19th November 1994, Hogsmeade Village, the High Street, 11:14 AM
The Saturday before the First Task arrived in the precise crystalline cold of late November in the Highlands—the kind of cold that did not permit cloud, that gave every shadow its full sharpness, that made the village's chimneys exhale white plumes against a sky of thin pale blue. Frost had crusted the cobbles into a faint white glitter. The lanterns above each shop were already lit at midday, more for cheerfulness than for need, and small charmed wreaths of holly had appeared overnight on doors throughout the village in the early concession to the coming Christmas season.
Harry and Luna walked down the High Street under the Invisibility Cloak.
They walked very close together—they had to, because the Cloak, although generous, had not been cut for two not-quite-fully-grown teenagers walking abreast—and they walked slowly, and they had each been holding a small steaming bottle of Butterbeer for the past ten minutes, which was a logistical arrangement that had required considerable initial coordination and now, with the practice of the previous half hour, was managed with the easy unspoken cooperation of two people who had become very good at being one shape under one cloak.
Luna's hand was tucked through the crook of Harry's elbow. Her shoulder was warm against his ribs. Through the cloak's slightly silvered weave, the world was as visible as ever; from the world's side, they were entirely absent.
It was, Harry thought with a small private interior pleasure, the best he had felt in a fortnight.
For a fortnight he had been Potter Stinks in flickering badge-letters, and the cheating boy in low corridor whispers, and the Boy Who Should Not Be Here in the stares of fifth-years who had never spoken to him. Today, in his Cloak, in the cold blue and gold of a Hogsmeade Saturday, he was nobody. He was simply the boy walking the High Street with the girl he loved.
He had not, he registered in passing, ever phrased it to himself in those words. He registered the phrasing the way one registers a small new piece of weather. He filed it. He did not interrogate it.
Luna's voice, very softly beside his ear: "Look. The flower-shop."
Harry looked.
In the bowed glass window of Wymondham's Botanicals & Petals, set between Honeydukes and the small leatherworker, two figures stood side by side at the central display—a fair-haired boy in an immaculate dark grey wool coat with the small precise tilt of his head that Harry would have known anywhere, and a small fair-haired girl with the precise focused interest of someone giving a topic her full attention. Draco and Astoria had been examining, by the looks of it, a small pot of late-season white roses for some minutes. Astoria was pointing at something. Draco was nodding. Astoria said something. Draco laughed—a quiet open laugh that Harry had only seen a handful of times in his life—and Astoria, catching it, smiled with the unselfconscious pleased smile she reserved for the very small list of people who were permitted to make her smile in public.
Harry felt Luna's small private breath of pleasure against his neck.
"They look happy," Luna whispered.
"Very."
"How long have they—"
"I don't think they have, exactly," Harry said softly. "Not formally. They're just—doing this, now. They have been for a while."
"Mm."
"Astoria has been wearing his House scarf to breakfast for the last week."
"Has she."
"Yes."
"Astoria in Slytherin green is one thing, Hah-ree. Astoria in Slytherin green that smells of Draco's cologne is another."
"How can you possibly know that—"
"I have been sitting next to her at breakfast for three years."
Harry, who was not quite sure whether to be impressed or appalled by Luna's olfactory observations of her best friend's wardrobe, settled for a small private mm of recognition. Inside the shop, Draco lifted the small pot of roses, turned it once, and—after a small hesitation that Harry registered as the precise hesitation of a fourteen-year-old contemplating a gesture—handed it to Astoria. Astoria's small composed face did the precise small flush at the cheekbones that Harry had come to recognise as her tell.
Harry and Luna moved on.
Honeydukes was the next stop, except they didn't go in. They paused in front of the great shop's frosted bow window with the slow attention of cloak-walking voyeurs, and Harry caught a glimpse, against the bright sweet-laden interior, of a tall ginger figure and a smaller dark-haired figure leaning together over a tray of Acid Pops.
Ron was holding two pops. Lavender was holding three. They were debating—Harry could tell by the precise bobbing rhythm of Ron's freckled nose and the small entertained tilt of Lavender's head—the relative merits of Acid Pop flavours, with Ron making the case for strawberry with the broad gesturing enthusiasm he applied to all such matters and Lavender, by every observable signal, conceding the argument with the affectionate patience of a girl who had decided several weeks ago that the boy was an idiot but was her idiot and was thus to be tolerated.
She tucked an Acid Pop into Ron's coat pocket without him noticing, with the small private grin of a girl who had rehearsed this exact small theft in her head and had executed it cleanly.
"Oh," Luna said softly, with delight.
"Lavender," Harry breathed, half-laughing.
"She is very fond of him."
"She is very much fond of him."
"And he doesn't know he's been pickpocketed."
"He genuinely does not."
"He'll find it tonight."
"And he will think she has bought him a present and will propose marriage to her by Christmas."
"Luna."
"I am only observing."
They drifted on.
The small corner bookshop Harry had walked past a hundred times and never entered was set back from the main street, slightly raised, with a green-painted door and a small brass bell. Its bay window held a precise little display of leather-bound classics in the warm amber light of a single oil-lamp. Behind the window, in the deep shadowed inside of the shop, two figures stood very close together.
Harry stopped walking.
Luna stopped beside him.
A girl with the exact line of the jaw Harry had been seeing across a study-table since he was eleven. A boy who was, against all reasonable expectation, almost not recognisable.
Viktor Krum had clearly been outfitted, with the diligent care of a girl who had thought carefully about how to render him discreetly invisible to fans, in what Harry could only describe as the Hermione Granger Concept of an Inconspicuous Wizard. He was wearing a long brown overcoat that did not quite belong to him; a plain dark scarf wound considerably higher than Hermione's own scarves usually wound, almost up to his nose; a knitted brown hat pulled down to his brows; and a pair of round spectacles, which he was clearly not used to and which made his dark heavy-browed face look mildly startled in a way that cover-photograph Krum had never been allowed to look. He held a heavy leather-bound book in his hands.
Hermione, beside him, was beaming.
She was beaming in the precise way Harry had only previously seen her beam at Crookshanks or, briefly, on Christmas Eve at home in her parents' kitchen at eleven o'clock with cocoa. The disguise was clearly her work. Viktor had clearly cooperated with the disguise with the meek good-humour of a boy who had decided that letting Hermione costume him was a reasonable price to pay for the entire afternoon's company.
"Oh," Luna whispered, with deep delight.
"Hermione," Harry breathed.
"She has dressed him."
"She has dressed Viktor Krum."
"As a very tall English antiquarian."
"He looks lovely."
"He looks absurd."
"He looks lovely and absurd."
Inside the shop, Viktor said something in his careful patient English. Hermione laughed—the unselfconscious peal of laughter she did not produce often and which always made Harry, when he heard it, want to be wherever it was being produced—and Viktor's face, behind the absurd spectacles and the high scarf, lit with the precise unhidden pleasure of a young man who had just learned that he could make this particular girl laugh.
Harry felt Luna's hand squeeze his elbow.
"She's happy," Luna whispered. "Really happy. Look at her shoulders."
Hermione's shoulders, which had spent the last fortnight tight and worried and over-organised on Harry's behalf, had come down a clear half-inch. Her hands moved freely as she talked. Her hair, with the cold of the shop's interior, had somehow managed to look intentional rather than chaotic.
Harry, who had not registered until precisely this moment how worried he had been for Hermione, registered it now, and felt some small interior stone shift sideways inside his chest and settle into a softer place.
"Yes," he said quietly. "Good. Let her have this."
"We aren't going in?"
"No. Definitely not."
"She would kill us."
"She would cheerfully kill us."
"Onward, Hah-ree."
They moved on.
They walked the rest of the High Street in their cloaked quiet—past the small charm-broker, past Scrivenshaft's, past the post office, past the small frozen pond at the far end of the village where two Beauxbatons girls were attempting a complicated pair-figure-skating manoeuvre on conjured blades and were, charmingly, failing. They drank their Butterbeer slowly. They stopped, at one point, on a small cold bench under a frost-silvered hawthorn tree, and Luna tucked her head against Harry's shoulder under the cloak and they did not say anything for nearly seven minutes.
It was, in the precise modest cold-bright Hogsmeade afternoon, one of the most peaceful times Harry had had since Hallowe'en.
Whatever was coming on Tuesday could wait.
For now there was Butterbeer, and Luna's warmth at his shoulder, and four good friends being unobservedly happy in the village around them, and the small private cloaked space of two people whom no one in the world could see.
He let himself have it.
19th November 1994, the Forbidden Forest, dragon enclosure, 5:47 PM
By the time the late afternoon began its slow surrender into the long November dusk, Hagrid was leading two figures along a small pine-flanked track deep in the Forbidden Forest, considerably further from the castle than students were, by any reasonable measure, permitted to wander.asd
The track was little more than a series of bent reed-grasses and crushed pine-needles, marked here and there by small charm-flares Hagrid had set the previous afternoon. The trees thickened as they walked. The air thickened too—an unmistakable thread of something in the cold pine-resin smell of the forest, a low warm undertone Harry's dad registered with the precise unfussed recognition of a man who had encountered the same scent on three different continents. It was the smell of a great quantity of living dragon.
Madame Maxime walked half a pace ahead of Hagrid, her enormous black satin cloak gathered in one gloved hand against the underbrush. Her dark eyes were keen and her mouth had the precise small interested set of a Headmistress who fully intended to be present at every relevant briefing, regardless of whether she had been formally invited to be.
Hagrid kept up beside her. His own beetle-black eyes had been alight with the particular shy delight Harry had observed on him since the night of the arrival ceremony. He was, Ethan registered with quiet amusement, trying to impress her.
Ethan walked half a pace behind. He had been at Hogsmeade for two hours that afternoon on Atid Stella business, signing the Tournament's revised broadcast-approval forms with Bagman's harried assistant; he had then accepted Hagrid's invitation to the dragon-briefing in his secondary capacity as the company's representative on the Tournament's safety advisory panel. He wore his charcoal travelling coat and his silver-framed glasses; in his right hand he carried a small leather-bound notebook he was not, as it transpired, going to need.
Madame Maxime had not previously met him. Hagrid had introduced him at the forest edge with the small deference of a half-giant introducing a man whose company had, the previous summer, custom-built him a cottage extension at no charge, and the introduction had been complicated by the fact that Hagrid had not, exactly, had the words for what Ethan was.
"Madame Maxime, this is Mr Esther. Atid Stella. He's, ah—he's advising on the safety side. And—" Hagrid scratched his beard, "—he's, uh. Harry's dad."
Madame Maxime's enormous handsome face had registered this with the precise small tilt of an aristocrat receiving a piece of information she had not been provided in her briefing-notes.
"Harry Potter's father."
"That is correct," Ethan had said, with the small polite warmth he reserved for first introductions to women of consequence. "Pleased to meet you, Madame."
Maxime had taken his hand briefly. Her eyes had held, for the precise length of two seconds, the particular careful attention of a woman who was now reassessing her view of the entire situation around the boy Potter.
Ethan had, of course, registered this. He had said nothing.
They had walked on into the forest.
Now they emerged into a wide cleared depression in the trees—a natural amphitheatre, perhaps two hundred yards across, ringed by tall pines and fenced at its perimeter by a heavy double line of charmed iron fencing whose magical thread, to Ethan's True Sight, glowed a steady reassuring amber.
Inside the fencing, six enormous shapes lay, knelt, or paced.
Hagrid's voice, when he spoke, had gone soft with reverence. "Theh's beauties, are they not."
The dragons.
The first, nearest the perimeter, was a vast pale-green creature whose long arched neck terminated in a heavily horned head with a precise alert attention. A Common Welsh Green, Ethan registered, by the markings. The second, beyond it, was a smaller silver-blue dragon with elegant arching wings and the precise high-strung readiness of a thoroughbred; the Swedish Short-Snout. A heavier, broader-shouldered red shape further in: Chinese Fireball. An iron-grey dragon with the harsh angular features of its Romanian breeding: Romanian Longhorn. A peculiar deep purple-black creature Ethan had only previously seen at distance: a Peruvian Vipertooth.
And, at the far end of the enclosure, slightly apart from the others, sleeping with the curled compact economy of a great cat, lay the largest of the six.
Black scales. Bronze horns. A heavy spiked tail laid across the cleared ground beside its body in a lazy curve. Even in sleep, the slow rising-and-falling breaths of its enormous chest displaced visible eddies in the cold air.
Ethan's amber eyes, in the precise instant they touched the creature, briefly took on the deeper amber of the True Sight at low frequency.
The threadwork around the sleeping dragon was a denseness of magic the Sight registered as a node rather than a creature—an overlapping interlace of life-force and history and the great old root-magic of dragons that had been doing what dragons did since long before the wizarding world had codified itself enough to give them names.
He breathed out, very slowly, with the small unfeigned reverent pleasure of a man who genuinely enjoyed the occasional encounter with the world's larger creatures.
A figure was approaching them along the inside of the fence, his stride confident and his face flushed with the cold. Charlie Weasley, in a heavy dragon-leather jerkin and gloves, his red hair pulled back, his arms laced with the small thin scars that marked his trade. He grinned broadly when he saw Hagrid.
"Hagrid!"
"Charlie."
"You brought friends."
"Madame Maxime, this is Charles Weasley. Charlie, Madame Olympe Maxime, Headmistress of Beauxbatons. And this here's Ethan Esther, Atid Stella—and Harry's dad."
"Mr Esther," Charlie said, with the bright easy warmth of a boy who had been hearing about Ethan from his father for years. He took the offered hand. "It's nice to see you again."
"Me too, Charlie."
Maxime's mouth twitched.
"Right, then." Charlie clapped his gloved hands, which produced a satisfying muffled thump. "Six breeds, six Champions. The Tournament committee asked for the most impressive selection we could safely manage. Welsh Green there—" he pointed, "—relatively docile, but smart. Swedish Short-Snout, fast as anything, breath-cone reaches forty feet. Chinese Fireball—territorial, the slowest-moving but the most likely to retaliate after the encounter ends. Romanian Longhorn, classic dueller. Peruvian Vipertooth—small but venomous, the most lethal of the six in sheer per-bite terms."
"And the Horntail," Madame Maxime said, with the small precise dryness of a woman who had read her briefing-notes.
"And the Hungarian Horntail," Charlie agreed. "Yes. The largest. The most aggressive when roused. Tail-spikes, wing-claws, breath-cone of fifty feet. Gorgeous creature, frankly. She came to us six months ago from the Hungarian preserve. Nesting mother. Ferocious, but predictable, which is what we wanted."
Ethan's eyes, still in their soft starlight register, rested on the Horntail.
'There you are,' he thought, with quiet recognition. 'That's the one.'
He had known, on arriving at the enclosure, before Charlie had spoken—because the Sight had told him at the edge of the trees, before he had crossed into the cleared ground at all—that the Hungarian Horntail was the dragon whose path was woven, over the next four days, into his son's. The threadwork said so. The threadwork insisted it.
It was not a threat the Sight registered with alarm. It registered it with the steady attention of a man cataloguing a known node along a known path. The dragon was not the danger. The dragon was the test. The danger was elsewhere—somewhere in the architecture of the Tournament itself, somewhere in the hand that had put Harry's name in the Goblet, somewhere not yet visible.
He let the Sight subside. The deeper amber of his eyes returned to its scholarly depth.
Madame Maxime was nodding gravely. "And one each. The selection is randomised on the morning of the Task?"
"Yes. A small enchanted bag with carved-scale models. Each Champion draws one. Their dragon, their order. The objective is to retrieve a golden egg from the dragon's nest without engaging the dragon to the point of injury—on either side."
"Without engaging," Madame Maxime repeated, with a small precise emphasis. "On either side. That is the safety protocol the Ministry has signed?"
"Backed by my entire team, two Senior Auror observers from the Bulgarian Ministry, and—" Charlie's eyes flicked to Ethan, "—Atid Stella's full broadcast-monitoring suite. We'll have eyes on every dragon at every moment. If a Champion is in actual danger of being burned, we are in the arena before they can be."
"Hmph." Maxime did not, exactly, look reassured—she was a Headmistress whose Champion was about to face a dragon—but she nodded, briefly, with the practical resignation of a woman who had decided she had asked the questions she was going to ask. She turned to Hagrid. "Walk me back to the Beauxbatons carriage, Hagrid. I have things to discuss with Fleur tonight."
"Course, Madame."
The two enormous figures retreated back along the path with Hagrid talking eagerly and Maxime listening with her precise listening-attention, and the cold pine air closed behind them.
Ethan and Charlie stood at the fence.
"Mr Esther," Charlie said, with a slightly different tone now—the lower confidential tone of a son of Arthur who had been raised to know precisely who Ethan was. "The arena."
"Yes."
"What can Atid Stella do for our perimeter spells that the Ministry hasn't already specified?"
Ethan opened the leather-bound notebook he was, after all, going to need.
"Quite a lot. Let's walk the line."
They walked.
For the next hour, in the gathering dusk of the Forbidden Forest, Ethan and Charlie Weasley walked the entire perimeter of the dragon enclosure together, with Ethan's notebook filling in the small precise hand of a man who designed magical safety architecture for a living and Charlie's deep practical knowledge of dragons supplying every detail Ethan asked about. They discussed shield-spell layering. They discussed evacuation Portkeys for Champions in distress. They discussed crowd-side ward redundancies. They discussed, with brisk professional efficiency, the precise sequence by which a Champion could be extracted, mid-combat, in under three seconds.
By the time the moon had risen over the tops of the pines, they had a working arena-protocol that was, by Charlie's professional assessment, considerably tighter than anything the Tournament Committee had originally specified.
"You think of everything," Charlie said, with the slightly dazed admiration of a young dragon-keeper who had just been schooled in safety architecture by a man who had been thinking about it for considerably longer.
"My son," Ethan said quietly, "is going to be in there, Charlie."
"Yes, sir."
"On Tuesday."
"Yes, sir."
"I am not relying on the Tournament Committee."
"I—understand, sir."
"Good lad."
19th November 1994, The Three Broomsticks, Hogsmeade, 7:32 PM
The pub at full Saturday-evening volume was a warm cheerful crush of bodies, and the small back booth Sirius had reserved by the window had the precise modest privacy of a corner that was visible to all but listened to by none.
Sirius rose when Harry and Luna came in.
He was, Harry registered with quiet pleasure, looking well—still tan from his autumn travels, his dark hair shorter than Harry remembered, a small new line of silver at his temples that suited him. He was wearing a Muggle-cut dark green jumper over a white shirt and a pair of comfortable cords. He hugged Harry hard. He hugged Luna very gently.
"You're both freezing. Sit. Madam Rosmerta is bringing soup. Don't argue."
"I wasn't going to," Harry said.
"Good."
They sat. The soup arrived almost immediately—a thick creamy mushroom-and-leek with hot bread and butter—and they ate it gratefully whilst Sirius, in the meantime, conducted the precise opening ritual of complaining about his life.
"The house, Harry. The house. I have been replenishing it for six weeks and I am not yet halfway done. Do you have any idea how much paperwork is involved in formally restoring a wizarding-family residence after a decade and a half of, frankly, the most depressing neglect in the western magical world? I had to register with the Department of Historic Magical Properties. I had to reapply for the house's protective ward licences. I had to pay back-taxes for thirteen years, which—Harry, I had no income for twelve of those years, what was the Department expecting—"
"Sirius."
"And the kitchen. The kitchen is cursed. The previous house-elf locked it as a memorial to my dear terrible mother and the locking-charm has teeth, Harry, literal teeth, Lupin lost a fingernail—"
"Sirius, you're well, then."
"I am well, Harry. I am enormously well. I am complaining because I am well."
Luna, beside Harry, was quietly smiling into her soup with the small contained pleased smile she gave when she was watching family.
"Right." Sirius set his spoon down. His face, in a heartbeat, went from complaining godfather to worried godfather. "Tell me everything. About the Tournament. From the beginning. Don't leave anything out."
Harry told him.
He told him in the brisk efficient sequence Hermione had drilled him to use when reporting to adults: the night of the Goblet, the binding, the antechamber, the Champions' alliance, Theodore's harassment, Skeeter's interview, Viktor's friendship, Ethan's letter about the Room, the bestiary research, the duelling practice. Sirius listened without interrupting, his grey eyes growing steadier and quieter as the report went on, the worry in his face slowly giving way to something more like operational readiness.
When Harry had finished, Sirius let out a long slow breath.
"Good. Good. You've done well. You and the others. Especially the Room thing. Especially the Champions-alliance thing. That's—" he shook his head, "—that's exactly what your mother would have done. Build the team. Trust the team. Don't try to do it alone."
Harry's throat did the small thing it did when his mother was mentioned offhand.
Luna's hand found his under the table.
"Dad will be there for the First Task," Harry said, with deliberate steadiness. "He's already been. He told me by letter. And Dumbledore will be there. And the perimeter is going to be heavily warded. Whatever the Task is—" his voice did not quite waver, "—it'll be survivable. With training. With the right preparation."
"It will be," Sirius agreed. "It will be. Because whoever put your name in that Goblet, Harry, cannot have you simply die on the first hurdle. They'd have given you a better assassination plan if they wanted you dead in the First Task. So the First Task is not where the real danger is. The First Task is where they're testing you—seeing what you can do, calibrating something. The real danger is downstream."
Harry exchanged a look with Luna.
"That's what we thought," he said quietly.
"Good. You're thinking like Aurors. Good. Now—" Sirius leaned forward, lowering his voice, "—I want to tell you three things you should know, and then you tell me to stop if I'm overloading you, and we'll come back to anything that needs coming back to. Yes?"
"Yes."
"One. Igor Karkaroff was a Death Eater."
Harry's eyebrows went up. Luna's did not.
"He was in the inner circle," Sirius continued. "Convicted in eighty-one. Released by giving up other names—lots of other names. The Ministry let him walk because half of Britain's Death Eater roster came from his testimony. He has been Headmaster of Durmstrang ever since, with a great deal of public legitimacy and no public accountability."
"He looked at me at the Welcoming Feast," Harry said quietly. "Karkaroff. Like he didn't want me there."
"He had reason to know your name as a target before he met you, Harry. Every Death Eater did. The Boy Who Lived. So when an unexplained fourth Champion turned out to be Harry Potter, Karkaroff's first instinct would have been to assume one of his old colleagues had done it—which would have terrified him, because if his old colleagues are operating again, they will come for him. Hence the look. Hence the cold."
"He also could have done it himself."
"He could have. I don't think it's the most likely scenario—he has a great deal to lose by drawing attention to himself, and he's been keeping his head down for a decade... but you should not rule him out."
"Right."
"Two. Moody."
Harry's attention sharpened.
"Skeeter ran an article last month," Sirius said quietly, "about the attack on his house in late August. I read it carefully, even with all of Skeeter's usual nonsense. The attack was well-timed. It came two days before the Hogwarts staffing announcements. If Moody had been killed in that attack, Hogwarts would have started term without a Defence professor. If he had been delayed, by injuries or by Auror investigation, the Tournament would have started without him on the security perimeter. Whoever attacked Moody was trying to prevent him from being here. They failed—Moody recovered, came to Hogwarts on schedule, took up the post. But the attempt tells you something."
Harry thought about this.
"They were trying to keep an Auror who knew dark wizards by sight from being here when the Tournament began," he said slowly.
"Yes."
"Which means the perpetrator is someone Moody would recognise."
"Yes."
A small precise pause. Luna, her hand still in Harry's beneath the table, said softly: "A Death Eater."
"A Death Eater," Sirius confirmed. "Probably one of the ones still at large. We'll come back to that."
"Three?" Harry asked.
"Three." Sirius's voice dropped further. "Bertha Jorkins."
Harry's brow furrowed. "Bagman's secretary. The one who's been missing since the summer."
"Disappeared in Albania," Sirius said grimly, "where Voldemort was last reliably reported to be. I knew Bertha Jorkins at school. Same year as your mother and me. She was—Harry, she wasn't bright. Genuinely. She was a kind girl who would believe anything anyone told her, and she had a particular weakness for gossip. She would have known about the Tournament before anyone—she worked in Bagman's department, she'd have seen the planning paperwork. If Voldemort, or his agents, captured her in Albania—and Sirius's voice went very quiet, they will have got out of her every detail of the Tournament's planning. Including the schools. Including the Champion-selection procedure. Including, I imagine, the Goblet of Fire."
The booth went briefly very quiet.
The pub around them was full of Saturday-night cheer—Madam Rosmerta laughing across the bar, a fiddle starting up in the corner—and inside the small island of their booth, three people sat with the cold understanding of precisely what had happened over the last summer.
"He's back," Harry said quietly. It was not, exactly, a question.
"He is coming back," Sirius corrected. "He is not back yet. But everything that has happened this year has been the work of someone preparing the way for him. The World Cup attack. The Dark Mark. Moody. Bertha. Your name in the Goblet. Someone has been clearing the runway, Harry, and that someone is one of his old servants, working from somewhere very near you."
A long silence.
Harry thought about it. He turned the soup-spoon in his fingers. He did not let his face show his thinking.
"Sirius," he said eventually. "You said you don't think it's Karkaroff."
"I don't. He's too frightened. Too publicly accountable. The man we're looking for is bolder. He is closer to you. He has been physically near the Goblet, near me, near Moody. He has had access to the inside of Hogwarts during the planning phase. That—" Sirius exhaled, "—that is a short list."
"Mm."
"I am not naming names tonight," Sirius said gently. "I have suspicions. They are not strong enough to be useful yet. But you—" he looked at Harry, then at Luna, "—both of you. You watch everyone at Hogwarts in the next month. Watch the staff. Watch the visiting officials. Watch anyone who has had access to the Goblet of Fire. Especially watch anyone whose attention to you is too consistent to be coincidence. Yes?"
"Yes," Harry said.
Luna's grey eyes were very quiet. "Yes, Sirius."
"Good." Sirius's expression softened. "I'll be at Hogwarts for the First Task. Lupin will too. We'll be in the audience as your father's guests, technically; under the Tournament rules we cannot give you direct help, but we will be visible to you, and we will be near. Whatever Tuesday brings, you will not face it alone."
"Thank you," Harry said softly.
Sirius reached across the table and squeezed his shoulder—briefly, warmly, with the precise gentle pressure of a godfather who had spent thirteen years being unable to do exactly that and was, even now, registering it as a small private gift each time he did.
"Eat your soup, Harry."
"Yes, Sirius."
"And you, Luna Lovegood. Eat your soup. Your father will come for me with a Crumple-Horned Snorkack-bone shillelagh if I let you leave this booth hungry, and frankly I would deserve it."
Luna's small dimple appeared.