“Actually, I wanted to ask you a favor,” Ron said. This was only somewhat true. Ginny was the one who had come up with this plan, and he had only agreed to it reluctantly. He had tried to ignore the small voice in the back of his head that said that half of Ginny’s plans were world-beaters, while the other half were sure disasters. He fervently hoped this one fell into the former and not the latter category. “You can travel in time, can’t you?”
She frowned curiously. “I can travel in dimensions, and time is a dimension,” she said. “But I don’t do it often — you can’t change the past, and there’s little point visiting the future; you’ll be there anyway one day.”
“I don’t want you to change the past. I want you to make sure it happens,” said Ron.
Rhysenn frowned at him. “Come again?”
Ron reached into his pocket and withrew a scarlet circle that looked as if it were made of red glass, carved all over with peculiar runes. “Have you ever seen this before?” he asked.
“No,” she said, and Ron felt his knees go weak, realizing that this plan might actually be one of the world- beaters and not one of the disasters after all.
“I need you to take this into the past and give it to someone,” he said.
“Seeing the future has unhinged your mind, Diviner,” she said, with a shake of her head. “What would be the point of that?”
“Because you’ve already done it — look, I know you have, because you’re the one who gave this band to Charlie to give to Harry, and you warned Harry about it later, but you can’t have done that yet or you’d remember it.”
Rhysenn looked at him through grey, unblinking eyes like a snake’s. “Who is Charlie?” she asked.
Ron turned and pointed through the window. “There — my brother. That one.”
Rhysenn looked pleased. “He’s very handsome. I like him. He looks like you, but more solid. And older.”
“You don’t like younger men?”
“When you’re six hundred years old all men are younger, but one does like to narrow the gap.” She took the band from him and examined it.
“These are powerful runes of protection.”
“I know,” said Ron, glancing nervously into the window. If he took much longer with this, Blaise would kill him. “That’s why you have to make sure to get it to Harry.”
“It sounds like a lot of trouble —“
“You have to,” Ron said earnestly. “If you don’t, and Harry never gets the band, then he and Draco won’t win out over Voldemort in Romania, and Lucius will never die, and you’ll never be free.”
She looked at him hesitantly. “Lucius,” she said. “How did he die?”
“I killed him,” Ron said, bluntly. And it was true — he hadn’t plunged the sword in, perhaps, but he’d killed him nonetheless.
Rhysenn’s hands tightened on the band until her knuckles stood out white and sharp, and her breath hissed through her teeth. “You killed him?”
Ron nodded.
“Then perhaps I do owe you, after all,” she said. “Tell me precisely what I am to do.”
Ron told her, repeating Ginny’s words to him exactly, though on some occasions he did forget specifics. “Oh, just say whatever you need to say to Charlie to get him to bring it to the party and give it to Harry,” he said, finally. “Just make sure he doesn’t see your face and can’t describe you later. And when you get to the party, you can say whatever you like to Harry, as well. Just make sure he winds up keeping the damn thing on him and doesn’t toss it in his trunk.”
“I can do that,” said Rhysenn equably, sliding the band onto her wrist.
She leaned forward then, shaking her hair out. “You won’t kiss me goodbye?”
“I can’t,” said Ron, with false regret. “Girlfriend.”
“Then tell me if I’ll ever see you again, Diviner.”
“No,” said Ron, and this time his regret was real. “You won’t ever see me again. But you’ll live a long time — thousands of years — and you’ll forget me, and forget my name. But I hope you will remember —“
Rhysenn drew back. She looked intensely strange and fey in that moment, the moonlight whitening her ageless face, her small teeth sharp and white as a kitten’s where she smiled. “Remember what?”
“That there is some value even in those of us who are ordinary. And that there is more to love than pain. Sometimes it can even make you happy.”
“Happy?” she said. “I’ve never been that.”
“No,” he said. “But you will be.”
At that she did smile, a real smile that looked nothing like a mask. She rose lightly to her feet, balancing on her toes on the edge of the railing, so precariously that Ron reached for her without thinking. She stepped backward, away from his hand, and vanished; Ron raced to the railing and looked over it, into the gardens, but she was gone entirely, leaving on the echo of her silvery laughter behind.
The library was dark. Harry was sitting in the window embrasure, looking down over the Manor grounds strung with lights, his hands clasped around his knees. Stepping into the room, Draco was hit with a powerful sense of deja vu, so strong that for a moment he only stood in the doorway, looking and wondering. Will it always be like this?
He took an unlit lamp from the desk and whispered Lumos to it. It flared into light and Harry glanced towards him, blinking.
