The Snow Wolf, chapter 2: The Garden of Enchantments

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THE SNOW WOLF

Summary:

While on his undercover mission to the werewolves, Remus disappears. Tonks sets out north, across countries and islands and frozen terrain, on a quest to find the man she loves and reclaim him from the clutches of a powerful magical beast. Along the way, Tonks meets many who help – or hinder – her quest, until at last she reaches the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard to face the dreaded Snow Wolf himself.


Chapter 2: The Garden of Enchantments

Tonks came abruptly to a halt at the top of a low cliff, and found she’d come to the edge of the land. In front of her, the ground tumbled down for a few feet as rocky scree, then dropped into the sea. Though the sky was only now beginning to lighten into a grey dawn, to Tonks it felt as if she’d run for days, in the strange, almost dreamlike state of following the wind and the spell she’d cast.

She put her hands on her hips and caught her breath.

To her left stood a cottage. It was a tidy little place built of stone, surrounded by a garden of colourful flowers and a trim white fence, perched there at the very spot where the grass ended and the land dropped down to meet the sea.

Now that she’d stopped moving, an awareness of her body caught up with Tonks all at once. She was so tired she was nearly swaying on her feet, and she hadn’t eaten anything since… Well, she wasn’t sure when she’d last eaten, actually. Sometime before she’d left London.

The sky above the sea was tinged a delicate shade of pink in the east where the sun, though not yet risen, was making its approach known from beneath the horizon. A new day was beginning. Had she truly left London only yesterday?

Tonks stood there, shivering, aware now how chilled she was in the pre-dawn air. She should approach the cottage, she decided. She could at least ask if whoever lived there might be willing to give her something to eat. Perhaps they would even be able to give her directions about how best to continue northwards, now that she’d run out of land on which to go by foot.

Before she could start forward, though, the cottage’s little door swung open.

“Why, hello!” cried the woman who stepped out of it, a warm Scottish burr to her voice. She was a tallish, plumpish woman with silver hair gathered tidily in a clip at the nape of her neck, and she wore a gardening apron over her dress. She smiled delightedly and gave an energetic wave in Tonks’ direction. “Hello, hello!” she repeated as she hurried down the garden path and unlatched the gate, then rushed through it and reached out to catch Tonks’ hands in her own. “What a delightful surprise! A visitor! So few people come this way, oh, this is a treat. Won’t you come inside, my dear? Oh, do say you’ll join me at least for a cup of tea.”

Bowled over by this unexpected reception, Tonks said, “I’d be glad for a chance to warm up for a little bit, if you don’t mind. But maybe you can also tell me how to get to –”

“Wonderful, wonderful!” the woman exclaimed. “Come right this way, dear, up the path, follow me.”

So Tonks, tired and bemused, followed her enthusiastic host through a profusion of blooming flowers and into the little cottage.

“Just sit right there and make yourself at home while I get everything ready,” the woman fussed, once they were inside her little yellow-painted kitchen. Curtains framed windows that looked out to the garden and over the sea, and everything was cosy and bright.

This woman was like several Molly Weasleys put together, Tonks thought with amusement, watching her host set out plate after plate of mouth-watering biscuits and dainty sandwiches to accompany the promised tea, as well as a bowl of sweet red cherries.

“Would you be a dear and help me carry these things outside?” the woman asked. “I do so love to breakfast outdoors, in the company of my flowers, and sunrise is such a lovely time of day.”

Tonks thought it would be too cold to sit outside, especially here where the wind blew off the sea. But when she followed the woman out again to the garden, she found that the sun was now fully risen and the day had turned pleasantly mild.

And all around, flowers were blooming. The ground was a carpet of delicate white snowdrops and luminous buttercups in warm shades of yellow. In amongst them, bunches of narcissus poked out their comical faces, and pink and purple hyacinths sprang up out of the ground like bright bursts of joy. Tonks marvelled at the sight of so many flowers blooming – so many springtime flowers, even though it was autumn. Clearly there was more than a little magic at work here.

“Now, you’ve been travelling a hard journey with the wind at your back, haven’t you?” the woman chattered, once they’d set out the plates and teacups on a little table nestled against the lee side of the house. They settled themselves into the two chairs there, one on either side of the table.

This section of the garden was mainly hyacinths, in vibrant shades of red and violet and salmon and peach, all swaying gently in the breeze. Tonks gratefully took a biscuit from the plate her host nudged towards her.

The woman leaned forward. “You must tell me all about it, my dear. Where do you come from? Where are you going? You have the look of someone who’s setting out on a quest, that’s what I say. Have I guessed it right, darling girl?”

Tonks paused in surprise, the biscuit halfway to her mouth. She hadn’t ever stopped moving long enough to think of it in those terms, but that was true, wasn’t it? Remus had gone missing and she’d dashed straight out to bring him safely back, never mind that she didn’t know where he was or how to find him, and she would have to figure it all out as she went. Yeah, that was pretty much the definition of a quest.

She looked at her host, whose sympathetic eyes were fixed on Tonks, and found herself telling the whole story.

She didn’t say anything about what Remus had been doing when he disappeared, of course – his mission with the werewolves was sensitive Order business, and even Tonks wasn’t allowed to know the details.

But she found herself telling about Remus himself, alternating her tale with bites of a delicious watercress sandwich her host urged on her. She described how they made each other laugh, how Remus turned out to have a sly sense of humour that slipped out more and more often as he allowed himself to let his guard down with her. And how over the past year, without either of them quite noticing, what began as a friendship had turned into something more than either of them had been prepared for.

“He wouldn’t just leave,” Tonks said. It felt self-indulgent to go into such detail about this with a stranger, but the woman really seemed to hang on Tonks’ every word. “Remus has such a sense of responsibility. Yeah, he’s not always great with emotions, I know that. I could probably see him going to some extreme lengths to avoid having to talk about his feelings. But shirking work? Not him.” She shivered. “If Remus has disappeared like this, something is wrong.”

Her host’s eyes were moist with sympathy. “But tell me, dear, wasn’t there any sign left behind of where he might have gone? Have you any clue to follow?”

Tonks chose her words carefully, so as not to give away any of the ‘oh and by the way also he was living with a werewolf pack at the time’ aspects of the story. “There was...one person I talked to, who told me which way to go to look for him. It sounded like she’d been there when it happened, whatever it is that happened to Remus. And it scared her so much that she couldn’t even talk about it, but she promised me she saw him still alive, and she told me to follow the wind north, which is how I ended up here. It seemed like, I don’t know, like she’d seen some terrible creature come there and steal him away.”

Did she imagine it, or had her host given a small shudder at those last words?

At any rate, she’d almost certainly shared more of a personal nature than her host had really wanted to hear. So Tonks turned her attention determinedly to another sandwich, this one cucumber.

“You must miss him terribly,” the woman said suddenly in a low, fervent voice.

Tonks nearly jumped in her seat, startled out of her own thoughts. She reached for her teacup and took a sip to cover up her overreaction.

“I lost someone, too,” the woman continued in that same intense voice. “My sister…it was so long ago…”

“I didn’t lose him,” Tonks retorted, then wondered what was wrong with her. Her host shared something painful from her own past, and Tonks responded by snapping at her? But something about that phrasing – lost someone – put her hackles up. “I just mean,” she hurried on, “that I’m going to find him. Like you said, it’s a quest. I’ve only just started out, but I won’t stop looking.”

The woman turned such mournful eyes on Tonks, she hardly seemed the same jolly person who’d hailed her so enthusiastically when she first stood outside the garden gate.

“Er,” Tonks said. Something about this whole interaction had grown deeply unsettling, though she couldn’t have said precisely why. To deflect attention and give herself time to think, she reached for one of the cherries that sat on the table in a little white bowl and popped it into her mouth, playing at casual when actually her senses were on high alert. “You say you had a sister? What happened to her?”

“We were so close.” The woman’s gaze was still fixed intently on Tonks. “We did everything together. She was older and she looked after me. She protected me. I thought she would stay with me, always. But then she decided to go north...”

It was truly creepy, now, the way the woman wouldn’t stop staring at Tonks with those terribly melancholy eyes. Tonks chewed on the cherry she’d taken, awkwardly aware of every movement of her mouth and of the sweet flavour bursting brightly across her tongue, in such contrast to this oddly darkening conversation. As soon as she could, she spit the stone out discreetly into her palm and dropped it onto the edge of her plate, where a last few biscuit crumbs lay scattered.

“But now, oh, how good it is that the wind has brought you to my door!” her host exclaimed. “I needn’t be lonely anymore. You can stay here, my dear, don’t you see? We’ll be so happy. I’ll bake you scones and make you tea and we’ll breakfast every day here in the sunlight amongst the beautiful flowers. You will be so happy, sweet girl, if only you’ll stay with me.”

Now it was Tonks’ turn to stare. Stay here? Why would the woman say that? Hadn’t Tonks just got done telling her that she was on a quest? A quest to find...

She was on a quest…

because...

Tonks felt everything inside her blaze momentarily hot, then icy cold.

She couldn’t remember.

She couldn’t remember. Just moments ago she’d been telling the woman about her quest, but now she couldn’t remember where she was going or what she was supposed to be questing for. Surely she could remember that, at least, of course she knew she was supposed to find…

Who was she supposed to find?

Tonks leapt to her feet, distantly aware of her chair clattering to the ground behind her.

“What did you do?” Tonks demanded. “What did you do to me? Why can’t I remember how I got here, or where I’m going or, or – anything! What magic did you do? Was it in the food?” Tonks stared down at the table, set for a tea that no longer seemed charming. Was it the biscuits that were cursed? The cherries? Could Tonks work out a countercharm even without knowing the original spell?

Tears leaked from the woman’s eyes and she seemed to crumple down into herself, until she huddled with her head hanging morosely over her elbows where they rested on the table. “I get so lonely,” she whispered. “So very... very lonely... I only wanted someone to stay with me, someone to be like a sister to me, since my sister left me alone…”

“That’s not how this works,” Tonks spat at her, fear making her cruel. “You don’t trap people into staying with you. That’s not how love works.”

The woman gave a pathetic little sob and sank further down over her own slumped arms.

Tonks spun on her heel, away from the woman. She could work this out on her own. She could find a countercharm. Okay: magic garden, full of enchantments, there must be something here that would help her memory, at least enough to tell her what she’d forgotten to remember.

There was a person-sized hole in her, an absent memory of someone she cared about enough that it had driven her out into the world to search. But instead of finding that missing person, she’d ended up here in the strange garden of this woman who’d tried to poison Tonks’ mind.

Panic rising in her no matter how much she tried to fight it down, Tonks ran back and forth through the garden, peering into all its nooks and crannies, desperate for anything that might give rise to memory.

A carpet of delicate white snowdrops, a little arbour with a wooden bench tucked in amongst its drapery of leaves, trumpet flowers swinging ponderously from vines that climbed the cottage wall...

Then, in a far corner, a single plant caught her eye.

This plant bore stalks of delicate, deep purple flowers. The shape of each blossom might, to a fanciful mind, resemble a miniature friar’s cowl, which was what lent the plant one of its several names: monkshood.

Aconite.

Wolfsbane.

How many times had Tonks pored over herbology texts and references, wishing that a novice potion maker like herself could somehow learn to safely produce Wolfsbane Potion and save Remus so much suffering? She’d eventually had to accept, to her great frustration, the hard truth that only a master potioneer should attempt such a difficult recipe. But by then Tonks had looked at so many illustrations that she could recognise wolfsbane anywhere.

With the sight of the wolfsbane’s delicate purple blossoms, all the rest came rushing back: Remus’ mission to the werewolf pack. The terrifying news that he’d gone missing. Tonks’ mad dash into the world to find him.

And Remus, Remus himself, Remus with his wry smiles and his deep chuckle and his particular way of saying her name that sent flutters straight to Tonks’ stomach, no matter how valiantly she’d tried for nearly a year to ignore that feeling.

Tonks could never forget Remus.

As Tonks stared down in shock at the wolfsbane, waves of memory crashing over her, her host had slunk quietly up behind her. Now Tonks spun around to face her.

The woman stood slumped and wretched, her arms clutched around her middle, tear tracks running down her face, a shell of the merry figure who’d first invited Tonks into her garden.

“I’m sorry,” the woman whispered miserably. “It was wrong of me to trick you.”

“Yeah,” said Tonks. “It was. I’ve found my missing memories, despite what you did. And now, somehow, I’m going to find a way to keep going north from here.”

She turned towards the garden gate to leave, but the woman took a step forward, putting herself in Tonks’ way. Tonks stepped instinctively back, out of her range.

“I can help you,” the woman said. “Let me make it up to you for what I did, let me help you on your onward journey.”

“You think I want your help?” Tonks cried. “I don’t want anything from you, except for you not to steal any more of my memories, thanks.”

The woman flinched at that, but she continued doggedly, “I know where you need to go. I don’t know the name of the beast you seek, but I do know it exists and I know the part of the world in which it lives. You can to choose to believe me or not. But if you wait at the shore here at dusk, I’ll ask a fisher I know to come and transport you as far as the Shetland Islands. There you can seek advice as to the rest of the way.”

Tonks glared at her suspiciously. She did look guileless, but then, she’d seemed that way when she’d first invited Tonks in for tea, too, hadn’t she?

“Believe me or not,” the woman repeated. “I’ll ask the fisher to come for you, and you can decide as you like.” She hesitated, arms tightening where they clenched around her body. “And if, in your journey, you happen to encounter my sister...”

Tonks braced herself for whatever unethical magical subterfuge the woman might suggest next.

The woman’s eyes were wells of sorrow and Tonks wondered that she’d ever thought her cheerful, with nothing more on her mind than enthusiasm for welcoming a passing traveller. The woman seemed to struggle to drag her voice above a whisper. But finally she straightened her back, looked Tonks in the eye and said, “If you see my sister…will you tell her that I miss her?”


(Continue to CHAPTER THREE)

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