"One of Those Quirky, Paradoxical Time-Travel Things"

Chapter One

"My father has a face that can stop a clock," said the young woman sitting by the fire.

"What good is that?" asked the black-haired man who had just appeared before her. "What's the use in being able to stop a clock? A Time-Turner is what I need."

The young woman sighed. The man was not supposed to lecture her. He was supposed to say, in response to her own statement, "Even a clock with twelve hands and no numbers?"--by which reply she was meant to know that he was the man she had come here to meet.

Not that there were more than two or three other men in the common-room of The Prancing Pony this evening. It was a wild, wet night in late October; besides which, most of the people of Bree stayed home after dark in these troubled times. The firelit, lamplit room was nearly empty of all but tables and chairs, the landlord himself, and two stocky, brown-haired men who smoked and sipped beer on the other side of the fireplace from where the young woman sat gazing up into the tall newcomer's eyes.

Those eyes looked as black and cold as the barrel of a SpecOps automatic, and almost as menacing, framed as they were in long greasy strands of black hair and shadowed by a large hooked nose. Even if the man had come in through the door across the room, instead of suddenly appearing before her out of thin air, she would have recognised him from his description.

She stood up and held out her hand to him. "Thursday Next," she said.

"Severus Snape."

He took her hand in a clasp as cold as the night outside. "It was good of you to come," he added; and abruptly withdrawing his hand from hers he sat down on the bench beside her, in the corner away from the fire, his long black cloak all but concealing him among the shadows.

Thursday's own cloak, lent her by Mrs Fairfax during her sojourn in Jane Eyre and never returned, looked, in its Victorian cut, no more out of place than did Snape's possibly twenty-first-century travelling cloak. He might easily have been the Ranger several of the Bree-folk in the backstory took him for; although with so many generic strangers on the roads these days one more wizard might not have roused the suspicions of even a Text Grand Central spotter--had any such spotter been allowed to scout for anomalies in a book of this genre.

No great fan of Text Grand Central, Thursday found herself wishing one more wizard would join her and Snape in the common-room now.

"Gandalf is here," she said, more calmly than she felt; "isn't he? At the inn?"

"He will be," Snape replied. "Soon. When Butterbur--" Snape nodded towards the landlord, who was trimming the lamp nearest to the door--"goes out with that club--" Snape jerked his head towards the rough weapon leaning against the doorjamb--"they will have arrived.

"But as you no doubt know," he continued, turning now to look directly at Thursday, "Gandalf will be talking with Butterbur and the hobbits for hours; he will not be free to join us until after the hobbits are in bed and asleep.

"They are more trouble than first years," he added, in a lower voice, as if to himself; and he turned away from Thursday again, with a sigh deeper than the one she had breathed a few moments earlier.

Thursday bit back the retort that had formed in her mind--Well, they've been through a lot more than most first years will ever have to deal with. It might be true that not even Slytherin first years had had to face mortal peril during Snape's years as teacher at Hogwarts; but no one in the BookWorld knew for certain what would take place in the as-yet-unpublished seventh book in the Harry Potter series. And, Thursday reminded herself now, the man sitting beside her in this inn tonight had faced mortal peril, perhaps for the first time, while still a schoolboy himself. She must not expect him to want to hang around indefinitely in The Lord of the Rings. He had not been waiting for her here at the inn, despite the fact that The Prancing Pony was known throughout the BookWorld as one of the very few places in fiction where magical and nonmagical folk could--and, on rare occasions, did--meet.

"Well, why don't we have something to eat while we're waiting?" she suggested. "Butterbur will bring Gandalf and the hobbits some supper; surely he could put together a snack for us as well"--and in fiction a meal often serves to further a story, she added, to herself.

But Snape got up abruptly. "I have no time to think of food, Miss Next. Nor did I intend this to be a social meeting. I need your help, and I need it now. Your father can do more than stop a clock, he can travel through time. If you want to waste time eating, then go home and ask him to come to me instead."

While saying this, Snape had stood as if he could only just stop himself pacing up and down the room. He had not raised his voice--the two local men had not seemed to pay any attention to what he was saying--but in his very stillness and quietness he had seemed to be trembling with suppressed emotion, as though it was all he could do not to rant and rave and charge out of the inn all on his own.

"I wish I could," Thursday told him, quite truthfully. She paused, and waited, hoping he would sit down again to hear what she had to say. When he remained standing, not looking at her--not appearing to look at anything particular in the room--she went on anyway, taking care to speak as quietly as he had. "Unfortunately for both of us, it doesn't work that way. I can't contact my father. He comes to me. Time grinds to a halt, and there he is. Oh, yes--he can take me places, with him, once he's arrived where I am. But he has to come to me."

"Why did you come to me, then?"

Snape sank down onto the bench, and leant back into the shadows again. "Why did you come, if you can't help?"

"I believe I can help. That is what Jurisfiction is for, after all--to reconcile the original wishes of the author of a book and the expectations of the readers of the book. That's what we do, you know."

"Not in the wizarding world you don't," Snape said, shaking his head. "All that text-monitoring, or whatever you call it, may work in the Muggle world, but it doesn't work in the magical world."

"But there are Muggles in your world."

He turned again to her now, his eyes glittering like black ice. "There are no Muggles in my world, Miss Next. And you tell me--why was it Gandalf had to arrange for you to come here? Why could you not simply read yourself into Prisoner of Azkaban, or Order of the Phoenix?"

"No spotters informed us of any problems in either of those books, Professor Snape."

"Mr Snape." He almost hissed the words. "I am no longer a teacher." He sighed again, even more deeply than before; and rose once more to his feet. "And you can no more read yourself into my story than I can--"

"--Apparate into Norland Park?" Thursday finished for him.

"Why should I wish to Apparate into Norland Park? Jurisfiction headquarters? I'm a PageRunner, Miss Next. A fugitive."

He was quivering again. The tension emanating from him was as tangible as the force-field around an electric power station. His eyes had glittered before; now they seemed to crackle with dark sparks.

Thursday took a deep breath, and spoke without trying to soften the tone of her voice. "Then as you have already broken what you call Muggle law, by jumping out of your story into another, why not break wizarding law as well, and seek the help of Jurisfiction? Or why not jump into fanfiction?"

Snape made a small sound, which might have been a laugh, or a snort. "'Fanfiction,'" he echoed. "That isn't about me."

"Isn't it?" Thursday asked; and seeing him start to shake his head she continued, "It's become a genre in its own right, officially recognised by the Council of Genres."

Snape was still shaking his head.

"Are you a snob, then?" Thursday asked. "Despite being only a half-blood?"

Snape stopped shaking his head. He froze, so completely that Thursday no longer sensed the vibrations of his tension. For a moment she felt like a first year facing mortal period, or at least a Saturday's detention.

But suddenly Snape sighed--a long, deep, trembling sigh; and when he spoke his voice sounded flat. "I'm a murderer, Miss Next. I killed Albus Dumbledore. It's written in the text of the story; and every reader, and every writer of fanfiction, knows it.

"I need your help, Miss Next. I've broken more than laws. I've broken trust with the readers who--"

He broke off, and tilted his head up as if to look at the lamp that Barliman Butterbur had just finished trimming. Thursday followed his gaze to where the lamp hung, shiny and shining, from a beam in the ceiling. Its light was bright enough to make her blink. Half-blinded, she turned her eyes away from it.

Snape cleared his throat, and looking at him again Thursday saw that the light had been too bright for him too. His eyes were closed, and he was frowning, as if at sights etched on the insides of his eyelids.

Thursday looked down at the pale hands that gripped the folds of the dark cloak draped over his knees.

"Two nights ago," she began, as if the hands were two tired children tucked up into a dark bed, "SpecOps headquarters were surrounded by readers holding torches--Muggle torches, which glow a bit like wands--and copies of Half-Blood Prince. They were standing looking up at the windows, as if the windows could shed light on the answers to their questions, on a response to their protest of the events that took place in the last four chapters of the book.

"I wasn't there, but a friend of mine told me about it."

"Where were you?" Snape asked, as a child might ask a question of the reader of a bedtime story.

"I was in the Great Library, with Radagast the Brown Wizard."

"He can speak with birds and beasts," Snape said.

"Yes. Including phoenixes, and cats."

Thursday looked up as she said this, in time to see Snape's eyes fly open. He glanced at her, briefly; and then leant back again, so that his face was in the shadows of the corner.

"Cats," he repeated.

"And witches. And wizards."

Snape nodded, frowning again. "I spoke with him."

"So he told me. And he spoke with Gandalf."

"Gandalf is here tonight," Snape said. "In the inn."

"Yes--but as you said, he is busy with hobbits and with matters taking place in the thread of this book's narrative. He is good, P--Mr--Snape; but he is neither Radagast's master nor a text spotter. He has no influence outside the pages of his own books."

Snape made the small, disbelieving or amused, sound again. "He knows that Rufus Scrimgeour has been to see the Muggle prime minister."

"And the prime minister is concerned that the narrative remains true to the author's original intentions."

"So is Jurisfiction."

"Yes."

"But you have gone rogue before, Miss Next. Twice. And you are the daughter of a rogue Chronoguard, who taught you how to travel forwards and backwards in time."

Snape leant forward again, and fixed his eyes upon Thursday. "You said you want to help me," he told her. "You've travelled forwards through your own time to do so. And I want you to do for me what you did for those Muggles--for Miss Eyre and Rochester. I want you to rewrite the last four chapters of Half-Blood Prince. And if you cannot, or will not, do that, then I want you to travel back through my time to Prisoner of Azkaban or Order of the Phoenix and bring me a Time-Turner so that I can change the final events of Half-Blood Prince myself."