Missing the Snitch

A shot was fired, my rose, and it struck our young hero deep in the heart…

She had vanished with a crack! like a gunshot, but Viktor did not turn around. He looked as if a shot had indeed been fired, and had struck him in the heart. It was many minutes before he could rouse himself to slouch over to a carved oak chair and collapse into it.

There had been a sound like breezes in the plum trees when the little gray owl had flown up to the balcony, but this was not the sound of the soft springtime winds but the whispers of the cousins in the courtyard below.

"Is that the red-haired boy’s owl? It is, isn’t it?"

"She’ll go back to him."

"No, she won’t. She promised Viktor… She wouldn’t do that to him."

"Better now than after they are married. My best silver necklace says she leaves." They all looked up at the loud cracking sound of Disapparation. Cousin Jana heaved a sigh of relief. It was a very beautiful necklace. "Poor Viktor, though. Well, where are the boys?"

Crack

! Crack! Crack - Crack! Here come Cousin Bojdan, Cousin Stojan, Nikola and Danjo. "So," said Bojdan. "Are we groomsmen, or avengers?"

"Neither," said Cousin Tudora, "and stop being silly. Just go and talk to him."

When the cousins reached the high balcony, they found Viktor still slumped in the chair. Bojdan picked up the ring in its box from the floor where Viktor had dropped it and tucked it back in Viktor’s pocket. "Get up, Little Khan! Time to celebrate!"

"What? Celebrate? She left me! Disapparated, behind my back, without a word, and me with the ring in my hand!"

Cousin Nikola coughed discreetly. "Just so. Your mother and father are in the Great Room, toasting each other with brandy, twice as strong as they drank at their wedding." The cousins roared with laughter, and even Viktor chuckled weakly.

Cousin Bojdan, the eldest, took command. "On your broomsticks, all you heroes! The tavernkeeper is waiting for us!"

From wine to brandy, by midnight Viktor and his cousins drank up three vineyards; so strong was the drink that it broke the shackles in which shyness bound Viktor’s strong young voice, and he filled the mechana with songs of old heroes, fairy maidens, and blood-feuds until all the old men wept into their glasses.

When daybreak came, there lay Viktor and Bojdan and Stojan and Nikola and Danjo like dead men on the wide veranda of the Krums’ big house. And how did they come to be in that place? Did Valja Sokolova, Viktor’s mother, go to the tavern with Cousin Jana and Cousin Tudora behind her giggling into their veils, load them onto pallets slung between their brooms and dump them unceremoniously onto the cold slate?

For three days Viktor suffered horribly, but what pained him worse he could not tell: his head from the drink or his heart from Hermione’s betrayal. Then on that third evening he finally opened his eyes when he smelled the steam of rich soup from the table at his bedside. Though it made his head spin, he sat up to drink the soup. Also there were slices of apple and bunches of grapes, and ripe sweet plums from the orchard; he ate those too. Then he got out of bed and called for a servant to draw him a bath, and the servant hurried off to do it, smiling broadly.

Clean and fed, Viktor went outside to the garden where his mother and father were sitting. They moved aside so their son could sit between them, and lay his head on his mother’s shoulder.

"This came for you," said his father, "but you had already left with your cousins. When you returned… well, maybe it’s as well to have waited." He handed Viktor a roll of parchment.

Dear Viktor,

I can’t bear to ask for your forgiveness, I don’t deserve it, as rude and stupid and thoughtless as I was, and I don’t deserve you, as kind and generous as you and your family have been to me even though they all knew things would not work out between us. Yes, they knew -- if your mother is reading this over your shoulder, turn around and look into her eyes. You came to me over all the pretty girls that wanted you and gave me confidence in myself as a woman; for that I can truly say I love you and always will.

I wouldn’t like to think that I would never hear from you again -- you are my first love and very precious to me, but I wouldn’t blame you. Just please find some way to let me know you don’t hate me, and please always know that people here love you (yes, Ron too! Ginny and Molly almost scratched my eyes out!) and would never forgive me if my foolishness kept you from them.

Hermione

Just for a moment, Viktor thought his head meant to ache again, but his mother’s hand was on his knee and his father’s hand was on his shoulder. And from inside the house he could hear the cousins, Jana and Tudora, Bojdan, Stojan, Nikola and Danjo, laughing and singing and playing the tambura.