16th October 1994, Hogwarts Castle, the Front Lawns, 9:47 AM
The morning had arrived with the particular crisp clarity of mid-October at Hogwarts, when the sky was the pale washed blue of cold mountain water and the sun gave light without warmth. The four Houses had been re-assembled along the lawn for the second morning in a row, joined now by the Beauxbatons delegation in their pale blue robes—shivering politely but visibly in the Highland chill—and the Durmstrang contingent in their heavy fur cloaks, who looked, by contrast, mildly pleased with the conditions.
The lawn was abuzz with quiet speculation. The two further schools were due in thirteen minutes, and almost no one in the assembled crowd had any idea what to expect from either of them.
"Ilvermorny," Hermione was telling the immediate cluster around her, with the precise authority of a girl who had spent the previous night reading the only book in the Hogwarts library that addressed it, "is in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York. Founded in the early 1600s by Isolt Sayre, an Irish witch who fled her aunt and crossed the Atlantic. Four Houses, named for North American magical creatures—Wampus, Thunderbird, Horned Serpent, Pukwudgie. And they teach a slightly broader curriculum than Hogwarts, with more emphasis on indigenous magical traditions—"
"Pukwudgie?" Ron repeated.
"Pukwudgie."
"That's a name?"
"It's a magical creature, Ronald—"
"It sounds like a cake."
"Uagadou," Daphne said quietly, with the calm of a girl who had grown up in a family that bothered to read about other parts of the world, "is harder. There is almost nothing published about it in Britain. It's the largest wizarding school in the world, located in the Mountains of the Moon in Uganda. They specialise in wandless magic, transfiguration, and astronomy—the students learn to do most of their magic without wands at all by the time they leave."
"Wandless?" Ron's eyebrows went up. "All of it?"
"Most. Yes."
Astoria, who had been quietly watching Luna's face for two minutes, leaned over. "You're looking for someone?"
"Yes," Luna said serenely.
"Robert?"
"Yes."
"Should I be jealous?"
"Don't be silly. He's just a friend. We met at Ilvermorny when Harry and I went with Ethan three summers ago. He's lovely. You'll like him."
"I am sure I shall," Astoria said, with the precise diplomatic restraint of a girl reserving her judgement.
Harry, who had been scanning the western horizon with the careful attention of a boy who had been waiting for a friend, did not lower his gaze. 'Howard would have written if he were coming. He hasn't written. But he might have just not had the time...'
A shadow crossed the sun.
Heads tilted up. The Beauxbatons students, already familiar with arrival-from-above, looked smug. The Hogwarts students did not. The Durmstrang students looked, in unison, professionally unbothered.
What descended out of the western sky was not a flying carriage.
It was a flock.
A wide, loose formation of perhaps thirty enormous birds—larger than any bird Harry had ever seen, with wingspans that put the Abraxan horses of Beauxbatons to shame—came down out of the cold blue with the unhurried economy of creatures that had been flying for many hours and had decided not to make a spectacle of arrival. Their feathers were a colour that did not entirely choose between gold and bronze and copper, and their dark heads held back-swept crests like brushed flame. They were, Harry registered with a small flicker of recognition from his summer reading, Thunderbirds.
They circled. They settled, in a wide ring at the edge of the lawn, with the calm authority of something that knew the ground would hold them.
The students of Ilvermorny dismounted.
They were not in robes. They wore travelling cloaks of cranberry-red over plain dark trousers and white shirts—practical, almost American-Muggle, but with the small magical flourishes (a row of silver buttons on a cuff, a faint stitched serpent on a collar) that Harry had come to recognise as the particular Ilvermorny style. There were perhaps twenty of them. They walked toward the lawn with the easy social democracy of a school that did not rank its students by formality.
A tall, white-haired witch stepped out at their head. She wore navy blue robes embroidered with silver Wampus-cat motifs, and she walked with the calm, authoritative briskness of a woman who had run her school for many years and was visibly enjoying the air. Headmistress Agilbert Fontaine, by Harry's library research; he could not have said for certain at twenty paces, but the bearing fitted.
Behind her, in the third row of students from the front, a familiar figure had already spotted Harry and Luna in the Gryffindor line and was waving with such enthusiasm that the boy beside him was leaning slightly away in self-protection.
"Robert," Harry breathed.
He was taller. He had grown that particular vertical inch and a half that sixth-years acquired over a summer. His close-cropped black hair was the same; his intelligent dark eyes were the same; the faint half-smile of a boy who took the world seriously but had decided to remain hopeful about it was the same. He was wearing the cranberry cloak with a small silver pin Harry recognised as Horned Serpent.
Luna's hand had tightened in Harry's.
Robert grinned. The grin was enormous. He did not break formation, but his grin alone seemed to traverse the lawn.
"Howard?" Hermione asked, who had gathered the relevant context from Harry's previous summer's account.
"I don't see him," Harry said. "He must have—" His eyes scanned the line of teachers behind Headmistress Fontaine. None of them was Howard. "He must be coming separately."
'Or with Dad,' a quiet voice in his head suggested. 'Who would know perfectly well that Howard was coming over from America for this and might have arranged a side-trip.'
He held the thought.
The second arrival, when it came, came differently again.
There was no descent and no ship.
There was, simply, a parting in the air at the eastern edge of the lawn—a soundless folding-aside of the cold morning, as though a sheet of glass had momentarily turned ninety degrees—and through the parting walked, in single procession, the delegation of Uagadou.
Twenty students. They had the broad spectrum of rich brown skin tones that the African continent's vastness produced—from honey-amber to deep black and they wore robes of beautifully patterned cloth in the deep reds and yellows and greens of warm earth, with embroidered detailing at the collar and cuff that Harry's eye, untrained in the specifics, registered as both meaningful and deeply old. A very few of them carried wands. Most did not.
They walked with the silence of a group whose magic was wordless and had been wordless for many generations.
At their head, a small woman of immense composure—greying hair tied back in tight neat braids, a long indigo robe of intricate beadwork, an expression of warm intellectual amusement—came forward and extended both hands to Dumbledore in the formal greeting of a woman who knew precisely how welcoming was done. Babajide Akingbade, Headmistress of Uagadou.
She and Dumbledore embraced, with the particular ease of two old colleagues who had corresponded for years and had finally got around to seeing one another.
"Friends, all of you," Dumbledore announced, turning, "be welcome at Hogwarts."
By Dumbledore's quiet arrangement, the Ilvermorny students were to share the Gryffindor table; Uagadou would join Hufflepuff. Both pairings had been chosen with care. The Pukwudgie heart-tradition of Ilvermorny rhymed quietly with the Gryffindor courage-of-heart; the African school's emphasis on natural magic and earthen connection rhymed quietly with Sprout's house and its earth-loving students. The arrangements clicked into place across the Hall as the second Welcoming Feast assembled itself.
What followed was, by some considerable margin, the most cosmopolitan meal in Hogwarts' recent memory.
The food itself was extraordinary—the Ilvermorny delegation had brought, by some discreet enchanted hamper, dishes of New England clam-chowder and Boston cream pies and a particular thing Robert called a whoopie pie that Ron developed an immediate philosophical attachment to. The Uagadou table produced, with quiet generosity, dishes of jollof rice, peppered fried plantain, slow-cooked lamb stew with peanuts, and a kind of small honey-cake spiced with cardamom that Hermione tried once and then carefully tried three more times to confirm her assessment.
But the food was not the point. The point was the talk.
Harry watched, with the small private pleasure of a boy who had spent his summers between continents and had always wished his school did the same, the Hall come alive with a sound it did not normally make.
Beauxbatons students were comparing French wand-lore with Hogwarts students at the Ravenclaw table. Two Durmstrang boys—one of whom was the Bulgarian who had got Harry laughing last night with his impression of an English weather forecast, were teaching Slytherin boys the rudiments of a Bulgarian sparring stance, using bread-rolls. Three Uagadou girls were demonstrating, at the Hufflepuff table, the small wandless trick by which a knife could be made to sharpen itself by being spoken to in a specific cadence; a small queue of Hufflepuffs had formed.
At the Gryffindor table—
"Treacle tart," Robert was saying, with reverence, "is not a thing we have in America. This is going to ruin me. I'm going to go home in three months and complain about my mother's pies."
"Welcome to Hogwarts," Ron said. "Most lasting damage is culinary."
Robert had been introduced to the whole set within three minutes of sitting down. He was easy with introductions in the way Americans often were—he met Hermione with the warm directness of a boy who recognised a fellow scholar and was delighted; met Ron with the enthusiasm of a fellow Quidditch enthusiast and they were deep into the comparative tactics within seven minutes; met Draco with the careful neutral courtesy of a boy who had been told certain things and now found them not quite matching the person before him, and met Astoria with the precise good-humoured wariness of a young man who could see, at a glance, that this small fair-haired Slytherin had appointed herself Luna's personal security and was assessing him.
Astoria, after thirty seconds, decided he passed. She permitted herself a small smile.
"And Howard?" Harry asked, after the food had begun to move from main course to pudding.
"Took a detour." Robert's grin became conspiratorial. "Said he had old friends in London he wanted to look up first. Said something about meeting Arthur and paying his respects to Ethan, and that he'd come up to Hogwarts properly tomorrow or the day after."
Harry's small private I knew it curled up at the corner of his mouth.
Beside him, Ron leaned over to Hermione—who had been carefully not looking at the Durmstrang table for several minutes and stage-whispered:
"You realise we don't have classes for the next two days, by the way. Whole school's on hold. Tournament organisation. Two days off, no homework, free supper."
"Ronald."
"I'm just observing."
"Studies are not a delay, Ronald. They're an aim."
"Studies are an aim you can pause for forty-eight hours," Ron suggested cheerfully.
Draco gave Hermione a small look of solidarity that was somehow simultaneously a small look of and yet I, too, am quite enjoying not having Charms homework. Hermione sighed.
When the plates cleared, Dumbledore rose.
"Friends," he said, "for the second time in two evenings, I welcome you. Tomorrow morning the formal procedures of the Tournament will begin. Tonight I have only a few small announcements."
His eyes glittered briefly with the particular humour he reserved for points he had been waiting all evening to make.
"Mr Crouch and Mr Bagman will, as previously announced, serve as judges. The Tournament has, however—and I am pleased to share this with you—secured a sponsoring partner whose name will be familiar to many of you. Atid Stella has agreed to underwrite the audio-visual provision for the Tasks. This means that every audience member at every Task will, regardless of their seat, see and hear the proceedings as clearly as if they were standing beside the Champion. The recording-drone prototypes some of you may have seen at the Quidditch World Cup have been finalised for live broadcast. Beyond Hogwarts itself, the proceedings will be transmitted in real time to designated public viewing-stations across nine countries."
A murmur went through the Hall.
Harry registered, with quiet pride, that his father's company had got there.
Hermione registered, with somewhat more practical attention, that her best friend's father's company had just acquired the largest single-event broadcasting contract in modern wizarding history.
"And now," Dumbledore continued, "the matter of the Champions."
He raised his wand. From behind the staff table, a tall casket came forward, carried by McGonagall, and was placed on a low pedestal at the centre of the Hall. Dumbledore tapped the casket. The lid lifted away. From within rose, slowly, a battered wooden cup of considerable age, blackened at the rim with the patina of centuries—and within it, crackling and dancing in cold blue-white, a flame.
The Goblet of Fire.
"Five schools," Dumbledore said. "Five Champions. The Goblet will choose. You have until tomorrow evening to submit your name on a slip of parchment, dropped into the flames. The Goblet will hold, weigh, and select. Tomorrow night, on Hallowe'en, the chosen Champions will be announced, here, in this Hall. The selections cannot be reversed. Once chosen, a Champion is bound, by ancient and inviolable magical contract, to compete."
He paused, and his eyes moved across the Hall with weight.
"I have placed about the Goblet an Age Line. None under the age of seventeen will be permitted to submit a name. Beyond that—I trust your good sense."
The Hall began to rise.
As the students filed out of the Great Hall in their five contingents, Harry felt the small specific cold of attention from somewhere off to his left. He glanced. Igor Karkaroff was watching him. The Durmstrang Headmaster's face had gone very still in the way of a man who had recognised something he would have preferred not to recognise, and his pale eyes carried—not quite hostility, but something colder. Something like displeasure.
Karkaroff held the look for perhaps two full seconds. Then he gave a small, precise tilt of his head, in a gesture that was not a greeting.
A heavy hand landed on Karkaroff's shoulder. Moody had appeared at his side with the inevitability of a tax collector. He muttered something low in Karkaroff's ear that Harry did not catch, and Karkaroff's expression went, briefly, to a pinched and bloodless white. The Durmstrang Head turned and walked stiffly toward the staff exit.
Moody's magical eye, mid-turn, flicked toward Harry. It held. It went on.
Harry, who had been making a small mental list of people watching me with unexplained attention since term began, made another small note.
The Goblet was placed at the centre of the Hall after dinner, with the Age Line drawn around it in a careful chalked circle.
Both Harry and Luna spent some time examining it.
Luna examined it with her sustained, inward, unfocused attention—the kind of looking she did when she was looking with her magic rather than her eyes. Harry examined it with his Cogitation engaged, looking at the threadwork of the Line itself, the way Ethan had taught him.
"Quite elegant," Luna said softly. "It has a—date-cipher inside it. A specific birth-date threshold, but it's checking the core of the magic, not the document. You couldn't fool it with a forged ID."
"Mm," Harry agreed. "The threshold's set to the seventeenth birthday, plus a small margin. Three days, maybe. Anyone whose magical core hasn't yet stabilised at that maturation point is rejected." He was already mentally drafting the letter to Ethan. Dad—saw the Age Line. Took a close look. The architecture is elegant. The Goblet itself feels older—pre-Hogwarts, possibly. Will photograph tomorrow if McGonagall permits.
"Mr Esther's son," Luna observed serenely, "is going to write to his father about it."
"Mr Esther's apprentice is going to write to him also, I expect."
"Of course."
The next morning vindicated Hermione's confidence.
Fred and George Weasley appeared at breakfast with broad grins, a small bottle of Aging Potion, and a scheme. They drank. They strode toward the Goblet with the precise swagger of two boys who had calculated their angles. They crossed the Age Line.
The Line responded with the patient finality of a piece of magic that had been programmed by Albus Dumbledore. There was a small flash. The twins were ejected backwards out of the circle in matching parabolas. They landed, more or less in unison, on the flagstones.
When they sat up, both had grown long, magnificent, snow-white beards reaching almost to their waists.
The Hall erupted.
"Brilliant," Lee Jordan howled, falling sideways off his bench with laughter.
Dumbledore, who had appeared at the staff table with the precise timing of a man who had been expecting this exactly, surveyed the spectacle with twinkling courtesy.
"Boys," he said, "your beards are, I must say, finer than those of the three other students who attempted this earlier and have already been sent to Madam Pomfrey. But please—do go and see her. She is in somewhat of a mood. She has had a busy morning."
Fred and George, undeterred, bowed extravagantly to the laughing Hall and made their dignified way out.
Hermione held out her open palm to Ron. "Galleon, please."
"That was a figure of speech—"
"Galleon, Ronald."
Ron paid up, with great wounded dignity.
It was while Harry was watching this transaction—Ron's mournful coin-counting, Hermione's small triumphant smile that he caught, at the edge of his vision, Theodore Nott walking past the Slytherin table without doing anything at all.
Harry registered this with the precise stillness of a boy who had been monitoring this particular variable for weeks.
Theodore had, in fact, since the ferret incident, been behaving. No bashing. No back-of-the-classroom hexes. No pointed comments. The Notts had, by Daphne's terse reporting, been quiet. Whatever embarrassment the family had absorbed at the World Cup—and whatever Snape had said behind his closed office door had apparently set a specific limit. Harry did not assume the limit was permanent. He took the pause as a gift.
'Stay quiet, Theodore,' he thought. 'For all our sakes. Stay quiet.'
That afternoon, Harry, Luna, Ron, Hermione, and Draco walked down to Hagrid's hut.
Hagrid had clearly been preparing for some time. He was wearing his best moleskin overcoat—the clean one, which Harry had only ever seen at official events—he had attempted to comb his beard, his hair was, by his standards, tidy, and he had splashed himself with what could only be described as a great deal of cologne. He greeted them at the door with a flushed, almost shy enthusiasm.
"Ah—come in, come in—I were just—well, I were just havin' a tidy."
Hermione's mouth twitched, then settled, then twitched again. She had clearly arrived intending to interrogate Hagrid about possible insider knowledge of the First Task, on the grounds that Hagrid was friends with every interesting magical creature in Britain and probably had a few hints he might let slip; her academic curiosity had, narrowly, won out over her ethical objections to the project.
"Hagrid," she began, "we were wondering—"
"Madame Maxime is six foot ten," Hagrid blurted, almost helplessly, and then went the colour of a brick.
Harry, Luna, Ron, and Draco arranged their faces with great care.
"Quite tall," Luna agreed serenely.
"Very tall," Hagrid said, with feeling. "Magnificent woman. Magnificent."
The afternoon was, in its way, delightful and informationally unproductive. Hagrid had, it transpired, no insider information whatever about the First Task. He had been deliberately kept in the dark by Dumbledore on this specific point, which Hagrid attributed grudgingly to his own well-known inability to keep a secret. Hermione abandoned her line of inquiry within ten minutes. Ron ate three of Hagrid's rock-cakes; Draco ate one out of politeness and surreptitiously fed the remainder to Fang. Luna asked detailed questions about the new Thestral foals.
When they left, Hagrid was humming. Quietly. Off-key.
"He's smitten," Ron diagnosed, as they walked back.
"He's blessed," Luna said gently. "I hope she likes him. It would be lovely."
Harry, looking back over his shoulder at the small smoke-trailed hut and the half-giant standing in the doorway watching them go, found himself hoping the same thing.
31st October 1994, Hogwarts Castle, the Great Hall, 8:14 PM
The Hall on Hallowe'en evening was at its full annual pageant—a thousand floating candles, the enchanted ceiling showing a clear sky pricked with cold autumn stars, the long carved pumpkins along the walls blinking their candle-lit grins. The five schools were arranged at their tables in their five colours, and a low electric hum of expectation filled the room.
Dumbledore rose. The Hall hushed.
"The Goblet is ready," he said simply.
The casket was reopened. The Goblet of Fire stood on its low pedestal, the cold blue-white flame within unchanged and steady. Then, abruptly, the flame turned red. It crackled. A small charred slip of parchment shot upward and into Dumbledore's outstretched hand.
"The Champion for Durmstrang," Dumbledore announced, "is Viktor Krum."
The Hall roared. Krum stood, with his usual flat-footed composure, and walked to the door at the side of the Hall through which the Champions were to retire. He passed close to the Gryffindor table on his way. His dark eyes flicked—involuntarily—to Hermione. Hermione's eyes flicked to her plate. Both of them blushed, briefly, in opposite shades.
The flame turned red again.
"The Champion for Beauxbatons is Fleur Delacour."
The luminous silver-blonde girl from the lawn rose with extraordinary grace and walked to the door, her pale-blue robes streaming after her like water.
The flame turned red again.
"The Champion for Hogwarts is Cedric Diggory."
The Hufflepuff table exploded into the loudest single sustained cheer Harry had ever heard from his quietest House. Cedric stood—handsome, slightly disbelieving, immediately gracious—and made his way to the door, accepting clapped shoulders all the way.
The flame turned red again.
"The Champion for Ilvermorny," Dumbledore announced, "is Robert Thornwood."
Harry's breath, briefly, went out of him.
Robert—at the Gryffindor table, where he had been sitting with them all evening—stood with the slightly stunned expression of a boy who had submitted his name as a gesture and had not, deep down, expected anything to come of it. He met Harry's eyes briefly, gave a small of course it's me shrug, and walked to the door.
The flame turned red again.
"The Champion for Uagadou is Adaeze Okonkwo."
The Uagadou table erupted in wordless ululating cheers—a beautiful, high, layered cry that Harry had never heard before and that made the back of his neck prickle. A girl with deep bronze skin, close-cropped dark hair, a dazzling grin, and a small green clay pendant around her neck stood at the Hufflepuff table—where, Harry realised with a small flash of recognition, she had been sitting beside Neville for the last twenty minutes. Neville, in fact, was clapping with his whole body, his face split with a delighted, proud, slightly bewildered smile, like a boy who had only just realised that the friend he had been quietly making was a person of consequence.
"Adaeze!" Neville called, helplessly, as she passed.
"Neville Longbottom," she called back, grinning, "I will win this thing for our plants—"
The Hall laughed. The Uagadou table cheered louder.
Adaeze Okonkwo passed through the side door.
Dumbledore turned.
"And so we have our five—"
The flame turned red again.
The Hall, which had begun to relax, did not.
The Goblet's fire roared up suddenly tall and blue-white, then guttered, then threw out, with a small sharp crack, one more slip of charred parchment. It described a slow arc through the air. Dumbledore caught it.
He looked at it.
His expression changed.
Harry saw Dumbledore's gaze stop at the slip, hold, and then slowly, very deliberately, lift across the Hall. Toward him.
Harry's stomach dropped before Dumbledore spoke.
"Harry James Potter."
The Hall went absolutely silent.
It was the silence of a thousand people simultaneously deciding they had misheard.
"Harry Potter," Dumbledore repeated, more firmly, his pale eyes fixed on Harry's. The Headmaster's voice had gone, briefly, into something Harry had not heard from him before—a tightness, a controlled, professional alarm. "Harry, please come up."
Harry did not move.
Hermione's hand had clamped on his forearm. Her fingers were white. Her eyes were already cataloguing the situation—calculating contracts, ancient magic, binding clauses, exits. She turned to him with the precise expression of a girl who had read about exactly this sort of inviolable magical compact in the very first reference she had ever pulled from the Hogwarts library.
"Harry, don't—"
But Harry was already moving.
His holly wand was in his hand before his feet were under him. His other hand had gone, in a single trained motion, to the small inner pocket where the Cloak lay folded—the Cloak he had carried in his satchel since first year, the Cloak Ethan had given him on his eleventh birthday—and as he stepped sideways past the bench and into the aisle, the Cloak unfurled and dropped over him in a single smooth motion, and Harry was no longer there.
The Hall gasped.
"Harry!" Hermione cried, half-rising.
Footsteps moved, invisible, toward the far doors. Several professors began to call. McGonagall stood. Moody's magical eye whirled.
But Harry was already through the doors, and the Cloak had hidden him, and he was gone into the corridors of Hogwarts to think.
31st October 1994, 221B Baker Street, London, 8:14 PM
Three hundred miles to the south, in the small private courtyard at the rear of 221B Baker Street, Ethan Esther stood with a brush in one hand and a bucket of warm water in the other.
Osian, the young Re'em, stood docilely under his attentions, the great creature's coat steaming gently in the cold London evening. His enormous dark eyes were half-closed; he was leaning very slightly into the brush. Ethan had spent perhaps the last hour at this small pleasant task, and the courtyard had filled with the comfortable smell of clean Re'em and damp wool and the faint smoke of the kitchen chimney.
Ethan had been smiling slightly. The kind of smile he reserved for tasks that required his hands but not his attention.
His amber eyes shifted.
It was a small change, the kind that lasted perhaps a second and a half. The deep amber lit, briefly, with the starlight brilliance of the True Sight catching upon something distant—a thread of fate yanking suddenly tight several hundred miles to the north.
The smile went.
Ethan stood very still for a long moment with the brush in his hand. His head turned, slowly, until he was looking northward across the cold London rooftops, in the direction of Scotland, with the precise focus of a man who had just seen something that he had been preparing for, in some quiet inner room of himself, for a very long time.
Osian made a small worried sound and pressed his great horn-crowned head against Ethan's chest.
Ethan's free hand came up, automatically, and rested on Osian's brow.
"It's all right, my friend," he said quietly. "It's all right."
He looked once more at the northern horizon. He drew a long breath. He let it out.
"It's here," he said, almost gently, almost to himself, almost to whoever in the cold autumn world might be listening.
"It's here..."