at him before disappearing entirely, and that was nearly his undoing. The animal had a pale lightning-shaped patch of hair just above its left foreleg, and its rack had the unusual characteristic shape Sirius remembered so well. He moved with the old wild terrible grace, and Sirius knew who he was—or at least who he pretended to be. The memory cut at him with the old sadness, as if something invisible had sliced across one of his interior arteries and now his heart’s blood was flowing out, slowly. Do you remember the nights of running until morning, when each rock and pebble and blade of grass had its own separate joy, and no sorrow could ever touch a joy so pure? Prongs. And behind him ran the spectral forms of a rat, a wolf, and a great, black dog. Your own memories could cut you more surely and keenly than anything else. There was a Cornish saying. Hilla-ridden. To be haunted by the stag. Sirius continued to walk, quickly, lightly, like a man who knew where he was going, although he did not know. He had heard that advised as the best stance to take when chased by ghosts. For a long time, he was chased, and haunted, by the stag.

After a while, he felt that he’d shaken off that particular temptation. It had been clever to get at him through the memories of his friends in their Animagus forms, yet even so this technique was not as effective as the other. His memories of James in particular were locked within a part of him so utterly protected that even the illusions of the Forbidden Forest could not get at them.

And he had the strange feeling again that he was fighting a definite intelligence, that there was a mocking, keen, clownish mind behind all these illusions, all these attempts to get at him. To get him to do… what? That was the question that gnawed at him. He was perfectly aware that allowing himself to feel too much curiosity about it might be as dangerous as anything else.

He walked for a very long time. He knew that his legs should have grown tired, and his feet begun to ache, but he moved as if in a dream. He wondered almost dreamily if this could be hell, if there really was a hell outside the circle of the waking world. He remembered the many times he had wondered that very thing as he had lain awake, night after night after night, on his narrow bed in his tomblike cell in Azkaban, hearing the muffled sobs and gasping breaths of other prisoners, and above it all the sound of the clock-watch, marking the seconds and minutes and hours and days. His wand had been broken, and all the proper magic he had ever learned had been taken away from him. But he was a wizard still, in the very marrow of his bones, and because he knew he was innocent the Dementors hadn’t been able to suck out every last bit of the magic that was in him. He could still make a clock-watch, and that he had done. And during those unending nights, his only companion had been Despair.

This was no figure of speech. There were nights when Sirius truly thought he had travelled too far from humankind and beast-kind alike, when even transforming into a dog had not untangled the desperately tangled threads of blackness in his mind. As the darkest part of the night approached, the Lady Despair would sometimes appear to him, and sit on the edge of his bed. She was a short, squat, hideously ugly woman, and in her right hand was a hook. She said little, and was patient. Yet as the nights dragged on and on, she told him things about decay and endings, about dark pools that had no bottom, and dark doors that led to closed corridors where dreadful things festered. After his hours with her, he always thought that death would be a release, but he could never refuse her the next time she came. After all, no other being, whether living or dead, terrestrial, infernal, or heavenly, ever came to talk to him.

He knew that she was one of the continuum of the seven Endless, those personifications of ideas that walked the cosmos before ever the gods were. There weren’t even many wizards who knew about the Endless, but the Blacks had delved further into forbidden knowledge than perhaps any mortals ever had done, and Sirius knew the secrets of his family. He remembered learning that her brothers were Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams, Destruction, the Lord of Chaos, and Destiny, who wrote the fates of gods and men, and that her sisters were Desire, Delirium, and the Lady Death. He never knew why she came to him, and wondered often what it might mean. He did not think she came to the other prisoners.

And now, without surprise, he saw her again. She walked beside him at the edge of the path, in the Forbidden Forest. If it was her. He gave her a sidelong glance, and did not speak. But she did.

“Do you remember me?” the Lady asked, and her voice grated on his ears like the clinging dirt at the bottom of a grave. “Have you forgotten me so soon? I was your constant companion, Sirius Marcus Black. In your waking and your sleeping, your speech and your silence, your dreams and your nightmares. Twelve years. When you sank to the very bottom of your black pit of depression, I was there. When you paced your cell and measured off the steps, when you counted the cracks in the walls and the stones in the floor, I was there. When you raged and clawed at the stone door until the tips of your fingers flowed blood, and in the small hours of the morning Dementors glided by your crumpled form on the floor, where you fell sobbing at last, feeding on your tears… I was there… Your friends have left you. Your loved ones have died. All the things of this world have slipped away from you. Only I have remained. I, the Lady Despair… do you think you can ever truly be rid of me?”

She stepped from the path, holding out her arms. Sirius took one step towards her. Then he shook his head. “You’re not real, either,” he said. “Or at least, you’re not what you seem to be. You won’t fool me.”

The Lady sighed. Her ugly face, her stocky, misshapen body, and her apelike jaw melted into the slender form of the blond man. "I see there’s no point in continuing to assume different forms.”

Sirius looked at him keenly. “Who are you? Are you one of the forest gods, like Lenkyn?”

The man shuddered. “Oh, no, no, no. Well, I suppose you could say that Lenkyn represents an aspect of me, but I’m no dreary local deity of flora and fauna.” He made a grandiloquent gesture, but since he was floating several inches above the forest floor it merely spun him in a perfect circle, and then back round again the other way. “Call me Loki.”

Sirius nearly stopped in his tracks. “Loki? The trickster god? The King of the Demons? The Lord of Darkness? That Loki?”

Loki smiled. “It’s nice to be recognized without a picture ID.”

“Wait…” Sirius said suspiciously. “You’re supposed to be bound to a rock of the Mountains of Pain in Nilfheim until Ragnarok, the fall of gods and men, with the serpent Nidhogg dripping venom on you… what are you doing here?” He looked at the wavering lights around the god’s head, and saw the flash of flames. He examined the god’s wrists, and saw the chains flickering up and down the pale, preternatural flesh. “What do you want from me?”

Loki shook his head. “So suspicious. Still, I suppose it’s natural enough… you have been put through the wringer, haven’t you? What makes you think I want something from you?”

“Why go through all this trouble, otherwise?” Sirius replied cagily.

“Why indeed.” Loki sighed. “Well, I might need something from you. The teeniest tiniest favor. You wouldn’t have to go out of your way the least little bit. It’s something I’m sure you would have done anyway—“

“What is it?”

“I can’t exactly tell you. Words are so inadequate, don’t you think? Why don’t I show you?”

“Show me?” Sirius asked dubiously.

“A picture is worth a thousand words!” Loki attempted to put a friendly arm around Sirius’s shoulder. Sirius promptly crumpled to the forest floor.

"Don't-- do that!" he gasped, once he could speak again.

“All right, that's never a good idea, is it?“ The god drifted overhead. “Listen, I can show you something I know you want to see. Think of it as a gesture of good faith.”

“How can you be sure?” Sirius growled.

“Because mortals always want to see it.” Loki paused. “I can show you what might have been.”

“What might have—what do you mean?”

“The paths not taken. The possibilities not explored.”

“In the past, you mean?”

“In your past.”

Sirius stared at him.

“Ah, now I have your attention,” said Loki, a faint thread of triumph in his voice.

“My past,” whispered Sirius. “My past.” He picked himself up and began to walk faster without realizing it. Loki kept up without effort. Sirius turned to the devil suddenly. “Can you show me what would have happened if James and Lily hadn’t died?” he asked abruptly. “If I’d never gone to Azakaban?”

“Alas, no,” sighed Loki.

“So your powers are limited.”

“No, but—well, it’s not a question of powers, but of laws. You know, it’s really quite a bit easier to deal with teenagers when it comes to this sort of thing… although come to think of it, it wasn't any easier with your cousin."

"You've been talking to my cousin?" Sirius asked suspiciously. "That's it. I don't trust you. If you've had anything to do with Bellatrix Lestrange--"

"Oh, no, no! It's a cousin you have at least a few friendly feelings for, believe me."

"I don't believe you. Tonks and I are in contact all the time; she would have owled me, or found some way to let me know."

"No, not Nymphadora Tonks. It's a cousin-- or a sort of cousin, anyway, that you, ah-- have yet to learn about and I'm sure it'll be a lovely surprise when you do. You'll see. As I was saying, even the Devil has to obey the laws of the universe. As do the Gods, and the Endless most of all. I can do anything, but there are things I may not do--unfortunately.” Loki stopped on the path. "Here is what I would show you. A past, your past, belonging to a world that lies close to this one, that touches it, close as a lover. A world that is not, but that yet might be... and that only you can keep from becoming."

"Different realities... parallel worlds..." muttered Sirius. "I've heard of those. Do you mean it would replace the one we live in now?"

Loki nodded.

"But why? And how? And who would cause it to be?"

"Believe me, this would all be a lot easier if I could fill you in on those little details," the devil sighed. "But I can't tell you anybody else's story. Only your own."

"Wait, wait. How can I be sure that any of this is the truth?" demanded Sirius, suddenly suspicious. "Weren't you supposed to be a liar from the beginning?"

"There's that credibility issue again." Loki pulled a sad face, erasing the strangely grave countenance he had been wearing. "Alas, a liar isn't believed even when he does tell the truth. I'm trying to tell you how to prevent the worst of all possible worlds, and you're calling me the Devil Who Cried Wolf... But look." He ran his hands up and down in a pattern that was like a dance, and shimmering trails followed his movements and formed themselves into a shape. The bright trails cleared. Behind them was a door. It stood by itself in the middle of the forest path. Sirius walked around it and saw nothing. Then he bent down and put his eye to a crack in it. There was a dark corridor stretching out in front of him, lit by flickering torches.

“What the hell is this?” he demanded.

Loki leaned against a tree, chewing on a straw. “Why don’t you open it and find out?” he suggested.

So Sirius did.

The forest disappeared once he closed the door behind him, and he was standing in a large, circular room, floors and ceiling utterly black, identical black doors set at intervals around the black walls. Branches of candles dotted the walls like the fruit of some strange and wizened tree, and their flames burned a cool, steady blue.

"I've seen this before," he muttered. "I've been here before... but it was a long, long time ago, I think... where am I?"

But there was no answer, for Loki had vanished, as well.

I don't think this was one of my more brilliant ideas... of course, considering my track record that's not saying much, either. Sirius turned to exit through the door he'd come in at, but even as he took the first step in its direction, there was an awful rumbling screech, as of enormous boulders being scraped across each other. The walls sped past him in a circular motion and then came to rest. There was no way to know which was the correct door. Yet even as this fact dawned on him, Sirius knew which door to take now, knew it as thoroughly as he might know the face of an old friend. It goes not back, but forward. That thought popped into his head, too. And forward was, after all, where he wanted to go.

He stepped through the third door to his left without hesitation.

It was a room both dark and brilliant, filled with shivering, dancing lights that seemed to come from one source. And all the lights were reflected back from the polished glass and glistening wood of the clocks that covered every surface. Slowly, Sirius wandered down a row of desks, and past some bookcases. Clocks everywhere. Carriage clocks and grandfather clocks, cuckoo clocks and even a tall clepsydra such as the ancient Romans had used to tell time. Sirius paused next to a sundial and a shadow clock with a little obelisk. A water clock dripped steadily as he tried to think. The ticking was rhythmic and perfectly synchronized; not one clock was off by so much as one quarter of a second. The answer was here somewhere; he knew it.

There were instincts bred into the blood and bone of wizards, and they remained when all that could have been taken, had been taken. It was one of those that warned him that he was not alone in the room. A Muggle would not have known. For the presence that stood at his side was not human, and that he knew instantly. The... man? creature? being? smelled of dust and the libraries of night. He cast no shadow. When he began to walk, and beckoned for the other to walk beside him, Sirius saw that he left no footprints. He spoke as if human speech was very strange to him, and he wondered at it, even as he used it.

"Do you know where you are, little mortal?"

Sirius nodded. It was like a dream, when nothing seems incredible. "I know, now, where I ought to be. This is a room in the Department of Mysteries, or at least it looks like one I remember pretty well. I've been here before, years ago, during the first Order of the Phoenix. But that's just another illusion, isn't it?"

The being nodded. "You are wiser than most mortals. Do you know who I am?"

Sirius looked at... him? it? Tremendously tall, with a long hooded cloak and a sharp, aquiline face in shadow, and carrying a large book. "Yes, I think I do... you are Lord Destiny, are you not, eldest of the Endless?"

"I am."

"If this is your kingdom..." muttered Sirius. "It's called the Garden of Forking Paths, isn't it?" And as he looked around the room, what he saw shimmered for a moment, and they were walking in the middle of a labyrinth of hedges higher than his head. Then it returned to what it had been. "But what I don't understand then," he continued, "is why it's taking on this form, the form of the clock room."

"Do you truly not understand that form follows function, mortal?" asked Destiny.

And Sirius almost did, or at least he felt that understanding was just beyond his reach. "It has something to do with the Hogwarts clock tower," he guessed. He did not get an answer to that, but then he had not expected one. "But what?"

"That I cannot tell you," said Destiny."I can tell you no story but--"

"My own, yes, I know. That seems to be a pattern with Immortals, doesn't it?"

But Destiny was silent, and Sirius knew that expecting anything more from the other would be like demanding speech from a pillar of stone that had stood mute since the world was made.

He walked around the clocks, looking at them closely. They seemed solid. They looked real. Yet he knew they weren't. That has to be important... doesn't it? All of them began making the same whirring sound as they readied themselves to strike the hour. He saw that although they were running in synchronicity, each one told a different time, and many of the faces were very strange. Some read half-past Fizzing Whizzbee, or pi o'clock, and as Sirius peered closer he saw that at the center of each was an image like a wizarding photograph. They even shimmered up from the bottom of each bowl of the water clocks and were contained in the shadows that told time on the sundials. And the images were becoming clearer as the clocks began to strike in a cacophony of sound, even as the clocks themselves grew dim. Dimmer and dimmer, the closer he leaned towards a white Westminster seven-day clock that was buzzing furiously...

And then he fell through the clock, as if into a Pensieve.

Scraps of sound and light and color flashed past him like photographs flipped faster than the eye could follow. There was his fifth birthday party. There was the time he'd hit Regulus over the head with a toy wand when he was six. There was Kreacher whispering malevolent bedtime stories about what happened to little boys who weren't good, who didn't obey their parents; the Crumple-Horned Snorkack might be permitted to come down the chimney and take him away... He wasn't going to find what he needed; he knew it instinctively. Sirius tore himself away from the memories and jumped into the next clock at hand, a large grandfather that was striking with the sound of an entire china cabinet crashing down a flight of stairs.

There was the yearly Imbeholc visit to the estate of his grandparents, and the solemn stuffy library where his grandfather always sat. Go and give your grandpapa a kiss, Siri. Go on. Honestly, I don't know what's wrong with him. Go and kiss him right now or I'll make you sorry... His grandfather's hooded, malevolent eyes, like some sinister bird of prey. The papery feel of his cheek, like dead parchment...

No. This wasn't it either.

He travelled through clock after clock after clock as they kept striking with a growing sense of urgency. The memories came faster and faster, more and more disconnected. A scrap of this. A scrap of that. The look on his mother's face when she learned he'd been sorted into Gryffindor. Ah, the shame of it. He'd never told her that the Sorting Hat had given him a choice, and that he'd refused to go into Slytherin as all the family had done... The tabby cat he'd once had. Grimalkin. Until he'd disappeared one day, and Kreacher had claimed he didn't know anything about it... The time his cousin Andromeda had come to Twelve Grimmauld Place to see his mother and hadn't been allowed in. She'd stood on the doorstep with her new baby in a pram, crying...

And neither was this.

The clocks had stopped striking. Sirius leaned against a desk, shaking. He'd tried them all. He didn't even know how that was possible-- there must be hundreds of clocks, here-- but he had done it. And none of them contained what he was trying to find, even though he didn't know exactly what he was trying to find.

A bright giggle came from behind him. He turned.

Seated at a large, low table was a girl with unevenly cropped red hair, dressed in randomly ripped rainbow-colored silks that flowed around her. On her hands she wore fingerless black gloves, and when he walked towards her Sirius saw that one of her eyes was blue, one green. And he knew who she must be.

"Lady Delirium," he said.

She didn't answer right away, being too absorbed in the huge shining bell jar on the table before her. All of the light in the room had been coming from it, he now saw. No, that wasn't quite it. The light flowered from her fingertips in fractured diamonds, and her fingers were thrust through the glass as if it were water. She was rolling a tiny, jewel-bright egg between her hands. As he watched, a red and gold hummingbird emerged. It flew to the very top of the jar and then seemed to falter, going through all the stages of bird life in reverse until it returned to the egg. Then she turned her smile on him. "Mm-hmm," she said. "Isn't this pretty? I think it's pretty. I like doing this with frogs, too... see..." And with a wave of her fingertips, a school of tadpoles floated in a current of water in the bell jar. They drifted towards the bottom and plumped out into multicolored frogs, hopping frantically around the jar and sticking to its sides with webbed feet before turning into frog eggs.

"Is this your realm, Lady?" Sirius asked her.

"I'm not quite exactly sure what happened to my realm. I think I lost it, and that's very sad because I had many flavors of ice cream there. I keep losing it and having to create new ones." The Immortal shrugged.

Sirius sat next to her. "I know you. I've seen you before. At Azkaban. I used to see you--uh-- visiting the prisoners who broke and went mad. After they went mad, I mean."

"Yes," said Delirium vaguely. “The lucky ones in Azkaban were mine. I liked to visit them. Some of them were nice and some of them weren’t. But you were never one of mine. Funny… you should have been but you weren’t. You might've been happier if you were.”

"Maybe," said Sirius.

The clocks ticked on. For a change of pace, Delirium created binary code and watched it develop into Java applets in its journey through the jar, and then back into a string of ones and zeros.

"Lady?" Sirius asked. "Could I ask you a question?"

"I don't know," she said, letting the zeroes skip down her palms. "Can you?"

"Is there a way to find what I need?"

She giggled. "Of course there is, silly. I'm glad you asked me that. There are a lot of things I can't tell you because they're not about you, but I can tell you that."

Sirius sighed. "Yes, well, it seems to me I've heard that song before. Why didn't it work, what I was doing? Going through the clocks?"

"Because that's just bits of memory projected, like wizarding photographs. Or like movies. Have you ever seen a movie? I like Disney movies because they always have happy endings. Once I changed every movie ever made so it had a happy ending. Scarlett got Rhett, and Charles Foster Kane went into therapy. Ilsa stayed with Rick in Casablanca, and nobody ever died at the end... And the audiences liked it too, but my brother made me change it back... Dream... because movies are his. They're called the ribbons of dreams, did you know?"

"Uh-- no, but-- Lady? What is that?" Sirius pointed to the bell jar.

"Oh. That. It's the Crucible of Time. I like to play with it."

"Um." His head was beginning to whirl. "Can that get me where I need to go?" he asked desperately.

"Of course it can!" Delirium laughed merrily, as if he had at last figured out a very good joke the two of them could now share.

Sirius put a hand on the outside of the jar. It was hard cool glass. "But how do I get in?"

"Take my hand." She stretched out one of her hands to him. Each fingernail was painted in stripes of different colors. He took it. A painless shock seemed to go through him, like a curse of such profound power that its impact couldn't be felt immediately. Her eyes began spinning in different directions, each a crazy whirlpool of blue or green light-- or wait, no, he was rushing through a narrow tunnel of swirling blue and green water at great speed. There were lights and sounds at the end, waiting for him; he went faster and faster, and he burst into the midst of a fully fledged memory.

He was playing with his little cousin Cissa. Her real name was Narcissa but she had a lisp, she’d always had it since she began to speak, although she will lose it around the age of ten. She was seven now, and he was nine. Her older sister Bella was watching them both, bitterly, grudgingly. She’d been assigned that duty while his mother and theirs presided over afternoon tea in the formal drawing room. She was sixteen and didn’t like minding stupid whining brats, as she puts it. He didn’t like Bella and Andromeda was older, he'd never known her well, she’d broken from the family too early for that, and she was already gone by then. The third sister, though, was a different matter. He was contemptuous about playing with girls sometimes, when he was with his friends, but there was a special place in his boy’s heart for Cissa. She was so beautiful, so unlike the other members of her family, although they were all handsome people too. But not like her; they were all dark, with black hair and brown or hazel eyes, and she was a fairy child, solemn and fair, with blue eyes and shining golden hair. She was so quiet, so fearful. It was always a challenge for Sirius to break down that unchildlike reserve and get her giggling.

He’d done it that day. She had little clips in her hair decorated with enamelled butterflies, and he’d set their jewelled wings fluttering. Spontaneous magic flowed out of him sometimes, as with all wizarding children, but he could already control it better than most. Cissa smiled, and it transformed her face, and ah yes, there was the gurgling delicious laugh that rang through the room, the one he so loved to hear.

Bella whipped her head round at the sound. “Can’t you hideous little brats keep your mouths shut?” she snarled. She was already angry, because she believed that she should have been included in the rigid, highly stratified tea ceremony that had so much in common with the ancient chanoyu ritual of Japan, although it would be impossible until she came of age the following year. Not that she had any patience for the ritual of tea, but Bella always wanted knowledge, power, inclusion. Hated being on the outside of things.

And with a wave of her wand, the butterflies became scorpions. Cissa gave a little cry of fear and tore them from her hair, whimpering a little when they nipped at her fingers. She had already learned to be quiet when she felt pain…

Sirius came back to himself a little then as the memory faded and he felt himself hover above it. What… how? he thought dazedly. Narcissa Malfoy… my cousin? Bellatrix and Andromeda’s sister? He’d been two years ahead of her at Hogwarts, but although he’d admired her beauty in an impersonal way, he had never, to the best of his knowledge, even spoken to her. She wasn’t even British, he did remember that. She was Bavarian, although most people didn’t know it, but then there weren’t many secrets that his family didn’t know. The Blacks themselves were distantly related to that most ancient and powerful of magical lines, the von Drachens, which was, of course, why Lucius and Narcissa had named their son Draco… no, wait, wait. Narcissa wasn’t a Black. Not in the world I know, slipped into his mind, unbidden. But here… in this one… it is not the same.

And he understood. This was exactly what Loki had promised him, a glimpse into a world that had diverged from his own. And somewhere, somehow, there was a difference that was desperately important. He could feel it, like a dog straining at its leash, desperate to drag him to a place it wanted him to go. He dove back into the bell jar of time.

He sped through his childhood as if flipping through the pages of a book. Many of the specific memories were the same. But there was a great difference waiting to happen, lurking in the future. Sirius paused on the night he ran away from home. Were his reasons the same? They seemed to be. Wait… here was a new memory, one that didn’t quite match the past. It was very late; the tremendous argument with his mother and his father had already happened, the one where they had hissed at him like snakes, trying to keep their voices down so that the visiting aunts and uncles and cousins wouldn't hear. He was preparing to slip out a side door once he knew everyone else was asleep. The furious anger in his head was the same. But now there was a deep hurt running through his heart, too, and that he did not remember. He dove into the scene.

“Don’t go,” Cissa was pleading with him. She had always been a light sleeper, and she heard him stealing down the back stairs, and came to try to stop him. She was crying, somehow managing to do it without any distortion of her face or hair so that she looked prettier than ever. She was nearly fifteen then, growing further every day into her earlier promise of beauty.

“I need to go.”

“Don’t.”

“But you know why... you know why I have to... haven't you ever felt it too? You must have done... come with me, Cissa!” He gripped her hands between his own. They were cold and white; the two of them stood at the foot of the outside stairs, and the winter wind whipped round them. She wore only a thin nightdress, and he wrapped the ends of his cloak around her, enclosing them both in its darkness, feeling the slight warmth of her body. “You can’t want to stay here and be married off to Lucius Malfoy," he said, his face inches from hers. "You just can’t. I won’t believe it of you, Cissa.”

He remembers now the source of this hurt. Her engagement to Lucius Malfoy had just been announced. They were to marry the day after she finished Hogwarts, in three and a half years. The Malfoy name was a rather dubious one by the standards of the Blacks. They were purebloods and had always been so, but they were also upstart peasants from the French Pyrenees, a few generations removed from scratching a living out of the earth. However, they were immensely rich, whereas the Black family fortune had become very much like an empty eggshell by then. Andromeda was a lost cause, but Bellatrix married well enough, into the Lestranges, and his parents and aunts and uncles had pinned their hopes on Narcissa. On a visit to the Lestrange estate in the French Pyrenees, they had gathered together their cousins, the Rosiers and the Malfoys and some relations or other of theirs, the Tessiers. That was how Michel Malfoy had first seen the thirteen-year-old Narcissa Black, fresh, unspoiled, and perfect, a daughter of one of the oldest British wizarding houses. And he instantly marked her out as the perfect mate for his own son, Lucius.

“Well, it’s not as I want to…” She wilted like a flower starved of water and then frozen in the wind, cast into a brittle mold of beauty. “I don’t have a choice, you know I don’t. But if you stayed…” Her eyes pleaded with him. Her beautiful eyes, blue as the deep shadows on the snow around them. If she had no other particular beauty of face or form she still would have been exquisitely beautiful in them. Then she drew up her slender elegant hands to hide them, cradling her face in her palms, sinking to the foot of the stairs where she and he stood. Those were hands that he had touched. Hands that he had kissed.

Sirius knelt down and touched his lips to her brow. “Goodbye, Cissa.”

Her child had the same way of moving his hands, I saw it even when he was an infant. That grace was all he ever got from her. Everything else was Lucius Malfoy. I knew it when I looked down at her fair-haired baby in his cradle, the last time I saw Cissa... and so I knew... I knew that Draco could not have been mine... wait, wait, what the hell am I thinking?

There was more to his memories of her, much more. It was all dark and full of anguish. He skipped over it as quickly as he could, not wanting to find out what any of it was.

The memories of everything else that came after that fell past his mind like a deck of Chocolate Frog cards thrown in the air. All, all the same. Once more, he felt the paralyzing grief of James and Lily dying. Once more, he felt the rage of Peter’s betrayal. That day on a London street, the explosion, the murder of all those Muggles. The death knell of going to Azkaban without trial. Twelve years there, and the agony of each one was somehow amplified, if anything, by the abbreviated way in which they were presented. Then his escape, going to Hogwarts, trying to find Harry. Wormtail escaping again. Coming so heartbreakingly close to freedom, to clearing his name, to taking Harry home with him... and then, his flight and hiding. He had never exactly been in the tropics, although he had deliberately used tropical birds to throw off anyone who might who tracking him, and watching his communications. Dumbledore had believed that he should go where no enemy or friend would ever expect him to go, into wizarding communities that had no contact at all with those in England, and that had never, or almost never, permitted European wizards in their midst. But Albus Dumbledore had contacts that no other European wizard had, and these magical communities, isolated and insular as they were, did at least know about the threat that Voldemort represented. So Sirius had vanished for nearly a year into the American Deep South.

Coming back to the cool green isles of Britain again, to Hogwarts, during Harry’s fourth year. His godson had never really had any idea of how desperately dangerous it was for him to come back. But Sirius had never begrudged him that danger, and it was better, perhaps, that the boy didn’t understand how profoundly he was loved, and cherished in the most secret part of Sirius’s heart, and how he would have willingly fought Voldemort himself rather than permitting Harry to face that evil…

And then, shockingly, abruptly, the memory did change.

For a moment, Sirius was so dumbfounded by it that he could only run over his memories of what actually had happened. There had been talk about reviving the Order of the Phoenix, but it never had come to much once everyone had learned that Harry truly had defeated Voldemort, as nobody had expected him to be able to do. Cornelius Fudge had been unbearably smug. There had been a brief time of deceptive calm. But then, Dumbledore had called them together, he and Remus and Moody, and they had begun to understand that something was still desperately wrong, some balance still shifted that ought to have been at rest. They had found out what Lucius Malfoy was trying to do-- to resurrect Lord Grindelwald, the dark wizard who had been far more terrible than Voldemort. Of course, they had still not understood exactly why the Death Eaters were taking the unprecedented step of going back four hundred years in time to find the talisman of incomparable power, the Jewel of the Harem. Its magical force would resurrect Grindelwald more fully, but there were other, far less drastic ways to do that. But it was not necessary to understand one's enemies' motivations entirely in order to be able to fight them. And silently, stealthily, they had begun to fight.

It had been necessary to bring Harry into that fight a little over a year before, and oh, how Sirius had argued against that. But after the things that had happened in the clock tower one year before, and Ginny's unwitting involvement in retrieving the prophecy contained in the Book of Dreams, he knew that there was no longer any way to avoid it. His part, and Remus's, was to create a magical reality in the clock tower that existed literally outside of time, and that contained the possiblity of a time warp, and time travel, in it. And it had all led to this. Harry and the others had gone. The Death Eaters had followed them, and, for some strange reason, Ginny Weasley. Dumbledore had retreated from the visible world into the heart of Hogwarts, the Chamber of Secrets, in order to preserve his powers. Like Merlin of old, he told them, he would emerge only at the last battle. Now there was nothing to do but wait, and watch. Keeping watch for a year had stretched every one of his own nerves to the breaking point and was driving him to rashness; he could see that now. Well, one way or another, it was almost done-- Sirius couldn't guess how long the race to grasp the Jewel of the Harem might take in the sixteenth century, but from his point of view, the end would come, however it came, just after the new year. So now he was waiting, waiting, frantic with pent-up frustration, waiting--

--waiting, nothing to do but wait in the house he thought he'd fled forever, but no, here he was, as if he'd jumped back into one of his worst nightmares. Sirius had often dreamed of wandering through this house in the years after he'd fled it, as he thought, for all time. And in those dreams it was always the same; derelict and abandoned, the wallpaper peeling and the carpet threadbare, every room infested with doxies and puffskeins, smothered and mummified, a house warped and deformed with long hiding away from faces and voices and the light. As it really was, now, with his mother, his brother, and his father long dead. But he, the prodigal son, had returned much against his will to the house of his fathers. To Twelve Grimmauld Place. For in this reality, in this world, that was where he had come.

But... how? Why? Why?

Yet the memories were frustratingly spotty and sometimes out of sequence; they made little sense without any sort of context. Sirius struggled to put them in order. He was spending a great deal of time either upstairs in Buckbeak's room, feeding him rats, or down in the basement kitchen. He had begun to drink heavily again, as he had for a little while during the first part of that year on the run. The sour taste of firewhiskey hangovers in his mouth. Kreacher, older and more malevolent than ever, a dirty loincloth dragging on the floor, a crafty gleam in his buglike eyes... Yet he wasn't always alone in the house. A long table lined with people-- Arthur and Molly Weasley, their oldest boy, Bill... and there was Tonks, Kingsley Shacklebolt, Dumbledore, Moody... ugh, they were all listening to Snape deliver some sort of information. A bolt of hatred stabbed him at the thought of Snape. He had some sort of reason to hate him in this world that even surpassed the reasons he had in the other, something that came out of the past, out of the Hogwarts days, but Sirius couldn't quite remember what it was... And there was Hermione, and Ron; they'd both been there all summer, and the youngest Weasley girl, Ginny... and Harry. Pain rushed through him. Harry, who he was to see so seldom that year, Harry, who looked so haunted, so unhappy, so filled with dread, and later there were strange terrible scars on the back of his right hand that certainly weren't there in the other world...

He tried to get at the central truth of this world, the reason why the Order of the Phoenix had set up headquarters in Twelve Grimmauld Place, why all these things were happening. He couldn't try to seize the answer to this problem, or it would dissolve under his fingertips. It was like sailing a boat. First you tacked a little to one side, then a little to the other, and you might reach your destination... Christmas. The house was full at last, and he himself filled with a soaring, rather manic happiness, grabbing the moments of companionship and fun and laughter before they disappeared again. Then the memory of something miserable and snarly. Snape came to see Harry and he and Sirius had a hideous quarrel, that was it. Snape was going to teach Harry something. Occlumency. But why Occlumency? Who did Harry need to keep out of his head; who was trying to get in it? And the answer slipped into place with the simplicity of a bolt sliding into a lock. Voldemort.

Lord Voldemort was trying to penetrate Harry's mind, and so they had all agreed to keep him in the dark about the activities of the Order of the Phoenix as much as possible. They had agreed to keep the prophecy from him, as well (what prophecy? Sirius wondered.) Except that Sirius hadn't agreed. He'd argued that Harry should be told; that he should know that Voldemort was after him, and...

...and that meant that Voldemort was still alive. Harry had not destroyed him at all. And between that world and the one he knew, that was the difference.

That, and Narcissa Malfoy. Why her? I grew up with her here; she was my cousin, and my playmate... and more than that, I think, she must have been more... But how odd. She looked exactly the same, fair and blonde, not the least bit like any of the Blacks. How, and why, could that be important? wondered Sirius. But it was more important, he decided, to figure out how all of this had ended. There was a feeling of urgency about it all, as if his time here were limited.

The memories became more and more fragmented. Harry had gone to the Department of Mysteries; that was it. But it was a trap. He'd gone because he thought that Sirius was imprisoned there and was in terrible danger, and so he'd risked his own life, and the lives of his friends, to save his godfather. Snape had come to tell them that, and Sirius had honestly wondered for a moment if it were all some sort of weird trap as well, and Snape a triple agent trying to get them there. But he could no more hold back from going to rescue Harry than Harry had been able to keep from rushing off to rescue him. And so they had gone...

There was a great deal of fighting, confusion, noise. The memories were getting very hard to shake into any sort of coherent order. But it was in one of the rooms at the Department of Mysteries; Sirius was sure of that, one he'd never been in. It was set up like a tiny coliseum with rows of stone seats in concentric circles, and a stone dais at its center. He couldn't see whatever was on it, since his back was to it in the memory, but he could feel whatever it was, like a constantly fluttering breath of cool wind. He'd been dueling with Dolohov first, he thought, and then Bellatrix. Yes, it was his cousin Bella; she must have escaped from Azkaban, he thought. He remembered how astonished he had been to see the wreck of her once-beautiful face, and yet it had still retained traces of its former beauty... and he had seen the wreck of himself, mirrored in her large dark eyes. Yes, they had dueled, and she had hit him squarely with a Stunning Spell. And then...

... and then...

... there was a sensation of falling. Endlessly falling. Always away, away, away from the room, and yet he wasn't moving at all. Something ragged fluttered past him. Still falling. Yet still standing on the stone dais, and Sirius could now see that before him was a stone arch and a tattered black veil, like a translucent curtain. The last thing he saw in the room was Harry, running towards him, wand upraised, an expression of surprise on his face.

"Sirius!" he called, in the boy's voice that had only stopped cracking that year. "Sirius..."

But then he and the room faded into nothingness.

"Do you want to see what happened next?" asked the voice of Loki.

"Yes," Sirius replied. They were both floating in some sort of formless space.

"Are you sure?"

"I want to see it all."

"Very well. Mortals are never exactly happy after seeing this, you should know. But remember, you asked for it..."

Sirius was standing at the end of a long dark passage. Loki was nowhere to be seen, but sitting beside him was a woman dressed all in black. He blinked. The veil seemed to be actually falling from her head. Then it seemed that she herself was the passageway between the room in the Department of Mysteries and wherever he was now. No. She was both the veil, and the door. She looked up at him from great dark eyes lined with kohl, and the beauty of her face pierced him through and through. Around her neck was an ankh on a chain. And he knew who she was, she who waited at his journey's end, as she waited for every mortal being.

"Lady," he whispered. "Lady Death."

She nodded. "I've been waiting for you."

"This is the end of this world," he said, past a sudden lump in his throat. "Isn't it?"

"For you," she said, and laid her hand on his arm in a friendly fashion. It felt quite like a human hand. Dazedly, he remembered reading that only one of all the Immortals may touch mortal flesh without bringing madness or destruction, and that she was that one. But he had already touched her sister Delirium; that was how he had gotten here in the first place, and he felt all right... well, no, he didn't...

"Where am I?" he blurted. "What has this really been? Was any of it actually real, or was it all illusion? Am I asleep? Dreaming? Mad? What?"

"Well, I really wish I could explain it, because I like you, Sirius. But I don't think I can... "

In his human form, he felt her hand caressing his arm, soothingly; in his dog form, he felt her fingers scratching the back of his head, behind his ears. All of his selves were utterly exposed to her gentle, merciless touch.

"It's a bit like this. In the house of the Endless," she said, "there are many mansions." Lady Death looked down at her hand, still stroking his wrist. "But mortals are always stuck in one little room and only one, and they can't leave, whether they're magical folk or not... because it's all still the magic of mortals. Human beings in the universe are like cats and dogs in a house. You have no idea of what's really going on, and it's easier that way, believe me. But now, you've been shown something. Something that is not, but that might have been, and that might still be."

"And what is it that I am shown now, Lady?" Sirius whispered.

In answer, she looked up at him again, and smiled. And then Sirius understood why mortals always went with her, leaving life behind willingly, even eagerly at the last. He knew that the smile of Lady Death would stay in his mind past every other living memory. But even as he leaned towards her, she held up her hand, palm out. The surface was smooth and utterly without lines.

"Not yet," she said.

"Will I ever see you again?" he asked, realizing too late what a remarkably stupid question that was.

""Everybody sees me again," she said. "One way, or another." Before Sirius could attempt to process her last words, she had taken his head between her two hands. Her fingers on his cheeks were cool, like marble, but they felt human. She kissed his brow, once, very gently. Kissed by Death, Sirius thought dazedly.

"Listen," he forced himself to say. "Was I the only one who died? What happened to everyone else?"

She shook her head. "I can't--"

"Tell me," he finished for her. "I should have guessed." He was suddenly incredibly weary, and his head fell to her breast without his volition. It was warm and dark and comforting, and he closed his eyes.

"What a cute couple," said Loki, who had suddenly popped into existence. "Are you going to seduce a mortal now, cousin? Can I watch?"

Lady Death let go of Sirius's head and jerked a thumb in some indeterminable direction. "You. Out. Now."

"'Fraid not," the devil said, smiling sunnily. "I'm allowed here, too." Then he circled round Sirius and began to whisper in his ear. so close that he could feel his breath. Did a devil have breath? It felt hot as all the fires of hell.

"Unsettling, isn't it? Seeing one's own death?"

"Let me go," Sirius said shakily.

"Going into darkness, into oblivion... forever and ever and ever. Unless you choose to become a ghost, but what a sad unlife that is."

"Get away from me. Away."

But Loki only continued to speak, his voice smooth and sweet, eddying into the ear. "Think of it, Sirius. Your powers and your weaknesses, your loves and your hates, your dreams and your nightmares, all of life you have remembered, all of life you have forgotten... gone, all gone, like sand trickling through an hourglass. And that is what may well be... unless..."

If you meet the devil by the side of the road, ask him no questions. Where had he heard that, or read it? No matter. It was too late. Everything during that long, long night had been leading up to this question.

"What must I do?" Sirius asked.

In answer, Loki held up his arms. Sirius could see clearly now that they were twined round with flickering red symbols, like chains of fire. "Set me free, Sirius Marcus Black. Set me free."

It had all led to this moment, the vision. It had all contained this decision, as a frame contains a painting. "I don't understand," Sirius said.

"There are only four mortals who walk this earth who can do it, and you are one."

"Who are the others, then?"

"One I may not ask. One has refused me. One I have not yet tried. See-- I must tell you truth, if you ask me."

"I-- I can't."

"This world would never need to be," the devil said in honeyed tones. "If I had my full powers, I could prevent--"

"I-- I mustn't."

"Do you really think the dreary powers of good could stand against Lord Voldemort returned? For you saw that was what happened, didn't you? You would be like straws in a fire."

"I--I--"

And then the devil made a fatal mistake, as devils have a tendency to do. Or at least that was what Sirius decided later.

"And you'll live," he said, in the tones of a cardsharp playing a trump card. "I can't promise you that you'll never die, of course, but you'll live a long, full life. Time to clear your name. Time to watch Harry grow up. And that's all that matters, you know. Just a bit more time, adding more years to your life. Because there are so many years to lie silent and dead, Sirius..."

And Sirius could feel them, the choking weight of eternity, each second and minute and hour of death dragging him down like a millstone round his neck. And he could prevent a great evil, his mind insisted in the last open space of light and air and sound before darkness closed in entirely. A world where Lord Voldemort had not been defeated, a world where the Death Eaters would surely win-- that must be a very great evil. What else had they been working against all this time, after all? If he only loosed Loki from his bonds... if he only stretched out his hands and touched the wrist of that unearthly white arm the devil held out to him, touched him of his own free will...

"That's it," whispered Loki. "Just a little further..."

But wait, a little voice inside him insisted. Don't pretend you're doing this to save the world from Voldemort, or some such noble aspiration. You want to save yourself. Be honest, at least. It's exactly like the times you'd be grateful when a Dementor slaked its thirst on another prisoner, because it meant you were safe from giving up a tiny part of your soul for another minute, another hour, another day... do you remember how it was... when there was no concern for any other living being in you? Do you remember... when you didn't give a damn what anyone else suffered? You would have sacrificed anyone to save yourself, Sirius. Because all you cared about was yourself. Remember?

Yes. Sirius remembered.

He came to himself. His fingers hovered centimetres away from Loki's arm. And the devil's face was filled with hunger unlike any human hunger that had ever been. It was a starvation that had lasted longer than the universe itself, that had ravened before the first star.

Sirius jerked his hand back.

"Never," he snarled. "Never. You won't get to me that way."

Loki nodded, as if conceding a point in a game. His face smoothed into a mask, unreadable. He dropped his arm without a word and Lady Death moved to stand behind him. The Immortals both looked at Sirius quietly, inscrutably, standing together. As if, whatever their differences, they were akin and not alien.

Neither of them spoke. But Lady Death raised one white hand in farewell, and turned away. She and Loki seemed to be retreating from him at a frantic rate, along with the arch, the veil, the room, and the corridor, as if everything Sirius had just seen was rewinding itself crazily. It zoomed away from him and he grasped at it; suddenly realizing that even with everything he had seen, he had understood nothing. But he had almost understood, almost made sense of it all... if it would only stay just a little longer...

His eyes opened. He was looking up at the starry night sky. It wasn't filtered through the branches of trees, but was bright and clear. Slowly, Sirius sat up and looked around. He was out of the forest, and sitting at the very end of the path at the edge of the fields behind Hogwarts. His head was going round and round; what had he just seen? Could any of it have been real? Or was it all only an illusion of the forest? Or was it because he had joined hands with Delirium?

"If we shadows have offended, say but this, and all is mended. That you have but slumbered here, while we phantoms did appear." Loki flickered into existence behind him, laughing. "Is that what you wanted to hear? Alas, such is not the case. It was real... or might have been real... or may yet be real. And if you search your feelings, you will find that you know it to be true, Sirius Marcus Black. But I cannot stay for further discourse, alas, not now. Will you say yea, or nay?"

Sirius said nothing.

"Snake got your tongue?" Loki asked. "Ah, well. Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue, We will make amends ere long; Else the Puck a liar call; So, good night unto you all. Give me your hands, if we be friends, And Loki shall restore amends." He stretched out his hand in a gesture of farewell. All the fingers were of equal length, Sirius saw. Then he winked out into nothingness, still laughing.

Sirius flopped back down onto the frozen ground with a sigh. Lying here and freezing to death just might be the easiest of the options presented to him.

Lady Gwenhyfar, Lady Gwenhyfar
she was handsome, she was fair,
and she went out to Elphick Glen
for to gather the flowers and the leaves so green
for to gather the flowers and the leaves.

And it's then she saw a young man
and he ran up to her side,
saying Who are you to gather flowers
without the leave of me, my dear,
without the leave of me?

A high elfin voice was singing, its tones eerie and just the slightest bit off-key, but in a pleasant way. It was drawing closer. As he watched, its owner came into view. The voice belonged to a young girl, fifteen or sixteen, he thought, dressed in a long blue cloak that flickered with rainbow colors. Her long dirty-blond hair fell about her face, and her blue eyes were large, prominent, and mild. She wore a wreath of dried grasses on her hair, and in one hand she held a witchlight.

Oh, I will walk in Elphick Glen
as freely as I please
and I will pick the flowers and leaves
without the leave of you, kind sir,
without the leave of you.

Then he catch'd her by the middle
and he gently laid her down
and when she ask'd the young man's name
he said My name it is Tam Lin;
he said, My name's Tam Lin.

It had just begun to snow, and the flakes fell lightly on her head and shoulders. She wandered as if through a dream, apparently taking no notice of her surroundings. Closer and closer she came.

The truth I'll tell you, Gwenhyfar,
and a word I would not lie;
I am a knight and a lady's son,
and I come from a noble house, he said,
from a noble family--

He sprang to his feet and seized her wrist in one lightning-quick motion. He thought that she would cry out in fear, but strangely she did not. "Who are you?" Sirius asked hoarsely. Really, no answer that she could have given would have surprised him.

"I'm a student at Hogwarts, of course," she said serenely.

He grasped the girl's wrist more tightly, as if she might fade into nothingness at any moment. He would not have been in the least surprised if she had done. "But who are you?"

"Luna Lovegood," she replied. "A fifth-year. And you really shouldn't hold my arm so tightly as that. I do bruise very easily, you know." She might have been correcting the addition of an incorrect ingredient to a potion.

"Sorry," Sirius mumbled, beginning to feel ashamed. He loosened his fingers but did not let go. "Your father..." He struggled to remember. "Publishes the Quibbler, doesn't he?"

"Oh, yes." She looked behind him, along the path where it wound into darkness. "Did you come from the forest?"

"I hardly know anymore." Sirius rubbed his jaw. "But I suppose I did, yes."

I come in here sometimes to see Delirium," Luna said dreamily. "She likes me. And Destiny, I like to talk to Destiny. We discuss his book, and he says that I'm one of those who can truly see far, one of the few... But I'd never go past the edges of the forest. I think you went in too far."

She began to walk through the grounds, the weed stalks rustling as she passed, pulling him with her. Sirius allowed her to do so, dazed. He wasn't completely sure that she was who she claimed to be, or that this Luna Lovegood was, in fact, human at all. Still he followed her. She stopped at the edge of an overgrown rose garden that abutted the field where the clock tower was.

"I don't think I should come any further. This is the place you want. And there's the door." She pointed at the black door set in the base of the tower. "At least I think it is. There are so many doors here, aren't there, leading to so many entrances and exits... very confusing sometimes... Well, goodbye, Sirius Black." She made as if to go. He held her arm fast.

"Wait, wait. How do you know my name, Luna?" he demanded.

For the first time, she looked startled, a little scared. "I'm not supposed to talk about things like that," she whispered.

"Things like what, what do you mean? Tell me what you mean." Where they were standing was very exposed, Sirius realized, and somehow it made him nervous. He wanted to be within walls. He began walking towards the tower, now pulling Luna with him.

"I'm not supposed to go near the clock tower," she said. "Please, let go of me--" Her unnatural calm was broken, and she was now a frightened girl. Sirius felt a faint wave of shame, but after everything that had happened there seemed little room in him for normal emotions, or worrying too much about anyone else's feelings.

"I'm not going to hurt you," he said. "Don't be afraid. I only want to know--"

"But my aunt warned me never to talk about--"

"Who's your aunt?" he demanded abruptly, halting at the base of the tower.

"S-Sybil Trelawney," Luna said, her lips trembling, trying not to cry, leaning against the tower for support.

Sirius stared at her. "You're a Seer. A real Seer. That's what Destiny meant, isn't it, when he said you were one of those who could truly see far?"

But Luna did not answer. She looked troubled, and her eyes grew curiously blank, as if staring out over an infinite distance. "What is it? Something's changed. It's almost the same," she said in a wandering whisper. "Yet not the same, not quite. I am here, yet not here. Something has shifted. I stand in one of the Soft Places."

Sirius did not ask what she was talking about. He knew. Insane as it was, he knew. He was holding her arm too hard; he knew it, and he certainly didn't want to hurt her, but there was that tantalizing feeling again, the one he'd had when the room, the arch, the veil, and the Immortals were all speeding away from him at the end of the vision. He could almost see that other world he had experienced in brief glimpses, could so nearly recapture it. It hovered all around him like a mirage even as he stood at the base of the clock tower in the Hogwarts he knew, holding Luna Lovegood's arm. And she was sharing it. What he almost saw, she almost saw-- and yet it seemed that she was also seeing more than he did. Her strange eyes seemed to see everything that had ever been.

"Ah, see. Ah, see, he sleeps in the arms of the grey king. Harry?" she asked uncertainly. "Harry, will you leave us now?"

"What?" His grip tightened even further.

"He walks in darkness," she said then, and her voice had changed into a low, gravelly growl.

Sirius felt a deep prickling along his skin,and knew, knew that he was about to hear that rarest of things-- a true prophecy.

"The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches. Born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies. And the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not. And either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives. The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord will be born as the seventh month dies..."

Then Luna crumpled against the door where she had been leaning, but Sirius barely noticed. He sleeps in the arms of the grey king. Harry, will you leave us now? Either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives... Harry... Harry... And in a flash, he understood, or seemed to understand.

The prophecy had to refer to Harry Potter. Yet Luna had said that the one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches. She could only be talking about Harry's birth, but the words were framed as if the event had still to take place. There was only one explanation. What she'd said was not an original prophecy, but a vision of one, and Sirius was suddenly, utterly sure that it was the one existing in the other world, the one he had so wondered about. In his world, Harry had defeated Voldemort, and survived. He was scarred, and marked, and haunted by what he had been forced to do since, but he still lived. But Luna must be able to see into both worlds, as true Seers did. Of course she would see more clearly than he, in that case, or at least when she both saw and spoke as a Seer.

And so in the other world, Harry was doomed; when Voldemort fell, so must he. He walks in darkness. That was what the first part of the prophecy must have meant. And this, this was the link between that world and the one in which he lived, that world that was coming, that must be... For an insane moment, Sirius would have been glad to bargain with the Devil. But it was too late. Too late. Or was it?

He felt something against his foot. It was Luna; she had fainted and fallen to the ground. He lifted her, slung her over his shoulder-- tall as she was, the girl seemed to weigh almost nothing-- and opened the door to the clock tower, carrying her upstairs. The door to the bedroom was ajar and Sirius could hear Remus's steady breathing. Quickly, lightly, he carried Luna up the winding bit of stair to the tiny side room off the clockface. There were two little cots in it, a chair, and a bookshelf. He laid her down on one of the mattresses. Her eyes blinked open.

"Where am I?"

"You'll be staying here for a little while," he said evasively. The enormity of what he was doing threatened to break in upon him. He had kidnapped a girl and was planning to hide her in the clock tower. If he could only talk to Dumbledore, he argued with his own conscience, a better plan could surely be found. But he couldn't. And Remus would never need to know. He had quite enough on his mind as it was. "Do you remember the things you just said?" he asked Luna.

"No," she replied. Her eyes roamed around the room, the irises pale, the expression blank. She seemed drained and colorless, and Sirius remembered reading that genuine Seers were always that way after delivering a prophecy. But if he let her rest--

"This place is very strange," she said vaguely. "It gives me a strange feeling. Like thoughts and ideas are struggling to get out of me, or like there are things I have to say."

"Really." Even better. A flash of triumph went through him. In a place of such strong magic, anyone with the sensitivity this girl obviously possessed would see more visions. True, the use of visions for one's own purposes was dark magic, very dark magic indeed. But desperate times, he told himself, call for desperate measures. In the end, everyone would thank him.

And he'd be very, very kind to this girl.

"Are you thirsty, Luna, or hungry?" he asked softly. "Are you warm enough? Do you want more blankets?"

"I don't think you should keep me here," she said.

"I'm afraid I have to," said Sirius. "Just for a little while." He patted her hand. "I'll come back soon. It's very late; get some sleep."

The girl kept looking at him with her great troubled eyes. They followed him out of the room. Just as he was closing the door, however, he remembered something that had been bothering him. "Luna?" he asked, turning back towards her.

"Yes?"

"How did you find me? In the forest, I mean?"

"A tall man with silvery hair stopped me in the wood," Luna said, her voice wandering a little. "There were flames all around him. He looked as if he were falling through fire... And he told me where I would find you, and told me that you needed me to lead you from one world to the next, or you might be lost on the borderlands and never, never find your way back to Hogwarts. You would only wander in the Soft Places until time and times were done, and I couldn't let that happen..."

"Loki," whispered Sirius. "Loki sent you to me."

"Goodnight," she said, turning over, pulling the blankets up to her chin.

"Sirius, is that you?" said Remus's drowsy voice from the other little bed in the bedroom.

"Of course it's me." He was in no mood to talk, not now. His heart was beating thick and fast. A guilty drumbeat. He wanted only to sleep.

"You got back through the forest all right, I see... I was worried..."

No, I didn't.

"I had a strange dream about you. You were being led down a dark path, and I called and called to you, yet you wouldn't turn around."

"Good night, Remus," Sirius said, pointedly.

Then his friend was silent, yet sleep would not come, and Sirius found himself staring up into the darkness. His conscience , perhaps, was what would not let him sleep. What a strange, mismatched, misshapen thing it was. So weak and small in so many ways, so stunted and malformed. All his scruples were saved for Harry, the one living being on earth he truly loved.

No, he thought, glancing at the restless figure in the other bed. That wasn't entirely true.

He wished for a despairing moment that there were some way of getting Remus the hell out of here. The tendrils of... something... were tightening around him; he could feel it. He didn't want Remus pulled along with him into the gathering darkness. Like the visions he'd had of the strange outer worlds around the clock tower, only he could see it, and only he did see it. He had a sudden mental picture of his friend walking into that darkness, all unknowing...

There are two people I have loved in this world, and I see something coming for them both, clutching at them with clawed hands. Must I sacrifice one to try to save the other?

Sirius shook himself. He was being ridiculous. There was no question of sacrificing anybody. He was simply trying to learn as much as he could; that was why he'd brought Luna here, why he was going to try to find out if she could see even more than she'd seen today. There was no harm in that.

But he had not made a bargain with the Devil. He hadn't.

And he wouldn't.

Surely not.

Far below, Millicent Bulstrode watched the door of the clock tower slam as Sirius disappeared, Luna Lovegood slung over his shoulder. She let all her breath out in a rush.

"What do you see?" Ivy Parkinson asked excitedly beside her, rubbing her hands together, blue with cold.

"Just a second," said Millicent. "A rose bush is digging into my bum." They were crouched in the deserted rose garden where Luna had first led Sirius. "He just took her up into the clock tower."

"I still don't see any clock tower," said Colin. "And I'm cold."

"Shut up, Colin," said Millicent.

"I'll decide who shuts up around here," said Ivy. "You're not getting paid to think, Millicent. You're here to do as I say. Shut up, Colin."

"I still don't understand why I can't see it," Colin whined.

"Salazar Slytherin had the right idea," muttered Ivy. "Muggle-borns shouldn't have ever been let in this school."

"What?"

"Never mind. All right, I'll explain it to you again. Only Millicent can see the tower because Luna is her close-cousin. And she can only see it now because Luna got taken into it. And we've been following that dingbat for days now because--"

"Zabini told you before they left that there were orders from the top to keep an eye on her, yes yes," interrupted Colin. "I'm not thick, you know."

Ivy said something under her breath about the way in which he was giving a remarkable imitation, then, but quietly enough so that he had an excuse to pretend he hadn't heard it. She felt strongly that it wasn't wise to push Colin Creevey too far.

"So now we know what we need to know," she said, more loudly. "That's where they are. That's where they're keeping track of what's happening... then." It was better not to speak more clearly in a place where they could be overheard; she'd been reminded of that point repeatedly in the secret meetings before everyone left for Malfoy Manor. "And now we only need to get someone in there."

"Why do you always end up looking at me?" asked Millicent.

"Nobody else can do it. We can't even see it."

"But how? What am I going to do, march up to the front door of the tower and start knocking? Hi, I heard my cousin was here, thought I'd pop round for a visit?"

Millicent was stupid enough to do just that with the slightest encouragement, Ivy thought. "Of course not. But that's the problem. You can't break in; that's not the way these sorts of magical places work. You have to be invited... I'll think of a way. Perhaps..." She propped her chin on her hands, thinking. "Perhaps we can get you in the same way Luna got in."

"Kidnapped by Sirius Black?" Millicent's dark eyes began to sparkle.

"I'm sure you'd love that," Ivy said dryly.

"Twelve years in Azkaban, just think. He must be rather desperate by now, I'd expect. Maybe I could arrange to be found bathing in the lake, and he'd jump on me in an excess of passion and drag me back to the--"

"It's December, Millicent." Ivy often wondered how anybody could be as thick as Millicent Bulstrode was and still manage to walk around. "Is anything still going on at the tower?"

Millicent shook her head.

"Then let's go. It's horribly cold, and it must be almost dawn."

"The common room's good and warm by now. I laid a fire before we left." Colin slipped an arm around Ivy's waist, leering. She wanted to shake it off, but didn't dare. He tried putting his other arm around Millicent as well, and she slapped him.

"How many times do I have to tell you, I'm not doing a threesome with you," she said.

"But what about Zabini and Warrington?"

"Lies, all lies."

"And Xanthia Morgan and Sadina von Tussel?"

"Ooh! They swore they'd keep their mouths shut, those--"

"And Draco Malfoy and--"

Ivy paid little attention to the conversation, which had been enacted in her presence before. Things were beginning to happen; she could feel it in her bones, and a hot, thick excitement started to fill her.

"Don't worry about her. I'll keep you occupied," she told Colin, and he began to grope at her as they slipped into one of the deserted back doors into the lower halls of Hogwarts, Millicent trailing them and turning off towards her own room at the first opportunity. Yes, at moments like these, Colin suited her very well.

Loki saw them on his last journey back to Leith, and chuckled. A pair after his own heart.

December 1566

Four hundred years earlier, in the upper room of the Lion and the Unicorn, Ginny Weasley was dreaming of stars.

Orion, she'd thought drowsily, looking up into the sky, memories of Astronomy classes flickering through her mind, and of Draco pointing out the constellations to her as they'd stood by the window, before it all had begun. She had thought she was far too upset to sleep, but her eyes grew heavy as she stood, and finally she sat on the floor, continuing to look up. Cassopeia. The Great Wheel, shambling across the sky... the wheel of birth and rebirth... Then the stars were drawing closer, sending out streamers of fiery white light. They spilled across her like strands of hair, soft, supple hair, hair like the ashes of burnt silver. She knew someone with hair like that, she thought in the boundary between sleep and waking, but she could not, for the moment, think who. Then the lowest star reached down and kissed her. She slipped entirely into dream, where she walked the Milky Way hand in hand with Draco Malfoy as innocently as Adam and Eve before the fall.

In the hour before dawn, Lord Morpheus, wandering through the dreams of mortals, saw Ginny lying in Draco's arms high above the skies of Istanbul. She had dreamed that he pursued her across the skies until she permitted him to catch her, and she gave to him what she had never given to any man. The two of them, in their delight, had formed a new constellation. Court astronomers studied them from high towers, and sailors on barges entering the waters of the Sublime Porte saw them emblazoned across the city, all its inhabitants wondering what fate such bright stars might portend.

"I do not envy you your fate, little dreamer, little Gwenhyfar," he murmured. And she woke then, although she did not at first know it.

She was curled up on the floor beneath the small, high window set in the plastered wall. The bed had not been slept in. Draco had not returned, and the fire burned low. Ginny shivered with cold. How strange, that she should feel cold in a dream. But she was quite sure that she was still dreaming; everything seemed pregnant with magic, and the very air was charged with the unearthly feeling that never belongs to waking hours. She went to the door, and tried it. Still locked. She turned. Sitting in the chair by the fire, the one in which she had tried to sleep, was a man. There was no way in which he could have gotten past her without her seeing or hearing him. So, without a doubt, this was still a dream.

"Who are you?" she asked in a conversational way, walking over to him.

"A traveler who has come far," he answered.

"What are those chains around your arms?" she asked curiously, pointing at the red web of symbols that flickered around his wrists.

"They are the chains that bind me."

"Oh. She sat cross-legged at his feet, and looked up into his face, perfect as a carved marble statue. His hair was long and curling and silvery, but touched with glints of red and scarlet, as if it were floating through fire. "Wouldn't you like to be set free?"

The atmosphere in the room sharpened suddenly. "Yes. Set me free. Set me free, Gwenhyfar."

She stretched out her hand, leaning closer to the man. Her fingers were nearly touching him. But as she brushed past the foot of the chair, the edge of her green gown knocked a hot coal from the fire, and it glanced against her ankle.

"Ouch!" She leaped up, swatting at her leg. The smell of scorched cloth filled the room and she coughed at how sharp and acrid it was. Why in the world would she be dreaming about that... wait....

"This isn't a dream," she said slowly, staring at the tiny blackened hole in her skirt. "This is real. I'm awake!" She scrambled back from the man as far as she could go until she was flattened against the opposite wall, breathing like a small, scared animal.

"Don't be afraid. It's all right. Really it is... please, listen to me..." He held up his hands in a placating gesture.

"How'd you get in here?" she demanded. Oh dear Goddess, how she wished her wand worked now! She had absolutely no weapon at all.

The man shrugged. "A little time travel, a little nature hiking... thank God I didn't have to go Greyhound. Look, that's not important now--"

She looked at him hard. Her eyes had been trained to see magic, and she saw now that he was more than he appeared to be. "You're that same man who talked to us downstairs, the one who disappeared. But who are you, really?"

"I can see I'd better cut to the chase." He strode towards her, smiling pleasantly and putting out his hand to shake. Ginny shrank back. "Really, there's nothing to be afraid of. We're going to be great friends."

"Who are you?" Ginny asked, almost despairingly.

The man sighed, nostalgically. "I used to get that all the time, you know. Who are you? What are you doing here? How'd you get into my palace? But then they realized who I was, and then it was always worship, prayers, falling down to their knees, and the rest of the god-related claptrap. I do miss it, though. Nobody does that anymore."

Ginny remembered the legends she'd studied, the Muggle fairy tales and myths where unearthly beings had to be asked questions three times, because on the third time they must answer. She looked at the man intently. "Who are you?" she asked, and her voice was quiet now. So was his, when he answered her, and there was no mockery in it this time.

"I am the god Loki," he said. "Do you know me now?"

And Ginny knew the being before her, and knew that he had, in some form or another, been chasing her since she had fled Hogwarts. Well, he had found her at last. Her mind rummaged frantically back over every scrap of information she had ever learned about Loki during her years of magical training. He was the king of all tricksters and all liars, and he would draw her into his web of deceit, if he could; oh, she must keep her wits about her now.

"I don't see how you can really be who you say," she said suspiciously. "I read about Loki in a book at the school library called Unworshipped Gods-- Where Are They Now? It said that the Norse and German gods were all dead, because nobody remembered them anymore, or worshipped them."

"Oh, gods die, like everything else." He settled himself comfortably in the chair, stirring the fire to new life with a poker. "I am Loki, but I am also more than Loki. If you want to be regional about it, you could call me Pan, or Robin Goodfellow, or Puck. Where the bee sucks, there suck I. Full fathon five my father lies. Oh wait, that's King Lear; never mind. I am the Green Man, the Year-King, He Who Runs With the Deer, Jack Sparrow, and Tom Bombadil. I have been unkindly known as Satan-- don't believe anything you hear about me under that name-- and I've also been called Merlin, although that isn't right at all, since he was only a jumped-up mortal who happened to get ahold of King Arthur's P.R. It's like buying penny stocks; you have to be in the right place at the right time. I'm losing you, aren't I?" he said at the blank look on her face. "All times are one to me, so I do tend to mix my metaphors. Many mortals of these British isles have woven names and tales about me, as have all mortals of all times and places-- but--" and his mocking voice suddenly grew serious "-- there is a reason why I am Loki to you, why I must be. And when they know that, your journey will be nearly done."

"I don't understand at all," said Ginny.

"Listen to me, listen." His voice grew suddenly serious. "My time is short. My imprisoned form has so little power. These are the only days in the year when I may walk among mortals, when the boundaries between worlds grow thin." His eyes were like silvery pools that had no bottom, and his voice caressed her into a langorous, dreamy stupor. "Set me free, set me free."

She struggled fiercely to hold fast to her own will. "Why?" she managed to gasp. "Why should I? I know what you are."

"Do you?" He chuckled. "No, I don't think you do. So you wonder what's in it for you, do you?"

"That's not what I said. See, you're twisting my words already!" Ginny folded her arms defiantly. "No. I won't do it."

Loki seemed about to argue. A shadow of menace passed over his face, like the tremor of the ground before an earthquake. Ginny's mouth went dry, and she fumbled for the doorknob behind her. But the door was locked. And what good would it do to escape the room, anyway?

In that moment of awful stillness, the distant clock tower boomed the hour. Five o'clock. Loki shook himself. "My time is almost up," he said quietly. "If you will not free me, will you take a gift from me at least, Gwenhyfar?"

"I'm sure I've heard that taking gifts from the Devil isn't a good idea. Yes! I have. I've read about Faust."

"Faust was an idiot. You're no idiot. I believe that you can understand, at least a little. As long as mortals need someone to blame for their own actions, I'll continue to get called the Father of Lies, the Prince of Darkness, Lucifer, the Son of the Morning, cast out of heaven by the seraphim, and a number of other titles which I privately think are quite dreary. But I am more than that, Gwenhyfar."

"What would you give me?" she asked cautiously. After all, there's no harm in at least finding out.

"I would give you the only gift I have ever given to mortals, and the only curse," Loki replied. "Knowledge."

"Knowledge..." Ginny whispered.

"But then, do you truly want it? And are you brave enough to take it? " His fathomless eyes mocked hers. "Men and women always say they do, and are. Then, when it all blows up in their faces, they can't think of anything better to do than to blame me. Would you take my gift, Gwenhyfar?"

"You said--" Ginny struggled to think "-- it was also a curse. But how could knowledge be a curse?"

"God only knows, and She isn't telling. But I've never been thanked for it yet. So do you want it? It's a limited-time offer."

Ginny stood motionless, staring into the space past Loki's left shoulder.

"Isn't there anything you want to know? Something you need to know?" His voice was coaxing now, sweet and wheedling.

"Ron," she whispered. "I want to know where my brother Ron is, and where my other brothers are as well. And I want to know-- but I don't think you can show me this." Somehow they had both moved so that she was in front of the mirror. She saw her haunted, terrified self in it, but she also saw him, and that, she thought, was strange. Weren't gods and devils supposed to cast no reflection? Well, maybe that was just vampires.

"Ask, and ye shall receive, Gwenhyfar," said Loki, his mirror-self sardonic.

"I want to know how to get out of the Hexensymbol bond with Draco Malfoy," she said.

"Be careful what you ask for," said Loki. "You might get it." He passed one white hand over her face, and her eyes closed.

The room was dark, very dark, but there was a single candle flame. She was floating above it, Ginny realized after a moment. It sputtered and then flared, spreading a dim circle of light, and glinted off something red. A head of hair, auburn with fiery highlights. Ron. She tried to figure out where he was, what he was doing. He wore a long black cloak and had slung a pack over his shoulder, she could see that. All his movements were restless and jerky, yet very controlled, as if he were trying not to make too much noise. He held the candle high in its pewter base and it briefly illuminated the room. It was at a waterfront inn, she guessed, not so very unlike the one she herself was in now, or where her body lay while her spirit roamed free, at least. But this one was rougher and dirtier. She could hear the soft lap of the waves in the distance through the window, which had a bit of oiled parchment nailed to it, rather than a glass pane. His face looked almost feverish. Is he ill? she wondered with a sudden pang. Her brother opened the door very carefully and slowly, glanced from side to side, and began to steal out into the corridor.

"Where are you going, Ron?"

At first, Ginny wondered if she had given voice to her own thoughts, since the sentence summed them up pretty well. But the voice that hissed that question was not hers. It came from the corridor, for one thing. Ron gave a violent start, nearly dropping the candle, and then collected himself.

"Go back to sleep," he said to whoever had spoken. "It's another hour till dawn, at least."

The other stepped forward, shrouded in a black cloak. "Going out for some fresh air, are you?" The question was sarcastic.

Ron's nostrils flared. He was at the end of his rope, Ginny knew; she had seen him like this sometimes. "Like it's any bloody business of yours where I go-- fuck it, Harry, let go of me--"

Harry stepped forward suddenly and Ginny could see that it was him now, the cloak had fallen back a little and revealed his face. "Do you even know where you're going?"

"Just let me go, never you mind where," Ron said stonily, trying to push past Harry.

"I'm tired of this," said Harry, and he gave Ron a surprisingly vicious push in return. The two boys shoved each other back and forth against the walls of the corridor with sudden, shocking violence, as if a boil had been coming to a head for a long time and had at last burst. They were snarling things at each other that Ginny couldn't quite hear, or that never exactly formed themselves into words, and then a door opened and Hermione stuck her head out.

"What in the world's going on?" she yawned.

Ron stared at her, and then turned on her. "Don't pretend you don't know," he said in a low voice. "You've been in on this all along, the two of you! Think you'll be able to keep me from going, do you?"

"Going where?" she asked a little dazedly. Ginny thought that Hermione must still be at least half asleep.

Ron looked past her, his lips tightly compressed. Harry answered for him. "To find Ginny," he said. "That's where he was going, Hermione. Isn't that right, Ron?" Ron did not say a word in reply, but met his eyes defiantly, and his back seemed to stiffen further.

Hermione sucked in her breath. "He can't be serious," she said in a horrified voice. "Do you have any idea how dangerous--"

Ron wiped his nose with the back of the hand that wasn't holding the candle. "I'm going," he repeated, and Ginny could hear that he was balancing on a precipice, on the edge of breaking down. His rages burned hot and then melted away like snow, always, leaving him weaker than he ever wanted anyone to know. "I have to find her."

"What makes you think you even could?" asked Hermione. Practical as always, Ginny thought.

"I'm not exactly sure. But I can feel where she is." Ron's voice was definitely trembling now. "I can feel her pulling me, like a magnet pulling metal, and I am drawn to her. If either of you tries to keep me away from my sister, I'll-- I'll do something absolutely mad. Let me go! Let me go!" He ran his hands over his face again, but Ginny can see that this time it was to hide the tears that shivered on the ends of his lashes.

A silence fell over the corridor, and a near-darkness too, broken only by the wavering candle flame. It cast fluid shapes of light and shadow over the faces of the three.

"Then we'll go with you," said Harry.

Ron stared at Harry as if he had never seen his friend before. "You'll... what?"

"I'm not letting you go alone," Harry added, flatly.

Ron looked at him uncertainly, and then his gaze swung round to Hermione. "And-- and you? What about you? Aren't you going to try to talk me out of this? Tell me that I can't know where Ginny is, and I'll ruin the entire mission if I try to find her anyway?"

"Well--" Hermione hesitated. "I can't. I already tried that, and you didn't listen. And oh, Ron! I can't bear to see you like this-- it's tearing me up inside and--" She made a helpless gesture with her hands.

"So you're going to come along because you feel sorry for me? You think I'm a nutter because I think Ginny's here, in Leith, in the sixteenth century, and you're going to humor me?" said Ron, in what was almost a sneer.

"That's not what I meant at all!"

"Or maybe you think I wasn't brave enough or ruthless enough or whatever enough to ignore her, and just go on with the mission?"

"No!" Hermione looked as least as close to crying as Ron did, and was not hiding it nearly so well.

"That's enough," Harry said quietly. "There are things that you can't ask a person to do. Courage and cowardice have nothing to do with it. I can see, now, that this was one of them. And it's all of us, in this thing--" he swept a hand round to encompass the three of them "-- or none of us. I can't-- I won't let it be none of us, Ron."

Ron looked at Hermione, and Hermione looked at Harry, and so the circle went round back to Ron. The three of them shared a look of almost unbearable nakedness, of loves and fears being laid bare. It was a look that could not have lasted more than a fraction of a second. Then Hermione had pulled them both towards her, awkwardly, one arm around each boy, and they stood close. Ginny felt things in this spirit form that she could never have felt in the flesh, and she knew that although the mending of the friendship might be long, it was not beyond mending. They had been weak in their separation, but now three failings were made firm.

The scene blurred a little. When it cleared again, Hermione wore a black cloak like the other three, and held a small lantern. Her hand was cupped over its front so that only a few rays of light escaped. They all stole down the corridor on tiptoe, but as they passed the last door on the left, it opened. Neville stepped out. He, too, wore a black cloak; his bag was slung over his shoulder, and his round face was very resolute.

Hermione sighed. "Go back to bed, Neville."

He shook his head. "I'm going with you."

"You're not."

"You can't hex me this time, Hermione! Your wand doesn't work."

"Neville," she said pleadingly, "think about it. It's already more than dangerous enough to have all three of us going. What good would it do to--"

"But what if someone gets sick?" Neville interrupted desperately. "What if someone's hurt? What are you going to do then? I could help. Magic isn't going to do any good for that sort of thing now, you need to have someone along who knows the things I know."

"He's right," Harry said suddenly. "Come on, Neville. And be quiet."

Hermione looked at him despairingly. "I don't think this is a good--"

"Oh, what does it matter?" sighed Ron. "Let's just go before everyone else at this inn wakes up and decide they want to come along as well."

And the four of them went down the corridor, opening a door and disappearing from view.

Ginny felt herself fading from that scene and coming back to the room at the Lion and the Unicorn, and her emotions returned to her, as they had before, in one sickening wave. Oh God! "They're coming for me," she whispered. She could feel it, the actual sensation of her brother somehow reaching out to find her. Groping. But not without purpose, and not without understanding. He was getting closer; they were all getting closer, like blindfolded searchers drawn by something stronger than sight. Loki was looking at her sardonically, and the longer she was under his gaze the more her own inner vision seemed to sharpen. Ron, Hermione, Harry, and Neville weren't the only people trying to find her. She sensed the others more dimly, in nowhere near so much detail, but she did sense them.

There was a flash of Fred and George at a back table in the Three Broomsticks, hoods pulled forward over their heads, leaning over the table to discuss something with Charlie. She could not see very distinctly, nor hear very much, but she felt something urgent pass between her three brothers. They were discussing her. How to find her. How to get to her. How to get into Hogwarts, where they believed she was. There was a danger hanging over them, like a long, dark cloud, one that only she could sense. They were walking into darkness by trying to find her, and they knew nothing of it. Her faint connection to them faded out like a station on the Wizarding Wireless Network, too distant in time and space to hold.

Now she had a brief glimpse of another room in another inn, still in Leith, she somehow knew. A long table, and a great number of people gathered around it, all in black. The light in the room was very dim but it wasn't only that which created the vast aura of darkness in that room. Ginny saw with the eyes of the spirit, and she saw corruption, decay; long grey corridors of the mind with locked doors behind them, hiding things that should not be let out... evil. And then, by candlelight, the flash of a dazzingly fair head, the hair a sort of silvery ash blond, so like Draco's. But it was not Draco. It was Lucius Malfoy. She saw his face clearly now. He was at the head of the table, and all eyes were on him.

" The time draws near," she heard him say. And then, "Make ready to ride..."

And she understood that they, too, were coming for her.

"Not really," said Loki. "They're coming for Draco. But it amounts to the same thing, doesn't it?" He chuckled.

"How can you laugh?" demanded Ginny. "If Ron and the others get to me, and then Lucius Malfoy and Death Eaters come here--" She gasped, remembering the explanation of the Gizli-Syr secrecy charm she had heard earlier. "They'll find them! They won't be hidden anymore. I have to get out of here. You have to unlock the door. You can, I know you can. I have to--"

"It's not going to do any good. They're all tracking a person, not a place. If you try to run, you'll just make yourself very tired. And believe me, you need all your energy right now."

As Ginny was to realize later, that was the moment when she forgot about the unwisdom of trusting the Devil. "What should I do?" she asked desperately.

"Ah, so someone wants the gift of knowledge after all, do they?" Loki examined his fingernails, idly.

"Please."

"It has a price. My gifts never come free, you know."

"Anything. Just tell me what it is."

"Nothing now. A future claim only. When I ask for your help, in a little thing, the least of things, you must give it."

"Yes, I told you, anything! Just tell me!"

"Trust your abilities. Don't underestimate your powers. Buy low, sell high. And whatever you do, don't turn around," said Loki. "Now I must go, but your last visitor has come, Gwenhyfar, and the one you least expected. Goodbye." The air shivered, and Loki disappeared. She was left staring into the mirror.

Don't turn around? What on earth could he have meant by that? And the last visitor... I wonder what... or who...

Lost in her own thoughts, Ginny realized too late that the door had opened, and then closed. She wanted to move. She tried to scream, but the sound died in her throat. A figure came up behind her, wavering and blurry in the mirror, holding high something in one hand that looked like a blazing, five-fingered candle. And, realizing who it was, and what her last visitor held, she did not turn around. The figure reached up with one hand, and pulled back the dark hood of the black cloak wore.

In the mirror, Pansy Parkinson smiled back at her.

Ginny stared as if hypnotized for a long moment. Yes, it was definitely Pansy. Her hair was cut very short, and it made her look like a boy in the concealing cloak. Maybe that was why she'd done it, to pass as a boy. It made her dark eyes look larger in her thin face with its triumphant smile.

"Didn't expect to see me, did you, Ginny Weasley?" she asked.

"Draco's not here," said Ginny, amazed that she was able to get any sound at all through her throat.

"I know that. I'm not stupid. Thought I was, didn't you?" Pansy laughed, a silvery, rippling sound. "I didn't come for Draco Malfoy. I came for you. Why don't you turn around, and say hello properly?"

Ginny did not answer.

"Do you like my candle?" Pansy held the thing up, turning it from side to side.

"I know what that is," Ginny blurted.

"Oh, so you actually paid attention in History of Magic class. You and I must have been the only ones, Weasley. What is it?" asked Pansy.

"A Hand of Glory," said Ginny.

"That's right. A Hand of Glory." Pansy came a little closer, idly. "Clever little bit of sixteenth century magic, don't you think? They were quite common in these days."

Much preferred by thieves and robbers, for they cast light and sound only upon them that hold this Hand. The sentences came back to her now, in Professor Binns' droning voice. The Hands of Glory may also allow passage through any door, and any lock, and allow those of ill intent to move about unnoticed. They have divers uses that have been long forgotten, but we know that their strength is in deception, in stealth, and above all in theft. The making of a Hand of Glory requires the blood of a hanged man... and Ginny knew, with a shiver, why Pansy had been at a hanging, and what she had put in that little tied bag at her waist. But why? What was the point; why did Pansy want to get to her?

Ginny's eyes went to the blazing hand held in Pansy's own. Even seeing its reflection had a hypnotic effect, no doubt about it. If she turned around and looked directly at it, she knew she would be in Pansy's power. She didn't know how long she could hold out.

"Why prolong the inevitable?" Pansy asked pleasantly. "Turn around, Weasley. Turn around..."

The flames came closer. There was something else that a Hand of Glory did... something Professor Binns had told the class on a drowsy May afternoon, when the breezes coming in through the windows were warm, and whispered of sleep. Pansy's hands were moving up to her head. Now they were on either side... She could almost remember it... almost.

...in theft. Used for theft. What else did he say. Theft of gold, of possessions, and of persons. Of persons...

Of persons...

Too late, Ginny remembered that darkest use of a Hand of Glory. She turned. She could resist the pull no longer. But she would fight against it; maybe it was too late for that, as well, but she would try.

Pansy's hands were on her head at each side, and from them she felt the deep tingling that preceded powerful magic. Something wrenched within her, pulling, twisting, like an earthquake within her own body. But Ginny struggled to push it back. She gave a cry and fell to her knees. She crawled on the floor, sobbing with unbearable sensations that were like pain and yet not pain. Pansy was crawling beside her, and in the extremity of their pain they cried and clutched onto each other, agony having pulled them past their mutual hatred. The pressure, or torsion, or whatever it was kept relentlessly on, on, on, until flesh and blood could stand no more and the world went black. She fainted. But before she lost consciousness, she could see the great black blob of dark magic that was trying to fasten itself on her; she pushed it away with the last burst of her strength and it dissolved into... Pansy? But it doesn't look like Pansy anymore.

Ginny opened her eyes. Only a few moments had passed; she felt sure of it. She was hideously hungry. She hadn't felt a bit hungry before, not after that enormous dinner. She rubbed her face with her hand, then lowered it slowly, looking down at it. It was small and delicate and fine-boned, as it had never been, not even in her earliest childhood. She got to her feet, swaying slightly, and looked down at the other girl, lying on the floor.

Ginny was looking at herself.

Slowly, she turned to the mirror. Reflected in the glass, darkly, for there was only one candle burning now and the first fingers of dawn were just beginning to touch the sky, was Pansy Parkinson. Ginny reached up her hand and touched the glass. So did the mirror-Pansy. She ran her hands through the shorn dark hair, and the reflection followed suit. Then she turned back to look at her own body on the ground, its eyes closed. Now, when it was too late, she remembered the entire lecture that day.

"But please, Professor Binns," Colin had been asking, in what was perhaps one of three questions that Ginny had ever heard asked in all her years in that class, "doesn't that mean that a Hand of Glory is just like Polyjuice Potion then? If it allows the person wielding it to take on the appearance of somebody else?"

Binns had blinked in surprise, as he always did on the rare occasions when a question was asked. "Mr. Creevey. No. Such is not the case at all; in fact, that effect of a Hand of Glory is precisely opposite to the action of Polyjuice Potion. Polyjuice is a spell of seeming, a glamour, an illusion. A Hand of Glory transfers mind and spirit from one body to another. As such, it is a spell of mysterious and uncertain effect, easily gone awry. None use it for that purpose now, or at any rate dark wizards only. Its heyday, they say, was during the goblin wars of the Italian Renaissance, when Lorenzo Magog desired to possess the body of--"

And once more, the briefly interested class had begun to drop off.

The Hand was gone; dissolved in that last burst of magic, she suspected. She didn't know where that last bit of strength had come from to resist it. If she had not been warned to avoid turning around, she would have been caught off guard, though, and she never would have been able to manage what she had. Loki had, in a way, saved her. And now she was bound to him by a future claim. Ginny shivered. She reached down to touch her body on its shoulder, tentatively. She shook it. How bizarre to see her face from upside-down-- her nose wasn't quite symmetrical, she'd never realized that before. Her lashes and brows were much darker than she'd thought. Her hair was dreadfully unevenly shorn. And that locket was around her neck... Pansy's neck?... and no longer glowing. What had happened?

But she had no time to think on it further, because at that moment, she heard the sound of a key turning in the lock. Draco Malfoy. Nobody else had a key. With only a split second to decide what to do, she leaped up and slipped into the other room, pulling the door nearly shut behind her. It was very easy to move without making any sound now; this body was smaller, lighter, its bones built like a bird. She pressed her face to the wall so that she could just see out the crack of the door.

Draco stumbled over something in the dark and lit a candle. His face looked a little haggard, she saw now. Had he gotten any sleep? He glanced from side to side, taking in the neatly made bed. "Weasley, I know you're in here, so you might as well come out right now. I'm in no mood--"

The candle guttered. He tripped over Ginny's body-- her own body-- and nearly fell, cursing loudly. "Do you know how late it is?" he snarled. "Or how early, I should say-- six in the morning!"

Ginny opened her mouth to protest that it was hardly her fault if he decided to stay down in the common room drinking until all hours, just because she wouldn't sleep with him. On second thought, she shut it. It would be unwise to say anything. Very unwise. But there was something odd. He should known instantly where she was, through the Hexensymbol bond. He should have come instantly into the adjoining room for her. But he hadn't.

Ginny held up her arm, small, thin, and rather brown now. No faint tracery of symbols flickered red around it. She felt no pull towards the corresponding magical web around Draco Malfoy's wrist. She felt no connection to him. Her flesh was no longer chained to his.

The bond was broken.

Surely it was.

Yet she looked at Draco for a long time as he stood in the middle of the room. His face was so weary. There were such dark circles under his eyes, marring his pale perfect skin. She wanted to wipe her thumbs over those stains of darkness and feel his lashes fluttering against her fingers, and pull his head to her breast, and let him fall into sleep as if laying down a burden too heavy for him to carry.

And she knew that something tied her to him still.

The candle Draco held flickered, then steadied. It cast a pool of light over the motionless body on the floor. He drew in his breath. "Weasley?" he said, almost uncertainly. Then, in a stronger voice, "Get up. Get up this second. What are you doing on the floor? Afraid that if I came back and found you in bed I wouldn't be able to resist you? You're a lot more resistible than you think. Now get up." He pulled at Ginny's arm, roughly. It flopped back down. He stood very still, looking down at her. Then he knelt beside her in one fluid motion, lifting up her head in his hands. It fell back like the head of a broken bird. He stared stupidly at it.

"No," he said. "No, no, no, no, no."

As he sat motionless, holding Ginny's body in his arms, the door opened. And his father walked into the room, his step light and leisurely. Catlike, as Lucius Malfoy always was, thought Ginny. As all the Malfoys were.

She didn't wait to hear or see what happened next. She was across the little dressing room and to its window before her mind had caught up with her feet. It was just as high as the window in the other room, the one she had decided earlier was much too far from the ground to be used in an escape attempt. If she thought about it, Ginny knew she would never dare to try climbing out of it. So she didn't think. A long stray strand of her unevenly cropped hair-- Pansy's hair--caught in the window frame. She impatiently jerked it loose.

She swung one foot over the ledge and began scrabbling down, feeling for footholds. The wind was icy and keen and shrieked past her ears as she found the first niche. Just keep going down. Don't think about how far from the ground you really are. Right foot-- left foot-- right hand-- left hand. The outer wall was old and crumbling brick. There were toeholds, although she doubted she could have used them in her own body. But Pansy's body was so light that it seemed to weigh almost nothing; the chief danger was that the wind would gust more strongly and blow her away. Keep going... keep going... It was like the time she'd had to get down the outer wall of Hogwarts almost a week before. And she'd made it then. She'd make it now. There were the skeletons of dried ivy clinging to the wall a bit further down, and she used them. Thank God the moon had gone behind a cloud. Otherwise she'd be clearly visible to anybody watching on the ground below. She felt for a foothold on a brick that looked stable. It wasn't. It separated from the wall and for a terrifying instant she swung into space, clinging to the vine. Don't scream! Don't scream! She bit her lip hard enough to draw blood, and continued on. Then, at long last, beyond hope, she felt her feet touch the ground. Ginny crouched against the wall, her entire body shaking. God, what now? It wouldn't do to stay on the waterfront any longer than she had to. But she couldn't go back into the inn; Lucius Malfoy and the Death Eaters were there! Yet... and the thought struck her with a kind of horror... her body was also there. She couldn't leave her own body. She certainly didn't want to stay in Pansy's body. There must be a way to switch them back. But even if she could find it, that solution would leave her in at least as much trouble as before.

As she hesitated, two horses cantered up the back alley adjoining the rear yard of the inn. Ginny shrank back further into the shadows and watched them pass. It was still very dark; the moon was mostly hidden by cloud, but there was something about the figures on those horses. Something familiar. One was clutching onto the neck of her mount, obviously trying not to fall off. She'd seen someone clutch onto what they were riding in just that way before, but it wasn't a horse... it was a broom. Hermione. And the clouds pulled out suddenly from in front of the moon, and a ray of cold light glinted off the dark head of the figure behind her. Harry. And behind him, Neville. On the other horse, then, was Ron. Must be Ron. Yet she stared, and stared at the familiar tall form of her brother, at his glistening red hair in the moonlight, the characteristic way he held the reins; how quickly he'd taken to riding. He was the same, yet not the same. No. She was not the same. She felt no connection with him at all. He might have been a stranger. Ron stiffened in his seat, and his mount shied nervously. The two horses moved closer to one another, as if for comfort.

"She's gone," Ron said, quite clearly. "I've lost her."

Harry leaned over and said something to Neville, and Hermione hissed a few words in an agitated whisper. Ron shook his head. Then they trotted round to the front gate. Ginny watched them go with a mixture of emotions almost too tangled to separate-- an emptiness, a blankness, a strange sense of loss, and an enormous, overpowering relief. They would not find her now. The Gizli-Syr charm had clearly been tied to her body rather than her inner self, so now it would not be broken. They would still be hidden from anyone who wanted to hurt them, to hunt them. Lucius Malfoy would not be able to find them. Safe. Ron's safe. They're all safe. No price seemed too great to pay for that gift. Yet she couldn't simply let them go. She had to find out where they were going after this, and what they planned to do.

Ginny's hands went up to her shorn hair, then ran down along her slight, straight body. Under the cloak she wore, she could definitely pass for a boy, she thought. How ironic, that she'd at last achieved the thing she'd so longer for in the past few days. Maybe... yes. I'll do it. I have to do it. Before she could lose her nerve, she straightened up, pulled her hood entirely over her face so that only her nose showed, and crept around the inn towards the front gate, following in the tracks of her brother and her friends.

"Don't bother to get up," Lucius Malfoy said pleasantly. "Do bring your hands out where I can see them, though, Draco."

Draco didn't move right away. The rest of the Death Eaters had entered the room and were massed behind his father, he saw. Ginny Weasley lay in his arms and there seemed no logical way to get her out of them; he felt the soft scratchy strands of her hair on his numbed hands. Her head lolled on her neck almost as though the bones had been broken. Her short hair shone shockingly red against her white, white skin. She was dead weight slumping through his fingers, and he could barely feel the slight push and pull of her back muscles that meant she wasn't dead after all. He had thought she was, at first.

He had sworn...

But it was too late.

I won't betray you...

But Lucius Malfoy had already found them.

I do. I swear it. I swear.

But he had never even been given a choice. And surely he didn't have one now.

Draco eased Ginny's head to the ground, as if laying down a burden of unbearable weight. Slowly, he raised his hands above his head in the universal gesture of surrender. At a slight wave of his father's hand, everyone else filed out of the room. His mother and Snape lingered behind the rest, pulling Ginny up to her feet and carrying her between them. Draco caught Narcissa Malfoy's eye as he rose from the floor. His mother nodded so slightly that nobody else would have seen the movement of her head. There was a language of such subtle gestures between this mother and son, however. He hardly knew, himself, what he was trying to tell her, but she seemed to understand it all the same.

At seven-thirty, the breakfast was brought in. Lucius had discussed something with Snape in the corridor, examined Ginny briefly, and then returned to the room. Then the Malfoys, father and son, sat motionless and silent across the table from each other for a long while. Draco stared at the smoking plates. He vaguely remembered eating, or feeling as if he wanted to eat, but it seemed very long ago and far away. The only reality was Lucius Malfoy's eyes trained on him, Lucius Malfoy's marble face turned towards him. Not even studying him, really, since one couldn't say that a marble statue was capable of studying anything, or would have any interest in the activity.

Or perhaps he, the subject, was simply not worthy of attention.

Draco lifted the covers of the dishes and began poking at the contents. It was a diversion. There was a bowl of oat stirabout with bits of dried fruit in it, manchet bread with butter, small ale. He was, he suddenly realized, very hungry, as if an appetite had been conjured from thin air. He moved his hand to pick up the spoon, and felt it being pulled from his grasp.

"We've been quite busy, of course, and there's been no time for breakfast," Lucius said. "If you would allow me...?"

"Uh-- of course."

Lucius began eating the stirabout. "One wouldn't expect much in the way of sixteenth century food, but this actually is very tasty."

Draco nodded, not trusting himself to speak. His stomach had started to rumble.

Lucius started on the bread, which smelled hot and fresh. "And obviously there's a decent bakery somewhere about..."

"Mm-hm." Draco watched his father spread butter on the bread with a knife from his belt as if hypnotized. His mouth was watering.

"Ah," said Lucius, draining the ale. "Certain secrets of brewing were understood in this age as well, I see."

My last meal, thought Draco. And I didn't get a single bite of it. Unconsciously, he sighed, and Lucius looked up at him in friendly fashion, dabbing his mouth with a napkin. As if inviting him to speak.

"I, ah, I didn't expect to see you, Father."

"That's quite obvious," Lucius said, studying his fingernails idly.

"But I hoped I would! Yes, I hoped I would. I knew you'd catch up with us. My plans regarding Ginny Weasley hit a few small snags, that's all, but they're coming along nicely-- ah-- they were, anyway--" Draco desperately wanted to ask if she was all right, but that would be a mistake, oh yes, that would be a dreadful mistake, he mustn't tip his hand in that way. He continued to talk as fast as he could, his words falling out and tripping over each other until he knew he'd probably do better to shut up, but it was too late for that by now, wasn't it?

He had started to speak too soon, Draco realized later, and lost his tactical advantage. Of course, the real problem was that he'd never had it in the first place. Talking with Lucius Malfoy was always a bit like duelling in a house full of mirrors, but this time had to be the worst ever. Finally, he simply seemed to come to the end of what he had to say, or at least he couldn't seem to recall any more of the English language at the moment. His father was looking at him, simply looking at him with the sort of basilisk stare that had frozen the marrow in his bones since his earliest childhood. He wondered in a panicked sort of way if he should start the entire story over again in German. That might buy a little time. But what good would that do? He was turning and running, turning and running like a mouse in a maze under his father's eyes.

The awful silence stretched on.

"Continue," said Lucius, after letting it linger for several minutes. "Please do. It's such an interesting story."

"Uh," said Draco. His wits were scattered far and wide, and there seemed no way to collect them.

"For instance, I'd love to hear why you thought it was a good idea to bond Ginny Weasley to yourself by a Hexensymbol without consulting me."

"What?" asked Draco, mechanically.

"Or, alternately, you could explain why you took her to Leith from the Forbidden Forest without informing me."

"What?" repeated Draco, his lips growing numb.

"Or perhaps--" Lucius spread butter on the last piece of bread. Back and forth, back and forth went the knife. It had a very keen edge. "Perhaps you could clarify what sort of good you actually thought that this pitiful little rebellion might do you."

"What?" It was the only word left in the world.

Then there was a flash of steel, and, almost faster than sight, Lucius stabbed the knife into the chair between Draco's legs.

"Sorry! Did I break your concentration?" asked Lucius.

Draco stared at it with wide eyes, little whimpers threatening to escape the back of his throat. No. No. Don't make a sound...

"Do you think I'm a fool?"

"What?" asked Draco, mesmerized by the sight of the blade quivering in the chair about half a millimetre away from his crotch.

"I do wish you'd leave off saying 'what,' Draco," said Lucius, his voice silky with menace. "It makes you sound half-witted. In fact, I will be very... displeased if I hear that word come out of your mouth again." Wordlessly, his son nodded.

Lucius rose from the table, throwing his napkin down on the empty plate. "And you smell like a brewery. Change your clothes."

He could hear vague murmurs from outside the room, but the door was locked, and he didn't particularly want to stir an inch from it anyway. Crabbe and Goyle came in shortly afterwards with a change of clothing in a leather bag. Numbly, Draco put on the neatly pressed trousers and the wool shirt. He wondered if they were authentic sixteenth-century garb. Probably not. But if he wore a long cloak, it wouldn't much matter.

If he never left this inn alive, it really wouldn't matter.

The sun moved across the sky in the high window. About noon, Draco roused himself to wash his face with the basin of water that had been brought up hours earlier. It was stone-cold by now, but he barely felt it. There was a little cake of soap, a round brush, and a sort of straight, very sharp knife laid out next to the basin. Draco didn't really need to shave again, not yet, but he supposed it was some sort of standard provided service. Or maybe he was expected to cut his throat with it. No, that lacked the personal touch.

"Want some help?" grunted Goyle, in the first words either he or Crabbe had spoken since the door closed.

"No," said Draco. Maybe Goyle was supposed to cut his throat? No, there was too much danger that he'd accidentally slit his own, and he obviously had his uses on this expedition.

He lathered and shaved, nicking the skin of his neck slightly, dabbing away the little trickle of blood. Sorry, Father. Not nearly deep enough. He really needed a servant. If you couldn't have house-elves-- and in sixteenth century England, it didn't look as if you could-- something else was clearly needed to fill the function, and apparently that something was human servants. I'll definitely have to see about getting one of my own. If I live past the next hour, that is. Or maybe Crabbe and Goyle could be trained, as he'd heard Muggles were able to do with monkeys. Draco doubted it, however. He looked up from patting his face dry with a bit of sacking to see Crabbe looking at him. A fleeting expression crossed the other boy's face, but it was gone too quickly for Draco to tell what it was.

The hours dragged on. Goyle cracked his knuckles repeatedly.

"Stop it," said Draco.

"Why should I?"

"Because it's bloody irritating. And because I say so."

"Don't see why I should stop just because you tell me to."

"That's always been enough before," said Draco, annoyed.

Goyle surveyed him with a kind of animal cunning on his face. "Maybe it isn't enough anymore. Maybe I'll do a bit more of what I like from now on, Malfoy."

"You think things have changed that much, Goyle?" Draco said softly, fixing his erstwhile henchman with a steady eye. "Are you sure?"

Goyle gulped, and sat back. He stopped cracking his knuckles.

Might as well be a pair of Crumple-Horned Snorkacks facing off for leadership of the herd, Draco thought tiredly. But at least it shows I've still got some sort of control. I can't feel it at all, though. He thought he heard Crabbe chuckle from his chair pulled up to the window. No, surely not.

Odd, thought Draco as the hours lengthened into late afternoon. This is the longest I've spent in the same room with these two in years. In fact, he'd never been stuck in one room with only Crabbe and Goyle's company for an entire day in all his life. Occasionally in his early teenage years he'd enjoyed holding forth in the Slytherin common room or walking around the Malfoy estate with them, but in truth it was maddeningly boring, a lot worse than talking to oneself. Goyle always made such stupid remarks, and Crabbe never said anything. No, he'd used them as bodyguards, as enforcers, as entourage; they'd trailed him like the personal slaves to a sultan, but that was all they had ever been to him. And in the past year and a half, they'd stopped being even that.

He didn't know them at all anymore, and he realized that in truth, he never had.

Goyle started eating bread he pulled out of the leather bag next to Crabbe's chair. "Give me some of that," said Draco, and the other boy did so at once. Good. Good sign. Gods, but he was hungry. He walked over to the bag to see if there was more. There wasn't. "Couldn't you have brought more food? I might have wanted it," he said, glancing up at Crabbe-- and received the shock of his life.

Vincent Crabbe was reading a book.

Draco closed his eyes and rubbed them. After the sort of week this had been, he was liable to imagine all sorts of strange things. But when he opened them again, Crabbe was still poring over the volume, his lips moving as they shaped the words, an abstracted frown on his face. Draco looked to see if he was holding the book right-side up. Yes.

"You're reading," he said, incredulously.

Crabbe raised his eyebrows, but made no other sign that he'd heard Draco speak.

"What on earth is it?"

Crabbe showed Draco the spine, then returned to his task. An English translation of Sun-Tzu's The Art of War.

"I didn't know you could read."

"There are a lot of things you d-d-don't know about me, Malfoy." Crabbe turned another page. "This is only one of them."

"That's the first time I've ever heard you string ten words together."

"That's the first time I ever h-h-heard you say something to me that wasn't an order. Must've been the shock of that. Only took you s-s-s-seventeen bloody years," Crabbe answered.

Draco stared at him in shock.

"Sell tickets, Malfoy. It s-s-s-peaks," Crabbe said with what Draco would have sworn was sarcasm. Then he returned to his book and didn't say another word for the rest of the day, leaving a very confused Draco.

In early evening, the door creaked open. Draco glanced up. Lucius Malfoy beckoned to him. Numbly, he got up and followed his father out into the hall. "Walk with me," said Lucius. Without waiting for an answer, he began walking purposefully towards the door to the back stairs.

They walked down to the ground floor and out into the gardens behind the inn. They were desolate now, the grey stalks of dead flowers whispering in the wind, and the broken branches of the apple trees stark against the darkening sky.

Draco pondered his options. There were none. He was stuck in the sixteenth century without a wand. The only wandless spell of any power he knew was the Hexensymbol, and he'd already seen how well the use of that had gone. He didn't even have his little knife. Ginny must still have it. Ginny... wherever she was now. Perhaps they were taking care of her; she must be valuable to them. Mustn't she? Not that it would do any good to worry about her now. Better to worry about myself. His rebellious self, who had attempted this failed betrayal. Lucius Malfoy wasn't known for overlooking betrayals.

A strange sort of fatalism overcame him, and he fell into step behind his father, fully expecting to meet his end on his seventeenth birthday in the kitchen garden of a seedy inn along the waterfront of Leith. Yes, this desolate winter's day was his birthday; he'd forgotten until now. He could perform magic outside of school now... not that he hadn't been doing so already for several years anyway... not that he'd ever have the chance to do magic again... His thoughts were random, and strangely without emotion. Maybe that lack of feeling would make the end easier. About the only emotion he seemed able to dredge up was a pang of regret that he hadn't slept with Ginny Weasley last night, not in any sense of the word. He would never experience those sensations again; not sensual satisfaction, not blissful sleep. He wished that he had shared them both with her then, because now he never could. But frankly even that feeling was fading.

Lucius stopped in front of a skeletal pear tree. "Sorry to have left you so long," he said.

"It doesn' t matter." Apologies from Lucius Malfoy were definitely not to be trusted. Draco knew that.

"You can ask what we were doing today, if you like." Lucius smiled, and suddenly had the air of granting a great treat.

"What were you doing today," repeated Draco, without turning the sentence up at the end.

"We were able to learn a great deal about Ginny Weasley. Although mostly it was Snape who learned it."

"So she's alive?"

"Oh yes, she's alive... Snape will explain everything to you later, after we're on board ship."

"On board ship?"

"We sail at dawn, on the Good Queen Bess. A small merchant galleon carrying trade goods to Istanbul. We're booked as passengers."

Draco stood very still. He would not allow himself to feel hope. Not yet.

"The Weasley girl will be very useful, in time," said Lucius. "And you..." He stepped closer to his son. "You brought her to us."

"Yes," Draco said dully. "I did." It didn't matter what he had meant to do, or what he had thought he was doing. All roads led to the will of his father.

"I knew you would..." Lucius said softly, and his very voice seemed to eddy round Draco's head in a sticky web.

There was no original idea that he could have. How could he, when his mind was contained in the mind of Lucius Malfoy? Everything he thought or felt had already been thoroughly examined, tested, graded, and either accepted or rejected by his father. Even his little rebellions were all known, foreseen, planned for...

The entire train of thought made Draco very tired. But his father was still speaking, and he struggled to listen.

"It was an error in judgment, Draco." Lucius Malfoy shrugged. "A mistake."

I'm going to live, Draco thought. He was too exhausted to feel relief. But that's not the end of it. It can't be. There's more... I can see in his face that there's more.

"You're seventeen years old today, Draco. You're no longer a child. The most valuable present I could ever give you is this piece of advice." Lucius Malfoy clasped his hands behind his back, and paused. "Children can afford to make mistakes. Women, too. Men can't." He laid a hand on his son's shoulder in something that was almost a caress. "Think about it. Don't talk. Boys talk. Men keep silence."

And with those words, Lucius turned and left Draco standing in the middle of the snow-covered garden among the black and broken vines, looking towards his father long after he'd disappeared from view.