Chapter Twenty-Two
**Hermione's POV**
It had been a week since the city had changed allegiances and ownership, and setting up the new governing council was going slowly, as the vetting process had not yet been perfected and was taking longer than expected.
Hermione was in her new chambers of this former pleasure city and felt dirty just looking at some of the furniture, she was in her room waiting not entirely thrilled for the next hour or so.
She sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, looking at the far wall, having an honest conversation with herself about the fact that she was stalling and knowing she was stalling and doing it anyway.
Then she sighed, stood up, and locked the door from the inside with a charm that would hold against anything short of a battering ram just in case she didn't arrive precisely on time.
She reached under her blouse and pulled out the necklace.
She held it up in the candlelight and looked at it, and despite herself she started to giggle at the memory of it.
The Time Turner, Small and unassuming. If only the wizarding world knew, Hermione Jean Granger, Muggleborn and proud, had pulled off what she was fairly confident was the heist of the century, not once, not twice, but a hidden third time, and not a single person had ever worked it out.
She turned it over in her fingers, remembering.
It had started with Professor Dumbledore, which in retrospect should have told her something. He had mentioned it in passing one afternoon, almost casually, that she really ought to apply for a Time Turner with the head of her house if she wanted to take all the classes she desired. She had thought it odd at the time because Dumbledore had never taken the time to chat with her before then, not directly anyways. He was always kind, always polite, always leaving a book on her desk with a short apologetic note when he had to take Harry elsewhere, but he never quite looked her in the eyes and he always seemed to arrange things so that she and Harry were not both in the same conversation with him at once.
She had thought about that a great deal over the years, she had not yet arrived at a satisfying answer. If only his portrait still functioned.
But the Time Turner.
From the moment he mentioned it, she had started planning. And then Umbridge had arrived and started dismantling everything that mattered about her education, and planning became intent.
To really call it a heist would be too generous to the Ministry's security arrangements, which was the embarrassing part.
She had gotten the building plans by posing as a student reporter working on a piece she thought the Daily Prophet might find interesting about the unsung heroes of the documentation sorting department in the Ministry basement. The men down there had been so thoroughly astonished that a pretty young witch thought their work deserved coverage that they had given her copies of practically everything she asked for.
She had actually felt guilty about that part.
Guilty enough that she had written a genuine two-foot summary of their department, their work, and their enthusiasm, which she had submitted to a junior editor at the Prophet who had actually run it under a false name she had given. She still cringed slightly knowing that framed copy was probably still on the wall down there, and might be forever.
The actual retrieval had been almost anticlimactic. Getting into the Ministry that day with Harry and the others had required nothing more sophisticated than walking through the visitors entrance. The hardest part had been keeping her real skill level concealed from the Death Eaters during the chase through the Department of Mysteries, because three of the lowest-quality Death Eaters she had ever encountered had been flinging spells in all directions with the accuracy and strategy of a blind startled Bull in a Fine China shop. Framing them for their own chaos while she quietly pocketed what she came for had taken more patience than skill as the idiots had actually caused a great deal of damage.
She had simply put the necklace on, tucked it under her robes, and walked out with the rest of the children when the Order came to save them.
To make it even more embarrassing is that they had not even been searched before leaving back to Hogwarts.
She rolled the Time Turner between her fingers now, thinking about what she had said to Dany about timing and strategy and the importance of not acting before you were ready, and allowed herself a small private moment of appreciation for the irony.
Especially since not even a few years later once again Hermione, Harry and Ron had broken into the Ministry. But this time while it was busy, and under the control of Voldemort, and it was still far too easy to get in. If Harry hadn't jumped the gun and attacked that disgusting Pink Toad Umbridge, they could have made it out while being able to question the woman at there leisure. Why did those boys always have to mess up her carefully created plans with poor impulse control.
She didn't count the bank fiasco though, Griphook had lied to them from the beginning about the Thief's Downfall trap, so she had bad information from the start, but they still made it and accomplished their goals.
She sighed to herself, she was stalling she knew it, she was tired and just wanted to get to bed.
Something had happened with Winky approximately an hour ago. She had felt it through the servant bond, and with the tracking rune she had quietly added into the hem of Winky's dress during their last hug, a small precaution she had taken because she loved Winky and Winky was currently wandering around alone with only a Dire Wolf and a Niffler. Winky had been too happy and excited to notice, which Hermione felt slightly guilty about and didn't want Winky thinking she didn't have faith in her.
The bond was still intact, and what she felt through it was a morbid since of satisfaction, the warm and settled kind that meant Winky had done something she considered a good job. So she was not worried, exactly.
But she needed to see for herself, as Winky had drawn deeply from Hermione to cast whatever spell she had cast, it didn't hurt and was only barely noticeable for a small second but Winky was not one to use large scale magic.
She heard her own voice in the corridor outside, calling out to Ser Barristan, which was the signal she had set for herself, to let her know the timing and to understand things went well based on how the other her first greeted to Ser Barristan.
She turned the Time Turner and stepped back into an hour ago.
---
**Winky's POV** *(One Hour Earlier)*
Winky had been enjoying the ride on Fuzzy friend "Nymi".
Winky was proud of the nickname, it was her time giving a friend a nickname and she thought it suited her new fuzzy friend very well, short and strong and a little easier to remember.
The journey North had been cold and getting colder, the trees getting bigger and older and further apart, the ground harder underfoot, the sky a low flat grey that did not seem to change much regardless of time of day. Nymi ran steadily and did not complain, which Winky appreciated.
What Winky did not appreciate were the bad noisy birds.
They had been following for the better part of a week. Ravens, mostly, circling at a distance that probably looked casual to anyone who did not have House Elf hearing and could therefore hear their wingbeats change direction every time Winky and Nymi changed direction.
Winky had been patient about this because Mistress had taught her that patience was important and you should understand a situation before you acted on it.
But then the stupid bird had crossed a line.
It had tried to break into Winky's mind, which made it a bad bird.
Winky had felt it the same way she felt it when someone tried a door she was standing behind, a pressure and a probing and a sense of something very old and very confident on the other side expecting to simply walk through.
Winky had grabbed the bird out of the air, summoning it to her hands eyes narrowed.
It flapped uselessly in her grip, and Winky looked at it properly and saw immediately that the poor bird was being controlled, pushed from the outside by something that had no business being in a poor bird's head, and Winky's anger shifted direction from the bird to wherever that something was coming from.
Mistress had taught Winky to protect herself. Had sat with her in the tent on quiet evenings going through exercises, patient and thorough, explaining what to look for and how to push back. Mistress was precise about it. A scalpel, she had seen it herself in her Mistress Careful. Targeted.
Winky was, as she well knew, more of a sledgehammer.
She found the connection between the bird and whatever was on the other end of it, reared back in whatever the mental equivalent of rearing back was, and went through it like a stone through thin glass.
There was a flash of cold and darkness and the smell of earth and roots and something ancient.
Then a *POP*, and she and Nymi were somewhere very much further North than they had been a moment ago.
---
**Brynden River's (The Three-Eyed Raven) POV**
Brynden had been many things in his long life.
Bastard son of a king, spymaster, hand, Commander of the Night's Watch, last great Green seer. He had watched history move beneath him for centuries from his throne of woven weir wood roots, in the dark beneath the hill, where no sunlight, moonlight or starlight reached and the only illumination was the faint luminescence of the roots themselves, pale and cool as old bone.
The cave was vast and silent around him. Its cramped branching tunnels full of weir wood roots pushing through the stone walls on all sides, the great cavern stretching out before him, large as the great hall of Winterfell, stalactites reaching down from a ceiling lost in shadow, stalagmites rising from the floor below. Somewhere in the deep dark behind him the cave dropped away entirely over a black abyss, a river rushing six hundred feet below, invisible but audible, a constant low sound like breathing.
Skulls sat in stone niches along the walls. Ravens moved through the upper darkness in ones and twos. The children of the forest moved quietly around the edges of his sight, tending their fires, going about the purposes of beings who had been here longer than he had and would likely outlast him.
He had been watching the creature for some time.
He had never in his centuries of sight seen a creature like her, and what he saw was not with the eyes that had long since failed him but with the sight, the green sight that showed him magic the way ordinary men saw light. Every person, every creature, every place that touched magic showed as a dim candle at best, a bright flame at the most extraordinary.
This strange creature blazed.
Second only to the dragons in what he could perceive, and the nature of its magic was different from anything he had catalogued in his long watching. It sat in her very bones, something very old and vast. He could detect something else too but...
He had sent the raven to learn more.
He had not accounted for what she would do with it when he tried to Warg inside of her mind.
The children reacted the moment she appeared, and they were fast and they were fierce and this strange creature in an even stranger dress and outrageous hat, had knocked all of them unconscious within seconds, and the great Dire Wolf had Leaf pinned to the ground with its teeth bared close to her face before Brynden could do anything useful.
Then the strange almost adorable creature looked at him or it could be said, looked straight thru him.
She was angry, small and furious and holding the broken handle of a *was that a ladle?* as though it were a weapon, which apparently it was at the moment, and her enormous eyes were fixed on him with an expression that communicated very clearly that she held him responsible for the bird and even more importantly the ladle.
"Now Winky is angry," she said, and pointed her finger at him and snapped it.
The pain was immediate and total and entirely unlike anything he had felt in centuries. First a buildup of magic so dense he was sure the explosion would kill them all. Then a snapping of fingers, then a bright blinding pain all over his body.
The spell was not cruel that was the remarkable thing, an house elf's magic of intent backed by pure power. It was purposeful, precise in its way despite the force of it, a sensation of pulling and rearranging and setting right, he felt something changing inside him that had been wrong for so long he had almost forgotten the sensation of the lack of pain, everything for him had then stopped.
He breathed in-and-out slowly, no chest pain.
He moved his body sitting up a bit, only the dull ache of needing a very good stretch was felt.
He was sitting on the cave floor and he was breathing free air and he could move his legs, and the roots of the weir wood that had grown through him over centuries were simply gone, and he was an old man on cold stone and he was weeping before he understood what he was doing, the first tears in longer than he truly cared to calculate, he truly had no words to think this being for this gift.
The strange floppy eared creature with the large dominate hat looked down at him with an expression that had softened from fury to something more like the look of a scolding parent who has corrected a naughty boys behavior.
"Next time you want to be a bad boy," she said, "Winky won't just take away your magic tree time, next time you want to spy on poor Winky, Winky will not put you in a timeout, Winky will bonk you good."
She looked around then, something shifting in her face, a sudden awareness of something she had not attended to, and she turned to go.
He had to speak. The only words that came were the ones that mattered most. He had known what the creature was looking for just not why and that had concerned him before but not right now.
"Jon," he managed. The word cost him. His voice was barely there in between sobs of joy and relief. "Wildlings, south of here."
The elf stopped.
She turned back and looked at him for a moment with those enormous serious eyes.
Then she patted him on the head, gently, the way you pat someone you have decided is going to be alright.
"See Nymi," she said, to the wolf, as they moved toward the cave entrance, her voice cheerful and certain, "all bad boys and girls can be made good with a proper bonk and the right discipline." the Dire wolf whimpering back in protest.
The sound of her footsteps and the wolf's paws faded up through the tunnels and were gone.
The cave was very quiet.
From across the cavern he heard Leaf's breath come back in a rush. He turned his head, slowly, still getting used to the idea that he could, and saw her frozen on the ground where the wolf had held her, staring up at nothing, her eyes very wide and her whole small body starting to shake.
The other children gathered around her slowly, silent, watching her face.
"Pack up," Leaf said. Her voice was strange, certain in a way it had not been before, or ever to his recollection. "We leave immediately."
No one argued, they began moving at once, collecting what mattered.
"Leaf." He got himself standing upright, shaking, his legs somehow with the aid of whatever magic that creature hit him with, able to keep him standing on his own after so long. "What has happened?" I asked almost out of breath, my body no longer used to moving around."
She stopped.
She turned and looked at him, and he saw something in her face he could not remember seeing there in all his long years of knowing her.
A real smile.
"Real hope," she said as she looked back at the tree's face that seemed to change just a tiny bit.
Then she picked up her pack and began walking, and the children followed, and Brynden Rivers stood in his cave for the last time on legs that worked, breathing the cold crisp air he had not truly breathed in centuries, and began the slow process of following them.
They would pick up the boy on the way.
South was where they were going, they needed to find the giants, and perhaps even Mance.
Walking towards the tree was a figured shrouded in a dark cloak that blended in with the background a bit to well, the snow beneath their feet melting as grass grew up around where they had just stepped. Nature finding more harmony with this creature than anything else in recent memory. The figured stared at the trees face in silence before saying two words, "Ent Egg."
Wildling scouts in the days that followed would tell of the cave that was once held by the last of the children, but one question lingered on the minds of almost everyone, where was the missing tree?