Golden cages - that was what she saw. The girls in blue stood in golden cages, wide-eyed in fear at their spectators, glancing furiously at each other for clues. She wasn't sure that they were cages at first - thought that perhaps it was a trick of the light, a geometric pattern of the tree's long lean branches catching her eye.
But no, most definitely cages. Her breath caught in her throat as it fled her beating heart.
"Next is Ms. Marcoux, of Paris," Madame said with a smile that was all wrong, stretching unevenly over her face as if it had been upholstered with the wrong measurements.
The girl to whom she gestured was a seventh year with large doe eyes who stood completely still, as though she might not be seen.
To her left was another seventh year, a tall flaxen-haired girl Lynn had been in class with that year. Her whole body trembled from behind the golden bars.
To her left was yet another seventh year. In fact, they all seemed to be seventh years. What was going on here? It looked to be some kind of demented graduation, the girls even dressed in their school uniforms, complete with identical blue hats.
And then Lynn heard the first of the men.
"5000 galleons-"
"5500," he was cut off by another.
Soon they were shouting over one another, like dogs yelping to be heard, and she realized with a jolt that they were bidding. As the winning bid was announced, the girl in question's cage turned blue. Sold. In Madame's hands, a quill recorded the transaction on a scroll held on a handle with golden caged ends.
She could not tear her eyes away from the blue girls in golden cages, even as her feet backed her slowly away. She recovered her senses what felt like hours later, her face pale and streaked with tears, body trembling and sweaty. She had run all the way back to the dorm.
The crowd had surged in the direction of the stadium, taking Dani and Aimee with it, before either of them could process what had just happened.
"Where are they taking her!?" Dani said frantically.
Aimee didn't answer. Something in Lynn's words had stirred a memory that she couldn't quite summon to the surface.
"You guys!"
Hermione was reaching for them frantically as the crowd pulled at them in separate directions.
"We should go after them," Dani said the moment she'd pulled herself and Aimee back to their friends.
"No."
Dani looked at the bushy-haired girl in surprise.
"Whatever she stole from Madame - she knew what she was doing. That means that whatever it is, it was important enough to risk everything."
She was right, and the implications fell on them in waves as they neared the pitch.
"She said we'd lose our minds…" Aimee said softly.
Her friends looked at her skeptically as though she'd already lost hers, but in any case they were just outside the pitch, and Beauxbatons and Hogwarts uniforms were being forced apart by seating arrangement.
"We'll figure it out," Hermione called over the crowd, by way of good bye.
They walked solemnly into the stands, thinking and hoping as their minds raced.
The Forbidden Forest was a gloomy place to be during the day, Lynn felt, and all the gloomier guarded by strange men and escorted by Pierre Simon's arrogant smirk. Still, her blood raced with the adrenaline of her moment of courage, and so though they held her arms, she felt certain that she held much more than that.
"Don't you want to know where we're taking you?" Pierre asked, snivelling.
"Not really."
To be frank, she realized that she hadn't actually given it a single thought since they'd begun walking, rather resigned herself to autopilot as she tried to predict Dani and Aimee's next moves in her mind.
Pierre seemed annoyed that his captive was not impressed.
"Well it should seem quite familiar," he said, recovering to her customary condescension.
Lynn wondered for only seconds at what he could mean before she saw it through the branches, glinting, deceptively elegant and beautiful for how cruel and menacing a creation it really was.
For in the woods sat a cage. A golden cage, whose door sealed closed at Lynn's back as she entered it, shaking.
"Potter and Malfoy still taking turns flipping each other off from afar. Certainly hope that Snitch turns up before they turn full circle to friends - Ooof! Sorry Professor…"
There were only ten minutes on the clock, but even the raucous laughter that accompanied Lee Jordan's announcement technique was grating the frayed ends of Dani's nerves. Her friend was in the woods. Alone, in the woods, with Simon. Alone, in the woods, with Simon and a strange man and the wrath of whatever beast she had awoken by stealing the thing that they could not find.
Next to her, Aimee stared vacantly at the hat of the girl in front of her, a position in which she had been frozen since they'd arrived.
"Slytherin score-oh no, knocked away at the last second by Oliver Wood. Too bad, you slithery-oof!"
A roar of cheering went up from the gold and red in the stands as Oliver circled the defended goal posts. His face was serious, even from afar. Dani had already caught him glancing into the stands a few times discreetly as though trying to search without anyone seeing...if only he knew why he couldn't find the face he was looking for.
Suddenly, Aimee was on her feet.
"Bugger Aimee, they didn't score, sit down."
She shook her head, eyes wide and face suddenly bright again.
"What is it you always say about me?"
"That you're a nutcase."
"Right! Oh no wait, not that," Aimee said, confused. "My bag! What is it you always say about my bag?"
Dani felt her blood and breath come to a complete halt, the noise of the stands forgotten.
"Dunno how you find anything in that bag," said Lynn, as they walked toward the castle.
"You'd lose your mind looking for anything in there," said Dani.
Without thinking, she grabbed her friend's arm and they both lurched to move below the stands, tearing Aimee's bag away with them.
It was not immediately obvious what they were looking for, because searching for anything in Aimee's bag felt a bit like scrounging through the discount bin somewhere in Diagon Alley.
"Why are there so many feathers!?" Dani insisted, throwing handfuls over her shoulders.
Aimee made a face but no explanation, setting a bundle of what looked like small Muggle fireworks to the side.
"That - what's that?"
The shine of something gold glinted in a spot of sunlight caught through the bleachers. Dani reached in and pulled out a scroll, miraculously untouched by any of the less scrupulous items in Aimee's bag.
Dani felt her breath stop at the base of her throat and realized she was inexplicably terrified.
"What is it?"
It was the softest she had ever heard Aimee speak.
There was a pause in which neither of them moved and the scroll stayed shut, ends held in Dani's frozen fingers. The bleachers shook with the force of flyers sweeping through the stadium, the noise of the game still crashing down on the outside of the wooden structure.
Thinking of Lynn alone in the woods, Dani carefully unrolled the scroll and felt a second wave of shock comb over her.
Without a word, Aimee peeked over her shoulder and the two read together the long list of names.
There were three to a row always, neat columns trailing down the page in careful, orderly script, like a shopkeeper's inventory or a clerk's record. The pattern was clear - first column: male name, second column: female name, third column: sum of money. No, that wasn't right…
"Prices," Dani said, at once willing it not to be true.
"They've been selling us," Aimee said, hissing.
Though still in shock, her friend looked up at her, speechless. When had Aimee ever been mad? Her small, fair face was livid.
"Look at the names, Dani, look at them! These girls here are from last year's class, these from the year before. We knew them, took classes with them, saw them on the grounds - and then, always, they disappeared after graduation, never to be heard from again."
She was pacing. Above them, a roar went up as someone scored. Dani's eyes dropped to the list.
"Adele Theret was beautiful...we all assumed she'd moved away to act-"
"Clemence Forestier -," Aimee interjected, pointing to another on the page "graduated our third year; everyone assumed she moved to Germany to marry that boy she always on about."
Dani's blood went cold. It sounded too much like what people would have assumed had it been her in Clemence's shoes. Shoes which, according to the scroll, now belonged to an "Antoine Bennett" for 50,000 galleons.
For a moment they only stared at each other, each wrapped in their own thoughts, impossible to discern even to themselves. Then at once they both flew through the stands, a trail of forgotten feathers and knick-knacks behind them, racking their collective brains to remember where Dumbledore had been sitting.