# Pentos - The Dragon's Gambit
The darkness in Illyrio Mopatis's manse was the kind of black that clung like oil, thick and heavy—a darkness where men whispered promises with one hand while counting coins with the other. It was not the gentle dark of night in the open air, where moonlight softened the edges of the world and made even shadows seem kind. This was a dishonest dark, pregnant with secrets and reeking of the particular rot that came from too much wealth gathered in too few hands.
*Like the Malfoy vaults,* Daphne thought as she moved through the corridor, her steps silent on the polished stone. *All that glittering prettiness hiding something fundamentally ugly underneath. Though at least Lucius had the courtesy to keep his blood money in Gringotts where proper wards could contain the stench of it.*
She belonged in this darkness—had always belonged in places where others feared to tread. Shadows seemed to part before her like curtains, recognizing something in her bearing that spoke of authority earned rather than inherited. The faint orb of wandless light that drifted ahead of her was no brighter than a candle's dying breath, yet it illuminated enough. More than enough.
*Careful, darling,* she reminded herself, her mental voice carrying that particular blend of silk and steel that had made her Hogwarts professors simultaneously proud and deeply concerned. *Too much light and you'll wake the dogs. Though whether I mean the four-legged variety or the two-legged variety currently snoring in their beds above remains to be seen.*
The corridors had been carved by craftsmen who understood that true power was not about ostentation—it was about making others understand, without words, exactly what you were capable of. Every arch, every pillar, every delicate flourish in the stonework whispered the same message: *See what I can afford to create. Now imagine what I can afford to destroy.*
She almost smiled at that. *Almost.* The expression that wanted to curve her lips was not the sort that belonged on civilized faces. It was the smile that had once made Draco Malfoy stammer mid-insult, the one that had caused Professor Snape to regard her with something approaching wariness during her final year.
*Lumos Solem,* she thought, coaxing a careful trickle of radiance from her wand. Just enough to see the floor she would not stumble on, not enough to trigger the crude detection wards she could feel humming in the walls like sleeping wasps. The warming charm she had cast at sunset still pulsed gently in her blood, but it did nothing for the deeper cold that had taken residence in her chest since that morning in King's Landing when she'd watched a child sold like a sack of grain.
*You traffic in people, Illyrio,* she told herself, her inner voice honeyed with venom. *Children torn from their mothers' arms, women branded like cattle, men broken on your altars of profit. All so you can drape yourself in silk and pretend civilization while you feast on the bones of the innocent. Tonight, my darling magister, we're going to discuss the concept of compound interest.*
The vaults lay deep—three levels beneath the sleeping house, past locks that would confound master thieves and wards that would peel the skin from lesser practitioners of the Art. But Daphne Greengrass had graduated from Slytherin House with honors, and Slytherins were not known for allowing inconvenient barriers to stand between them and their objectives.
*Besides,* she mused as she approached the final door, *it's not as though I'm stealing. I'm simply... redistributing assets according to a more ethical framework. Call it charitable giving with a rather more hands-on approach than most philanthropists prefer.*
Her wand rose, elegant fingers wrapping around holly and unicorn hair with the casual intimacy of long partnership. "Alohomora Maxima."
The wards bent like wheat before the scythe. Tumblers yielded with sighs of relief, as though they too had grown weary of guarding blood money and welcomed the opportunity to serve a worthier cause.
The vault door swung open on silent hinges, and for a moment even Daphne—who had grown up among the Greengrass fortune, who had toured Gringotts with her father and seen the accumulated wealth of the oldest pureblood families—had to catch her breath.
*Sweet Merlin's sagging left buttock.*
It was a dragon's fever dream of avarice made manifest. Gold gleamed in vast heaps, coins from a hundred different mints piled in towers that swayed gently in the faint light like metallic wheat. Jewels spilled from chests and caskets in glittering cascades: rubies fat as plums and red as fresh blood, emeralds the deep green of ancient forests, diamonds that caught her wandlight and shattered it into prismatic rainbows that painted the walls in living color.
*This isn't merchant wealth,* she realized, her breath coming shorter as the true scope of the hoard revealed itself. *This is conquest. This is kingdoms stripped to their bones, empires reduced to trinkets. How many cities burned to build this pretty little collection? How many innocents bled out their lives so Illyrio could sleep on silk sheets?*
The air itself seemed thick with the weight of accumulated greed, heavy with the scent of metal and dust and something else—something that spoke of suffering transformed into gold, of tears crystallized into gems.
But it was not the treasure that made her pulse quicken, not the wealth that could ransom nations. It was what waited at the far end of the vault, arranged on pedestals of white-veined marble like offerings on some ancient altar.
Three objects that burned with a light that had nothing to do with gold or gems. Three perfect ovals that made the very air around them shimmer with possibilities older than recorded history.
*Eggs.*
Not fossil. Not stone. Not the pretty forgeries that adorned merchant halls to impress visitors who had never seen the real thing. These were *alive*—so alive that they made her magic sing in harmonies she could feel in her bones, in her teeth, in the secret places where power pooled like quicksilver.
*Impossible,* her rational mind whispered even as her magic reached toward them with desperate hunger. *The last dragon died over a century ago. Their eggs are legend, myth, children's stories told around winter fires.*
And yet here they were.
The first egg was black—not the simple black of night or ink, but a black so profound it seemed to drink light, streaked with veins of red that pulsed like captured fire beneath glass. The second gleamed green as spring forests, bronze whorls winding across its surface in patterns that might have been runes, might have been maps to places that existed only in dreams. The third was pale as cream touched with gold, warm enough that her magic responded to it like a flower turning toward the sun.
*Unless...* The thought struck her like lightning, sudden and illuminating. *Unless these are older. Eggs that slept through the Doom of Valyria, hidden in caves no man dared enter. Waiting. Patient. Dreaming of fire and flight and the day when worthy hands would wake them.*
She took a step closer, then another, her wand forgotten at her side. The eggs called to her—no, not to her exactly, but to something deeper than Daphne Greengrass, something that lived beneath the careful manners and the Slytherin cunning and the endless lessons in pureblood propriety.
They called to Daenerys Targaryen. To the blood of Old Valyria that flowed in her veins, unbroken and undiluted despite the centuries that had passed since her ancestors rode dragons across burning skies.
*You know me,* she thought, wonder bleeding into her mental voice as understanding crashed over her in waves. *You know what I am, though I had almost forgotten it myself. The girl in borrowed flesh, the woman in silks and society manners—no. Beneath all that pretty pretense, the blood of dragons runs true. You see it, don't you? You feel it singing in my veins.*
Her smile deepened, beautiful and terrible as a blade kissed with poison. She reached out one pale hand, not quite touching but close enough to feel the heat radiating from ancient shells.
*"Hello, darlings,"* she whispered, the words carrying all the love and longing and deadly promise of a mother greeting children she had never seen but always known were hers.
But first—the serpent of ambition that had coiled around her heart since childhood reminded her, soft and merciless as silk—there were vaults to empty, fortunes to liberate, a very particular kind of justice to be served.
The dragons could wait. After all, the best vengeance was served with proper preparation.
For the space of an hour, Daphne worked in silence broken only by the soft whisper of gold sliding into enchanted nothingness and the rustle of green silk as she moved through her task with the focused precision of a priestess conducting sacred ritual. The pouch she carried—small, innocuous, stitched in Slytherin green and charmed with every expansion and concealment ward she could layer onto silk—opened like a hungry mouth to devour wealth that could have ransomed kingdoms.
*This is not mere theft,* she told herself as she upended a chest of sapphires, watching their blue fire scatter into the pouch like fallen stars. *Not even simple vengeance, though vengeance does add a certain... piquancy to the evening's entertainment. No, this is correction. The sort of meticulous accounting that the Ministry never taught but that every proper Slytherin learned at her mother's knee.*
Each coin that vanished into her pouch was a child who would not be sold. Each jewel was a woman who would not be broken on the altar of men's greed. Each golden goblet or silver plate was a family that might remain whole because the monster who had torn them apart could no longer afford to do so with quite such casual ease.
*Really,* she mused as she worked, her movements taking on an almost dance-like quality, *if any of my former professors could see me now—McGonagall in particular—they'd have to admit this is the most thorough practical examination in Applied Ethics ever conducted. And I am passing with distinction.*
The irony was delicious. Here she was, burglarizing one of the most powerful men in the Free Cities, and she had never felt more righteous in her life. Every handful of gems that disappeared into her pouch was a victory for justice, every tower of gold that vanished was a blow struck for the innocent. She was Robin Hood in green silk and perfectly applied cosmetics, and she was loving every moment of it.
*Though I do hope I look rather better than the folk tales suggested he did,* she thought with a soft laugh that echoed too loudly in the pillaged vault. *All that living rough in forests—terribly hard on one's complexion.*
The vault slowly transformed under her ministrations, magnificent dragon's hoard becoming picked-clean corpse. But she did not hurry, would not cheapen the moment by treating it as common burglary. Each movement was ceremonial, each gesture deliberate. This was art as much as theft, poetry written in vanishing gold and liberated gems.
And through it all, the eggs sang.
Not with voices—nothing so crude as sound. They sang with something deeper, older, an ache that pulled at her very bones and made her magic hum in harmonies that had not been heard in the world since Valyria burned. Three perfect shells holding three perfect dreams of fire and flight and power beyond imagining.
When the last coin had been claimed and the final jewel liberated, Daphne straightened and turned to face the true prize. Her breath came faster now, pulse quickening with something that was part anticipation, part reverence, and part barely controlled hunger.
*Care,* she told herself, though her hands shook slightly as she approached the marble pedestals. *Respect. Recognition. These are not trinkets to be grabbed and stuffed into bags. These are possibility itself, wrapped in shell and ancient dreams.*
The black egg came first. Her fingers brushed its surface and warmth flooded through her—not mere heat, but recognition so profound it made her gasp. The egg was heavy and light simultaneously, solid as stone and insubstantial as smoke, as though it existed in several dimensions at once. Magic rippled between them, folding through her, around her, until she felt something stir within the shell—ancient, patient, and suddenly, wonderfully alert.
*Yes,* she breathed, her lips parting in a smile of pure wonder. *You know me. You've been waiting for me, haven't you? Sleeping and dreaming and waiting for the one who could wake you properly.*
A whisper shivered through her mind—whether from the egg or from the deepest well of her own ambition, she could not say and did not care. *Dragon Queen.*
The green egg hummed with secrets of forests that had never known human footsteps, bronze spirals shifting and rearranging themselves into patterns that might have been letters in some lost language, might have been maps to places that existed only in dreams of fire and conquest. When her magic touched it, the patterns flowed like quicksilver, spelling out promises in characters older than memory.
The cream-and-gold egg was last, and when her fingers closed around it, she nearly dropped it from the sheer intensity of connection. It was warm, almost pulsing, like holding a living heart in her palms. All three eggs sang to one another now, harmonies weaving and intertwining until the very air of the vault trembled with their music.
*Mine,* she thought, the word carrying absolute certainty and infinite tenderness. *My children, my weapons, my destiny wrapped in shells of impossible beauty. Together we will remake this world, won't we? Together we will teach them all what fire and blood truly mean.*
She placed them carefully into the pouch, whispering every cushioning charm and concealment ward she knew, though something deep in her bones suggested they needed no such protection. Dragons, even unhatched ones, cared little for the frail magic of mortals. Still, she treated them as treasures beyond price because that was exactly what they were.
*Well then,* she thought as she smoothed her hair and checked her reflection in a nearby mirror of polished silver, expression settling into something wickedly satisfied. *Inventory corrected. Ethical adjustments applied. Justice served with a side of larceny and a generous helping of poetic retribution. Time to depart before dear Illyrio discovers that his hoard has been liberated by someone with better taste in ethics and considerably superior cheekbones.*
The return journey through the manse was almost disappointingly simple. Guards yawned and blinked at shadows that refused to resolve into anything threatening. Wards slumbered peacefully. Servants dreamed of feasts they would never taste while their master's fortune vanished into green silk and ambitious dreams.
She passed like a ghost—silent, unseen, undetected. Just another shadow in a house full of them, except this shadow carried the seeds of empires in her magically expanded purse.
By the time she reached her chambers, dawn was painting the eastern sky in shades of rose and gold, and Daphne felt more alive than she had since awakening in this strange new world with memories not her own and a destiny that seemed to shift like smoke every time she thought she understood it.
She sank onto her bed, silk sheets cool against her skin, and drew the eggs from the pouch with reverent hands. They seemed to glow more brightly in the growing light, pulsing gently as though aware of one another, aware of her, aware of the momentous nature of this reunion.
*North,* came the whisper—not from them, but from within her, the same magnetic pull that had tugged at her consciousness since the moment she'd opened eyes that were not quite her own in a world that was not quite her own. *He is north. My Harry. Stirring up trouble as always, his incurable addiction to justice running rampant through whatever nest of vipers he's stumbled into this time.*
Her smile spread slowly across her face, beautiful and terrible and full of promises that would reshape the known world.
*But some problems, my darling boy, cannot be solved by noble hearts and sharp swords and that devastating smile of yours. Some require fire. Some require wings. Some require the sort of power that makes kings kneel and gods take notice.*
She arranged the eggs before her on the silk coverlet, their ancient song filling the chamber with harmonies of conquest and flame. For a long moment she let herself imagine the look on Harry's face when she arrived bearing these gifts—three perfect engines of destruction and creation, three keys to unlock the cages that held the world in thrall to lesser men.
*Reunions, after all, are sweetest when they come with the promise of absolute victory.*
The serpent of ambition that had coiled around her heart since childhood purred with satisfaction. Yes, let the fat merchant keep his empty vaults and wonder where his blood money had gone. Let him rage and search and suspect everyone except the pale young woman who had smiled so sweetly at his dinner table.
She carried away something he would never understand—destiny itself, singing in three shells of fire and ancient dreams.
And she would deliver them herself, personally, with her compliments and her love and her absolute certainty that together, she and Harry would burn this corrupt world down and build something beautiful from the ashes.
*After all,* she thought as sleep began to claim her, one hand still resting protectively on the nearest egg, *what good is being a Dragon Queen if you don't have anyone worthy to share the throne?*
The eggs pulsed once more, as though in agreement, and in the growing light of dawn, Daphne Greengrass—who was and was not Daenerys Targaryen—dreamed of fire and flight and the look in emerald eyes when prophecies came home to roost.
—
# The Road to Wintertown
The air of the North had a taste to it—salt and iron, pine-smoke and frost, with an underlying bite that seemed to seep through skin and settle in the marrow. It was colder than dragonfire was hot, more merciless than hunger, sharper than the grief she'd carried like a stone in her chest for seventeen years. Even with warming charms layered upon her like invisible armor—each one carefully calibrated for maximum efficiency and minimum magical signature—Hermione felt the cold creeping beneath her defenses, a patient thief stealing warmth from bone and blood alike.
*Note to self,* she thought with the methodical precision that had once made Professor McGonagall's lips quirk in approval, *climate variation must be factored into long-distance apparition calculations with far greater weight than previously assumed. England's perpetual drizzle provides woefully inadequate baseline data for continental weather patterns.*
She drew her conjured cloak tighter—a creation born of pure will and theoretical knowledge, woven from spellwork and scholarly understanding rather than the pelts of slaughtered beasts. The irony wasn't lost on her that she was using magic to protect herself from magic's consequences, but practicality had always trumped philosophical consistency in her personal hierarchy of values.
*Secondary note,* her mind continued with that familiar, almost compulsive need to catalog and analyze, *despite the undeniable romance of appearing suddenly where one is most needed, the academic literature rather severely understated the sheer logistical nightmare of apparating blind across hostile territory, where every startled peasant defaults to assuming the sudden stranger must be thief, witch, or spy. Trial-and-error navigation makes for absolutely abysmal efficiency ratings.*
The method she had devised over the past forty-eight hours had been effective, if inelegant: leap by apparition in the general direction her magic tugged her, pause to recalibrate against local magical resonances, leap again. Progress measured not in miles covered but in patience expended. What should have been a journey of hours had stretched into two grueling days—two days of watching villages from shadow-wrapped hillsides, of speaking to no soul, of recalculating bearings by the light of unfamiliar constellations while her feet slowly went numb in boots that had seemed adequate in the temperate south.
But here, at last, the ordeal bore fruit worth the suffering.
The signature blazed before her now like a beacon fire on the darkest night—not the faint whisper she had chased from one horizon to the next like a woman possessed, but something bright and immediate and *real*. Harry. Not a memory, not wishful thinking, not the phantom ache that had haunted her dreams for nearly two decades. Him. Actually him.
*Alive,* she thought, and the word carried seventeen years of desperate hope and carefully suppressed longing. *Breathing. Here. Impossible and inevitable and absolutely, utterly real.*
Her magical senses sang with proximity, every nerve ending in her body suddenly alive with recognition. North and east, in a settlement of middling size that her mental maps suggested was Wintertown, he waited. The signature was unmistakably his—that particular combination of power and compassion, strength tempered by gentleness, that had made her fall in love with him when they were barely more than children playing at war.
Her breath caught in her throat, visible in the frigid air like a small ghost of hope.
But the awareness that flooded through her brought complications along with joy. Other magical signatures surrounded his like threads woven into the same impossibly complex tapestry. Three at minimum. Perhaps more. Each one distinct, each one somehow *connected* to Harry in ways that made her scholar's mind race through possibilities even as her heart began a slow, painful descent toward her boots.
And one of those signatures...
*Oh.*
The recognition hit her like a physical blow, sudden and devastating and absolutely certain. Her heart didn't just skip—it seemed to forget entirely how to beat for several long, airless seconds.
*Fleur.*
The name was prayer and curse woven together, soft as honey on the tongue and sharp as steel between the ribs. Fleur Delacour, with her silver-bright hair and her fire that could melt steel or heal hearts depending on her mood. Fleur, who had loved Harry with the sort of devastating completeness that made poets weep and pragmatists despair. Fleur, who had died for him without hesitation and would have walked with him into the shadow itself if death had demanded such a price.
*Of course she found him first,* Hermione thought, and the mental voice carried layers of emotion she wasn't entirely prepared to examine. Resignation, certainly. A twist of bitter amusement at fate's sense of timing. And underneath it all, if she were being honest with herself—which she always tried to be, even when honesty felt like swallowing broken glass—a sharp stab of something that might have been jealousy if she were small enough to indulge in such petty emotions.
*Of course they are together. They were forged for one another—soul meeting soul across every barrier mortality could devise. She died for him. He lived for her. They built something that no scholar could quantify, no strategist could unravel, no rival could reasonably hope to displace. And now...*
She closed her eyes against the sting of wind and recognition both, her breath misting white in the iron-cold air.
*Now I must enter this reunion not as the triumphant heroine of my own story, but as a supporting character in theirs.*
The realization should have been devastating. Perhaps it would be, later, when she had time and privacy to properly examine the implications. But Hermione Granger had not survived a war, seventeen years of believing herself alone, and the transition from one world to another by allowing setbacks to paralyze her. She was nothing if not adaptable.
*Very well,* she told herself with the sort of calm practicality that had once made Harry call her the most dangerous person he knew. *The parameters have changed. Adjust accordingly.*
It would not be enough to simply sweep into Harry's arms like some romantic heroine, breathless with triumph and drunk on reunion. Fleur would see such an approach as a threat, and she would be right to do so. Bonds like theirs—forged in war, tempered by death, refined by years of shared struggle—did not welcome disruption gracefully.
No, what was required here was diplomacy of the highest order. Careful words deployed like chess pieces. Careful gestures that spoke of alliance rather than invasion. She must frame herself not as an intruder seeking to displace what already existed, but as a force multiplier—support rather than competition, complement rather than rival.
*Fortunately,* she thought, drawing upon memories that belonged to Margaery Tyrell as much as to Hermione Granger, *I am uniquely well-suited to such negotiations.*
The thought brought with it a surge of confidence that felt almost foreign after so many years of academic isolation. Margaery's memories whispered of court intrigue and political maneuvering, of alliances built with rose-soft smiles and steel-sharp minds. Fleur might possess beauty that could stop hearts and power that could reshape battlefields, but Hermione had subtler weapons in her arsenal.
Political acumen honed by years in the most dangerous courts of Westeros. Resource access that spanned multiple worlds and academic disciplines. A scholar's systematic approach to complex negotiations. Most importantly, the patience to play a longer game than mere passion could sustain.
*I need not oppose Fleur,* she realized, and the understanding brought with it a spreading warmth that had nothing to do with warming charms. *I need only demonstrate that opposition would be wasteful when cooperation offers so much more.*
Her lips curved in a smile that would have made Margaery proud—demure enough to disarm, calculating enough to warn, and ultimately warm enough to invite trust rather than suspicion. It was a expression that had toppled kings and built kingdoms, wielded by women who understood that true power lay not in force but in making others want to give you what you needed.
*Let Fleur be flame and Harry be steel,* she decided, straightening her shoulders as purpose crystallized around her like armor. *I shall be the hand that guides both toward something greater than either could achieve alone. Love is not a zero-sum contest—not when there are kingdoms to be won and worlds to be changed. If they are fire and metal, I shall be the alchemical process that transforms base elements into something precious.*
The metaphor pleased her scholar's mind even as it steadied her lover's heart. She had crossed worlds for this moment, defied death and probability and every rational calculation that suggested Harry Potter was lost to her forever. She would not be turned away by something as mundane as romantic complications.
Snowflakes drifted past her face as she adjusted course toward the distant lights of Wintertown, each flake unique and ephemeral, like the choices that had brought her to this moment. Each step forward carried her closer not only to reunion but to negotiation—to the delicate work of weaving herself into a tapestry that had been beautiful without her but might become transcendent with her careful addition.
Her conjured cloak whispered against her ankles like a promise. Her breath steamed in the frigid air like incense offered to whatever gods governed second chances. Her magic pulsed in rhythm with her heartbeat, aligning her path with destiny's thread.
She walked on through the gathering dusk, into the cold that bit like regret, into the uncertain dawn of a future she would help write with her own hands.
---
Snow crunched beneath her boots with a sound like breaking bones—an unfortunate metaphor that her mind seized upon and refused to release as she crested the final hill between herself and her destination. From this vantage point, Wintertown spread before her like an illuminated manuscript painted in shades of grey and white, its stone and timber buildings huddled together against winter's siege like a community of scholars around a dying fire.
*Apt comparison,* she thought with dark amusement. *Academic communities and northern settlements both survive through the sharing of resources and the collective determination to outlast hostile conditions. Though I suppose Wintertown's residents are considerably less likely to stab each other in the back over publication credits.*
The wind that swept across the hilltop carried scents that spoke of life persisting against all odds: horses and woodsmoke, bread baking and leather curing, the distinctive musk of humanity pressed close together for warmth and safety. It was simultaneously welcoming and alien—familiar enough to recognize as civilization, foreign enough to remind her that she stood at the threshold of a world not her own.
*This is either the most important conversation of my existence,* she thought with characteristic precision, *or a catastrophe waiting to devour everything I hold dear. No middle ground exists between those outcomes. Either I walk away from this encounter with love firmly in hand, or I destroy the bonds that have sustained us all these years in my selfish attempt to reclaim what was never truly mine to begin with.*
The possibility of failure sat in her stomach like a stone, cold and heavy and absolutely unignorable. But failure had always been a possibility in every worthwhile endeavor she had ever attempted. The key was not to eliminate risk—that was impossible—but to minimize it through careful preparation and intelligent strategy.
Her eyes moved across Wintertown's layout with the calculating precision of a general surveying a battlefield. Narrow streets pressed close between buildings, creating a maze of shadow and possibility—privacy for secrets that needed keeping, but danger for the unwary or unprepared. Markets clustered near the main thoroughfares, their residual magical signatures speaking of commerce lively enough to provide cover for comings and goings even in the depth of winter.
Three inns dominated the settlement's heart like the points of a triangle, their windows glowing amber against the gathering darkness. Each one radiated warmth and welcome, but only one sang with the particular resonance that made her magical senses flare to life.
*There,* she breathed, and seventeen years of careful emotional control nearly cracked under the weight of recognition. *The Silver Stag. Of course it would be called something appropriately symbolic.*
The beacon that had drawn her across half a continent blazed from those windows like a star calling wanderers home. Not just Harry's signature now, but the complex harmony of multiple magical auras intertwined in patterns that spoke of deep familiarity and deeper trust.
*He's not alone,* she confirmed, though she had known it intellectually since first detecting the compound signature hours ago. *Two others at minimum. Possibly three. And one of them...*
*Fleur.*
Even thinking the name made her chest tighten with a combination of joy, apprehension, and something that might have been stage fright if she were being honest about her emotional state. Fleur Delacour—brilliant, beautiful, devastating in both her power and her compassion. The woman who had claimed Harry's heart so completely that even death had only managed to separate them temporarily.
*Which makes this delicate beyond all previous calculations,* Hermione acknowledged with the sort of ruthless self-assessment that had made her the youngest professor in Hogwarts history. *Fleur does not share easily, and she has no reason to trust my intentions. From her perspective, I am a complication at best, a threat at worst. She fought for Harry. She died for Harry. She has every right to see my arrival as an invasion rather than a reunion.*
The wind shifted, carrying with it the scent of pine and possibility, and Hermione felt something that might have been Margaery's memories stirring in response. Court intrigue. Political maneuvering. The delicate art of transforming potential enemies into essential allies through careful application of mutual benefit.
*But I am not without advantages,* she reminded herself, drawing confidence from the accumulated wisdom of two lifetimes. *Fleur may have beauty that stops hearts and power that burns worlds, but I have different weapons. Political acumen refined in the deadliest courts of Westeros. Resource access that spans multiple academic disciplines and several worlds. Most importantly, I have patience—the ability to play games that span years rather than moments.*
Her lips curved in an expression that would have made her Slytherin friends proud—soft enough to disarm suspicion, sharp enough to convey competence, warm enough to invite cooperation rather than competition. It was a smile that had been wielded by queens and kingmakers, by women who understood that the most powerful victories were won not through conquest but through making your opponents want to give you what you needed.
*Diplomacy, then,* she decided, feeling strategy crystallize around her like the formation of ice on still water. *Present myself not as a rival for Harry's affections, but as a valuable addition to their existing alliance. Demonstrate that my presence strengthens rather than threatens what they have built together. Show Fleur that cooperation serves her interests better than opposition.*
The approach felt right in ways that mere romantic fantasy never had. Love might have brought her across worlds, but it would be intelligence and patience that secured her place in whatever future they built together.
*Let Fleur be flame and Harry be steel,* she thought, echoing her earlier insight with growing conviction. *I shall be the alchemical catalyst that transforms their partnership into something greater than the sum of its parts. Not replacement, but enhancement. Not conquest, but synthesis.*
She began her descent toward Wintertown with measured steps, each footfall deliberate and sure. The people here would not welcome strangers lightly—sudden appearances led to questions she had no intention of answering truthfully. So she approached the problem as she always did: systematically, thoroughly, with every available resource bent toward optimal outcomes.
*Disillusionment first,* she catalogued mentally, weaving the charm with practiced precision. *Subtle enough to deflect casual observation without triggering the more sophisticated detection wards I can sense layered throughout the settlement. Then a Notice-Me-Not, carefully calibrated to encourage eyes to slide past rather than create the obvious blind spot that marks amateur work. Warming charms maintained beneath both, because there is absolutely no point in traversing dimensions and defying probability itself for love, only to succumb to hypothermia in some provincial street before reaching the people who make the journey worthwhile.*
Her lips curved in genuine amusement at the thought. Margaery's memories provided a dozen examples of political negotiations derailed by insufficient attention to basic comfort, and Hermione had no intention of joining that ignominious list.
Wintertown grew larger as she approached, its narrow streets and glowing windows becoming individual rather than collective. Voices carried on the wind now—laughter from taverns, the cry of vendors hawking late-evening wares, the comfortable murmur of a community settling into its evening rhythms.
Somewhere in that maze of stone and timber and human warmth, Harry waited. Harry, and Fleur, and whatever future they might build together if she could navigate the next few hours without destroying everything that mattered.
*Time to discover,* she thought, straightening her shoulders and lifting her chin with the sort of quiet confidence that had once made enemies mistake her for easy prey, *whether Hermione Granger learned enough from Margaery Tyrell to play the game that matters most.*
She stepped forward into Wintertown's embrace, carrying with her the hopes of two lifetimes and the determination to write a better ending than either world had offered her before.
---
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