Notes: I apologize for the delay with this, and I hope that the chapter sort of makes up for it. There are a lot of little references and allusions to various things in it.

Thanks to guest reviewer YZ (on AO3) for inspiring the idea at the beginning of this chapter. I didn't choose to include this back story in the preceding chapter, because of various reasons: fairy-tale heroes and villains, Tom can't boast of his Slytherin descent due to the Chamber of Secrets fiasco, and even my "moderate" Tom doesn't approve of wizard-Muggle marriages. But if you're unfamiliar with the Pottermore material about the founding of Ilvermorny, Tom is very distantly related to the founder.

Albania was a Soviet-aligned communist state at the time this story is set. Its government was particularly repressive, and I have extrapolated the likely implications of that for wizards. It's not pretty.

Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Museum of Magic, Part III: Unearthed

Inside the newly refurbished museum building, Hermione studied the draft design that Tom had created. "The Wizarding World's Darkest Hour: Persecution by Muggles, Betrayal by Wizards" was the caption for the museum exhibit, inscribed in a hand evocative of seventeenth-century writing. He had indicated where paragraphs of historical information should go, as well as where the pertinent artifacts would be displayed. Farther down the exhibit was a section specifically dedicated to Cordelia Orne. A silhouette of a witch with her wand out, poised for combat, would frame that section. Tom had written that it would be very clear that she practiced the Dark Arts and attempted to rid her community of the menace of the Scourers.

It was obvious to Hermione what Tom was trying to do. He wanted to paint the Dark Arts in a sympathetic light, and he definitely emphasized the persecution of magical people by Muggles over the acts of the Scourers. But these things had happened, and it was important to know about that era of history as it really had unfolded, rather than the false benign narrative that her own country's leading historians promoted now.

The sound of approaching footsteps made her ears perk up. She glanced toward the door as he entered the room. He smirked when he saw what she was looking at.

"What do you think?" he asked.

She smiled faintly. "Your design is artistic and compelling. It should hold people's attention and direct them naturally to the next part of the exhibit that they're supposed to read or look at."

"And the content? Such as it is so far."

She thought for a moment about how to phrase her response. "It's an accurate account. I mean… all right, Tom, I know that you're particularly interested in these topics, and so you want to emphasize them… but I'm grateful that you have been measured in how you've phrased the material."

"It was necessary to be measured," he said evenly. "I want to change minds. There is too much ignorance about these things, but if I put it up as blatant propaganda, then the Weasley cohort would squeal about it. They'd say we were the ones lying, and it would just harden people in their uninformed views." He paused. "There is a time and a place for propaganda," he added, a dark smile forming on his face, "but this isn't it."

Hermione rolled her eyes in exasperation, but affectionately.

The museum was progressing. The building's interior still had the distinct look of unfinished work and ongoing construction, even though much of the work was magic. However, Hermione could tell now how it would look when the work was finished. Exhibits in various stages of completeness filled the building, showcasing documents and magical artifacts from the Middle Ages forward.

Dumbledore had really come through with the Room of Hidden Things. Most of the items in the room were ordinary magical objects, but they were still antiques, snapshots of everyday wizarding life in bygone eras. She had accepted the donation and had worked them into exhibits detailing this sort of magical history in Britain through the ages.

To Hermione's surprise, the room had also turned out to hold a selection of unique medi-magical devices from Dilys Derwent's time. They had probably belonged to her, as a Headmistress and a director of St. Mungo's. Derwent probably had good reason to conceal them in the room, because they were clearly handmade prototypes—they were not all functioning properly—and even in their refined forms, looked very painful and torturous. Magical medicine had a history that was just as unpleasant as the history of Muggle medicine, after all.

One Saturday evening, Hermione found herself in Tom's private office at home, gazing at his cabinet of artifacts. There was the Elder Wand, she noted. Near it was the locket of Slytherin. Hermione wished that he would see clear to loaning it to the museum, but she knew that was hopeless. He was far too possessive of his property to consider that.

Hermione's gaze passed over the remainder of the objects, mostly curios and Dark curiosities of the same sort that she knew decorated the Black family home. Then something unusual—something she could not explain—caught her eye.

At first glance, it looked like another wand, but as Hermione studied it more closely, she realized that it was… a small tree branch. Why did he have a stick in his cabinet? Surely he meant to have it there, but what was its significance?

She tracked him down in the house to ask him about it. As she finished her question, that familiar smug smirk formed on his handsome face.

He draped an arm around her waist, still smirking. "I meant to tell you, but it always slipped my mind. It's something I smuggled out of Wizarding New England."

"I assume, then, that it's more than meets the eye, or there is some special importance to it if it is just a branch."

"It's definitely important. It's a branch from the tree that is thought to be the transformed wand of Slytherin."

Hermione was aware that Tom was distantly related to the magical founder of Ilvermorny School, who shared common ancestry through the Slytherin line. He had not boasted of the connection, though, for a couple of reasons. For one, that witch had married a Muggle, and although Tom did not harbor prejudice for Muggle-borns—and even had a certain respect for their immediate relatives, due to their strain of wizarding ancestry—he still strongly disapproved of marriages with non-magicals who did not have any known magical relatives. And secondly, although his Gaunt ancestry was public record, it was not widely known anymore that they were descended from Slytherin. Because of the Chamber of Secrets connection, Tom wanted to keep it that way.

Tom's thoughts had been following this same trail as he explained the provenance of the branch to Hermione. However, he also had reasons not to worry about the exposure of his ancestry, he reassured himself. The idea that the Chamber of Secrets had been opened was only a rumor among certain parts of the student body, and no one outside Tom's own close circle credited it after Hagrid was expelled for harboring an Acromantula in the castle. And also, the one figure who could have blown that cover story—Moaning Myrtle—was out of the picture permanently. After the girl she haunted had complained to the Ministry, Tom had made sure that the ghost was persuaded to let go of her childish grudge and pass through the Veil in the Department of Mysteries. He suspected that one of the original purposes of the Veil had, in fact, been to allow ghosts to change their minds about lingering….

That was an uncomfortable line of thought for personal reasons that had nothing to do with the Chamber of Secrets, so Tom banished it. He forced himself to think about the tree branch and the Founders of Hogwarts. He had another plan concerning one of them, anyway.

"That reminds me," he said.

His tone was a bit too overly conversational, too affected and casual, and Hermione noticed. Her eyebrows rose a bit.

He continued. "We need to take the Albania trip soon."

"I hope we can narrow the search. Do you have an idea of what part of the country that Helena Ravenclaw might have left the diadem?" Hermione asked.

He nodded. "I got a lot of detail out of her when I asked, and I remember all of it."

"That's a relief," Hermione said feelingly, meaning it. She had not relished the idea of finding a proverbial needle in a haystack. "In that case, I'll need to make the diplomatic inquiry, and I hope that the Albanian Minister is easy to work with…?" she ended questioningly.

Tom chuckled darkly. "Then I'm sorry to inform you that he's something of a berk."

Hermione groaned.

By the time they were ready to take the trip, Hermione had done her homework thoroughly. Muggle Albania was a totalitarian regime so brutal and repressive that it made Soviet Russia look like a democratic society. The other Soviet states were losing their leverage over the increasingly reclusive nation. Like all other wizarding governments in the Soviet bloc and other totalitarian Muggle states, the Albanians had imposed absolute secrecy. The Albanian wizarding leader, Aleksander Kona, was reluctant even to tell much to Tom—and Hermione did not want to seem reliant on Tom as a conduit of information this time, anyway. It was her project. She turned to her own resources.

To Hermione's surprise, Volodymira Koroleva was still leading wizarding Ukraine despite the fiasco of the previous year on her watch. Had she been a Ukrainian wizarding citizen, Hermione would have wanted a change of leadership. However, that was not her problem, and it did make it easier to have someone to correspond with whom she already knew. Although thinking of that mess still brought out painful, guilt-wracked memories, Hermione knew she needed to avail herself of any sources she could, unless she wanted to give the impression to the upper ranks of the Ministry that Tom was actually the force behind her museum. Koroleva was glad to tell her what she wanted to know, at least.

Kona called himself the Albanian Minister for Magic, Koroleva reported to Hermione, even though his government was barely large enough to deserve the name.

.

I realize, Koroleva wrote, that my own government must have seemed disastrously small and weak to a nation such as your United Kingdom, with its well-established wizarding state. However, Minister Kona's government consists of little more than his own small circle of advisors and a small security team. He has the Trace on every known wizarding home, which seems excessive (even given the dangers of exposure in Albania) and far too much like the repression of the Muggles in his native country. I think he must have some form of surveillance on the non-magical population as well, because they do not appear to have a problem identifying wizards of non-magical parentage. I do not know his method, but it is probably similar to the means that we all employ.

.

Hermione placed this letter in her beaded purse, watching it vanish into the magically expanded depths. She had just reviewed it one last time before the Portkeys were set to activate, but it was not really that useful. Hermione could not decide whether this Aleksander Kona was a despot who was seizing on Muggle tyranny to impose much stricter surveillance and tougher laws than really necessary, or a patriot who was trying to protect his people from a grave threat. I suppose I'll have to form my own impressions of him to decide that, she thought. She hoped that he wasn't—in Tom's words—so much of a "berk" that she was unable to see past that to determine what sort of leader he was.

She glanced at her older children, who were clutching a Portkey and awaiting the moment it activated. Tom stood nearby. The whirling sensation began, and the family were pulled into darkness.

Hermione steadied herself, calmed Cynthia, and gazed out, taking in her new surroundings. They seemed to be… in someone's house. It was a nice house—Minister Kona's? she wondered—but it was not a governmental installation, surely. Of course, according to Koroleva, Wizarding Albania would not have one of those.

She looked up as movement at the nearest door, the approach of a shadow, caught her eye. The person entered the room… and Hermione found herself looking upon the second-handsomest wizard she had ever seen. Her eyes widened for a fraction of a second before she instantly brought them back to a normal gaze. She hoped that this man hadn't seen that reaction.

The wizard was relatively young, olive-complected, black-haired, and athletic. Other than the dark hair and eyes, it was a different kind of good looks than Tom's. He did not appear to be wearing Muggle-style clothes at all, just traditional wizard robes. He smiled a toothy smile and shook the Riddles' hands.

"I am Minister Aleksander Kona," he said, still smiling. "You must be the Riddles. Welcome to Wizarding Albania, Minister." He addressed himself only to Tom.

Hermione set him straight immediately. "We're delighted to meet you, Minister Kona. As you know, we're here to retrieve a magical artifact for the British National Museum of Magic. I am leading that project, though my husband is on the board of directors."

Kona turned to her. "Yes," he said briefly, "the letter did mention that… but I thought… ah, no matter."

A surge of annoyance rose in Hermione. He had thought—what? That it was a façade? A legal dodge for Tom to sidestep suspicion and attacks for his motives in creating a history museum, perhaps? Or was it that a witch shouldn't really be in charge of anything?

She pasted a false smile on her face as she addressed the man. "Indeed, the museum was my idea, and my organization is administering it. We have strong evidence that an artifact from wizarding Britain was brought here many years ago and secreted away in a forest, never used again, certainly not in circulation. This is an item of highly significant historical value to Britain."

Tom winced. Hermione noticed out of the corner of one eye, and she wondered why he had, but she continued. "We also think we know what part of the country it is in, so we will not disturb any of your people with a broad search."

Kona smiled thinly. "Then it sounds as if you are eager to be on your way."

"I didn't mean—" Hermione began to say.

Kona waved his hand dismissively. "I am not offended, Mrs. Riddle. Obviously both of you have work awaiting you at home, and you want your trip here to be quick and efficient." He gestured ahead, out of the room they stood in. "Let me see you out."

As they followed him out, they passed several rooms, all of which were decorated very lavishly. There was so much heavy, gold-and-dark ornamentation that the rooms were almost claustrophobic, just like the one that the Portkeys had taken them to.

"Is this your family home?" Hermione asked mildly.

Kona looked almost embarrassed as he answered. "I'm afraid it isn't. I was not born to wealth. I purchased and decorated it in my own lifetime."

Then you've done extremely well from something, she thought. What could be so lucrative in this country?

They passed by the kitchen, and movement inside caught her eye. She paused and watched for a moment as a human child moved about the kitchen, putting cookware and dishes in the cupboards. The boy's face looked blank and expressionless.

Kona noticed that she had stopped. "I apologize," he said, with a dark look at the child that Hermione did not care for. "That door was not supposed to be open."

"I didn't realize you had children," Tom said, his voice a bit too mild. Hermione glanced at him. She recognized that tone.

"He is not mine," Kona said at once, closing the kitchen door and trying to hurry the Riddles out. "I have pages who are learning about magic and governance from me."

That was odd to Tom and Hermione, but they did not comment. Perhaps it's simply that a different country does things differently, she thought. Having pages is an archaic practice, but perhaps it never went out of favor here.

Tom apparently had a different opinion. He regarded Kona with suspicion. "Do they not go to one of the schools, like Durmstrang?"

"Not Mudbloods."

Madeline and Virgil gasped in shock.

"That term is a slur in Britain," Hermione said tautly, irritated that her children had heard it, and from a powerful wizard at that.

"Then I apologize," Kona said. "It is not offensive here, at least not in our own language. But it's the truth, Mrs. Riddle," he added quickly, seeing her visage turn stormy at his justifications in front of her children. "These children are… Muggle-born. Obviously, they cannot stay in the Muggle world in this country."

"Of course not," Tom agreed. "Witches and wizards should never live as Muggles. But that boy was doing your housework."

"Pages do chores," Kona said. "It is how it has always been." He moved forward. "Let's continue."

At last the family stepped out of the house into sunlight—or they would have if it had not been an overcast day. Hermione turned to Tom, who would know in what part of the forest they should begin their search. They linked hands with each other, and the two older children attached themselves to their parents' clothing. As one, they Apparated.

They landed in a clearing of a forest. The fresh scent of woods filled their nostrils, and Hermione took a deep breath of the fragrant air.

Tom, rarely sentimental, was already examining the site with his wand in the air, casting broad-area magic detection spells.

"How close do you think we are?" Hermione asked.

He lowered his wand arm, evidently disappointed with the results. "I'm not detecting anything here," he admitted.

"Nothing at all?"

He grimaced, unwilling to acknowledge it verbally. "And I don't know what direction to walk."

Hermione thought about it. That was a problem. They had even odds of walking away from the diadem if they just chose randomly… but without even a hint of magic as a compass, what choice was there?

Virgil spoke up. "When you don't know where to go, you can use a map," he supplied. "Do we have one?"

Tom and Hermione started to shake their heads, but as they regarded their son, they stopped abruptly. The same idea had entered their heads.

"If there's no magic in this area, it won't be Unplottable," Hermione said, speaking quickly.

"The diadem itself probably will be," Tom said, "but we can at least see where we've been and where we're going. And if the Grey Lady was right—and wasn't lying to me—we are within walking distance of it."

Hermione withdrew a sheet of parchment from her supplies. At once she and Tom began casting the charms on the sheet that would turn it into a magical map. They could not use the magic as a shortcut to the diadem, to map places—or items—that they had not seen themselves, but the map would expand and update whenever they came to a new place. It would also track their footsteps. With this map, not only would they not get lost, but they also would avoid going in circles or inadvertently heading in an unprofitable direction.

"That was a good idea," Hermione said to Virgil. He smiled happily as they began to walk through the woods.

Thank goodness for magic, Hermione thought in a bit. Obviously, it was not possible—or safe—to take a baby down rugged terrain in a pram. However, there were some subtle little spells on Hermione's baby sling that carried much of the child's weight so that Hermione's own muscles did not have to. This walk would have been debilitating otherwise, and she would have been unable to help Tom with the wand-waving and spellcasting to detect signs of magic.

They had to turn around once, as Hermione had feared. Nothing was showing up, and by that point, something should have if they had been going in the right direction. They doubled back and headed in the direction from which they had just come, but at least they knew that they were getting closer to the diadem now.

Sure enough, after what felt like hours of walking—though she knew it wasn't quite—the magic-detection spells that she and Tom were casting lit up the tips of their wands like vivid purple lights.

"That's better," he said smugly, taking the map from Madeline and making a mark on it.

They continued, making a slight northward detour when the purple lights dimmed a bit. The magic-detection spells served as a magnetic compass for them, pointing them exactly where they needed to go… or so Hermione hoped.

"I hope we're following the trail of the diadem," she remarked in a low voice to Tom, "and not some other source of magic."

"What other source could there be in the middle of the woods?"

"I don't know… and neither do you," she added pointedly. He fell silent, but they continued to walk in the direction the wands pointed them.

At last, however, something new appeared on the map: a structure. Hermione drew her breath. Tom would not like this. He had wanted them to be alone digging up treasure….

The building came into view as they approached. It was a small stone cottage, perhaps no larger than a single room. Set in a clearing, the house and its immediate yard had just enough sunlight that a vegetable and herb garden could grow, as they observed. There was also a goat behind a simple fence. Apparently the occupants got their sustenance from the garden, the goat's milk, and presumably from hunting in the woods.

Tom's face was curdling with irritation and contempt. They were very close to the source. Are we really going to have to deal with Albanian peasants to get it? he thought in deep frustration. Well, I suppose at least they're simple-minded forest-dwelling Muggles. It could be worse.

Hermione remembered what Volodymira Koroleva had told her. If her information was correct, Minister Kona might well have the Muggle population monitored in some way. She had told Tom about that, but if he didn't remember in time, he might use the Imperius Curse on these people to get past them. It would not be good if Kona detected him doing that. For all of Tom's dealings with Grindelwald and Grindelwald's discovery in Russia of Tom's darkest secret, they had made sure, via the Fidelius Charm and the Unbreakable Vow, that Grindelwald could not blackmail Tom.

A young child's high-pitched cry of fear pierced the air. The Riddles halted in their tracks as a very pretty little girl darted toward the stone cottage from the nearby thicket. Hermione turned to look at the spot the child had been hiding and gasped. It was ablaze.

"Do you think she's—" Tom began to say, but his words were drowned out at once by the sounds of a woman inside the cottage shouting in dismay and terror in her own language. Tom immediately cast the translation spell so that they could understand what the people were saying.

"Ana! You have set the trees afire again!" the woman screeched. "I have no water drawn except for our dinner!"

The child cried. "People were coming for me! I couldn't help it. I was scared!"

"People are coming?" The woman's face appeared in the window of the cottage. The Riddles were standing very openly in the clearing, not attempting to hide. The peasant woman turned pale with fear, and her face disappeared from their sight as she fled from the window.

As Tom cast Aguamenti to extinguish the blaze, Hermione put up a powerful magic shield protecting her children. The woman was probably non-magical, since she felt that she had to put out the fire with a bucket of water, but she still might have Muggle weapons. And the little girl was….

The peasant woman emerged from the door, attempting—and failing—to put on a brave face. "Welcome," she said in shaky tones, through the translation charm. She glanced uneasily at Tom and Hermione's wands. Then she noticed Madeline, Virgil, and Cynthia, and the fear turned to sheer terror. "Please, I beg you, do not take Ana. She does not mean to set the fires."

Tom was staring at the peasant woman with a very peculiar, puzzled, thoughtful look on his face. Hermione could not fathom why—the woman was non-magical and wasn't even attractive—but for whatever reason, he was not fully himself right now. She cast a second translation charm, so that this woman could understand what she was saying as well.

"We are not here for your child," Hermione said clearly. "We did not mean to disturb your family at all. We're from Great Britain, and we're looking for something in this area—an object."

The little girl peeked around the woman's skirts. She had spoken like a five- or six-year-old, but she was diminutive and thin. She looked at Madeline and Virgil with a frightened gaze.

"Oh, please," the woman begged. "This is all that we have, what is in this house—"

"I don't think that what we're searching for is in your house," Hermione said. She glanced at the child. "But why were you afraid that we were going to take your daughter?"

The woman did not want to answer. She hesitated, staring at Tom, clearly intimidated by the people before her.

"Can your daughter do magic?" Tom finally spoke up, though the thoughtful puzzlement did not fully leave his face. "Is that it? She can, can't she? That's how she set the fires."

The woman shivered. "I see I cannot deceive you about this," she mumbled. "Yes, Ana is like her brother—and they took him away for it." She gazed fearfully at the Riddles. "These children—they are yours? You truly are not here at Kona's request?"

Kona's request? Hermione thought. Suddenly she thought about the boy in Kona's kitchen, the blank stare on the child's face.

Tom seemed to be remembering the same thing, as indignation appeared rapidly on his face. "Yes, they are ours. Is your Minister Kona sending people to steal magical children?" he asked, his voice rising.

The woman seemed more willing to talk, now that it was apparent to her that her visitors disapproved of the idea of taking her child. "My husband, who is now dead, had a son with his first wife, and they came for him—people in fine robes, with wands. They said that Aleksander Kona, the Minister for Magic, had sent them. We pleaded for them not to, but they killed my dear husband when he tried to stop them. They would have taken Ana too if they had known… but it was two years ago, and she did not do magic until four months ago."

"Could your husband do magic?" Tom asked.

The woman shook her head. "He could not, but we knew a little of such things anyway. He was my second cousin, and his first wife was my first cousin, and we had all heard that there used to be magic in the family a long time ago. He told me that Kona was turning the children into elves."

Turning them into elves? Hermione thought. The boy she had seen was definitely human. But… he did have that blank face. Was Kona putting the children under Imperius? These peasants, with their knowledge of magic distorted and diminished by time, could have some vague oral history that witches and wizards could turn people into something else, and that house-elves were enslaved, and therefore that any sort of enslavement must mean being turned into an elf.

What to do about it, though? They were here to find the diadem of Ravenclaw. They could remove Kona from power, but someone would have to take his place, and they did not know enough about the political leadership of this country to determine a good choice. Still… if Kona and his cronies were stealing children of non-magical parents and using them for slave labor, that had to be stopped somehow.

"That is despicable," Hermione said to the woman. "We do, unfortunately, have to meet with Kona before we leave the country—but we will not betray your daughter to him," she added as the woman became fearful again. "What we will do is try to make him stop this, and try to get Ana's brother back. If he doesn't want to cooperate, there are…." She hesitated about how to word this so that these people would grasp the concept of the International Confederation of Wizards. "There are magic police who can even arrest national leaders if they do wrong," she finally said. "We'll report him to them if he doesn't stop this."

The woman looked relieved. "Thank you very much," she said. Ana emerged at last from behind her mother's skirts and stepped toward the Riddle children. Wordlessly she smiled at them before losing her nerve and darting away again. Virgil was bewildered, but Madeline bore a knowing look on her face. She was clearly old enough to understand the situation—and feel confident due to her age and superior life experience.

Hermione addressed the woman again. "Now, with that settled, I would like to ask you—since you have some magical ancestry yourself, you might be able to feel it. We were using spells to try to locate the object we're searching for, but we might have been detecting your daughter's magical ability instead. Do you know of any locations that feel… different?"

The woman shook her head, but the child's face appeared once again. "I do," she said shyly. "The hard stump by the spring. I go there when I forget something. I always remember then."

Tom was paying close attention. "Hard stump? Petrified, you mean?"

The girl and her mother apparently did not know what that meant. "The spring water is very nice near the stump," the peasant woman said, trying to be helpful.

Tom was convinced. "That'll be it. Thank you for your assistance."

With that, they left the cottage. Hermione's head was whirling with a variety of feelings—indignation, disgust, pity, but also moral righteousness and excitement. Here was an opportunity to set another wrong right. Kona would put an end to this practice, or he would suffer the wrath of the international wizarding community.

But at the same time… that child used the stump—which, Hermione agreed with Tom, almost certainly concealed the diadem—to help her memory. It might even enhance her magic a bit. And they were going to take that away, from a child who had little enough as it was.

She expressed this concern to Tom as they approached the sounds of bubbling water. "The little girl might suffer if we take the diadem," she said in a low voice. "She's clearly benefiting from it, even without wearing it."

"The diadem belongs to Britain, and that child should get a magical education instead of relying on a concealed artifact and what little oral tradition her mother can tell her," Tom said firmly.

Hermione glanced at Madeline, Virgil, and—in her sling—Cynthia. My children will receive the best magical education that the world has to offer, she thought with a pang. They will have everything in life that they could want, because of who Tom and I are. That little girl… she is a witch, but will she be taught at all? Durmstrang won't accept her due to her parentage, and they don't speak her language at Beauxbatons. Where can she go? The idea made her feel bad. She would have to consider what else she might do.

Something else occurred to her, perhaps due to the proximity of the diadem and the effect it apparently had on memory. "Tom, what were you thinking when you were looking at the woman so thoughtfully?" she asked.

He frowned. "I had the oddest feeling of déjà vu when I saw her, like I knew her but couldn't place her. But I couldn't have, of course. I'm not sure what it was. Maybe someone at home looks like her."

Hermione pondered that. Suddenly a very unpleasant idea entered her mind. The cottage was apparently very close to the diadem, its inhabitants the only humans anywhere in the vicinity. Or maybe, in another life, you would have— She shoved the idea out of her mind at once, not wanting to complete that dark thought.

The aforementioned spring was finally before them, bubbling cheerfully. Hermione gazed down the bank in both directions.

Stumps, fallen trees, and piles of decaying wood dotted the water's edge. She cast the magic-detection spell, which made her wand tip flash extremely bright purple. They were very, very close, but they knew that already. With Madeline next to her, Hermione walked down the bank to the right, keeping her wand aloft and watching the light to see if it dimmed or grew brighter.

It did not change in a detectable way.

Tom was going down the left side with Virgil in tow. His wand was also aloft, and it was not changing in intensity either. Evidently the spell was not precise enough, or the human eye was not good enough, for it to be useful at such close range. But still, there were dozens of trees and stumps, most of which looked very old indeed. Now what?

"Are you sure?"

Madeline and Hermione whipped their heads around. Tom was standing next to Virgil, who had selected one old, hardened lump of long-dead tree seemingly at random and was examining the ground nearby. It was barely a stump at all, but instead looked like a tree that had collapsed on itself and hardened over time.

The little boy looked up at his father. "I want to try this one first," he said stubbornly.

"What is different about this one?" Tom inquired, brandishing his wand. Hermione and Madeline shared a glance and turned around to walk toward the males of the family.

Virgil bit his lip. "I don't know. It's just different."

"I can't feel anything different about it," Tom said. "But"—he added at once, seeing Virgil's face fall—"that doesn't mean you're wrong. I'm just curious about what seems different to you."

Virgil looked frustrated at being unable to articulate what it was. "I don't know," he said.

Tom decided not to press it. He extended his wand over the stump and brought it down in an arc, splitting the remnant of the tree—now hardened, almost petrified, from centuries of weathering—into several pieces. He began sifting through the debris.

Hermione's heart pounded rapidly, and she quickened her pace, arriving at the spot just as Tom lifted a tarnished silver tiara out of the pile.

Virgil beamed, clapped, and jumped excitedly. "I knew it! I knew it!" he exulted.

Tom's gaze shifted from the diadem to his son. A peculiar look came over his face again, a look of resistance and dismay at first, but then it changed subtly to an expression of acceptance and peace, as if something he had long known on some level was now essentially confirmed to him.

Before returning to Kona's house, Tom and Hermione went to the stone cottage and cast a protective spell over it. It was not perfect, but it was probably sufficient. It was the one that would render anything inside it invisible to outsiders, even wizards. That way, if Kona or his cronies sent goons to abduct Ana, they would not be able to find her. Still, Hermione hoped to achieve a more permanent solution.

She stashed the diadem in her beaded bag, marveling at the fact that—unlike the time she had bought the locket of Slytherin for him—nothing about this troubled her. Perhaps it was that in her old life, she had never worn the diadem, never had it in her possession for months on end. Perhaps it was also the passage of time. Perhaps it was that, now, her mind was already associating the item with Virgil instead of with Tom. She smiled to herself about what that likely implied. Tom had seemed all right with it after the initial surprise, and he had even promised their son that he would receive primary credit for the find in the official museum record—shared, but Virgil's name would be first on the listing. In any case, it did not bother her to handle the tiara.

The family linked arms and Apparated out of the forest, back to the front entrance of Aleksander Kona's obscenely ornate house.

The wizard was surprised at their return so soon, but he greeted them at the door and welcomed them into his house once more. Hermione had decided to confront him with knowledge of the kidnapping ring immediately.

However, Kona had other ideas. He smiled—his smile now seemed sleazy and sinister to Hermione—and spoke first.

"Might I have a look at the artifact that you found?" he asked in a seemingly mild tone.

Tom stiffened. Hermione narrowed her eyes at him. "Is there any particular reason?" she asked.

Kona looked affronted. "I merely would like the chance to see it before it leaves my country forever," he said, attempting to put melancholy into his words, but not quite succeeding.

Hermione stared levelly at him. He had some ulterior motive. There was no question of that. Tom was giving him black looks indeed, so he might even have used Legilimency on the man to determine what those motives were. But even though she did not know what Tom had discovered, Hermione was quite intelligent enough—and, she thought briefly, the diadem might be helping—to realize that whatever it was that Kona wanted, she could extort and intimidate him out of it by revealing her knowledge of the child abductions. She opened her beaded bag, waved her wand, and drew the diadem out of it.

Kona's eyes gleamed. "You said it was important to your country's magical history," he observed. "It is clear that it is valuable in its own right too. Well," he continued, a slick smile forming on his face once more, "in that case, I'm afraid that this significantly raises the, ah, 'export fee.' And based on where you found it, you'll need to pay the… fee… to my head of security."

Hermione and Tom tensed. The older children looked uneasily at their parents, well aware of what this sort of body language foreshadowed. They had not wanted to bring the children into Kona's parlor to hear this, but they certainly were not going to entrust them to this man, and in any case, they had already heard some details from the peasant woman.

She leaned forward aggressively. "No, Minister Kona, I don't think so. This artifact was never supposed to be in your country in the first place. It was stolen and brought here in secret, and it has never been part of wizarding education or commerce here."

Kona regarded her with a challenge on his face. "This is the policy of this country, Mrs. Riddle. I am the Minister of Albania. I oversee all wizarding matters here, and anyone who is served or otherwise benefits from any wizarding person, or anything of a magical nature, must pay me or one of my officials."

Hermione glared around the room they were seated in. "So that's how you have made the fortune to pay for this house, I presume—extorting wizards!" she snapped. "You and your cronies, probably bleeding the magical population dry! They are impoverished, while you and your 'officials' live in luxury. The very caricature of a corrupt oligarch with a two-bit government!"

Tom drew his wand and turned it around between his fingers menacingly. "That, and the money that you undoubtedly bring in from your trafficking of children for slave labor."

That visibly startled Kona, but he attempted to recover. "I do not know with whom you have been speaking, Minister Riddle, but that is… what is the term? Propaganda."

"Your 'security team' abducts children from non-magical families and does something to them—the Imperius Curse, or something—to make them compliant," Hermione snarled. "Do you deny it?"

Kona shrugged. "It is not the Imperius Curse. Nothing so crude as that. They live as house-elves, Mrs. Riddle. We have determined how to apply the geas that controls house-elves to human children. It involves a potion made with a drop of blood from an elf… but what would you have me do?" he continued, seeing how visibly angry this was making her. "Do you know how I came to power, Mrs. Riddle?"

"I can guess."

"No, I doubt you can. When the Muggle dictator assumed power thirteen years ago, we wizards had to scramble to protect ourselves. We had to impose absolute secrecy, but there was the problem of those children you speak of. They continued to be born, and their existence threatened our existence, with the Muggles in power being what they were. My opponent wanted to kill them as infants. My advisors and I came up with this alternative."

"And how convenient that it gave you a source of obedient slaves that you didn't even have to educate, and could sell to others for an exorbitant amount," Hermione snapped. "We have devised a better answer in Britain, you know. We bring the whole family into the wizarding world, which is good for our population growth too. If the parents are hostile, we use magic to change their minds. They get to remain a family. Ever think of that solution? Do you even know what becomes of the children that you and your 'advisors' don't take?"

Kona shrugged again. "They are shipped out of the country. It is not our concern."

Hermione shook her head, staring at him in disgusted wonder. "You really don't care," she said. "Well, Minister Kona, I'm afraid that the I.C.W. will care, unfortunately for you and your cronies."

"The I.C.W. did not act on the incidents in Russia," Kona said airily.

"We didn't bring it to their attention," Tom spoke up. "I am a member of the I.C.W., and I guarantee you that they will listen to a report from the British Minister for Magic. I strongly advise you to drop this demand that we pay off one of your cronies to take a magical artifact that has always been British property. I also recommend that, if you want the I.C.W. to go light on you, you turn over all the magical children in your custody and release them to their families, or to the European alliance's refugee relocation program if they no longer have family."

Kona glanced around the room, anxiety spreading over his face as he realized that Tom and Hermione were deadly serious.

"Wizarding governments in the other Soviet republics have agreements with the alliance to relocate families who want to leave or are in danger," Hermione said evenly. "You never had to engage slavers. My husband is correct—you'd better give it up if you want to stay out of Azkaban."

Kona swallowed hard. "Well," he said, his voice noticeably weaker and more subdued, "perhaps we can come to an agreement."

"I'm sure we can," Tom said, his words menacing.

The boy in Kona's kitchen was not, as the Riddles had hoped, the little girl Ana's half-brother. He was an orphan who, once his free will was restored, claimed to have adult cousins in Greece. That would be looked into, but in the meantime, he and the other children that the Albanian Minister and his corrupt "friends" had in their service would be turned over and held by their allies in the East. The British-European alliance of free wizarding governments would attempt to track down the children who had been shipped out by private human traffickers.

In the meantime, Hermione and Tom made a stop in Paris on the way back home and quietly told the magical authorities there about the little witch in the Albanian forest. They had concluded that going to Beauxbatons was her best option, and that she was still young enough to learn French easily if someone started to teach her soon. She could be ready to go to the wizarding school by the time she was old enough.

Finally, they were ready to go home. Hermione glanced at her own children, sorrowful that they had been exposed to something this sordid and frightening. Madeline especially looked graver than she had before the trip. She, at least, was fully old enough to comprehend what had been taking place. Virgil, it appeared, was still mostly distracted by the joy of discovering a powerful magical artifact.

"I hope that he can be forced out of power and a real government instituted there," Hermione muttered to Tom as they prepared to Apparate back to London.

He sighed. "I do too… but we can't force it."

"No, we can't. But at least the alliance and the I.C.W. know to watch closely. His power is crippled now, even if he retains the title."

He nodded. "There is that. Now let's go home. Every time I go abroad, I am reminded of how easy we have it even when the Daily Prophet is attacking us viciously. I'm eager to be back in wizarding Britain… and it's time for this"—he touched the beaded bag, which held the relic of a Hogwarts founder—"to return home as well."

They held hands and Apparated away.