Bonds of Blood and Magic by Duelist
Summary: A few days before Bill and Fleur's wedding, Harry vanished. Two weeks later, Ginny disappeared, also alone and without a trace.
Someone has stepped out of the shadows for a moment, moved some pieces on the board, and changed the rules of the game.
Rating: PG-13
Categories: Post-HBP
Characters: None
Genres: None
Warnings: None
Challenges: None
Series: None
Published: 2008.07.28
Updated: 2015.05.30
Bonds of Blood and Magic by Duelist
Chapter 1: Chapter 1: Blood Magic
Author's Notes: The mountain, trees, and rocks stood silently, allowing the wind to play its way across them and make the music of wild, lonely places. A falcon’s shrill cry over the next peak came thinly to the glen, but no one was there to hear.
With a faint popping sound, two shadows appeared next to a large, flat-topped stone at the edge of the clearing. One was a tall, black cloaked man, while the other was shorter, wider, and seemed quite misshapen. On closer examination, the shorter shadow consisted of a pair of teenagers. The boy was dazed, and appeared quite ill-used with blood and bruises covering every visible surface of his skin. Much of his skin was, in fact, visible, through his tattered and shredded clothing. The slight girl beside him supported his weight almost fully, and grunted with the effort.
“Sit with him on the stone,” commanded the man, as he took part of the boy’s weight from the girl and guided him down.
“Hold out your right hands, both of you.” The girl just glared at him with undisguised malice. “We do not have time for this. You will do EXACTLY as I say! Now!” The man was not exactly being nasty, but he was very blunt, and terribly impatient.
The boy was dizzy, in pain, and didn’t understand what was going on. The girl narrowed her eyes as she continued glaring. She was practically holding the boy up, even sitting on the stone, but she shifted around to where they could have both their right hands available to their supposed saviour, who pulled out a small dagger, a Sgian Dhub, and made a shallow cut across each of their right palms and then forced their hands together. “Don’t let go,” he commanded her. Her glare intensified after the cut, and she seemed ready to almost say something, but stopped herself and just nodded.
He pulled out his wand and started muttering to himself while making short, sharp movements over their hands and then bodies. After a few moments, he made a slower, larger movement in an arc that included both of their heads. There was a flash of golden light that surrounded the two teenagers. It seemed to last forever, but was gone in moments. As soon as it was gone, he started muttering again in a different tone and pattern, with his back to the teenagers. As he began, the golden light from the previous spell glowed around the tightly clasped hands again and a thin thread of the light pulsed out, hitting him in the back. He repeated a similar spell eight times, moving around the pair sitting on the stone one-eighth of a circle before starting the next spell. As he finished each spell, another, dimmer flash of light glowed around the pair on the stone, until the eighth time. When he finally finished the last spell, a bright flash of blue light covered them both, and then was gone.
The wizard pulled the young couple’s hands apart. Both teenagers now seemed quite dazed, and the boy was barely conscious. The man healed the cuts with his wand, which left a clean, white scar on each palm. He didn’t bother trying to sort out the scars, as he knew that they never would respond to any spell or potion. He then healed a few of the boy’s more severe injuries and cuts, set the broken bone in his leg, forced him to drink a blood restorative potion, and then tied a string around their wrists.
“Ginevra. Wake up.” He snapped his fingers, then again in front of her face, but she didn’t react. He sighed, and again pulled out his wand, muttering “reenervate!” at her. “Ginevra!”
“Ginny. Don’t call me Ginevra.” She opened her eyes, and then they got wide as she realized who she was speaking to. “Sorry, Professor.”
“Listen to me. We don’t have much time, and you have much to do and understand. The Dark Lord is after you, Ginevra. He has been holding Harry for the past fortnight, and yesterday ordered me to kidnap you and bring you to him, so he could attempt to force Harry to divulge Dumbledore’s secrets by threatening you, and probably by abusing you in front of Harry. I cannot give you to … I will not allow you to be turned over to Him. If ever you were with Him, Harry would do anything to get you back, or to protect you, and he would foolishly tell the Dark Lord whatever he had to in order to save you, or get himself killed, and either of those endings would destroy everything we’ve been working for. Besides that in the end, you’d both be dead, of course.
“I have done my best to protect the two of you. I have given you a blood bonding, which will enable the two of you to share your magic. I’ve done this to protect you both. What is important to understand is that you are both exponentially stronger, more powerful magically, now that you are going to share your magical cores. You will be able to do some truly amazing things, and power incredible spells. There are some consequences to this, however. The most significant is that you are married, and you must consummate this as soon as possible — before midnight tomorrow, at the very latest. You must remain together, permanently. You may not live apart, not ever. The longest you can be apart without negative consequences is two days, and by that I mean that you must be together, physically, at least that often, and preferably much more.”
At her confused look, he snorted. “Oh, don’t make me say it, girl. Surely you can figure out …” he sighed. She shook her head, confusion growing. “You … you are married, you have to consummate as soon as possible, and physically be together as much, and often, as possible ...” Her sudden look of shock and comprehension let him stop having to explain what they had to do.
“You can never be with anyone else. There is no possibility of divorce, and the bonding will not forgive infidelity. If one of you does this, you will both die. If one of you is killed, or gets sick, or when you get old, whatever the cause, when one of you dies, the other will die shortly thereafter.”
“Why did you do this to us?” she wailed.
“Hush, girl. It is to protect you, both of you. It is a gift, and an honor to you both besides, as no one outside the Prince family has been given this gift in seven centuries. I will never receive it myself.”
“Why not?” her voice was low, still a bit whiny, but curious. She was going through a lot of emotions, but she was curious about why he was limited from this tradition of what she knew to be his mother’s family.
“ That is none of your concern. Suffice it to say, I lack the capacity for it.
“But that is not important for now. You must listen to me. The second part of the bonding is the greater reason for what I have done. It is a powerful blood warding spell that will make it impossible for the Dark Lord, or anyone else, to find you by magical means, so long as you are together. This is the other part of your new protection, and in many ways, for now, the more important.
“You are now invisible to all scrying, magical traces — including those incompetents at the Ministry — or any other magical surveillance methods, and Harry should now be immune to the Dark Lord’s ability to project images into his mind. I don’t know if it will protect him completely from his connection to the Dark Lord, as it has never been used this way before, but Harry could never have learned Occlumency well enough to truly block Him. I should know, I spent most of the past school year trying to force him to learn it, so I kept my promise to Dumbledore to help Harry in another way, by this spell.
“I could only do this after the blood bonding, because no living witch or wizard is strong enough by themselves to power this warding. I myself am not powerful enough to even cast it without drawing on the power of the bonding. It is not dependent on runes, stones, structures, the faith of a secret keeper, or relationships to a home, but is a permanent part of your, now married, blood-bonded relationship. You love each other, and your love and loyalty and relationship will grow stronger over time. Since those are the things that fuel the warding, it, too, will grow stronger.
“You are the key to the strength of the bonding, the heart of it, the core. Ginevra, with you, he cannot fail to triumph.”
“What do I have to do?”
“I told you. Be with him, love him, be loved by him, and share yourself with him. Learn what it is to be a woman and a wife. Talk to your mother about these things when you get the chance. I’m sure that she will give you a large piece of her mind about being married at this age.” He smirked widely. “But you must also learn to keep yourself safe. You must be able to fight ferociously when necessary, but be wise enough to flee — and to take him with you when you go. And you will have to flee more often than you fight. Like right now. It is time for the two of you to go.”
“Wait.” Harry was drained before, and then mostly unconscious after the blood ward was cast due to the drain on his magical core, but the restorative potion he’d been forced to swallow, combined with the reduced amount of damage his body was now dealing with, had allowed him to become more aware, and he was not quite ready to leave. Harry’s eyes were in focus for the first time in several hours.
“What, Potter?” snapped the impatient man before him.
“Why should we trust you? What about Dumbledore?”
“You should trust me because I just saved your damned life. AGAIN. You, too, Miss We… Mrs. Potter.” He sneered slightly.
“Snape, you captured me in the first place, you bastard! And you didn’t save me — I escaped on my own. How do we know this isn’t some kind of trap, or trick, or …”
“You arrogant little git. Of course, I captured you. The Dark Lord so ordered it. I am a spy. That is what I do — look like I’m working for one side, while endangering my life by actually working for the other. I kept him from killing you, and I Confunded your guard tonight when he was about to take you from your latest session with the Dark Lord, so that I would be able to break you out. Fortunately for both of us, you were stronger than I expected you to be, and you were able to get away on your own. It would have been harder to explain your escape otherwise.”
“You Confunded Draco?”
Huffing again, Severus said, “Of course. You don’t think that he would have forgotten on his own to tie you up, or turned his back on you while you were conveniently close to a large vase, do you? Good job on that, you cracked his skull. He was already dead when I found him. Thanks for that, by the way. Poncy little bastard was hitting on me.”
The three shared a glance and then shuddered in unison. “Draco? That’s just so…” Ginny couldn’t even finish.
“Yes, well, I’ll thank you not to bring it up again. Now, Mrs. Potter, I recommend an additional blood restorative as soon as possible. I’ve set his leg, but he needs a dose of Skelegrow as well. The string is a portkey. It will take you both someplace safe, where you can take proper care of your husband for the time being. Do NOT attempt return to the Burrow, whatever you do. It is no longer safe there. If someone betrays your location by normal means, you may be found. You must hide where I am sending you now for at least the next week.”
“Wait. You didn’t answer my other question. What about Dumbledore? Why did you betray him? Why did you murder him, you bastard!” Harry’s words, while angry, had no force, and he was beginning to slur them. By the time he finished his short tirade, he was leaning against Ginny to stay somewhat vertical.
Snape was silent for a long moment. “I will see you in a few days. Ask me then.” He handed Ginny a small bag before continuing, “Now, no more questions. No, Potter, you’re going.” He pointed his wand at the string around their wrists, said, “Activate,” and they disappeared with another small pop.
Severus sat heavily on the same flat piece of granite, visibly drained. “I don’t know how you did it, Albus. I have no idea how you did all of it.” ‘Perhaps that’s why he seemed so barmy,’ he thought to himself.
Snorting quietly, he stood and Disapparated, leaving the lonely mountain glen to itself once again.
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