The Snow Wolf, chapter 6: North and North Again
THE SNOW WOLF
Summary:
While on his undercover mission to the werewolves, Remus disappears. Tonks sets out north, across countries and islands and frozen terrain, on a quest to find the man she loves and reclaim him from the clutches of a powerful magical beast. Along the way, Tonks meets many who help - or hinder - her quest, until at last she reaches the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard to face the dreaded Snow Wolf himself.
Note: This chapter is dedicated to C., who - in a stage production of The Snow Queen I worked on - played the role that's equivalent to the character you'll meet in the second half of this chapter. She's an extraordinary actor, and her portrayal inspired the way I've written the character here.
Chapter 6: North and North Again
They ran north and further north, Tonks clinging tightly to the back of Hindrun in her reindeer form, stopping only briefly now and then for them both to rest and for Tonks to eat a bit of the food Hindrun had brought. Hindrun herself grazed on lichens and leaves, and grasses when she could find them, seeming disinclined to change out of her reindeer form once she was in it.
The nights were long now - how much time had passed since Tonks left London? - and the northern lights crackled and snapped overhead, great arcs of green that shifted and slid across the dark sky. It grew colder as they went, too, and Hindrun's hooves pounded through deep drifts of snow. Tonks was glad of the warm cloak and boots she'd been given by the mage and her partner in Shetland.
Tonks lost track of the days. She stopped trying to count them and simply gave herself over to the journey, as Hindrun ran through ever deeper snow and denser forests, along mountainsides and past deep, still glacial lakes. Tonks simply had to trust that she would arrive where she needed to be, and that she would get there before it was too late to help Remus.
One day, Hindrun shifted into human form at last. They had stopped for a rest during the brief period around midday when the winter sun traced a low arc across the southern horizon, before sliding away again into the darkness of the Arctic afternoon.
Tonks was crouched against the trunk of a pine tree, huddled inside her cloak and gnawing on a hard biscuit. Their supplies were down to a last few provisions and Tonks was rationing them carefully.
Hindrun, newly human-shaped and stamping her boot-clad feet experimentally in the snow, glanced over at Tonks and said, "This is about as far as I know how to go."
Her voice sounded rusty after many days of disuse, and far less buoyant than on that first day that now felt so long ago, when she'd boisterously assailed Tonks in the woods. Tonks looked up at her friend and hoped she wasn't driving her to exhaustion.
"I know a place where we can ask directions, though," Hindrun went on. "There's a fishing village near here, at the inland end of a fjord, where they'll be able to tell us which way to go on. Sound all right?"
Tonks nodded her agreement. She was so cold and so tired that anything sounded all right, as long as it brought her closer to her goal.
"Right, then," Hindrun said, stamping her feet again like she was reminding herself how they worked when they weren't hooves. "We're nearly to the edge of the town, so I might as well stay in this form. You mind walking for a bit?"
She extended a hand to Tonks, who let Hindrun pull her to her feet.
The walk did Tonks good. She felt more alert once she was moving on her own power through the brisk afternoon air, and she looked around with interest as they entered the village, which was a tidy little grouping of houses all painted red with white-framed windows.
They approached a low-slung building that looked to be the village hall. As they reached the door, Hindrun muttered in Tonks' ear, almost as an afterthought, "Oh, and they're Muggles, so don't mention the whole reindeer thing, all right?"
Tonks was surprised to find herself laughing. During the long, numbing ride it had felt as if the cold leached away her stronger emotions, and it was good to feel them trickling back as they stepped inside the warm village hall.
It was a simple, rectangular room, set up for a feast. Rows of folding tables filled the room, people bustled about setting out dishes, and the wafting scents of food were positively blissful.
"Hindrun! Velkommen, jenta mi!" A woman with a round, smiling face and steel-grey hair pulled back in a neat bun was hurrying towards them from across the room. She said something more in Norwegian that Tonks didn't catch, then the woman reached them and swept Hindrun into a hug. Hindrun laughed and hugged her back.
"Mona," she said, when she'd let go again. She was again speaking in English for Tonks' benefit. "As you can see I've brought a friend along, and she's travelling further north than I know how to go. Can we impose on you to tell us the way, if we describe where we need to go?"
"Well," Mona said, her eyes sparkling. "If even intrepid Hindrun needs to ask the way, this must be a journey indeed. But first you must have something to eat. You've arrived just in time for our festival dinner and I won't let you go away hungry." She turned to Tonks. "Welcome to you too, my dear. A friend of Hindrun's is a friend of ours." Then she winked. "I hope you like fish."
True to Mona's word, fish proved to be the centrepiece of every part of the meal shared in the village hall that night. There was fish soup and fish balls, fish smoked and poached and pickled and fried. Hindrun pretended for a while that she didn't understand what Tonks was asking about, but finally gave in and explained that they'd arrived in time for the town's yearly fish festival, a long-held tradition because fishing formed such an important part of this coastal town's livelihood.
Tonks and Hindrun were seated opposite each other at one end of a long table that ran nearly the whole length of the hall. A pleasant hum of chatter sounded all around them.
"How do you know the people here?" Tonks asked. She didn't know how far they'd come exactly, but she knew they'd travelled a long way from the south of the country, where Hindrun made her home with her merry band in the ruined abbey.
"I get around," Hindrun said lightly. Then she lowered her voice and murmured, "Reindeer, remember? Migrating is what I do."
Since that seemed to be all Hindrun was willing to say, Tonks returned to spooning up her soup.
But after several moments had passed Hindrun sighed and said, "I'm not from the south originally. I ended up down there because I fell in love. And then the person I fell in love with left, and there I still was. I could have moved north again, and maybe I should have done - don't remind me how absurd it is to spend even part of one's time as a reindeer in a place with so pitifully little snow! But somehow I fell into the habit of collecting others like me, who didn't fit in and needed a home, and I trained them as Animagi so they'd have a way to protect themselves. Before I knew it, I'd made a whole world for myself in the south. I can't leave them now." She gave Tonks a wry look, across the dishes accumulated on the table between them. "They're like family to me. It's not what I set out to make, but I made it all the same."
Tonks thought of the Order, and thought she rather knew what Hindrun meant.
Cautiously she asked, "Am I right in thinking... This person you fell in love with, did I meet her? Was it the woman from Shetland, who brought me here to Norway?"
Hindrun heaved a melodramatic sigh. "She's so detestably loyal to those islands of hers. She went back home, and met that mage, and the rest was history. The awful thing is, they're so perfect for each other, I can't even properly be cross about it. She still feels badly about how it ended, though, so she likes to come over here sometimes and drop off seekers and questers in my woods. She thinks a good puzzle will keep my mind off things." She scooped up a stray scrap of one of the fish balls from her plate and popped it in her mouth. "And the really irritating thing is, she's right!"
Hindrun gave a self-deprecating laugh. Tonks, though, was caught by that realisation, that the woman from Shetland had led her intentionally to Hindrun.
Tonks had felt she was stumbling along, finding clues only by luck. But in fact she'd been helped quite often, hadn't she? The young werewolf had directed her north, which was how she'd found the woman with the garden. And the woman had, in the end, been helpful too, by sending Tonks to sea with the fisher, who in turn had told her to seek the advice of the mage and the wise woman. And they'd been the ones to tell her about the Snow Wolf. The wise woman, too, hadn't taken her to that particular spot in Norway by chance; she'd brought Tonks to where Hindrun would find her. And now Hindrun had brought her here, to this village in the far north of Norway, and they weren't here merely to eat fish soup.
Even as Tonks thought that, the older woman who'd first welcomed them, Mona, slid gracefully into the seat beside her.
"Well?" Mona asked with a smile. "Have we stilled your hunger?"
"Utterly," Tonks said. "Everything was delicious, thank you." She hadn't known just how hungry she was, and how cold, until she'd come into the warmth and finally had enough to eat for the first time in days.
"Now," Mona said, turning her attention to Hindrun across the table. "What is it that I can do for you?"
Hindrun leaned forward, intent, her elbows perched on the edge of the table. "I've heard there's an old, wise woman who lives at the very northern tip of the country, who knows how to harness the winds. And I think she'd be able to tell us how to reach the place we're looking for. Can you tell me how to find her?"
She said this bashfully, much like...well, exactly like someone talking about magic in front of a Muggle, even though she knew she wasn't supposed to. Tonks looked on in surprise.
Mona caught Tonks' look and smiled softly. "Oh, come now," she murmured. "You don't live this close to the world of the Snow Wolf and not learn a little about magic, no matter who you are."
Again, Tonks felt a shudder at the sound of that name. The Snow Wolf.
Mona turned back to Hindrun. "The woman you speak of lives in a lighthouse at the very tip of the land. It's not so very far from here, but it's difficult to find if you don't know the way. Those of us who don't have magic only rarely catch glimpses of her light, when the fog moves in certain ways around the promontory where the lighthouse stands. But I've lived long enough that I've seen the beacon a few times, and I can tell you the way if you're daring enough to travel it." She raised one eyebrow at Hindrun. "Don't tell me more of your secrets than you wish to, of course, dear, but I've always thought you had a few more hidden abilities than you've ever quite admitted to. I don't think you'll have trouble seeing that lighthouse's magical light."
Hindrun coughed, looking embarrassed. "Er, yeah," she said. "Well."
Mona laughed. "It's fine, don't tell me! Keep your secrets. I'd only like to know that you'll be able to keep yourself safe, and your friend here as well."
"I'll keep her safe," Hindrun said. "I've brought her this far, haven't I?"
So Mona sketched a careful map onto the back of a paper that showed the lyrics to a Norwegian folksong, numerous copies of which were on hand for a community sing-along that was to follow the dinner.
Tonks and Hindrun, though, set out again as soon as the meal was over. Mona tried to convince them to stay longer and perhaps spend the night, offering to make space for them in her own home, but Hindrun was impatient to be off, now that they had directions to the location of the powerful witch she sought.
Tonks, too, was feeling edgy and ready to depart. She'd very much appreciated the hearty food and the chance to warm up. But being indoors, in such a normal atmosphere of a village hall and kindly Muggle neighbours chatting - all of it made Remus and the Snow Wolf and his terrible fortress of ice feel very far away.
At the edge of the village Hindrun transformed, Tonks climbed onto her back, and they set off running once again. It was dark, of course, but that hardly mattered. It was dark nearly all the time now, this far north.
They ran all night, or maybe it was more than a night, as time slid away under Hindrun's hooves with the hard-packed snow. Tonks clung tightly to Hindrun's warm reindeer fur, pressing her face into the comforting animal scent of it to protect her lungs from the unforgiving air.
She heard a crackling overhead and looked up to see the northern lights setting the sky on fire, glorious pinks and purples radiating from the horizon, swooping and arching until they filled the whole sky. The beauty of it took Tonks' breath away as she stared up and up into the wheeling colours of the Arctic night.
Then all at once Hindrun skidded to a halt, her hooves clanging out against bare rock instead of snow.
They'd stopped at the top of a rocky rise looking out over the sea. Below them, a narrow causeway led out to a tiny islet of rock. A lighthouse squatted there, solid and square and very white against the darkness of the sea. Its beacon flared in an uneven rhythm - one two… one two… - and the light appeared faint, as though it were shining from far away, even though the lighthouse lay so close beneath them.
Tonks slid down from Hindrun's back, in case her friend wished to transform back into human form, and rested one hand lightly against the reindeer's flank as she stared down at the lighthouse below. A strange mist swirled around it, following no natural pattern Tonks had ever seen. At times it would part completely, then refold itself around the building almost like a set of double doors being slammed closed.
Beside Tonks, Hindrun shivered, rippled, and became human again.
"Yup," Hindrun said, as casual as if the two of them had been chatting back and forth all day. "I reckon that's where she lives, this witch who knows all about the far north and the winds."
As Tonks watched, the mist again parted then shut around the lighthouse below. Staring at the eerie picture it made, Tonks mused, "I wonder how she feels about visitors."
Hindrun turned to her and grinned. "Want to find out?"
There was a precarious path down the side of the outcropping that allowed them, barely, to pick their way down the rock to sea level, then cross the narrow land bridge that connected the lighthouse to the shore. Standing in front of the little wooden door of the lighthouse, Tonks looked at Hindrun and Hindrun looked at Tonks.
"Knock?" Tonks wondered aloud. It felt anticlimactic, after the long journey they'd undertaken to get here.
"Suppose so," Hindrun shrugged. "Unless you know some special secret signal for summoning magic women who live in lighthouses."
"Nope," Tonks said, and she reached out and rapped at the door.
They waited, staring at the unmoving door, for a long time. The strange fog they'd observed from above now swirled about their feet, moving not like any normal fog would do, but like a living thing.
It began to snow, too, big flakes that drifted down all around them until the whole world seemed full of it. Snow landed in Tonks' eyelashes and eyebrows, and she kept having to blink it away so she could see.
They waited in front of the lighthouse door so long that Tonks started to wonder if they were going to have to turn around and leave and find a different way onwards, after they'd come so far to find this place. She felt her shoulders drawing up around her ears and her hands clenching in frustration. It couldn't end here. It couldn't.
The door banged open.
"What do you want?" demanded the woman standing inside it. She was tiny, barely as tall as Tonks' shoulder, with wiry arms and a slight hunch to her back, yet she radiated enormous power. Wild grey hair stood out from her head in all directions and her dark eyes snapped at them, keenly intelligent and missing nothing. Tonks was reminded of Dumbledore, if Dumbledore were tiny and fierce instead of tall and almost aggravatingly amiable.
"My name is Tonks, and this is my friend Hindrun," Tonks said, in her best being-very-reasonable Auror voice. "I'm trying to find the way to the Snow Wolf's fortress, and we've heard you might be able to tell us how to get there."
"Huh," the woman said, sounding extremely unimpressed. She scratched absently at her elbow as she scowled at both Tonks and Hindrun. "You seek the Snow Wolf? You? What are you going to do, wave your wand at him?"
Before Tonks could say anything, Hindrun answered instead, with a beseeching note in her voice that Tonks hadn't heard before. "My friend isn't as powerless as you're thinking. She's got a pure heart and a strong will. And she's questing for the sake of love, and that still matters with these ancient old foes, I know it does."
The old woman burst out in raucous laughter. "'Ancient old foes'," she repeated mockingly. "What do you know of ancient old foes, little fawn?"
Tonks glanced over at Hindrun, surprised that this witch could guess not only that Hindrun was an Animagus, but even what her form was. Tonks wondered if she was discomfited by being so easily exposed. But Hindrun was busy scowling back at the woman.
"I know enough," Hindrun glowered. "I know the Snow Wolf isn't human, so he doesn't play by human rules. I know we'll never find him if we just walk around looking for him with our eyes and nothing else to guide us. I also know that you have the power to help us, if you decide you can be bothered."
The witch stared back at her for a long moment. Then she made a noise of utter disgust that sounded something like ekhhh. "Fine," she said. "You might as well come inside." She stamped away into the building, then waved an arm back at Tonks and Hindrun, calling, "Well? Aren't you coming? You're letting the snow in."
Tonks stepped into the lighthouse, and Hindrun followed and shut the door behind them. Inside was a single large room, perfectly square except for one corner where a wooden staircase spiralled upwards and disappeared into the room's ceiling, leading presumably to some upper chamber from which the lighthouse's beacon sent out its strange and intermittent signal through the icy mists.
"Go on, warm yourselves by the fire," the woman grunted.
Tonks and Hindrun crossed the room to the merry fire that crackled behind a grate in the middle of one wall. Tonks gratefully pulled off the thick mittens the mage and the wise woman had given her, and stretched her fingers out to thaw in the fire's warmth.
"Now then," the lighthouse keeper went on, coming to stand between Tonks and Hindrun and rocking impatiently from her heels to the balls of her feet. The top of her head barely came up to Tonks' shoulder. "What's this nonsense about seeking the Snow Wolf, eh? What's put that idea in your pretty wee heads?"
For all her gruffness, there was also a hint of a lilt to the woman's voice, and it didn't strike Tonks as Norwegian. This woman didn't talk like Hindrun or Dúfa or Mona or anyone else Tonks had met since she first Apparated into that forest of spruces and pines. And yet there was something vaguely familiar about the woman's speech, but for the life of her Tonks couldn't place it.
The woman was looking at her with impatience, so Tonks launched into her story again, telling how Remus had disappeared and how she'd gone out into the world to look for him. And she explained what she'd learned along the way about the Snow Wolf, this ancient being who lived in a land of ice but sometimes came south to kidnap werewolves.
"Everything I've learned about the Snow Wolf fits with what I know about Remus' disappearance," Tonks concluded. "Someone Hindrun knows even saw the Snow Wolf carrying Remus north. I know that's where he is, and I know I've got to go there and find him and bring him back."
"Ha!" The woman burst out with another harsh laugh, then poked one sharp finger into Tonks' shoulder and fixed her with a stare. "Let me give you some advice, from one who knows a great deal more about the Snow Wolf than you ever will."
"Yes?" Tonks answered unwillingly. She had a pretty good idea what the woman's advice was going to be.
The lighthouse keeper dropped her hand to her side and rocked back onto her heels. "Go on home, girl. Only fools seek the Snow Wolf, and fools don't survive the encounter." She gave a wry little cough. "I'm not entirely cold of heart, whatever you may think, and I'm sorry your friend has been lost. But it helps nothing and no one if you sacrifice yourself as well. Go back home. Enough of this, now."
She smacked her hands together, as though brushing the whole matter away, then stalked away from them, to a table along the opposite wall that was piled high with scrolls and books. She began shuffling aimlessly among the papers, for all the world as though she'd already dismissed her visitors' presence from her mind.
Tonks and Hindrun exchanged a look. But it was Hindrun who darted across the room to the woman's side. They made quite a contrast, seen there together: tall, athletic Hindrun with her pale, fine hair, and the tiny, wiry woman with a shock of grey like a cloud around her head.
"We know the Snow Wolf is powerful, but there must be some way to defeat him," Hindrun pleaded. "You have power, too, you can harness the winds - can't you give my friend extra strength so she can fight the Snow Wolf?"
"Strength!" The woman yowled with laughter. "Strength, to fight the Snow Wolf? Are you utterly ignorant, girl? You don't fight the Snow Wolf with strength."
The woman's gaze snapped to Tonks, on the other side of the room.
"Listen now," she hissed. Her voice was barely louder than the crackling of the fire, but Tonks heard every word. "This friend you seek, he wants to stay where he is. He thinks it a very fine place! You can be sure that by now he'll have looked into the Mirror of Reason and, well! There's no coming back after that."
Tonks felt a chill at those words, just as she'd done the first time she heard of the Snow Wolf. Her voice caught in her throat, but she asked the question: "What is the Mirror of Reason?"
"Mirror of Unreason, more like," the woman growled. "It shows anyone who looks into it the worst possible version of themselves. Of all the Snow Wolf's magicks, it is perhaps the most dangerous of all, for it shows the truth, or at least a version of it. Once your friend has seen and believed the worst of himself, he won't believe any longer in the person he was before. He has no wish to return to you now."
Tonks felt Hindrun's eyes fixed on her in sympathy, as well as the lighthouse keeper's harsh stare, but all she could see was her mind's own picture of Remus, somewhere in an icy wasteland, gazing into a mirror that made him forget himself.
"I'm not turning back," Tonks said fiercely. "You can say whatever you want, you can tell me it's pointless, but if there's even the tiniest chance I can find him and bring him back, I'm going to do it. And if you don't help me, I'll find another way there."
The woman gave a weary sigh, still fixing Tonks with her stare from across the room. "Will you? Hundreds of cold miles across the open waters of the Barents Sea?"
"Yes," Tonks said.
"Listen," the woman snapped. "I didn't come up here to the edge of the world for the fun of it, you know. I am here in this place to keep balance. I keep the Snow Wolf from extending his reign further south than the lands that have always belonged to him. And I keep fools who come here from the lands beyond his domain, like you, from stumbling too far north, into things beyond their understanding. I tell you again, foolish child, turn back."
Tonks stared at the woman, several things falling together into sudden sense. The oddly familiar lilt in the woman's voice. Her admission that she'd come here from somewhere else. Even her use of the word lost to describe Remus.
"You're her sister," Tonks breathed. "Aren't you? I mean: you have a sister, who keeps a magical garden, but you left her behind to come up here and be this…gatekeeper of the north. That's you, isn't it?"
It was only for a moment, but Tonks saw a chink appear in the woman's gruffness. A glimpse of the little girl she must once have been, before she decided to leave everything she knew and take up this role as a protector at the border of the Snow Wolf's domain. It was a glimpse that showed through for only a moment, but it was enough to let Tonks know that she was right.
She pressed on, before the woman could speak and refute her. "Okay. So you had a sister once and you cared about her. I don't know if you still do, but there must once have been a time when you did, so maybe you can understand when I say that's how I feel about Remus. Not the same kind of love as for a sister, but the same amount." Tonks found her feet drawing her across the room towards the woman, caught up in the intensity of what she needed to convey. "I care about Remus. I'm not going to turn him over to fate and walk away. You say he doesn't want to be rescued from the Snow Wolf, and maybe that's true, I don't know. But if there's even the tiniest chance that the tiniest part of him still wants to come home - I'm going to find him and give him that chance."
She'd reached where the woman stood by her paper-strewn table. Tonks stood in front of her, silent and pleading to be understood. Hindrun watched them both and seemed not even to breathe.
The woman stared back at Tonks for a very long time. It was so silent in the room that over the crackling of the fire Tonks could hear the wind outside soughing around the lighthouse walls. The tiny, fierce woman with the piercing eyes stared up into Tonks' face like she was taking the measure of her heart.
At last she said, "Ekhhh, fine! I will put the wind at your back, to carry you across the sea." She snapped one hand impatiently through there air. "Be glad of it, for you wouldn't make it there at all if I didn't. Little deer!" She spun around to Hindrun.
"Yes?" Hindrun asked, startled.
The woman poked her finger into Hindrun's chest. "Change into your animal form and carry her there. Don't tarry along the way. There are Muggles on Svalbard, with their towns and their research stations. Ignore them. Go directly to the northernmost of the islands, where the Snow Wolf's fortress lies. Leave your friend there, at the southern edge of that island, and turn back. Only one can approach the Snow Wolf's fortress, and it must be the one whose heart draws her there." She cocked her head at Hindrun, sizing her up with her sharp eyes. "You're not entirely wrong, foolish little animal though you are: purity of heart and strength of will, these things do matter. Your friend here is questing for love - more fool her! But if the motives of her heart are as strong as she claims, then, who knows? She might yet rescue her lost love. But she must venture there alone if she's to try."
Hindrun looked past the lighthouse keeper, her eyes meeting Tonks'. "Are you sure you want to do this?"
"Absolutely sure."
Hindrun nodded once, and Tonks saw a little of that jauntiness in her again, the same devil-may-care attitude that had been so striking about her the day they'd first met. If Tonks had to cross hundreds of miles of frigid sea, she couldn't think of a better person to do it with.
Tonks turned to the lighthouse keeper. "I don't know if it matters to you, after all this time. I understand if it doesn't, if that's not the life you want for yourself anymore. But I met your sister on my way here, and she misses you. I think it would mean a lot to her to see you, if you wanted to visit her sometime. Even just once."
The woman cocked her head again, fixing Tonks with the sceptical glare that seemed to be her speciality. But, too, Tonks saw again that tiny flash of the little girl she'd once been - a child who must have loved her sister, and had had her own reasons for leaving, but maybe still lived somewhere inside the woman who stood here now.
"Okay," Tonks said. "Anyway. Thank you for helping us, even though you didn't want to."
"Go," the woman said, but her gruff voice was surprisingly gentle. "Go now. I'll send the wind to lift you up as soon as you step outside."
(Continue to CHAPTER SEVEN, the final chapter)
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Summary:
While on his undercover mission to the werewolves, Remus disappears. Tonks sets out north, across countries and islands and frozen terrain, on a quest to find the man she loves and reclaim him from the clutches of a powerful magical beast. Along the way, Tonks meets many who help - or hinder - her quest, until at last she reaches the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard to face the dreaded Snow Wolf himself.
Note: This chapter is dedicated to C., who - in a stage production of The Snow Queen I worked on - played the role that's equivalent to the character you'll meet in the second half of this chapter. She's an extraordinary actor, and her portrayal inspired the way I've written the character here.
Chapter 6: North and North Again
They ran north and further north, Tonks clinging tightly to the back of Hindrun in her reindeer form, stopping only briefly now and then for them both to rest and for Tonks to eat a bit of the food Hindrun had brought. Hindrun herself grazed on lichens and leaves, and grasses when she could find them, seeming disinclined to change out of her reindeer form once she was in it.
The nights were long now - how much time had passed since Tonks left London? - and the northern lights crackled and snapped overhead, great arcs of green that shifted and slid across the dark sky. It grew colder as they went, too, and Hindrun's hooves pounded through deep drifts of snow. Tonks was glad of the warm cloak and boots she'd been given by the mage and her partner in Shetland.
Tonks lost track of the days. She stopped trying to count them and simply gave herself over to the journey, as Hindrun ran through ever deeper snow and denser forests, along mountainsides and past deep, still glacial lakes. Tonks simply had to trust that she would arrive where she needed to be, and that she would get there before it was too late to help Remus.
One day, Hindrun shifted into human form at last. They had stopped for a rest during the brief period around midday when the winter sun traced a low arc across the southern horizon, before sliding away again into the darkness of the Arctic afternoon.
Tonks was crouched against the trunk of a pine tree, huddled inside her cloak and gnawing on a hard biscuit. Their supplies were down to a last few provisions and Tonks was rationing them carefully.
Hindrun, newly human-shaped and stamping her boot-clad feet experimentally in the snow, glanced over at Tonks and said, "This is about as far as I know how to go."
Her voice sounded rusty after many days of disuse, and far less buoyant than on that first day that now felt so long ago, when she'd boisterously assailed Tonks in the woods. Tonks looked up at her friend and hoped she wasn't driving her to exhaustion.
"I know a place where we can ask directions, though," Hindrun went on. "There's a fishing village near here, at the inland end of a fjord, where they'll be able to tell us which way to go on. Sound all right?"
Tonks nodded her agreement. She was so cold and so tired that anything sounded all right, as long as it brought her closer to her goal.
"Right, then," Hindrun said, stamping her feet again like she was reminding herself how they worked when they weren't hooves. "We're nearly to the edge of the town, so I might as well stay in this form. You mind walking for a bit?"
She extended a hand to Tonks, who let Hindrun pull her to her feet.
The walk did Tonks good. She felt more alert once she was moving on her own power through the brisk afternoon air, and she looked around with interest as they entered the village, which was a tidy little grouping of houses all painted red with white-framed windows.
They approached a low-slung building that looked to be the village hall. As they reached the door, Hindrun muttered in Tonks' ear, almost as an afterthought, "Oh, and they're Muggles, so don't mention the whole reindeer thing, all right?"
Tonks was surprised to find herself laughing. During the long, numbing ride it had felt as if the cold leached away her stronger emotions, and it was good to feel them trickling back as they stepped inside the warm village hall.
It was a simple, rectangular room, set up for a feast. Rows of folding tables filled the room, people bustled about setting out dishes, and the wafting scents of food were positively blissful.
"Hindrun! Velkommen, jenta mi!" A woman with a round, smiling face and steel-grey hair pulled back in a neat bun was hurrying towards them from across the room. She said something more in Norwegian that Tonks didn't catch, then the woman reached them and swept Hindrun into a hug. Hindrun laughed and hugged her back.
"Mona," she said, when she'd let go again. She was again speaking in English for Tonks' benefit. "As you can see I've brought a friend along, and she's travelling further north than I know how to go. Can we impose on you to tell us the way, if we describe where we need to go?"
"Well," Mona said, her eyes sparkling. "If even intrepid Hindrun needs to ask the way, this must be a journey indeed. But first you must have something to eat. You've arrived just in time for our festival dinner and I won't let you go away hungry." She turned to Tonks. "Welcome to you too, my dear. A friend of Hindrun's is a friend of ours." Then she winked. "I hope you like fish."
True to Mona's word, fish proved to be the centrepiece of every part of the meal shared in the village hall that night. There was fish soup and fish balls, fish smoked and poached and pickled and fried. Hindrun pretended for a while that she didn't understand what Tonks was asking about, but finally gave in and explained that they'd arrived in time for the town's yearly fish festival, a long-held tradition because fishing formed such an important part of this coastal town's livelihood.
Tonks and Hindrun were seated opposite each other at one end of a long table that ran nearly the whole length of the hall. A pleasant hum of chatter sounded all around them.
"How do you know the people here?" Tonks asked. She didn't know how far they'd come exactly, but she knew they'd travelled a long way from the south of the country, where Hindrun made her home with her merry band in the ruined abbey.
"I get around," Hindrun said lightly. Then she lowered her voice and murmured, "Reindeer, remember? Migrating is what I do."
Since that seemed to be all Hindrun was willing to say, Tonks returned to spooning up her soup.
But after several moments had passed Hindrun sighed and said, "I'm not from the south originally. I ended up down there because I fell in love. And then the person I fell in love with left, and there I still was. I could have moved north again, and maybe I should have done - don't remind me how absurd it is to spend even part of one's time as a reindeer in a place with so pitifully little snow! But somehow I fell into the habit of collecting others like me, who didn't fit in and needed a home, and I trained them as Animagi so they'd have a way to protect themselves. Before I knew it, I'd made a whole world for myself in the south. I can't leave them now." She gave Tonks a wry look, across the dishes accumulated on the table between them. "They're like family to me. It's not what I set out to make, but I made it all the same."
Tonks thought of the Order, and thought she rather knew what Hindrun meant.
Cautiously she asked, "Am I right in thinking... This person you fell in love with, did I meet her? Was it the woman from Shetland, who brought me here to Norway?"
Hindrun heaved a melodramatic sigh. "She's so detestably loyal to those islands of hers. She went back home, and met that mage, and the rest was history. The awful thing is, they're so perfect for each other, I can't even properly be cross about it. She still feels badly about how it ended, though, so she likes to come over here sometimes and drop off seekers and questers in my woods. She thinks a good puzzle will keep my mind off things." She scooped up a stray scrap of one of the fish balls from her plate and popped it in her mouth. "And the really irritating thing is, she's right!"
Hindrun gave a self-deprecating laugh. Tonks, though, was caught by that realisation, that the woman from Shetland had led her intentionally to Hindrun.
Tonks had felt she was stumbling along, finding clues only by luck. But in fact she'd been helped quite often, hadn't she? The young werewolf had directed her north, which was how she'd found the woman with the garden. And the woman had, in the end, been helpful too, by sending Tonks to sea with the fisher, who in turn had told her to seek the advice of the mage and the wise woman. And they'd been the ones to tell her about the Snow Wolf. The wise woman, too, hadn't taken her to that particular spot in Norway by chance; she'd brought Tonks to where Hindrun would find her. And now Hindrun had brought her here, to this village in the far north of Norway, and they weren't here merely to eat fish soup.
Even as Tonks thought that, the older woman who'd first welcomed them, Mona, slid gracefully into the seat beside her.
"Well?" Mona asked with a smile. "Have we stilled your hunger?"
"Utterly," Tonks said. "Everything was delicious, thank you." She hadn't known just how hungry she was, and how cold, until she'd come into the warmth and finally had enough to eat for the first time in days.
"Now," Mona said, turning her attention to Hindrun across the table. "What is it that I can do for you?"
Hindrun leaned forward, intent, her elbows perched on the edge of the table. "I've heard there's an old, wise woman who lives at the very northern tip of the country, who knows how to harness the winds. And I think she'd be able to tell us how to reach the place we're looking for. Can you tell me how to find her?"
She said this bashfully, much like...well, exactly like someone talking about magic in front of a Muggle, even though she knew she wasn't supposed to. Tonks looked on in surprise.
Mona caught Tonks' look and smiled softly. "Oh, come now," she murmured. "You don't live this close to the world of the Snow Wolf and not learn a little about magic, no matter who you are."
Again, Tonks felt a shudder at the sound of that name. The Snow Wolf.
Mona turned back to Hindrun. "The woman you speak of lives in a lighthouse at the very tip of the land. It's not so very far from here, but it's difficult to find if you don't know the way. Those of us who don't have magic only rarely catch glimpses of her light, when the fog moves in certain ways around the promontory where the lighthouse stands. But I've lived long enough that I've seen the beacon a few times, and I can tell you the way if you're daring enough to travel it." She raised one eyebrow at Hindrun. "Don't tell me more of your secrets than you wish to, of course, dear, but I've always thought you had a few more hidden abilities than you've ever quite admitted to. I don't think you'll have trouble seeing that lighthouse's magical light."
Hindrun coughed, looking embarrassed. "Er, yeah," she said. "Well."
Mona laughed. "It's fine, don't tell me! Keep your secrets. I'd only like to know that you'll be able to keep yourself safe, and your friend here as well."
"I'll keep her safe," Hindrun said. "I've brought her this far, haven't I?"
So Mona sketched a careful map onto the back of a paper that showed the lyrics to a Norwegian folksong, numerous copies of which were on hand for a community sing-along that was to follow the dinner.
Tonks and Hindrun, though, set out again as soon as the meal was over. Mona tried to convince them to stay longer and perhaps spend the night, offering to make space for them in her own home, but Hindrun was impatient to be off, now that they had directions to the location of the powerful witch she sought.
Tonks, too, was feeling edgy and ready to depart. She'd very much appreciated the hearty food and the chance to warm up. But being indoors, in such a normal atmosphere of a village hall and kindly Muggle neighbours chatting - all of it made Remus and the Snow Wolf and his terrible fortress of ice feel very far away.
At the edge of the village Hindrun transformed, Tonks climbed onto her back, and they set off running once again. It was dark, of course, but that hardly mattered. It was dark nearly all the time now, this far north.
They ran all night, or maybe it was more than a night, as time slid away under Hindrun's hooves with the hard-packed snow. Tonks clung tightly to Hindrun's warm reindeer fur, pressing her face into the comforting animal scent of it to protect her lungs from the unforgiving air.
She heard a crackling overhead and looked up to see the northern lights setting the sky on fire, glorious pinks and purples radiating from the horizon, swooping and arching until they filled the whole sky. The beauty of it took Tonks' breath away as she stared up and up into the wheeling colours of the Arctic night.
Then all at once Hindrun skidded to a halt, her hooves clanging out against bare rock instead of snow.
They'd stopped at the top of a rocky rise looking out over the sea. Below them, a narrow causeway led out to a tiny islet of rock. A lighthouse squatted there, solid and square and very white against the darkness of the sea. Its beacon flared in an uneven rhythm - one two… one two… - and the light appeared faint, as though it were shining from far away, even though the lighthouse lay so close beneath them.
Tonks slid down from Hindrun's back, in case her friend wished to transform back into human form, and rested one hand lightly against the reindeer's flank as she stared down at the lighthouse below. A strange mist swirled around it, following no natural pattern Tonks had ever seen. At times it would part completely, then refold itself around the building almost like a set of double doors being slammed closed.
Beside Tonks, Hindrun shivered, rippled, and became human again.
"Yup," Hindrun said, as casual as if the two of them had been chatting back and forth all day. "I reckon that's where she lives, this witch who knows all about the far north and the winds."
As Tonks watched, the mist again parted then shut around the lighthouse below. Staring at the eerie picture it made, Tonks mused, "I wonder how she feels about visitors."
Hindrun turned to her and grinned. "Want to find out?"
There was a precarious path down the side of the outcropping that allowed them, barely, to pick their way down the rock to sea level, then cross the narrow land bridge that connected the lighthouse to the shore. Standing in front of the little wooden door of the lighthouse, Tonks looked at Hindrun and Hindrun looked at Tonks.
"Knock?" Tonks wondered aloud. It felt anticlimactic, after the long journey they'd undertaken to get here.
"Suppose so," Hindrun shrugged. "Unless you know some special secret signal for summoning magic women who live in lighthouses."
"Nope," Tonks said, and she reached out and rapped at the door.
They waited, staring at the unmoving door, for a long time. The strange fog they'd observed from above now swirled about their feet, moving not like any normal fog would do, but like a living thing.
It began to snow, too, big flakes that drifted down all around them until the whole world seemed full of it. Snow landed in Tonks' eyelashes and eyebrows, and she kept having to blink it away so she could see.
They waited in front of the lighthouse door so long that Tonks started to wonder if they were going to have to turn around and leave and find a different way onwards, after they'd come so far to find this place. She felt her shoulders drawing up around her ears and her hands clenching in frustration. It couldn't end here. It couldn't.
The door banged open.
"What do you want?" demanded the woman standing inside it. She was tiny, barely as tall as Tonks' shoulder, with wiry arms and a slight hunch to her back, yet she radiated enormous power. Wild grey hair stood out from her head in all directions and her dark eyes snapped at them, keenly intelligent and missing nothing. Tonks was reminded of Dumbledore, if Dumbledore were tiny and fierce instead of tall and almost aggravatingly amiable.
"My name is Tonks, and this is my friend Hindrun," Tonks said, in her best being-very-reasonable Auror voice. "I'm trying to find the way to the Snow Wolf's fortress, and we've heard you might be able to tell us how to get there."
"Huh," the woman said, sounding extremely unimpressed. She scratched absently at her elbow as she scowled at both Tonks and Hindrun. "You seek the Snow Wolf? You? What are you going to do, wave your wand at him?"
Before Tonks could say anything, Hindrun answered instead, with a beseeching note in her voice that Tonks hadn't heard before. "My friend isn't as powerless as you're thinking. She's got a pure heart and a strong will. And she's questing for the sake of love, and that still matters with these ancient old foes, I know it does."
The old woman burst out in raucous laughter. "'Ancient old foes'," she repeated mockingly. "What do you know of ancient old foes, little fawn?"
Tonks glanced over at Hindrun, surprised that this witch could guess not only that Hindrun was an Animagus, but even what her form was. Tonks wondered if she was discomfited by being so easily exposed. But Hindrun was busy scowling back at the woman.
"I know enough," Hindrun glowered. "I know the Snow Wolf isn't human, so he doesn't play by human rules. I know we'll never find him if we just walk around looking for him with our eyes and nothing else to guide us. I also know that you have the power to help us, if you decide you can be bothered."
The witch stared back at her for a long moment. Then she made a noise of utter disgust that sounded something like ekhhh. "Fine," she said. "You might as well come inside." She stamped away into the building, then waved an arm back at Tonks and Hindrun, calling, "Well? Aren't you coming? You're letting the snow in."
Tonks stepped into the lighthouse, and Hindrun followed and shut the door behind them. Inside was a single large room, perfectly square except for one corner where a wooden staircase spiralled upwards and disappeared into the room's ceiling, leading presumably to some upper chamber from which the lighthouse's beacon sent out its strange and intermittent signal through the icy mists.
"Go on, warm yourselves by the fire," the woman grunted.
Tonks and Hindrun crossed the room to the merry fire that crackled behind a grate in the middle of one wall. Tonks gratefully pulled off the thick mittens the mage and the wise woman had given her, and stretched her fingers out to thaw in the fire's warmth.
"Now then," the lighthouse keeper went on, coming to stand between Tonks and Hindrun and rocking impatiently from her heels to the balls of her feet. The top of her head barely came up to Tonks' shoulder. "What's this nonsense about seeking the Snow Wolf, eh? What's put that idea in your pretty wee heads?"
For all her gruffness, there was also a hint of a lilt to the woman's voice, and it didn't strike Tonks as Norwegian. This woman didn't talk like Hindrun or Dúfa or Mona or anyone else Tonks had met since she first Apparated into that forest of spruces and pines. And yet there was something vaguely familiar about the woman's speech, but for the life of her Tonks couldn't place it.
The woman was looking at her with impatience, so Tonks launched into her story again, telling how Remus had disappeared and how she'd gone out into the world to look for him. And she explained what she'd learned along the way about the Snow Wolf, this ancient being who lived in a land of ice but sometimes came south to kidnap werewolves.
"Everything I've learned about the Snow Wolf fits with what I know about Remus' disappearance," Tonks concluded. "Someone Hindrun knows even saw the Snow Wolf carrying Remus north. I know that's where he is, and I know I've got to go there and find him and bring him back."
"Ha!" The woman burst out with another harsh laugh, then poked one sharp finger into Tonks' shoulder and fixed her with a stare. "Let me give you some advice, from one who knows a great deal more about the Snow Wolf than you ever will."
"Yes?" Tonks answered unwillingly. She had a pretty good idea what the woman's advice was going to be.
The lighthouse keeper dropped her hand to her side and rocked back onto her heels. "Go on home, girl. Only fools seek the Snow Wolf, and fools don't survive the encounter." She gave a wry little cough. "I'm not entirely cold of heart, whatever you may think, and I'm sorry your friend has been lost. But it helps nothing and no one if you sacrifice yourself as well. Go back home. Enough of this, now."
She smacked her hands together, as though brushing the whole matter away, then stalked away from them, to a table along the opposite wall that was piled high with scrolls and books. She began shuffling aimlessly among the papers, for all the world as though she'd already dismissed her visitors' presence from her mind.
Tonks and Hindrun exchanged a look. But it was Hindrun who darted across the room to the woman's side. They made quite a contrast, seen there together: tall, athletic Hindrun with her pale, fine hair, and the tiny, wiry woman with a shock of grey like a cloud around her head.
"We know the Snow Wolf is powerful, but there must be some way to defeat him," Hindrun pleaded. "You have power, too, you can harness the winds - can't you give my friend extra strength so she can fight the Snow Wolf?"
"Strength!" The woman yowled with laughter. "Strength, to fight the Snow Wolf? Are you utterly ignorant, girl? You don't fight the Snow Wolf with strength."
The woman's gaze snapped to Tonks, on the other side of the room.
"Listen now," she hissed. Her voice was barely louder than the crackling of the fire, but Tonks heard every word. "This friend you seek, he wants to stay where he is. He thinks it a very fine place! You can be sure that by now he'll have looked into the Mirror of Reason and, well! There's no coming back after that."
Tonks felt a chill at those words, just as she'd done the first time she heard of the Snow Wolf. Her voice caught in her throat, but she asked the question: "What is the Mirror of Reason?"
"Mirror of Unreason, more like," the woman growled. "It shows anyone who looks into it the worst possible version of themselves. Of all the Snow Wolf's magicks, it is perhaps the most dangerous of all, for it shows the truth, or at least a version of it. Once your friend has seen and believed the worst of himself, he won't believe any longer in the person he was before. He has no wish to return to you now."
Tonks felt Hindrun's eyes fixed on her in sympathy, as well as the lighthouse keeper's harsh stare, but all she could see was her mind's own picture of Remus, somewhere in an icy wasteland, gazing into a mirror that made him forget himself.
"I'm not turning back," Tonks said fiercely. "You can say whatever you want, you can tell me it's pointless, but if there's even the tiniest chance I can find him and bring him back, I'm going to do it. And if you don't help me, I'll find another way there."
The woman gave a weary sigh, still fixing Tonks with her stare from across the room. "Will you? Hundreds of cold miles across the open waters of the Barents Sea?"
"Yes," Tonks said.
"Listen," the woman snapped. "I didn't come up here to the edge of the world for the fun of it, you know. I am here in this place to keep balance. I keep the Snow Wolf from extending his reign further south than the lands that have always belonged to him. And I keep fools who come here from the lands beyond his domain, like you, from stumbling too far north, into things beyond their understanding. I tell you again, foolish child, turn back."
Tonks stared at the woman, several things falling together into sudden sense. The oddly familiar lilt in the woman's voice. Her admission that she'd come here from somewhere else. Even her use of the word lost to describe Remus.
"You're her sister," Tonks breathed. "Aren't you? I mean: you have a sister, who keeps a magical garden, but you left her behind to come up here and be this…gatekeeper of the north. That's you, isn't it?"
It was only for a moment, but Tonks saw a chink appear in the woman's gruffness. A glimpse of the little girl she must once have been, before she decided to leave everything she knew and take up this role as a protector at the border of the Snow Wolf's domain. It was a glimpse that showed through for only a moment, but it was enough to let Tonks know that she was right.
She pressed on, before the woman could speak and refute her. "Okay. So you had a sister once and you cared about her. I don't know if you still do, but there must once have been a time when you did, so maybe you can understand when I say that's how I feel about Remus. Not the same kind of love as for a sister, but the same amount." Tonks found her feet drawing her across the room towards the woman, caught up in the intensity of what she needed to convey. "I care about Remus. I'm not going to turn him over to fate and walk away. You say he doesn't want to be rescued from the Snow Wolf, and maybe that's true, I don't know. But if there's even the tiniest chance that the tiniest part of him still wants to come home - I'm going to find him and give him that chance."
She'd reached where the woman stood by her paper-strewn table. Tonks stood in front of her, silent and pleading to be understood. Hindrun watched them both and seemed not even to breathe.
The woman stared back at Tonks for a very long time. It was so silent in the room that over the crackling of the fire Tonks could hear the wind outside soughing around the lighthouse walls. The tiny, fierce woman with the piercing eyes stared up into Tonks' face like she was taking the measure of her heart.
At last she said, "Ekhhh, fine! I will put the wind at your back, to carry you across the sea." She snapped one hand impatiently through there air. "Be glad of it, for you wouldn't make it there at all if I didn't. Little deer!" She spun around to Hindrun.
"Yes?" Hindrun asked, startled.
The woman poked her finger into Hindrun's chest. "Change into your animal form and carry her there. Don't tarry along the way. There are Muggles on Svalbard, with their towns and their research stations. Ignore them. Go directly to the northernmost of the islands, where the Snow Wolf's fortress lies. Leave your friend there, at the southern edge of that island, and turn back. Only one can approach the Snow Wolf's fortress, and it must be the one whose heart draws her there." She cocked her head at Hindrun, sizing her up with her sharp eyes. "You're not entirely wrong, foolish little animal though you are: purity of heart and strength of will, these things do matter. Your friend here is questing for love - more fool her! But if the motives of her heart are as strong as she claims, then, who knows? She might yet rescue her lost love. But she must venture there alone if she's to try."
Hindrun looked past the lighthouse keeper, her eyes meeting Tonks'. "Are you sure you want to do this?"
"Absolutely sure."
Hindrun nodded once, and Tonks saw a little of that jauntiness in her again, the same devil-may-care attitude that had been so striking about her the day they'd first met. If Tonks had to cross hundreds of miles of frigid sea, she couldn't think of a better person to do it with.
Tonks turned to the lighthouse keeper. "I don't know if it matters to you, after all this time. I understand if it doesn't, if that's not the life you want for yourself anymore. But I met your sister on my way here, and she misses you. I think it would mean a lot to her to see you, if you wanted to visit her sometime. Even just once."
The woman cocked her head again, fixing Tonks with the sceptical glare that seemed to be her speciality. But, too, Tonks saw again that tiny flash of the little girl she'd once been - a child who must have loved her sister, and had had her own reasons for leaving, but maybe still lived somewhere inside the woman who stood here now.
"Okay," Tonks said. "Anyway. Thank you for helping us, even though you didn't want to."
"Go," the woman said, but her gruff voice was surprisingly gentle. "Go now. I'll send the wind to lift you up as soon as you step outside."
(Continue to CHAPTER SEVEN, the final chapter)
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