Entry tags:

chapter, g, ginny, harry, ron/hermione

Encore - It's Him or Me, this Hallowe'en
Title: Riddle
Pairing/Character: Ron Weasley/Hermione Granger, Harry Potter, Ginny Weasley with mentions of Bill Weasley, and from Armenia, Javan Margarian, and a lady named Narine
Rating: G
Wordcount: 3,148
Summary: Part V: In the search for the remaining horcruxes Ron, Harry, and Hermione have been at Grimmauld Place hoping to find information about the locket. During their research Hermione accidentally happens upon something quite different - something which takes Hermione and Ron to St Mungo's on a visit to Gilderoy Lockart, until he in turn leads them back into to a party in late 18th century Vienna where they are led to the seventh and final horcrux
Beta(s): To millieweasley and manynames huge thanks
Author's Notes: In response to millieweasley's Harry Potter History Challenge **here**. I'm taking some of our HP friends back to Vienna, 1786. It's terribly brave of my volunteer history advisors to allow me to take this on, I'm not too sure whether they'll encourage me back another time however! Link to Part I **here**, Part II **here**, Part III **here** and Part IV **here**.




Part V of V: Encore - It's Him or Me, this Hallowe'en

Still on the Grimmauld Place kitchen table when they got back, next to a note explaining that Harry was going to be away in Hogsmeade overnight, was the piece of parchment in Hermione’s handwriting that listed, against numbers one to seven, the horcruxes that had been collected, or that were known to them so far. At the bottom of that list by the side of the number seven was a huge question mark, which could hopefully soon be removed, if everything in the next day or two went as she expected.

There’d been no search for them then. That was a relief. It was also nice to return back and spend some time alone, just the two of them before they started up with normal life again. The front room and two big mugs of good old twentieth-century British tea had been a hugely attractive proposition and that’s exactly where Ron and Hermione had been when Harry returned shortly afterwards, dangling the chain of the locket from his hand.

“I got it. That’s another one to cross off the list.”

Hermione reached up and took the heavy silver locket from Harry, turning it over. “You know,” she started. “I’ve wondered lately if this was supposed to have been kept inside the jewellery box. Do you remember that?”

The particular day that the sitting room at Grimmauld Place had been decontaminated, they’d come across a selection of curious enchanted objects. When opened, some form of enchantment on the jewellery box had made them feel increasingly drowsy. It was only when Ginny had snapped the lid shut they’d realised how powerful it had been.

“And I’m wondering now if that’s the sort of enchantment we’ll have to contend with at Armavir..”

“You found something out?” Harry asked, watching Hermione turn the locket over again, her fingers tracing the intricately designed S on one side.

“Yeah, and you’ll never guess how, mate,” Ron turned to Harry, “Or who from.”

“Not Lockhart?” Harry’s voice, which had contained a slightly excited air before, was now definitely showing a tinge of disappointment.

“Yes. And I have no reason whatsoever to doubt what he says,” Hermione said with conviction as she passed the locket to Ron, “A little more research and I think we should all be on our way to Armenia. Do you think you can be ready tomorrow afternoon? We can travel while it’s light and spend a night in Yerevan before travelling onto the village. It’s called Vanand and is located in western Armenia right on the border with Turkey. We’ll need to take warm outer cloaks, some money to use with the villagers in the hope of being able to get into the monument … oh, and it might be an idea if you two look up a few curse-breaking charms while I’m finishing off the translation of the riddle. Maybe you could meet with Bill?”
“Hermione,” Harry’s voice now sounded perturbed, “You seem very sure. I think you’d better start and tell me from the beginning. I’d like to hear this whole story.”

***

They’d actually been delayed by an extra day before leaving for Yerevan. Obtaining Armenian money, drams, hadn’t been quite as simple a task for Gringotts as obtaining pounds, francs or marks. One of Bill’s colleagues had been able to make an introduction with a wizarding hotelier in Yerevan, however, which was more than useful as a base for their trip in a day or two. On Bill’s advice, once there, they were going to spend a little time researching the area properly, comparing their hand-drawn map on parchment to official records of the area and be entirely sure that they were fully prepared for the trip to the village.

Bill had passed them the drams with a bit of a reluctant look, his voice sounding a little wistful, “I’d have come with you. I’d have really loved to, but it’s not fair on Fleur at the moment. But you know, if you need me, just send word. I can come at the tap of a wand for business reasons – if there were to be gold in the monument, for instance.”

“He doesn’t like being stuck behind a desk all the time, does he?” Harry had said to the others as they were gathering everything together and preparing for a last look at the spells that Bill had suggested to be useful.

Ron had shaken his head, putting the parchment into a pile to take with them. They needed all the information they had on hand at their hotel, just in case. “Nah, he’s a doer, is Bill. He’s never liked being stuck indoors. Don’t know if I’d have wanted him coming along, though. He’s got tons of experience, but we have our own way of doing things now. It wouldn’t do to mess that up after all this time.”

“Okay. I’m entirely sure I know what we’re looking for now,” Hermione had announced appearing in the kitchen, “And if someone would like to make a cup of tea, then I’ll explain it all.

***

“This village was an education, Gin,” Ron was saying as Harry and Hermione joined them in the front room and passed mugs of tea. “Primitive houses like you’ve never seen before, where the people had literally nothing. Not even running water or heat and it gets really cold there in the winter.”

“That’s right,” Harry agreed. Life in the village had made life in the cupboard in Privet Drive seem almost luxurious. “The people in the village were really suspicious of us to start with, which was understandable. We’d met this friend of Bill’s at the hotel in Yerevan, Javan Margarian, and he’d said the best thing to do was to take gifts to start with, rather than just the money we’d got with us.”

“Cake?” Ron offered the others, sitting down on the sofa beside Hermione and moving closer to her. “We took water. Loads of it, more than you could ever imagine being able to carry.”

“Is that all - water?” Ginny asked, reaching out towards Ron for a slice of one of her mum’s best sponges left at Grimmauld Place for the travellers’ return.

“Yeah. It seemed strange to us first too, but this bloke Javan said water was worth more than gold in the village, so if we took as much as we could carry then it would help show that we were sincere and not some sort of threat to the people there.”

“Go on,” Ginny said, catching crumbs in one hand as she ate from the other.

“Like Ron said,” Hermione took over, holding her own piece of cake in the air in front of her as she spoke, “We had to work hard to get the trust of the villagers, so we took water the first day, using a nice little charm to make it lighter and easier to carry to take as much as was possible, and then the second day we took some firewood. It was all very different from our trip to Vienna, wasn’t it, Ron?”

Neither Harry nor Ginny could help but catch the looks that passed between their friends and matched it by raising an eyebrow to each other before Harry took over the explanation.

Ron nodded, remembering how easily they’d been accepted there, only their height causing any real interest , “Yeah, we had to work really hard to persuade them that we were there with good intentions, and not trying to make life harder in any way.”

“They don’t speak English in Armenia though, do they?” Ginny asked.

Hermione shook her head and they others looked at her for a moment as she finished a mouthful of cake before going on. “As well as their native language, a lot of them speak Russian. Javan knew of a girl, well a woman really, in the village who he told us knew a little bit of broken English.”

“Her English wasn’t that bad,” Harry added, “She, Narine, was brought up in the capital – Yerevan – and when she married her husband moved to the village. She knew enough to be able to earn money translating in the town nearby. She told us that she went there most months to collect medication for her father-in-law as there are no facilities any closer. If she was lucky, she could do a little bit of translation while she was there – sometimes enough to pay for the treatment.”

“So she translated for you?” Ginny had turned a little on the floor and shuffled so she was resting against the chair where Harry was sitting.

“After we talked to her a lot on the first day, she seemed to trust us and she persuaded the others in the village that they should too, that we were going to try and help them.”

“I think what really did it,” Ron grinned breaking off Hermione as she spoke, “was taking my personal stash of Honeydukes goodies. The kids loved them. I don’t think I’ve ever seen children looking so happy to have a few sweets.”

The other three all laughed at Ron before Ginny spoke, “I bet your face was a picture at giving up your collection of Fizzing Whizzbees though!”

“And my chocolate frogs … seriously though, I didn’t mind,” Ron answered to be greeted with a playful poke from his sister.

“She eventually told us,” Harry said, turning to look at Ron and Hermione, “What it was that made her trust us. Do you remember how she looked into our eyes, like hers were boring into our souls?”

“Yeah, it was a bit like Dumbledore when he knew you’d done something wrong and was giving you the chance to own up. You got the feeling that he didn’t quite believe you, but he wasn’t going to question you if you didn’t want to say.”

“I always felt guiltier that he didn’t make us own up than I would have if he had,” Harry said, catching Ron’s eye in a grin. They’d had some narrow escapes at Hogwarts, and Harry was sure afterwards that Dumbledore had known more about the events then even Ron and Harry had done themselves, despite them being the ones that were there.

“We wouldn’t know, would we Hermione?” Ginny grinned towards her friend.

“Eventually, tears began to pour from Narine’s eyes. She’d looked from one of us to the other, staring hard, and then she began to talk. She told us how her husband’s uncle had been seized by the man that came before, that she’d looked into our eyes to make sure she could trust us as everyone that met him said his were dreadful.”

“Terrible,” Ron added, looking across at Hermione.

“Voldemort, probably,” Harry agreed before letting Hermione continue to repeat the story to Ginny.

“Narine told us the story. She’d heard from her husband, her mother-in-law, and then her father-in-law how Ohanes had been taken. We never see him again, we were not alone. Other families lost loved ones. He cared not. We found many years later bones and clothes. The flesh had rotted or been eaten by animals. We buried them but we do not know if they were the bones of our sons or brothers particularly, we had to trust to God that they were. ”

They sat in silence for a few moments before Ginny spoke again, her own voice now choked with emotion. “That’s awful, he’d been there and taken some of them just like he’d taken some of us.”

They watched as Harry passed Ginny the parchment they’d found in the bureau, the ones they’d used to base their trip upon.

“It was awful,” Ron agreed, “But by the third trip to the village, the villagers seemed to believe we were serious and could do something to help. Narine told us when we arrived in the morning that we could see the monument.”

“It was a sign of how seriously they took the monument,” Harry was explaining to Ginny, now sat at his feet in front of the Grimmauld Place fire, “That they used one of their most precious commodities – firewood – to make the fence to protect their families.”

“Was it cursed?” Ginny asked, the piece of parchment on her knee as she followed the information upon it while listening to the story.

Hermione slipped from the sofa onto the floor beside Ginny and pointed to some scribbled words, “We think so. We can’t be entirely sure as we weren’t able to test it for ourselves, but from what the villagers said, yes. It happened that one of the curse-breaking charms Bill told Ron and Harry was very similar to this,” she tapped her finger lightly on the words. “So we, well Harry, made that the first charm he used.”

“Yeah,” Ron recalled, “There had been a chilled wind around the monument until that moment. It was one of those that could get deep into your bones, even on the hottest day and that you’d never be able to get rid of again.”

“And it went?” Ginny asked.

“It did.” Hermione looked up over her shoulder towards Ron and smiled warmly, “The villagers moved a step closer at that point. They’d been in a circle around the outside, watching, holding their children back. Much like third years are on a first visit to Hogsmeade and the Shrieking Shack, but more so,” she smiled again.

“So how did you get into it, Harry?”

“There were a series of symbols etched into the stone. Some of them had nearly disappeared, weathered over the years, probably.”

“We tried to work out if they had meanings,” Hermione took over, “But that was useless. They didn’t match with Runes or anything else that we know. But Ron noticed a pattern.” She stopped for him to take over.

“Much like the castle, Gin,” Ron started. “If you followed the pattern the way that the castle would move in a game of chess, then they made a sort of a map.”

“How did that help?”

“That was the thing, the map led us to one particular side of the monument and close to the top there was a piece that was a different texture than the rest.”

“It got difficult then,” Harry took over telling the story, his fingers playing in the ends of Ginny’s hair, “It was nearly dark by the time we got the right combination of spells, but when we did a small door opened.”

“And you went in?” she asked, a hand reaching up to lightly touch Harry’s before she left him to stroke her hair.

“No. There was no need. The box was there, to take out. I got it and passed it down to Ron and Hermione.”

Ron reached for the box then and passed it to Ginny. “It’s okay to open it. We’ve had Bill check it out since. There are no curses now.”

The three of them watched as Ginny’s finger tips smoothed over the simple wooden box, before moving to lift its lid away, “A tooth? The seventh horcrux is a tooth?”

“Nous sommes beaucoup de soeurs ; c'est pénible pour nous unir de même que séparer. Nous habitons en un palais, pourtant nous l'appellerions plutôt une prison, pour nous sont fermé à clef assurément et doit travailler pour la nourriture d'hommes. La chose la plus remarquable est que les portes sont ouvertes pour nous tout à fait souvent, le jour et la nuit, et nous ne sortons pas toujours, sauf quand l'un retire par la force. It was the riddle, you see, the riddle that led us to the last piece of Voldemort, Tom Riddle himself,” Hermione lent across and gently squeezed Ginny’s arm.

“I don’t understand.”

“We are many sisters; it is painful for us to unite as well as to separate. We live in a palace, yet we would rather call it a prison, for we are securely locked up and must work for the sustenance of men. The most remarkable thing is that the doors are opened for us quite often, both day and night, and we still do not come out, except when one pulls out by force. It was what Mozart said at the party after the rehearsal. He told it in three languages, Italian, French and German. The French was more difficult than I knew, and some of the words were no longer in use today, but the librarian at St Pancras was very helpful. She has a degree in Ancient Languages, mainly unspoken ones now, like Latin and Ancient Greek, but she knew how to find the words and where to look if she didn’t know them herself.”

“So what comes next?” Ginny asked, a sinking feeling in her stomach as she did so. There was only one thing that could come next.

“October the thirty-first,” Harry announced to them all. “Hallowe’en. The anniversary of the night my parents died. He’s going that night, or I am. It will end then, once and for all.”

For a while, a long while, the four of them sat in the room, only lit by the fire flickering in the grate, each alone with their thoughts. There was little point in arguing, Harry knew he had to do this thing. He had to meet Voldemort and one or the other of them had to win. They could offer to go with him, and doubtless in the few weeks between now and then, as they helped Harry prepare they’d offer over and over, and doubtless each time he’d decline their help. It was something that he knew he had to do alone.

They’d all be there for him afterwards, of course. Ginny, Ron, and Hermione would all be there, each loving him in the special way that they did. But for now, Ron and Hermione knew that Harry and Ginny needed some time together, even if to sit in silence and to think of the future, of what they hoped would be.

“I could do with an early night,” Ron suggested, his voice gruff as he tried not to display the emotion he was feeling inside.

Hermione stood. “Me too.”

They walked from the living room with just a nod to their friends, making their way towards the stairs and up to the rooms each had claimed as their own.

“Ron?”

“Yes?”

“I … uhm ... transfigured my bed.”

“What into?” Ron smiled towards Hermione who had a glint appearing in her eye.

“A bigger one. A silent bigger one. Would you like to see?”

“Was Godric a Gryffindor?” Ron asked as he opened Hermione’s door and slipped through after her, a glint appearing in his own eye as he wound his arms around her waist, “Did Mozart write bloody good operas? Did Gilderoy Lockhart finally come up trumps?” There was no need to say anything else.



I actually did it!