Jewel of the Nile

Chapter Forty-One

When it came to illicit adventures, Harry had slowed down a lot, in the last year.

Part of it was due to Hermione being gone, quite a big part – it wasn’t the same, going prowling without her, and besides, without her around to nudge them along with their homework, he and Ron had had to be more proactive about it themselves. Part of it was due to Ginny, who wasn’t much taller than she’d been when he’d first met her – not much bigger, either; it was as if all of her available molecules had just up and shifted one night, into subtle-but-unmistakably-adult topography – but who possessed a startling candour when it came to beds, and the sharing thereof.

Harry, not for the first time, said a silent prayer to the Gods of Invisibility Cloaks, and offered up a minor incantation or two as well to the benevolence of whatever deity had seen fit to give him a girlfriend who was a prefect, and who therefore had a room of her own. Roaming around the school at all hours of the night just didn’t seem as appealing as it once had, when he could be spending the same time cuddled up to curvy little Ginny in her big four-poster bed … he didn’t know whether it was despite being Molly Weasley’s only daughter, or because of it, but somewhere along the line Ginny had developed a very dirty mind indeed.

He wasn’t complaining.

On the other hand, sometimes it was nice to fall back into the old patterns. Comforting, somehow. And so when he’d gotten the note from Malfoy in Charms – Can I have a word with the three of you tonight? Restricted Section, eleven o’ clock – he’d caught Draco’s eye, just for a moment, and nodded, feeling a flare of the old excitement tingle in his fingertips.

They’d wedged themselves under the Invisibility Cloak with a bit of difficulty – it was a good thing Ginny was so small, otherwise they’d never have been able to pull it off, and as it was he and Ron had to hunch down to hobbit-level to keep their feet from showing – and had trundled off to the library. As it turned out, they needn’t have bothered with the Cloak … the castle was peacefully, serenely quiet. Harry, remembering the vigilant days after Sirius’ escape, and then, following Voldemort’s return, when you couldn’t have gotten from Gryffindor Tower even to the Great Hall without dodging Filch, two ghosts, and at least one professor, smiled to himself.

Looked like he wasn’t the only one who had slowed down.

But as Draco pointed out to them a few minutes later, there was still Malfoy. Lucius, that was.

"No hope for this term, of course," he said. They were lounging around Elysium’s hearth in conjured chairs, crunching idly at some chocolate biscuits Gabrielle had procured earlier from the kitchens. "But I imagine my scholarship’s still standing, even if it’s been overridden at the moment. It’d be nice to get back to Beauxbatons after the Christmas holidays."

"One would think Madame Maxime would let you back now," Ginny said sympathetically. "I mean, it’s not as if he’s attacked the school, is it? Has anyone even heard where he’s gone to, in the last few months?"

Harry shook his head.

"The last I heard of Malfoy," he said, nodding at Draco, "was back in September when he first escaped and Dumbledore sent Snape and McGonagall to fetch you and Hermione home. Then the two of you"—here, he indicated Gabrielle with a sideways jerk of his head—"stayed, and she was back in Cairo before her bags were unpacked."

"Anybody heard from her since?" Draco asked casually. Ron frowned.

"Yeah," he said. "She’s good about writing, better than I am anyway. I’ve got a stack of postcards up in my room. Not that they say much."

"I got one of those, too. Two platitudes and a signature, right?"

Harry’s eyebrows lifted. Looked as if Draco was still a bit bitter. He cut his eyes over to Gabrielle, who was nibbling a biscuit with elaborate nonchalance. Wonder which way the wind’s blowing there?

Aloud, he said: "She took a couple of bodyguards back with her, right? It was the only way Dumbledore would let her go."

"Right," Ginny said, and snickered. "Trelawney, remember? Dumbledore taught Divination himself for two whole weeks. And Sal."

"Yeah," Ron said slowly. "But Trelawney’s been back for weeks."

"Good thing Sal’s still there, then, isn’t it?"

"He’s not," said Gabrielle, and they all turned, open-mouthed, to look at her. She gave them a one-shouldered shrug. "I saw him the other day," she said. "Playing horseshoes with the Bloody Baron, down in that dead-end corridor by the Potions classroom. He was winning – the Baron didn’t look too happy."

Harry and Ron exchanged glances. "Are you sure it was Sal?" Harry asked, and Gabrielle nodded.

"Fairly sure," she said. "I don’t know him personally, of course, but I heard the Baron call him by name. He’s not too tall, he wears plain robes, he’s got a short beard, he’s sort of – oh, I don’t know, twinkly—"

"That’s him," Draco said. "I wonder how long he’s been back?"

"Awhile." That was Gabrielle again; when they all looked at her, she rolled her eyes. "Well, I didn’t know he was supposed to be in Cairo, or I would have mentioned it earlier. He showed up in the middle of Potions a few weeks ago, with a witch I’d never seen before. Not a ghost. We were in the middle of making Swelling Solutions, and Professor Snape cancelled class – told us to leave our cauldrons where they were and get out. He practically ran out of the classroom with them, and headed off down that same dead-end corridor. Looked even paler than usual."

Harry and Draco exchanged dark looks. Ron looked puzzled.

"What does Snape have to do with anything?" he asked, and Ginny raised one eyebrow.

"Oh, didn’t you know? He and Hermione were lovers, before she left for Egypt." She looked momentarily thoughtful. "Probably they got it on again when she came back for the weekend in September, because she certainly never showed up in my room."

"Not that there would have been room for her," Harry murmured sotto voce. Ron had gone quite pale.

"Wait a minute," he said. "You mean to tell me that Hermione slept with Snape?"

Draco, who had been looking rather pained, managed a malicious smile. "Apparently I wasn’t the last to know, after all," he said, half-to-himself, then scowled again. "But why, then, would both of them be back at Hogwarts without Hermione?"

"Maybe they’ve caught him and they haven’t told you yet," Ginny suggested, and frowned at Ron, who was still blankly mouthing, Snape???, as if to say, Oh, get over it.

Gabrielle shook her head.

"No, I heard Lupin and Black say that he’s still on the loose, and that he’s got some rare book with him that Dumbledore wants. Not only that, but he’s managed to hire some kind of wizard assassin, and he’s sent him at the very least after Hermione, and possibly after Draco as well."

Silence. Harry’s head was spinning.

"Something’s happened," he offered finally. "And whatever it is, they’ve hushed it up, Dumbledore and whoever else is in on it."

"Well, who’s that, then?" Ginny held up one finger. "Dumbledore’s in on everything, so of course he knows. Trelawney, probably. Sal, definitely. Whoever that strange woman is who was with him, back in Gabrielle’s Potions class. And –"

"Snape," Harry and Draco said at the same time, in the same malevolently triumphant tone. Ginny blinked.

"Yeah," she said. Ron scowled.

"Him most of all," he said bitterly. "He’s probably up to his greasy hairline in this."

They considered this for a moment. The room was utterly quiet, except for the hiss of coals in the hearth and the small, steady, methodical tick of Gabrielle tapping the end of a quill against the arm of her chair. Draco was the first to speak.

"I know where his rooms are," he said, and fixed Harry with a measuring look. "Best if there’s just two of us. You with me, Potter?"

Harry nodded.

**

Late evening. Alexandria.

Itmana and Khaled were gone, packed back off to Amman with the Parental Highnesses. "Will I see you back in Cairo?" Hermione had murmured into Itmana’s ear, as they hugged goodbye, and Itmana had shrugged.

"Don’t know. Hope for the best."

Why they hadn’t stayed the night, Hermione didn’t know – there was certainly enough room in the villa. On the other hand, she couldn’t say she was sorry to finally, finally have Farouk to herself … her curiosity was about to reach flash point.

"So," she said. They were in the library – Farouk in that same Moroccan-leather chair she’d first seen him in, Hermione on a velvet chaise with her slippered feet tucked under her. "What do you know about the Priestess?"

Farouk closed his eyes briefly, as if wondering where to begin. "Quite a bit," he said finally. "It’s just a matter of finding the proper sequence, that’s all. It’s quite a complicated story."

"The beginning?" Hermione suggested. That got a rueful smile out of him.

"Ah, but if we knew where that was." He was silent for a long moment, his eyes fixed on the fire. "I suppose it’s worth saying, to begin with, that this family has had more than its share of wizards, though they’ve rarely been the actual heirs to the throne. There’s been at least one in every generation, up to mine, and historically we’ve kept our secrets; the Sufi branch of Islam has been most helpful in providing a plausible cover in that respect, in recent years." He shifted in his chair. "My father’s brother was my magical mentor – I came to know him quite well – and before him, his mother, though she died young and I never met her. The wizarding Husseins have impeccable records; I own archives of diaries, dating back to well before the birth of Christ. The oldest of them is written on papyrus; its author was, by her own account, a lady-in-waiting to Cleopatra herself."

"Wow," Hermione said, secretly vowing to at some point coax her way into that archive. "And you’ve owned the Priestess all that time?"

Farouk nodded.

"What do you know about the legend?" he asked, and obligingly Hermione dug up from her memory the first stanza of the poem Snape had quoted her. She hadn’t gotten even as far as Rose the goddess, river-streaming, cold, when Farouk held up his hand to stop her.

"Ah, yes," he said, sounding amused. "The old epic. We wizards stole that from the Muggles, you know – it’s colorful, of course, but it barely scratches the surface." He ran one hand thoughtfully through his hair. "The biggest misconception," he said, "is that the goddess chose only one Priestess. In reality, there’s documentation for at least seventy-five, all of them Husseins."

Hermione gaped at him.

"Really," she said. "Is it true, then? The blood, the glory, the vengeance-wreaking?"

"It’s true." Farouk studied her narrowly. "I’ll let you look at the diaries," he said. "No doubt you’ll find them familiar. The pattern’s unmistakable: bad dreams that only the Priestess can still, bloody visions, strange near-misses with certain death. Tales of the pendant travelling through walls, through locked doors." At Hermione’s start, he smiled faintly. "At one point, back in the 1500s, the lucky girl in question travelled fifty miles out to sea and tossed the Priestess into the Mediterrenean. When she arrived home, it was underneath her pillow."

Hermione shivered. "What happened to them?" she asked. "If that’s how it starts, how does it end?"

"Always the same way," Farouk said, and paused a moment, as if he didn’t want to go on. "Murder. Or madness. Usually both."

"I don’t understand."

"For such an ancient artifact, the Priestess tends to keep up on her current politics," Farouk said, as if Hermione hadn’t spoken. "She seems to emerge at times of political unrest, to target social conservatives and religious extremists in positions of power." He ran his tongue over his upper lip. "My great-aunt, in her journals, relates her year-long struggle with the Priestess – nightmares, dizzy spells, the usual. Finally she spent a night vomiting blood after she tried to break the statue apart with a garden trowel; she wrote only one more journal entry after that, and it was only one sentence long: I give up."

Hermione caught her breath. "What happened?" she asked, and Farouk studied her for a long moment before answering.

"Three weeks later, she invited a group of prominent conservative Egyptian clerics to dine at the palace, and served them—and everyone else at the table, including herself and her husband—poisoned fruit juice. They were dead before the soup course."

Hermione tasted bile in her throat and determinedly swallowed. The warm lump of jade around her neck seemed suddenly heavier.

"That’s not in any of the history books," she said, fighting to keep her lips from trembling, to keep her voice steady. Farouk only smiled and shook his head ruefully.

"If everything was," he said, "we’d be dead before we finished reading."

Hermione wrapped her arms around her knees and took a steadying breath. "Okay," she said. "So you’re saying that the Priestess makes people go crazy and start killing other people. Right?"

"In a nutshell, yes."

"Why, then …" Her voice was shaking now, she couldn’t help it; she was too angry to stop – "Why did you give it to my grandmother?"

Farouk closed his eyes. His grimace made him look very tired and very, very old.

"A thousand reasons," he said wearily. "But here are the main ones. First, she wasn’t a witch. Not only that, but she wasn’t even Egyptian, but Italian, and about to marry a Brit who was obviously as Muggle as Muggle could be." He took a deep breath. "Secondly, she was accustomed enough to getting gifts of jewelry that she wouldn’t think too much of it, and though the Priestess was a beautiful piece, I knew that the minute she got it back to England, it’d go into a vault somewhere, probably never to be worn again. It’s not like pearl earrings, after all."

He gestured toward the bookshelves. "We’d had it in our vaults, of course, for millenia – but what good did that do us, when the Hussein women were right there with it? My sister had just had twins, a boy and a girl – neither of them magical, as it turned out, but I didn’t know that at the time, and its very existence seemed too big a risk to take, when I could take advantage of the fact that it was deactivated at the moment to get rid of it. I rather fancied the thought of it moldering away in a British safe-deposit box."

He shook his head. "And then, I was in love with Martina and I knew I couldn’t keep her, and I wanted to make some grand gesture or other. Stupid of me – but then, I was quite a young man."

Hermione opened her mouth, then shut it again. "But …" she began.

"Yes?"

"But if it only chooses Hussein women," she said slowly, "why did it pick me?"

"Well," Farouk said, "that does seem to be the question of the moment, doesn’t it?"

Hermione stared at him. "You and Gram … you didn’t …?"

"We did," he said, not looking at her. "Just once. Though to be fair, we don’t know for sure that the Priestess wouldn’t have chosen you anyway. It’s possible that any likely young witch would do, regardless of bloodlines – up until I gave it to Martina, it had never left the family, after all." He sighed. "That was my other blunder. Who was to know that her granddaughter would end up in Egypt?"

"You might be my grandfather," Hermione said, trying the words on for size, and tried not to think – well, it would certainly explain the witch thing, wouldn’t it? Farouk grimaced.

"I might." He paused, pointedly. "And I might not."

She stared down at the back of her hand, at the pale British skin of her forearm that showed every flush, every fingerprint. Granger skin, Gram had said once, cheerfully. Just like your father – you’ll burn to a crisp before you’ll tan a bit. Let’s get another layer of sunblock on you, shall we, sweetheart?

Gram herself was dark-haired, with those same gorgeous olive undertones in her skin that Giulia had. Hermione looked sharply at Farouk – aged, grey-haired, his weatherbeaten skin the same shade as Itmana’s – and sighed.

The truth was never simple, was it?

"Well," she said, and worried her lower lip between her teeth. "In any case …"

"Yes?"

"Perhaps I’d better take a look at those journals."

When in doubt, research. The Granger Credo.

She swallowed the sick feeling in her chest and followed Farouk toward the bookshelves.

**