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What Binds the Grey Lady



“Are you sure you’re okay?” Andy asked, holding Ermalene’s hands. His palms were damp with nervousness. She nodded. “You’re sure?” She nodded again. He took a deep breath.

“Andy,” she assured him, “I’m okay. This is what I wanted. Go with Hagrid down to the hut and I’ll come out straight away when this is over.”

“Okay.” He reluctantly let go of her hand.

Hagrid said, “If yer needin’ anything at all, you come and get me an’ Andy.”

“I will, Hagrid, I promise,” Ermalene replied.

The two of them hesitated in the doorway - especially Hagrid, who eyed the Grey Lady suspiciously - and finally they left, heading down to wait in Hagrid’s cabin.

Ermalene looked up at the ghostly woman, “Okay, it’s just you and me now. Lead the way, m’am.”

“Call me Helena.”

“Okay… Helena then.”

The ghost swept into the hallway, Ermalene following along behind her through the corridors, past rows and rows of armor. The paintings on the walls continued their mysterious chases from frame to frame, even more feverishly now that the Grey Lady led the way than they had before, Ermalene couldn’t help noticing. They whispered and hissed in one another’s ears as they scurried along after them.

“So… do you… like… being a ghost here at Hogwarts?” Ermalene asked.

The Grey Lady replied, “Being a ghost is not something one likes, Ermalene.”

“Oh. Right. I’m sorry. But I meant only -- maybe Hogwarts is preferable over… I don’t know… some other place to haunt?”

“It is no better nor worse than any other place,” Helena stated.

Ermalene followed along behind her, feeling foolish for having asked at all. She’d only wanted to make a conversation. She chewed her lower lip.

“It isn’t terrible,” Helena’s voice came suddenly.

Ermalene looked up at her.

“I suppose there might be more terrible places to haunt than Ravenclaw tower,” she explained. “For example, there’s a ghost that haunts a girl’s toilet downstairs. I wouldn’t like to be her.”

“Moaning Myrtle?” Ermalene asked.

“Yes,” Helena replied. “What a terrible way to spend eternity. In a U-bend.”

Ermalene laughed, “I can’t imagine.”

“Nor can I,” the Lady said. She smiled ever so slightly before the smile faded and she went stone-faced once more.

Ermalene walked along in silence a moment or two, watching Helena’s long hair flowing out behind her ghostly form. Then, “So what keeps you here? Being a ghost, I mean?”

Helena stopped moving for a moment. If ghosts could take deep breaths, she would have in preparation of her reply, “My mother’s diadem.”

Ermalene made a face, “But… the diadem was destroyed.”

“The diadem remains.” The voice of the Grey Lady shook.

“What do you mean ‘the diadem remains’?” Ermalene asked, taking a step toward her, “It can’t. Harry Potter destroyed it forty years ago. It was the sixth Horcrux. He threw it into the Room of Requirement with a fiendfyre.”

The Grey Lady closed her eyes, summoning all of her strength. The secret had been kept for so long, the whole story so tightly held for centuries and centuries that she wasn’t sure she could bare the release of it. “No.” she murmured.

“No?” Ermalene repeated.

“No,” Helena whispered. She shuddered at the admittance and closed her eyes. She felt as though she were being unraveled.

Ermalene’s voice was panicked, “But if the diadem wasn’t destroyed, then… then Voldemort’s horcrux…” She felt a clammy cold seep through her skin. “Is Voldemort still alive?” she asked.

The Grey Lady shook her head, “No. The horcrux was destroyed.”

“But you said the diadem wasn’t destroyed,” Ermalene was confused.

Helena’s eyes rolled up so that she stared up at the ceiling. “Harry Potter destroyed the horcrux, yes, but not the diadem.”

“But the horcrux was the diadem.”

“It was a diadem,” agreed Helena, “But it was not mine.” Her voice was harsh again and her eyes flashed in anger. She closed her eyes, and when she reopened them, they were kinder. She stared at Ermalene and her lips pressed together tightly. “I’m sorry,” she said. The words were obviously hard for her to say. “I didn’t mean to shout… at you.”

Ermalene said, “It’s okay. I bet this is hard to talk about.”

The Grey Lady nodded.

“So what happened to the real diadem, then, if the one that Voldemort had wasn’t yours?” asked Ermalene.

Helena replied, “I hid it in Albania.”

“That’s the one Voldemort had, though,” Ermalene said.

“He had the replica.”

“The replica?” Ermalene asked.

The Grey Lady hovered silently, a long, expectant silence hung between them as she held onto the secret for one last moment. Finally, she said, “I thought that I was in love with him at first.”

“Pardon me?” Ermalene took a step closer, confused, “In love with who? Voldemort?”

“No!” The Grey Lady shouted, her eyes flashing brightly, “The Baron, the bloody Bloody Baron!” she shouted. Her voice trembled so that Ermalene guessed if ghosts could produce tears she would’ve shed them. She paused, looked at Ermalene, and lowered her voice as she explained, “My mother, Rowena Ravenclaw, did not approve of him. He was a member of nobility, but he was still not good enough for me because he was of the house of Slytherin. Whatever my mother and her friends, Helga and Godric, claimed, they were prejudiced against Slytherin’s house as much as he was prejudiced against theirs! ‘You cannot be with that barbaric man!’ she warned me. If only I’d listened! But I was foolish. We saw each other in secret for a time… sneaking out passageways throughout the school, meeting in empty classrooms or locked prefects bathrooms. She had nary an inkling of our secret affairs.” She paused, “But my mother was right about him. He was barbaric, he - he was forceful and terrible and --” She cut herself off and her hands clasped before her, a sneer upon her beautiful, pale face.

Ermalene’s voice was tiny, “He killed you,” she suggested, “In the end, he killed you.”

“Yes,” The Grey Lady’s hand flattened upon her torso for a moment. “But before he killed me… before I left Hogwarts… he --” she stopped, unable to utter the words to describe what the Bloody Baron had done, and she whispered, “Peeves is the only one who knows. He was just a boy -- he saw -- I’m sure he didn’t fully understand -- but it’s why Peeves fears the Baron more than any other ghost in the castle, why he is a man and yet still acts a boy… his secret, the one that binds him to Hogwarts is very nearly the same as mine. The Bloody Baron is brutal, stronger than me… and I - I couldn’t stop him. I would rather have died.” Helena shook her head. “But I became pregnant as the result,” she whispered, so softly that her voice was almost lost beneath the sound of Ermalene’s breathing.

Ermalene’s heart rate picked up speed as she realized what the Lady was saying. “Pregnant?” she whispered. “He - he raped you?”

The Lady’s palm, she now noticed, was cradling her abdomen, as though in memory of the curve of a baby bump. “Yes. And I was afraid - I was afraid to tell my mother, afraid to tell the Baron about the child, afraid of what might come of the baby if anyone were to discover how and who… or worse, that I should be forced to marry that beastly man to make the child legitimate,” She hung her head. Then, “It is a terrible thing,” she said, “As a woman, to need advice and wisdom of another, and be unable to seek it from one’s own mother because of terrible fights and an inability to admit that - that I was wrong.”

Ermalene’s heart ached for the pain in Helena Ravenclaw’s voice. She couldn’t imagine the horror that Helena had suffered. “So what did you do?” she asked.

“I sought the wisdom of my mother and so the wisdom is what I took,” she explained, “The diadem has powers… it bestows wisdom upon the wearer. I needed that wisdom, needed it to figure out what to do. So in the night, I snuck into my mother’s quarters and I stole the diadem from her bedside. The moment I put it on, I knew I had to run, to get as far away from Hogwarts as possible. I had to give the child a chance… So I went to Albania,” continued Helena. “I had a little cottage in the shadows of the Prokletije mountains and there I had the child… Bardyllis. He was my one light, my one white star. He was the proof that good things come, even from the hardest times. He gave me hope again that something could be pure and good and I vowed to give the diadem to him, to pass my wisdom on to him, to always be for him the white star that he was to me.”

The passion in the Grey Lady’s voice rose and Ermalene felt herself admiring the woman before her in a new and unexpected way. This lady had so fiercely loved her child that the love was just as fiery as it had been nearly a thousand years ago. She wondered what that was like, to be loved so strongly for never had she felt that sort of love before.

Helena stared up at the ceiling, “And then came the day when my mother’s spirit was failing. She was dying and her final wish was to see me one last time, to make amends with me. Knowing that the Baron had once loved me, unaware of the - the terrible crime he had committed against me and the hatred now between us - my mother sent him to find me, thinking that of all of the people in all the world he would be the only one that I would listen to, that I would return with. Choosing to send the Baron over any other was meant to be an olive branch, a promise of peace between us. I understand that now, but at the time I did not. I saw it as a threat because I was silly and naive and did not remember that she knew nothing of the secrets I’d kept. I don’t know how the Baron found me, but he came to the cottage. I kept Bardyllis hidden from sight with the nurse in a back room of the cottage, protected by magic charms of concealment. The Baron begged of me to return to Hogwarts with him. I told him to give me time in which to think about returning and reluctantly he agreed to return in one month’s time.

“I thought that my mother was truly seeking after the diadem and nothing more. I knew that should she receive the diadem back that she would know of Bardyllis and everything that had conspired… so, I had a second diadem forged by the goblins that lived in the mountains. Exactly like the true diadem in every way. They used the true diadem as a model and then, when they were finished, I had them… disguise… the true diadem so that it would not look like itself, so that I could hide it cleverly without it being detected. On the day when the Baron was to return, I hid the replica in the place I’d hidden the original, and I placed the true diadem with Bardyllis, in the folds of the blankets that kept my son warm so that all of my treasure was bundled together, kept hidden beneath the charms just as before.

“When the Baron returned, I told him that I would surrender the diadem but not return to Hogwarts myself and he was enraged for he had waited a month for me to return with him and, I later learned that Rowena was fading fast at home and the pressure to return to Hogwarts with me was very strong. And so he grabbed hold of me, to force me to go with him, and I remembered only the feeling of the last time that man had touched me and I screamed and made fuss so as to attract the attentions of anyone who might rescue me -- and the Baron was so enraged with me, and so desperately wanted for me to stop screaming, that he lost sense of mind and he sought any way possible to silence me and so he drew his knife… and I screamed no more.”

Ermalene’s hands were covering her mouth in shock, tears filled her eyes. “Oh no,” she whispered.

Helena continued, “Realizing what he had done, the Baron tried to repair my body. He carried me quickly into the cottage, becoming covered in my blood as it seeped from my body, he sought essence of dittany or any potion that I may have stored that could start my heart once more. The protective enchantments I had set to keep Bardyllis safe had expired with my life and the Baron saw for the first time why I had run and what he had done. He stared into the eyes of his son and he felt so much remorse and grief that he ran into the mountains and took his own life as well with the same knife with which he’d taken mine...

“Our spirits returned to Hogwarts and here we have remained since.”

Ermalene lowered her hands slowly. “What became of Bardyllis?”

“His nurse raised him,” Helena replied, “And he grew into a strong man at her knee and eventually he, too, had a son… who had a son… who had a son… and so forth through the generations, passing down the name that I had given him.”

Her mouth felt dry as bone and she whispered, “And the diadem that Tom Riddle turned into a horcrux…”

“Was the replica,” Helena supplied. “When that charming boy came to me seeking the diadem, he thought that I gave away my secret. But I gave him the only thing that I’d ever intended to give any who sought to steal the replica from the heirs of Ravenclaw.”

Ermalene asked, “Then where is the true diadem of Ravenclaw?”

Helena replied, “It has traveled these many years with the family, down through generations, from Bardyllis to every descendant of his family.”

“But if the diadem has been passed down, then how is it lost?” Ermalene questioned.

Helena said, “Because the goblins of Albania melted it down and used the stones and the silver to create a new object, one that could not be recognized for what it is to protect it.”

“What is it now?” Ermalene asked.

Helena Ravenclaw did not reply, but stared at Ermalene, withholding the knowledge purposefully.

Ermalene said, “But maybe if you reveal it to somebody, you’d be able to finally rest.”

“Maybe,” the Grey Lady replied. She looked at the wall, at the paintings watching them, listening with rapt attention to her tale. Her cheeks became slightly more opaque than they normally were, realizing that they had an audience, that her tale was certainly about to be spread all over the castle. She turned back to Ermalene. “The Hall of Ancestors is here,” she said suddenly. She waved her palm at the wall.

“Where?” Ermalene saw no doorway.

“Walk five times past this place, requesting the Hall and it shall appear,” the Grey Lady replied, spinning her finger to indicate the motion of walking.

Ermalene stared up at the wall with it’s dark maroon paper. It was an inconspicuous bit of wall, though it did stand out in the hallway full of paintings as the only blank space along the corridor. The nearest painting, one of a man with a long scroll hanging over a desk with a lantern by his knee, was staring at her with interest, like all the others, adjusting his spectacles. “Only a pureblood can open the Hall,” he said from his frame. Below it was a small brass plate that read Cantankerous Nott Records the Sacred Twenty-Eight.

Ermalene glanced at him, then back at the Grey Lady.

“Go on,” Helena encouraged her.

So Ermalene paced. Forward and backward… backward and forward… thinking about the Hall and the answers that she so desperately sought to find there… about the meaning of family and how badly she wished she had a mother who had loved her as strongly as Helena had loved Bardyllis… forward and backward… backward and forward…

There was a great hissing sound and when she opened her eyes, sparks had lit up on the wall in the shape of the doorway, great golden ropes, shining in the dimly lit corridor. They snaked about, adding details to the door including the knob, which popped from the wall, glowing brightly.

Ermalene stepped up to it, her hand shaking, afraid that it might burn, and touched it quickly. It was quite cool under her tap, so she took hold of it firmly and turned, opening the door. She looked back at the Grey Lady, “Will you come with me?” she asked.

Helena shook her head, “I cannot,” she replied.

“Why?”

“I just can’t,” she answered heavily. “Go.”

Ermalene turned back to the doorway and stepped inside the brightly lit room. Her eyes adjusting to the light, she glanced around, and before she’d even comprehended all that she was seeing, a voice broke the silence…

“Ermalene Talon? Is that you?”