Chapter Four: In the waves of a foreign air
Soon
"Why me?" she asked softly. "Why not Ron, or Ginny, or -"
His eyes caught the light as he looked at her, and Hermione fell silent, feeling the press of his gaze against her skin, quickening her blood, making her pulse a raging storm.
"You were the only one who followed," he said quietly. "And besides, you're the only one who could understand, Hermione."
Her name on his lips like a spell, calling her forward, the way that she had called him, and her hand splayed on his chest, feeling the insistent beat of his heart against her palm.
Now - July 10th 2002
"You could have been killed."
His voice came from behind her, and Hermione turned, squinting into the bright sunlight. His messy hair was silhouetted against it, his face cast in shadow. "I wasn't though," she said. "We had a plan. And in any case it was you that said -"
"I said he had the information you need. I didn't say that you should put yourself in -"
"Harry," she said quietly, and he stopped. Hermione held up a hand to shield her eyes, trying to get a better look at his face, but the light behind him was too much. "I'm willing to do whatever it takes to get you back. I want to see justice do-"
"Justice!" He laughed, though it was low and humourless. "Do you really still believe in justice, Hermione?"
She felt her mouth tighten, her throat thick with hurt; with the crushing disappointment of having found that life was not fair, was not just. "Not anymore," she conceded.
"Good," he said, and she could hear it in his voice that he was smiling now. "Justice is irrational anyway."
Hermione sat up, still staring at him. "Well," she found herself saying, "It would be just like you to think that."
His hand shot out and caught her chin, his grip almost painful as he pulled her face towards his. His eyes glittered, jewel-bright, and Hermione felt her stomach clench, certain that if his fingers did not leave a bruise, his gaze just might.
"People talk about justice being served," he murmured. "Whereas revenge is something you take."
"Harry…" she breathed again, lifting her hand towards his cheek, her fingers a hair's breadth from his skin -
"Hermione!"
She woke up with startling suddenness, her breath short, her heart beating wildly. Unthinking, she started to bring her fingers to her chin, sure that she would feel the mark of his touch, but then the hammering at the door that must have woken her began again, Ron shouting her name.
"Hermione, wake up!"
"What is it?" she asked, throwing the door open, her voice clipped with irritation at the interruption.
What if it had come a minute later? She wondered. What if he had -
"We finally heard back from Blaise," Ron said, not waiting before pushing past her into the room, Anthony at his heels. The excitement in their faces was enough to force down the memory of the dream -
- for now -
- and the news was a relief; it had been over two weeks since they had set the charms and sent the hawk. Hermione had been beginning to worry that something had gone wrong, that they had been somehow intercepted, or worse, that Blaise had been compromised.
But it couldn't be bad news, she realised, her eyes flicking between the two of them. Anthony had a small smile on his face as Ron had screwed up his nose in annoyance. "And?" she asked impatiently.
"Not particularly sophisticated," Anthony said, passing her a slip of parchment. "But it does the job."
"Why are you laughing?" Hermione asked, before she started reading, and the corners of Anthony's mouth turned upwards like the curled edges of the missive.
"Blaise sent flowers with it," he said. "Asters." Hermione frowned, thinking back to OWL Herbology. Aster, she remembered. Elegance. Daintiness.
Patience.
When she looked up at him, Anthony held her gaze, his green eyes steady.
"Ginny said she's never liked flowers and he should know when to stop trying," Ron huffed, shattering the stillness that had fallen as he threw himself petulantly into one of the deep leather armchairs that were scattered through the room.
"That doesn't sound particularly vehement," Hermione mused, looking away from Anthony to read the message.
The line one gets for playing a game
Of the time one passes in paradise
The sky the colour of a flame
The day's reflection in your eyes
Look for me where I left you
There will I be again.
"He's getting better," she ventured, and from the corner of her eye she saw Anthony nod, folding his arms and finally turning away slightly. Something about the movement made her relax, release a breath she hadn't realised she'd been holding.
A score meant the twentieth, and seven was presumably July. A red sky and the day's reflection she had to conclude meant sunset, but she didn't know what where I left you might indicate.
"Did Ginny say anything about what this meant?" she asked.
Anthony winced slightly, "She didn't really seem to be in the mood for conversation."
"Do you think she'd tell me?" Hermione asked, voicing the question to both of them. Anthony was subtle, and good at reading people, but Ron was a Weasley, and shared the same hothead temperament as his sister.
"Girls tell girls stuff," he shrugged now. "Better you than me."
Before - October 7th 1998
The voices were a quiet hiss of furious whispers, pitched low enough not to wake anyone, but impossible to miss if you weren't already sleeping. Hermione slipped along the landing, following the sound to Ginny's bedroom, where the door stood slightly ajar.
"I've told you, over and over, I'm not going to -"
"He will come for your family eventually, you know he will, and he will not be gentle when he does -"
"Maybe not but at least we'll -"
"I could not bear to know that you were dead, and I might have saved you."
The words were pitched low, and Hermione blushed, feeling guilty for having overheard, and yet not quite able to believe it, because she knew that voice, low and melodious, though she had only ever really heard contempt in it.
"Blaise," Ginny said, "Blaise, you know I can't -"
Hermione had wondered, knew others in the group had too, at the tension between the pair of them; the taut, teasing flirtatiousness with which they addressed one another. She knew that Harry had broken things off with Ginny before Bill and Fleur's wedding, knew that he had felt himself bound to go where she could not follow. Knew, too, that Ginny had spent her seventh year at Hogwarts fighting a war on a different front.
And wars required allies.
She searched for surprise in her reaction, and couldn't find it. It made an odd sort of sense, Hermione thought, that Ginny; fiery, impetuous Ginny; would have buried her hurt in somebody cool and quiet and watchful.
Still waters, to temper wildfire.
"Bill and Fleur are -" Blaise was saying.
"Fleur's pregnant, it's completely different." Ginny's voice was a flat dismissal, but there was a pause - enough time for a hand to stroke a cheek, for a shaky breath to be drawn, then -
"Does it have to be?" Blaise asked, his voice urgent and earnest in a way that Hermione had never heard before.
"I'm staying," Ginny said, and though her tone brooked no argument Hermione caught the quaver in it; the whisper of regret.
"Well," Blaise murmured, "Your funeral," and Ginny gave a shocked little laugh that became a gasp that sent Hermione stumbling back, continuing downstairs to get the glass of water she had woken up for.
When Blaise had arrived at The Burrow two days before, sent by his mother in response to a desperate plea from Andromeda, Hermione had been stunned by the reactions of those who had been at Hogwarts the previous year. Neville, Dean and Seamus seemed to treat Blaise with a wary, grudging respect. As for Ginny, she had half-turned away without even greeting him, but Hermione had seen the way her eyes caught and held Blaise's, the way his posture shifted so that he was always angled slightly towards her.
He would be taking Andromeda, Teddy, Bill and Fleur, and Dean and Seamus too; spiriting them out of the country with an international portkey that seemed to have been acquired by some dubious means.
"The further you travel, the more there is to trace," Blaise explained over dinner. He had managed to ingratiate himself to Molly by eating everything put in front of him, never once letting his impeccable manners slip. They were lucky that the Burrow was practically self-sufficient, Hermione thought ruefully, as she remembered the paucity of food the last time they had been on the run.
"The border wards will be triggered by any sort of international travel," Blaise was explaining. "It's pretty much unavoidable, and once you've activated the wards, however you do it, you become traceable, whether you're apparating, on a broom, or using a portkey."
"So how do you get around that?" Bill asked, his scarred features drawn into a frown that made him look more than usually wolfish.
"We use a modification to the charms," Blaise said. "It reroutes the trace via any active portkey in a 500-mile radius, so -"
"So anyone trying to track the journey would have to check multiple destinations." Hermione finished quietly, and Blaise nodded.
"Thus, unlike apparition or broom travel, the portkey becomes effectively untraceable," he said, with a wicked smile.
Hermione frowned at him, "But surely you could track the magical signature on a portkey?"
Blaise sniffed and sipped his water. "A great shame that a large number of federal portkeys were liberated from the Italian Ministry a few months ago" he said, making a show of studying his fingernails before his eyes cut to Ginny. Her head was half-cocked to listen, though she steadfastly avoided his gaze. "I'm here on official diplomatic business to help the British Ministry find any such portkeys that might have ended up in the wrong hands. Or at least I was," he said with a smirk, "until I returned to Milan two days ago."
"You're helping the Ministry?" Hermione asked, disbelieving.
"First rule of being a spy, Granger," Blaise let the old condescension bleed into his voice, though when he looked at her his eyes danced with wry amusement. "Play both sides of the board."
Now - July 10th 2002
There was no way it could have lasted, Hermione reflected as she made her way through the corridors of Hogwarts towards the Transfiguration classroom. Blaise could only manage so many illegal portkeys until suspicion would have fallen on him, and the last time they had received word from him had been nearly two years ago - a note delivered by a sparrowhawk (the bird chosen for its ability to slip past magical barriers) bearing only an address in Montenegro, and the message For emergencies.
"Ginny?" she called quietly, stepping through the door and slipping her way between the lengths of silk that fell from the ceiling.
Voldemort had laughed, Draco had said, as he put Hogwarts to flame, and Hermione had shivered to think about it; how the boy Tom Riddle, who had found his first home, the first place that he truly belonged, in the castle, could have set the place alight and watched it burn.
But when they had returned to it, following Draco's reckless conviction that it was the last place Voldemort would suspect, it was to find that while the Fiendfyre had done its work in destroying much of Hogwarts, the blaze had also freed the wilder, older magics that had been dug into the very foundations. It had taken a long time, and at first they had not noticed the way that the rooms that they chose were altered, but gradually those spaces - the Charms and Divination classrooms for Luna and Parvati, Snape's dungeon quarters for Draco and Daphne, Ron in Gryffindor Tower - began to shape themselves to their new inhabitants.
The castle, much as the Room of Requirement had once done, provided for each of them, fashioning rooms from the ruins, each as unique as its occupant.
What did the flowing silks that covered the Transfiguration classroom say about Ginny? Hermione wondered.
What did the old wood and scarred leather seats of the Head's office say about her?
And then, briefly, Hermione's mind flicked to the blue and silver, to the deep quiet and sconces filled with bluebell flames in the room that had been Professor Vector's office, and thought what did they mean, these features of the room where Anthony lived, that she had visited only once -
"Oh, it's you," Ginny said, turning her head to look at Hermione from where she lay, sprawled on what was just recognisable as Flitwick's old desk, but was now something resembling a banquette, covered in brightly coloured cushions.
"Who were you expecting?" Hermione asked, raising a suggestive eyebrow.
Ginny rolled her eyes, pushing herself upright. "There's no need to look at me like that," she said. "I haven't heard from him in years, not since they got wise to the Protean Charms."
Neville had had his Galleon on him when he'd fallen, and Hermione had watched, horrified, as the message around the edge of hers had changed.
Come out, come out.
She remembered the thrill of fear as she'd realised. "They'll be able to trace them," she'd whispered. "They have the signature now."
My signature, she'd thought with a shiver.
Even with the multitude of wards that they had laid thick about the castle - even with the Unplottables, with the Fideliuses, with the Notice-Me-Nots - they couldn't afford the risk.
Ginny had been crying silently when she surrendered her Galleon, though she had never explained herself, and Hermione had felt awful for even wanting to pry, as she turned her wand on the thing and muttered, "Reducto."
"Where is he coming to?" Hermione asked now, sitting on the cushions by Ginny's feet, folding her legs beneath her.
With a sniff Ginny pushed herself onto her elbows. "The Astronomy Tower," she said, poking at one of the cushions. "There's a gap in the wards, where the railing meets the stone -"
"A gap?" Hermione asked, aghast, and Ginny rolled her eyes.
"You'd have to know exactly where it is, and even then you're apparating to the lip of the platform." She frowned, continuing to jab the cushion, which hadn't done anything to deserve its treatment except be there, as far as Hermione could see. "It's getting close enough to apparate that's the problem."
"Right then," Hermione said, her mind still reeling from the revelation that there was a gap in their defences. She'd known about the thin spot above the lake - about the patch right outside the castle gates where Theo had apparated to - but that there was a weak point in the castle itself and Ginny hadn't said anything -
"We have to have an escape route," the redhead said, leaning back and looking up at her, her jaw set mulishly, as though daring her to argue. Hermione pursed her lips, but couldn't fault the reasoning.
"Will you leave?" she asked instead, the question as much of a surprise to her as it seemed to be to Ginny, who stared at her for a moment before twisting around to sit upright next to her.
"No," she said quietly, leaning her shoulder against Hermione's, the defensiveness gone from her expression, leaving her face drawn in lines of pain. "If you're going to bring Harry back…" she tailed off, then seemed to gather herself. "I want to be here, when You-Know-Who falls. I want revenge for what he did to my family."
Revenge is something you take, Hermione remembered, and the echo was like an itch beneath her skin, cold and warmth all at once, and she pushed herself to her feet.
"Good," she said. "I think we'll need you."
Ginny nodded, and Hermione felt her eyes follow her as she twisted her way back between the scarves. Like a maze, she thought. Shifting walls of gossamer fineness, with the girl, with the weight of her grief, at their centre.
Once out in the corridor Hermione half-turned to go back to her own room, but then she felt again that tingle in her nerves, the twist of something in her stomach.
Revenge is something you take - and his face so close to hers, fingers like steel holding her chin.
Hermione took a deep breath, and started up the corridor towards the office that had once belonged to Professor Vector.