{ Chapter Three }
When Draco said it could take awhile to translate Hermione's journal, he wasn't kidding. Two months later he had barely made any headway at all. He had managed to almost translate the first two pages, but when he tried to make sense of his translation he couldn't. He expected a woman's journal to be filled with descriptions of events, feelings, hopes and dreams. What he had translated so far were mere sentence fragments. Section C, subsection two, things like that. The pages didn't even seem to be in order.
Several times he had gotten so frustrated with it that he had put it down and refused to look at it again for days at a time. As it was, it had been almost a week since he opened the bloody book, but his mind was never far from either the journal or the woman that had written it. Somehow he knew that he was meant to have the journal, and that he was meant to translate it. She had given him the code, after all, but still he felt like he was missing something. There was some vital piece of information that she had forgotten to give him.
After spending yet another evening trying to make sense of the runes and getting nowhere, he finally gave up, locked the book in his desk drawer and went to bed early. He lay in bed that night, staring at the ceiling for hours before his eyes drifted shut. Behind closed eyes he saw her, lying in a hospital bed, covered in yellowish bruises that were in the final stages of healing, just as he had seen her that night. She sat up on the edge of the bed and placed a book on the table.
"There's more to it than that," she said. "The symbol also tells you what order to read the pages."
His eyes popped open and stared into the blackness of his room. Had she actually told him that? If so, he had completely forgotten about that. What else had she said that night that he needed to know in order to translate her journal? Wide awake now, he slipped out of his bed and made his way across the hall to his study.
His pensieve had been a gift, willed to him by his grandfather. He had used it only once, several years ago. Ironically enough, that had been to review a memory of Hermione Granger as well.
He set the bowl carefully on his desk and placed the tip of his wand against his temple. Concentrating on the memory of that night, he pulled the silvery thread from his memory and placed it in the bowl. He took a deep breath, then he allowed himself to be pulled into the memory.
At the time, he had assumed she was only talking about her work, trying to pass time and keep her mind off of the attack. He watched himself, sitting across the table from her, barely even paying attention to what she was saying, and he wanted to smack himself in the back of the head.
She kept looking at him, gauging how much attention he was really giving her. Several times she rolled her eyes and sighed deeply, but then she kept going.
"The symbol will be on the cover of the book in one of the four corners. That tells you which group of pages to read first. See here? The rune is on the upper right hand corner of the cover, so all of the pages with the rune in the upper right hand corner are read first. From there, you go clockwise. Next you would read all of the pages with the rune in the lower right hand corner, then the lower left hand corner, and lastly the upper left hand corner. Do you understand?"
The memory Malfoy nodded his head and muttered "um, yeah." The Malfoy that was watching the memory, though, was listening intently.
"Usually when a text is written in this type of code, the message itself isn't even in that particular book. It's a map of sorts, telling you where to go to find the information that's needed. See? If you don't know how to order the pages, the directions you find will be wrong, sending you on a wild goose chase."
Memory Malfoy made another noncommittal noise.
Draco rolled his eyes at his own memory self as he looked up from the book. His breath caught in his throat, though, as he realized that Hermione was looking right at him. This was a memory. There is no way she could know that he was standing there, listening to every word. And yet, her eyes looked right at him. No, more like they were looking right through him.
"It's a long process, really. First you have to order the pages. Then you translate the runes. Next you follow the instructions. Then you solve the puzzle. It can sometimes take months, years even, but that's okay. Two years should be more than enough time, I think. Are you getting all of this, Malfoy?"
"Yeah, I got it," he felt compelled to respond, even though he knew there was no logical way for her to hear him.
"Well, I certainly hope so," she murmured. "Otherwise I am well and truly fucked."
Memory Malfoy's head snapped up and he focused on her for the first time in many minutes.
"What was that?"
"Of course you would hear that part, Malfoy." She rolled her eyes before closing the book in front of her with a snap and lying back on the bed.
"Sorry, Granger. I must have zoned out there for a minute. I'm listening. What were you saying about the code?"
"Never mind, Malfoy. Someday you'll realize how valuable this information is, and you'll wish you had paid more attention." She smirked at him as she said it. He remembered thinking she was joking with him. In reality she had known exactly how true her words were.
Two days later he again sat in his study with the journal, only this time he was armed with Hermione's instructions. The first thing he did was make a copy of the journal. The original was placed back in his desk, locked away in the second drawer on the right.
He cut the pages from the copied journal and started four different stacks on the desk in front of him. The rune on the cover of the journal had appeared in the lower right hand corner, so all pages with the symbol in the lower right hand corner went in the first stack. The second stack was pages with the symbol in the lower left hand corner, and so on. Once the pages were sorted, and arranged correctly, he started translating the first page.
It was a long and tedious process. Most of the runes were not symbols he was familiar with, so he had to look them up one by one. They also had different meaning depending on the context, so he had to take into account all different possible meanings for each symbol.
He sat there, late into the night, thinking that it would take him forever to figure it all out. Two years, she had said. Two years should be more than enough time. Looking at the stack of papers in front of him, two years would not surprise him in the least.
The next day when Draco arrived at the office Cho and Dean were already at their desks and Harry walked in right behind him. It was the first of September, and a lovely fall day outside, complete with a cold drizzle and strong wind. The mood in the office matched the weather. Dull. Gray. Dreary.
Draco had just removed his cloak when a blonde witch carrying a thin white box knocked on the door. Every eye in the room turned to her and she smiled a dazzling white smile.
"I have a delivery for Mr. Ronald Weasley," she announced to the room in general.
"He's not in yet." Harry stepped forward. "You can leave it on his desk if you'd like."
He motioned to Ron's desk in the corner. The witch smiled at him again and set the box on his desk. With a wave of her wand the box disappeared and in its place sat a small vase holding three black roses. A card was lying next to the vase with Ron's name printed in a loopy script.
The delivery witch smiled again and left without another word. The occupants of the office stared at the flower arrangement for a long moment before anyone spoke.
Harry and Draco had both moved closer to the desk without really realizing what they were doing until they both stood next to the flowers.
"Is today the first?" Harry asked the man standing beside him. "I didn't even realize. Today is their wedding anniversary. Three years."
"Three black roses, sends one hell of a statement." Draco reached for the card and flipped it over. On the back was a series of letters.
DCCXXX
"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" Harry plucked the card out of his hands and stared at it, flipping it back and forth several times to see if he had missed anything.
Dean and Cho had both come over to see the flowers and the card. Draco was starting to feel crowded, so he turned and walked back to his desk.
"I'm starting to think that Granger is either bloody brilliant, or bloody insane. I'm not sure which one it is yet. Does she ever just say what she means, or is everything a code to her?"
Cho had taken the card from Harry and was inspecting it carefully when she laughed, a short chuckle, and handed the card back to Harry.
"It isn't a code. It's a number," she stated triumphantly. The three men in the room looked at her like she was crazy, because clearly there was no number written on the card. "Come on, guys, I'm not the only one here that took arithmancy, am I? It's written in roman numerals."
Draco went back over and looked at the card again.
"You're right. It is a number. It looks like…seven hundred and thirty, right?"
"Right," she smiled and laid the card back on the desk next to the vase. "So now we just need to figure out what the hell seven hundred thirty means."
They stood gathered around Ron's desk for a few more minutes before they all scattered and got back to work. Every one of them was thinking about the flowers, though, and the mysterious card. Ron himself was working a night shift rotation, so he wouldn't receive the flowers or the card for several hours yet.
It was lunchtime when Harry had a sudden thought.
"Of course! It's so obvious, isn't it?"
Draco was the only one in the room at the time and he nearly dropped his quill at the unexpected sound of Potter's voice booming through the room.
"What are you on about now?" He cleaned up the spilled ink on his desk and glared at Harry. The dark haired man stood and retrieved the card that was still lying on his friend's desk.
"When we were at Hogwarts, in second year Hermione hung a board over our dormitory doorways. She charmed it to count down how many days were left until NEWT's. The numbers were random, though. Sometimes they were written with regular numbers, and other times they were written in roman numerals."
Draco stared at him for a long moment before his face broke into a grin and he laughed. His first true laugh in many, many months.
"She started a countdown to NEWT's in second year? Seriously?" He laughed harder, imagining a twelve year old Hermione Granger counting down to an exam that was still five years away.
"That's beside the point." Harry rolled his eyes, caught between defending his friend and laughing right along with him. He slapped the card down on the desk in front of the blonde. "This isn't just a number, Malfoy. It's a countdown."
"A countdown to what?" Draco picked the card up once again and looked at the numbers. "Seven hundred thirty days? That's, what, two years?"
Harry started pacing back and forth between their desks, running his hand through his hair occasionally in frustration.
"Okay, so what do we know? We know that Hermione is alive. If the flowers are any indication, she hates Ron. And for some reason she's counting down the days between now and her fifth wedding anniversary, which is two years away. Does any of this ring any bells, Malfoy?"
"No. None." He lied. Inside his mind, her voice was echoing over and over again.
"Two years should be more than enough time, I think."
A cold chill ran down his spine and he dropped the card on the table. The message was clear to him now. He had two years left to figure out where she went and why.