A Visit To Bulgaria

Chapter Ten: In Which A Certain Someone Shows Himself To Be a True Gentleman

Hermione managed to wriggle into the clothes that Anastasia had brought for her, as she hunched under a bush, drenched in moonlight. She had heard quite a bit about the Revels, but it did not seem like a great deal of fun yet. Anastasia had only communicated with her in frustrating innuendos about the nature of the Revels, and she had not been able to pick up a single clue from any of Anastasia's friends--or, for that matter, anyone at all. The whole thing was shrouded in an air of secrecy, and it was rather annoying since it seemed that everyone knew exactly what was going on, except for her. Yet she still had a great deal of anticipation. The Ball had been everything that she had hoped, yet she had left it with the feeling that the night was definitely not complete, that something very important was going to happen before the night was over.

It did seem to her that this was one of those nights especially made for important things. It was warm and clear, and the trodden earth under her feet still held some of the heat from the sun, giving her the impression that the earth itself was full of warm possibilities. It had indeed been astute of the Ball's planners to set the date of the event for the full moon of August. She remembered a favorite French poet of hers that had called this type of night a reine du nuit, queen of the night. She understood the words now, as she saw the impossibly pregnant moon rise over the treetops of the forest, surrounded by a pale white aura, the color of milk against the black of the sky, the kind of black that was more than black, that you could sink into if you gazed at it for too long. The stars were beginning to glow, but they kept their distance from the moon, which commandeered the entire sky. The breeze was warm, wafting onto her skin, and the deep red of the wild roses that grew in the forest stood out, as dark as drops of blood, against the pitch black of the sky and of the evergreens.

She finally finished changing into the clothes that Anastasia had brought for her. Her ball gown lay discarded on the forest floor; she picked it up and laid it gently in Anastasia's bag, along with the glass slippers. She smiled as she slipped those into the bag along with the dress. Leave it to Anastasia to dream up something like glass slippers. They were exquisite creations, open-toed shoes with tiny heels that shone and glittered in the moonlight as if tiny stars were captured within. She had an odd feeling that these slippers would not be with her long--indeed, that none of this would be with her for very long at all. She hated when she had little flashes like this, flashes that left her confused and more than a little scared. She never saw anything exactly, but sometimes she knew, knew with the same certainty that she knew that she breathed. Yet tonight she was concentrating on keeping such thoughts from her mind. She wanted to let herself be lost in this night, in what she suspected would happen. She wanted to wake up the next morning and know absolutely nothing of what had happened, and only have everything slowly dawn on her, the delicious realization that it had not been a dream.

"'ermione? You are ready, or no?"

"I think that I am. You?"

"Mais oui, 'ermione, you know zat I am always ready. Zis way. Follow me."

Hermione followed after Anastasia in the near-darkness of the forest, through the area where the trees overhead were so thick and dark that only stray rays of moonlight managed to struggle through to the forest floor. She was not surprised with Anastasia's clothes: a completely white sleeveless shirt with a square neckline, beautiful in its simplicity, and a long flowing green skirt that came down to the middle of her calf. Hermione thought, looking at Anastasia, that she could have passed for a fairy, with her pale, almost translucent skin, and her pale clothes. She thought that she heard Anastasia laughing. Yet Hermione pushed these thoughts away--there was something about it that seemed very odd to her.

Anastasia seemed very excited, and Hermione had to run a little to keep up with the pace that she set. She could see almost nothing in the thick darkness. The air was heavy with warmth, and crickets droned endlessly somewhere in the distance. Though the trees were set very close together, the path was fairly unobstructed, and although Hermione was barefoot, she felt no stings; indeed, the soil of the forest floor was as soft as a deep-piled carpet between her toes. It seemed very strange to her that the forest floor should be so divinely soft, with nary a twig to step on. Yet it was still the forest, because her bare feet against the deep brown soil were cream-colored. Other things about the forest seemed odd to her now as well. There were no crickets now, but she did hear singing and drums, from a long distance away. Now that she thought of it, she could not remember Anastasia changing her clothes, yet she most definitely had. The trees were clearing quickly, but when she had flown over the forest earlier, she had seen only one clearing, nearer the Fortress than they were now. An odd scent wafted up onto her nostrils, and she tried to recognize it--it was cloves, cloves and other spices that she could not name but that she imagined had exotic names like saffron, cardamom, star anise. Yet she could not focus on anything for too long, because Anastasia was running faster and faster through the forest, and had she not been holding tightly to Hermione's hand, Hermione certainly would have lost the path that her white feet were making, dashing in between the trees.

"Anastasia! Slow down!"

The other girl only laughed and kept her pace. Hermione could see something approaching--or rather, it was not something, but someplace. Her head was beginning to pound. Where was Anastasia taking her? There was a clearing up ahead, with torches waving abstractly and blurred human forms. She could not tell what they were doing, whether they were dancing, or flying, or simply standing still. Anastasia kept on running and running, and the ache at Hermione's temples grew worse and worse until--

They were in the clearing. She was hyperventilating, though Anastasia's breath had not quickened at all. She was more confused than she had been in a long time. What had just happened? She knew that she had been running, sprinting, with the only thing she could hear being Anastasia's laughter, and then, like a rush of air, they were in the clearing. Hermione drew in a deep breath, blinked once or twice, squeezed on Anastasia's hand to steady herself, and looked around.

As far as she could tell, they seemed to be inside a rather large circular clearing. About one hundred people were milling about, talking with their friends. Off to the side, a dozen others were engaged in gathering chunks of wood from the surrounding forest, and piling them in the very center of the clearing. The wood pile was defined by an almost perfectly round circle of grey stones. She recognized many of the people from the earlier festivities of the evening. Some people were carrying torches, but the majority of the lighting seemed to be coming from somewhere else. Hermione looked up, and she saw the moon again. It had disappeared from her sight for a time while she had been running with Anastasia through the forest. The moon seemed even more full now than it had been before. The entire clearing was drenched in its light, although it was dulled slightly by the torches.

Hermione was still clasping Anastasia's hand; indeed, she was almost afraid to let it go. She was of course used to magic, yet what had just happened--how they had come to this place--seemed different to her, seemed less like the magic that she knew and more like something from the books of fairy tales that her parents had read to her when she was a small girl. She remembered fantastical tales that had amazed her at bedtime, stories of dancing princesses, enchanted forests, and evil goblins. Anastasia herself appeared rather otherwordly now as well. Before tonight she had always been, while certainly attractive, very human and earthy. Now she seemed something other than what she had been. Her eyes had taken on a certain cast, and her hair had lost some of its color, had become paler than straw, more the color of butter. This certainly was turning out to be an odd night.

Lost in her thoughts and in her observations, she did not notice Alexei and Viktor approaching Anastasia and her until they spoke.

"Stasi! You did not have any trouble getting here?"

"Ah, no, pas vraiment. Only zat Hermione, eet was her first time, so eet was a little slower, we 'ad to slow down."

Alexei laughed at that, but Viktor looked slightly concerned and ventured, "Stasi, you should have told me that she has never been here before. I would been able to take her some easier way."

"Ah, you worry too much, you need more joie de vivre. Zere ees nothing wrong with taking ze ordinary way, and I promise zat she ees quite well."

Hermione felt quite disconcerted by now, since none of them had bothered to give her the slightest clue about where they actually were. "If you wouldn't mind...where exactly is this place? And how did I get here?" She felt rather like the victim of memory loss.

Viktor saw an interesting opportunity to talk alone with Hermione. Turning to Alexei and Anastasia, who were already casting amorous looks at each other, he said, "Well, why don't Hermione and I just go off somewhere else and leave you two to...um...talk? I'll explain everything to her."

Anastasia looked delighted, as though she could not have thought of a better solution if she tried. To her it seemed perfect--she got to spend some time with Alexei without the other two around, and, she got to further her plot of somehow getting Hermione and her brother together. "What a wonderful idea. A tout a l'heure!"

Once they had wandered off, Viktor smiled a little, in relief. "I do love Stasi, quite a bit, but she can be a little...what is the word...flighty, sometimes. I'm sorry that you had to take the regular way."

"The regular way to where? You still haven't told me where we are."

"Right...how to explain this...we're still in the Forest, you see. But there are really two realities in this forest--the one that appears on the surface and the one that we are in now. In some areas they overlap each other, after a fashion, so that it is possible for those who know how to get to the other world from the surface world without a great deal of trouble. That is what this place is...the otherworld. We choose to hold the Revels here because it is really a perfect location. No one can get in unless they know how, and only people that we know, know how."

"But how did Anastasia...what happened, in the forest? How did we get here?"

"Stasi wanted to take you the fastest way, I suppose. You got here by a spell, the same way that all of us did."

"Oh." She felt a little less ignorant, but she also felt that it was going to be a while before she perfectly understood this. "So...what exactly is that big pile of wood for?" Various people were still collecting chunks of wood, and she noticed that some had simply begun conjuring them out of thin air. The pile was growing higher, and it was ringed with small stones.

"That will be for the bonfire."

"The bonfire?"

He lifted an eyebrow. "Don't you have bonfires in England, for that funny holiday of yours?"

"Guy Fawkes Day?"

"Yes, yes. And the young people in your country, they go to the beach and light fires?"

"No, no, that's in America," murmured Hermione. She giggled, "What are we going to do? Have a wienie roast?"

Viktor blinked once or twice. "Wienie?"

She laughed. "Nothing."

"Right...oh! There they are! I knew that they would come sooner or later!"

"Who?"

"The veela!"

"What?"

Hermione had only really seen veela once before: at the Quidditch World Cup, where they had performed as the Bulgarian national mascots. She had been vaguely annoyed by them at the time, since they had caused most of the males in the audience to do remarkably stupid things. The wisdom of bringing veela to a celebration in the middle of an otherworld forest where half of the people were hormone-driven teenage boys somehow escaped her. She also remembered that the veela had an interesting quality of turning into birds of prey whenever they were provoked. Although she doubted that any...provocation, per se, would be taking place tonight, she still eyed them warily. There were about twenty of them, at the other end of the clearing, and they all looked rather similar. They were quickly dispersing throughout the clearing, and each one of them appeared to be passing out bottles of some drinkable substance.

"Why, for Merlin's sake, would you bring veela?"

Viktor shrugged. "Personally, I do not like them very much. They are a bit too...well, I do not like them. But Alexei, I know, is a great fan of them. So are most of the others, in fact."

"Didn't you see them at the World Cup? They're quite dangerous!"

"To tell the truth, I did not really pay that much attention to anything at the World Cup except the Snitch."

And, she thought to herself, I didn't really pay that much attention to anything at the World Cup except for you. She felt that this tangent of the conversation had reached a dead end, so she smiled and said, "How about we see what the veela are handing out?"

"Oh..." He chuckled. "No, no, I do not think that you want any of that. It is somewhat more potent than your British butterbeer, I believe. And the taste, it does take a lot of getting used to."

"I'll take your word for that..." She had rather wished that, with Anastasia and Alexei gone, they could have engaged in some serious conversation about the status of their quasi-relationship; however, the evening was not turning out that way so far, and she would not be the one to press it. She noticed that many of the people in the clearing were congregating around the enormous pile of tinder in the middle. "Will they be lighting the fire now?"

"Ah! Yes, let's go up to the front, this is always very interesting." He took her hand and pulled her insistently through the throng of people right up to the pile of wood. One boy, who looked to be about a seventh-year, appeared to be the appointed bonfire-lighter. He shouted out in a foreign language to attract the attention of the crowd. Hermione could not understand a word that he said, and turned to Viktor, standing on her tiptoes to whisper in his ear, "What is he saying?"

"That he is most honored to welcome all of us to this year's Revels," he whispered back, and then paused. "Ah yes. He is very proud of the Revels tradition, which goes back more than six hundred years. Now, he will light the bonfire as a symbol of this ancient tradition." As a side note he added, "He is Sergei Alexandrovich, one of the top seventh years. We just recruited him as a reserve Keeper for the school Quidditch team."

All of this was, unfortunately, lost on Hermione, who was now completely absorbed in the fact that Viktor had not let go of her hand. She was entirely confused and had no idea what to do. As Sergei raised one of the torches and ceremoniously lowered it to the pile of tinder, she slowly, very slowly, turned her head and looked up at Viktor.

"Viktor," she said, forgetting to whisper, "I think that we need to talk."

He gave an almost imperceptible nod. "Come with me."

He would have taken her hand to lead her off from the main throng into the surrounding forest; however, it was then that he realized that he had never let go of her in the first place, and he began to understand what it was that Hermione wished to discuss. He thought to himself, with a trace of cynicism, it has been two years that we have known each other, and it is only now that we begin to discuss what I was quite sure of from the beginning.

He whispered to her, "I think I know where to go. There is a lake in this forest, did you know that?"

"I believe I saw one...a couple of weeks ago."

Without another word, he moved away from the crowd and they slipped soundlessly into the forest.

"How far is it from here?" she asked.

"About a quarter of a mile. Enough so that no one will go looking for us, but also enough so that we can get back relatively quickly."

They walked in silence. After they had gone about a hundred feet from the clearing, Hermione noticed that she could no longer hear the sounds of the party; neither could she see the bonfire, which logically should have been visible for quite some ways. However, she had noticed that logic seemed to be suspended tonight, so she said nothing. It took them about ten minutes to reach the shores of the lake, which was not very large but seemed to be in a perfect circle. She was surprised to see that there was sand on the shore, fine white sand that seemed completely out of place in the middle of the forest. Again, she said nothing.

Viktor conjured a blanket for them to sit on, and together they spread it out over the sand. He was the first to sit down. Hermione thought that perhaps this was one of the most uncomfortable moments of her life. He would understand completely if she just muttered, "Never mind," and left it at that. Yet, she knew that from the moment of her arrival here, everything that had happened had been leading up to this night. What needed to be said would be said, whether she wanted to or not. So, she sat down, about two feet away from him.

"I don't know where to start." She immediately thought that that was possibly the most unhelpful thing she could have said.

"I do." There was a short pause, in which, Hermione supposed, Viktor collected his thoughts. "You said that you wanted to come here to talk, and I think that I have a very good idea of what you wanted to talk about. We have talked a great deal, you see - I remember very well all those novel-length letters you wrote me during the last year - but never, in any of your letters, or in any of mine, did we talk about what we needed to. Do you know what that is?"

"Yes," she whispered. She had begun to cry, and she felt even worse because she thought it was quite stupid to cry at a time like this. She expected him to conjure a tissue, or to tell her, "Don't cry," or to get annoyed and go off, but what he did surprised both of them.

"Come here," he said softly.

She looked up at him in surprise, the moonlight outlining a few tear-marks on her face. Her face was quite unattractive when she cried, her eyes puffing up and her skin turning a bright shade of red. She moved over to him, closing the two-foot gap between them. He put his arm around her shoulder and said, "If you want to cry, you can. For as long as you want. It's all right."

One of Hermione's most basic needs that was hardly ever fulfilled was the need to cry. She was a well-known person, and often she felt that she had an image to uphold. Crying in front of other people was certainly not part of this image. It was possibly the best gift that Viktor could have given her: the opportunity to cry, deeply, unashamedly, without a thought about who was watching her or who could hear her. She took advantage of the moment, and cried, rather loudly, for about five minutes. She was not quite even sure what she was crying about.

After a while, she lifted her face, swiped a hand across her red, puffy eyes, and sat up. She supposed that it was her turn to speak.

"I was - " she faltered and murmured something unintelligible to herself, before continuing, "I was, although my later actions do not prove this, very impressed with you the first time that I saw you. I thought that a person with your drive and confidence and sheer genius was certainly someone worth knowing. But I also felt that you were complicated, and that you would bring more conflict into my life than...happiness. So I tried to ignore you. For the most part, I succeeded. I was too sunk in all my studies to notice much of anything."

Hermione paused, wiped her eyes dry again, and continued. Apparently she had a great deal which she was finally ready to say.

"You know about what happened that year. I was so surprised when I found out that you knew me, and that you were interested in me. But in the beginning - no, really, for all of that year, I didn't like you very much at all. I felt that I didn't want a relationship at all, and certainly not with someone as unhappy and reserved as you were, that year. And...I suppose that it's only now, almost two years later, that I can really apologize to you for what I said to you at the end of my fourth year.

"If you remember, you made me a promise that day. I know that with the way I acted, I have no right to hold you to it, but I'm asking you to anyway. You promised that you would always be here, waiting for me, if I wanted you."

She looked up at him, her stomach churning with nervousness, and whispered, "Is that promise still in effect?"

Viktor looked off into the distance for a few moments, at the lake and the wavering white line of the moonlight on the water. His voice was stiff and he appeared to be making an effort to control himself. "I told you that I would always be here. I keep my promises." Then, he turned from the lake towards her, and she saw that his eyes were filled to the brink with tears. "And even if I had never made any promises to you, I love you. I love you and I have loved you for nearly as long as I have known you. I cannot imagine any greater happiness than to have you with me. And if this is what you meant, Hermione," he said as a tear twitched out of his left eye and made its way down his cheek, "then the answer is yes, I will keep my promise, and I will be here for you as long as you wish."

Hermione let go of the breath that she had been holding in. The moon was even more radiant than it had been minutes before, and it seemed full to bursting. The only sound was their breathing, and the beating of their hearts, and the soft lapping of the tiny waves on the shore of the lake. If she had not known that a quarter mile away, the Revels were in full swing, then she would have been sure that there was not a soul in this forest besides her and Viktor. She stared into his brown eyes. She had always thought that brown eyes were boring and nondescript. Now she knew that they were huge pools, oceans, and all the poetic nonsense that she had scorned now made sense. His eyes were as intense as the first time she had seen him. They were so dark that nothing was reflected in them. In the relative darkness, it seemed that the pupils merged into the iris, so that the whole of his eye was a great deep circle of brown.

Nothing happened as Hermione had suspected it would. At times like this, the concrete world was supposed to melt away. You weren't supposed to feel or notice anything. She had expected to lose herself in his eyes, but she realized that you could not lose yourself in someone's eyes, or in anything else. She was a little frightened. It seemed like this whole night would be so much easier if only she could lose herself, lose control of herself, and therefore not be accountable in the morning. She didn't even want to remember this in the morning. Now, though, she found that no matter what, she was not going to lose herself. The blanket was hard and concrete under her, and the sounds of the slowly lapping waves were clear. She was perfectly conscious of the fact that they were moving closer to each other. This wasn't how it was supposed to happen. She was supposed to melt in his arms, forget everything before that moment, forget that there was anything afterwards.

They were now sitting as close as they could to each other. Their knees were touching.

Please, I have no idea what to do, no idea how I'm going to deal with this later.

He took one of her hands and brought it to his lips.

I'm perfectly capable of stopping this. Why aren't I?

He was kissing her hand.

I'm dreaming. Perfect, logical explanation.

They had their arms around each other.

Dreaming is never this real.

She kissed his cheek, his forehead, his eyelids.

Rachel...

He moved his hands up to her hair, which had by now grown into a mess of wisps.

...is dead, dead for five years. Gone.

He smelled like pine, clean bracing pine.

There is no one here but me and him.

He kissed her on the lips, slowly and gently at first, then, as she responded, with greater insistency.

Hermione, whispered the nagging voice in her head, what do you think you're doing?

A smile spread slowly over her face until she was laughing out loud.

I know exactly what I'm doing.

*~*~*~*

Anastasia yawned and sat up, straightening her clothes, which were in an interesting state between being worn and being removed. "Cheri, where do you think zat Viktor and 'ermione 'ave gone off to?"

"Haven't the slightest. Although, I wouldn't be surprised if they're doing exactly what we're doing." Alexei grinned, leaning over to kiss her briefly on the lips.

She smacked him playfully. "Ah, you know zat zey are not like zat! I do not even want to think of mon frere doing such things!"

Alexei leaned back in the grass and laughed. "How long has he known that girl? Two years now? And he still hasn't..." He trailed off into silence, with a lascivious smile on his face. "Viktor is my closest friend, and quite an admirable person, but he has far too much patience. And that girl - "

"Her name is 'ermione."

"Sorry, Hermione. Anyway, she is rather a prude, don't you think? It's really obvious that they're attracted to each other. Why haven't they done anything about it yet? It's ridiculous. Just stupid."

"Well, zere was Rachel."

Alexei was silent for a moment, which was rather uncharacterist. "He had me burn almost everything, you know."

"Everything of what?"

"All of the photographs, all of the letters, all of the documents for the vacation. He even got a new passport and had me burn the one he had used that summer."

"I was not on zat vacation, I went back to France instead," murmured Anastasia. "And 'e 'as never told me exactly what 'appened."

Alexei shrugged. "There was a girl named Rachel, the daughter of another family who was vacationing at Lake Como. Rachel Cecile Moray, from Scotland. She was from a very good aristocratic family. He loved her, and she loved him. She drowned. She was fifteen years old. That's all that happened."

Anastasia sensed that more had happened, and that Alexei had been more involved in the happenings than he cared to say (why else would he know Rachel's middle name and her family), but she let it go. It was a beautiful night, and it was silly to waste it mourning for people who had been dead for five years.

*~*~*~*

They were lying on the sand, whispering to each other.

"Hermione?"

"Mm?"

"Come swimming with me."

She grinned. "I haven't anything to swim in, you know."

He kissed her forehead. "Swim in what you're wearing."

"Here, in the lake?"

"What? Should I conjure up a swimming pool?"

"No," she laughed, climbing to her feet. She stretched out her hand to him, and he took it, pulling himself up.

"You can swim, I hope." A tinge of apprehension was in his voice.

"Very well. And the lake can't be that deep."

They joined hands and slowly waded into the clear, warm waters. The bed of the lake felt like it was covered in tiny tufts of water plants that wedged their way between her toes. When the water had come up to her chest, she dropped Viktor' hand and pushed herself out into the water. Once she had gotten out nearer to the center of the lake, she turned onto her back and began doing a slow backstroke, swimming across the path of the moon on the water. Her clothes clung to her legs, but the fabric was naturally diaphanous, so her swimming was not impeded. She felt large ripples wafting across the surface of the water, and knew that Viktor was swimming towards her. Without moving her head, she knew that he was approaching, with a measured breaststroke. He too flipped over onto his back and lay there in the middle of the lake with her, humming softly to himself.

"What's that song?" she whispered, not moving her head, afraid to lose her balance in the water.

"Only a song that we used to sing when we were children, about a girl named Janka in a field of flowers."

"Sing it to me."

He frowned, which she could not see. Her eyes were still on the stars. "I do not remember the words." He paused; he was not sure what to think anymore, after what had just happened. His words were no longer controlled, and he no longer thought before he spoke. "But it does not matter. Come back with me to the shore."

"So eager to get out of the water?"

"Well," he murmured, as he took her hand and they leisurely swam back to the shore, "there are two more things I want to do tonight."

They reached the sand, and Viktor spread his cloak over the ground. "What might they be?" Hermione inquired. To her, the night seemed almost complete.

"They will be dancing at the Revels soon, and it is always the greatest...most entertaining part." He seemed unable to find the exact word.

Hermione stood up and began to wring the water out of her clothes. "Well, I'm soaking wet, and I'm sure that will raise a lot of eyebrows, but..." she grinned down at him, "somehow I find that I don't care anymore." She wanted to take off her wet clothes and let them dry in the warm night air.

He shook his head. "But we are not going yet. I have not told you the other thing I wanted to do."

"Yes?" He stood up to his full height, which was quite some inches above hers.

"Kiss you again." He took one of her hands and brushed his lips to it. "May I?"

Hermione smiled; she had no idea why the events of the night were making her feel so giddy and carefree, but she quite liked the feeling. "You know that you may kiss me whenever you like."

"I cannot believe this," Viktor whispered to himself as he bent down to kiss Hermione again.

Enjoy it while it is yours, thought Hermione. Almost instantly she wondered why she should think such a thing. Now, though, she was past caring, past worrying, past anything but the night.