Fest Entry: A Year in Their Courts (1/2)
She had assumed she’d share a room with Lavender and Parvati, until she realized they hadn’t returned either and the first years had their old room; then she thought she’d be in with Ginny and her year, but there were only five beds. She finally found herself, that first night, in a small room at the very top of the staircase, with an oak desk and only one bed. There was an old, handsome wardrobe in one corner, and the bookshelves were enchanted to expand every time she ran out of space. Hermione unpacked, relishing in having her own room for the first time in Merlin knew when, and when she was finished she looked around and realized how quiet everything was. “Never mind,” she told herself, and Crookshanks looked up from his seat on her bed and purred. “There will be people when classes start tomorrow.”
But her classes turned out to be mostly one-on-one, with the off lesson here and there with the seventh years-and without Ron and Harry, she was lonely. Hermione had never realized, or never cared, that without Ron and Harry by her side, she tended to stand alone. And so few of her classmates had returned to repeat their seventh year that she knew only a very few people. There was Ginny, of course, and Luna-but Ginny and Harry were Working Things Out, and Luna was Luna. Harry and Ron came down as often as their training would let them, for long walks by the lake and dinner at the Three Broomsticks or (sometimes) in the Great Hall; but their visits were few and far between, and they seemed to spend much of that time fending off first- and second-years who wanted autographs.
No one ever wanted Hermione’s autograph, and she was beginning to find that there was a gulf-an odd, unexpected gulf-between her friends who were working, or near to it, and herself. She wasn’t sure, in the end, if it was the distance or that she was still a schoolgirl or something else entirely, but she stuck more firmly to her lessons and textbooks, and studied by herself in her single room at the top of a tower-Charms and Potions and Defense Against the Dark Arts, history and politics and social theories, and human Transfiguration, which Professor McGonagall taught with more zeal than she had ever taught Hermione in OWL- or even NEWT-levels.
McGonagall was headmistress, but the new Transfiguration professor wasn’t an Animagus (or at least not a registered one; Hermione had met enough illegal Animagi not to trust the registry), so Professor McGonagall had agreed to tutor Hermione in the evenings. Hermione was hoping for a cat, in the end, or maybe something that flew. All the books said you could never be sure-and even Professor McGonagall had confided that she hadn’t know what she was going to be, before her first transformation-but Hermione dared to think she knew herself better than most, and sometimes she woke at night from dreams of padding noiselessly through the halls on velvet paws, eyes shining in the dark and ears pricked to any sound.
She spent more time restlessly roaming the corridors at night that year than ever before; she missed Harry’s invisibility cloak (and being squashed beneath it with two boys just as exhilarated with rule-breaking and excitement and danger as she was), but she didn’t need it. It seemed none of the prefects dared to take points from Hermione Granger, whom everyone knew had impersonated Bellatrix Lestrange and calmly destroyed a Horcrux with basilisk venom, and the professors seemed to understand (what, Hermione was never sure-she barely understood it herself. There was no adventure this year, no crazed Dark wizard to defeat, no worrying that Harry or Ron or both of them could get killed, rushing about like fools-and wasn’t that what she had wanted? Why, then, this restlessness?). Only the new Divination professor seemed to regard her strangely, in a way that made Hermione feel vaguely uncomfortable, when they met at night. It was odd enough that Hermione had taken to avoiding her, in the corridors, if she could; and that was why, when she saw the dark-haired woman turn down the corridor, Hermione ducked into the first door she saw, to hide.
The room was nothing she had ever seen before (though at Hogwarts, that was not particularly surprising)-dark and dusty, with old furniture stacked in corners, chairs piled on top of tables and tottering bookshelves looming over her. In one corner was an old wardrobe, which had probably been stately and handsome at one point but which was now covered in a thick layer of dust. The door was half open, and on the floor of the wardrobe was a book, lying open in the dust. Hermione tutted and immediately went to investigate: the title was in Latin and the text in Greek, and the only word Hermione recognized was the author’s name on the cover-Plato.
“Hm,” she said, and moved farther into the wardrobe, toward a dusty box which she hoped didn’t contain more Plato. People should be more careful, honestly-philosophy was important, and books were sacred, and Merlin knew Hogwarts had its share of mice. She patted the cover of the book absently, in case it had recently been nibbled on.
The box, she realized with a sudden start, did contain more Plato-it looked like an entire collection of books had been boxed in an old wardrobe and forgotten! Hermione resolved to check through the rest of the wardrobe, in case there were other books that had been forgotten and left to rot. “Lumos,” she muttered, and she continued on toward the back of the wardrobe.
After several minutes, Hermione realized with a start that there didn’t seem to be an end to the wardrobe! Every second she expected the dim glow from her wand to illuminate the far wall-but it never seemed to happen, and after a moment she realized her wand was illuminating something brown and covered in bark. She stood stock-still and examined the tree trunk (for it was a tree trunk) from all angles before deciding that perhaps this was some sort of Vanishing Cabinet, and the best thing to do would be to get out at once, the way she came.
Therein lay the problem, though: Hermione had gotten so turned around she seemed to be in the middle of a wood, not a wardrobe-and she couldn’t tell which way was out. Nor, she realized after several frantic moments, could she Apparate anywhere. Hermione squared her shoulders. Well, then, there was but one thing to do: keep her wand at the ready and continue on.
In a moment she came to a clearing, and in the clearing was what looked like a lamp-post, stuck into the ground as if it had grown there. The lamp gave off a warm glow and cast a pool of light around the clearing floor, which was covered in red and brown leaves. The only other light came from Hermione’s wand and the stars up above, for the night was cloudless. “Nox,” she whispered, stepping away from the post to look at the sky more clearly-there was no light pollution here, and the moon had not yet risen; seven full years of studying the heavens had taught Hermione to take full advantage of clear nights like these. And that was when Hermione received her first real shock of the night.
She had never seen these particular stars before in her life. Hermione was fully confident in her ability to recognize Earth’s stars wherever she was on the globe-they were, after all, the same stars, more or less, whether you were in Australia or Great Britain. But these-these were nothing like Earth stars. She could not spot the Dog Star, or the North Star, or Mars; she could not find any of the normal constellations, or even anything that looked like them, and these stars were much larger than Earth stars. In short, Hermione was no longer in her own world.
For a long time, Hermione stood where she was, looking up at the stars in shock. She had traveled through time before, and space; but she had never encountered magic powerful enough to send her what must be galaxies away, to a place where people planted lamp-posts in the middle of a wood, to light the way for people who tumbled out through wardrobes looking for stray volumes of Plato.
Hermione, finally, stepped to one side of the clearing and managed to transfigure a spare bit of parchment into an eiderdown quilt and snuggled down underneath it with the book she could not read, deciding to explore the wood once it was light. She debated for a moment whether or not to set wards up around her makeshift camp, but decided finally that it wasn’t worth the risk; she wanted anyone coming from Hogwarts to find her, and she didn’t know if there were wizards here capable of tracing her spells.
**
When she woke, there was a large black bird standing over her. “Hullo,” it said.
Hermione scrambled to sit up and looked at the bird. “Hello,” she replied evenly, gripping her wand more firmly under the quilt.
“Have a fight with your folks, did you?” asked the bird, tilting its head to one side. “Nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to be ashamed of.”
Hermione, who hadn’t spoken to her parents face-to-face since she’d the day she’d restored their memories, blinked. “I haven’t had a fight with anyone,” she said guardedly. “Why would you think that?”
“Oh, that’s what always happens when young girls sleep in Lantern Waste,” the bird said with authority. “Always trouble with the boys, it is. Not meaning to cause offense, you know, but you humans would be better off if you did as us birds do, and fled the nest as soon as you were ready to eat on your own. Nothing to be ashamed of,” he-for its voice was decidedly male-repeated. “Sometimes these things happen. Why don’t you run along home, and tell your mam and da you’re old enough to choose your own mate?”
Hermione drew the quilt about her shoulders. “I haven’t been fighting with anyone,” she said again, “and anyway, I can’t just run along home; I don’t know how I got here.” She thought for a moment, and then-because any talking bird had to be magical-added, “Do you know anyone who would be able to help me get home? I was just there, and then I walked through a wardrobe and found myself here.”
The bird’s eyes grew large. “Ooh,” he said, and then-“best to ask at Cair Paravel, then, yes, that’s best. Their Majesties will know what to do, you can count on that. Or if they don’t, they’ll know who to ask, sure enough.”
“How to I get there?” Hermione asked.
“Just go east, of course,” said the bird, ruffling up his feathers. “East as the birds fly-you’ll know you’re there when you smell the salt breeze.”
Hermione nodded and stood up, folding the quilt. “Thank you,” she said.
“Of course, of course, glad to be of service,” said the bird. “You just tell the birds you meet that-” and then he stopped. Hermione’s wand had slid from her fingers and fallen to the ground. “What’s that?”
“What’s what?” Hermione asked, realizing too late that he knew what the wand was. She bent to pick it up, but the bird was too quick for her; in a moment, he had picked it up in his beak and flown to the top of a tree. “Come on,” she said, “give it back!”
He took the wand out of his beak with one claw and shook his head. His beady black eyes were trained on her. “That’s a wand, that is,” he said. “We won’t be having any more witches in these parts, no we won’t. No more hundred-year winters and no more beasts turning into stone!”
Hermione’s mouth dropped open. “I’ve never turned anyone to stone!” she said. “And-what do you mean, you won’t have any more witches?”
But the bird had stopped listening to her. “Witch!” he was yelling. “Witch! Witch!” In a moment, the clearing was filled with beasts and birds of all sorts-and even a few creatures that were neither. Hermione saw several beautiful women, strangely tall and leaf-like for humans, and several creatures that had a man’s top half but a goat’s legs and hooves. Hermione backed up and folded her arms, trying to look both imposing and unthreatening at the same time. Without her wand she felt vulnerable and too open to attack, and the crowd all around her was rapidly turning into a mob. There was a sinking feeling in her stomach as she remembered stories of witches being yanked into town centers and burned-without her wand, Hermione would be unable to cast a Freezing Charm, and she would die.
“Kill it!” several voices yelled at once. “Kill the witch!”
“Her wand!” yelled other voices. “Break the wand!”
“Quiet!” yelled another voice, finally-a raven, Hermione realized after a moment spent craning her head. “The witch must be taken to Cair Paravel, and her wand with her; the High King must decide the matter,” it said. Then, to Hermione: “I am Swallowpad, and I serve Their Majesties. If you come peaceably, you shall not be harmed.”
Hermione nodded stiffly. “Very well,” she said, seeing no way out of the mess she was in. “I won’t struggle,” she said. “You have my word.”
“Very well,” said Swallowpad, and raised his voice: “Will someone bring a horse, that we can take her more quickly?”
Several minutes passed, and then a-was that a dwarf?-appeared leading a plodding pony on a lead. Hermione allowed herself to be placed on the horse by a giant (he looked no more intelligent than most, but rather kinder), and the party set off. There were all manner of animals on four legs, who argued as they went; and in front, leading the party, was Swallowpad the raven. He was a most chivalrous companion, Hermione had to admit: he circled back every so often to reassure her that no harm would come to her without just cause; that the High King would be fair, should she choose to snap her wand and live a redeemed life. Hermione tried to smile, both because he was being kind and because she didn’t want to give off an impression of fear, but there was nothing reassuring about having to snap her wand in half.
**
The ride to Cair Paravel took the entire day and much of the next. Hermione was treated kindly, but she wasn’t allowed anywhere without an escort. She said nothing, but it was disconcerting that they felt the need for such a guard around her-one girl, even if she was a witch, and a witch without a wand at that.
The castle of Cair Paravel was on the coast, overlooking the sea. Hermione was led through the gate and into an antechamber, which was deserted. She was calm enough to notice that the walls were hung with rich tapestries-most of them featured a lion-and the floor was tiled. She shifted anxiously. Swallowpad, noticing her discomfort, said kindly, “If you have done nothing wrong and are willing to give up your wand, you have nothing to fear.”
“Right,” Hermione said faintly, as a small door opened and a faun called out, “Their Majesties will see you now!”
She was led-gently but quite firmly-through the doorway and into a bright throne room. Four people sat on four thrones, and Hermione followed Swallowpad’s motions, curtseying awkwardly.
“Thou may’st rise,” said one of the men, and Hermione stood slowly up again; the one who had spoken sat on the tallest throne, and must, she though, be the High King. She wondered if the rest were his wife and children-but they all seemed too close in age. “What hast thou found, Swallowpad?” he asked.
“This woman, Your Majesty,” said Swallowpad. “She was discovered in Lantern Waste, with a wand; she is a witch, and she does not deny it. She claims not to know whence she comes.”
“Is this true?” asked the younger king (prince?), shifting slightly.
“Yes, Your Majesty,” Hermione said honestly. “I am a witch, I do own a wand, and I don’t know how I got here-though I do know where I was. I come from a place called Scotland.”
“How did thou findest thyself here?” asked the youngest of the four, a girl who could not have been Hermione’s age, yet.
“I went through a wardrobe,” Hermione said awkwardly. “And I came out here.”
“Ah,” said several voices at once.
“She might be lying, Your Majesty,” remarked someone else-one of the half-goats, Hermione saw. “It is a well-known story.”
“Nor would it be just to punish an innocent,” put in the younger king.
“That is true,” the High King said finally, “but neither can we allow a witch free reign. Witch”-this to Hermione-“we cannot know how thou arrivest here, nor why; but we shall not harm thee. But thy wand must be taken from thee and destroyed.”
“No!” Hermione cried, and a low murmur went through the room. “Wait, don’t-don’t snap it. I-my wand is part of me,” she explained desperately, “it chose me. Lock it up if you must, I can’t do magic without it, but don’t snap it.”
The High King exchanged a long look with the other three, and finally nodded. “Very well. Thou may’st stay with us at Cair Paravel, in rooms suitable for thy station, and thy wand shall be kept under lock and key, on pain of death. We do this, witch, because Aslan desires us to be merciful in all things, and because thou hast harmed none.”
“I, er, thank you, Your Majesty,” Hermione managed. She felt naked without a wand, completely vulnerable. But at last it would not be broken, and there was always the chance that when they figured out how she’d managed to stumble into this world, they would give her back her wand and let her leave again.
“Now,” said the older of the two women, “thou hast not told us thy name.” It was the first time she had spoken, and her voice was like running water.
“Hermione,” Hermione managed.
“Then, Hermione, Alambil shall take thee to thy rooms and see thee dressed more comfortably.” This seemed to be a dismissal, so Hermione bowed again and backed away, looking around for Alambil, whoever that was.
Alambil turned out to be a tall, willowy girl from a place called Archenland, which was a country to the south of Narnia, the land she was in now. Narnia, Alambil explained cheerfully when they had left the throne room, was ruled by four monarchs-the High King Peter and his siblings: Queen Susan, King Edmund, and Queen Lucy. They had all come out of a place called Spare Oom through a wardrobe, and they had defeated the ruler of Narnia before them, an Empress Jadis. They were, Alambil hastened to assure her, the kindest and fairest of rulers, and as the Narnian court was not particularly keen on ceremony, Hermione would probably come to know them well (Alambil, as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Susan, could vouch for this personally). “For you are a guest,” Alambil reminded her. “And I don’t think you’re a wicked witch, even if I’ve never heard of any good ones.”
“Where I come from,” Hermione offered, “witches can be good or evil, just like anyone else.”
“It has not been so here,” was all Alambil said, and she turned the conversation neatly aside-to the layout of the castle, to Hermione’s two rooms, to Hermione’s gowns (for apparently she was to be dressed in the Narnian style). She was friendly, and Hermione was still a little unsure of how secure her place was in this world, so she did not press the issue, and merely allowed Alambil to dress her for the feast and explain court etiquette and how to find the Great Hall.
**
At the feast, Hermione found herself seated on one side of King Edmund, who looked at her kindly and asked her, after the toast, to recount again how she had come into Narnia. “And thou didst not mean to come into Narnia?” he asked, when she had finished.
“No,” Hermione said. “But that-that is how you came here, isn’t it? Through a wardrobe, I mean.”
“Yes,” King Edmund told her. “Like thee, my brother and sister and I came from another world, through a wardrobe in a spare room in the home of a kind old man who had taken us in during the war-for we were children there,” he added, as if to assure her that King Edmund and King Peter (and perhaps the two queens as well, if it came to that) would never shirk from combat, here and now.
“Oh,” said Hermione, wondering when and where the could have come from-not Scotland, or at least not her Scotland; there was no war, there. Then. “How does the magic work?”
“Thy guess is as good as mine,” he explained. “For it is all controlled by Aslan.”
Hermione made a mental note to ask Alambil who Aslan was. “And you…came here, and defeated the woman who ruled Narnia at the time?”
The king regarded her thoughtfully. “Thou might be more careful whom thou terms ‘woman’, my lady. Jadis was no human.”
“It’s just Hermione,” Hermione said absently, and decided to change the subject. “Who are the other people at the high table?” she asked instead-though she said people, only perhaps a third were actually human; there were fauns and centaurs, dwarfs and the oddly tree-like people Alambil called hamadryads, and all manner of animals.
**
King Edmund was perhaps a year older than Hermione, and she found herself liking him very much; he was direct and chivalrous, and he spoke kindly to her (even if she half-suspected him of thinking her just as wicked as the witch he had displaced). And when his attention was required by one of the other lords at the high table (a mouse that, Hermione noted with some alarm, could speak), she allowed her gaze to wander around the Great Hall. The room was enormous, with a vaulted ceiling and windows that looked over the sea. The floor was covered in colored tiles-red, yellow, orange-and the walls were hung with rich tapestries. More than half of them featured a lion in some form or another. On the dais was a long table, and four thrones sat behind it. The tallest of these had a lion of the seat-back (Hermione had to wonder if this held some sort of symbolic religious meaning, or if the Narnians simply liked lions), and that was where the High King sat.
Since there were four monarchs, Hermione sorted them at first glance, as she would any group of four. It wasn’t difficult; the High King was a Gryffindor through and through, down to the lion on his throne. His brother, who was quieter and seemed just a little darker, was a Slytherin, and the girls followed-the beautiful Queen Susan to Ravenclaw, and Queen Lucy, who had not stopped smiling the entire feast, was obviously the Hufflepuff of the bunch. For some reason, this made Hermione feel calmer, more at home, and she dug into the next course with more appetite. For a moment, she spared a thought for Ron and Harry-how would they react when she was discovered missing? Especially Ron, who had once visited a den of giant spiders to save her, even before they were in love.
She missed Ron. Harry, at least, would be all right-he might find some way to blame Malfoy, but there was no danger if he poked around in Hogwarts, looking for her. It was Ron who would be up all night, worrying. After a moment, Hermione put her fork down and took a sip of her wine instead. She was not going to cry; she was going to find out who this Aslan person was, and she was going to find out how to get home again. And even if King Peter wouldn’t return her wand…well, Hermione had functioned without her wand once before, when the Death Eaters had taken it. She would be fine.
**
In the next few weeks, Hermione began to be acclimated to her new surroundings. Alambil had cheerfully explained about Aslan, the great Lion, but she had added to that no one knew when he would be back (“It’s not like he’s a tame lion, you know, or at least that’s what the Lord Beaver says,” she explained), and so Hermione was next trying the library at Cair Paravel. It was more expansive than she had dared to hope, but it was still not even half the size of her own collection.
King Edmund, when he had heard what she was planning to do, offered to help her find the best books on the subject. He was surprisingly relaxed with her, dropping the “thous” and “thees” and not chiding her the few times she slipped and called him Edmund, instead of Your Majesty. He was even curious about her life before Narnia, her school for witches and wizards and her adventures there. The Narnians called him King Edmund the Just, and Hermione was beginning to see that it fit: Edmund was polite, and curious, and fair, and he seemed to absorb information about other cultures and places like a sponge. “Ravenclaw,” she said absently one afternoon as they sat in the courtyard and read (again) the only book in the entire library on magic.
“Pardon me?” Edmund said, and Hermione laughed awkwardly.
“Ravenclaw,” she repeated. “It just-my school was divided into four Houses, and it just struck me that you were a Ravenclaw. I had thought you a Slytherin, at first.”
King Edmund laughed. “Were you in Ravenclaw?”
“Almost,” Hermione told him. “But I wound up in Gryffindor.”
King Edmund laughed again, and Hermione almost didn’t mind that they still hadn’t found a way for her to get back through the wardrobe; Narnia was more beautiful than home, and Alambil and Edmund were turning out to be fast friends, and surely a few more weeks wouldn’t matter, when she’d already been gone so long?
Winter
“Hermione! Hermione, wake up!” Alambil’s voice was close to laughter, and Hermione woke up and rubbed at her eyes with one hand. Neither of them noticed her other hand went instinctively to the wand that wasn’t there.
“What time is it?”
“Past three,” Alambil said. “Hurry up, get dressed! Put something warm on, we’re going outside.”
“Outside where?” Hermione demanded, but she got up and found her warmest gown and a fur-trimmed cloak with a hood. “What for?”
“It’s the Great Snow Dance,” Alambil said impatiently, dancing from one foot to another. “They do it every year here, at the first big snowfall-the dwarfs and fauns and dryads, I mean. The whole court is going, and Queen Susan told me to wake you up especially, because she knew you wouldn’t know to come out.”
“I didn’t realize it was snowing,” Hermione said, pulling on her dress and lacing up her boots, and then hesitated. “I thought Narnia was-I mean-after the hundred years of winter and everything?”
“It’s not winter that’s a problem,” Alambil said after a moment. “I mean, so long as you know spring will come later, and it always does, now.”
“Oh,” Hermione said as she plaited her hair. “I suppose that makes sense.”
“Are you nearly ready?” Alambil asked. “The queen is waiting!”
“Yes, I’m ready,” Hermione told her, and grabbed her cloak. They dashed down the stairs, giggling like mad (Alambil’s excitement was contagious), and met up with Queen Susan and several of her ladies at one of the side doors.
“Ah, Alambil, you found her,” the queen said, smiling at them both. Queen Susan’s smile was as beautiful as the rest of her, but it did not put Hermione at her ease-she had heard of too many knights coming near to blows over who would carry her favor into battle, or share the next dance with her. “Shall we go?” the queen asked. “The others have gone on ahead already.”
“Did we keep you?” Hermione asked. “I’m sorry; you needn’t have waited.”
Queen Susan smiled. “I thought I might escort thee, as it is thy first snow-dance.” She offered her arm, and Hermione took it hesitantly, and thus the small party walked into the night.
The dance took place a half-mile or so from the castle (“It is a bit of a walk,” Queen Susan said, “but the night is so lovely,” and of course they all agreed with her), and they followed a path that had been plowed by the revelers who had gone on before. The night was clear, and the stars and huge moon shone brightly above them (Hermione had learned to recognize a few of the constellations: there was the Ship, and the Leopard, as well as the Lyre and Fledge, which looked almost like a flying horse if you turned your head and squinted) as their boots crunched the snow. “This happens every year?” Hermione asked.
“Yes, at the first moonlit night when there’s snow on the ground,” one of the ladies-in-waiting explained. “We’ve been looking forward to it all year.”
In another moment, Hermione heard music-wild, sweet music that floated over the snow like wind. There were several flutes, and something under that that sounded like violins, and then drumming under it all. And then they were close enough to see a great bonfire, with people sitting and standing all around it, and then Hermione could see the dance itself: a circle of fauns and dryads dancing a dance so complicated it made her dizzy to remember it, and around them was a ring of dwarfs, who were throwing packed snowballs in between the dancers, in time with the music. It was an eerie dance, somehow; Hermione felt almost as if it were working some sort of magic on her heart, but a different kind of magic than any they’d ever taught at Hogwarts. She drew her cloak more tightly around her with her free hand, and Queen Susan seemed to notice, because she squeezed Hermione’s arm. “It is beautiful, is it not?” she whispered. “The Narnians have been doing it every winter, time out of mind.”
“It is beautiful, Your Majesty,” Hermione whispered back. If it were Edmund, she realized, she would be hearing all about the possible theories on the origin of the dance-but Susan wasn’t interested in that sort of thing. She was the Queen everyone went to when important policy decisions had to be made-not to decide the just and proper course of action (for that was Edmund’s part), nor to proclaim it (for that was the High King’s), but to break the news gently to all involved and sooth ruffled feathers, should there be any. And she was terribly practical; Hermione had heard of plenty of policy decisions that Queen Susan had coolly decided-for though she did not ride to the wars and hated bloodshed, she was calm enough when the enemy was far away.
Hermione was beginning to think she had sorted Susan wrongly, just as she had mis-sorted Edmund: she was clearly a Slytherin, practical and cunning, even if she was gentle about it. But then, Hermione was beginning to think she had sorted them all wrong-for Queen Lucy was called Queen Lucy the Valiant, and the High King was loyal, loyal to Narnia and the Narnians, and to Aslan the great Lion. And there were the lions, too, of course: surely any king who had a lion on his throne and his shield would be in Hufflepuff House, whose mascot was a lion--or was that Gryffindor? For Hermione was beginning to forget. It had started as the little things-the number of Weasleys, or the names of her grandparents, and she would sit up all night and think, in order to remember them. But now it was the bigger things, the more important things, and it unnerved her. The day she woke up and realized she could no longer remember, for instance, the color of Harry’s eyes-it had shaken her to the core.
But she still wasn’t sure if they were brown or blue.
“Hermione?” Alambil said, and Hermione looked up, startled out of her reverie. The Queen had moved on, and Alambil was pressing a steaming mug into her hands. “Here, drink this, you look a bit pale.”
“Thank you,” Hermione said. “The music-it’s a bit…not frightening, exactly, but-”
“Unnerving?” Alambil suggested. “I mean, in the literal sense? That it does things to your nerves?”
Hermione had to smile. “Yes,” she agreed. “Exactly like that.”
They fell silent, then, watching the dancers and the flying snow in the moonlight.
**
Snow had been covering the land for weeks when Alambil came to Hermione’s room in tears. “What is it?” Hermione asked immediately, putting an arm around her and guiding her to the bed. “What’s wrong?”
It took Alambil a few minutes to recover herself, and Hermione found a handkerchief and handed it to her. Alambil wiped her eyes and sniffed loudly. “I’m being sent away,” she said finally.
“Sent away?” Hermione repeated. “What do you mean? Sent away where?”
“Back to Archenland!” Alambil said, and this brought on another wave of crying. “My father,” she explained through her tears, “has called me back home, because he wants me to find a husband!”
Hermione rubbed her back sympathetically. “Can you tell him you don’t want to go?”
“No!” she wailed. “He didn’t want me to come here before, and now I’ve been here for five years already, and he says I have to go home and how will I bear it?” She collapsed, sobbing, into Hermione’s pillows.
“He can’t be such a troll,” Hermione said practically. “Or if he is, why don’t you speak to Queen Susan?”
“We would say ogre,” Alambil said with a sniffle, but Hermione’s words must have cheered her; she sat up. “Trolls haven’t been seen in thousands and thousands of years. Did you have them where you came from?”
Hermione had to stop and think at that. She was almost sure there had been trolls, in that-that other place, Pigspots or wherever it was, but she couldn’t remember. Perhaps it had been an ogre, instead, that Ralph and Henry had rescued her from. “What if you made a compromise with your father?” she suggested. “You could promise to go home for a year or a season, and then if you haven’t found someone you could come back.” She hesitated a moment. “He wouldn’t force you to marry, would he?”
“Of course not!” Alambil cried, shocked. “This isn’t Calormen, Hermione. Women aren’t forced against their will.”
“Right,” Hermione said. “Then what have you to worry about? You might meet someone you love, in Archenland; and if you don’t, then surely he’ll let you come back?”
“But-how can I leave you? And the queen?”
Hermione cast around for something comforting to say. “You’ll still be able to visit, surely,” she said. “And maybe I can come visit you; and you know Queen Susan will go to Archenland, on visits of state. And if you do meet someone in Archenland, that would be worth a year away from us, don’t you think? Falling in love is like magic.”
Alambil regarded her curiously. “Have you been in love, then?”
Hermione frowned, taken aback at the question. “I don’t think so,” she said, for she couldn’t remember ever falling in love, back in that other place. “But I know that’s how it feels,” she added firmly-because she did.
Alambil sniffed again. “I believe you,” she said finally. “And I still don’t want to go-but I will, anyway. And you will come stay, won’t you? In the spring, perhaps?”
“Of course,” Hermione said firmly.
Alambil was quiet for a moment. “Hermione?” she asked after a moment.
“Yes?”
“While I’m gone, Queen Susan will need someone else for a lady-in-waiting. She said I ought not to worry about it, that she would manage-but would you take my place? And then when I come back, you could-could step aside and let me back in?” She was biting her lip. “I’ve spoken to the Queen and she says that would be fine, and you don’t have to and I know I have no right to ask, but…”
Hermione surprised herself by nodded. “I wouldn’t mind,” she said. She liked Queen Susan, who was gracious and gentle and by all accounts kind to her ladies, and she didn’t want Alambil, who was her closest friend here, to feel hurt. “I would be honored,” she added, because the situation seemed to require it.
Alambil broke into an enormous grin and flung her arms around Hermione. “Oh, thank you, thank you!”
**
Hermione moved quarters the day after Alambil left. The ladies-in-waiting lived in rooms adjoining the Queen’s rooms, and she shared with a girl named Helen, a distant cousin of Alambil’s. She was very quiet, and seemed to be carrying on a furtive romance with a river god, so Hermione did not see her very often. Unlike her sister’s, Queen Susan’s ladies were mostly human, and the few naiads and dryads among them were much less wild than Queen Lucy’s, who were known to accompany her on midnight romps and even into battle. Queen Susan seemed to prefer quiet companionship, and often retired to her rooms after a night of feasting and dancing to listen to the quieter, calmer music of a harp. She was wonderful to talk to, affectionate and loving, and beautiful besides; Hermione saw immediately that there were more men after Queen Susan’s hand than she had known about as a mere guest, and it was the job of the ladies-in-waiting to preserve the quiet of her rooms, so that the suitors could not bother her there. “Do you think you will marry?” she dared to ask one night, and the Queen merely smiled.
“I suppose one of us must,” she said finally. “For we cannot rule indefinitely.”
Though the Queen did not mention it, Hermione knew the problem: would a consort come between the four? Would he (or she) be welcomed as a fifth ruler, or would there be a divide? And, if two of them happened to marry and produce children, which would rule after their death? And even if Susan did marry, would she be expected to leave for her husband’s country? “Would it be easier for your brothers?” Hermione asked, hardly believing her daring.
“I do not think Edmund is ready for a wife,” Queen Susan said lightly, with a laugh, and then she called for an end to the music, saying she was tired and wished to go to bed. Helen went with her, and Hermione was left to walk slowly back to her room, thinking it all over and wondering whom, in the end, Queen Susan would choose.
Other than sitting and talking with the Queen, Hermione’s tasks as lady-in-waiting were very slight. Sometimes they might ride with her on a hunt, or sit with her during a tournament; occasionally, the Queen would pick one or two girls to accompany her on a visit to the home of a nearby lord. And every night the Queen shared her bed with one of her ladies; castles were drafty, and queens needed someone there to vouch for their virtue (though who would dare to impugn Queen Susan’s virtue, or who would believe it if he did, was unclear to Hermione). This had not surprised her-indeed, aside from muttering a little bit about the misogynistic nature of it (for surely kings were not subject to the same rule), Hermione had not noticed it much, except to note that it was a great honor and wonder what to do if the Queen turned out to snore.
**
Alambil had been gone a month before Queen Susan smiled at Hermione and said, “Wilt thou join me tonight?”
“Of course,” Hermione said, and Queen Susan led her into the great royal bedchamber. She helped the Queen into her nightshift, and Susan allowed Hermione to brush her hair, which was long and dark and fell nearly to her feet.
“Are you happy here?” the Queen asked her, after several moments of silence.
“Yes,” Hermione answered immediately. “It is beautiful here, Your Majesty, and you have all been so kind.”
“And thou dost not miss-thy old home?”
“No,” Hermione told her slowly, honestly. “I don’t-remember much of it, you see. And what I do remember, I only remember like you might remember a dream.”
“Ah,” said the Queen. “So it is with us. Aslan’s doing, no doubt.”
“No doubt,” Hermione agreed. She still wished to meet this Aslan, to whom even the High King swore fealty. “Do you think you will ever go back there?”
“I should hope not,” the Queen said. “I would not want to leave Narnia.”
Hermione smiled. “Understandable,” she said. What she did not say was, Does it frighten you? For Hermione privately thought the Queen Susan to be the most afraid, of all the monarchs. That was not to say she was a coward, but…Queen Susan did not like the unknown, and she did not like change. Of course she would not want to leave Narnia. Hermione found herself wondering if Queen Susan had wanted to come into Narnia, in the beginning.
The Queen yawned.
“Oh!” Hermione said. “Your Majesty, are you tired?”
“Yes, a bit,” Susan said, and Hermione helped her into bed and tucked her in before blowing out the tapers and slipping in next to her. The bed was warm and soft, and the sheets felt like they were made of silk. She sighed in contentment, and Susan whispered, “Art thou comfortable?”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” Hermione replied. She’d thought the Queen had wanted to sleep, but it seemed instead she wanted to talk.
“What dost thou think of the Calormene prince?”
“I think he’s very brave,” Hermione answered vaguely.
“That is no answer at all,” Susan chided gently. “My royal brother thinks he means to court me. What dost thou think of that?”
The thought that the Queen might have to go far away to the south was not a comforting one. “Isn’t Calmash the second son, not the heir-apparent?” Hermione asked. “Maybe you should wait for him to come courting you. And anyway, would Narnia stand for a half-Calormene heir? You said yourself that they have very different traditions, especially when it comes to government.”
“Thou speakest the truth,” the Queen said, but then she added, “though it may not matter, in the end, what the Narnians wish. We must have a ruler, when the four of us are dead.”
“But you are young,” Hermione reasoned. “The four of you, I mean. And doesn’t King Peter say Aslan will provide?”
“Aye,” said the Queen. “But he provided for the White Witch; and he acts in his own time, and not ours.”
After a moment, Hermione said quietly, “But every king wants you for a bride. Couldn’t you wait to pick one you like?”
“I should like to,” Queen Susan said, wistfully, and then suddenly she rolled over and kissed Hermione, very gently, on the mouth. Hermione was too stunned to move for a moment, and then she slowly, tentatively, kissed back.
**
After that, her nights with Queen Susan always began the same way: the gentle, hesitant kisses, and then her hands moving over Hermione’s body, and both of them trying to stifle their cries. Queen Susan would whisper, afterward, that it-this-didn’t count, not between them, two women. And Hermione believed her, or allowed herself to believe, because the Queen’s virtue and worth, on the international marriage-market, must be preserved, and because, deep down, she felt almost as if there was something (someone?) that meant she shouldn’t allow the kisses or the touches-which was silly, because she had never been in love, and she had been in Narnia half a year already.
She did wonder, sometimes, if Queen Susan was as forward with the other ladies-in-waiting, if that was why Alambil hadn’t wanted to leave. But Hermione knew she could not ask, and no one else volunteered the information. After all, ladies-in-waiting had to be discreet. And she did not mind; Susan was a wonderful lover, gentle and kind and surprisingly skilled, and Hermione was lonely, with Alambil gone and King Edmund off to the Lone Islands on affairs of state. But it was still difficult, not to tell anyone she was having an affair with the Queen, and to know that any moment a foreign might catch Susan’s eye.
Queen Susan was careful, of course, not to show Hermione too much favor, and so they sometimes went days without being alone together. Hermione thought she should care, but in some ways that was easier. And as the days grew longer again and the snow began to melt, she began to spend more time outside-not with the Queen, but walking alone, through the Narnian woods. Sometimes she listened to the merpeople, who tended to surface occasionally to sing madrigals.
“Hermione!” Hermione turned to see Helen dashing towards her, hair flying. “Come quick, there’s to be a tournament the next month, and everyone is to have new gowns made, and the Queen wants your assistance with the dressmakers!”
Hermione had to laugh, and she followed Helen back down the path and into the castle, where Queen Susan stood on a stool, surrounded by dressmakers and mirrors and swaths of fabric. “Ah, Hermione!” she exclaimed, when they entered and curtsied. “Which do you think, the blue or the green?”
Hermione considered the colors carefully. Both looked stunning on Susan, who could probably wear tree bark and get away with it. “The green,” she said finally. “It suits you better.”
Susan laughed, and twirled around in front of the mirror, and the dressmakers switched the blue fabric for green and started arguing about sleeves.
“It won’t change anything, this tournament,” Susan said later, when they were in bed. “Between thee and me, I mean.”
“I know,” Hermione said with a smile. “I trust you.”
Part Two
But her classes turned out to be mostly one-on-one, with the off lesson here and there with the seventh years-and without Ron and Harry, she was lonely. Hermione had never realized, or never cared, that without Ron and Harry by her side, she tended to stand alone. And so few of her classmates had returned to repeat their seventh year that she knew only a very few people. There was Ginny, of course, and Luna-but Ginny and Harry were Working Things Out, and Luna was Luna. Harry and Ron came down as often as their training would let them, for long walks by the lake and dinner at the Three Broomsticks or (sometimes) in the Great Hall; but their visits were few and far between, and they seemed to spend much of that time fending off first- and second-years who wanted autographs.
No one ever wanted Hermione’s autograph, and she was beginning to find that there was a gulf-an odd, unexpected gulf-between her friends who were working, or near to it, and herself. She wasn’t sure, in the end, if it was the distance or that she was still a schoolgirl or something else entirely, but she stuck more firmly to her lessons and textbooks, and studied by herself in her single room at the top of a tower-Charms and Potions and Defense Against the Dark Arts, history and politics and social theories, and human Transfiguration, which Professor McGonagall taught with more zeal than she had ever taught Hermione in OWL- or even NEWT-levels.
McGonagall was headmistress, but the new Transfiguration professor wasn’t an Animagus (or at least not a registered one; Hermione had met enough illegal Animagi not to trust the registry), so Professor McGonagall had agreed to tutor Hermione in the evenings. Hermione was hoping for a cat, in the end, or maybe something that flew. All the books said you could never be sure-and even Professor McGonagall had confided that she hadn’t know what she was going to be, before her first transformation-but Hermione dared to think she knew herself better than most, and sometimes she woke at night from dreams of padding noiselessly through the halls on velvet paws, eyes shining in the dark and ears pricked to any sound.
She spent more time restlessly roaming the corridors at night that year than ever before; she missed Harry’s invisibility cloak (and being squashed beneath it with two boys just as exhilarated with rule-breaking and excitement and danger as she was), but she didn’t need it. It seemed none of the prefects dared to take points from Hermione Granger, whom everyone knew had impersonated Bellatrix Lestrange and calmly destroyed a Horcrux with basilisk venom, and the professors seemed to understand (what, Hermione was never sure-she barely understood it herself. There was no adventure this year, no crazed Dark wizard to defeat, no worrying that Harry or Ron or both of them could get killed, rushing about like fools-and wasn’t that what she had wanted? Why, then, this restlessness?). Only the new Divination professor seemed to regard her strangely, in a way that made Hermione feel vaguely uncomfortable, when they met at night. It was odd enough that Hermione had taken to avoiding her, in the corridors, if she could; and that was why, when she saw the dark-haired woman turn down the corridor, Hermione ducked into the first door she saw, to hide.
The room was nothing she had ever seen before (though at Hogwarts, that was not particularly surprising)-dark and dusty, with old furniture stacked in corners, chairs piled on top of tables and tottering bookshelves looming over her. In one corner was an old wardrobe, which had probably been stately and handsome at one point but which was now covered in a thick layer of dust. The door was half open, and on the floor of the wardrobe was a book, lying open in the dust. Hermione tutted and immediately went to investigate: the title was in Latin and the text in Greek, and the only word Hermione recognized was the author’s name on the cover-Plato.
“Hm,” she said, and moved farther into the wardrobe, toward a dusty box which she hoped didn’t contain more Plato. People should be more careful, honestly-philosophy was important, and books were sacred, and Merlin knew Hogwarts had its share of mice. She patted the cover of the book absently, in case it had recently been nibbled on.
The box, she realized with a sudden start, did contain more Plato-it looked like an entire collection of books had been boxed in an old wardrobe and forgotten! Hermione resolved to check through the rest of the wardrobe, in case there were other books that had been forgotten and left to rot. “Lumos,” she muttered, and she continued on toward the back of the wardrobe.
After several minutes, Hermione realized with a start that there didn’t seem to be an end to the wardrobe! Every second she expected the dim glow from her wand to illuminate the far wall-but it never seemed to happen, and after a moment she realized her wand was illuminating something brown and covered in bark. She stood stock-still and examined the tree trunk (for it was a tree trunk) from all angles before deciding that perhaps this was some sort of Vanishing Cabinet, and the best thing to do would be to get out at once, the way she came.
Therein lay the problem, though: Hermione had gotten so turned around she seemed to be in the middle of a wood, not a wardrobe-and she couldn’t tell which way was out. Nor, she realized after several frantic moments, could she Apparate anywhere. Hermione squared her shoulders. Well, then, there was but one thing to do: keep her wand at the ready and continue on.
In a moment she came to a clearing, and in the clearing was what looked like a lamp-post, stuck into the ground as if it had grown there. The lamp gave off a warm glow and cast a pool of light around the clearing floor, which was covered in red and brown leaves. The only other light came from Hermione’s wand and the stars up above, for the night was cloudless. “Nox,” she whispered, stepping away from the post to look at the sky more clearly-there was no light pollution here, and the moon had not yet risen; seven full years of studying the heavens had taught Hermione to take full advantage of clear nights like these. And that was when Hermione received her first real shock of the night.
She had never seen these particular stars before in her life. Hermione was fully confident in her ability to recognize Earth’s stars wherever she was on the globe-they were, after all, the same stars, more or less, whether you were in Australia or Great Britain. But these-these were nothing like Earth stars. She could not spot the Dog Star, or the North Star, or Mars; she could not find any of the normal constellations, or even anything that looked like them, and these stars were much larger than Earth stars. In short, Hermione was no longer in her own world.
For a long time, Hermione stood where she was, looking up at the stars in shock. She had traveled through time before, and space; but she had never encountered magic powerful enough to send her what must be galaxies away, to a place where people planted lamp-posts in the middle of a wood, to light the way for people who tumbled out through wardrobes looking for stray volumes of Plato.
Hermione, finally, stepped to one side of the clearing and managed to transfigure a spare bit of parchment into an eiderdown quilt and snuggled down underneath it with the book she could not read, deciding to explore the wood once it was light. She debated for a moment whether or not to set wards up around her makeshift camp, but decided finally that it wasn’t worth the risk; she wanted anyone coming from Hogwarts to find her, and she didn’t know if there were wizards here capable of tracing her spells.
**
When she woke, there was a large black bird standing over her. “Hullo,” it said.
Hermione scrambled to sit up and looked at the bird. “Hello,” she replied evenly, gripping her wand more firmly under the quilt.
“Have a fight with your folks, did you?” asked the bird, tilting its head to one side. “Nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to be ashamed of.”
Hermione, who hadn’t spoken to her parents face-to-face since she’d the day she’d restored their memories, blinked. “I haven’t had a fight with anyone,” she said guardedly. “Why would you think that?”
“Oh, that’s what always happens when young girls sleep in Lantern Waste,” the bird said with authority. “Always trouble with the boys, it is. Not meaning to cause offense, you know, but you humans would be better off if you did as us birds do, and fled the nest as soon as you were ready to eat on your own. Nothing to be ashamed of,” he-for its voice was decidedly male-repeated. “Sometimes these things happen. Why don’t you run along home, and tell your mam and da you’re old enough to choose your own mate?”
Hermione drew the quilt about her shoulders. “I haven’t been fighting with anyone,” she said again, “and anyway, I can’t just run along home; I don’t know how I got here.” She thought for a moment, and then-because any talking bird had to be magical-added, “Do you know anyone who would be able to help me get home? I was just there, and then I walked through a wardrobe and found myself here.”
The bird’s eyes grew large. “Ooh,” he said, and then-“best to ask at Cair Paravel, then, yes, that’s best. Their Majesties will know what to do, you can count on that. Or if they don’t, they’ll know who to ask, sure enough.”
“How to I get there?” Hermione asked.
“Just go east, of course,” said the bird, ruffling up his feathers. “East as the birds fly-you’ll know you’re there when you smell the salt breeze.”
Hermione nodded and stood up, folding the quilt. “Thank you,” she said.
“Of course, of course, glad to be of service,” said the bird. “You just tell the birds you meet that-” and then he stopped. Hermione’s wand had slid from her fingers and fallen to the ground. “What’s that?”
“What’s what?” Hermione asked, realizing too late that he knew what the wand was. She bent to pick it up, but the bird was too quick for her; in a moment, he had picked it up in his beak and flown to the top of a tree. “Come on,” she said, “give it back!”
He took the wand out of his beak with one claw and shook his head. His beady black eyes were trained on her. “That’s a wand, that is,” he said. “We won’t be having any more witches in these parts, no we won’t. No more hundred-year winters and no more beasts turning into stone!”
Hermione’s mouth dropped open. “I’ve never turned anyone to stone!” she said. “And-what do you mean, you won’t have any more witches?”
But the bird had stopped listening to her. “Witch!” he was yelling. “Witch! Witch!” In a moment, the clearing was filled with beasts and birds of all sorts-and even a few creatures that were neither. Hermione saw several beautiful women, strangely tall and leaf-like for humans, and several creatures that had a man’s top half but a goat’s legs and hooves. Hermione backed up and folded her arms, trying to look both imposing and unthreatening at the same time. Without her wand she felt vulnerable and too open to attack, and the crowd all around her was rapidly turning into a mob. There was a sinking feeling in her stomach as she remembered stories of witches being yanked into town centers and burned-without her wand, Hermione would be unable to cast a Freezing Charm, and she would die.
“Kill it!” several voices yelled at once. “Kill the witch!”
“Her wand!” yelled other voices. “Break the wand!”
“Quiet!” yelled another voice, finally-a raven, Hermione realized after a moment spent craning her head. “The witch must be taken to Cair Paravel, and her wand with her; the High King must decide the matter,” it said. Then, to Hermione: “I am Swallowpad, and I serve Their Majesties. If you come peaceably, you shall not be harmed.”
Hermione nodded stiffly. “Very well,” she said, seeing no way out of the mess she was in. “I won’t struggle,” she said. “You have my word.”
“Very well,” said Swallowpad, and raised his voice: “Will someone bring a horse, that we can take her more quickly?”
Several minutes passed, and then a-was that a dwarf?-appeared leading a plodding pony on a lead. Hermione allowed herself to be placed on the horse by a giant (he looked no more intelligent than most, but rather kinder), and the party set off. There were all manner of animals on four legs, who argued as they went; and in front, leading the party, was Swallowpad the raven. He was a most chivalrous companion, Hermione had to admit: he circled back every so often to reassure her that no harm would come to her without just cause; that the High King would be fair, should she choose to snap her wand and live a redeemed life. Hermione tried to smile, both because he was being kind and because she didn’t want to give off an impression of fear, but there was nothing reassuring about having to snap her wand in half.
**
The ride to Cair Paravel took the entire day and much of the next. Hermione was treated kindly, but she wasn’t allowed anywhere without an escort. She said nothing, but it was disconcerting that they felt the need for such a guard around her-one girl, even if she was a witch, and a witch without a wand at that.
The castle of Cair Paravel was on the coast, overlooking the sea. Hermione was led through the gate and into an antechamber, which was deserted. She was calm enough to notice that the walls were hung with rich tapestries-most of them featured a lion-and the floor was tiled. She shifted anxiously. Swallowpad, noticing her discomfort, said kindly, “If you have done nothing wrong and are willing to give up your wand, you have nothing to fear.”
“Right,” Hermione said faintly, as a small door opened and a faun called out, “Their Majesties will see you now!”
She was led-gently but quite firmly-through the doorway and into a bright throne room. Four people sat on four thrones, and Hermione followed Swallowpad’s motions, curtseying awkwardly.
“Thou may’st rise,” said one of the men, and Hermione stood slowly up again; the one who had spoken sat on the tallest throne, and must, she though, be the High King. She wondered if the rest were his wife and children-but they all seemed too close in age. “What hast thou found, Swallowpad?” he asked.
“This woman, Your Majesty,” said Swallowpad. “She was discovered in Lantern Waste, with a wand; she is a witch, and she does not deny it. She claims not to know whence she comes.”
“Is this true?” asked the younger king (prince?), shifting slightly.
“Yes, Your Majesty,” Hermione said honestly. “I am a witch, I do own a wand, and I don’t know how I got here-though I do know where I was. I come from a place called Scotland.”
“How did thou findest thyself here?” asked the youngest of the four, a girl who could not have been Hermione’s age, yet.
“I went through a wardrobe,” Hermione said awkwardly. “And I came out here.”
“Ah,” said several voices at once.
“She might be lying, Your Majesty,” remarked someone else-one of the half-goats, Hermione saw. “It is a well-known story.”
“Nor would it be just to punish an innocent,” put in the younger king.
“That is true,” the High King said finally, “but neither can we allow a witch free reign. Witch”-this to Hermione-“we cannot know how thou arrivest here, nor why; but we shall not harm thee. But thy wand must be taken from thee and destroyed.”
“No!” Hermione cried, and a low murmur went through the room. “Wait, don’t-don’t snap it. I-my wand is part of me,” she explained desperately, “it chose me. Lock it up if you must, I can’t do magic without it, but don’t snap it.”
The High King exchanged a long look with the other three, and finally nodded. “Very well. Thou may’st stay with us at Cair Paravel, in rooms suitable for thy station, and thy wand shall be kept under lock and key, on pain of death. We do this, witch, because Aslan desires us to be merciful in all things, and because thou hast harmed none.”
“I, er, thank you, Your Majesty,” Hermione managed. She felt naked without a wand, completely vulnerable. But at last it would not be broken, and there was always the chance that when they figured out how she’d managed to stumble into this world, they would give her back her wand and let her leave again.
“Now,” said the older of the two women, “thou hast not told us thy name.” It was the first time she had spoken, and her voice was like running water.
“Hermione,” Hermione managed.
“Then, Hermione, Alambil shall take thee to thy rooms and see thee dressed more comfortably.” This seemed to be a dismissal, so Hermione bowed again and backed away, looking around for Alambil, whoever that was.
Alambil turned out to be a tall, willowy girl from a place called Archenland, which was a country to the south of Narnia, the land she was in now. Narnia, Alambil explained cheerfully when they had left the throne room, was ruled by four monarchs-the High King Peter and his siblings: Queen Susan, King Edmund, and Queen Lucy. They had all come out of a place called Spare Oom through a wardrobe, and they had defeated the ruler of Narnia before them, an Empress Jadis. They were, Alambil hastened to assure her, the kindest and fairest of rulers, and as the Narnian court was not particularly keen on ceremony, Hermione would probably come to know them well (Alambil, as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Susan, could vouch for this personally). “For you are a guest,” Alambil reminded her. “And I don’t think you’re a wicked witch, even if I’ve never heard of any good ones.”
“Where I come from,” Hermione offered, “witches can be good or evil, just like anyone else.”
“It has not been so here,” was all Alambil said, and she turned the conversation neatly aside-to the layout of the castle, to Hermione’s two rooms, to Hermione’s gowns (for apparently she was to be dressed in the Narnian style). She was friendly, and Hermione was still a little unsure of how secure her place was in this world, so she did not press the issue, and merely allowed Alambil to dress her for the feast and explain court etiquette and how to find the Great Hall.
**
At the feast, Hermione found herself seated on one side of King Edmund, who looked at her kindly and asked her, after the toast, to recount again how she had come into Narnia. “And thou didst not mean to come into Narnia?” he asked, when she had finished.
“No,” Hermione said. “But that-that is how you came here, isn’t it? Through a wardrobe, I mean.”
“Yes,” King Edmund told her. “Like thee, my brother and sister and I came from another world, through a wardrobe in a spare room in the home of a kind old man who had taken us in during the war-for we were children there,” he added, as if to assure her that King Edmund and King Peter (and perhaps the two queens as well, if it came to that) would never shirk from combat, here and now.
“Oh,” said Hermione, wondering when and where the could have come from-not Scotland, or at least not her Scotland; there was no war, there. Then. “How does the magic work?”
“Thy guess is as good as mine,” he explained. “For it is all controlled by Aslan.”
Hermione made a mental note to ask Alambil who Aslan was. “And you…came here, and defeated the woman who ruled Narnia at the time?”
The king regarded her thoughtfully. “Thou might be more careful whom thou terms ‘woman’, my lady. Jadis was no human.”
“It’s just Hermione,” Hermione said absently, and decided to change the subject. “Who are the other people at the high table?” she asked instead-though she said people, only perhaps a third were actually human; there were fauns and centaurs, dwarfs and the oddly tree-like people Alambil called hamadryads, and all manner of animals.
**
King Edmund was perhaps a year older than Hermione, and she found herself liking him very much; he was direct and chivalrous, and he spoke kindly to her (even if she half-suspected him of thinking her just as wicked as the witch he had displaced). And when his attention was required by one of the other lords at the high table (a mouse that, Hermione noted with some alarm, could speak), she allowed her gaze to wander around the Great Hall. The room was enormous, with a vaulted ceiling and windows that looked over the sea. The floor was covered in colored tiles-red, yellow, orange-and the walls were hung with rich tapestries. More than half of them featured a lion in some form or another. On the dais was a long table, and four thrones sat behind it. The tallest of these had a lion of the seat-back (Hermione had to wonder if this held some sort of symbolic religious meaning, or if the Narnians simply liked lions), and that was where the High King sat.
Since there were four monarchs, Hermione sorted them at first glance, as she would any group of four. It wasn’t difficult; the High King was a Gryffindor through and through, down to the lion on his throne. His brother, who was quieter and seemed just a little darker, was a Slytherin, and the girls followed-the beautiful Queen Susan to Ravenclaw, and Queen Lucy, who had not stopped smiling the entire feast, was obviously the Hufflepuff of the bunch. For some reason, this made Hermione feel calmer, more at home, and she dug into the next course with more appetite. For a moment, she spared a thought for Ron and Harry-how would they react when she was discovered missing? Especially Ron, who had once visited a den of giant spiders to save her, even before they were in love.
She missed Ron. Harry, at least, would be all right-he might find some way to blame Malfoy, but there was no danger if he poked around in Hogwarts, looking for her. It was Ron who would be up all night, worrying. After a moment, Hermione put her fork down and took a sip of her wine instead. She was not going to cry; she was going to find out who this Aslan person was, and she was going to find out how to get home again. And even if King Peter wouldn’t return her wand…well, Hermione had functioned without her wand once before, when the Death Eaters had taken it. She would be fine.
**
In the next few weeks, Hermione began to be acclimated to her new surroundings. Alambil had cheerfully explained about Aslan, the great Lion, but she had added to that no one knew when he would be back (“It’s not like he’s a tame lion, you know, or at least that’s what the Lord Beaver says,” she explained), and so Hermione was next trying the library at Cair Paravel. It was more expansive than she had dared to hope, but it was still not even half the size of her own collection.
King Edmund, when he had heard what she was planning to do, offered to help her find the best books on the subject. He was surprisingly relaxed with her, dropping the “thous” and “thees” and not chiding her the few times she slipped and called him Edmund, instead of Your Majesty. He was even curious about her life before Narnia, her school for witches and wizards and her adventures there. The Narnians called him King Edmund the Just, and Hermione was beginning to see that it fit: Edmund was polite, and curious, and fair, and he seemed to absorb information about other cultures and places like a sponge. “Ravenclaw,” she said absently one afternoon as they sat in the courtyard and read (again) the only book in the entire library on magic.
“Pardon me?” Edmund said, and Hermione laughed awkwardly.
“Ravenclaw,” she repeated. “It just-my school was divided into four Houses, and it just struck me that you were a Ravenclaw. I had thought you a Slytherin, at first.”
King Edmund laughed. “Were you in Ravenclaw?”
“Almost,” Hermione told him. “But I wound up in Gryffindor.”
King Edmund laughed again, and Hermione almost didn’t mind that they still hadn’t found a way for her to get back through the wardrobe; Narnia was more beautiful than home, and Alambil and Edmund were turning out to be fast friends, and surely a few more weeks wouldn’t matter, when she’d already been gone so long?
Winter
“Hermione! Hermione, wake up!” Alambil’s voice was close to laughter, and Hermione woke up and rubbed at her eyes with one hand. Neither of them noticed her other hand went instinctively to the wand that wasn’t there.
“What time is it?”
“Past three,” Alambil said. “Hurry up, get dressed! Put something warm on, we’re going outside.”
“Outside where?” Hermione demanded, but she got up and found her warmest gown and a fur-trimmed cloak with a hood. “What for?”
“It’s the Great Snow Dance,” Alambil said impatiently, dancing from one foot to another. “They do it every year here, at the first big snowfall-the dwarfs and fauns and dryads, I mean. The whole court is going, and Queen Susan told me to wake you up especially, because she knew you wouldn’t know to come out.”
“I didn’t realize it was snowing,” Hermione said, pulling on her dress and lacing up her boots, and then hesitated. “I thought Narnia was-I mean-after the hundred years of winter and everything?”
“It’s not winter that’s a problem,” Alambil said after a moment. “I mean, so long as you know spring will come later, and it always does, now.”
“Oh,” Hermione said as she plaited her hair. “I suppose that makes sense.”
“Are you nearly ready?” Alambil asked. “The queen is waiting!”
“Yes, I’m ready,” Hermione told her, and grabbed her cloak. They dashed down the stairs, giggling like mad (Alambil’s excitement was contagious), and met up with Queen Susan and several of her ladies at one of the side doors.
“Ah, Alambil, you found her,” the queen said, smiling at them both. Queen Susan’s smile was as beautiful as the rest of her, but it did not put Hermione at her ease-she had heard of too many knights coming near to blows over who would carry her favor into battle, or share the next dance with her. “Shall we go?” the queen asked. “The others have gone on ahead already.”
“Did we keep you?” Hermione asked. “I’m sorry; you needn’t have waited.”
Queen Susan smiled. “I thought I might escort thee, as it is thy first snow-dance.” She offered her arm, and Hermione took it hesitantly, and thus the small party walked into the night.
The dance took place a half-mile or so from the castle (“It is a bit of a walk,” Queen Susan said, “but the night is so lovely,” and of course they all agreed with her), and they followed a path that had been plowed by the revelers who had gone on before. The night was clear, and the stars and huge moon shone brightly above them (Hermione had learned to recognize a few of the constellations: there was the Ship, and the Leopard, as well as the Lyre and Fledge, which looked almost like a flying horse if you turned your head and squinted) as their boots crunched the snow. “This happens every year?” Hermione asked.
“Yes, at the first moonlit night when there’s snow on the ground,” one of the ladies-in-waiting explained. “We’ve been looking forward to it all year.”
In another moment, Hermione heard music-wild, sweet music that floated over the snow like wind. There were several flutes, and something under that that sounded like violins, and then drumming under it all. And then they were close enough to see a great bonfire, with people sitting and standing all around it, and then Hermione could see the dance itself: a circle of fauns and dryads dancing a dance so complicated it made her dizzy to remember it, and around them was a ring of dwarfs, who were throwing packed snowballs in between the dancers, in time with the music. It was an eerie dance, somehow; Hermione felt almost as if it were working some sort of magic on her heart, but a different kind of magic than any they’d ever taught at Hogwarts. She drew her cloak more tightly around her with her free hand, and Queen Susan seemed to notice, because she squeezed Hermione’s arm. “It is beautiful, is it not?” she whispered. “The Narnians have been doing it every winter, time out of mind.”
“It is beautiful, Your Majesty,” Hermione whispered back. If it were Edmund, she realized, she would be hearing all about the possible theories on the origin of the dance-but Susan wasn’t interested in that sort of thing. She was the Queen everyone went to when important policy decisions had to be made-not to decide the just and proper course of action (for that was Edmund’s part), nor to proclaim it (for that was the High King’s), but to break the news gently to all involved and sooth ruffled feathers, should there be any. And she was terribly practical; Hermione had heard of plenty of policy decisions that Queen Susan had coolly decided-for though she did not ride to the wars and hated bloodshed, she was calm enough when the enemy was far away.
Hermione was beginning to think she had sorted Susan wrongly, just as she had mis-sorted Edmund: she was clearly a Slytherin, practical and cunning, even if she was gentle about it. But then, Hermione was beginning to think she had sorted them all wrong-for Queen Lucy was called Queen Lucy the Valiant, and the High King was loyal, loyal to Narnia and the Narnians, and to Aslan the great Lion. And there were the lions, too, of course: surely any king who had a lion on his throne and his shield would be in Hufflepuff House, whose mascot was a lion--or was that Gryffindor? For Hermione was beginning to forget. It had started as the little things-the number of Weasleys, or the names of her grandparents, and she would sit up all night and think, in order to remember them. But now it was the bigger things, the more important things, and it unnerved her. The day she woke up and realized she could no longer remember, for instance, the color of Harry’s eyes-it had shaken her to the core.
But she still wasn’t sure if they were brown or blue.
“Hermione?” Alambil said, and Hermione looked up, startled out of her reverie. The Queen had moved on, and Alambil was pressing a steaming mug into her hands. “Here, drink this, you look a bit pale.”
“Thank you,” Hermione said. “The music-it’s a bit…not frightening, exactly, but-”
“Unnerving?” Alambil suggested. “I mean, in the literal sense? That it does things to your nerves?”
Hermione had to smile. “Yes,” she agreed. “Exactly like that.”
They fell silent, then, watching the dancers and the flying snow in the moonlight.
**
Snow had been covering the land for weeks when Alambil came to Hermione’s room in tears. “What is it?” Hermione asked immediately, putting an arm around her and guiding her to the bed. “What’s wrong?”
It took Alambil a few minutes to recover herself, and Hermione found a handkerchief and handed it to her. Alambil wiped her eyes and sniffed loudly. “I’m being sent away,” she said finally.
“Sent away?” Hermione repeated. “What do you mean? Sent away where?”
“Back to Archenland!” Alambil said, and this brought on another wave of crying. “My father,” she explained through her tears, “has called me back home, because he wants me to find a husband!”
Hermione rubbed her back sympathetically. “Can you tell him you don’t want to go?”
“No!” she wailed. “He didn’t want me to come here before, and now I’ve been here for five years already, and he says I have to go home and how will I bear it?” She collapsed, sobbing, into Hermione’s pillows.
“He can’t be such a troll,” Hermione said practically. “Or if he is, why don’t you speak to Queen Susan?”
“We would say ogre,” Alambil said with a sniffle, but Hermione’s words must have cheered her; she sat up. “Trolls haven’t been seen in thousands and thousands of years. Did you have them where you came from?”
Hermione had to stop and think at that. She was almost sure there had been trolls, in that-that other place, Pigspots or wherever it was, but she couldn’t remember. Perhaps it had been an ogre, instead, that Ralph and Henry had rescued her from. “What if you made a compromise with your father?” she suggested. “You could promise to go home for a year or a season, and then if you haven’t found someone you could come back.” She hesitated a moment. “He wouldn’t force you to marry, would he?”
“Of course not!” Alambil cried, shocked. “This isn’t Calormen, Hermione. Women aren’t forced against their will.”
“Right,” Hermione said. “Then what have you to worry about? You might meet someone you love, in Archenland; and if you don’t, then surely he’ll let you come back?”
“But-how can I leave you? And the queen?”
Hermione cast around for something comforting to say. “You’ll still be able to visit, surely,” she said. “And maybe I can come visit you; and you know Queen Susan will go to Archenland, on visits of state. And if you do meet someone in Archenland, that would be worth a year away from us, don’t you think? Falling in love is like magic.”
Alambil regarded her curiously. “Have you been in love, then?”
Hermione frowned, taken aback at the question. “I don’t think so,” she said, for she couldn’t remember ever falling in love, back in that other place. “But I know that’s how it feels,” she added firmly-because she did.
Alambil sniffed again. “I believe you,” she said finally. “And I still don’t want to go-but I will, anyway. And you will come stay, won’t you? In the spring, perhaps?”
“Of course,” Hermione said firmly.
Alambil was quiet for a moment. “Hermione?” she asked after a moment.
“Yes?”
“While I’m gone, Queen Susan will need someone else for a lady-in-waiting. She said I ought not to worry about it, that she would manage-but would you take my place? And then when I come back, you could-could step aside and let me back in?” She was biting her lip. “I’ve spoken to the Queen and she says that would be fine, and you don’t have to and I know I have no right to ask, but…”
Hermione surprised herself by nodded. “I wouldn’t mind,” she said. She liked Queen Susan, who was gracious and gentle and by all accounts kind to her ladies, and she didn’t want Alambil, who was her closest friend here, to feel hurt. “I would be honored,” she added, because the situation seemed to require it.
Alambil broke into an enormous grin and flung her arms around Hermione. “Oh, thank you, thank you!”
**
Hermione moved quarters the day after Alambil left. The ladies-in-waiting lived in rooms adjoining the Queen’s rooms, and she shared with a girl named Helen, a distant cousin of Alambil’s. She was very quiet, and seemed to be carrying on a furtive romance with a river god, so Hermione did not see her very often. Unlike her sister’s, Queen Susan’s ladies were mostly human, and the few naiads and dryads among them were much less wild than Queen Lucy’s, who were known to accompany her on midnight romps and even into battle. Queen Susan seemed to prefer quiet companionship, and often retired to her rooms after a night of feasting and dancing to listen to the quieter, calmer music of a harp. She was wonderful to talk to, affectionate and loving, and beautiful besides; Hermione saw immediately that there were more men after Queen Susan’s hand than she had known about as a mere guest, and it was the job of the ladies-in-waiting to preserve the quiet of her rooms, so that the suitors could not bother her there. “Do you think you will marry?” she dared to ask one night, and the Queen merely smiled.
“I suppose one of us must,” she said finally. “For we cannot rule indefinitely.”
Though the Queen did not mention it, Hermione knew the problem: would a consort come between the four? Would he (or she) be welcomed as a fifth ruler, or would there be a divide? And, if two of them happened to marry and produce children, which would rule after their death? And even if Susan did marry, would she be expected to leave for her husband’s country? “Would it be easier for your brothers?” Hermione asked, hardly believing her daring.
“I do not think Edmund is ready for a wife,” Queen Susan said lightly, with a laugh, and then she called for an end to the music, saying she was tired and wished to go to bed. Helen went with her, and Hermione was left to walk slowly back to her room, thinking it all over and wondering whom, in the end, Queen Susan would choose.
Other than sitting and talking with the Queen, Hermione’s tasks as lady-in-waiting were very slight. Sometimes they might ride with her on a hunt, or sit with her during a tournament; occasionally, the Queen would pick one or two girls to accompany her on a visit to the home of a nearby lord. And every night the Queen shared her bed with one of her ladies; castles were drafty, and queens needed someone there to vouch for their virtue (though who would dare to impugn Queen Susan’s virtue, or who would believe it if he did, was unclear to Hermione). This had not surprised her-indeed, aside from muttering a little bit about the misogynistic nature of it (for surely kings were not subject to the same rule), Hermione had not noticed it much, except to note that it was a great honor and wonder what to do if the Queen turned out to snore.
**
Alambil had been gone a month before Queen Susan smiled at Hermione and said, “Wilt thou join me tonight?”
“Of course,” Hermione said, and Queen Susan led her into the great royal bedchamber. She helped the Queen into her nightshift, and Susan allowed Hermione to brush her hair, which was long and dark and fell nearly to her feet.
“Are you happy here?” the Queen asked her, after several moments of silence.
“Yes,” Hermione answered immediately. “It is beautiful here, Your Majesty, and you have all been so kind.”
“And thou dost not miss-thy old home?”
“No,” Hermione told her slowly, honestly. “I don’t-remember much of it, you see. And what I do remember, I only remember like you might remember a dream.”
“Ah,” said the Queen. “So it is with us. Aslan’s doing, no doubt.”
“No doubt,” Hermione agreed. She still wished to meet this Aslan, to whom even the High King swore fealty. “Do you think you will ever go back there?”
“I should hope not,” the Queen said. “I would not want to leave Narnia.”
Hermione smiled. “Understandable,” she said. What she did not say was, Does it frighten you? For Hermione privately thought the Queen Susan to be the most afraid, of all the monarchs. That was not to say she was a coward, but…Queen Susan did not like the unknown, and she did not like change. Of course she would not want to leave Narnia. Hermione found herself wondering if Queen Susan had wanted to come into Narnia, in the beginning.
The Queen yawned.
“Oh!” Hermione said. “Your Majesty, are you tired?”
“Yes, a bit,” Susan said, and Hermione helped her into bed and tucked her in before blowing out the tapers and slipping in next to her. The bed was warm and soft, and the sheets felt like they were made of silk. She sighed in contentment, and Susan whispered, “Art thou comfortable?”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” Hermione replied. She’d thought the Queen had wanted to sleep, but it seemed instead she wanted to talk.
“What dost thou think of the Calormene prince?”
“I think he’s very brave,” Hermione answered vaguely.
“That is no answer at all,” Susan chided gently. “My royal brother thinks he means to court me. What dost thou think of that?”
The thought that the Queen might have to go far away to the south was not a comforting one. “Isn’t Calmash the second son, not the heir-apparent?” Hermione asked. “Maybe you should wait for him to come courting you. And anyway, would Narnia stand for a half-Calormene heir? You said yourself that they have very different traditions, especially when it comes to government.”
“Thou speakest the truth,” the Queen said, but then she added, “though it may not matter, in the end, what the Narnians wish. We must have a ruler, when the four of us are dead.”
“But you are young,” Hermione reasoned. “The four of you, I mean. And doesn’t King Peter say Aslan will provide?”
“Aye,” said the Queen. “But he provided for the White Witch; and he acts in his own time, and not ours.”
After a moment, Hermione said quietly, “But every king wants you for a bride. Couldn’t you wait to pick one you like?”
“I should like to,” Queen Susan said, wistfully, and then suddenly she rolled over and kissed Hermione, very gently, on the mouth. Hermione was too stunned to move for a moment, and then she slowly, tentatively, kissed back.
**
After that, her nights with Queen Susan always began the same way: the gentle, hesitant kisses, and then her hands moving over Hermione’s body, and both of them trying to stifle their cries. Queen Susan would whisper, afterward, that it-this-didn’t count, not between them, two women. And Hermione believed her, or allowed herself to believe, because the Queen’s virtue and worth, on the international marriage-market, must be preserved, and because, deep down, she felt almost as if there was something (someone?) that meant she shouldn’t allow the kisses or the touches-which was silly, because she had never been in love, and she had been in Narnia half a year already.
She did wonder, sometimes, if Queen Susan was as forward with the other ladies-in-waiting, if that was why Alambil hadn’t wanted to leave. But Hermione knew she could not ask, and no one else volunteered the information. After all, ladies-in-waiting had to be discreet. And she did not mind; Susan was a wonderful lover, gentle and kind and surprisingly skilled, and Hermione was lonely, with Alambil gone and King Edmund off to the Lone Islands on affairs of state. But it was still difficult, not to tell anyone she was having an affair with the Queen, and to know that any moment a foreign might catch Susan’s eye.
Queen Susan was careful, of course, not to show Hermione too much favor, and so they sometimes went days without being alone together. Hermione thought she should care, but in some ways that was easier. And as the days grew longer again and the snow began to melt, she began to spend more time outside-not with the Queen, but walking alone, through the Narnian woods. Sometimes she listened to the merpeople, who tended to surface occasionally to sing madrigals.
“Hermione!” Hermione turned to see Helen dashing towards her, hair flying. “Come quick, there’s to be a tournament the next month, and everyone is to have new gowns made, and the Queen wants your assistance with the dressmakers!”
Hermione had to laugh, and she followed Helen back down the path and into the castle, where Queen Susan stood on a stool, surrounded by dressmakers and mirrors and swaths of fabric. “Ah, Hermione!” she exclaimed, when they entered and curtsied. “Which do you think, the blue or the green?”
Hermione considered the colors carefully. Both looked stunning on Susan, who could probably wear tree bark and get away with it. “The green,” she said finally. “It suits you better.”
Susan laughed, and twirled around in front of the mirror, and the dressmakers switched the blue fabric for green and started arguing about sleeves.
“It won’t change anything, this tournament,” Susan said later, when they were in bed. “Between thee and me, I mean.”
“I know,” Hermione said with a smile. “I trust you.”
Part Two