Autumn into Spring
Author note: "Autumn into Spring" is a sequel to "A Romance, with Dragons," which I recommend reading first. This is not a story for children. There is, I hope, a lot of love in this tale, but there are also many cruel blows dealt by life to both major and minor characters, and some readers will find some of the material upsetting.
My apologies in advance to anyone who's Romanian! The Muggle and magical worlds are largely distinct, and my depiction of the Romanian wizarding community is not intended to be a reflection on Muggle Romania. Rather, it's an exploration of another side of wizarding culture—one we don't see too much of at Hogwarts. That said, I am indebted to Tim Burford and Norm Longley, The Rough Guide to Romania (Penguin, 2004) for my knowledge of Romanian Muggle history and geography.
Chapter 1: Autumn in Bucharest
If you go to Bucharest, now the Dark Lord's gone, if you go to Bucharest and walk from Piata Unirii up Boulevard Bratianu, if you wend your way through the Gypsy market in Strada Lipscani towards Stavropoleos Church, you will see a chain-mail fence. Look not over the fence but through it, bind your clothing to your body, think of magic, say a charm, and slip through the rusting links into Piata Centaura.
The centaur fountain has never worked, not since the First War. It stands majestic and desolate, littered with owl droppings and usually also with owls, hooting conversationally in the murky light. Be a good citizen and mutter, "Scourgify!" before you turn right to Maslan's Bookshop or left to the tiny branch of Gringotts (open daily, 10-2). Calica's Wand Shop has gone out of business (Death Eaters), as has Harghita Owl Emporium (Death Eaters), as has Bucegi Dragon Supplies (same). Walk up Strada Cornmare, past the shuttered shop windows, the shuttered offices of the Drum Liber, past the elegant façade of the Hotel Nai, now a brothel run by a skinny, tattooed Albanian. After a block and a half you will face a long, low, charmless concrete bunker: the Romanian Ministry of Magic.
Stand up straight, empty your pockets, and hold your wand limply in your left hand, please. Queue up, hold still, and wait. Security is tight, for the war was a bad war here.
When the guard waves you through, when you walk with brisk nervous steps down the charmless concrete hall, don't pass the unlabelled wooden door to your left, but seize the handle and walk through. Step boldly through the dark little anteroom into the totally unexpected, totally charming, glowing golden library.
Here, at the desk, you will find a startled young woman named Marina Vasik. She will lift her large dark eyes and her tattered phoenix feather quill from the parchment on her desk. She will tilt her pointed chin under the weight of her heavy dark coronet braids, and she will ask you your business. If she likes you, if she decides to trust you, she will tell you gently and sheepishly that it was been two weeks and a half since any soul deigned to consult the Romanian National Wizarding Library.
Two patrons in a month is a busy month for Marina.
Days are long, though life is short, for Marina.
At twenty-four she looks nineteen and feels thirty-five. Romania is not a gentle place, and life has not been kind. She spends her days sitting—unpaid, because the bankrupt Ministry has no funds to pay her—in a library that no one visits. She dusts the books, she arranges the books, she reads the books. She stares into space and thinks up things that ought to be done if only anyone in this daft impoverished country of pessimists and vampires and Death Eaters could be persuaded to take an interest in the law. She spends her empty nights teaching herself a little English, a little Italian, a little Hungarian from outdated tourists' primers, bought second-hand, cheap, almost free, from Muggle bookshops. Meticulously, fretfully, she scrubs her modest flat and cuddles her pet Kneazle. She spends her weekends hanging around her brother Slovadan and his friends at the Transylvanian Dragon Research and Breeding Facility, baking cakes and pies for the "boys"—one of whom is thirty-eight—and flying out to look at the Longhorns.
Sometimes, in the library that no one visits, Marina takes a small hand mirror out of her pocketbook and studies her face, patting dark heavy curls anxiously into her coronet braids, rubbing the circles around her eyes as if she could rub them away. And she thinks, I look nineteen, I really do, but what does that matter if I'm twenty-four, if I feel thirty-five, if I'm to spend the rest of my life sitting in a silent dusty library, writing fairytale laws that will never be passed, annotating the International Ban on Dueling that our Minister—unlike every Minister of Magic in civilized Europe—will never sign.
Now and then, of a Saturday morning, she slips out to a Muggle pastry shop. She orders a cup of white coffee and, if she can afford it, a brioche. She lingers over the Muggle newspapers, which Ministry of Magic employees aren't supposed to do, and she thinks, no wonder we're not in the E.U.
She sips her white coffee and she picks at her brioche and she thinks that her grandmother—the Transylvanian one—would turn in her grave if she knew that her only granddaughter was sitting in a Muggle pastry shop reading a Muggle newspaper article about the E.U.
It makes her sad, but it doesn't stop her from reading the newspapers. Sometimes she reads the English ones too.
For years, from her early teens, Marina has been dogged by a sense that she is innovating, that she is transfiguring herself, that she is creating a sort of life and a sort of career that have never existed before, not for witches, not for poor ones, not in Romania. It is not a pleasant sensation. But in a life marked by scarcity, need has been the mother of invention. Looking forward is hard, but looking back is worse.
In the eighteenth century, in the nineteenth century, in the years before the Grindelwald War, Vasiks were to Romanian Longhorns what MacFusties are to Hebridean Blacks. But time passes, and fortunes ebb with the tides. Vasiks, like pureblood families the world over, are dying out. Slovadan and Marina are the youngest and the last, save for some cousins who run a small and not very reputable reservation in Ruthenia. And Slovadan and Marina are different—almost disowned—because their blood is not quite pure.
For centuries, till her grandmother's day, the Vasik family consisted solely of men who were Dragon Keepers and women who married their cousins and raised their sons to keep dragons. Marina's mother was the first of the new breed, a half-blood, a foreigner, a Slovenian who married in, an improbably well-educated woman who spoke German and French and who taught those languages to her children, after a fashion, before she was overcome by darkness. A weakling, Marina thinks now, a woman who believed in wishes and not in duties, a woman who thought magic was charming, a witch who had no dragons in her blood.
Marina does not keep dragons, and Marina has no sons. But still, she thinks, but still, she has dragons in her blood.
This is what she is thinking when Viktor walks in and she drops her quill in surprise.
People fault Marina for being awkward, for being shy, but she doesn't quite understand how she's supposed to be otherwise. She was raised a half-blood and a half-caste in the most traditional wizarding community in Europe, and easy self-confidence is not for her.
Viktor is a friend of Charlie Weasley, an old friend of hers, no big deal. But Viktor is also the famous Quidditch Seeker whom she's known by reputation half her life and, more recently, the elusively distinguished Bulgarian spy. He has the most beautiful manners, courtly and kind, and he has been charming to her on the few occasions they've met, but he always makes her uneasy. She finds him a little too interesting; she likes him a little too much. His careful concentrated attentions stir the most unreasonable hopes in her, and even though she's a poor half-blood librarian, she wants to act as if she has the poise and worldly savoir-faire that she had never a chance to gain, as if she had the education she did not, in fact, have.
"Good afternoon, Viktor," says Marina, with a convincing imitation of poise. "May I help you?"
"I—" Viktor looks around at the empty library. "I just came to say hi."
"Oh," says Marina, a little confused. Even her friends don't do this. But then her friends, unlike Viktor, all have day jobs.
A newspaper lies open on her desk, a slightly outdated copy of Paris Match, and he's reading it upside down. The left-hand page in a sensational exposé of the latest sex scandal in the Muggle French political world. It makes Marina blush to see him looking at it, and she slams the paper shut. If that story were unfolding in her own world, it would upset her terribly. Marina does not find adultery amusing. Her father was unfaithful and it broke her mother's heart—even though her parents were all but separated by then, even though Julijana Vasik too had been unfaithful, in thought and word if not in deed. Marina does not find adultery amusing, but when it happens in the Muggle world, it doesn't seem so real.
"It's Muggle, isn't it?" says Viktor, staring down at the front page.
"I'm just brushing up on my French," says Marina,a littledefensively. This is something less than the truth. Marina has just started freelancing for the Hungarian Ministry of Magic. Her task is to digest Muggle news from the French and Italian papers for Hungarian staffers eager to embrace the liberalization of wizard-Muggle relations that has, in some parts of eastern Europe, accompanied Voldemort's fall. This undertaking is illegal in so many ways that Marina can hardly keep track. It is illegal for her to read the Muggle newspapers, it is illegal for her to bring them into the Ministry, it is illegal for her to be employed by a foreign Ministry of Magic while she's working for the Romanian Ministry, and it is of course illegal for her to work for the Hungarian Ministry on the Romanian Ministry's time. But the Romanian Ministry hasn't paid her in over a year, and Marina is breaking fewer laws than most of her neighbors are at the moment. (In wizarding Romania, laws are made to be broken.) The job appealed to her curiosity about Hungary and France and Italy, even as it offered some slight respite from poverty, so she took it anyway.
Her brother and her brother's friends wonder sometimes why Marina stays on at the Ministry, when so many other Romanian staffers are deserting what now appears to be a sinking ship, but Marina has her reasons, only one of which is that she hopes eventually to get paid.
"Have you been to Paris?" says Viktor, as if reading her thoughts. "Or to Beauxbatons?"
Marina shakes her head ruefully. She has never been west of the Adriatic.
"Would you like to go somewhere?" blurts Viktor. "I mean—what I meant was—would you like to have dinner with me, somewhere fun? Paris is too far, I know, but I was thinking maybe Budapest."
She looks at him, as shock flows into gratitude. She smiles slowly and she nods, not much, because she knows it would be a mistake to show how excited she is. She thinks that it's been over a year since any man asked her out, any man at all, if one excludes the Albanian pimp who operates out of the Hotel Nai and the homeless Muggle who keeps coming onto her in Strada Lipscani.
"Where would you like to go?" asks Viktor. "The Vicious Veela or the Harried Horntail?"
"Er—where would you recommend?" asks Marina, who likes to travel but doesn't have the Galleons to eat out much, especially not in a wizarding quarter as hip as Budapest's.
"The Harried Horntail," says Viktor firmly. "Best cuisine in central Europe. Well, the best in a wizarding pub, anyway. The Vicious Veela has some interesting mixed drinks, but it's—well—well, I think you'd like the Harried Horntail better."
"Thanks," says Marina, cautiously but happily. "Thanks, I'd love to go."
"Are you leaving soon?" asks Viktor, once again glancing around the empty library.
Marina nods. She stands up and straightens her desk. Viktor helps her into her coat. Just before she flicks off the lights, Marina pulls her wand and transfigures the copy of Paris Match into a carefully creased and highlighted copy of the Romanian Ministry of Magic staffers' handbook for the edification of the guards.
She always had a knack for transfiguration.
