Chapter 11.

East of the Sun, West of the Moon.

A/N: I can't think of a clever quote right now! Thanks to all the reviewers. Y'all will be individually thanked next time. I own everything but what you recognize from JKR. Again, the Ballad of Tam Lin is absolutely authentic to 16th century border Scotland.

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All during the journey, he had held the jeweled book that held him to her; all through the worlds and times, he traced her by the silver cord that connected them. No matter how thin it stretched, he knew that he would not lose her. Draco had saved Ginny's life only two days before, however little he had meant to do it. He really had only clutched at her instinctively when she went over the balustrade on the night of the Yule Ball; he supposed that the reflexes of a Quidditch seeker had been to blame for that. But she would have died if not for his actions, and that tied them by a bond that could never be broken. Ah, it's more than that, a voice whispered in his head, but he ignored it. What about all those nights, hour after hour after hour, lying sleepless in your bed in the Slytherin dormitory after kicking out Xanthia or Milicent or Sadina, seeing Ginny Weasley's face luminous against the darkness in your mind's eye, and--

There seemed to be no way to shut the voice up as Draco floated through dimensionless space. Also, it had a penchant for run-on sentences.

Then he felt himself hitting something cold and hard, and smelled green grass as his face skidded across the earth.

Slowly, Draco picked himself up, glancing around him. Something about these trees looked familiar. The shape of them, and something about the way they grew, the way they leaned towards each other. He was in the Forbidden Forest, he'd swear to it. But it looked wilder, older, the trees more imposing. Darker, somehow. Of course it's darker, you twit. It's the middle of the night. But this clearing... he didn't recognize it, and he knew, with a sudden chill, that it could not exist in the forest he knew. He'd flown over it through far too many pre-dawn hours that fall to not be sure of that. He took a deep breath, savouring the sweetness of the air, more full of wild things and green things that the air of his day. We did it. We really did it. We're here, in the year 1566.

And the other black-cloaked figures moved to stand about him, seeming to come out of the hollow hill, one by one. He had led them all here, he realized; he had tracked Ginny Weasley to find this place, this time. Draco smiled slightly. Good. It was always good to be the leader; it set the tone well for the future of this entire endeavor.

But then there was no time to think about anything more, because the link between him and her was intensifying, and on the other side of the tumulus he saw her, closed his eyes and only saw her more intensely, as if she glowed white-hot in the moon-dappled darkness. Ginny was on the other side of a large bramble bush. She raised her head, like a deer scenting danger, and for an instant their eyes met. Hers held sheer terror.

"It's her," he said to his father, who was standing behind him. "Ginny Weasley. I see her, she's here."

Don't move, he whispered to her in his mind, almost gently. Don't run. What's the point, really? We've caught you. I've caught you. He wondered dimly if the rest were behind her somewhere in the darkness, where he couldn't see them, Potter and her brother and the mudblood and the rest. But it didn't matter. Only Ginny Weasley mattered.

He stood there, holding her with his eyes, and felt the Death Eaters mass behind him like an army of darkness. Oh, what a glorious feeling that was. He felt the shadowy presence of Lord Grindelwald whispering approval, giving strength. He felt the long muscles in his thighs tighten, readying themselves to move him forward, and the sinews in his hands clench in anticipation of feeling her wrists trapped within his encircling fingers.

Oh, you're mine. You're mine, he told Ginny silently.

"Now," he said aloud.

And even as he took the first step towards her, she turned and vanished into the forest.

Draco was startled at that, but the forward momentum of them all was too strong to halt. The wave of black-cloaked figures surged onto the path.

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Afterwards, Ginny was never able to piece together the voyage through the forest. It was a journey that took an eternity and no time at all. It ran through a land unlike any she had ever seen or known. But she thought that she had dreamed of it, perhaps, when she was most deeply descended into sleep. Later, all she could seem to bring to her mind, thinking of where it might be, was a fairy story her mother used to tell her before she closed her eyes in her narrow child's bed at night. "Once upon a time," the story began, "east of the sun and west of the moon..." That was where she had wandered. East of the sun, and west of the moon.

She'd been in the Forbidden Forest one year before, of course, in her own time --I won't think of that, I won't-- But even that had not been like this, nothing like this. Ginny shivered, and turned her face straight ahead. Just the way she had been taught to ride a broom when she'd first been learning in her backyard. "Don't look down," her brother Bill had said, "and you won't fall off." She began to sing the words of a song on the Weird Sisters' latest album, and the sound of her voice, so lost and scared at first, quickly strengthened.

"O I forbid you, maidens all,

That wear gold on your hair

To come or go by Edinburgh,

For young Tam Lin is there.

There's none that goes by forest road

But must leave him a pledge

Either their mantles of green

Or else their maidenhead.

Now gold rings you may buy

Green mantles you may spin

But if you lose your maidenhead,

You'll ne'er get that again."

Ginny snickered at the last verse. Oh, the trouble she'd gotten into at home when her mother heard her singing it, last summer! But the sound of her laughter was so strange in that forest, on that dark path winding ahead to greater darkness, that the very trees seemed to lean down and listen. She gulped and continued on.

Only the strength of Ginny's will kept her feet on the path, and her face from looking back. She was never sure if she was walking through this world or not. Often, she was sure she wasn't. It was not cold in the forest, and not warm. Her feet felt no stones beneath them, and no winter wind blew upon her face. There were times when she heard the faraway sound of singing, and saw rings of dancers with long silver hair holding hands around great bonfires. It seemed that she went down to them and sang more sweetly than she ever had before, and that she lay in the arms of one of them and heard the sighing of the sea beneath a bed of pine boughs. And then there were times when she seemed to be walking into the past, and through the day one year ago when she had been in the Forbidden Forest. Lost. Running away from her friends, the book clutched in her hands. Drawing closer and closer to the--

But then she blinked, and realized that she was only standing at the very edge of the path, one of her feet about to step into the forest. Rhiannon's words came back to her, ringing in her ears. You must not stray from the path. And you must not look back.

Ginny continued to walk, struggling to think about something logical, reasonable. What would Hermione think of at a time like this? The silver locket Rhiannon had given her. She forced her mind full of the locket, wondering what it really was. An amulet? Some sort of talisman? Her fingers went up to stroke the silver. The smooth surface felt oddly comforting.

Open the locket, a low voice whispered. . A male voice, and one of such strength that it might easily have been harsh, or perhaps that was only from the soft guttural accent, German, she thought it was. But a deliciously hypnotic voice, soothing, caressing. Her fingernail picked at the silver seam between the two halves. Then Ginny realized what she was doing, and yanked her hand away. She kept her eyes fixed resolutely on the path.

She walked on, and the sky and earth whispered to her in languages that no human had ever heard before. The vast net of branches above her head seemed to be weaving themselves into a pattern. It teased at her mind, because if she looked at it long enough it would surely turn into something that made sense. And the pattern became-- yes! she could see it now-- the web of spells binding the god Loki, as she had seen him in the portrait hall at Hogwarts, falling, falling eternally through fire, and she saw his face shimmering through what entrapped him...

--free me from my imprisonment, his voice whispered to her again, free me, free me, Gwenhyfar--

Ginny stood and stared for so long that she could almost feel the grass growing her feet. She woke from her trance with a start, and thought for a terrfied moment that she had been standing in that one spot for hours, days, years. She would not have been surprised to lift her hand and see fingernails grown to the point where they were curving all the way around her wrist.

She shook herself, and saw that she was only walking the path, which was worn down into a groove a foot or more below the level of the trees that stood like sentinels about it."Keep it together, Gwenhyfar Alvean Weasley," she chanted to herself over and over. "You've got to keep it together or you'll never get out of here." Ginny counted her breaths, the beats of her heart, the steps of her feet; she would not fall into dream. A sourceless silvery laughter mocked her, and she wondered if Rhiannon was its source. If in some strange way, perhaps this entire forest, so like and yet so unlike the one she knew, was woven about the dark lady.

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Draco's first hint that something had gone badly wrong was the blurring of his vision and the prickly feeling in his mouth.

Strange-- I've never felt anything quite like this before, wonder what it could--

Then the dull shock splintered through him, and the next thing he knew, Draco was lying on the ground, flat on his back and rather dazed. "Try again, you fools, that's what I said," Lucius was snarling from somewhere to the right of him, and he saw that everyone else seemed to be sprawled on the ground as well. As soon as any of them attempted to move towards the forest path, they were rebuffed by an invisible force that carelessly tossed them back on the grass with the ease of a giant's hand. The younger Goyle in particular seemed to be having an extraordinarily hard time with figuring out what was going on and how to avoid it, and flew backwards over and over and again as Draco got to his feet.

Cautiously, he prodded at the air on the other side of the grassy hill with his hands, feeling a series of little shocks as he tested the boundaries. It seemed to be a wall of magic that was keeping them from getting any further into the Forbidden Forest, but what sort of magic that might be, Draco could not think. He had moved beneath a tree that blocked the moonlight utterly, and he pulled his wand from its holster beneath his robes. "Lumos," he murmured. Nothing happened. He blinked.

"Your wand won't work here." His father had come up behind him.

"What's this barrier? Is it responsible?" Draco very vaguely remembered hearing something of this sort in a History of Magic class. In earlier times, when preserving the balance of magic was of greater importance than it was now-- well, in his own time, he amended silently-- a greater spell or charm frequently canceled out a lesser one.

"No, it is not."

"Then why?" Why, the question that should never be asked of Lucius Malfoy. But if there was ever a time to make an exception to that rule, this was surely it.

"Most of our magic isn't the sort that can be done in this place and time. Wand magic in particular."

"You seriously mean that my wand won't work?" Draco asked incredulously.

"Isn't that what I just said?" Lucius answered impatiently, tapping at the invisible wall.

"But--" Draco was at an utter loss for words. His head was dreadfully dizzy and he shook it from side to side, trying to clear it. Something was missing, some indefinable, incredibly important thing, as if he'd suddenly lost an arm or a leg.

Several of the cloaked figures were gathering around them now, whispering urgently. "We can't get through," Draco heard Pettigrew say in low tones to Lucius Malfoy.

"Can't is not a word I wish to hear at the present moment," his father replied in the icy tones Draco knew so well.

Another figure came forward and felt out the boundaries of the magical wall with long, slightly gnarled fingers. Yet they were strangely elegant as well; the hands of a skilled craftsman, and they moved over the night air as if in the steps of a dance. Shimmering designs trailed after them-- circles, spirals, the twisted forms of snakes, strange wavelike and knotlike forms. Draco stared hard, but not at the designs. There was something very familiar about those hands. He'd seen them many, many times before, moving carefully, precisely, measuring ingredients, stirring a cauldron, adding a pinch of powder to some potion or other...

Oh, bloody hell, potions...

And even before the man spoke, Draco knew, with a queer sinking feeling at his heart, who he was.

"It's Ogham magic," Severus Snape said clearly.

"Well, break the spell, can't you? Isn't that the sort of thing you've spent the past year secretly studying?" Lucius asked impatiently.

Snape turned to Draco's father, and even in the fitful moonlight the motion of one raised dark eyebrow was clear on the Potion Master's face. "I'm afraid it isn't quite that simple."

"Why not?" asked Lucius through clenched teeth.

"Ogham does not derive from the mortal, nor the human. Its spells cannot be broken." Snape traced one of the serpent spirals with his forefinger, and it glowed red. "Just as I believed. We don't have a prayer of getting through this wall of spells. They're wrapped about the Ogham symbols, and the magic is contained in the trees of the forest themselves. They are not the trees we know."

Lucius was obviously struggling to control his temper, and despite the emotions tearing through him, Draco couldn't suppress a smirk. "Then explain to me," said Lucius in measured tones, "why my son saw Ginny Weasley vanish down that path not ten minutes ago. In all the research you've done, have you ever seen the answer to that simple question?"

Now there definitely a sardonic gleam in Snape's eyes. "Well, after all, Lucius, it is said that only gods, immortals, and the pure of heart may walk this path. That would rather tend to exclude any of us."

Lucius Malfoy swore a muffled oath under his breath and turned away from the forest path.

And all at once, Draco realized what had happened. "They're gone," he said. "Ginny Weasley and Lord Grindelwald both. I lost them as soon as I touched the Ogham wall." He took a deep breath. "They went through. Both of them. One after the other."

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At last, Ginny's feet were growing sore. She wondered dismally how long she had been walking. Will I ever find my way out? What if I can't? What if I'm just doomed to wander here forever until I die, or maybe I finally do get out and it's a hundred years later and everyone else is dead, or-- Ginny shivered as she remembered vague stories she'd heard in the Gryffindor common room when she was wandering around at three in the morning and couldn't sleep.

"He went into Aladdin's cave," Lavender would whisper to Parvati in the two big armchairs pulled up near the fire, "and was bewitched by the djinn."

"I heard that when they came out again it was a different century," Parvati would hiss back. "The dwarves trapped them in a web of hex symbols."

"I heard she never came out at all, and she's still there with the shining ones, and if you stand in front of the mirror at Yule and whisper "Bell Witch" three times, she reaches out and grabs you!"

And so on, and on, and on. Ginny had rolled her eyes at the time, and wondered if it were possible to tie Lavender and Parvati's tongues together into a knot. But now, everything had suffered a sea change. She stood still for a moment, taking deep breaths, trying not to fall into panic. I can get through this if I don't panic. All I need to do is to follow the path, after all.

She opened her eyes again.

The straight path stretching ahead of her had vanished. In its place was a crossroads, the four ways leading off in different directions. At its center was a great white standing stone.

Ginny burst into tears. But the stone and crossroads only seemed to be waiting silently, breath held, until she stopped crying and made her decision.

"But Gwen has kilted her green kirtle
A little above her knee,
And she has gone for Edinburgh
As fast as she can be. "

She didn't even realize that she had picked up the thread of Tam Lin exactly where she'd left off until she heard the sound of her own voice. But it calmed her a little; as always, the sound of the music she made herself strengthened her slightly. Ron used to love me singing this song, she thought, blinking more tears away. It was his favorite. Much later, Ginny would reflect on how different all their lives might have been if she hadn't started singing at that precise moment. But there is never any way to know what flows from the divergence of two roads in the Dreamtime.

"He took her by the milk-white hand
And by the grass-green sleeve
And laid her low down upon the flowers
And asked of her no leave--"

"Ginny?" said a drowsy voice. She broke off singing, glancing around wildy. There was no way to tell its source; it had come from the empty air, the sound lingering everywhere and nowhere.

It was, unmistakably, her brother's voice.

And there was something far ahead of her, vanishing behind a tree. Something almost like the shadow of carriage wheels.

Rhiannon's advice was forgotten. Ginny tore off into the forest as fast as she could run. "Ron!" she yelled. "Oh, where are you? I'm coming, wait for me!"

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Draco knelt in front of his mother at the side of the King's Road, rubbing Narcissa's hands together in his. They felt so cold, so bloodless. Her face was without expression. Draco was afraid that she'd had a bad journey through the clock tower, something similar to what had happened to him that first time, or perhaps the shock of the Ogham wall had affected her more seriously than the rest. But she would not speak to him or to anyone else, only shaking or nodding her head in response to questions. Silent as she always was, this was even worse than normal. Draco's heart turned over in his chest at the thought that she was suffering something dreadful in silence.

He hadn't looked at Snape since the moment when they recognized each other. It was no surprise to him that his potions master was a Death Eater, only dreary confirmation. It was yet another one of those pieces of information that he had known without being told. Their eyes had met, and Draco would have sworn that he saw the same expression mirrored in both pairs. A queer sort of expected disappointment. Each of them now knew a bit more about what path the other had chosen. Each had, in some corner of their minds, hoped for better.

Draco saw a shadow step between him and the moonlight, and glanced up to see the subject of his thoughts standing before him.

"She is all right, isn't she?" Snape asked impatiently.

"Yes," replied Narcissa in a clipped voice, rising to her feet."Perfectly."

Snape put his hands behind his back and began pacing along the winding path that led along the fringes of the forest they could not enter. Draco followed him. "So what now, Professor?" he asked, feeling strangely awkward with the familiar form of address. Of course, he didn't know what might be more appropriate, considering what he now knew. Esteemed Fellow Death Eater, maybe? Or have we progressed to first names, now that we both know just how far we've each fallen?

"Carriages are arranged for. We'll take the King's Road to Leith; I always felt that this might be necessary. Nothing passes through the Forbidden Forest now without the Lady's will and permission... neither of which we were ever likely to get."

"Arranged for?" Draco echoed.

"They've been summoned."

"I thought magic didn't work here."

Snape's look was rather cold, but then it always had been, for all that Draco knew he was the closest thing to a favorite the Hogwarts potion master was ever likely to have. "I sincerely hope you haven't been daydreaming through every History of Magic class, Mr. Malfoy."

"I certainly know they use magic in 1566, but--" began Draco in a defensive tone of voice.

"No, we use magic. They are magic. You might say that the witches and wizards you have known contain the art as a cup contains water, but those who hold the power today are themselves the vessel. It can be learned, but it's a vastly different art from what we study at Hogwarts."

"Really? How so?" If he could just concentrate on something besides this crushing sense of failure, even for a few moments--

"It's far more--" Snape halted and gestured a circle in the air"--organic, I suppose you might say. Closely related with the seasons and cycles of the year, the strength of the magic waxing and waning. I doubt we would have had this much trouble if it weren't so near to the feast of Yule, but then we couldn't have traveled through the clock tower at any other time. This sort of magic is tied up with the land, too, in a way unimaginable in our time."

"All of it? Really? You mean wherever in the world we go, it'll be like it is here?"

Snape shook his head. "No, no. The magical parts of the world have long since begun to retreat, to lose themselves in the mists. And of those that remain, many are guarded, as you saw. But this is one. A few still exist in Germany as well-- the Holy Roman Empire, they call it now-- and Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, of course,is another."

"That's where we're going," murmured Draco. "That's where the Jewel of the Harem is."

Snape began pacing again. "Yes, well, there'll be time enough for lessons later." He glanced from side to side, but there was only Narcissa, leaning tiredly against a tree a few hundred yards away. "Do you feel the Dark Lord's presence at all?" he asked in an undertone.

Draco reached out his mind to Grindelwald, as automatically as a man reaching to feel the fingers of his own hand, and with as much certainty that they would be there. When he felt nothing, it was like a amputation. "Nothing, " he said numbly. "He went through the Ogham wall, I'm sure he did."

Lucius Malfoy fell into step just behind them, murmuring something to Lestrange and Peter Pettigrew over his shoulder. "Ready to go? Good," his father said without preamble.

"But, we--" Draco stopped, at a loss for words. "We can't simply leave here without Lord Grindelwald." Or Ginny Weasley, he added silently.

"The Dark Lord will find us; he understands how dangerous it is for us to stay here one moment longer than absolutely necessary. I'm sure he had a purpose in entering the Forbidden Forest that we couldn't know." Lucius looked at his son sardonically. "Didn't he tell you?"

"No," mumbled Draco.

"As for Ginny Weasley, I believe we can do perfectly well without her-- Ah yes, I see that the carriages have arrived." The older man glanced upwards, toward the road.

"But-" began Draco.

"Into the coach." Lucius Malfoy's eyes were like chips of cold granite in the moonlight, and the slight wind whipped his silvery hair. Once again, his voice held the tone of command, and the unquestioned expectation that it would be obeyed.

Draco wondered when things had changed. It had been so long since he'd heard his father's voice that way, since he'd seen that hardness in his father's eyes. But the sight and the sound were so tied up with all the memories of his childhood that it was like seeing an unquiet ghost leap back to life. Gods, but how afraid he'd been of Lucius Malfoy once; it was a fear he seemed to have drunk in at his mother's breasts.

But he wasn't afraid anymore, he wasn't. What a contemptible emotion, after what Draco had seen that summer, and after what he knew, the truths he knew about his father, about all the Malfoys--

"Didn't you hear me?" the iron voice asked.

"I heard you," Draco replied, despising the tone of his own voice. "I'm going up, Father."

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In a badly sprung carriage rolling down the King's Road towards Leith, Ron's eyes opened, and he sat up suddenly.

At first, no-one noticed. Moody was talking to Neville in a low voice, and they were opening a black leather bag and turning over the contents of dried bunched herbs on the seat. Hermione was lying back with her eyes closed, her head on Ron's shoulder, trying to ignore the smell of stale dust and God-only-knows-how-many unwashed bodies that had pressed into the cushions before her. Harry was staring out one of the windows, his face expressionless. Although sharing the same ten cubic feet of air, the inhabitants of the coach were immured in their own private worlds. But then Hermione felt Ron's body stiffening all along her left side, and she sat up, too.

"What is it?" she asked.

"We have to stop the coach," he said.

"Stop the coach?" she repeated. "Whyever would you want to do that?"

"I heard Ginny. I heard her voice, she was calling me."

Hermione shrugged. "You were asleep, Ron. It was obviously a dream."

"That was no dream." He shook his head vehemently.

"But Ron," she said patiently, "I think I even heard you talking in your sleep. Believe me, you were dreaming."

"No, I wasn't!" he retorted, raising his voice a little. "Harry, listen to me, Ginny's here-- I'm not exactly sure where but I just heard her, maybe along the side of the road somewhere, and we need to stop!"

"Please, be reasonable," Hermione begged. "You couldn't have really heard Ginny, you know you couldn't. She certainly couldn't be in this coach, there's barely room enough for us, and nobody's voice out in the road could carry over the carriage wheels and the closed doors."

Harry turned his head towards Professor Moody and raised an eyebrow, questioningly. The older man shook his grizzled head.

"What? We're going to stop, aren't we?" Ron demanded.

"No," Harry said quietly.

"No? What do you mean, no?"

Harry and Moody exchanged glances, and Hermione lowered her eyes.

"What's going on? You're doing it again. You're exchanging signals, secret signals-- don't think I don't see you--"

"Ron, we're not doing anything, really we're not." Hermione attempted to lay a hand on his arm, but he shook it off, his face growing increasingly agitated.

"We've been through this before, Weasley," growled Moody. "We don't have the time or energy to start it up again."

Ron turned his face to the cold window briefly, struggling for control. "My sister's out there," he said. "You can't tell me you didn't hear her screaming. She said she was coming, she said to wait for her."

"Er, Ron," said Neville, seeming to realize what was going on for the first time. " I don't think any of us heard anything."

"But that's impossible." Ron's voice was growing hoarse. "I heard her, I heard her just as clearly as I hear you."

"Why don't you lie back and try to get a little more sleep," Hermione said coaxingly, pressing his hand.

"Don't patronize me. Don't you dare," snapped Ron at her.

"I know how you feel, Ron. Or I can guess," Harry said flatly. "But we're not stopping this coach. We can't. The Death Eaters could be right behind us, for all we know. Maybe this is even a trick of theirs."

"Right then," said Ron. He bit his lip. "Right. I see how it is."

There was a moment of silence.

Then Ron grabbed the inside handle of the moving coach and opened the door, jumping out onto the snow-covered road.

It took all four of them to wrestle him back inside.

"Let go of me!" he snarled, struggling to free himself from the eight restraining hands. "Let go!"

"I don't know-- how much longer I can-- hang on--" panted Neville, Ron's left ankle in his grasp. "Ow!" He did not quite manage to dodge the kick aimed at his head, and fell back against the cushions, whimpering. Hermione was trying to hang onto his wrists and began crying when he swore violently at her; he managed to get one hand free and pushed her to the floor. Harry tried to grab Ron's arms from behind to wrestle him down, but his best friend was using his greater size and strength to fight his way to the door again. "Quickly!" barked Moody at Neville.

"I'm trying, I'm trying-- oh, where is it--" Neville flipped frantically through the contents of the black leather bag. "Here it is!" He grabbed a packet wrapped in silver foil and pushed it at Moody with shaking hands. The older man shook a dry stream of crumbled grayish-green dried herbs into his gnarled palm and poked at them with a finger. They smoldered, sending up thin tendrils of smoke, and he shoved them under Ron's nose.

"Sersemletmek," he said in a harsh voice.

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"Is he going to be all right?" Hermione asked tensely, pulling Ron's unconscious body up onto the seat. "Is he?"

"Oh, it's no different from a Stupefying charm, really," said Neville.

"But maybe that's the question we should be asking about Ron," said Harry thoughtfully. "I always wondered if he'd make it through this."

Her voice grew shrill. "What will you do if you don't think he can? You can't cut him loose now, you know you can't. I'll go with him if you do."

"Nobody's suggesting any such thing," said Harry.

"Will you do to him what you did to Ginny, a year ago?" Hermione wiped the tears from her eyes, impatiently. "It was a year ago today. Did you remember? I remembered. I never forgot what we had to do."

"What I had to do." Harry turned again so that only the line of his chin and cheekbone could be seen against the full moon shining through the window. "What I had to do, Hermione, your hands were kept clean. I made sure of that."

Hermione drew in her breath in a sharp hiss. "If you throw that in my face one more time, Harry James Potter, just once more--"

"What, Hermione? What will you do? Something worse than what's happened already, and what's going to happen?" He swung around towards her. They faced each other down, glaring. The silence dragged on and on, broken only by Neville's frightened breathing. Ron's head lolled on his chest, shaken back and forth with each jerky movement of the carriage, and even in this unnatural sleep his face was unbearably tense.

Moody thrust his grizzled head between them. "A very wise man once said something we would all be wise to heed," he said quietly. "'If we do not hang together, gentlemen, we will all assuredly hang separately.'" He allowed them all to digest his words for a moment. "You know what we fight," he continued. "You know what we face. I'm truly sorry that you have to carry the burden of this knowledge." Harry gave a very bitter, low laugh, and Moody continued as if he hadn't heard.

"It's more than any of you should have to handle, but I think you can handle it. Yes, even Ron. There are reasons why all four of you were chosen for this mission--and it's not the reason you think." He held up a hand, forestalling Hermione's objection. And after what was, for him, an unusually long speech, he turned back to Neville and began going over the dried herbs again.

Hermione gave Ron's hand a squeeze, knowing he couldn't feel it. His skin felt oddly alien, tainted somehow by the strange Turkish spell. "I hope I never have to do that again," Neville mumbled.

"But you will," said Harry from his vigil at the window of the coach, staring out unseeingly into the snowy small hours of the night. "You will." And he wondered if he, too, heard the last faint echoes of Ginny Weasley's despairing cry.

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They had been walking down the side of the path that led up to an embankment, and Draco tipped his head up to see, high above, three black carriages at road level, their black horses shifting restlessly in the traces. He sighed. Nothing to be done but to get into one of them, really, although he couldn't shake the vaguely sick feeling of failure, of being at a permanent disadvantage from the very beginning of this venture. A procession of black-cloaked figures was already filing up a path that wound round the embankment. He shifted the Kitap-an Dus under one arm and began to climb. Then he felt the heat seeping through the pages.

The edges of the book were glowing a fiery red. Draco sucked in his breath and grabbed it with shaking fingers, opening the book to one page and running his right hand over the tiny gems embedded in the parchment. He could feel the presence of Ginny as if she was within his own skin.

"Draco?" Lucius stopped as he was entering the first coach and called back to the retreating figure of his son far below.

Draco turned briefly. "I'm going in," he said, not loudly, but his words were carried up to the road on the cold night air.

"You're what?"

"Into the forest. To get them."

"You can't!"

In answer, Draco held up the glowing Book of Dreams. "I'll meet you on the King's Road, Father," he called.

"Just what the hell do you think you're playing at?" Lucius snarled.

But it was too late. Draco Malfoy had vanished through the Ogham wall, slipping through the spells as easily as the night itself. His father stared after him for a long time.

"Shall we go?" Snape asked, impatiently.

"He's mad," Lucius said at last. "We'll never see him again."

In answer, Snape leaned out the open carriage door and craned his neck up at the innkeeper's lads from the Lion and Thistle, who were sitting on the coachman's box. "We're not paying you lot to sit here all night," he said. The horses stamped and whinnied in fear at the strange harsh voice, their eyes rolling.

"Hist, lassie," one of the boys crooned, patting the neck of one of the mares.

"Horses be wiser than humans," the other said grimly, crossing himself.

"Eh, aye," the first said dreamily, a vague expression on his face."We must make all haste. So I hae been told. A gold piece at the end o' this journey, an we reach Leith in three days' time."

The second glanced back at the black-cloaked heads and shoulders, silhouetted against the window in the darkness within the coach. "For the dead travel fast," the innkeeper's son said in an undertone. Then he clicked his tongue and slapped the reins against the black horses' necks. The carriage wheels rolled their burdens away. Lucius Malfoy stared out the window unseeingly, thinking, thinking. And far below them, Draco began his journey through what he knew as the Forbidden Forest. And so it was. But it now contained the land that had, by his day, long retreated into the mists, into the shadow of a legend long forgotten. The Dreamtime.

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A/N: Review! Review! If you're not on the mailing list and you want to be, tell me! And YES!! Lots and lots more D/G contact in the next chapters. This one was just getting insanely long and I realized I couldn't post anything of the length it was becoming. NEXT chapter, he catches up to her and they're back together, I swear on a big stack of Bibles. Ooo, it's gonna be good. Wow, and what's going on with Harry, Ron, and Hermione? Tensions aplenty there. What happened a year ago in the Forbidden Forest, and what did Harry have to do to Ginny? (Next chapter...)What did Draco learn in the preceding summer about the secret past of the Malfoys, and why did it cause him to lose respect for his father? (Soon...)

The words of the second coachman ("for the dead travel fast") are from one of the creepiest movies ever made, F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu. I really picture Grindelwald as looking like Count Orlov, the undead German Dracula, but with more hair. Last year's Shadow of the Vampire was the fictional retelling of the making of that classic silent film. "An" was a 16th century way of saying "if"-- it's not "and" misspelled, btw.

You may notice that Snape is a bit mellower, but I think that slightly different aspects of his personality are revealed when he's around Draco. When Ginny remembers Lavender and Parvati talking about faerie abductions, Parvati is referring to the famous Bell Witch of Adams, Tennessee. I've been to the farm where her ghost supposedly still lives (or doesn't live, I guess,) it's about an hour from Nashville. The family that was originally haunted by the Bell Witch still lives there and gives tours of the haunted cave, and they show visitors a big scrapbook of ghost pictures. And yes, if you look in a mirror on Halloween night and say her name five times, well, they SAY she comes out to get you. That was supposedly the original source of the Candyman urban legend.