21st November 1994, Hogwarts Castle, the Seventh-Floor Corridor, 4:38 PM
The November sun had already given up on the day by half past four. Through the high arched windows of the seventh-floor corridor, the Highland sky beyond had gone the deep indigo-grey of a winter afternoon that had slipped, without warning, into evening; the lanterns along the corridor walls had been lit by some attentive Hogwarts spell, and they cast small warm pools onto the flagstones at intervals.
Harry walked beneath them with a folded slip of parchment in his hand and the precise interior stillness of a boy who had just received news he had been bracing for and was, nonetheless, not entirely braced for.
Hedwig had come down at the end of Charms with the small new silver thread along her left wing-feather catching faintly in the late light, and a single sealed note in her beak. Harry had read the note in the corridor outside the classroom, and his face had not changed except in one precise minimal way: the small set of his jaw had hardened, and his green eyes had gone, briefly, the steady quiet they went when he was registering a thing he was now going to have to deal with.
The note, in Ethan's small precise hand, had read:
Harry—
I am writing in haste, but you should know before tomorrow. The First Task is dragons. Six breeds. One per Champion. The Goblet's selection is randomised on the morning. Charlie Weasley and the Romanian preserve are providing them. I have walked the perimeter with Charlie myself; the safety architecture is, by my own design, considerably tighter than the Tournament originally specified. You will be observed at every moment. You will be extracted in under three seconds if you are in actual danger of harm.
I am not telling you this to give you preparation that the rules forbid. I am telling you because the other Champions will know by tomorrow morning—Maxime knows, Karkaroff certainly knows, the Ilvermorny and Uagadou Heads know. You should know also.
Use what you know. Trust your training. Play to your own strengths.
Your father is near.
All my love,Dad
He had read it twice. He had folded it precisely in three. He had thanked Hedwig, who had given him a small dignified preen and departed for the Owlery.
Then he had begun walking, quickly, toward the Room.
'Dragons,' he thought, as the corridor passed beneath him. 'Of course it's dragons. The historic First Tasks Hermione catalogued. Beasts is a category. Class four, class five. If they ruled out Manticores it's because they wanted to rule them out for something larger. Dragons are exactly the kind of beast the Ministry would let through under "controlled and observed" protocols.'
He thought, as he walked, of the small bestiary illustrations he had been studying for three weeks. Welsh Greens. Norwegian Ridgebacks. Common Hungarian Horntails. He thought of Charlie Weasley's stories at the dinner table at the Burrow last summer, of the long scars Charlie had on his forearms, of the precise practical respect with which Charlie had spoken about the creatures.
He thought, briefly, of fire.
Then he reached the corridor opposite the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy, walked past it three times with the precise concentration the Room required, and the door opened to him.
"Dragons," Ron repeated, in the precise tone of a boy who was reasonably sure he had not heard correctly. "Mate. Mate, you said dragons."
"Dragons."
"Dragons."
"Yes, Ron. Dragons."
Ron put his hands flat on the long oak table and stared at the wood for a precise count of three. Then he sat down. Then he got up again. Then he sat down.
"Dragons."
Hermione had already pulled her notebook out and had opened it to a fresh page, her quill moving before she had quite caught her breath. The colour had gone out of her cheeks and been replaced by the precise focused white of a girl who had decided that panic was a luxury and was instead converting her panic into protocol.
"Right. Dragons. Six breeds. We have, by my last assessment, three of the six well-covered in our reading. Welsh Green—docile, breath-cone short, manageable. Norwegian Ridgeback—aggressive but small. Common Hungarian Horntail—" she glanced up at Harry briefly, "—not manageable. We have probably another forty hours of preparation before the Task. We need a fast triage. Ron, stop pacing—"
"I am not pacing—"
"You are pacing, Ronald—"
Draco, who had been leaning against the back of his chair with his arms folded, said quietly: "Hermione. Ron. Stop."
They stopped.
His grey eyes were fixed on Harry. He had gone fractionally paler than usual. A small thin line of perspiration had appeared along his hairline. But his voice, when he spoke, had the precise calm clarity of a boy whose Healer-training had taught him that you did not, ever, transmit your alarm to the person in actual danger.
"Harry. What did the note say beyond dragons."
"Six breeds. Random draw on the morning. One per Champion. Egg from a nest. Don't engage the dragon to the point of injury on either side."
"Egg from a nest."
"Yes."
"So it is not a combat objective. It is a retrieval objective."
Harry's eyes went, briefly, sharper. He had not, in the seven minutes between reading the note and entering the Room, processed that distinction.
"Right. Yes. Retrieval."
Luna, sitting on her cushion in the window-alcove, tilted her head with the precise serene attention she gave to interesting magical questions. "A dragon will not pursue someone who has taken from her nest, Hah-ree, if she perceives the threat to the rest of the nest as having ended. Mother dragons are protective, not vindictive. The objective is to remove yourself, with the egg, to a place beyond her perceived nest-perimeter. Once you do that, she will return to the nest. The combat is therefore optional."
Hermione's quill paused.
She looked at Luna with the precise expression of a girl who had spent the last seven minutes preparing a combat protocol and had just been told, by a thirteen-year-old Ravenclaw, that combat was not the optimal solution.
"Luna," she said, with the small reverent affection she gave Luna at moments like these, "say all of that again. Slowly. I am writing it down."
Luna repeated it. Hermione wrote.
Ron, who had returned to his chair and was now drinking water with the methodical pace of a boy attempting to manually slow his heartbeat, exhaled slowly.
"All right. All right. So the play is—lure, distract, retrieve, evacuate. Yes? Not duel."
"Yes."
"Which is good news, mate. Because duelling a dragon would be—" he gestured helplessly, "—not good news. Lure-distract-retrieve-evacuate is the kind of plan you can do."
"Mm."
"You are very good at lure-distract-retrieve-evacuate," Ron continued, with the precise loyalty-warmth of a boy reassuring a friend by listing his actual abilities. "You have been doing lure-distract-retrieve-evacuate since Hagrid's three-headed dog. You did it for the Stone. You did it for the Diary. You can do it for an egg."
Draco's mouth twitched. "Ron, you have a theory of Harry Potter as a magical-retrieval professional. I find this charming."
"It is not a theory. It is empirical."
Harry, despite himself, was smiling.
His friends—as they always did—had the precise effect of a small bright fire lit in a cold room. The dragon was still there. The Task was still tomorrow. But the Room was warm, and Hermione's quill was already moving, and Ron was processing, and Draco was Healing-calm, and Luna was beside him serene and certain, and it was, for the moment, survivable.
He sat down.
"Right," he said. "Let's work."
21st November 1994, Hogwarts Castle, the Library, 8:42 PM
He had been in the Magical Beasts section for forty minutes when he sensed someone coming up the aisle behind him.
The instinct was Ethan-trained—a low awareness of the threadwork of nearby attention, the particular adjusted quality of the air when someone was specifically approaching you rather than passing through. Harry registered the approach without turning. He knew, from the cadence of the footfalls, that it was Cedric.
He turned at the precise moment Cedric rounded the end of the bookcase.
Cedric had dragon books in his hands too.
The two of them stopped, looking at each other, holding identical Dragons of the British Isles and Continental Europe volumes by the same author. There was a precise small two-second pause.
Cedric's mouth twitched.
"Hello, Harry."
"Cedric."
"You're—researching dragons."
"As are you."
"Well."
Another small pause.
Harry made his decision in approximately a second and a half. The decision was, by every sensible measure, foolish. The Tournament rules forbade Champions from sharing strategic information. The other Champions—Maxime, Karkaroff, the visiting Heads—had certainly already informed their Champions; Cedric, with no Headteacher to act as intermediary, was the only Champion in Britain who had been left genuinely in the dark.
It was, Harry registered with the calm interior weight of decisions one had already made, not fair.
"Cedric," he said quietly, "you should know. The First Task is dragons."
Cedric's face went very still.
"Six breeds," Harry continued, in the same low voice. "Random draw on the morning. One per Champion. Retrieve a golden egg from a nest. Don't engage the dragon. The other Champions all know already. Maxime told Fleur. Karkaroff told Krum. Headmistress Fontaine told Robert. Headmistress Akingbade told Adaeze. You don't have a Headteacher who will tell you, because Dumbledore is the host and is, by the rules, not permitted to advise his own Champion."
A long moment.
Cedric's grey eyes had gone entirely unreadable. The handsome unselfconscious ease that was his usual register had retreated into something deeper and more careful, and what looked back at Harry was the precise quiet attention of a sixth-year Hufflepuff who had, in the moment, registered both the gift and the rule it broke.
"Harry—"
"It's not fair. The way it stands."
"I know."
"So now it's fair."
Cedric drew a long breath and let it out. He set his dragon book carefully back on its shelf.
"Thank you," he said, very simply.
"You're welcome."
"This—this is, you understand, the kind of thing—"
"Cedric. I understand. I would ask that you don't tell anyone I told you, because I don't want either of us in front of the disciplinary panel. Beyond that, do as you like with it."
Cedric nodded, slowly. The small grateful warmth that returned to his face was the warmth of a boy who had been considerably more frightened of going in blind than he had let himself admit.
"I owe you," he said quietly.
"You don't."
"I owe you, Harry."
"All right."
A small precise clunk of a wooden leg sounded at the end of the aisle.
Both boys froze.
"Potter. Diggory."
Mad-Eye Moody emerged from between the two ends of the bookcase with his magical eye doing its independent rotation and his good eye fixed steadily on the two of them. He did not smile. He did not, however, look angry.
"Sir," Cedric said, with the composed alarm of a Hufflepuff who had been, three seconds earlier, the recipient of forbidden information.
"Sir," Harry said, with the precise neutrality of a boy who had been the giver.
Moody's good eye rested on them for a long count of three. Then he gave a small dry sound that was, technically, a laugh.
"Diggory. Off you go. I want a word with Potter alone."
Cedric, with the small fortunate composure of a boy who had been given a reprieve, nodded once, gathered his books, and departed up the aisle toward the main reading room.
Moody waited until the footfalls had receded. Then he turned his good eye to Harry.
"Decent of you," he said quietly. "Diggory. He'd have walked in cold tomorrow. Now he won't."
"I—"
"I won't be reporting it."
"Th-thank you, sir."
"Don't thank me. I'm a teacher, not a Tournament Committee member. The rules they wrote are stupid, and I will not enforce stupid rules." A small pause. "Now. About your dragon, Potter."
Harry's attention sharpened.
"You'll find out which dragon tomorrow morning," Moody continued, his gravelly voice low. "But whatever you draw, the principle's the same. Play to your own strengths. The dragon's strengths are size, fire, and territorial aggression. Yours are—" his good eye glittered briefly, "—precision, speed, and a wand that does what you tell it without needing a great deal of incantation. So you don't fight it. You don't out-fire it. You don't out-strong it. You bring it onto your ground. You use a simple spell to do what you actually need to do. Something the dragon won't expect, because dragons don't expect human tools."
Harry's mind moved.
A simple spell. Something he had been doing since he was eleven.
A small precise click in his thinking.
Moody's good eye, watching him, registered the click and approved of it.
"Yes," Moody said. "Quite. Now go to bed, Potter. You'll need the sleep."
He turned, his wooden leg striking the flagstones, and clunked back toward the main reading room.
Harry stood for a long moment in the Magical Beasts aisle, holding his book.
'Why is he helping me.'
The thought was precise. He filed it. He did not yet know the answer. He would, eventually, work it out.
For now: bed.
22nd November 1994, the Champions' Tent, 9:04 AM
The tent had been pitched at the southern edge of an enormous open enclosure that Hogwarts and Atid Stella had, by some prodigious feat of overnight construction, raised on the broad meadow east of the lake. Through the canvas walls, Harry could hear—even at this distance—the rising murmur of the assembling crowd, the brisk official voices of the Tournament stewards, and, most distinctively, the low intermittent throaty rumble of a great deal of living dragon in the enclosure beyond.
The tent itself was warm, the heating-charms working hard against the November cold outside. A long table stood in the centre with six wooden chairs around it; a second smaller table at the side held tea, water, and a selection of small biscuits that none of the six occupants of the tent had touched.
Cedric stood by the entrance, his Hogwarts-yellow robes neat, his face carefully composed. He had nodded once at Harry on arrival and given him the precise small private thank you with his eyes that Harry had registered and returned in kind.
Fleur Delacour stood by the side table. She was wearing the pale blue Beauxbatons formal robes, her silver hair pulled back into a tight braid. Her face was the composed expression of a young woman who had decided, several hours ago, that she would not permit nervousness to be visible in this room.
Viktor Krum was sitting on one of the wooden chairs with his elbows on his knees and his hands folded. His Durmstrang fur cloak was at the foot of his seat. He looked up when Harry entered and gave a single grave nod.
Robert Thornwood was at the small table pouring himself a cup of tea. He saw Harry and his face split with the particular American grin Harry had come to recognise as Robert's I am about to do something difficult and refuse to be afraid of it grin.
Adaeze Okonkwo was standing very still in the centre of the tent, her dark eyes closed, her hands open at her sides. She was not, Harry registered, praying in any sense Harry would have recognised; she was doing some interior centring exercise that Uagadou's wandless tradition had clearly trained into her for moments like this. Harry watched her for a precise three seconds and made the small mental note to ask her about the technique at some later, calmer point.
He took the empty chair beside Cedric. The six Champions were now assembled.
The tent flap opened.
The interruption that came through the flap was not the one any of them had expected.
Rita Skeeter, in her electric magenta robes and her charmed clipboard floating helpfully at her elbow, smiled the precise smile of a journalist who had decided that being where she was not invited was the precise behaviour her readers deserved.
"Champions! Just a small word, my dears, before the morning's events begin. Just to capture, if I may, the spirit of the moment for the Daily Prophet's readers—"
Six pairs of Champion eyes turned on her with six varieties of no.
The tent flap opened a second time before Skeeter could complete her opening sentence.
Verrona Rogeiros entered in her precise white blouse and dark skirt, her copper hair pulled into its neat French chignon, her Atid Stella enamel pin at her collar, her green eyes containing the particular cold professional brightness of a manager who had been informed that an unsanctioned journalist was attempting to interfere with the Champions' preparation period and had decided to handle this personally.
"Miss Skeeter."
Rita's mouth opened.
"The Champions' tent is not open to media," Verrona said, with the precise steel-courteous tone Harry had heard her use exactly twice in his life and had noted, both times, to be the tone that ended a thing immediately. "The Tournament Charter is on the second page of the press kit your office signed. You have been provided with three press-access points outside the enclosure. I will personally escort you back to the appropriate area."
"I'm sure the Champions wouldn't mind a few small—"
"The Champions are about to face dragons, Miss Skeeter. They will mind very much. Out, please."
It was conducted with the precise grace of a swan ejecting a bath-toy. Skeeter, with an attempted smile that did not reach the predatory upper half of her face, departed.
Verrona turned to the Champions.
"Apologies," she said, with the warm professional briskness with which she had been managing crises and dignitaries at Atid Stella for the last four years. "I had been informed she might attempt this. I came in time. Now—" her green eyes warmed, "—I have something for each of you."
She produced a folded set of garments from a satchel at her side.
"Tournament outerwear," she said. "Atid Stella's contribution to your safety today. They are enchanted—" she flicked a small careful glance at the assembled six, "—flame-resistant. Not, I should say plainly, flame-proof. The Tournament Charter does not allow magical protection at that level for the contestants—the Tasks are intended to test you, not insulate you from them. But they will significantly reduce thermal damage from incidental fire. They carry your school's emblems."
She unfolded them.
The cloaks were, Harry registered with quiet pride, beautiful. Each one had been cut and tailored to the specific Champion's measurements, in the school colours of the school they represented. Cedric's was Hufflepuff yellow with a small embroidered black badger at the breast. Fleur's was Beauxbatons pale blue with a silver feather. Viktor's was Durmstrang dark red with the eagle. Robert's was cranberry with the Horned Serpent. Adaeze's was a beautiful deep ochre with the patterned earth-spiral. And Harry's—
Harry's was Hogwarts, which had, briefly, presented Atid Stella's design office with a problem; a non-Champion-of-Hogwarts-but-also-not-of-anywhere-else fourth Champion. Verrona's office had solved it elegantly. The cloak was the deep burgundy of Gryffindor with all four Hogwarts-House emblems embroidered in a small precise quartered crest at the breast, the entire Hogwarts shield, in micro-detail. Hogwarts in its largest sense, not any single House. Harry, registering the design, felt his throat do the small quiet thing it did when his father's company had gone to particular trouble for him.
"Verrona," he said quietly.
"Mr Esther insisted on the design personally," she said, with a small warm smile. "Try them on. I want to see they fit."
The Champions tried them. They fit. Verrona made the precise small adjustments at three collars and one cuff with brisk efficiency. She wished each Champion good luck in turn—Cedric, with a warm clasp of both hands; Fleur, with a small complimentary murmur in French that produced a startled small smile from the Beauxbatons girl; Viktor, with a respectful nod; Robert, with a small grin and give them hell; Adaeze, with a careful attentive bow that Adaeze returned in matching kind.
She came to Harry last.
She did not shake his hand.
She hugged him.
It was a brief, precise, motherly hug—the hug of a woman who had known Harry since he was nine and had, over the years, become for him one of those small significant figures who were not quite family and not quite not family, who occupied a particular warm place in the small private list of adults Harry trusted. She held him for the precise count of two and released him with a small fierce squeeze of his shoulder.
"Be careful, Harry."
"Yes, Miss Rogeiros."
"Verrona, dear. We have known each other long enough."
"Verrona."
"Better. Now I must go. Your father is in the Atid Stella command centre. He sends his love and asks me to tell you that he is watching every angle."
She turned and departed.
The flap closed behind her. The six Champions stood in the warm tent in their school cloaks, each with a small piece of new dignity that had not been there four minutes ago.
Then Bagman entered.
Ludo Bagman had brought with him a small enchanted velvet bag whose interior, when he turned it briefly upside down, revealed itself to contain six small carved wooden dragon-models, each precise and beautiful and, by a small charm, gently breathing.
"Champions!" Bagman beamed. "Right. Now then. The Task is straightforward. Inside the arena, six dragon-nests, each guarded by the dragon you draw. Inside each nest, a golden egg. Get the golden egg, get out, head clear of the perimeter line. The Tournament will award marks for speed, for technique, for bravery, and for style. Ladies first, Mademoiselle Delacour."
Fleur drew first.
She produced, from the bag, a small carved silver-blue dragon with a slender neck and elegant wings. Swedish Short-Snout. Around its neck, a small charm-plate read 2, indicating her place in the running order.
Viktor drew next. Chinese Fireball. 3.
Robert drew next. Welsh Green. 4.
Adaeze drew next. Romanian Longhorn. 5.
Cedric drew. Peruvian Vipertooth. 1.
Cedric's face, briefly, went the precise composed white of a boy who had been hoping not to go first and had not been granted that mercy.
Harry was the last. He reached into the bag and his fingers closed around the largest, heaviest model, and he drew it out, and he saw what he had drawn before Bagman announced it.
A small carved black dragon with bronze horns and a heavy spiked tail.
Hungarian Horntail. 6.
Harry's mouth pulled, very briefly, into a small wry smile.
'Of course.'
Of course.
"The Hungarian Horntail!" Bagman announced, with the precise theatrical relish of a commentator who had been hoping for exactly this. "The most aggressive of the six! And the position of honour, Mr Potter—you go last. You'll have time to watch your fellow Champions. You'll have time to learn."
"Yes, Mr Bagman."
The Champions exchanged precise small nods.
"Good luck, Cedric," Robert said, with sincere warmth.
"Good luck, all of you," Adaeze added.
"The best of luck," Fleur said.
"Win it cleanly," Viktor said.
"Survive it," Harry said quietly to himself.
Cedric squared his shoulders. The cannon outside the tent went off with a small concussive boom that vibrated the canvas.
The First Task had begun.
22nd November 1994, the Tournament Arena, the central tier audience seats, 9:14 AM
"Sirius," Lupin said, with the precise pained patience of a man who had been managing his oldest friend since they were eleven. "Sirius. Please."
"What."
"The hat, Sirius."
"What about the hat."
"It is enormous."
"That is the point of the hat, Moony."
"It is on fire."
"That is also the point of the hat. It is a hat that resembles a small dragon that has caught fire. I had it commissioned in Diagon Alley last week. The magic is excellent. The flames are illusory. The hat is significant."
"Sirius."
"Moony, my godson is about to face a dragon. I am wearing a hat that resembles a dragon on fire. By the law of sympathetic magic, the dragon will look at me, the dragon will look at this hat, the dragon will become confused, and my godson will benefit. I will not hear any further argument on the matter."
"The law of sympathetic magic," Lupin said wearily, "does not, in fact, work that way."
"It does today, Moony."
In the row of audience seats Sirius and Lupin had been escorting, the assembled cluster of Harry's friends were arranging themselves with the precise contained energy of a group who were, all of them, secretly terrified and were managing it with the precise bracing humour they had learnt over the last fortnight.
Hermione sat on the aisle end with her small notebook in her lap and a cup of hot tea in her hand. Ron was in the seat beside her—and was, by Lavender's careful arrangement, also beside Lavender. Lavender had three paper bags of Honeydukes confectionary on her lap and was steadily distributing them along the row with the precise efficiency of a girl who had decided that snack-management was the appropriate response to her boyfriend's nerves. Boyfriend. The label had been quietly settled, by the two of them, two days ago. The row had absorbed the news with the precise affection of friends who had been waiting six months for it.
Draco sat next to Lavender, pale but composed. Beside him, Astoria—whose face was somewhat paler than usual. Draco glanced at her and, with the quiet efficiency of a Healer-trained boy, produced from his coat-pocket a small dark glass vial.
"Astoria."
"I am fine, Draco."
"Take it."
"I do not need it. It is not bad today."
"You are pale enough that you will worry your sister, and you will worry me, and if you faint Madam Pomfrey will have to attend you, and I would rather you simply drank the bottle and were warm."
Astoria, with the precise dignified resignation of a girl whose oldest friend had her well in hand, accepted the bottle, drank it, and gave Draco a small wordless thank-you-look. Her colour, with the bottle's slow warmth, began to return.
Daphne, on Astoria's other side, exchanged a glance with Draco that was the precise glance of two people who had been managing Astoria's chronic illness for years and had, between them, an unspoken protocol.
Luna sat beside Draco. She had taken Astoria's small cold hand in both of hers and was holding it gently. She had not spoken since they sat down. Her grey eyes were fixed on the entrance to the arena far below.
Neville sat beside Luna with his hands folded in his lap, very still and very quiet, watching the arena with the precise focused attention of a boy who had become, over the term, increasingly close to one of the Champions and had brought a small bouquet of dittany flowers in his pocket just in case.
Sirius's enormous flame-illusion dragon-hat—because Sirius had, in the end, refused to be argued out of it—made him visible from the far end of the arena. Lupin, beside him, had given up.
The cannon sounded.
The first Champion entered the arena.
Cedric.
Cedric and the Peruvian Vipertooth went, from the audience's perspective, in a precise sequence of too fast and too slow at once. He entered the arena at a brisk walk; he saw the dragon coiled around a clutch of rocks and eggs at the centre; he raised his wand.
What followed was a Transfiguration-based gambit. He turned a stone into a small fast-moving dog and threw it across the dragon's field of vision. The Vipertooth—small, lethal, fast—turned its head with a serpentine snap and pursued the dog. Cedric ran for the eggs. He had almost reached them when the Vipertooth, registering the trick with the small precise outraged cleverness peculiar to the Vipertooth breed, turned back, and breathed.
Cedric threw himself sideways. The breath-cone was venom, not fire, and it caught him across the side of the face and the right shoulder, and he made a small choked sound and kept moving. He reached the nest. He grabbed the golden egg. He threw himself, with the side of his face already darkening with what Harry would later learn was the particular dragon-venom burn of a Peruvian Vipertooth, behind a low rock outcrop, and the crowd erupted.
Madam Pomfrey was in the arena before the Vipertooth-keepers had subdued the dragon. She had her pot of orange paste already out and her sleeves already pushed up. Cedric, with the side of his face ugly and burning, gave a small thumbs-up to the audience and was led away to the Champions' medical tent, where Cho Chang—who had been seated three rows ahead of Harry's friends—had already half-risen and was halfway to the medical entrance with her hands at her mouth and her cheeks visibly wet.
Hermione let out a long held breath.
"He did it," she whispered.
"He did it," Ron whispered back.
Draco was watching with his Healer's eye. "Vipertooth venom. The orange paste is the right antidote. He will be all right. Possibly some scarring."
A small precise pause.
"One of six," Lupin murmured.
Fleur entered next, against the Swedish Short-Snout, and conducted what was, by every measure, the most balletic engagement of the morning. She enchanted the dragon to drowsiness with a precise low-level soporific charm she clearly had considerable confidence in, and she retrieved the egg with the precise unhurried elegance of a woman who had decided that grace was a viable strategy.
The dragon did, briefly, snore on her cloak hem. Her cloak hem caught a small flame. She put it out with a single dispassionate Aguamenti and walked out of the arena to a roar of applause.
"Mate," Ron whispered to Lavender, very quietly, "she was very good."
Lavender, beside him, smiled the precise small dangerous smile of a girl who had been waiting for this exact moment.
"Ronald."
"I am simply observing technical—"
"Ronald."
"Yes, Lavender."
"I believe you."
"Thank you, Lavender."
"And the next time you drool at a Veela, I will hex you."
"Yes, Lavender."
Hermione was openly grinning into her tea.
Viktor entered next.
He moved into the arena with the flat-footed unhurried economy of a Quidditch Seeker who had decided that the dragon was, in essence, a faster Bludger. His wand rose. He cast the Conjunctivitis Curse—and the Chinese Fireball, which had been preparing to roar, blinked once and lurched in confusion. Viktor conjured, with a quick precise gesture, a lasso of light, dropped it around the egg, and pulled. The egg flew across the arena and into his outstretched hand. He had retrieved the egg in precisely forty-one seconds.
The blinded dragon, in its confused thrashing, did crush a number of the real eggs in the nest, and Viktor—Hermione would later note, with the precise admiration of a girl who had learnt this about him already—had clearly factored this into his approach and had gone for the golden egg first to minimise the dragon's distress-time.
He walked out of the arena to the largest cheer yet.
Hermione, in the centre tier, did the most uncharacteristic thing of the morning. She stood up. She cupped her hands. She cheered.
"VIKTOR!"
The tier around her registered this with a small precise collective notice. Lupin's eyebrow rose. Sirius turned in his seat with the precise delighted attention of a godfather who had just been handed an excellent piece of intelligence.
Viktor, pausing in the arena to wave to the audience, found Hermione's voice across approximately three hundred feet of crowd, and his careful Bulgarian face split into the precise unguarded delighted smile that Hermione had only previously seen in the corner bookshop in Hogsmeade.
He waved at her.
Specifically at her. With the precise small private gesture of a young man whose face had been carefully professional for the entire morning until that exact moment.
The tier registered that too.
Hermione, with the precise dignified composure of a girl who had just realised that she had stood up and cheered in front of approximately forty people who knew her by name, sat down with controlled grace, plucked Luna's brass spectroscope from where Luna had been wearing it as a pendant, and pressed it to her face with the precise focused attention of a student studying technical broadcasting equipment.
"Hermione," Ron said, with delight, "was that—"
"I did not stand up. I was reaching for my notebook."
"Hermione."
"It is not what it looked like."
"Hermione."
"Ronald, I will hex you."
Sirius, from two seats over, was wheezing with the precise silent laughter of a man who had been waiting his entire godfatherhood for exactly this kind of inter-friend romantic complication, and was now savouring it.
Robert entered fourth. He went up against the Welsh Green—the most docile of the six—and, in the precise American style Harry had registered at Ilvermorny, he did not attempt elegance. He went in with a robust charm-shield held in front of him like a Muggle riot-shield, weathered the dragon's first short fire-blast with the particular practical resilience of an Ilvermorny student who had been training in protective combat since age eleven, and applied a potent Conjunctivitis-variant of his own that turned the dragon's eyes briefly silver. He grabbed the egg. He took a small clip on the calf from a tail-swipe as he retreated. He limped out of the arena with the egg held high and a wide grin.
Madam Pomfrey applied dittany. Robert was fine. He waved at Harry's row across the audience with the relaxed Boston grin of a boy who had passed his exam.
Adaeze entered fifth.
She did not carry a wand. She carried, in her right hand, the small carved blackwood staff Mr Ollivander had admired at the wand-weighing. In her left, nothing. She entered the arena at a slow walk and stopped.
She raised both hands, palms outward, and began.
What followed was, by Hermione's later estimation, one of the most beautiful things she had seen. Adaeze did not, exactly, cast spells. She moved. Her hands traced careful patterns in the air—precise, unhurried, with the rhythm of a long-rehearsed dance. Each gesture produced a small concrete effect: a vine of green erupted from the arena floor and twined around the Romanian Longhorn's right hind leg; a second gesture summoned a small cloud of focused mist that obscured the dragon's eyes; a third produced what Harry could only describe as a hardening of her own body—her shoulders broadening fractionally, her stance widening, the precise Uagadou body-augmentation magic that she had been quietly teaching the Hufflepuff first-years over the last week. She walked, strode, into the dragon's nest, lifted the golden egg, and walked out, the dragon thrashing against its bound leg behind her.
The crowd did not, immediately, cheer. It was too quiet-spectacular for the immediate cheer.
Then it erupted.
Neville, beside Luna, was clapping with both hands.
"Adaeze," he murmured, with quiet pride.
Then the cannon fired for the sixth and final time.
Harry stood up in the Champions' tent.
He drew a long breath in. He drew it out. He adjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose. He set the burgundy cloak straight on his shoulders. He pulled the hood up over his hair—not for fashion, but because the simple act of putting on a hood, before a fight, settled the head. He drew his holly wand. He stepped through the canvas flap and into the arena.
The crowd of approximately eight thousand erupted around him.
He saw, in the precise instant he stepped onto the arena floor, his friends in the central tier. Hermione's tea forgotten in her lap. Luna sitting forward with her hands folded. Draco with his face composed. Ron beside Sirius, both of them on their feet, both of them with their hands cupped at their mouths shouting. The enormous flame-illusion dragon-hat on Sirius's head, which Harry registered with a small private wave of fond exasperated affection that did, for a fraction of a second, settle his nerves the way nothing else could have.
Lupin, sat beside Sirius, was watching him steadily with the precise focused care of an old teacher who had taught him Riddikulus against a Dementor and was, in his quiet way, with Harry now.
Harry did not see his father.
He had not expected to. Ethan, by now, was in the Atid Stella command centre at the lake-side—a small temporary stone-and-canvas building that had been raised by Atid Stella's design team specifically for this morning, where every angle of every dragon-engagement was being captured and broadcast across nine countries. Harry did not need to see his father to know, with absolute interior certainty, that Ethan was watching, his amber eyes in their starlight register, his pocket watch open in his palm, a cup of tea cooling beside him.
'Dad.'
The thought was small and steadying.
He turned to the Hungarian Horntail.
She was enormous.
She was, in the precise instant he registered her, far larger than the bestiary illustrations had suggested. Black scales the colour of polished obsidian. Bronze horns that caught the morning light with a hard cold gleam. A heavy spiked tail laid out across the rocks of her nest with the lazy unhurried economy of a great cat whose entire body was a weapon. Her great yellow eyes had narrowed on him the moment he stepped into the arena.
She roared.
The sound went through Harry's chest the way the World Cup crowd had gone through it—a vibration in the bones, a pressure on the heart, a wholly physical communication that meant get away from the eggs.
Harry registered it. He did not move.
'Lure-distract-retrieve-evacuate,' he thought, with the precise calm of his Cogitation engaging beneath the noise. 'Play to your strengths. Simple spell. Something dragons don't expect, because dragons don't expect human tools.'
His holly wand rose.
"Stupefy!"
The bolt crossed the arena and struck the Horntail in the precise centre of her broad chest.
The Horntail—who, by Charlie Weasley's later technical analysis, was approximately forty-eight times the magical mass at which a single Stupefy could fully stun a creature—staggered, very slightly, and shook her head in the precise irritated way of a creature whose attention had been suddenly drawn from the eggs and onto the small man-shape that had just struck her with something.
Her great wings rose.
"Stupefy! Stupefy! Stupefy!"
Three more bolts, in quick precise succession, struck the Horntail across the shoulders and flanks. Each one staggered her. Each one, more importantly, moved her attention—her great horned head turning fully now to track Harry, her body shifting in the nest to face him directly.
She roared again, and this time the roar was followed by fire.
A column of golden-orange flame erupted from her open jaws. It crossed the arena in the precise direction of Harry's chest with the sound of a great furnace.
Harry was already moving.
He pivoted to his left at exactly the speed Ethan had drilled into him, and the column of flame passed his right shoulder with a pressure of heat so immediate that the flame-resistant cloak Verrona had given him registered the contact and held.
The Horntail's tail came around in the same instant and Harry, registering it with the trained reflex of his entire fourteen-year-old body, leapt.
The tail passed beneath him. He landed running.
'Now.'
His left hand went into the inside pocket of the burgundy cloak and retrieved what was, by every practical measurement, the simple spell Moody had told him to use.
A small leaf-shaped object the size of a pinky-finger nail, in dull bronze.
The miniature Firebolt.
He dropped it. He pointed his wand at the small bronze object on the ground.
"Engorgio!"
The Firebolt resumed its full broom-length in a single soundless expansion.
Harry was on it before it had fully settled.
'Up.'
He kicked off and the broom shot skyward with the precise responsive eagerness it had given Ron for two seasons of Quidditch, and Harry was, in approximately a second and a half, fifty feet in the air over the arena, looking down at the great black bulk of the Horntail and at the precise line of her nest below.
The crowd roared.
Sirius, in the central tier, bellowed.
The Horntail registered the new development. She flexed her great wings and prepared to follow.
She could not. The chains—the heavy enchanted bindings Charlie Weasley had set into the arena's deep stones months ago in collaboration with Ethan's perimeter-protocol—rose from the ground at the precise instant her wings made for elevation, and held her. She could only watch as the small man on the small broom circled, dropped, and approached the nest from above.
Harry came down. He reached. He had the egg in his hands.
The Horntail's great head whipped around faster than Harry had expected—faster than the bestiaries had said Horntails could—and a second column of flame erupted from her jaws aimed directly at his back as he rose, the egg now in his arms.
Harry, mid-rise, twisted in the air, holding the broom with his knees, his wand already raised in his right hand.
"Protego."
The shield-charm formed beneath him in the precise polished plane it had formed in Ron's duel and Draco's duel. It was, to Harry's wand, a routine charm. To the Hungarian Horntail's fire, it was a perfect plate of clear unyielding magic.
The flame met the shield. It dispersed. It went around him, harmless on either side.
The crowd, which had been holding its breath for the precise count of two seconds during which it had been entirely sure Harry was about to be incinerated, exploded.
He rose above the dragon's reach. He hovered.
Below him, the Horntail, against her chains, gathered herself for one final lunge.
Harry's holly wand was still raised. His green eyes had gone, in the air with the egg in his arms, the precise quiet they went in the duels in the Room. He looked down at the great dragon below him, and he did the small interior thing he had practised exactly twice in private in the Room of Requirement two nights ago, after Moody's library tip and Ethan's letter and the long quiet hours of his own thinking.
He cast a charm Ethan had been teaching him since the previous summer. A charm that was not in any standard textbook. A charm that combined a Disarming Charm with a precise interwoven sequence of three Ancient Runes that Harry had learned at age twelve from Ethan's own personal grimoire—runes for bind, for still, for yield.
The charm, when it left his wand, was not red and not blue.
It was a sharp clean crimson lightning, the colour of a sunset over a far ridge, and it struck the Horntail in the precise centre of her broad black chest, and the great dragon's body—which had been rearing against its chains—went, in a single sustained moment, still.
Not unconscious. Not harmed. Bound. The way a ship is bound to its anchor. The way a charm is bound to a wand.
The Horntail subsided into a great slow careful posture of I am no longer in this fight, and her enormous yellow eyes blinked once at Harry with what, to those watching, looked very much like surprise.
The arena was, for a precise count of four seconds, absolutely silent.
Harry came down on his Firebolt, landed lightly on the arena floor twenty feet from the now-still dragon, dismounted, and stood with the egg under his left arm and his wand at his side, his burgundy cloak and dark hood fluttering in the small cold morning wind.
He looked up at the central tier.
He found Luna's eyes across the distance. He saw her hands at her chest in the small held gesture she did when she was watching something she had known would happen and had been waiting to see. He saw Hermione, who had her hand over her mouth. He saw Ron, who had his fist in the air. He saw Draco. He saw Sirius's enormous absurd dragon-hat. He saw Lupin, who was openly smiling. He saw Astoria, with colour returned to her cheeks. He saw Daphne, who was clapping. He saw Neville, who was clapping. He saw Lavender, who was cheering.
And, in a small private flash that lasted the precise length of a heartbeat, his own father in the Atid Stella command centre at the lake-side, with a cup of tea in his hand, with his amber eyes in the precise starlight register of the True Sight.
The arena, breaking out of its silence, erupted.
The cheer that went up was the largest the Tournament had heard that morning by some considerable margin—a cheer that came from Hogwarts, and from Beauxbatons, and from Durmstrang, and from Ilvermorny, and from Uagadou, and from approximately five thousand wizards and witches who had, two minutes ago, been quite sure they were about to watch a fourteen-year-old boy be set on fire.
Harry, in the precise arena-centre with his hood still up and his cloak still settling and the golden egg under his arm, did the precise small thing his father had taught him to do at the end of a successful piece of work.
He bowed.
Once. Briefly.
To the dragon first. To the audience second.
Then he turned and walked, not ran, out of the arena, with the precise unhurried economy of a boy who had just done exactly what he had set out to do.
The First Task was over.