"Look, quick—the shore's gone!"
Justin from Hufflepuff's startled, loud cry made Harry, who like most of the others aboard had been gazing idly out toward the distant heart of the lake, whip his head around sharply at the sound.
Just as Justin had shouted, the shore where the boat had docked only moments before had vanished from view behind them, swallowed up somewhere in the haze. Now the boat sat somewhere out in the middle of the lake.
And it wasn't heading toward the island at the lake's centre at all, either, as everyone had assumed—it was moving instead in the exact opposite direction, cutting a slow path away from where the prison presumably stood!
"From this moment on, we are on our way to Avalon Prison—"
Professor Watson walked from the railing, where the students had instinctively kept their distance, toward the centre of the boat instead, and addressed everyone gathered there with a smile.
Fwip, fwip, fwip!
Through the lake breeze, soft as any spring wind despite the season, came a few sharp, piercing shrieks cutting through the air—as if a dozen bird-like shapes, each one trailing thin wisps of steam behind it, had suddenly swept in from somewhere far off and now hovered above the oak vessel.
"Monitoring Omni-oculars—"
Harry blurted it out instantly.
"That's right, well done—"
Professor Watson nodded at Harry approvingly, clearly pleased by the quick recognition, then turned to give the whole crowd of curious young wizards a bit of "background" on the matter, settling into the explanation.
"This lake carries a great many powerful magical wards layered one atop another, some of them my own work, others Professor Dumbledore's. Anyone hoping to cross this water and reach Avalon Island by force alone is simply not going to manage it—"
"What exactly are they, then, Professor Watson? Would you tell us?"
Cedric asked, leaning forward slightly, clearly interested.
Harry had privately assumed the question would go unanswered, or at least deflected—but to his surprise, Professor Watson actually told them.
"First, every stretch of space within your current sight, in every direction, is bound by a powerful Anti-Disapparition Charm. Anyone attempting to Apparate here—even goblins or house-elves, with their own separate means of instant travel that ordinarily bypass such wards—will find, without exception, that it simply isn't going to happen for them—"
Bryan said gently, his tone was patient.
"Beyond the Monitoring Omnioculars circling above your head, the surface of the lake itself is also laid with Anti-Flight Charms, Howling Charms, and a number of far more formidable spells besides that I won't trouble you with the names of just now. Any intruder foolish enough to try crossing the lake by flying, on broom or otherwise, will be burned to ash."
"And beneath the lake, Professor? What's down there?"
Hermione raised her hand eagerly at that, as though she were back in a classroom.
She had, after all, endured her own share of trials beneath the Black Lake back during the second task of the Triwizard Tournament, and the question came from genuine, hard-won curiosity rather than idle interest.
"There are vast numbers of Monitoring Omnioculars stationed beneath the surface too, Miss Granger, every bit as thorough as the ones above. In fact, feel free to look for yourselves if you'd like—only do be careful about it. If you happen to fall in, I'm afraid I can't entirely promise I'll be able to fish you back out again in time—"
Bryan said, chuckling warmly at his own dry warning.
The young wizards crowded toward the railing at once, jostling for a good view. Harry squeezed himself a spot among them too, leaning carefully out over the edge to study the clear water below.
The lake, was crystal clear without a single trace of murk clouding it anywhere.
And once Harry's eyes adjusted past the shifting, dazzling play of light on the rippling surface, he saw that the lakebed far below wasn't sand or silt at all, as he'd have assumed, but was instead carpeted entirely in a dense layer of vines—green shading gradually into pale blue toward their tips—woven together tightly like a vast, living net stretched across the whole bottom.
"What plant is that, Neville?"
Harry couldn't help asking, turning to the boy standing beside him at the railing.
"Sorry, I don't actually know, Harry—"
Neville shook his head slowly, still peering down at the water himself, and the admission caught Harry rather off guard—because when it came to Herbology, Neville was reliably better than even Hermione, and rarely stumped by anything green.
"But I'd guess, just looking at them, that these vines share some of the same traits as Devil's Snare, from the general shape of the growth. And look—see the blue barbs running along them there, Harry, just at the edges—"
Neville said gravely.
"These vines are very likely poisonous. Professor Watson wasn't exaggerating a bit when he warned us. We'd best all be careful."
After Professor Watson's brief, matter-of-fact account of the lake's true defences, the tranquil, sunlit illusion that had settled comfortably over the whole scene dissolved rather abruptly—and something of its menace showed through the surface calm for the first time.
Which meant, several students realized, that the boat currently beneath their feet was the only way to reach the prison at the lake's heart?
Someone in the crowd was quick to point this exact conclusion out aloud.
"Hijacking this boat is no simple matter at all, I promise you—"
Professor Watson tapped the deck lightly with the toe of his shoe, and said smiling easily the suggestion,
"First, you'd have to defeat, in the space of a single blink, the several dozen highly trained Hit Wizards stationed back at the harbour we just left—because those particular men hold the authority to destroy this oak vessel in an instant, the moment they judge it necessary.
And even if you somehow, against all odds, managed that first part, you still wouldn't be able to board the boat and use it for your purposes.
Because there's another separate group of wizards stationed on the island itself who hold that exact same destructive authority, and they keep a constant watch on the shore as well. If they see the harbour breached and its guards defeated, they'll simply use their own authority to destroy the boat all the same—"
Hermione knew that she probably shouldn't be dwelling on this quite so hard, picking at it like a loose thread, but she couldn't quite help herself, already searching for the flaw in the system.
"What if someone had a sufficiently clever method to fool the guards on shore, though—Polyjuice Potion, say, or the Imperius Curse used on someone already trusted, or becoming an Animagus to slip through unnoticed—"
"Avalon Prison has safeguards in place against every single method you've just named there, Miss Granger, I promise you that much. Though I'm afraid I can't say a great deal more about the specifics of how, for obvious reasons—"
Professor Watson said, his tone turning briefly more serious.
"Unlike Azkaban, which relies heavily on its natural barriers and its Dementors for security, most of Avalon Prison's own defences rely instead on people—trained, vetted, watchful people, working in layers.
So, in designing this prison's defences from scratch, I built in a system considerably more thorough than Azkaban ever had, or Erkstag, or any of the other wizarding prisons.
Take, for instance, this very boat we're all standing on right now—it has to drift across the lake for a full hour before it's even permitted to dock at the island, so that the people stationed there have time to determine, through certain confidential means I won't detail, whether an infiltrator has managed to slip in somewhere among us along the way."
He paused there, letting that sink in, and Bryan's gaze drifted, seemingly by chance, toward Theodore Nott, standing among the gathered Slytherins.
"And here's the other truly crucial point: unless whoever is actually trying to breach Avalon Prison is somehow capable of killing every single guard here in a single, simultaneous instant—the moment this prison suffers any breach at all, of any degree or any kind whatsoever—the Ministry of Magic and I personally will be notified immediately without any delay."
That, several of the young wizards thought privately to themselves that must be the real reason Avalon Prison feared no invasion.
There was no need to stand on such ceremony aboard this boat, Harry thought, finally able to relax a little.
He stepped back from the crowded railing, pulled a boiled egg from his coat pocket, cracked the shell open against his palm, and popped the whole thing into his mouth in one go, chewing contentedly.
"Harry—"
Most of the other students were still clustered thick at the railing, peppering Professor Watson with a steady stream of further questions. Taking the small opening while attention was elsewhere, Hermione came quietly over to where he stood.
"What time is it now?"
"Seven-oh-eight—"
Harry glanced down at his watch and answered around a mouthful of egg.
At this particular hour on a Saturday morning, Ron would still be fast asleep in bed back at the castle.
Seeing the small, telltale furrow forming on Hermione's brow at the answer, Harry knew exactly what she was worrying over.
"Don't worry so much, Hermione. I trust Ron won't get himself into any trouble—he's sharper than you sometimes give him credit for, honestly—"
Hermione wasn't entirely sure whether she ought to feel touched that Harry had such straightforward faith in Ron's judgment, or mildly offended that Harry seemed, in the same breath, to be gently questioning her own judgment on the matter instead.
In the end, weighing both options, she settled for shooting Harry a brief, irritated look for good measure, then wandered off a few steps to admire the view of the lake instead, leaving the matter there.
It was just as Professor Watson had described it all, exactly.
Though the great oak boat beneath them kept moving forward without any pause, it never once settled into any fixed, predictable position on the vast expanse of open lake around them.
At its very closest pass, they came within perhaps half a mile of the prison itself. But even then, viewed from the moving boat, the island sitting at the lake's heart stayed stubbornly shrouded in a hazy, shifting light, and nothing on it could be made out clearly, no matter how hard anyone squinted.
At its farthest point, by contrast, the island shrank to nothing more than a small, dark speck sitting at the very edge of their field of view.
A few times over the course of the crossing, the boat even flickered back, disorientingly, to somewhere near the very shore where they'd first started out, as though retracing its own path for no clear reason.
No one needed to explain any of it to him directly—Harry understood well enough on his own, watching the pattern, that the great oak boat's whole course across the water was deliberately chaotic, following no fixed pattern at all that a hostile observer could ever hope to predict or exploit.
Listening carefully to everything Professor Watson had described, the young wizards gathered aboard found themselves settling considerably as the crossing wore on, the earlier tension was easing.
After all, over the course of just a single turbulent year, two of the wizarding world's most storied, supposedly impenetrable prisons—Azkaban and Erkstag both—had each been breached in turn, one after the other.
There had been a time, not so very long ago, when Sirius Black's escape from Azkaban alone had thrown the whole of Britain's magical world into complete uproar for weeks, and Fudge, in his day, had been frightened badly enough by it to go running personally to notify the Muggle Prime Minister of the danger.
And now, with Voldemort's open return to power, wizarding prisons being breached and their most dangerous criminals scattering out to the winds had started to feel, disturbingly, almost commonplace to everyone, the shock of it was dulled by repetition.
Thud—
One moment the great oak boat had been drifting idly, almost lazily, at the lake's centre, going nowhere in particular; the next, it lurched hard beneath everyone's feet, as though it had struck some hidden reef just beneath the surface.
The hazy, shifting light that had hung before them the whole crossing scattered all simultaneously in every direction, and Avalon Prison appeared before everyone's eyes at last, without any further warning.
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