A Girl's Best Friend, Part V - Epistretes
"The epistretes is a stone of a brilliant red, born from the sea. It protect virgins from natural dangers (earthquakes, lighntning, etc.) It also has the power to appease lovers' quarrels."
Miyako Shuemaki. "Precious stones, their power, their usage."
Japan. IXXth century.
The jewellery shop was as dark as ever when Draco walked in that morning, chased inside by the unyielding rain. His eyes adapted rapidly to the penumbra, the outside skies being barely paler than the store. A storm was brewing.
"You look awful."
Ginny's voice rang clear, neither compassionate nor cutting.
"Yes, the rain does wonders for my hair," Draco retorted sarcastically.
"I wasn't talking about your hair," she said, coming forward.
She did not care to give him any further explanation, and so failed to elaborate. He noted that she was wearing gray pants and a black button-up, an outfit that would have seemed nearly masculine had her curves not surreptitiously shaped the cloth. Part of him considered the indecency of having such thoughts only a week after his break-up with Astoria, but there seemed to be no remedy to his wandering ideas.
"Well, Mr. Malfoy. What can I do for you?"
"It's the ring."
He pulled out the jewel-box from his robes and handed it back to her without another word.
"Are you not satisfied with it?" she asked, genuine surprise rearranging her features. She peered at him, curious, and took in the dark circles under his eyes, the wry pull of his mouth, the economy and precision of his usually flowing movements. "No, that isn't it, is it?"
He shook his head.
"I didn't propose. I realized I no longer wanted to - that I had never really wanted to."
Ginny looked at him sadly, her eyes filled with compassion. How well she knew that feeling; how hard it had been living with herself after she had expressed it to Harry! She did not understand the motion that pushed her closer to Draco and that made her place a comforting hand on his shoulder.
"Better to make difficult choices, no matter how difficult they may be, than to find yourself inside in a prison of your own making."
He looked at her oddly, appreciating the unadorned placation of her reaction.
"As for the ring," she said, "you needn't have bothered."
She opened the jewel-box. There was nothing in it.
"I'm sorry, I - I must have dropped it somewhere…" Draco said, knowing full well that it could not have been the case and wondering if Astoria had taken it.
"The ring was not a mere trinket, to be forgotten at the bottom of a pocket, Mr. Malfoy," Ginny said with a smile. "When your desire to marry Miss. Greengrass disappeared, so did the ring. It's part of its magic. It might even have vanished before you knowingly made the decision to break things off."
Her smile widened and acquired a mischievous quality.
"Besides, I don't recycle."
Confusion spread on Draco's face as he wondered what "recycle" meant. Suddenly, a question of an entirely different nature presented itself to him.
"Is that what happened to your second earring?" Draco asked.
He could tell from the way her face fell that he had made a mistake. From amused, her eyes had gone to cold and mute. Her entire silhouette tensed.
"I don't know you well enough to answer that question, Mr. Malfoy," she said, her voice now sharp.
"I apologize," was all he could find to say.
She appraised him frigidly, trying to understand whether he had meant the comment to be hurtful or whether he truly had no idea what he had inquired about. Finding his countenance satisfying and moved by a feeling she couldn't quite explain, Ginny did something she would never have suspected of herself.
"I must do some research on certain stones dwarves have offered me from Tronjheim. Would you care to accompany me to the Dumbledore Library?"
Draco looked at her with curiosity. He felt he deserved the rebuke and could not understand why she now extended a hand to him. Perhaps she felt pity for his recent separation. Perhaps she needed his phenomenal research skills. Or perhaps she, too, could not resist the growing complicity between them.
"It appears that even the Gryffindors heard of my talent as library researcher, then?" he said, smiling.
"Trust me," she retorted as she summoned her purse, "whatever rumours concerned you at Hogwarts, they had more to do with girls than with books."
He smiled knowingly and escorted her out. Though the jewellery store was not immediately on Diagon Alley, it occupied one of the small streets that branched from it. Within a few seconds, they were back on the main street and followed it to the Dumbledore Library. Ginny thought fondly of her Headmaster whenever she walked past, as she knew he would have preferred giant candy-canes to the marble columns lining the façade, and the statue of a striped sock to the imposing rendition of himself as it stood inside the hall. The library was a beautiful building, with high ceilings and interminable corridors, the greatest wizarding library since its construction a few years after the end of the war.
Draco and Ginny entered the library, and she made a sharp left turn to head into the sections that were closed to the public.
"Good morning," she said to the guard stationed at a wooden booth in a well-lit corridor. "I'm Ginny Weasley," she showed him a library badge, "and I need access to the Mineralogy department for myself as well as -"
"Mr. Malfoy, what an honour to see you here!"
Ginny turned as quickly as Draco did. They were met by a small, plump man with a thick white mustache and a dark costume.
"Hello, Albriecht. Good to see you," Draco said smoothly, and shook his hand. "This is Ginevra Weasley, a childhood friend. Ginevra, Albriecht Vanhall, the very capable director of this establishment."
"Now, Mr. Malfoy…" Albriecht scolded him, turning pink and looking like he had been bestowed with the Order of Merlin. "I won't keep you, but I hope you will find the library's collection to your liking."
He bowed to Draco, and then to Ginny, and wandered off. The pair headed back toward the guard, who stood up and bowed obsequiously as they passed.
"Well, well, Mr. Malfoy, it seems like your fame precedes you," Ginny snickered.
"Please, call me Draco," he drawled, and then added, "I donated the quasi-totality of the funds for this library. Few wizards are aware of the fact, but," he grinned ferally, "Mr. Vanhall most definitely is one of them."
Ginny stared at Draco, wide eyed.
"You - donated - the Dumbledore library?"
"It's always a pleasure to find you so coherent, Miss. Weasley," Draco said, secretly pleased at her display of emotion.
Though during their sessions to prepare Astoria's ring Ginny Weasley had progressively warmed up to him, he had always felt a barrier between them; it had become a wall when he had asked about the earring, and now, suddenly, presented a possible breach.
"Please," she cooed, imitating his tone to perfection, "call me Gin."
"Not Ginny?"
He had heard her brothers calling her loudly enough times for her pseudonym to have remained engrained in his memory.
"Not Ginny," she repeated, the ghost of the morning's distance coursing through her eyes and then disappearing.
"Gin it is," he said in an attempt to lighten the mood.
She smiled and directed him expertly to the Mineralogy section. The entrance to each department looked pretty much the same: a tall doorway with a golden oil-lamp, beyond which little could be seen of the ceiling-high stacks and the rows of neatly packed books. While the corridors were brightly lit, the sections were less so in order to preserve rare books and manuscripts from damaging rays of light. Draco was therefore surprised by the coppery penumbra of the Mineralogy section, but appreciated the cool and dry climate maintained for the sake of the books.
"The air smells like… sand," he heard himself saying.
"Sand, really, in the mineralogy section? No way," Ginny replied. When she saw he hadn't been joking, she looked at him quizzically. "A spell does that. Today, it makes the air smell like sand roasting in the sun, I think, although I'm surprised you could identify that without any training."
"You mean you can actually tell what type of rock this smells like?"
Ginny smiled briefly.
"Well, you yourself said it smelled like sand. I can tell you that there's limited saline content to that sand, so it's probably not from the sea; in fact, I'd say that the chlorite-glauconite content makes it basaltic sand. They like to mix it up."
"I thought you differentiated rocks based on what they looked like," Draco noted, following her knowing progression through the book-shelves. He enjoyed the way the rich, brown light made her hair seem like tarnished gold.
"I would be a poor jeweller if that were the case. You see, there is so much more to stones than just their appearance. Their smell is unique, of course, but their texture is absolutely fascinating, as well; not to mention, it changes so much!" She had stopped in front of a stack and let her fingers drift across the spines of the books. "When you get a diamond from the rock in which it became a diamond, it smells and feels entirely different from when you have it polished and inserted into a precious metal. It's amazing to watch it change, and even more to have a hand in that evolution from a coarse, natural set of carbon atoms to a finely carved gem worth hundreds of Galleons."
Ginny pulled out a book and handed it to Draco. He took it, amused by the notion that she was using him as a book-carrier, but too interested by her rant to comment upon it. He sensed an enthusiasm the likes of which he had never heard in her voice, and felt somewhat privileged to be present when she let her guard down. The fact that he got to watch her reach for books highly placed and note the strain in her garments also helped.
"What got you into rocks in the first place?" he asked.
She was already moving onward, casting brief glances down different alleys, as though she had memorized the location of different books. He guessed that she may well have had.
"You probably don't know this, but during your first year at Hogwarts, Hagrid got a dragon."
"Oh, I remember," Draco muttered darkly.
Ginny cast him a brief glance but did not press the issue.
"Well, my brother adopted it and brought it to Romania with him. A few years later, when I was visiting Charlie-"
"You named the dragon Charlie?"
"Charlie's my brother…"
"So plebeian," Draco snickered. She handed him the next book with a bit more force than was necessary, and very nearly hit his hand in the process.
"When I was visiting Charlie, Norbert - the dragon - got sick. He vomited a stone that Charlie let me keep, because he said it was a bezoar, and had magical properties. It looked like a small egg, black and perfectly polished - probably by Norbert's stomach juices."
Draco did not look thrilled by the description.
"So I looked it up, and found it was called a draconite. Not very original, if you ask me, but it's supposed to make you capable of vanquishing all your enemies." She giggled self-depreciatingly. "I thought of giving it to Harry, of course, but by then he had already left to find Voldemort's horcruxes," she did not see Draco wince, "and I kept it."
She pulled out another book and gently placed it on top of the seven that Draco was carrying. As she turned to face him, he noted the look of tiredness that marked her features.
"I forgot about it for a while, and then, well… After the war, I wasn't sure of what I wanted to do. I found the stone again and remembered how it had felt in the palm of my hand, how I could almost hear it whisper of unparalleled victories and successful enterprises." She shrugged and gave him a small smile. "As Minister Weasley's daughter, I had no difficulty obtaining an apprenticeship with Creon, the founder of Glauce's Jewellery and the best jeweller in England, and that's how I ended up here."
"Well, you've reduced a Malfoy to servitude, so clearly polishing dragons' vomit has its advantages."
She smacked him playfully on the arm. They found an empty reading room by one of the windows and sat at a table facing each other. Ginny took the first book from Draco's hands and opened it.
"So what exactly are you looking for?" he asked.
"Information on this stone," she said, flipping through pages quickly. "Dwarves from the city of Tronjheim have offered to sell me some, even though it's one of their most precious stones. I just want to make sure that it's actually the case and that the gem's properties outweigh its value."
"Reasoned like a Slytherin."
"How else would I have made such a business?"
Ginny smirked, and he could tell she was proud of having achieved such a standing in the wizarding community, independently of her father, brothers, and Harry Potter. Thinking of the latter brought no happy memory to mind, but he did not feel the ravaging hatred that had once plagued him when Draco had recalled he owed Potter his life.
"Ah, look," Ginny said suddenly, and turned the book so that Draco could see it.
Under the name of "epistretes", he saw a bright, rich, red stone drawn with inks of different colours. He gave a cursory glance to the explanations below it.
"Supposed to preserve virgins from natural disasters?" he read, a sarcastic grin creeping into his voice. "I don't see how this stone could be of use to most women nowadays."
"You understand ancient Greek?" she asked, mocking but pleasantly surprised.
"Sure, don't you?"
"No, I was going to use these," she produced an enormous pair of Translation Glasses from her purse.
"Please don't let me stop you. I haven't seen a Weasley make a fool of themselves in years and must admit I miss it sorely."
She leaned toward him with an expectant look on her face; this was not the reaction he had been expecting, and he did not like the interested smile on her lips.
"Actually, I was rather hoping you would help me translate."
The light shining through her irises suddenly made them look more like amber than the dark brown Draco imagined. He realized that the darkness that usually pooled around her orbits had nothing to do with the actual colour of her eyes so much as the thick rim of her eyelashes and the distant sadness within. As it was, he had a hard time resisting the wide-eyed innocence of her gaze, and the sugary perfume that emanated from her skin.
"What's in it for me?" he asked.
The smile Ginny returned was unmistakeably impish. Neither knew full well whether it was also flirtatious or simply amused.
"The pleasure of my company?"
"I also read Latin," Draco pointed out as though this would get him additional favours.
"Now you're just bragging," she teased him. "It's brownie points or nothing."
"You'll bake brownies? I have house-elves to do that for me, you know."
"It's an expression, Draco. And no, I don't make brownies. I'm a jeweller, not a baker. Much to my mother's despair, I might add."
As they spoke, Ginny had kept perusing through one of the books. She stopped and read what it said, then nodded to herself.
"Yes, that's what I thought."
Draco looked at the page and could not decipher the script. It looked like none of the alphabets he had ever encountered, full of thick, sharp lines and points.
"Dwarvish," she explained as though she had read his thoughts. "It says here that the epistretes' properties apply to unmarried women, not virgins." She shrugged. "The Greeks were already obsessed about the sanctity of virginity when that book was written, but for dwarves it has never been an issue. I tend to trust their knowledge rather than the Greeks' where stones are concerned, but you can still have a look at this and tell me what you find."
She handed him two dusty, worn-looking books, one of which was in Latin, the other in ancient Greek, then took a third book for herself. She toyed absent-mindedly with her lower lip as she read through that volume.
"You see, if the stone is a protection for virgins, then I won't buy it from the dwarves. But if it's meant to protect all unmarried women, then any father or even fiancé could want a piece of that gem for his daughter or beloved."
"Although, admittedly, the odds of a lightning bolt or earthquake harming a wizard are rather slim…"
Ginny found his mocking smile absolutely charming and chose to ignore the warning bells that trilled in her mind.
"If I remember correctly, "natural" means not only "from nature", but also occurring in a normal way, in accordance with the laws of nature. So imagine that you fall from a broom - your fall is made possible and necessary by gravity, which draws you downwards as opposed to say, upwards. If you're wearing the stone, the fall won't be as bad. Or, if you get into an accident with one of those fancy carriages of yours, the stone should limit the shock."
Draco, interested as he was by her explanation, had a hard time believing the validity of her words.
"And you actually believe this?" he asked dubiously.
She looked at him, her eyes round with wonder, and started laughing. The more she relaxed with him, the more, he found, her laughter enthralled him. There was something inherently free and happy about it that changed from the polite giggles women around him had to provide in response to appropriate jokes.
"Of course I believe this! Otherwise, I would not be the jeweller that I am today." She nodded to the book he was holding and added, "And part of my talent lies in my excellent capacity to assess the exact nature of these stones' properties. Research counts for a lot, but sometimes you have to look beyond what the texts say and know which sources to trust. I learned that the hard way."
Draco was ready to see a wave of sadness hit her when she said that, but she gave no sign of falling apart at her own allusion to the Chamber of Secrets. Whatever kept exacting a toll on her happiness, her time with Tom Riddle's diary was not it. He resolved to find out what it was, with the understanding that success in that endeavour was highly unlikely.
"Well, what does your book say?"
"I don't know, I was too busy listening to you," he replied glibly.
She glared at him and motioned for him to keep reading, but he was obviously not as used to this kind of research as she was. In the time it took her to peruse two Dwarvish texts, he had only managed to reach the portion concerning the epistretes in his volume.
"Unmarried women," he confirmed.
"See? I told you so."
Ginny beamed with confidence as she snapped her book shut. She removed her glasses, rubbed her forehead, and leaned conspiratorially toward him. Draco made a conscious effort to avoid looking down her shirt.
"So. If you knew what we now know about this stone, would you purchase it?" she asked him.
"It depends on whether it looks good or not."
"Mmh, always does, doesn't it?," she teased him. He smirked. "The stones the dwarves manage to extract from the earth are, in my opinion, some of the most beautiful things one can find in nature. The drawings you saw obviously can't give the gem justice, but imagine something ten times redder than the darkest ruby you've ever seen, burning with a fire the likes of which must exist only in Hell."
"Impressive," Draco said, sounding utterly unimpressed.
"It only is because of its properties. A lot of stones exist that are much more spectacular than diamonds or emeralds, but very few actually possess properties worthy of notice. Coincidentally, one epistretes is worth five rubies of the same size, cut, and purity."
"Now you're talking."
Ginny shrugged, rolled her eyes as if wondering what she would ever do with him, and pushed the books back for him to carry. As she rose, Draco gave an appreciative glance to her curves. He followed her through the stacks, enjoying the secretive intimacy of their surroundings. The young woman stopped without warning and his bumped into her, a rush of adrenaline coursing through him like cold fire as his body came into contact with hers. She turned to him, her pupils dilated - but with desire or the attempt to see through the darkness, he couldn't tell. She took a book from his hands, and reached for the shelf where she had to replace it.
"Here," he said, putting his hand on her hip and gently taking the book from her hands, "let me do it."
Ginny did not understand why she did not subsequently step back to let him manoeuvre more freely. His arm, as it brushed against her, made her blood sing with anticipation. Draco let his hand drop and she headed for a different set of racks. He helped her with the remainder of the books, negotiating his movements well enough that their skin kept touching. In the silence of the library, their increasingly rapid breathing whispered of a yearning neither was willing to satisfy. When at last they emerged from the Mineralogy section and stepped into the vast, brightly lit corridor, they knew they were safe. They also knew they had missed their chance.
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