Chapter 10.
Rhiannon.
Isis, Astarte, Diana, Hecate, Demeter, Kali, Inanna.
--Goddess Chant, Deena Metzger.
A/N: Thanks to all the reviewers, esp.Troglodyte, Suli, BlueEyes, Adie, Lyta Padfoot, Carolanne O'Rourke (that was the BEST review!!!), ArrA, Supergirl, Cappy_22, Sparklyglove, Arafel, Eliza,Persephone, Avanti, Jana, Catalina Royce, StarEyes (please!! check out her artwork, her Draco is just edible!! I don't have the link--well-- email her!!), LadyJade, Eruesse, RavenBlack, Acacia, Allie, Julianka, JoJo (whose fic"The Promise" is amazing,)Gryffindor-girl 2002,Yin, VirtualFaerie, VioletJersey (who is always wonderful!), and Kyran.
A Note: Chapter 11 will come out very quickly too, and then there will be a LITTLE bit of a longer wait for Chapter 12-14. That's when Draco and Ginny get back together again; I'm writing it right now. I swear to God the room is getting hotter when I'm working on those chapters. Just thought I'd drop a little evil hint... ;)
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Ginny awoke to a bitterly cold wind blowing through her hair, and she shivered deeply. She couldn't have been unconscious long or she'd have frozen to death, but there was no trace of Harry, Hermione, Ron, Neville, or Professor Moody. Slowly, she sat up. Her weakness and dizziness were gone, but she felt curiously empty and unformed. She looked around, now noticing things she hadn't seen before. The trees were black and bare and skeletal, but-- she blinked-- she could see larkspur and bluebonnets growing at the edge of a stream running through the edge of the clearing and into the woods. The gurgling sound of the water made Ginny realize how terribly thirsty she was. She walked to the stream and dipped her hands into it, slurping up the most delicious water she had ever tasted, rinsing her face and wiping it on her white cotton blouse. She'd drunk her fill before she realized that the water wasn't frozen, wasn't even particularly cold. The earth where she stood was warm, too. But when she took a few steps away from the edge of the forest, the rock-hard ground bit icily at her bare feet again.
Every one of the fine blonde hairs on her arms rose in a purely instinctive reaction of animal fear. The blood along one arm had dried, she saw now; she tried to wash it off, but scraping at the injured skin only made it sting unbearably. Ginny studied her blurred reflection in a still pool at one edge of the stream, trying desperately to find something familiar, something that might calm her a little. But she looked indescribably strange to herself, her face white and terrified. Then she saw what was behind her.
A curved stone wall loomed up to the midnight sky, surrounding a castle, and on the ramparts stood archers, their bows at the ready.
Ginny could hear her heart thumping, thumping, thumping through her chest. She forced herself to turn as slowly as she could, her hands raised in the air. The defenders of the walls wore some sort of leggings and leather jerkins, with lengths of differently colored plaid wrapped about them and held by silver pins. Their hair was long and dark, and their faces were very fair but without any expression at all. Then they let their arrows fly. The tock! sound seemed to reach her ears very, very slowly. She was so paralyzed by fear that she literally couldn't move a muscle, although she thought later that staying still was probably the smartest thing she could have done. The arrows passed so close to Ginny's head that she could feel a breath of air on each side of her hair. Then they lodged harmlessly in the ground.
The tallest archer raised her head; Ginny could already see that it was a woman. And although she could never remember quite seeing how, the huntress seemed to come down from the wall all at once, without taking any noticeable time in doing it. Then she was walking towards Ginny, perhaps ten yards away. Now, by a trick of the light, she seemed to have come from the grass-covered mound. A hollow hill, Ginny remembered. The domain of the faerie folk. Wish I'd paid attention in History of Magic class that day. Looking at her, Ginny felt the stirring of some magic so alien to her own that it set shivers down her back. I thought I was so clever at school, she thought wonderingly, but I really learned so little at Hogwarts. Spells and potions and wand-waving... but this... but this...
Ginny watched the woman, her brows knitting. The longer she stared, the more indistinct the archer's appearance was. It was as if she moved in a nimbus of Confundus charms. At first Ginny thought she looked like Lady Death in her dream, or vision, or whatever it had been; then she didn't, and she was never able to make up her mind on that point.
When she was nearly face to face with Ginny, the woman stopped. The air before her shimmered and steadied. Her eyes were pools of blackness, and her dark hair streamed down her back beneath a long black veil. Her robes fell in dark folds with shimmers of crimson light. On her forehead was the full moon, painted blue.
She was the figure Ginny had seen in the Priestess card when she had done the Tarot reading in Professor Trelawney's office the day before.
"What do you here, Gwenhyfar?" she asked. Her voice was musical and deep, almost too deep for a woman.
Ginny gaped. The full moon shone overhead, and she was undoubtedly standing on a patch of grass in a forest. She could feel her stomach rumbling with hunger, and the bottoms of her bare feet were cold, a little sore from walking on the hard ground. She stepped away from the creek at the edge of the forest, and a wave of bitter cold hit her. She pinched the underside of her arm surreptitiously. It hurt. This was real. Real. Yet here she was talking to a woman from a Tarot card. "I--I came with my friends," she said stupidly.
"Ah." The woman regarded Ginny. She moved a little, her hair falling back slightly, and Ginny saw that it was fastened behind her with a black velvet band.
She ran through every magical category in her head, trying desperately to find something familiar, some peg to hang this woman on. Ginny knew that she wasn't a veela or a Norn or a cailleach, not a Valkyrie, nor a zombi. She'd never actually seen any of these beings except for a veela anyway, and that was only because Fleur Delacour had come from France to visit her brother Bill last summer holidays. But it was impossible, too, to get any sort of fix on her. The woman's face seemed to be constantly shifting and changing, as if her flesh were only a thin veil of matter fixed over what she really was, whatever that might be. One moment her hair was dark; the next it flashed gold, red, and even grey; her eyes glinted blue or green, and then were fathomless darkness again. "Who are you?" she finally asked.
"I have many names. But you may call me Rhiannon, when I take on this form for your eyes," said the woman, a faint smile upon her face. "That name will do as well as any other."
Ginny knitted her brow, dimly remembering a long-ago lesson. Rhiannon... that means "great queen" in some language or other, the old Cornish tongue maybe... "Are you the Queen of the Faerie Folk then, lady?"
"I have dominion over this place," Rhiannon said. "But beware of trusting what you see, Gwenhyfar. The eyes may be deceived."
"Why did you shoot at me?" Ginny asked flatly.
Rhiannon raised her eyebrows mockingly, as if this foolish mortal girl had just shown that she was utterly unaware of the proprieties of a conversation such as this-- although Ginny could never have said how, she knew that the woman was neither mortal nor human.
"You missed," Ginny continued, feeling a bit like a first-year Hogwarts student sticking her tongue out at Voldemort.
"Missed?" Rhiannon made a gesture with her hand, turning. An archer from the top of the ramparts let an arrow fly from his bow. Before Ginny could move or speak a word, she felt something whizzing past her and thudding into a tree, jerking back her head. She reached up to touch it gingerly. The arrow had gone through the center of her silver hoop earring, pinning her ear to the tree trunk. Her mouth opened and closed several times, but no words would come out. "When my people shoot, they do not miss," said Rhiannon, almost idly. She reached down with strong white hands-- as tall as Ginny was, the woman was a full head taller-- and pulled the earring free. "Come, walk with me." She started down the winding path that Harry, Hermione, Ron, Neville, and Moody had used, and Ginny followed her.
"Your friends have gone before you, unknowing," Rhiannon said in a tone that was almost conversational. "So what will you do now, Gwenhyfar?"
"I-- I don't know," said Ginny. "Why do you call me that?"
"It is your name."
"But--" Ginny couldn't seem to collect her thoughts; they lay scattered about her like spring leaves after a storm.
They turned a curve in the little path that wound about the tumulus, and the moon shone full on the castle behind the winding wall. Ginny gasped. "It's Hogwarts! But smaller, and not quite so-- it's the Hogwarts in the painting. The painting I saw. That's what it is! It really is 1566."
Rhiannon nodded. "As you would reckon the time."
A blessed feeling of relief swept over Ginny. "It's all right then! All I need to do is to find the headmaster, it's Nicolas Flamel now I think, and he'll know what to do. I can stay here until he can figure out some way of getting me back!" She started towards the great gate in the wall. But a single touch from Rhiannon held her back. The woman's hands were stronger than anything else she'd ever felt. When she looked up, she saw that the archers had their bows at the ready again, arrows pointed towards her.
"That way is closed to you," said Rhiannon.
Ginny stared at her incredulously. "You can't mean that. You can't."
"You have a very long road to travel, little Gwenhyfar, before you may return."
"But then where can I go, what can I do?" Ginny pled frantically.
"You shall do what you must do. You must walk the path fate has appointed to you, through fire and sword, snake and dragon's tooth." Rhiannon's voice grew even deeper than before. "Beware the king who is no king, Gwenhyfar, Gwenhyfar, for that which is whole cannot be divided..."
That almost sounds like what Professor Trelawney said to me, thought Ginny. Oh, none of this makes any sense at all! "I can't get into Hogwarts," she said, struggling to hold onto some scrap of logical thinking, "and I can't stay here. Does that mean that I have to find my friends?" Rhiannon's eyes on her were answer enough.
"But I can't!" burst out Ginny. "I can't, this is insane! I don't have anything to eat or anywhere to sleep or any shoes and I don't know the way, and I don't have my wand--" She caught at Rhiannon's hand. Normally, she would have died of shame at such an outburst, especially since she didn't trust the dark queen an inch, but nothing mattered in the face of the fear she felt. "I'm not even sixteen years old yet," she said brokenly. "I can't. I can't."
The lady's face was almost kindly. "Never name that well from which you will not drink, Gwenhyfar."
"If this matter so much then come with me. If you have the power, then take me where I need to go! You do, I know you do."
Rhiannon shook her head. "Even if I would walk this road with you, I could not. For my power has dwindled, dwindled. My followers have diminished. The world has been changing, Gwenhyfar, for a long time, at least as mortals would reckon it. The time of the great evil is at hand. Either our hope comes soon, or else all hope's end."
Ginny felt the frozen grass under her cheek; she had sunk to the ground and was crying. The dark queen watched steadily, no emotion upon her beautiful face. I'll just lie here and cry, Ginny thought. I really could. I could just cry and cry until I freeze to death and wild animals run out of the forest to eat me. I can't ever leave this spot again. I'll stay here until Draco Malfoy comes through that oak and--
Dragon's tooth!
Hermione had said that the Malfoys were right behind them, perhaps no more than an hour. That was what she had felt when she was traveling through the worlds, that sense of possession as he seized her and tracked her here. How long had she lain unconscious? Ginny's head jerked up wildly; she half expected to see Draco striding towards her that very moment, the familiar half-sneer on his face. The image stirred something in her that was part excitement, part fear. But-- and the thought struck her with pure loathing and terror-- his father would be with him. Of course he would. The familiar impotent rage went all through her. She hated Lucius Malfoy with all her heart and soul; if it hadn't been for him, she herself would never have been caught by the diary when she was only eleven years old; oh damn him, damn him for making her feel this way, beaten, afraid, lost.
Ginny simply cowered on the ground like a frightened animal for a long, long moment. A roe deer, perhaps, with great golden eyes, waiting for the predators to close in. And the dark huntress-queen Rhiannon stared down at her all the while. Her eyes were not scornful, not judging, not mocking; it could not really be said that they were anything. But still she stared.
At last, Ginny had cried through all the tears that were in her. There was a great exhausted peace in her chest now. Sniffling, she sat up, leaning against a tree. The trunk was very old, gnarled, and strong. She looked up at the brilliantly black velvet sky, wisps of clouds chasing each other across the moon.
All her life, she had been protected, cosseted, and sheltered. Her family had been unable to keep her from the evil that withered some part of her soul when she was barely twelve years old, but their efforts had only redoubled after that. They had wrapped her in cotton wool. And she knew, with a sudden, cold clarity, that it had not been wise. Life had now snatched her from their loving grasp, and she was not prepared.
Her brothers, her mother, her father, her beloved house at Ottery St-Catchpole. The white dimity curtains in her room, swaying in the gentle breeze from the window. Her narrow child's bed with its white lace coverlet. Waiting, waiting for her to return. But only the gods knew if she ever would. They lay further from her than if they were separated by all the seven seas.
She almost seemed to see all her family crowded in that room, waving at her. Her dear dumpy mother with an apron tied around her ample waist; her father, his thinning reddish hair sticking up in wisps, his glasses perpetually askew, his robes rumpled. Bill and Charlie, leaning up against the window with their arms folded; their faces filled with the kindly-uncle love of older brothers who had been half-grown when she was born. Percy looking at her uncertainly, itching to go back to writing something in a ledger, his priggishness somehow dear and familiar now. Fred and George smiling at her mischievously, all their miserable teasing of her and her fiery threats of revenge against them forgotten. Ron. Dearest to her, and closest to her heart. Oh gods, but that was where the iron bit. She wanted to fall into wild weeping at the thought that she was sundered from him now.
All waving at her. All retreating from her. How vast was the gulf that now separated her from them. If she tried to go to them, to grasp them as they faded, she would seize only a sea of formless sparkling memories, both bitter and sweet. So she looked at them, and loved them, and let them go. And the thought came to her that beneath all the well-meant smothering protectiveness she'd received from them was a mysterious core of herself, one buried so deeply that she had never called on it before.
Ginny took a deep breath and rose to her feet.
"What way can I take, lady?" she asked.
Rhiannon nodded slightly, as if Ginny had passed a test she hadn't even known she faced. "There are two paths," she said. "One is the King's High Road to the port of Leith, that which the Romans built. It winds all about the forest."
"That's the way they went, Harry and Ron and -- But I can't. I'll freeze to death," said Ginny.
"Then there is the forest road." Rhiannon turned and pointed a long white finger towards the massive trees. A path wound between two oaks and into the heart of an impenetrable darkness.
"But it's dangerous. Professor Moody said so. It isn't safe to go there even in my time, and now--" Ginny shuddered uncontrollably from merely looking at the dark trees. And perhaps a little, too, from her fleeting half-memory of only time she had ever been in the Forbidden Forest, the one that both was and was not what she saw now.
"Nothing within my forest will harm the pure of heart."
Ginny gave a short, bitter laugh when she heard that. The lady continued to speak.
"And the road lends wings to the feet of mortals, Gwenhyfar. But you must not stray from the path. And you must not look back. For that way lies the Dreamtime."
Ginny pretended she hadn't heard what Rhiannon had said. She stared into the darkness for a very long time.
"Wait," said Rhiannon. Ginny hadn't even realized that the lady was still there. "One gift for you I have."
"What?" Ginny asked ungraciously.
She took something from around her neck and fastened it about Ginny's. "You have a parchment in your pocket that is torn from the Kitap-an Düs, the Book of Dreams."
Slowly, Ginny drew it out. She would have been shocked that Rhiannon knew what was in her pocket, except that she felt curiously numb, as if nothing could shock her now.
"So what do I do with it?"
"Fold it into fours."
Ginny did so, and she felt Rhiannon reach up around her neck. The woman touched the necklace, or whatever it was, she had just given to Ginny. It popped open, and she saw that it was a silver locket with a chased engraving of a bird on its front. A pheonix, perhaps, or some sort of eagle, with a spray of laurel leaves in one claw and a quiver of arrows in the other. Rhiannon took the folded scrap of parchment and placed it inside, snapping it shut. "Now go," she said.
Ginny shivered, feeling the sudden cold wind that had sprung up. She tried not to think about it. Rhiannon's dark eyes were on her. Weighing. Measuring. Was she supposed to say something more?
"Uh--" Thank you were the words that came to mind, the ones her mother had taught her to say, but she didn't feel very thankful. Ginny tucked the locket beneath her shirt and hesitated just one more moment where she stood behind the elderberry bush, fearing to stay where she was, fearing even more to set out on the road. And in that moment, her pursuers came through the worlds and into the clearing.
Something alerted her; she couldn't have said what it was. Perhaps it was simply that even without her wand she still felt magic. A deep shiver of awareness. Ginny turned to see a line of black-cloaked figures materializing from thin air, one by one. They stepped gravely into the circular clearing. Run! screamed through her mind. Run! Yet her feet were frozen to the spot. Without her volition, her hand crept up to clutch the silver locket around her neck. One of her fingernails popped the catch, and she absently stroked the surface of the parchment, scarcely realizing what she was doing.
The tall figure at the head of the line lifted its head. A faint shimmer of ashy-blond hair, cruelly handsome features, flat, cold grey eyes. Lucius Malfoy. If there was ever a moment to leave, this was it; or at least that was what kept thrumming through her brain, but her legs didn't seem capable of obeying. The solemn, measured procession of the cloaked ones was hypnotizing her against her will. She dimly remembered snippets of conversation she'd overheard when nobody knew she was listening, and knew who they were, who they must be, although she'd never actually seen them before. The Death Eaters. Hermione had been absolutely right.
The cloaked one behind Lucius moved with such grace that Ginny simply watched its steps, almost like a dance in the cloud-flickered moonlight. She barely even realized how close it was getting to her. Then it stopped, held up a slender hand and turned. Its hood fell back completely. The moon shone down bright as daylight, giving an unearthly glow to the slanted silver eyes of Draco Malfoy.
He-- he couldn't possibly see me behind this bush, but he's looking at me! He knows I'm here! Ginny was suddenly sure of it, but she still couldn't move, couldn't leave the spot. He had captured her, and there was no escape.
Ad even as she stared at him, frozen, terrified, she realized that she saw something else-- someone else-- beside and behind Draco. But there was nothing there to see. A dizzying wave of darkness rushed over her. I've felt this before. Where, when?
The beginning of second year, she remembered. When she was on the Hogwarts train with Harry and Ron and Hermione, and the cloaked dementors had passed by her in the corridor. As those undead things had been, what she now saw, she knew, was no living man. It--he-- was a shadow of malice and darkness, looming behind Draco like the spectre of death itself. Her knees threatened to buckle. The forest lay behind her and there was no way of escape.
But there was, and even through her terror, she knew what it was. It was the only way.
Dropping the locket to swing on its chain, Ginny turned and ran as fast as she could in the other direction, keeping the massive trees between her and the Death Eaters. She had gone nearly a mile before it dawned on her. She had set her feet inexorably on the forest path that had terrified her so. There was no way out, now, but through.
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