Chapter Seven: Three
It was the middle of the night, and Lavender and her uncle were sneaking across the naval base South of Vlore. As magicals, they had a few advantages over the security, the of admittedly not very secure Naval Base Pasha Liman. Lavender had been on a Royal Navy Base in England, and it had been a lot harder to get on. Here, they probably could have gotten by without the invisibility cloaks.
They were heading for a small clearing in a wooded ravine above the base that sported a particular Roman Era ritual circle, dedicated to Glycon. It had taken them a week to narrow down the likely location of Voldemort to this particular circle. They had snuck across the naval base a few times before, mostly heading past it towards the end of the peninsula. Last night they'd found the remains of a couple of possessed snakes. Lavender had cast the charm to identify the possessor, her personal experience of the shade of Voldemort passing through her allowing her to confirm exactly who it was that had taken control of those snakes.
She stepped to the edge of the clearing, not quite clear of the trees and scrub, looking at the paving stones surrounding the statue of Glycon. There were not many of those statues. Laying on the stones was a large snake, vipera berus. It was pure gray with some black incomplete dorsal crossbars. Like most possessed snakes, it was a bit larger when possessed, a unique factor in snakes. It was probably more venomous than normal, but Lavender didn't intend to find out if it was.
She nodded to her uncle. She watched as her uncle carefully circled the circle touching six stones. Only once was she able to hear her uncle's whispered incantation, "lapis enim arcendos." After the last stone was touched, the six stones rose to become pillars, a good meter high. Her uncle said something else, out of her hearing, and a bright flash filled the clearing, quickly dimming to a light crimson plane between each of the pillars. It was enough to wake the snake.
"Who dares disturb the sleep of the Lord Voldemort!" the snake slurred. It focused not on her uncle, but on Lavender.
Lavender stepped into the clearing, staying clear of the caged snake. "A servant of Her Majesty, the Queen," she said. "Your sentence in rebelling against her just rule has been determined."
"The muggle Queen has no power over me, and neither do you," the snake said, before dropping to the ground, a black mist rising from its body. The specter formed from the mist, his noseless face, as Harry had described, clearly visible in the insubstantial form. "What is this?"
"It is judgement," the twelve-year-old witch said. And then she began to cast the spell that Professor Flitwick had taught her the day after the confrontation over the Philosopher's Stone. "Perempta est spiritus in carcerum."
Suddenly the crimson planes became scarlet, and began to shrink inwards. They seemed to harden and become less transparent. Voldemort's shade tried to escape, his black mist trying to find a way around the sharp scarlet planes, and finding there were no gaps, as they briefly flared violet with his impacts against them. The snake caught fire, as the scarlet planes rose above him, shrinking down to the size of a plum.
The ruby dropped into the charred remains of the snake, as the pillars flared once again. "Latet conditum crystallum," Lavender said, imagining the appropriate container for the jewel that now contained Voldemort's spectre. Once the spell was over, she walked into the circle, reached down, and picked up the crystal cage that held the ruby that contained the Dark Lord. She opened the heavily warded handbag that Q had given her, and dropped it in.
"Ready to go, Uncle Charlie?" Lavender asked, putting the hand bag into her back pack. She was sure that in just a few minutes, the fact of who she'd just managed to face was going to hit her, and she was going to break down, and wanted to be as far as possible away from this place as
possible.
"Just one more word," her uncles said, "Fidelis." The clearing suddenly was empty, and he came and took Lavender's arm. "Now, I think we'll head Northeast, to the other coast, rather than going back to the naval base."
As they hiked away, now just a uncle and his niece in the ravine scrub, the concentration and the mission she'd focused on since landing in Albania receded. Suddenly Lavender felt a cold shiver up her spine, and she began to tremble.
"Are you okay, Lavender?" her uncle asked, as his arm supported her as she stumbled.
"I have a dark lord in my pack," she mumbled, right before she lost her last meal along side the trail.
"Dad, I want to get Ginny a broom for her birthday, a good one," Ron said, as he helped his father assemble some sort of muggle model in his shed. "I know you want me to put aside most of my advance for editing the book, but I think Ginny deserves a good broom of her own." He had no idea what the model was supposed to do, but when the model was properly assembled and a pair of double A batteries inserted, it would apparently light up and look just like it did in New York Harbor. It said so on the box.
"Your sister is just turning eleven, and hasn't taken flying yet," Arthur Weasley said.
"My sister flies better than anyone but Harry does in my year, and she might be able to beat him," Ron replied. "You should have seen her on Neville's new broom a couple weeks ago. She really put it through its paces."
"So, you weren't insinuating that your sister was after the Longbottom heir?" Arthur said. "Hand me that plaque. I think it goes in the arm. You know it almost caused your mother not to let him come for Ginny's birthday party."
"Well, not entirely," Ron admitted. "She was the primary source of the teasing when I helped at Neville's Rite."
"Well, that's expected," Arthur admitted. "Have you considered going in with your brothers on a broom?"
"Bill has already got something, and I know better than to go in with the twins," Ron said. "It's too late to coordinate with Charlie. I could ask Percy, but he's got his own twins, and I don't think he's got a lot to spare. I want Ginny to get a good broom."
"Let me think on it tonight, and talk with your mother," Arthur said. "Now, I believe the instructions say to insert the batteries into the back of the base. It seems that they're not included, though."
Ron found himself looking out the door, and discovered that somehow his sister had managed to for once get on a broom, his, in the middle of the day instead of her midnight broom rides. "Dad, look at her flying now."
Arthur came to stand next to Ron. Together they watched Ginny dive, spin, flying above the Burrow. It was obvious that the girl was pushing the broom she was riding to its limits. They saw her dive sharply, and the pull up nearly as close to the ground as Harry would, then she spun, threading her way around the trees at the edge of the orchard. "Ron, you're right, she does deserve a really good broom."