Mid-October 1994, Hogwarts Castle, the Library, 4:42 PM
October at Hogwarts had settled, by the second week of the month, into the particular rhythm that always belonged to October at Hogwarts—the leaves on the lakeside trees turning the colours of old bronze and worn copper, the lake water grey before lunch and silver after, the smell of woodsmoke from the village rising in the still afternoons, and a low, unspoken anticipation throughout the castle that something out of the ordinary was approaching and was taking its time arriving.
Inside the library, the small four-table corner that had become, by quiet consensus, the territory of the Group occupied its accustomed positions. Hermione was at the head of the largest table with three open books, two scrolls of parchment, a small ink-pot of the peacock-blue ink Luna had bought her in Hogsmeade, and the focused expression of a girl whose Time-Turner—still, Harry knew, hidden on its slim chain beneath her jumper, just in case, had not been used since term began. The workload had, for once, been fitted. Hermione had remarked upon this with the particular satisfaction of a girl who had spent two years carrying more than was reasonable and had, over the summer, learnt the discipline of enough.
Harry had a Charms essay open before him and a private second project to one side—a small bound notebook in which he had begun to sketch threadwork diagrams for Hermione's wandless training, the gradual progression curriculum he had promised her in August. He had been understated about it. He had been understated about a great many things this term. The professors knew, of course; McGonagall in particular had taken to giving him his Transfiguration assignments with a faint, knowing look that meant yes, dear, I am aware that you finished this essay before the question was set, do not be smug about it. Snape had, by some miracle of professional accommodation, dialled the bashing back to perhaps a quarter of its previous frequency. Harry suspected this was less concession than recognition: after the events of the previous year, Mordred Slythra, the duel, the things Harry had done that Snape had observed without acknowledging, the Potions Master had reached his own private revision and had decided that Harry Potter was less of an absolute waste of his time than initially supposed.
It was not affection. It was barely civility. But it was, Harry had decided to consider, progress.
"Ron," Hermione said, without looking up, "stop tapping."
"I'm thinking."
"You are tapping."
"That's how I think."
"You are thinking very loudly."
Ron had, against all natural inclination, become a creditable Defence Against the Dark Arts student this term—Moody's intensity had a way of motivating compliance and an equally creditable Charms student under Flitwick. The rest of his subjects he was getting by in, which was, by the Ron Weasley calibration, an excellent term.
Across the library, at a separate small Ravenclaw study-table, Luna was working on an Ancient Runes translation under the dotingly proud supervision of Professor Flitwick himself, who had taken to wandering past her table whenever he could find a pretext and had begun, increasingly, to refer to her with quiet pride as Mr Esther's apprentice. The fact that she was Ethan Esther's apprentice—a fact Flitwick had only recently confirmed for himself through correspondence with an old colleague, appeared to have transformed Luna in his estimation from unusually gifted Ravenclaw to future colleague.
Astoria sat at Luna's elbow with the precise vigilance of a sister-in-spirit on guard duty. A second-year boy from Ravenclaw had attempted, three days previously, to mock Luna's earrings. Astoria had not raised her voice. She had simply looked at him for approximately seven seconds, after which the boy had remembered an urgent appointment elsewhere. Harry, observing from the next aisle, had decided not to intervene; Astoria had it well in hand. He had still made very sure to walk past on his way out.
Then, the peace of October was punctured, predictably, by Defence Against the Dark Arts.
Moody had decided that Wednesday afternoon was the appropriate time to teach the fourth-years the resistance of the Imperius Curse. He had lined them up along the classroom wall, one at a time, drawn his wand, and applied the curse to each in turn with the dispassionate efficiency of a man performing a fitness assessment.
The lecture preceding had been clipped. "The Ministry says I cannot do this. The Ministry has not said it twice. Until they say it twice, you will all learn what it feels like to have your mind gently invited to be someone else's, and you will learn what it feels like to refuse that invitation. You will be grateful, when you are forty and somebody attempts this for real, that I taught you this when you were fourteen."
Most of the class proved approximately as resistant as wet paper. Seamus performed an enthusiastic Irish jig. Dean attempted three impressions of Professor Sprout. Lavender Brown, given the curse, walked in a perfect figure-eight reciting the names of moonstone properties; Parvati, when prompted to climb upon the desk and recite a love-poem, did so with such vigour that the entire class was applauding before Moody released her. Hermione, given the curse, abruptly stood very straight, saluted toward the staff table portrait of an old witch, and announced, "For the Captain! Wood would have wanted it!"—at which point the entire row of Gryffindors collapsed laughing, including Moody, who allowed himself a single dry bark of approval.
"Granger," Moody said, releasing her. "Tribute. I'll allow it. Sit down."
It was Ron who surprised them.
Moody applied the curse. Ron's eyes went briefly glassy. Moody said, "Quack like a duck, Mr Weasley," with the precise disinterest of a man giving a small instruction. Ron did not quack.
Moody waited. He pushed harder.
Ron did not quack.
The room registered the silence with growing astonishment. Ron's brow had begun to crease. His freckled hands had clenched. Forty-eight seconds passed—Hermione was, characteristically, counting and Ron still did not quack.
Then he fainted.
He fell, with the slow grace of a tall boy whose tall body had used itself up, directly into Lavender Brown's arms. Lavender, who had spent the last fortnight conducting a careful, mostly-successful campaign of low-level retaliation for the Trelawney incident, found herself catching approximately eleven and a half stone of unconscious Weasley with a small oof and an expression of considerable confusion.
Ron came round about a minute later in Lavender's arms, blinked up at her, blushed the precise red of his hair, and stammered, "S-sorry," with such genuine unstrung apology that Lavender's expression softened into something Harry would later describe to Hermione as complicatedly forgiving.
"He resisted for forty-eight seconds," Hermione murmured to Harry afterwards. "That is genuinely extraordinary. Ron has the strongest stubbornness I have ever encountered, and it appears stubbornness is, mechanically, a Mind-magic resistance."
Then it was Harry's turn.
He felt it the moment Moody's wand turned his way. The Imperius did not arrive as a command; it arrived as an invitation, warm and soft, suggesting that there was no reason to hold any particular thought in his head and that letting go would be easier than not. Harry's Cogitation engaged before he had to call it—the blue moon assembling at the back of his mind with reflex speed as his Occlumency shields slid into place behind it with the smooth mechanical efficiency of years of practice.
The invitation slid off him.
Moody pushed harder. He pushed several times, in fact, with increasing technical interest, and Harry stood at the wall with his wand in his hand and his mind precisely his own, and looked steadily back at Moody with the small wry expression that had become, over the term, his preferred mode of professional engagement with the man.
The eye, the magical one, had gone fixed and very intent.
Moody released the curse.
"Good," he said, in the carrying voice. "Very good, Potter. Sit down."
He marked something in his ledger.
Harry sat. He did not look at the ledger. He felt, distinctly, that the ledger was being marked.
Transfiguration the following morning was Professor McGonagall in full pre-O.W.L. mode—a professional manifestation Harry had not previously witnessed and now hoped never to witness again. She had stood in front of the fourth-years with her hands clasped behind her back, and she had looked at them with the exact expression of a woman who had attempted, with limited success, to keep them alive long enough to reach this point and was about to inform them that she expected them to keep themselves alive for the next eighteen months.
"O.W.L.s," she announced. "End of next year. Begin now."
A collective groan rose. McGonagall did not blink.
"Ordinary Wizarding Levels. Five subjects minimum, more by sane election. They determine what N.E.W.T. courses you may take in your sixth and seventh years, which determine in turn the careers available to you. They are not difficult if you have prepared properly. They are catastrophic if you have not. You will, beginning this week, receive additional preparatory homework in this subject and in others. You will also, beginning next week, receive your first formal career-aspirations consultation with your Head of House. You will think seriously about this. You will not waste my time with the answer I don't know yet."
Hermione's eyes had taken on the specific, hot, bright, focused intensity that meant Hermione had just found a new mountain to scale. Harry's eyes had lit, more quietly, with the recognition of someone whose path he had been silently considering for some time—the Department of Mysteries and the Unspeakables; his father's path, the gloomy genius; the work of the world's quieter rooms. Ron, beside him, had groaned audibly.
"Mr Weasley."
"Professor—"
"That groan suggests that you imagine your future to involve not working very hard over the next eighteen months. Allow me to disabuse you."
What followed was a four-minute lecture, delivered without raised voice, that managed to be more terrifying than any shout. Ron's ears were the colour of post-boxes by the end of it.
"Yes, Professor."
"Excellent. Your essay is also five inches short, Mr Weasley. I will expect the additional five inches Friday, on top of the standard assignment, on top of the new preparatory work I am setting today."
"Yes, Professor."
"Splendid. Class dismissed."
Mid-October 1994, Hagrid's Paddock, 4:47 PM
A week later—on a Saturday afternoon that had set itself up to be a peaceful one, Harry and Luna took advantage of a free afternoon to go and help Hagrid with the new Thestral foals.
The herd lived in a small enclosed paddock behind the line of trees beyond Hagrid's hut, and Hagrid had been managing the new foaling season for about a month. He had grown considerably more confident in his role as Care of Magical Creatures professor over the past year, but the Thestrals were close to his heart in a particular way, and he had been, Harry suspected, hoping for an excuse to introduce them properly to someone who would appreciate them.
The two of them arrived at the hut with a basket of scones Molly had sent by owl-post and the easy companionable silence of two friends who had walked together in many places, including some considerably further from Scotland.
"Hagrid?"
"Out back, Harry!"
They rounded the hut and stopped short.
Hagrid was in the paddock, in his enormous moleskin coat, kneeling in the grass with one massive hand resting very gently on the side of a small velvet-black foal whose leathery wings—still wet and barely formed—were folded at its sides. The foal's eyes were open. They were the milk-white pearl of all young Thestrals, with that disconcerting blank brightness that only later acquired the watchful intelligence of the adult animal. Around them, three more foals stood with their mothers.
Hagrid looked up.
His enormous beetle-black eyes moved between Harry and Luna. They both, Harry registered, had stopped at precisely the place where the foal in front of Hagrid was clearly visible to them, in a way that—if they had been unable to see Thestrals—it would not have been.
Hagrid's mouth opened. It hung there for a moment.
Then he closed it. He did not ask. He did not say anything. His gaze softened in the particular way of a man who was now recalculating a number of things in private.
"Well," Hagrid said, after a moment. "Right then. Glad yeh could come help. Yeh'll find brushes in the small shed there. Mind the third one in the corner, the bristles've gone a bit sharp."
Harry understood what had not been asked, and was grateful.
They worked with him for over an hour. Hagrid showed them how to approach the foals from the side rather than the front, how to scratch the place at the base of the wing-joint that the mothers groomed but could not easily reach themselves, how to encourage the foal to eat from the hand without permitting it to nip. Luna had a particular gift for them—she crouched in the grass and a foal walked up and rested its small velvet head against her shoulder and stayed there for ten minutes whilst she traced gentle slow circles on its withers.
Jasper, who had emerged from Harry's pocket with curious chirping interest, was at one point taken into Hagrid's enormous hand and brushed, very gently, with a small soft-bristled brush Hagrid produced from somewhere. The brush was the size of Hagrid's thumb-pad. The Snidget was the size of a large sparrow. The whole tableau had, Harry thought, the precise unexpected delicacy of large men proving capable of small tendernesses, and he watched it with a private throat-tightening pleasure that he did not show.
"He's a fine bird, Harry," Hagrid rumbled. "Fine bird."
"He likes you."
"Course he does. I'm trustworthy."
By the end of the hour the sun had begun to drop toward the trees, and the paddock had taken on a thick autumn gold that made everything in it briefly dreamlike. Harry was carrying a pail of grain-mash toward the small feeding trough with Luna walking just ahead of him, and a foal—small, black, curious—chose precisely that moment to skip sideways, not in alarm but with the specific clumsy delight of a young creature.
It bumped into Luna's hip.
Luna stumbled a half-step. Harry's hand was already at her elbow before he had registered moving—the trained reflex Ethan had built into him and the half-step turned into a small fall that he caught against his chest. The pail clanged against his shin and tipped harmlessly into the grass.
For a precise second, they stood like that.
Luna was warm, and small, and pressed against him. The cardigan she wore was soft. Her hair smelled of her usual lavender and the autumn wind. Her hands had landed flat against his chest, just below the collar of his jumper, and through the wool she could surely feel—as he could feel hers—the immediate, treacherous, accelerated thudding of his heart.
Luna's silvery grey eyes, very close, were very wide.
His own face, Harry was certain, was on fire.
'Hormones,' Harry's mind announced, in the precisely level voice of a boy who had had, at the start of the summer, a frank and deeply uncomfortable Talk with his father about exactly this category of physiological development and what to expect from it. 'You are fourteen. Your body is a chemistry experiment. This is normal. Just.. if needed ... there's Cogitation.'
The blue moon assembled, with reflex speed, behind his eyes.
His heartbeat, slowly, found its way back to baseline.
Luna's eyes, he saw, had taken on a particular focused interior look. She's doing it too, he thought, with a small distinct flicker of fond pride. She's doing Cogitation. We're both calming down.
"All right?" he said, very carefully, into the small space between them.
"All right," Luna confirmed. Her voice was perfectly level. She did not entirely move away from him. He did not entirely move away from her. Her hands stayed on his chest a half-second longer than physics required.
A long, low, very enthusiastic whistle came from across the paddock.
Hagrid, leaning on his staff and grinning hugely, was pretending to look in another direction with the precise transparent unconvincingness of an enormous man pretending not to have seen.
Jasper, on Hagrid's massive shoulder, was vibrating with what Harry could only describe as the excited Snidget equivalent of an approving snigger.
Luna stepped back, with composure, and smoothed her cardigan, and said, "I'll fetch more mash," and turned and walked toward the shed with the dignity of a girl who had decided that the moment was not over so much as paused.
Harry, who suspected he was about the colour of Hagrid's prize pumpkins, picked up the pail.
"Hagrid."
"Yes, Harry?"
"Don't."
"Wouldn't dream of it."
It was exactly at this point, with the gold of the late afternoon thickening to bronze, that Ron came barrelling through the trees from the direction of the castle at a dead run, his school robes flapping, his face the precise colour of his hair, his chest heaving.
"Harry! Hermione says—come now—they're—"
"Breathe, Ron."
"The schools. They're here. They're arriving. The Ravenclaws spotted something coming over the lake—come now—"
Mid-October 1994, Hogwarts Castle, the Front Lawns, 5:34 PM
The four Houses had been assembled in long lines along the lawn before the front steps of the castle.
The October sky above was darkening to the colour of slate, with the first stars emerging at the edges; the lake stretched beyond them in still grey. The whole school stood with the particular hush of anticipation, and the staff—McGonagall, Flitwick, Sprout, Snape, Moody, Hagrid (towering even at the edge), Dumbledore at the centre—stood ranged along the top of the steps in their finest robes.
Madame Maxime arrived first.
She came out of the sky.
A vast pale-blue carriage drawn by twelve enormous winged Abraxan horses—each the size of a small elephant, palomino-gold against the dusk, harnessed in silver—descended in slow circling from above the trees and landed on the lawn with an impact that shook the gravel. The carriage door opened. A figure of staggering proportions emerged—a woman as tall as Hagrid, perhaps fractionally taller, with handsome black hair drawn back severely, dark eyes, and a heavy black satin travelling cloak that draped from her enormous shoulders with imperial elegance.
Olympe Maxime, Headmistress of Beauxbatons.
Hagrid, beside Dumbledore on the steps, had gone very still in the way of an enormous man who had just registered something. His beetle-black eyes had taken on a peculiar struck-shy quality. Harry noted this with the small private amusement of a boy who had observed many things over the years.
Behind Madame Maxime came her students—a delegation of perhaps twenty, in robes of the same pale blue, walking with the precise self-aware grace of students who had been informed they represented something. They were led by a young woman of striking, almost luminous beauty—silver-blonde hair, pale skin, the sort of clean line of feature that produced, in the surrounding crowd, the same low murmuring susurrus the Veela had produced at the World Cup.
Harry felt the pull, registered it, performed the now-reflexive interior gesture that engaged Cogitation, and the pull receded into nothing more than the ordinary recognition of yes, that woman is beautiful, the same way he might recognise a beautiful sunset.
Beside him, however—
"Ron," Hermione hissed.
Ron's mouth was actually open. There was a small, distinct, treacherous gleam at the corner of his lower lip that Harry was pretty sure was actual drool.
"Ron."
A small but precise crack sounded as Lavender Brown's open palm met Ron's cheek with the specific smartness of a girl who was only just not about to declare hostilities. Ron's head snapped sideways. He blinked. Awareness returned to his face in stages.
"Ow."
"You are welcome," Lavender said, with awful sweetness, and turned her face very precisely away from him to look at the lake.
Hermione gave Harry the look of a woman beholding the fall of empires. Harry returned the look of a man who suspected reconstruction was going to take some considerable time.
Then, from the lake, came a sound.
It was the sound of water beginning to displace upward. The lake's flat grey surface bulged in the centre, then broke open, then disgorged—rising slowly, water cascading down its black sides—a tall, three-masted ship of gleaming dark wood with a green-glass figurehead and lanterns burning at its prow. Skeletal in its architecture, beautiful in its silhouette, it sailed serenely the last hundred yards toward the shore where the lake waters lapped at the lawns. From its deck, in heavy fur cloaks of crimson and dark grey, the Durmstrang delegation began to disembark.
Igor Karkaroff led them. He was a thin man with a goatee, oily-haired, his smile fixed and not entirely sincere, his eyes constantly moving.
Behind him, walking with the heavy, slightly flat-footed stride that Harry had seen in a stadium not two months ago, came Viktor Krum.
The whole crowd registered him at the same moment. There was a low collective murmur.
Krum did not look up. He did not need to.
He walked with the precise attention of a young man who was professionally accustomed to being watched and had learnt to exclude the watching from his cognition.
Until.
Until his dark eyes, in their slow hawkish sweep across the front rank of the Hogwarts students, found Hermione Granger.
His face did not, by any external measure, change. It was Krum: the impassive serious face that had stared down a Bludger in the third minute of the World Cup Final without flinching. But to the trained observer—and Harry, by now, qualified—a small, very specific brightening occurred in the eyes. A tiny half-nod. The ghost of the relief of a person who had not been certain they would see again the person they had been hoping to see again.
Hermione, Harry registered with the same trained observation, had gone the same colour Ron had been three minutes earlier, only on different grounds entirely. She was very deliberately not looking at Krum. She was looking at her own shoes.
Harry leaned slightly to her ear. "Hermione."
"Don't."
"Hermione."
"Harry, I am warning you—"
"He saw you."
"I know he saw me, do not say anything—"
"Notebook girl."
"Harry James Potter-Esther I will hex you."
Harry noded bemusedly, for the first time all afternoon.
The Welcoming Feast was vast. The Beauxbatons students, by Dumbledore's instruction, took the Ravenclaw table; the Durmstrang delegation took Slytherin. Madame Maxime was given a seat of carefully constructed dignity at the staff table; Karkaroff took his place beside her. Hagrid arrived late to the staff table, his face flushed in a way that Harry decided not to comment upon. Bagman arrived later still. Crouch arrived last—his posture as immaculate as ever, his expression somewhere middle-distance, and a quality in him that Harry could not quite name and that nudged, faintly, at the back of his mind.
The food was extraordinary. There were dishes Harry had never seen on a Hogwarts table—delicate French pastries in small towers, hearty Slavic stews of paprika and beef, pickled herring, chocolate desserts that Luna pronounced very promising. The Beauxbatons students were, after the initial reserve, charming; the Durmstrang students were more reticent, but two of them turned out to speak excellent English and to be, in their way, extremely funny.
When the plates cleared, Dumbledore rose.
The Hall settled into the precise listening hush.
"Welcome," he said, "to the schools of Beauxbatons and of Durmstrang. We are honoured by your presence." He inclined his head to Maxime and to Karkaroff. "Mr Bartemius Crouch and Mr Ludovic Bagman, of the Department of International Magical Co-operation and the Department of Magical Games and Sports respectively, will be joining the three Headteachers as judges of the Tournament's three tasks." A small applause. "And before we proceed to the matter of the Goblet—"
He paused.
"There is one further announcement, which—forgive me, my colleagues and friends—I have been keeping until tonight. Tomorrow morning, at ten o'clock, Hogwarts will welcome two further schools to this Tournament. The Wizarding world has, in our more recent consultations, agreed that an event of this magnitude ought to reflect a broader internationality than has historically been the case. It is therefore my privilege to announce that we shall also be hosting—" he allowed the suspense to sit for two full seconds "—the Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry of North America, and the Uagadou School of Magic of the African continent."
The Hall erupted.
Harry's hand found Luna's almost before either of them had thought.
"Robert," he said quietly.
"And Howard, perhaps," Luna said, with the small warm certainty she reserved for the people she most believed in. "Robert is sixth-year now. Of an age. They will surely send him."
"Howard isn't a student—"
"He is a teacher, Harry. He may have come."
Their eyes met. The warmth that passed between them was the warmth of two people who had, between them, a small private list of friends scattered across the world, and who had just been informed, with no warning, that the world was being brought to their door.
Across the Hall, on the staff table dais, Dumbledore raised his glass.
"To friends," he said, "old and new. Tomorrow at ten. Goodnight."