Chapter 3: Indian Summer in Transylvania
One Saturday, after her weekly jaunt into Muggle Bucharest to drink coffee and read the papers, Marina apparates out to Transylvania to see her brother and the dragons. The mountains are still lushly green and the air is warm for November. There was an American intern once who called this season "Indian summer."
Antonja, the elderly Squib-of-all-work, is dragging buckets of dragon dung across the courtyard. She squeals when she sees Marina, who's a favorite of hers, and rushes up to hug her. She stops two feet short of the young witch, and Marina pulls her wand and mutters, "Scourgify—Scourgify—Scourgify," until Antonja's face and hands and dress are as clean as a whistle. They embrace.
"Look at you," says Antonja. "Look at you. New shoes?"
"I repaired the heels," explains Marina. She is quite adept at such things. She is living mostly on savings now, supplemented by a little cash from the Hungarian Ministry of Magic. Fortunately she still has some gold left in Gringotts. After their mother's death, Slovadan and Marina sold off their family's small plot of land. They sold off the goblin-wrought silverware that their rich Slovenian mother had brought to her poor Romanian marriage, and most of the china too. Slovadan bucked at the china, made a motion to save some of it for Marina's hope chest, but Marina said, sell it all. She didn't want the memories.
"Look at you," says Antonja again. "Such rosy cheeks, such a smile today. Later you have a date?"
Marina shrugs and smiles as Fergal crosses the courtyard. "Hey, Marina," he calls. "You heard the good news? Both of us can go."
Last summer, Slovadan and Fergal thought they would have to toss a Galleon for the privilege of attending Charlie and Katie's English wedding. The dragon reservation cannot be entirely denuded of its senior staff; there is simply no question of all three Assistant Dragon Keepers taking time off at once. But then the Director, who is as nearly a saint as a rotund, aging Dutchman with a dragon fixation can be, offered to take their places, to stay and tend the hearth himself, with the help of some hand-picked second-year interns, while Slovadan and Fergal went to England. So both of them are going, and everyone's delighted, including Marina, who would have missed Fergal almost as much as she would have missed her brother.
Not that she would say so to Slovadan.
Slovadan gets on with Fergal well himself, but he has always tried to prevent Marina from having too much to do with him. He thinks Fergal is too old for her, too jaded, too experienced. He thinks she doesn't know that Fergal goes slumming among the Muggle girls. Marina lets him think this. After all, he is her big brother. But though she too thinks Fergal is too old for her, though she doesn't trust him far, they have certain things in common. Fergal, like Marina, sprang from a beautiful land with a tragic past. But unlike Slovadan, who faces life with an iron will and a steely reserve, Fergal is witty and emotional, a talker, a singer, a baker and giver of Irish breads and sweets, and sometimes it's a relief to be around him.
Marina knows, of course, that Charlie is the one Slovadan would have liked her to fall for, but much as she likes Charlie, she was little tempted. Much as she likes Charlie, she always thought of him as the sheltered Englishman, a not quite grown-up lad. She knows she's being unfair. Charlie lost uncles in the first war and a brother in the second; he served out an apprenticeship that few wizards finish, and he has quite a knack with Horntails. But still, she thinks, but still, he came from a happy home. He had a proper education in a world at least somewhat secure.
He has seen only the nice side of dragons.
She waves to Fergal and goes into the mess hall, where Slovadan is seated at one of the long tables, wading through a pile of internship applications, and Charlie is writing yet another frantic letter to Hermione with an owl perched on one shoulder and Katie leaning over the other. Katie waves to Marina in greeting, and Charlie throws her a quick smile before returning to his letter.
Charlie has been sending a lot of owls to Hermione this autumn, and the burden of them all is the same. Do not tell Luna Lovegood I am getting married. Do not let Ginny tell Luna Lovegood I am getting married. Do not invite Luna to the wedding. Do not invite Luna to cover the wedding for the Quibbler. Bury Dad's Muggle camcorder in the backyard now, before the ground freezes. Do not let Colin Creevey within a mile of the Burrow, with or without a camera.
Katie finds this all very amusing.
"The Quibbler coverage of Bill's wedding was scandalous," protests Charlie. "Those allegations about Kingsley could have ruined his career—the Ministry's a very uptight place—"
"I thought it was a scream," says Katie. "Best wedding article I ever read. Best photos, too—"
"You weren't even there," says Charlie. "Or were you? Was that yet another of the occasions on which I didn't meet you?"
"No," says Katie. "Well, yes, actually, I was invited. But I came down with doxy flu and couldn't go. My mother bought me a copy of the Quibbler to read while I was stuck in bed—it was hilarious—"
"Remus is a very private person," says Charlie. "I don't think I can ever forgive Luna for saying—"
Katie laughs.
"Remember Petru Cioran?" asks Slovadan, looking up from his pile of papers.
"Petru Cioran is applying for an internship?" asks Marina incredulously. Her surprise is not so much that Petru is old enough to be considered—though it is a wonder how those who were nine become, in the blink of an eye, seventeen—as that a boy like Petru, a boy with options, would want such a career. Petru's father Tomas is the consulting Healer at the dragon reservation, and Petru is now in his final year at Beauxbatons. (His blood, like Marina's, is not quite pure enough for Durmstrang.) Once upon a time, Tomas and Nina Cioran gave Marina a home for two years, the semblance of a family. Once upon a time.
Slovadan hands her a sheaf of neatly handwritten papers. Marina takes them absently and stares into the middle distance. She sees the familiar boyish handwriting and she sees, with the pulsing pain of nostalgia, the child on a toy broomstick, skimming bare feet over the wheat fields that line the road to Sighisoara. She sees the Ciorans' ramshackle wooden house, overflowing with books and children, of whom little Petru was the eldest. She sees the hot bright kitchen and the cold dark chambers, the jollity when Tomas was there and the anxiety when he was away. She sees herself at sixteen, bashful and withdrawn, reading and writing by the light of her wand through sleepless nights in the unlit, unheated garret, slipping out at dawn along the garden path that led to Stefan's secluded, cluttered laboratory, from whose windows leapt, at irregular intervals, small herbivorous wildlife.
"It's a horrible thing to say about a man," asserts Charlie, rousing Marina from her reverie.
"I was a fourth-year when he was teaching at Hogwarts," says Katie. "There was speculation even then, once we found out he was a werewolf. You should have heard what Angelina—"
"Stefan thought he was brilliant," says Marina quietly, handing the file back to her brother. "A kid, you know, but brilliant." She thinks, but she does not say, Slovadan, don't put this boy's life at risk, don't throw this boy's career away, by letting him marry himself at seventeen to the ungrateful service of large, violent, and irascible dragons.
"Even Bill was appalled by the part-human comments," says Charlie, "and I've never seen Bill lose his cool."
"All that sex stuff that got into those articles, that was just Colin being a sixteen-year-old boy," says Katie. "Luna's a fruitcake, but there's no harm in her. I'm glad she wrote those articles. Some people are sick for months with flu, but I was out of bed in no time, with such a good distraction."
Charlie still looks skeptical. "Have you got any sealing wax?" he murmurs.
Katie shakes her head and says, "It's on the kitchen counter. Just summon it." Marina glances at a stubby pencil on the dining table. With a snap and a tiny puff of smoke, it turns into a stick of the Dragon Facility's trademark blood-red sealing wax.
"Thanks!" exclaims Charlie, setting the wick alight with the tip of his wand, as Slovadan mutters, "Oh, stop showing off."
"May I borrow one of the Cleansweeps?" asks Marina. "It's so warm today, I thought I'd do a quick loop around the reservation."
"Sure, help yourself," says Charlie."Wilhelmina left a spare Nimbus 2000 last time she was here. Take that."
"I'll come too," says Katie quickly. "I'll go and get my broom."
Marina realizes that someone—Charlie or Slovadan—has told Katie that she's not supposed to be flying alone, which is grossly unfair, because Marina flies well, almost as well as Slovadan does. And she is not a child. She is twenty-four, two years older than Katie, who is getting married next month. But she knows why Slovadan worries, so she does not protest, when Katie runs off to get her broom.
They fly merrily through the Romanian Longhorn range, with the warm autumn wind on their tails, looping twice around the mountain peaks—a girls' afternoon out. Katie wants to visit Minnie on the way back to the compound, but Marina demurs. At last she agrees to a fly-by. "You can't really tame a dragon," she explains to Katie, who, dragon enthusiast though she is, does not have eight generations of family tradition behind her.
"I know it's unusual," says Katie. "I didn't believe it when Charlie first told me. But Minnie's so sweet!" She speaks as if Minnie were a large, rowdy puppy.
"She's beautiful," allows Marina. "But Katie, you can't tame a dragon."
When they get back to the compound, Slovadan and Charlie are playing chess in the mess hall as the chef and a cross-looking intern set out the supper dishes with a series of thuds and bangs. Slovadan, as usual, is conducting extended, leisurely, strategic conversations with the knights and the rooks. "If I castle," he warns them, "I'll probably lose the queen." The white queen wrinkles her face at Slovadan in a hideous moue.
"But he'll win the game anyway," mutters Charlie to Slovadan's queen. "It's just not your lucky day."
"Give the queen a swig of Felix Felicis," calls Fergal from the corner where he sits reading a cookbook, "and tell Slovadan to think up a new strategy. He always, always, always castles, sacrifices the queen, and wins the game."
Marina blanches. Fergal and Charlie both looked thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Slovadan shuffles his feet and looks away. "He was just joking, Marina," says Charlie quietly. "He—we forgot."
For a moment, all is silence. Then Slovadan sweeps the chessmen off the board and starts packing them up, a little more forcefully than necessary. Charlie watches without protest.
"I'm sorry, Marina," says Fergal, coming up and laying a hand on her shoulder. Slovadan glowers at them. "I'm sorry. My bad. Stay for dinner?"
"Thanks," says Marina. "Thanks, but I need to apparate now. I'm meeting a friend for a dinner in Budapest." There, she's done it, she's made a public announcement.
"A friend?" says Slovadan, her protective big brother. "Which friend?"
"Budapest?" says Charlie, the merry Englishman. "Which pub?"
"You are not going to the Vicious Veela," says Slovadan. "It is the most disgusting, tawdry—"
"We're going to the Harried Horntail," says Marina quickly.
"Order the venison," says Fergal, the aging gourmand.
"Just so you know," says Charlie. "The portrait to the left of the door as you walk in is inaccurate in certain crucial respects. You've probably noticed, a Horntail's horn is actually—"
Katie laughs and cuffs him affectionately. She's completely sold on Ukrainian Ironbellies, now that she's met Minnie. Fergal is delighted; Charlie is not.
"Good," says Slovadan. "The Harried Horntail is a very nice, family-oriented restaurant, with very good security. All the same, I'm not sure if it's suitable for two young women alone, and I don't like the idea of your going all the way to Budapest to meet a man that you don't know well—"
Marina knows her big brother well enough to know this is a question. She doesn't satisfy her big brother's curiosity. She smiles mysteriously, takes three steps, and apparates to Budapest.