She landed hard on her side, her wrist and arms taking the brunt of the fall, stretched out in front of her like a Seeker going into a free-for-all dive for the Snitch.  Parvati flinched as she rolled onto her hip, assuming a half-sitting position that let her turn her hands over to see how much damage had been done.  She remembered Mum's stories from her gladiating days, when she used to ride and train hippogriffs for a type of racing on an airborne track, and Mum always told them that if you were going to fall, you should tuck your head and take the brunt of the impact on your shoulder.  She had obviously forgotten about that, Parvati thought, wincing.  She plunged one hand, with its mosaic of gravel and dirt and blood dotting her palm, inside her robe and mumbled a half-hearted healing spell.  It only got some of the dust and ragged skin off her hands, but it was good enough that it didn't hurt.

Parvati got to her feet, shaking her stinging palms so that little sprays of red, like tiny flowers, were left on her robe, then looked around uncertainly.  She had no idea where she was, or even why she was here – well, aside from the obvious, of course.  Priori performo was an incredibly handy spell that she and Lavender used most often when they couldn't decide whether they preferred this shade of eye shadow or the last one, and priori performo cast the last spell used on the subject's face – or, in this case, bed.  With all three-point-seven seconds of thought that Parvati had put into it, it had seemed like a good way to figure out where Pandita had gone.  But in retrospect, she decided that it had not been the most brilliant idea ever to occur to her in her sixteen years.

Padma would have known what to do, Parvati reflected wryly as she turned around in a slow, tentative circle, trying to absorb as many landmarks of the unfamiliar scenery as she could.  Padma always knows what to do.  I suppose she wouldn't have used the first spell that came into her head, either.

She laid her wand flat on her hand and said, "Point me."  The golden-brown wand spun around a few times in a blurry circle, then settled on a direction between her thumb and index finger.  That was north, then, which was nice, but didn't help much.  Parvati had no idea where she was, so knowing which way was north meant about as much as knowing some sodding spell that only Hermione Granger would learn.

Parvati was suddenly aware that she was standing in the middle of a battled-scarred field, with very few shrubs or bushes, and only the barest amount of ragged grass crunching to death under her feet.  She wasn't sure why that made her uneasy, but she felt very unprotected – and slightly stupid – standing in a destroyed meadow trying to get her bearings.  Cautiously she made her way to a scattering of immature trees off to the northeast.  Above her head the leafless branches rattled together in hollow vibration, and the clattering reminded her inexplicably of bare bones.

From her meager shelter amid the trees, the field looked even more desolate.  A light wind, slow and gentle but so cold that it felt like ice against her neck, lifted some dead grass and dirt and swirled it off in a haze to the north.  The air smelled unnatural, like an old fire, and sickly-sweet treacle tart, and a coppery scent, like –

Parvati remembered, suddenly, Lavender's first and only owl to her since she had joined Pomfrey in the fields, right before the Patils made their house unowlable to protect Padma.

So many bodies, Parv, dead people and animals, not just wizards but Muggles too, pets and even Death Eaters.  Walking around trying to find pulses.  Madame Pomfrey is trying to create a spell that will heal en masse, but it has to only work for the people fighting on our side.  Do you remember in Muggle Studies, learning about the Viet-nam War?  That's what this is like.  Bodies just left in the middle of a field.

Sometimes I think I'm getting the Gift, Parv, I think I can see the future.  Without tea leaves, though, I don't need them anymore.  I can See but I'm just so scared of finding everyone I know on a field like this …

Wherever I go, no matter what, I smell blood.  It smells like copper.  It doesn't matter if there are no bodies around, I smell it all the time.

– like blood.

Parvati shivered.  For a moment she hugged herself, burying her chin in the smooth collar of her robe, wanting nothing more than to be tucked into bed with a steaming mug of hot cocoa and some chocolate frogs, reading to her little sister.  Wherever she had followed Pandita, it was not a good place.

And then she pulled herself together, or at least buttoned her lip against her teeth, and started off through the trees.

Unfortunately, there didn't seem to be much in any direction she walked.  Parvati tried moving first to the right, then the left, but all the trees looked the same, the wind came from the same direction every time she turned around, and in fact she had the distinct feeling that something was wrong in her head, perhaps she didn't know how to perceive different directions, or she was just getting turned around without realizing it.  Her wand weighed heavy in her fingers, leaving the smooth indentations of mangrove wood on the pads of her thumb and forefinger, but she held it up bravely so that the beam cast bouncing shadows down near her toes.  She wanted to call out to Pandita, but she sensed, with the kind of Gift Trelawney had never told them about in class, that it would be just as stupid as everything else she had done tonight.

By the time Parvati reached the sixteenth clump of trees that looked just like the first group she had taken refuge under, her calves ached under her robe and stung more blindingly than her palms.  She still had no idea where she was, or if she was back where she started.  And it didn't look like England or Scotland, either.  The emptiness and the chill reminded her of – she struggled to remember something, anything, from Muggle Studies – maybe Russia?

The faintest flash of white in the forest to her left made her whip around, long black hair hanging straight against one ruddy cheek, and the beam from her wand jumped against the warped leathery bark of the trees.  "Hello?" she called softly, biting her once-lipsticked lip between her teeth.  "Is anyone there?"

No answer.  Parvati took a deep breath, mumbled "Nox" so she was plunged into uncanny blackness, then started off to the left, feeling rather blindly with her feet.  Briefly she remembered her kitten Nandin, and wished he were still alive so that she could have his sense of vision.

When Parvati reached another clearing, which she sensed because of the change in the air and not with her still-poorly-adjusted vision, her breath caught between her vocal cords and she emitted an involuntary kitten-mew of fear.

A neat, wide circle of wizards in black robes took up the entire clearing.  They were spaced barely six inches apart, but there were so many of them that Parvati could barely see the men on the other side of the circle.  She squinted, trying in vain to focus.  About all her knowledge of math came from being yelled at by Snape in Potions for adding too much Asiatic sea root to the six chopped aconite leaves, but she estimated that there must be eighty or ninety Death Eaters – she knew with a sudden, stomach-jerking chill that they were Death Eaters, for when one of them raised his left arm, long black wand held high in his fingers, she saw the momentary flash of a black Mark on his skin.

In the middle of the circle were several bound figures in brightly-colored robes that contrasted sharply with the unerring black of the Death Eaters.  Parvati studied them, straining her eyes as much as she could.  There were two adult wizards, three young wizards about her age, two small boys, and a little girl.  None of them looked familiar.

She remembered how Lavender had written, I've been lucky so far.  All this caring-for-the-wounded.  I haven't seen anyone I know – or maybe I just don't want to see them.

She studied the little girl in the center of the circle and the loss of her luck smacked her like the Cruciatus curse between her eyes.

Parvati didn't have the wits to mumble a silencing spell, so she clapped one dusty, bloody hand over her face and bit down hard on her own skin to keep herself from screaming.  She would have recognized the small figure with a waterfall of witchy black hair and pink cotton pajamas if she'd been blind.

She tried to remember how to breathe, but suddenly all the things she knew – how to do her hair, how to flutter her eyelashes and flirt with a boy, even how to narrow her almond-shaped brown eyes so that she could read the tea leaves in Divination – nothing she knew seemed to give her the strength to tell her what to do now.

Terrfieid now, she wondered what to do.  She watched the Death Eater with his arm raised as he flicked his wand – his left hand must be his wand hand, she realized inanely, she could still see the fabled Mark flashing as his black sleeves fell down his arm.  One of the little boys in the center of the circle levitated in the air; then abruptly the ropes slid from his body, falling onto the ground with a soft puff of brown dust, and the other Death Eaters raised their wands expectantly.  She saw the flashes of white teeth and glittering eyes that made them look painfully like a group of little kids just given a new toy – and then she understood that was what it was, because the little boy began to bounce through the air, like a twisted game of soccer (which Dean had explained to her many times, but she still didn't quite understand) played with only the flicks of wands in the air.

Parvati Patil wanted to scream.  She wanted to cry.  She wanted to throw up.

She was afraid that she was going to do all three at once when a rustling sound behind her put her on her guard.  Her wand came out of her robe, trembling between unsteady fingers, and she knew that she was sending curses of Gryffindor crimson and gold every direction she could, but they must not be working, because there were hands – first against her shoulders – then her mouth – and then another body against hers, shoving her down to the forest floor -

"Parvati?"

Parvati's arm, which was twisted behind her back in a vain attempt to curse the person who was sitting on her spine, flopped to the ground at the sound of a familiar, if flabbergasted, voice.  "Uh – Hermione?"

"Erm … yeah."  The pressure eased off Parvati's spine, and after a minute the highly uncomfortable sensation of Hermione's wand poking into her neck disappeared too.  "Well, get up!  What the bloody hell are you doing here, Parvati?"

"I was – I was looking – my sister, my little sister, we – oh, Merlin, she's out there!  We have to go!  Hermione, please, we have to go!"  Parvati scrambled to her feet so fast that she tripped over the hem of her robe and ended up in a sprawled heap on the ground again; Hermione rolled her eyes and offered one bony hand to help her up.  Parvati either didn't notice or didn't need any help.  "We have to go get her!  We have to get her!  We have to – "

She didn't realized that she was running until she heard Hermione say softly, "Petrificus Totalus."  For a moment she wondered why she wasn't going anywhere, and then she wondered why she felt so suddenly weightless and heavy at the same time, and then she realized that she was lying on the ground again, unable to do anything but blink nervously up at Hermione's serious face.  Parvati tried to say something, tried to make Hermione understand how important it was for them to go out there and save Pandita – her little sister – but her lips wouldn't move.  Only her eyes, which strained as they fastened onto Hermione's face in the dark.

"Parvati, we can't go out there," Hermione said briskly, sensibly, sounding as infuriatingly know-it-all as she usually did in Transfiguration, or Herbology, or History of Magic.  "Do you have any idea where you are?  I mean, you do know what they would do to you if you raced in on some secret gathering of Death Eaters?  Frankly, I haven't the foggiest notion how you got here in the first place, I've been tracking the Death Eaters for ages and this is the first time I've broken into their forced-Apparition charms – oh, I'll unbind you.  But you need to promise not to scream or run out there, all right?"  She waited a moment for a blink of assent, then performed the counter-curse, but she didn't drop her wand.  She kept it held high in her fingers, as if ready for whatever Parvati was about to do next.

"We have to go out there," Parvati insisted croakily as soon as she could speak.  "We have to.  She's my sister, do you know what they're doing to those people?"

"Which they will just as easily do to you if you do something foolish like try to save her," Hermione said severely.  For a strange moment Parvati was reminded of Professor McGonagall.  "Parvati, I don't know how much you know about what's going on, but we need to get you out of here quickly – something urgent has come up, and Padma and Dumbledore and I need you right now.  Come on, we have to go."

"No," Parvati insisted, planting her feet firmly inside her robe, and suddenly she was aware of how stupid she must look to Hermione, running around in what used to be her best dress robe when Hermione Granger was out fighting a war, just like her twin sister.  "We can't!  I won't leave without Pandita, I can't do that to her!"

"Quietus," Hermione said fiercely, aiming her wand at Parvati's throat.  "Look, you brainless excuse for a Gryffindor, didn't you hear a bloody thing I just said?  It's not safe.  We can't do anything.  We need to go!"

"Do you have a little sister?"

"I don't see what my family has anything to do with – "

"You don't, do you?"  It crossed Parvati's mind to wonder how she could never have bothered to ascertain that from Hermione in the five years that they had shared a room, but then Hermione generally took pains to distance herself as far from Lavender and Parvati as she could, short of moving into the Slytherin dungeons.  "Then you can't understand, but I need to help her!  She might die out there, Hermione, she's just a little girl, and they're going to kill her – "

"Parvati, it's no safer for you than for her.  Do you understand?  You can't do anything to help her."

"What do you mean?" Parvati asked absently, yanking away from Hermione's iron-clad grip on the sleeve of her robe.  If she stuck her head out around that tree, she could just see Pandita, who looked so small, and yet, oddly, not as scared as Parvati would have thought she would be …

"Don't act so bloody daft."

Parvati felt Hermione's hand latch back onto her arm, and she jerked it away again.  If she moved a little, she could see Pandita's hands, where they were tied tightly behind her back.  Her small chest was rising and falling rapidly under her pajama top.  "I am not acting 'bloody daft,' as you put it, you blasted know-it-all.  Look, if you know so much, help me figure out how to get my sister."

"Parvati."  Hermione took another step forward to follow her again, and this time her hand was gentle but heavy on Parvati's shoulder.  "I can't help you.  We need to leave now.  We need to get out before they find us too."

"I won't leave without my sister!" Parvati shrieked.

She felt a small hand with tense, strong fingers clap over her mouth as a few of the Death Eaters turned and glanced into their clearing.  She could smell the dusty scent of Hermione's curls and the muffled saltiness of sweat on Hermione's palm, and under all that, still that coppery smell that had tinged this place ever since she followed her baby sister here.

The Death Eaters who had heard her scream were moving now, and Hermione was dragging her back into the woods, and then she could feel herself rushing through the air with a little pop like her ears were exploding.  So this is Apparating.  And before all her consciousness left the coppery forest where she had been, she heard a little girl's keening cry, and the sound of ripping cotton cloth, and Parvati closed her eyes and threw up into the darkness.