31st October 1994, Hogwarts Castle, Astronomy Tower (north parapet), 9:47 PM
The Astronomy Tower at night had its own particular silence—a silence that was not absence but elevation. Up there, three hundred feet above the Highland ground, the world's noise fell away and was replaced by the cold enormous quiet of a sky that had been there for considerably longer than the castle, and would be there for considerably longer than the people in it.
Harry sat in his place.
It was a small recessed corner on the northern parapet, behind a curve of ancient stone that broke the wind and was invisible from the main observation deck unless someone deliberately walked round to look. He had found it in his second year and had quietly kept it. It was where he came when he needed to think in the way one needed to think when ordinary corridors had become too small to contain the thinking.
Tonight was such a night.
He sat with his back against the stone, knees drawn up, arms loosely folded around them. The Invisibility Cloak lay folded across his lap. His holly wand was on the flagstones beside his thigh. In the air a foot in front of his face, perfectly steady, hung a small orb of Lumos—not his largest, not his most demonstrative, just the small white-gold globe he used for reading on a moor at midnight, the kind he could hold without effort whilst entirely thinking about something else.
He looked at it.
He breathed out, slowly, into the cold, and the breath plumed and curled around the orb and was carried away by the wind.
'How,' he thought, with the precise detachment of a boy who had learnt over the years that despair was a luxury and that what one did with one's troubles, in the end, was catalogue them, 'How. Why me. Why now. Who.'
The who was the obvious one. The why would, in time, follow from the who. The how would follow from both. Harry had been raised by Ethan, and Ethan had taught him that catastrophes resolved themselves into questions, and that questions, properly held, eventually produced answers.
But for the moment—just for the moment, on a freezing parapet on Hallowe'en night, with a small orb of light in front of him and the cold sky above him, he allowed himself to feel, simply, what he felt.
Tired.
A small, quiet, soft footfall on the spiral stair behind him. He did not turn.
"Hah-ree," Luna said gently.
She came round the curve of stone and sat down beside him—and then, in the small reorganisation of position that they had practised many times without ever discussing, she shifted ninety degrees and pressed her back to his. Through the wool of her cardigan and his school jumper, he felt her shoulders settle warm against his shoulder blades. They breathed together for a moment without speaking, in the practised wordless rhythm of two people who had been finding each other in cold high places for some years.
"How did you find me?" he asked quietly.
"Hah-ree." There was the small affectionate amusement in her voice that meant she was both fond and gently mocking. "I have always known where to find you. That is not really a question, is it?"
He felt, despite himself, the smallest twitch of a smile.
"I suppose not."
The orb of Lumos hovered. The wind moved past them. Below, far away, the lake was a sheet of cold black silver under starlight.
"How," Harry said, after a while. His voice was small and carefully level. "How did this happen, Luna. I didn't—I didn't put my name in. I couldn't have crossed the Line. I don't even want to be in the Tournament. Why—" his voice tightened, "—why does this keep happening to me."
Luna was quiet for a moment.
"I don't know how," she said, her voice very gentle. "I think we will work that out. I don't know why, either. I think perhaps that is more difficult. But I know that you have been picked out before, by other people who wanted other things from you, and that you have always chosen what you did about it. So this is the same shape, even if the size has changed."
"Mm."
"And the others are waiting at the bottom of the tower. They have been waiting for quite some time."
Harry's head turned slightly. "All of them?"
"Hermione, Ron, Draco. Yes."
Harry coughed. It was a small sheepish cough that produced, briefly, a fog of his breath that the orb of Lumos lit gold. "Are they—are they very angry with me?"
Luna's small giggle, when it came, was the warm familiar thing that had been making his shoulders unknot for four years.
"They are worried, Hah-ree. Mostly. Hermione is raging, but she is raging because she is worried, which is the way Hermione rages. Ron is also worried, and is hiding it by being unhelpful about it. Draco is worried, and is being practical about it. They all want to see you. And Hermione—" Luna's voice took a small wry note, "—Hermione is the worst of them. She has been pacing in the same eight feet of grass for the last forty minutes."
"Oh."
"Yes."
He let out a long breath.
"All right."
Luna stood, gracefully, and turned, and held out her hand to him. He looked up at her—silver-blonde hair lit at the edges by his small orb of light, her grey eyes calm and attentive, the Blue Moon necklace from Ethan resting at her throat.
He took her hand.
The orb of Lumos puffed itself out at his quiet thought. His holly wand returned to his sleeve. The Cloak folded itself into the inner pocket of his jumper.
They went down together.
31st October 1994, Hogwarts Grounds, the foot of the Astronomy Tower, 10:12 PM
The grass at the base of the Astronomy Tower had been worn into a small distinct path, in the last forty minutes, by a single pair of shoes traversing the same eight feet at a brisk pace.
Hermione Granger was at one end of the path. She turned. She walked the eight feet. She turned. She walked back.
Ron Weasley sat on a low stone bench against the tower wall, watching her with the wary patience of a boy who had learnt some time ago that interrupting Hermione mid-pace produced consequences. Draco Malfoy sat beside him, his pale arms folded inside his cloak against the cold, his grey eyes lifted toward the dark stone of the tower above them.
"He's coming down," Draco said calmly.
"How do you know?"
"Luna went up. Luna will not return without him. The thing has resolved."
"He'd better be coming down," Hermione muttered, "or I am going up."
"Then we'd be standing here for another thirty minutes whilst you also climbed it," Ron observed, "so personally I'm hoping Luna's the more reliable Harry-extraction strategy."
Hermione's glare was the precise one that meant yes I have heard you and I am ignoring you in the interest of group cohesion.
The small wooden door at the foot of the tower opened.
Harry emerged with Luna's hand firmly in his and Luna walking, very slightly, ahead of him—a small physical configuration that anyone who knew them could read as Luna has been deployed as the human shield for the next sixty seconds, please direct your fire accordingly. Harry had the careful sheepish expression of a boy who was extremely aware that he had bolted from a thousand-person Hall under an Invisibility Cloak in front of every Headteacher in Europe and the Atlantic, and was now arriving for the consequences.
Hermione opened her mouth. She closed it. She opened it again.
"Hi," Harry said quietly, from behind Luna's shoulder.
"Harry James Potter-Esther."
"I—"
"I have paced. I have paced enough grass to feed Hagrid's Thestral foals for a week. I have worried about you for the last seventy-two minutes, and I have also been worrying about you for the last several hours, and on top of all that—" she paused, drew a sharp breath, and to Harry's enormous private surprise she did not continue at volume but in the precise small wobble of a girl whose ranging was, she had only just realised, mostly a costume for the worry, "—on top of all that I am very glad you are not lying in a corridor somewhere having done something stupid."
Harry's expression went through three small adjustments.
"Hermione," he said, very gently, from behind Luna, "I'm fine."
Hermione exhaled. The shape of the exhale was all right then. She gathered herself. She gave Harry the precise look of a girl who was reserving the rest of the row for later, when she had recovered her composure properly.
"Right," said Ron, with the easy diplomatic intervention of a boy who had, despite all natural expectation, become quite skilled at this over four years. "Right. Everyone's accounted for. Excellent. Harry—you didn't put your name in, yes?"
Harry blinked at him. "Of course I didn't."
"Just checking."
"Ron, I literally watched the Goblet last night and could see the Age Line wouldn't permit me to—"
"Mate, I know. I'm just—" Ron grinned, slightly lopsidedly, "—dotting the i, aren't I. So we don't waste time on it later. Yes. He didn't do it. Excellent. Moving on."
Draco, drily: "An admirable forensic style, Ronald."
"Thank you, Malfoy."
Harry, who had been bracing for some version of Harry, did you really not put your name in, found himself standing in a small loose circle of four people who had, between them and without conferring, simply decided he was telling the truth and had moved on. Something in his chest, which had been tight all night, eased fractionally.
He hadn't known he was bracing for that. He had been bracing for it.
He let out a breath he had not realised he was holding.
"Thank you," he said quietly. "For—just. Believing me."
"Obviously," Hermione said, with the brisk dismissal of a girl who found gratitude on this point superfluous.
"Obviously," Ron agreed.
"Obviously," Draco said, with a small inclination of his head.
Luna squeezed his hand.
"Right, then," Harry said, more firmly. "Let's work it out."
They settled themselves on the cold low bench and the surrounding grass. The night above them was very dark, the moon a thin sliver, the stars sharp.
"Someone put my name in," Harry began. "That's the simple part."
"Yes," Hermione said. "That much is obvious. The Age Line is the kind of charm you can't push through; you have to pass it cleanly. Which means whoever entered Harry's name was either over seventeen, or had a way of bypassing the cipher entirely. Probably the former; it's by far the simpler explanation."
"And as for how they got it in under the Goblet's selection—" Draco picked up smoothly, "—the simple answer is the schools. Five schools, five slots. Whoever entered Harry's name simply submitted it as a candidate from a school the Goblet had no roster for. Or, alternatively, as a sole entry from a sixth school that didn't otherwise exist. The Goblet has no way of knowing whether a school is real; it merely knows that a slip was put before it, properly, by someone of age, and processes accordingly. If the slip was the only entry from its named institution, the Goblet would select it by default."
Hermione's eyebrows went up. "Draco. That's exactly it."
"I'm not entirely useless."
"I wasn't suggesting—"
"I know."
Ron groaned, dropping his head into his hands. "I'll tell you what, mates. Last year it was Mordred and now this. This year it's some bloke who can stroll into the most heavily warded school in Britain and slip a parchment into a five-hundred-year-old Goblet, and no one notices. I am beginning to seriously question Hogwarts' ward maintenance. Atid Stella should audit. They should send someone with a clipboard."
Hermione gave him a steady look. "Ron, the wards of Hogwarts are layered over a thousand years of accumulated charms by some of the greatest witches and wizards in history—"
"And yet," Ron said.
Draco tilted his head. "He has a point. The wards are old. The defences are deep. But every defence has a weakness, and novel attacks find them. Mordred last year was novel—a Slytherin-blooded Seer, technically not violating the school's primary protections because he wasn't, by the wards' reckoning, an external attacker. This year's novel attack might be the same kind of thing. Someone with the right category of access to slip past."
"Or someone already inside," Luna said quietly.
The four of them looked at her.
She had been sitting cross-legged on the grass, her head tilted slightly, her grey eyes resting in the unfocused middle distance she used when she was considering more than the immediate visible.
"Whoever did it," Luna said, "wouldn't have done anything more than this. They wouldn't have raised a louder alarm. They wouldn't have done a Mordred-thing. They would have done a small precise thing—a slip of paper, a name and then quietly waited. Because the next part of the plan needs Harry alive and bound. If they had drawn larger attention, the Headmasters could simply have acted accordingly."
Harry, who had been listening, registered this with a small focused quiet of his own.
"She's right," he said softly. "Whoever did this needed minimum disturbance. Just enough to get my name into the bowl. Anything more, and the spell wouldn't have carried."
"And then they need you to compete," Draco said. "Why."
"Why," Harry agreed.
The four of them looked at him.
Harry thought about it. He thought about the three Tasks of the Triwizard Tournament, of which only the broad shapes were known—Tasks designed historically to kill contestants, restrained now by Ministry oversight but still Tasks of an order that had needed Ministry oversight to make them survivable. He thought about being placed into one of them by an unknown party.
"Maybe they want me to die in one of the Tasks," he said quietly. "The Tournament has the legitimacy—the audience, the cover. If something goes wrong during a Task, it's a tragic accident, not an assassination. No one investigates an Auror raid. Everyone investigates a Task gone wrong, but they're investigating the Task, not the planner."
A small silence.
"Yes," Draco said. "That fits."
"That fits," Hermione said, with the precise grim weight of a girl who had been hoping for a less elegant explanation.
"Brilliant," Ron muttered.
Luna's hand found Harry's again, on the grass between them.
Hermione, after a moment, drew herself up. "Right. We can't sit out here all night working it. Harry—we will work this out, properly, tomorrow. You need to go back, now. People will be looking. Dumbledore will be looking."
"Dumbledore," Harry echoed, with a wince.
"Dumbledore will be more concerned about you than angry. But you need to go back. The contract is binding. Hiding at the bottom of a tower will not undo it."
Harry nodded, with a slow, heavy motion. "Yes. All right."
Luna pulled him gently to his feet.
31st October 1994, Hogwarts Castle, Champions' Antechamber, 10:34 PM
The room behind the staff table where the Champions had been assembled was small and warm and panelled in old wood. A fire burned in a hearth. The four other Champions were standing in a loose group around it, with the three Headteachers and the two Ministry officials in raised conversation by the door, and an unsettled energy in the air that Harry recognised from his own father's diplomatic functions—the energy of adults who were arguing about something with extreme professional courtesy and had not yet settled it.
The door opened. Harry slipped through with McGonagall behind him.
The room turned.
Harry braced.
What he received was not what he expected.
Cedric—first—gave him a nod that contained no reproach but a great deal of quietly-revised respect. "Harry," he said quietly, with a small tilt of his head that was, more than anything else, welcome to a worse position than you wanted to be in.
Robert, beside him, met his eyes and produced the small wry American smile that Harry had been hoping to receive across a corridor at some normal point in the term and had not expected to receive across an antechamber on Hallowe'en.
"Reckless eleven-year-old grew up to be reckless fourteen-year-old," Robert said, very softly, to himself but not so softly that Harry didn't hear. "Glad to see consistency."
Harry's mouth twitched, despite himself.
Fleur Delacour, on the other side of the fire, regarded him with a long, evaluating look. Her silver-blonde brows drew slightly together. "Boy," she said, in her precise French-accented English, "you are fourteen."
"Y-yes."
"This is absurd."
"I—I know. I didn't—"
"Of course you didn't." She cut him off with the air of a woman who had already calculated the social arithmetic. "Anyone could see you didn't. We will all be very angry about it together."
Adaeze Okonkwo—the Uagadou Champion, whom Harry had only been introduced to at distance two hours before—stepped across to him. She was perhaps an inch taller than him; her dark eyes were sharp and warm. She took his hand briefly.
"Harry Potter," she said. "Neville Longbottom said you were a good one. I see he is right. Be careful in the Tasks. Watch the people who are watching you."
Harry, who had not expected anything of the four Champions to whom he was effectively muscling in by accident, found his throat doing a thing that required him to swallow before he answered.
"Th-thank you," he managed. "Th-thank you all. I'm—I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—"
"We know, boy," said Karkaroff coldly from across the room, in a voice entirely not in keeping with the others, "but the Goblet does not. And the Goblet is what binds you."
Madame Maxime turned. Her enormous dignified face had taken on the expression of a woman who had been arguing this point for the last thirty minutes and was having to argue it again. "Igor. I have said. The boy is bound. He cannot withdraw without forfeiting his magic, possibly his life. The contract was signed by the Goblet's selection, regardless of the manner of submission. Your protests about fairness are now exclusively academic."
"I will be writing to the Bulgarian Ministry," Karkaroff said, with venomous courtesy.
"You will," Madame Maxime agreed pleasantly, "and they will tell you the same thing the British Ministry has also told you, which is that the contract is inviolable and the boy is competing."
Bartemius Crouch had been standing very still by the wall. He stepped forward now, and his voice had its usual immaculate professional flatness.
"The First Task," he said, "is on the twenty-fourth of November. The Champions have until that morning to discover and prepare for its nature. They are forbidden from receiving direct assistance from teachers, family, or any other adult; this is a measure of the Tournament's tradition. They are permitted to learn and to deduce through their own means, however."
His eyes flicked across the five of them.
"The Second Task's nature will be communicated upon completion of the First. The Champions will, by virtue of their Tournament participation, be exempt from end-of-year examinations."
A tiny ripple of interest from Cedric. A small approving sound from Robert. Fleur looked entirely unmoved. Adaeze rolled her eyes slightly with a smile.
Moody, who had been standing in shadow by the far wall for the entire exchange, spoke for the first time.
"Whoever entered Potter's name," he said, in his familiar gravelly voice, "did it through a sixth school category. Slipped past the Goblet's school-categorisation by entering an institution that didn't otherwise have a roster. A trick of category, not of power. Whoever did it knew what they were doing. They wanted the boy bound, and they wanted him competing. The most plausible reason for that, given the historical mortality of these Tasks, is that they wanted him to die in one and have it look like Tournament misadventure."
A small heavy silence.
Crouch did not look at Moody. Crouch looked at his own immaculate cuffs.
"That is a theory," Crouch said, "and one we shall be investigating."
"Investigate fast," Moody said.
His magical eye, in passing, swept across Harry. It rested for a fraction of a second longer than it needed to. It moved on.
Harry filed this, with all the others.
31st October 1994, Hogwarts Castle, Gryffindor Common Room, 11:26 PM
The Common Room was on fire with celebration when he climbed through the portrait hole.
The Gryffindors had decided, by some collective democratic frenzy that had needed approximately ten minutes to manifest, that Harry Potter being entered in the Triwizard Tournament was enormously brilliant, and that Gryffindor's two Champions: Harry and Cedric, who as a Hufflepuff was also being claimed by association was a piece of inter-House triumph requiring immediate Butterbeer, music, and the careful disregard of all curfews.
Harry stood in the portrait hole. He looked at the room. The room looked at him.
A roar went up.
"POTTER, you—"
"How did you do it—"
"Mate, the Cloak trick was—"
Harry looked across the room and met Ron's eyes from where Ron was standing by the fire with two pulled-up Butterbeers in his hands. Ron's expression had the precise wince of a boy who knew, with the practised reading of long familiarity, exactly what Harry was about to do.
Harry nodded at Ron, briefly, in apology.
Then he crossed the Common Room with the steady tactical efficiency of someone moving through a crowd he had no intention of engaging, climbed the dormitory stairs, opened his door, closed it, locked it, and sat down on his bed.
Below, the music continued. The cheers continued.
Harry pulled out parchment and quill.
Dad—
A great deal has happened. I'll tell it in order.
The quill moved.
1st November 1994, Hogwarts Grounds, the Beech Tree by the Black Lake, 7:42 AM
The morning was cold and the lake was still, and the small group that had taken up its accustomed shape under the great copper-leaved beech tree had arrived early enough that no one else was about. Harry, Luna, Hermione, Ron, Draco. They sat on the half-circle of root that the tree had spread out for them years ago, with Luna in the centre and the others fanned around her.
Harry looked tired but settled. The act of writing his father had done what it always did for him, which was rearrange the facts into a shape he could, more or less, manage.
"Right," Hermione said, with the brisk decisiveness of a girl who had planned the entire morning the night before. "Two parallel projects. Combat training—Harry needs to be sharp for whatever comes in the First Task, and he needs sparring partners. Ron. Draco. That's you."
Ron's expression brightened with the precise enthusiasm of a boy who had been waiting four years for exactly this assignment. "Alright! I have been waiting to spar Harry. Properly. I want to see him fight. He's been getting Ethan's training since the Basilisk and we have literally never gotten to see him actually—"
"Ronald."
"I am focused, Hermione. I am eager and focused."
Draco's mouth twitched. "I will manage him."
"We need a space," Ron said. "And the castle's full. All the empty classrooms will have Beauxbatons or Durmstrang or Ilvermorny or Uagadou kids in them studying or others Champion with their preparation too. Let's hope that there still one left for —"
"The seventh floor," Luna said.
Five heads turned to her.
She had been sitting with her hands folded, and her grey eyes had the particular soft-focused look that meant she was looking at something more than the tree. There was, just for a moment, a faint flash of cool blue at the irises—the colour of her Blue Moon, the colour she went when she was seeing in the way Harry could not quite see.
Then it was gone, and her eyes were grey again.
"The seventh floor," she repeated gently. "The corridor opposite the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy. There is a room there. No one else will you it"
Hermione's eyes had gone very wide. "What room?"
"It's there."
"How do you know?"
Luna smiled, with the small inward smile she gave when the answer was I just do. "It's there."
Harry, watching her, registered the small flash of blue and the absolute serene certainty, and decided—as he had decided several times over the past four years—not to ask.
"Right," he said. "Seventh floor. Past Barnabas. Got it."
"And the other half," Hermione continued, briskly recovering, "is research. Past Tasks. Past Tournaments. The Tournament has a recorded history; the patterns of First Tasks alone have been documented. Even though the specific Task is meant to be a surprise, the categories of First Task are not infinitely varied. I'm going to spend every morning in the library before classes, and every free period, going through the historical records. If I can find the pattern, we can narrow the field."
"Bri—" Ron began, and caught himself, "—excellent, Hermione. Splendid. Genius. Really top-notch—"
She narrowed her eyes at him. He grinned wickedly.
"Hermione Granger," Ron said, in the precise theatrical voice of an announcer, "Library General. Field Marshal of the Stacks. The Defender of the—"
Her fist met his shoulder with the particular Hermione-calibration that was gentle by her standards and not gentle at all by anyone else's.
"Ow."
"I like that you appreciate me, Ronald. I would like you to appreciate me at thirty percent lower volume."
"Yes, Hermione."
Draco, who had been observing this with the air of a man cataloguing a successful diplomatic performance, looked at Harry. "What about you?"
"I'll write to Dad. I already have. He may have ideas. I'll also—" Harry's expression had that precise focused look it acquired when he was doing the Ethan-thing of laying out a problem in clean parallel lines, "—watch people. If someone here put my name in, they're still here. Whoever did it has been near the Goblet. Has been near me. Patterns will appear. I just need to be looking."
"Constant vigilance," Hermione said, with a small wry smile.
"Mm," Harry agreed.
Above them, the copper leaves of the great beech tree turned in a small cold wind, and a single one detached and drifted down, and landed in the open palm of Luna's hand without her looking up to receive it.
She closed her fingers around it.
1st November 1994, Hogwarts Library, 11:14 AM
Hermione was, by ten past eleven, two and a half hours into her morning's research.
She had occupied a small alcove table near the back of the library where the Tournaments and Competitions, Historical section met the Magical Sports, Defunct section, and she had assembled before her a stack of nine books at varying heights. Three were open. Six were waiting their turn. Her quill had been moving steadily. Her notes had reached the third sheet of parchment.
The book she now needed was the seventeenth-century compendium Inter-School Trials of the Northern European Mage-States, and it lived—as the older more obscure volumes in this section invariably lived—on the third shelf from the top. Hermione, at five foot four, was not by any stretch at the third shelf from the top. The library step-stool had been taken by an industrious-looking Beauxbatons girl two aisles over, and Hermione's reluctance to interrupt a fellow scholar at study had warred briefly with her desire for the book and lost.
She looked up at the book.
She looked at the empty space where the step-stool was supposed to be.
She looked at the book again.
'I could,' the worst part of Hermione thought, 'just jump for it.'
A more rational part of Hermione, which had the precise tone of Ethan's recorded lessons on physical risk, said Hermione, you have had karate training, you have decent vertical, but the recovery on landing in trainers on this floor surface is—
'Just once,' the worst part of Hermione overruled. 'It's only six inches over my reach.'
She set down her quill. She rolled her shoulders. She bent her knees. And she made what was, by any reasonable measurement, an excellent jump—her right hand closing around the spine of Inter-School Trials on the upward stroke and pulling it free.
The book was hers.
Her trainers met the polished wood of the library floor on the descent—and slid.
There was the precise small lurch of a human centre of gravity continuing forward at a velocity the human's feet had elected not to accommodate. Hermione registered, with the clinical terror of a girl who had read enough physics to know exactly how this story ended, that she was about to fall face-first onto a stack of fifteenth-century leatherbound books with possibly her own jaw between her teeth and the books.
Two hands caught her.
One at her elbow. One at the small of her back. With the same reflexive surety she had felt once before, on a crowded path on a Devon moor in late August, in the middle of a Quidditch World Cup crowd.
The book, Inter-School Trials, was still in her hand. She had not dropped it.
She straightened, with extreme care. She did not turn round immediately. The two hands released her with the same deliberate gentleness with which they had caught her, and stepped back a measured pace.
She turned.
Viktor Krum stood there, his heavy brows drawn slightly with concern, his dark hawk-eyes carefully scanning her face for any sign of injury, his hands now politely at his sides.
"You are—not hurt?" he asked, his accented voice careful.
Hermione registered, in the precise sequence the body reported it: that she was not hurt, that her hair was probably catastrophic, that her face was the colour of a postbox, and that Viktor Krum had—for the second time in four months—caught her before she hit a hard surface.
"I—" she said. "I am—not. Hurt. Thank you."
"You vere reaching for a book."
"Y-yes."
"There is a stool."
"Y-yes."
"I see," Viktor said, with the careful neutral courtesy of a young man working out whether to be concerned or amused and arriving, gently, at amused. "Ven I am ready for a book on a high shelf, I also do not always vait for the stool. The stool is slow."
"Y-yes," Hermione said, with what she suspected was a mortified, helpless, slightly hysterical small laugh. "The. The stool is. Very slow."
A small, unmistakable smile crossed Viktor Krum's serious face. He reached down to the table beside her and picked up the second book she had been planning to retrieve, and set it carefully, the right way up, on top of the stack of those she had already opened.
"My name," he said, "is Viktor Krum."
"I know," Hermione said, before she could stop herself, and immediately wished the floor would open. "I—yes. I know. I am—Hermione Granger. We—we met. Briefly. At the World Cup. You caught me then also."
"I remember."
"Y-you remember?"
"Yes."
A small pause. Hermione was certain her ears had turned a colour visible from the staff table.
Viktor Krum's mouth twitched once, with the precise small warmth of a boy who had been hoping to be remembered and had just discovered that he had been.
"It is—nice. To formally meet you, Hermione Granger."
"Yes," Hermione said, with the slightly winded composure of a girl whose afternoon had taken an unexpected turn. "Y-yes. It is. Nice. To meet you. Also. Properly. Viktor."
She did not, she registered with private horror, let go of the book.
She also did not, she registered with rather different horror, particularly want to walk away from the alcove just yet.
The library hummed quietly around them.