The W(hat Is in These People's Tea?)ild Swans

"I want…" Ron began as he sat at the kitchen table, staring forlornly at the vacant cloth in front of him.

"Food, yes, we know," Hermione said, not looking up from her knitting and sounding more than a little cross.

Harry couldn't blame her. They'd finally managed to get a decent meal that day, a really rather princely windfall due to a cook at a local restaurant pitching a fit and tossing a whole leg of mutton at a butcher who was supposed to bring lamb chops instead. Thinking quickly, Harry, who had been rummaging a nearby dumpster from under his invisibility cloak, had managed to throw a Summoning charm at the exact moment when the mutton left the chef's hand. In the confusion of all the yelling and shrieking and demands for payment and declarations of never using the butcher again, no one had bothered to notice what had become of the mutton, which Hermione had managed to turn into a very passable lunch. It seemed a bit rude, really, for Ron to be complaining yet again when they'd actually done quite well.

Ron, however, just continued looking glumly at the table before mumbling, "No, not food. I want to see Mum and Dad. And Fred and George. And Bill and Charlie and Ginny. I wouldn't even mind a peek at Percy, the prat."

Hermione's needles stopped clicking at once, and Harry saw her blush in embarrassment.

"Sorry," she said. "I just sort of assumed…"

"Natural assumption. Any other time you'd have been right, but I'm just feeling rather homesick, I guess," Ron said, picking absently at a bit of lint on the worn out tablecloth.

Harry felt sorry for him and a bit jealous at the same time. He really didn't have a home to miss, and despite the cease fire between Dudley and him, family wasn't really on his list of things to look forward to after the Horcrux hunt was over. He had absolutely no plans to tell Ron, though, that he wasn't the only one who missed Ginny. Still, Ron was in low spirits, much lower than usual, and Harry couldn't help wondering how long it would be before a sort of constant cloud of depression swallowed them all up.

"Well, I do know a story about a family that reminds me a little bit of yours," Hermione said tentatively. "I could tell it to you if you think it would make you feel any better."

"Is it mental?" Ron asked, looking a bit brighter.

Hermione tipped her head to one side as if considering carefully before saying with a smile, "I'd say it rates on the Mental Meter somewhere on the level of Ashyweeper."

"Then by all means, let's have it," Ron said, moving to a nearby chair so he could see better.

"Once…," Hermione paused, and Harry knew she was expecting Ron to interrupt, "upon a time."

She blinked as Ron just continued to listen, and Harry was actually alarmed by Ron's nonparticipation. He must really be feeling low. The same thought had obviously occurred to Hermione as well since she looked rather alarmed.

"There lived a king who had six sons and a daughter, who was the youngest of all," Hermione said.

"Okay," Ron said, smiling a little, "I think I see the resemblance."

"To be honest, in some versions of the story there are twelve brothers, but others do have six, and the sister is almost always the youngest one," Hermione said.

"Twelve brothers?" Harry said. "I don't think Mrs. Weasley would have a shred of patience left with thirteen kids running around."

"Can you imagine if the other six were three more sets of Fred and George?" Ron said, now really grinning. "The house would have been blown to smithereens years ago."

"And then the smithereens would have blown up," Harry added.

"So, the father's there, but where the mum?" Ron asked.

"Oh, um, she's sort of… dead?" Hermione said, looking apologetic.

"Eh, that's okay," Ron said. "Mothers have a mortality rate like dragon pox in these things. Let me guess, there's a step-mother involved?"

"There is," Hermione said, "but she comes about in a strange way. One day the king is riding through the forest and gets very lost. He comes upon an old woman and asks her for directions, and she agreed to help him get out of the forest on one condition."

"Let me guess. He has to marry the old woman," Ron said.

"No, of course not," Hermione said. "He has to marry the old woman's daughter."

"Oh," Ron said. "Well, same thing I suppose. So the king just decides to marry this girl, sight unseen, to get out of the woods. This whole thing could have been avoided with a simple Four-Point Spell."

"Yes, but the king is a Muggle, Ron," Hermione said. "They don't have locator spells, though really there's no excuse for his not having a compass. But yes, he does agree to marry the girl."

"And I'm guessing she's got some sort of issues," Ron said. "What, is she an ogre or a troll or a banshee or something?"

"No, she's actually extremely pretty," Hermione said.

"Well, not so bad then," Ron said. "Well done, king."

"But there was also something about her that made the king feel very strange, like there was something deeply wrong with her," Hermione added with a glare that Harry knew was her way of trying to remind Ron for the thousandth time that pretty and good were not always the same thing, though personally Harry was grateful she wasn't about to give the same speech yet again.

"It's generally not a good sign if your bride-to-be gives you the collywobbles," Ron said, nodding.

"Even more suspicious, it seemed as though the young woman had been waiting for him when he came to her mother's house, for her bags were already packed and she left with him without so much as a word," Hermione said.

"Sounds like a set up to me," Harry said. "Was the old woman a witch by any chance?"

"You've got it in one!" Hermione said. "And so is the daughter, of course."

"Now that's interesting," Ron said, squinting into the distance as if he was trying to figure something out.

"What?" Hermione asked.

"The witch has a daughter," Ron said. "None of the other witches in these stories have children, well, except for in the one about the really hairy girl, and she's just a payment for her birth mother's lettuce addiction."

Harry snorted, but Hermione tipped her head to one side, obviously thinking.

"You know, you're quite right," Hermione said. "I don't think I can recall a single other instance of a witch having actually given birth to a child in any other fairy tale, and this one does inherit her mother's ability with witchcraft, so it's fairly accurate to the way magic is usually handed down in traditional magic or half-blood families. It's highly intriguing that the storyteller makes a point of creating a family background as opposed to just having the king meet the young woman instead, thereby at least partially humanizing the old witch through her concern for her daughter's future. I wonder if the writer might actually have met a witch at some point."

"Or it was just convenient for the story," Ron said, shrugging.

"Or that," Hermione said. "In any case, the king, feeling something was off about the woman, became concerned for his seven children and decided it might be best to keep them out of sight until he was sure of how she would behave with them."

"He's just not going to mention he's got better than half a dozen children?" Harry asked.

"That's not going to work," Ron said. "I don't care how big that castle is. There's some sort of a row at our house at least three times a day, and usually it's even louder than the ghoul in the attic. Unless the woman can't hear well, she'll suss it out sooner or later."

"Ah, but he doesn't keep them in the house," Hermione said. "Instead he hides them in a cabin in the woods."

"How deep?" Ron asked, looking suspicious.

"A fair walk," Hermione said. "Why?"

"Because Xeno Lovegood actually heard Mum when she was bawling out the twins a few years ago for not getting enough O.W.L.s," Ron said. "He sent over a note by owl wanting to know if we'd been attacked by Snorkacks. That's almost a mile away. So he better hide those kids deep."

"We'll assume he did," Hermione said, and Harry couldn't tell whether she looked impressed or vaguely terrified by Mrs. Weasley's vocal abilities. He was guessing it was a combination of the two. "The new queen had no idea she had seven step-children."

"That doesn't really seem right either," Harry said. "It's a pretty huge lie."

"It is," Hermione agreed, "but he wanted to keep his children safe."

"Then why didn't he just not marry her in the first place?" Ron asked.

"Because he'd given his word to the old woman in the woods," Hermione said.

"So?" Ron asked.

"So he can't just break a promise, Ronald," Hermione said, sounding rather sharp. "It was a matter of honor."

"Between breaking a promise or protecting his kids by stuffing them in a cabin in the middle of nowhere? At that point honor ought to take second place, I think," Ron said with a firm nod.

"But that's not the way Muggles did things back then," Hermione said. "It would have been a really bad breach of etiquette. Still… you have a point."

"So he abandons his kids in the forest," Ron said. "Then what?"

"Oh, no, he doesn't abandon them," Hermione said quickly. "He goes to visit them very regularly, almost every day."

"That's a bit better," Ron said, sounding placated. "Okay, I don't dislike him so much now."

"Unfortunately, that's what led to the trouble, though," Hermione said. "The new queen wondered where her husband went every day and finally she followed him in secret."

"Thought he had a bit of fluff on the side," Ron said, shaking his head knowingly. "It does look suspicious."

"I suppose so," Hermione said. "It would certainly have been a common enough situation back then. Most royal males had multiple mistresses."

"What about the royal females?" Ron asked.

"Oh, no," Hermione said. "At least, not as commonly. That was considered high treason and would have led to being executed."

"So if it was so common for the fellows, why would she be angry about it?" Ron asked.

"Just because something's usual doesn't mean that it stops upsetting people," Hermione said.

"Like when Mum gets upset at us for tracking mud into the house when we've been out degnoming the garden and forget to wipe our feet," Ron reasoned. "We do it all the time, but she still blows her top."

"Yes, Ronald, tracking mud in the house causes exactly the same level of anger and betrayal in women as marital infidelity," Hermione said, shaking her head. "At any rate, she saw the six boys come running out of the house to greet their father, and she was furious."

"Can't say I blame her at this point," Harry said. "As secrets go, that's enormous."

"Wait, where was the girl?" Ron asked.

"She was inside, tending to the soup over the fire, so she didn't come out to see him, and the queen didn't know she was there, which was lucky for the girl," Hermione said. "Well, at least that's the case in one version. In another, she sees the girl isn't as threatened by her."

"Threatened?" Ron said. "Of a bunch of kids? How rowdy are they?"

"Oh, that's not it," Hermione said. "You see, if the king had legitimate children with his first wife, which she now realized was the case, her own children by him wouldn't have any claim to the throne unless something happened to all of them, or at least all the sons."

"Say," Harry said, "didn't anyone else in the castle or the rest of the kingdom or anything know about the seven kids?"

"I suppose they must have," Hermione said.

"They just didn't say anything at all?" Harry said.

"The king probably ordered them not to," Hermione explained.

"I don't care how much he threatened them, someone would have slipped," Ron said, and Harry nodded in agreement. "That's unrealistic, that is."

"It's a fairy tale," Hermione said. "I don't know if you've noticed this yet, but they're not especially noted for their accurate portrayal of realism."

The two boys paused before they eventually both shrugged in tandem.

"Fair enough," Ron said. "It's not like that Picasso fellow really thought people were stripy, multi-colored collections of triangles and circles with two eyes on one side of their face, so I guess not everything has to be realistic to be artistic."

"You know about Picasso?" Hermione said, her eyes widening in surprise. "How?"

"Oh, ehm, Fred and George," Ron said, starting to blush. "They, um, lifted a book of his prints out of a Muggle bookshop once."

"Let me guess," Hermione said, smirking. "A collection of his nudes?"

"Uh, yeah," Ron said and turned a darker shade of pink. "They thought it'd be, you know, fun. But mostly it just made them really confused. Also, for a while they thought Muggle girls were blue and had single-sided noses."

Hermione sighed deeply and pinched the bridge of her nose, but soldiered on.

"Well, it gets stranger from here out," Hermione said. "The queen went home and made six white shirts, one for each son."

"Aw, that's sort of nice," Ron said. "She wants to make them a present."

"Not exactly," Hermione said. "The queen cast a horrible spell on the shirts. The next day, she followed the same path through the forest to the cottage, and when the birds began to call out as though someone were coming, the boys came running, thinking it was their father."

"I'm guessing that didn't end well," Harry said.

"No," Hermione said. "The queen threw the shirts into the air, and each one landed on one of the boys so that he was wearing it."

"Now wait just a second," Ron said. "How can you throw six shirts in the air and have them just naturally come to rest so that the boys are wearing them? At the very least, that's going to take some participation from the kids, that is."

"Yeah, I've never had that happen," Harry said. "It'd be convenient, though, just being able to throw your clothes in the air and have them all land in place."

"Well, it happened this time," Hermione said stoutly, folding her arms, "and that's not even the strangest thing that happened with the shirts."

"Oh, I already figured that bit out," Ron said with a dismissive wave of his hand. "She poisoned the shirts and they're all dead, right?"

"No," Hermione said, looking aghast at the suggestion, though Harry couldn't help thinking that was rather rich considering how gory most of these were. "The shirts turn the boys into swans."

Harry and Ron looked at each other.

"You know, that might actually be worse," Ron said.

"Well, I suppose it would be rather horrifying to suddenly have yourself turn into an animal," Hermione said, "particularly if you don't even know about the existence of magic. In fact, I think the story probably hits upon the innate fear latent in the human psyche of losing the ability of advanced cognitive processes and having the inner ego cave to the forces of the animalistic id, as seen in some of the stories about werewolves, for example, though those are of course based in fact. That would suggest that one of the greatest shared irrational fears is the suppression of higher thought and a return to a pre-evolutionary nature. Added to that, there's the possibility that the human and reasoning side of the six brothers is still at least tangentially aware within the animal form assumed, or in this case forced upon them, and therefore they can have the reasoning capacity of humans to be appalled by their loss of their own humanity. Really, it's quite similar to what Barty Crouch Jr. did when he punished Malfoy by turning him into a ferret. That particular breach of protocol really should have raised more red flags concerning his fitness for a teaching position. As much as I loathe Malfoy, Professor McGonagall was right: Transfiguration should never be used as a disciplinary tool."

"Um, I just meant it would probably be worse than death for a bunch of boys to be stuck as such such girly birds," Ron said. "It might not be so bad if they were hawks or eagles or something, but swans?"

"For your information, swans can actually be quite terrifying and vicious, particularly if they're provoked by having their young endangered," Hermione said rather coldly.

"Harry? Back me up on this one?" Ron said.

"Sorry Hermione, but swans do seem sort of automatically feminine," Harry said. "Maybe it's just because that's Cho's patronus. In any case, I'd prefer being a ferret to a swan given the choice."

"Well, if it makes you feel any better, in one version of the story the boys are turned into ravens. Is that better?" Hermione said, still sounding rather put out.

"A raven would be better than a swan," Ron said, nodding. "Actually, I'd prefer that to a ferret. So the hierarchy of possible animal changes would be, in order from most to least desirable, raven, then ferret, and finally swan."

"Wonderful, now I can't help mentally calling this story 'The Wild Ferrets,'" Hermione grumbled before setting off again. "In any case, the six swans all flew away, leaving their sister behind."

"Aw, now that really is sad," Ron said. "What happened to her?"

"Well, it depends on the version," Hermione said. "In one she's still quite a little girl, and the queen sends her to live with some peasants for several years while the king goes nearly mad trying to find her. Then, when she's sixteen, the peasants give the girl back to the king, but the queen tries to destroy her."

"Of course," Harry says. "So, how?"

"Yeah, this has got to be good," Ron said.

"Poisoned toads," Hermione says.

The boys blinked.

"Okay, I wasn't expecting that, but I'll give her points for originality," Ron said. "How exactly does she attempt assassination via Trevor's nasty cousins?"

"She's actually not trying to kill her outright. The queen waits until the princess is about to take a bath, and she slips three toads into her bathwater, telling the first one to settle over the girl's heart, the second on her forehead, and the third on the top of her head. The one on her head was supposed to make her stupid, the one on her forehead was supposed to make her ugly, and the one on her heart was supposed to turn her towards evil."

"Muggles really just do not get how magic works, do they?" Ron said.

"No," Hermione said, "though I suppose you could say that one is supposed to Confund her, another is a sort of camouflage spell, and the third is a form of the Imperius Curse."

"Okay, maybe," Ron agreed. "So what happened?"

"Nothing," Hermione said. "The three toads climbed onto her in the bath, but she was so good and kind and pure that they turned into roses instead and did her no harm."

"Uh… huh," Ron said. "That's… I think the word I'm looking for here is 'unique.'"

"She can turn toads into roses?" Harry asked.

"Apparently," Hermione said with a shrug.

"So is she a witch?" Harry asked. "Because it does seem like something she might be able to do with Transfiguration."

"You know, when you put it that way, you really do have a point," Hermione said, looking excited. "Oh, that would be interesting, wouldn't it! We'd have a good witch in one of these stories for once, though of course they wouldn't call her a witch since the term is automatically evil in all the old stories, but she does seem to have some rudimentary skills at least, and there's even more of that later in the story if you look closely enough. That's really quite refreshing!"

Ron gave Hermione a pat on the shoulder as she beamed happily. As usual, Harry noticed his hand lingered a few seconds past what would be normal, casual contact, not that Hermione seemed to mind.

"So, what does dear old Step-Mum do when the toads don't turn the daughter into an evil, ugly idiot?" Harry asked.

"The queen was furious, so she scrubbed the girl's face with walnut dye and smeared horrible ointments in her hair to make her look bad, then took her to the king," Hermione said. "He said his daughter couldn't possibly be so ugly, so he rejected her and sent her away into the forest."

"He doesn't recognize her because her face is dirty and her hair is untidy?" Ron said. "Ladies and gents, we have yet another winner in the Lousy Fairy Tale Father contest."

"Well, to make it a little less terrible, remember he wouldn't have seen her for ten years and the queen might have used magic to alter Eliza's appearance as well," Hermione said.

"Wait, she has a name?" Ron said.

"Oh, yes, I forgot," Hermione said, looking embarrassed. "It's only in some of the versions, specifically those based off of Andersen's take on things, but he does call her Eliza."

"Okay, two things. First, Eliza is a perfectly normal name," Ron said. "I mean, there is literally nothing odd about it at all. Am I right on this, Harry?"

"Yeah," Harry said. "I think there were at least a couple of Elizas at the school I went to before Hogwarts."

"So Eliza can join Jack the Giant Killing Moron in a very select group of fairy tale characters with less than insane names," Ron said.

"You said two things?" Hermione prompted him.

"Oh, right," Ron said. "Almost forgot while basking in the glow of normalcy."

"Your view of a normal name might be a bit tilted. Don't you have an uncle named Jklngszkrtpb?" Hermione said.

"Well done with the pronunciation on that," said Ron looking impressed, "yeah, and Aunt Gordon. But at least I know those are odd. In any case, who's Andersen?"

"I mentioned him once before. He was a Danish fellow who wrote several fairy tales or came up with new versions of them," Hermione said. "'The Little Sea-Maid' was one of his."

"Oh, yeah, the one about the bleeding tongueless girl. He must have been a cheerful fellow," Ron said, voice dripping sarcasm.

"Not particularly. He wrote a story about a homeless little matchgirl who hallucinates about food and having a family as she slowly freezes to death," Hermione said. "That's about par for the course with him."

Harry snorted loudly.

"What?" Hermione said. "It really is a sad story."

"Oh, I don't doubt it," Harry said, "but who on earth read that one to their kids at bedtime?"

"Victorians," Hermione said with a shrug. "Anyway, that's Andersen's take on the swan story. In other versions, the father comes by the day after the boys turn into swans and the daughter runs out to him and explains what happened, but because she's never seen the queen, she doesn't know who it is who did the charm. The king says he will return for her the next day and bring her back to the castle after he tells his new wife about her. After he leaves, it occurs to the girl that the wife is probably exactly who did this in the first place, so she runs off into the forest so the queen won't kill her."

"Smart girl," Ron said. "Either way, the nameless girl or Eliza or what have you winds up all alone in the woods. Then what?"

"Well, she wanders through the woods for a while, and finally she comes to a lake where there are six swans swimming," Hermione says.

"Shouldn't that be 'six geese a-laying' and 'seven swans a-swimming?'" Harry said with a grin.

"Oh, Merlin, that song is going to be stuck in my head for hours," Hermione said, looking horror struck. "Lovely. Anyway, as the swans were also wearing golden crowns, she knew they must be her brothers."

"Well, that's lucky," said Ron. "Nice that they got to keep their headgear, even if they lost pretty much everything else. It's a bit too convienent that they're still so close by, of course, but if it's the one where this all happens the next day, they really shouldn't have flown that far anyway."

"Actually, swans can fly up to 50 miles per hour under the right conditions, so they could have been very far indeed," Hermione said.

"You just know the flight velocity of a swan off the top of your head?" Ron said, looking stunned.

"European, not Afrian, and unladen only, no coconuts," Hermione said with a giggle, then when both of them stared at her with no reaction, she sighed and mumbled, "Note to self: after this is all over, rent Holy Grail and force the boys to watch it."

"Okay, so the princess finds her brothers, only they're birds," Harry said. "Now what?"

"Well, the brothers started to blow on one another, and as they did so, their feathers blew away, and there they stood in the white shirts the queen had thrown upon them," Hermione said.

"They blew off their feathers?" Ron said, grimacing. "Seems messy."

"Yeah, and sort of an anti-climatic story," Harry said. "So they go back to the king and explain what happened and that's the end?"

"Oh, no," Hermione said. "The enchantment lifts for only fifteen minutes every evening."

"Well, that's bloody inconvenient," Ron said.

"In yet another version, they become human from dusk until dawn, which is a bit more like the lycanthropic tales, but the oldest versions we can find do seem to have the fifteen minute problem in them," Hermione says.

"Right," Harry said. "Because… no, that just makes no sense at all."

"Whatever," Ron said, waving away the strangeness of the spell as though he was becoming used to this sort of nonsense, "but she does take them to the castle and has them hang about until the father sees them for that fifteen minutes, right?"

"No," Hermione says. "The brothers say if they come anywhere near the king again, the queen will kill them on sight."

"Oh," Ron said, looking dejected. "Well, I guess that actually does make sense."

"But they're very concerned for their little sister," Hermione said, "and they want her to go away with them to a faraway land. In the version where it's been several years since she's seen them, there's actually a clause in the spell that says they can set foot on their homeland only one day a year, and she just happened to find them on that day. In the others, they just decide it would be better to leave."

"Probably not the worst decision they could make," Harry said. "Basically, it's sort of what we did, really, keeping on the run so we aren't caught."

"I suppose so," Hermione said, looking a little sad. "So the brothers weave a big net out of vines for her, and when dawn comes, she lies down in the net, they take the edges of it in their beaks, and they fly off with her across the sea."

"Pretty, but maybe not the safest way they might have done it," Harry said. "What happens if they turn back into humans only partway across?"

"Oh, they do," Hermione said. "There's this whole big race against time sequence where they're trying to make it to a rock at the halfway point across the water, but they forgot to factor in that they'd be flying more slowly due to carrying their sister. They just barely beat the setting of the sun, and they have to spend the whole night on a very tiny, slippery island in the middle of a tempest before continuing their journey the next day."

"Brilliant planning," Ron said, rolling his eyes. "I suppose they couldn't just use a boat as it wouldn't be nearly as batty. I take it they don't slip off the rock and die in the ocean?"

"No, they reach land," Hermione said. "Once they do and the brothers are human again for a bit, Eliza asks them if there isn't any way the enchantment could be undone. Then, depending on the version, they either say they don't know and she gets the information for how to fix things in a dream, or they do know and tell her, but say there's no possible way anyone could accomplish the task."

"And that is?" Ron asks.

"She has to make them another set of white shirts," Hermione said.

"Oh no!" Ron cried in mock horror. "Who could possibly make shirts! Why doesn't she just go down to the tailors and get them made up?"

"It's never that easy in a fairy tale, Ron," Hermione says. "She has to go out and gather prickly nettles that grow on graves at midnight, trample them with her bare feet until they become flax, spin the flax, weave the cloth, then sew the shirts. She has to finish all of the shirts in six years, and she cannot speak or laugh in all that time or else the brothers will be stuck as swans forever."

"Blimey," Ron said. "Okay, now that's a challenge."

"That is one seriously specific spell," Harry said.

"Being the heroine of the story, Eliza does indeed undertake the charm, which again shows that she might be some sort of a witch. Her brothers come to her the next day when they're human again and find her working on the nettles and not speaking. They're very sad, but grateful to her," Hermione said.

"As they should be," Ron said. "I don't think Ginny could manage not talking for six years. Might make it a couple hours, though."

"I think you're underestimating her," Harry said. "If you or your brothers were really in trouble, you'd have a time of it getting her not to do anything."

"You're probably right," Ron admitted, looking homesick again. "Of course, she'd probably just take out her wand, curse the queen with a truly spectacular Bat Bogey hex, and force her into undoing the spell, though."

"Yeah, that'd be Ginny," Harry said, smiling a little too fondly at the thought, and he found himself clocked over the head with a throw pillow.

"Oy, less drooling over my kid sister, yeah?" Ron said, though he didn't really look too offended.

Hermione shook her head at Ron's attitude towards his sister's private life but went forward, "So things went quite well for a time. Ginny… I mean Eliza. Now you've got me doing it, Harry! Eliza worked very well, and although the nettles stung her hands and feet until they blistered, she never spoke a word of complaint or made any sound."

"Poor kid," Ron said. "At least she's actually doing something instead of waiting around for someone else to fix everything."

"I quite agree," Hermione said. "Some critics point out that the removal of the character's voice is an example of the silencing of women by society, but I prefer to think of it more as her choice to remain silent to create a society that she prefers in rebellion against the status quo. And yes, she doesn't just sit about waiting to be rescued. She's actually the rescuer here."

"Like the mermaid with the bleeding feet saved the prince when his ship sank," Ron said knowledgably. "So Andersen may be a strange blighter with a weird tendency to add in details about foot pain, but his female characters do at least do things."

Hermione stared at Ron.

"What?" he said.

"No, it's just… I think you might be right. Andersen's version does play up the idea that she steps on stinging nettles in her bare feet and winds up blistered, and the little mermaid's feet stab her like pins and needles, and he even wrote a story about a girl who wore a pair of red shoes to church," Hermione said, looking shocked.

"What happened to her?" Harry asked.

"Her feet got chopped off by an ax," Hermione said, looking rather sick, "but that still isn't enough to pay for her sin of vanity, and the shoes with the bloody feet in them dance in front of her, blocking her from entering the church."

"Okay, that's nightmare fuel I didn't need," Harry said, turning green.

"I wonder if there's anything about feet in 'The Little Matchgirl' or some of his other stories," Hermione said in a tone that suggested her curiosity was piqued. "I don't recall ever reading anything about Andersen undergoing foot-related trauma, but perhaps he was investing his stories with some of his own experience."

"Maybe he had bunions," Ron suggested.

Hermione had already reached into her little beaded bag and produced a bit of parchment on which she was scribbling down notes that Harry was absolutely sure were research questions.

"Possibly," Hermione said. "That was really a very astute deduction, Ron. You've obviously been paying attention."

"Aw," Ron said, turning a pleased pink, "it wasn't anything. Besides, listening to you is a lot less boring than staring at the wall."

Hermione stopped scribbling and looked up at him.

"Thank you," she said. "I'm so glad I'm more interesting than a blank canvas tent sheet."

"You're welcome," Ron said, smiling and apparently not catching her sarcasm.

"So, we've gotten off topic," Harry said quickly. "Gin… I mean Eliza, had finished one shirt."

"Right," Hermione said, snapping her attention back to the story. "The six brothers and Eliza lived in a cave deep in a forest, and she would go out to work by daylight when her brothers were off flying as swans."

"Why'd she live in a cave?" Ron asked.

"Oh, I don't know," Hermione said, sounding exasperated. "I guess she couldn't build a whole house alone, and with her brothers being human only fifteen minutes a day, they couldn't very well accomplish much. So they lived in a cave. Is that acceptable?"

"I suppose," Ron said, but he looked discontent. "Couldn't a swan use a hammer?"

"Swans don't have thumbs, Ronald," Hermione said through gritted teeth. "It's rather hard to operate a hammer without those."

"Eh, I see your point," he said, looking happier. "Okay, so she lives in a cave with her brothers."

"One day, as she was working, a few men from the king's court came by. She was frightened of them, so she climbed high into a tree to get away," Hermione said.

"Too bad those vicious swans weren't about," Ron said.

"Well, really, I suppose they could have bitten the men," Hermione said.

"Or pooed on them," Ron said seriously.

Hermione rolled her eyes as Harry and Ron chuckled.

"Yes, fine, let's all stoop to the level of First Years," she sighed. "I can't wait to see what you do with the next bit. The men wouldn't leave her alone and kept trying to get her to talk, so she tossed her necklace at them, hoping they would take it and go away."

"Well, it's a fair bribe," Harry said. "Did it work?"

"No," Hermione said, "so she tried throwing them her girdle, which was studded with precious stones."

"Her girdle?" Ron said. "Like the kind my Great Aunt Tessie wears? Because even if that was covered in rubies as big as the ones on Gryffindor's sword, I'd run as far away as possible from that."

"Not that sort of girdle," Hermione said. "This would have been like a fancy belt."

"Oh," Ron said. "That's less terrifying, then."

"The men still wouldn't leave, so she tossed them her garters, which were of fine silk," Hermione continued.

"Wait, I think she's unclear on the concept of making men want to leave," Ron said. "There's a pretty girl up in a tree, and she starts basically doing a strip tease to make them go away. With most males, that isn't going to have the desired result of having them leave."

"Well, considering most of the stories say she next flings her dress at them, you're not far wrong," Hermione said.

"Naked girl up a tree," Ron said. "Yeah, that'll really make them take off at a swift jog."

"She's not naked," Hermione said crossly. "She's still got her underclothes on, which would undoubtedly have been quite modest."

"Okay, so a girl up a tree in her knickers," Ron said. "I'm going to take a wild guess here and say the blokes stayed around hoping for an encore."

Hermione cast him a seething glare, but went on.

"The king happened by on his horse," she said, and Ron's jaw dropped.

"Her dad's going to see her sitting in a tree starkers?" he said. "Oh, wow, that is not going to be a good reunion."

"Not that king! He's on the other side of the ocean, remember? This is the king of the land they're currently in," Hermione said.

"Well, that's a relief," Ron said.

"The king was quite taken with her as she was remarkably beautiful," Hermione said.

"I've no doubt," Ron said. "Pretty, mostly naked girls don't grow on trees. Except, apparently, when they do."

"She is not almost naked!" Hermione shouted. "You've seen the pajamas I wear. Eliza probably had on something very similar."

"Eliza was wearing a set of striped pink and white flannel trousers and a tee-shirt with a picture of Paddington Bear on it?" Ron said.

She gave him a look of patent disbelief, rubbed her hand over her face, and went on.

"I'm not even going to question how you know who Paddington Bear is," she said, and while Ron was about to volunteer the information, she raised a warning finger for silence. "The king tried to ask her what her name was, using several different languages, but he received no answer. Eventually, he realized she was mute. However, he was still so overcome with her loveliness that he decided to take her back to his castle and marry her."

Harry and Ron looked at one another.

"That was a rather fast courtship," Harry said. "Did he bother asking her?"

"I suppose, but she couldn't answer, of course," Hermione said.

"Well, she could shake or nod, couldn't she?" Harry said.

"Hmm," Hermione said. "I suppose she could, but she doesn't. Perhaps that would fall under the idea of talking somehow, or at least she didn't want to risk it. She never attempts writing a note either, and being a princess she most likely would have known how to write at least a little, so I think it's safe to assume that she's not allowed to communicate at all."

"So, no sign language? No pointing at things? No sketches?" Ron asked.

"No, I guess not," Hermione said. "She really is remarkably isolated."

"That is deeply disturbing," Harry said, shuddering. "So essentially the king kidnaps her."

"I guess you could say that he does," Hermione said. "He takes her back to the castle, though she insists on bringing the one completed shirt and the nettles with her. However, she wasn't very well received. Many people in the kingdom were unhappy about having the mute girl as the queen."

"Well, considering she can't communicate at all, even if she is pretty, she probably wouldn't be able to do much in the way of royal duties, except maybe posing for postage stamps or something," Harry said.

"Not quite. There was one duty she could perform," Hermione said. "Once the wedding was celebrated—"

"Wait, exactly how did they handle the bit about saying 'I do,'" asked Ron.

"Yeah," Harry said. "It wouldn't be a binding ceremony without her consent, would it?"

"I don't know," Hermione said, coming up short. "You know, that really is a remarkably good point. I have absolutely no idea, unless they said something like, 'If you object, then leave, and if you accept, then stay.'"

"But wouldn't that still be communicating?" Harry said.

"Technically yes," Hermione said. "I'd guess that more than likely the king probably had the right to marry anyone he wanted with or without her permission, so he might have done away with asking her at all."

"Well, that's just plain rude!" Ron said.

"Got to agree with you," Harry said. "That is a very twisted king."

"We're unanimous on that," Hermione said. "If only we could have as easy a time reaching a consensus on who was going to do the washing up each night."

"I still say we should do it alphabetically," Ron said.

"Right, since using either first or last names you go last," Harry said.

"S'true," Ron said, grinning. "So, go on, the king and the girl who can't talk or communicate in any way somehow have a wedding in which no one bothers to ask her anything and yet this is somehow legal in the bizarro country they're currently in. Now what?"

"Eliza continues to make the shirts," Hermione said. "The king actually gives her a wedding present of a room made to look as much as possible like the cave she was living in."

"That must have been hard to gift wrap," Ron said.

"Let's just pretend he put a nice bow on the door and leave it at that," Hermione said, looking tired.

"Did he put in those stalactite thingies? What about bats? Maybe some well chosen lichens and moss for a dash of color?" Ron said.

"I agree it's strange, but it did make Eliza happy as she was able to continue working on the shirts in peace and quiet," Hermione said, sighing. "Oh, peace and quiet. Those are things I miss."

"So she starts making shirts again. I take it the king never notices her hands and feet are covered in blisters?" Harry asked.

"No, she wears gloves all the time," Hermione said. "She was doing quite well, and about a year later, she gave birth to her first child."

"Wait, she had a kid?" Ron asked.

"Yes," Hermione said. "As a queen, bearing offspring would have been one of her royal duties, easily the most important one, and she could perform it whether she was mute or not."

"You're telling me this poor girl went through labor without making a single sound?" Ron said, staring at her.

"Well, yes," Hermione said, grimacing. "I suppose she would have had to."

"Okay, there's a limit to how much a kid sister can be rationally expected to stand in order to free her brothers from a stupid swan curse," Ron said, "and that is far beyond that limit."

"Have to agree there," Harry said. "Ow."

"Agreed," Hermione said, "but Eliza is just that determined. Unfortunately, the king's mother never liked Eliza, and she decided to do something really horrible to try to get rid of her."

"Her mother-in-law?" Harry asked. "What could Eliza have even done to get on her bad side? She can't talk at all."

"Yeah, so she obviously didn't insult her cooking or call her fat or talk too much," Ron said, then tipped his head to the side, considering. "You know, in some ways, that's sort of a perfect wife, isn't it?"

Hermione looked almost murderous at this, and Harry quickly stepped in to stop an explosion.

"I think I'd prefer a wife who could tell me what she was thinking," Harry said pointedly.

"Yeah, I suppose so," Ron agreed, "though from what I've seen they sort of expect you to read their minds anyway. It would get awfully lonely, though."

Hermione had developed a tic in her left eyebrow by now, and Harry could see her moving her lips as she silently counted to fifty. Ron used the pause to retie his shoelaces, apparently not noticing.

"Okay, so the girl goes through labor in perfect silence," Ron said, prompting her to go on. "Then what?"

"The mother-in-law steals the child and claims Eliza killed him," Hermione said.

"Whoa," Ron said, his mouth dropping open. "That is extreme. Mum used to claim that Dad's mother didn't like her cooking, and she swears to this day that one Christmas Gran snuck into the kitchen and did something to the roast goose so it didn't turn out right to make her look bad, but this is a whole new level of bad."

"It's really horrible," Hermione said. "Andersen actually has the local bishop framing Eliza, but most of the stories use the mother-in-law. She even goes so far as to sneak into their bedroom and dab blood on Eliza's mouth while she's sleeping, claiming that she not only stole the child but ate him."

"Ate him?" Harry said, turning green. "I don't think even Vol…"

"Please, just don't say it, mate," Ron interrupted him quickly. "My nerves are already on edge, yeah?"

"All right," Harry said, rolling his eyes, "I don't think even You-Know-Who has a penchant for eating babies. He has to be a line drawn somewhere, and I guess that's it."

"Yeah," Ron said. "I'm pretty sure even if he had managed to off you when you were a little tyke, he wouldn't have tried to turn you into shepherds pie or something afterward."

"So, what did the king do?" Harry asked, staring at Ron and thinking he would probably never eat shepherds pie again.

"At first, nothing," Hermione said. "He declared that he didn't believe that his wife was capable of anything so terrible, and he ignored his mother's accusations, saying she didn't have any real proof."

"Well, at least he got one part right," Ron said. "I'm guessing that didn't go down well with Mum, though."

"Indeed it did not," Hermione said. "Eliza became pregnant again, and after the second child was born, the mother-in-law did the exact same thing, stealing the child and smearing the mother's lips with blood, claiming she was a cannibal."

"It seems like the castle really should have tightened up on security after the first go around," Harry said, "or is the mother-in-law meant to be a witch as well?"

Hermione considered this for a moment before saying, "It's not impossible. She's certainly every bit as villainous as the step-mother was, or the step-mother's mother for that matter."

"This story has a lot of mother issues," Harry said. "The only living mother figure in here who isn't evil is Eliza, and her kids keep being stolen, so I'm not sure that even counts."

"Now that you mention it, it really is odd," Hermione said. "The king once again doesn't believe the accusations. Of course, had Eliza spoken on any of these occasions in her own defense, she could have explained what really happened, but she couldn't."

"That is one tricky spell," Ron said. "And I thought Polyjuice Potion was a pain."

"Eliza continued to work on the shirts, and at long last she had completed five of them, and the end of six years was starting to get very close. She became pregnant for the third time and had yet another child who the mother-in-law spirited away in precisely the same manner as before. This time, the king's trust in his wife was starting to wane."

"Well, there is a limit," Ron said sympathetically. "There's only so many times you can wake up to find your kid gone and your wife with blood on her lips before you suspect something's up, even if she does seem nice."

"I suppose that's true. In any case, he starts to secretly follow her, wondering if anything she's doing is at all suspicious. At this point, the nettles Eliza had originally gathered ran out, and she still needed to finish the last shirt. So at midnight, she got out of bed and went to the cemetery to gather more," Hermione said.

"You know, we go to a school of witchcraft, and even I have to admit that really does not look good," Ron said.

"Yeah," Harry agreed. "From a Muggle perspective it would appear pretty damning."

"It gets worse as there happened to be a group of ghouls sitting on one of the tombstones. It took all of Eliza's courage to go forward and take the nettles with them sitting there, but she did it. Unfortunately, the king saw her, and he at once believed the stories that his mother had told him that she was blood-thirsty and a witch when he saw where she was, believing that she might possibly even be a ghoul herself," Hermione said.

"Wait, ghouls? What's so awful about ghouls? I mean, besides the racket, the one who lives in the attic at the Burrow is actually kind of homey," Ron said, "and he was very nice about pretended to be me with spattergroit."

"Muggles don't understand what ghouls are," Hermione explained. "They think they're evil creatures that live in cemeteries and eat the flesh of the dead, so you see it looked doubly bad for Eliza since she'd been accused of doing fairly close to just that."

"Your lot really do have morbid imaginations," Ron said, wrinkling his nose.

"The king obviously thought that he'd been wrong and his mother right all along, and he had Eliza arrested and thrown in the dungeon. She was tried for witchcraft and sentenced to be burned at the stake," Hermione said.

"Well, that's not so bad. Witch burnings are completely ineffective. Binns taught us that much," Ron said.

"They're ineffective for actual witches, Ron. For Muggles, they're lethal," Hermione said.

"But she is a witch… ehm, right?" Ron said.

"I suppose if she actually is, there wouldn't be a better time to pull off some unschooled self-protective magic, but more than likely, no, she'd just die," Hermione said.

"Oh," Ron said, looking glum. "That's not good, then. Poor kid goes through labor three times in complete silence, spends years with blistered feet and hands, can't even say whether or not she wants to marry the king, and she winds up dead. This is a rotten story, Hermione."

"But it's not over yet," Hermione said. "You see, the people hated her so much that the only blankets she was permitted in prison were the very shirts she had been making, and instead of straw to sleep on they'd given her the nettles. This meant she was able to work on the last remaining shirt up to the morning of her execution."

"Yeah, that's comforting. By the way, where are her brothers during all this?" Harry asked.

"Off being swans, I suppose. They were very upset when she was gone from their cave, and they spent a long time looking for her, but they hadn't been able to find her," Hermione said. "However, as Eliza was being carted to the stake, with the shirts and nettles in the cart with her, her brothers caught sight of her and landed around it, hissing wildly and putting out their wings, refusing to let it move forward."

"Well, maybe they are a bit terrifying and vicious," Ron admitted. "And then?"

"And then Eliza throws the white shirts over her brothers, each landing right around a swan's neck, and they all changed back from swans into human beings again. Well, all except the last brother. You see, she hadn't had time to finish his shirt, so there was one sleeve missing. He wound up with one arm that was still a swan's wing," Hermione said.

"Yeah, leave it to the youngest brother to always get the worst of it," Ron said, snorting. "Poor kid probably got hand-me-down crowns his whole life, and he's the one who gets stuck with a wing for an arm. That's going to get him laughed at for the rest of his life."

"Still, it's better than being a swan with one human arm," Harry said.

"I don't know," Ron said. "It'd be an improvement over just being a swan, anyway. At least he'd be able to use a hammer."

Hermione scrubbed a hand across her forehead but plodded gamely ahead once more.

"Eliza then shrieked 'I am innocent!' and fainted," Hermione said.

"Obviously that isn't going to work," Ron said. "She'd just done magic in front of the whole town. Everybody's going to know she's a witch now even if she didn't eat her kids."

"Actually, no," Hermione said. "They all believe her now and burn the mother-in-law at the stake instead."

"But… that makes no sense," Ron said. "Why?"

"Well, they just figured someone who was evil wouldn't be able to do something good like turning her brothers back to human again, and the boys spoke up on her behalf, explaining why she hadn't been able to talk and why she'd been so obsessed with making the shirts and why she was in the graveyard at night, and the king believed them," Hermione said.

"Okay," Ron said, though he sounded like he was still trying to work out how that was supposed to vindicate her, "then what?"

"The six brothers moved into the castle with their sister and her husband, and they all lived happily ever after," Hermione said.

"Where were her three kids?" Ron asked immediately.

"Oh," Hermione said, frowning. "I hadn't really thought about that. None of the stories ever mention them again, so I don't know."

"I'm going to assume they just wound up in some nice peasant cottage on the outskirts of town where they can be peacefully turned into swans or ferrets or ravens or whatever and live happily ever after themselves," Ron said. "At least that's what I'm going to pretend to assume."

"Yeah, and what about her father, the one who didn't recognize her?" Harry said. "Does he really have to live the rest of his life not knowing what happened to his seven kids and stay married to the evil step-mother?"

"Apparently," Hermione said. "There's nothing in the story that says otherwise."

"So the evil step-mother never gets punished for what she did wrong, but the evil mother-in-law does," Ron said. "I think there's a moral in there somewhere, but I'm not really sure what it is."

"It's supposed to support the idea of goodness and determination conquering all in the end, even if there are hardships along the way," Hermione said, then added, "but I admit, I don't really get the part about the step-mother versus mother-in-law conundrum either."

"But at least she gets to live forever with her five human brothers and one brother who's roughly 90% human," Ron said, then clapped an arm around Harry and grinned conspiratorially. "Maybe when Ginny gets married someday, she'll do the same and invite all her brothers to come live with her. That way we can all keep an eye on her and her new husband twenty-four hours a day in shifts."

Harry laughed at this, but he did shoot a desperate look at Hermione, hoping that she would give him some sign that she thought Ron was joking. Unfortunately, all she did was looking back and forth between them and give Harry an unsure shrug.

That night, as they were about to go to sleep, Harry just barely heard Hermione whisper to Ron from across the room.

"Ron? How did you know about Paddington Bear?" she asked quietly.

"I had one when I was a kid. Mum got it for me for Christmas because she reckoned it was sweet," Ron said, then added in a barely audible undertone, "I think it's still upstairs in the attic back home. Cute little fellow, well, after he got over that problem of turning into a spider."

Hermione laughed, and then Harry heard her roll over, though later he thought he caught her humming "The Twelve Days of Christmas" in her sleep. For himself, he kept awake for quite some time thinking of another brave and loyal sister and what she might be up to. However, he added with a shudder, all six Weasley brothers would most definitely not be living with them if he ever did get lucky enough to marry her.

N.B. It was only while writing this that I noticed for the first time that Andersen really does seem to have foot issues. The other story I mention about the dancing feet is "The Red Shoes." To answer Hermione's question about "The Little Matchgirl," Andersen does mention three different times that she is barefoot and her feet are freezing.