26th June 1995, the Headmaster's office, 11:02 AM
The morning sun lay warm across the circular office, glinting on the spindle-legged silver instruments that whirred and puffed on their tables, and on the slumbering portraits of Headmasters past, several of whom were pretending to sleep so as to better eavesdrop. Fawkes preened on his golden perch. And around the low table before Dumbledore's desk sat the heads of the five schools, teacups in hand, in the quiet aftermath of a Tournament that had ended in fire.
Igor Karkaroff's chair was empty.
But Durmstrang had not collapsed in his absence — far from it. The stern, broad-shouldered man who had stepped into his place, his deputy, had taken the reins with a calm competence that Dumbledore had observed with quiet approval over the past two days. The ship had not foundered for the loss of its captain. If anything, it sailed the steadier.
"Then we are agreed," Dumbledore said, setting down his cup. "Mr Potter and Mr Diggory share first place. Mr Krum, second. Miss Okonkwo, Mademoiselle Delacour, and Mr Thornwood, third — and all six to be honoured, for all six acquitted themselves with great courage." He inclined his head. "And the Tournament itself — despite its terrible end — has shown what such a gathering of our schools can be. I should like to see it continue. An international event, held once in five years, the hosting passing between us in turn."
There were nods around the table. Madame Maxime murmured her assent; the Durmstrang man inclined his head; Babajide Akingbade of Uagadou and Agilbert Fontaine of Ilvermorny exchanged a glance and agreed.
And then Headmistress Fontaine set down her own cup, and her shrewd dark eyes settled on Dumbledore.
"That is the easy business done," she said. "Now. If you have something to say to us about the Dark Lord — about... Voldemort, for I see no reason to be coy with the name in this room — then I think, Albus, you had better say it now."
Babajide Akingbade leaned forward, her voice low and curious. "I confess I am eager to hear it. You knew this man before, in your war. How did you find him, last night, returned? And how does this Voldemort measure against the one you remember?"
The room went quiet.
Dumbledore smiled faintly — and the smile had no warmth in it at all.
"Before I answer," he said, "permit me a question of my own. Olympe — your school weathered his shadow, in those years. And Durmstrang knew him better than most. But Ilvermorny, and Uagadou — across the seas — how much do the two of you truly know of the man we faced?"
Fontaine and Akingbade looked at one another, and a thread of contemplation passed between them. It was Fontaine who answered first.
"Less than we ought, perhaps. We know he led a movement. Pure-blood supremacy, the old ugly creed — and that he made it into terror, here and across Europe, against wizards and Muggles both. We know he was feared as no dark wizard had been in a century." A pause. "And we know the story every child knows. The Dark Lord, undone by an infant. The Boy Who Lived."
Akingbade nodded slowly. "It is, to us, almost a tale. A thing that happened, far away, and ended."
Dumbledore's smile widened, and grew colder still.
"Everything you have said is true," he said quietly. "And every word of it has been... watered down."
He rose, and moved to the tall window, and spoke with his back half to them and his eyes on the smoke-scarred grounds below.
"Voldemort does not want power as a king wants a throne. He wants it as a starving man wants bread — all of it, in every form there is, and he will never once be full. He is obsessed past reason with his ideology, and past that with his own deathlessness; he has done things to himself, to escape mortality, that I will not name in this room. He tortures because he wishes to, and he enjoys it — his enemies, his servants, it makes no difference; last night he murdered his own followers where they knelt, for the crime of being insufficiently pure, and smiled to do it."
He turned. "And he is charming. Do not forget that. He can be the most reasonable, the most reasonable-sounding, man you have ever met. That is the most dangerous thing about him. The monster wears a very fine face."
The heads listened, and their reactions varied. The Durmstrang man's jaw had set hard. Maxime had gone still and grave. Akingbade's eyes had narrowed with a sharp, assessing interest; Fontaine's hand had tightened, very slightly, on her cup.
"Now," Dumbledore said, returning to his chair, "I will answer you. This Voldemort is not weaker than the one I remember. He is, I fear, worse — older, more patient, and burning now with the particular fury of a man who was beaten once, by a child, and has spent thirteen years in the dark nursing the shame of it."
He folded his hands.
"And here is the question I would have you each carry home with you. A man of such ambition, such cunning, such appetite — humiliated, and risen again — will he stop at Britain? At Europe?" His blue eyes moved from face to face, and rested last and longest on the two from across the seas. "Or will those of us who imagine ourselves safe, watching the drama from a comfortable distance, find one morning that the distance was never safe at all?"
The room was silent.
"When he begins in earnest," Dumbledore said, "and he will — I ask you to remember this hour, and to be ready. This war, if it comes as I believe it must, may prove the largest our world has ever known."
No one, this time, exchanged a glance of detached curiosity. The drama had, in the space of a few quiet sentences, reached into the room and touched every chair in it.
30th June 1995, the Great Hall, the Leaving Feast, 7:14 PM
The Great Hall had been dressed in splendour for the year's end.
Five great banners hung the length of the enchanted ceiling — Hogwarts' four-beast crest, the Beauxbatons twin wands, the Durmstrang double-headed eagle, the Ilvermorny Horned Serpent, the Uagadou ram — and beneath them the long tables gleamed with gold plate and floating candles, the whole vast room warm with the light of a summer evening that came down soft through the false starlit sky.
Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Ginny stopped in the doorway, struck by it.
"Now that," Ron declared, surveying the decorations, "is the sort of thing a certain Gilderoy Lockhart would've absolutely loved. Fame, glamour, his good side to the candlelight—" he adopted a simpering voice, "—'and a humble word, if I may, on the subject of my award-winning smile—'"
Hermione and Ginny rounded on him with identical expressions.
"Don't," said Hermione, "make me think about that man."
"A whole year," said Ginny darkly, "of that man—"
"It was a joke—"
What followed was a brief and friendly assault, conducted with elbows and one well-placed pinch, and Ron squirmed and protested and was thoroughly served, while Harry and Draco watched with the serene enjoyment of two boys glad it was not them.
Ron was rescued only by Hermione catching sight of Viktor — sitting at the table with Luna, Daphne, Lavender, and Neville, waving at her with a smile so soft and so daft on his usually stern face that Hermione melted on the spot and went skipping over to him.
Ron picked himself up off the metaphorical floor. "Women," he muttered, with feeling, edging behind Harry and Draco where Ginny couldn't reach him. They went, all of them, to join the others.
Dumbledore rose, and the Hall fell quiet.
He spoke first of Bartemius Crouch — a memorial, brief and honest. A hard man, the Headmaster said; a man who had made grave mistakes, the gravest of them against his own blood. But a man who had also, in his time, stood against the darkness when the darkness was at its worst, and given much in that fight. Let us remember the service, Dumbledore said, and learn from the error, that we none of us repeat it. To Bartemius Crouch. The Hall murmured it back, and lifted their goblets.
And then — against the express wishes of the Ministry, who would have preferred to manage the news — Dumbledore told them the truth. Plainly, and without flinching. The graveyard. The ritual. The name.
Lord Voldemort had returned.
He did not dress it in comfort. He told them because they had a right to know, and because, he said, in a time of darkness, the truth is the only ground worth standing on.
A cold hush moved through the Hall.
At their own table, Harry quietly relayed to the others what Hagrid had told him on the walk up — the coming war, Hagrid's secret errand for Dumbledore, Madame Maxime, the recovery of Crouch Senior — Ron chewing throughout until Hermione and Draco between them confiscated his fork. Ginny listened white-faced. Viktor's arm found its way around Hermione's shoulders.
But Dumbledore, wise as ever in the management of young hearts, did not leave them in the dark for long.
"And now," he said, and his voice warmed, "we have grief enough in the world tonight without adding to it by ignoring our joys. We have had a Tournament. A magnificent one. Let us remember why we held it."
The Great Hall darkened. And on the air above the tables, the Atid Stella projectors bloomed to life.
The footage rolled, and the Hall came alive with it.
The best of the year, gathered and edited — by the Creevey brothers, the credits proudly announced, in partnership with Atid Stella. Harry bowing the Hungarian Horntail. Cedric's nerve at the lake. Adaeze out-swimming the merfolk. Viktor and his kelpie. And — interspersed with the heroics, to roars of laughter — the best of the audience: a third-year fainting clean off his bench at the First Task, a Beauxbatons girl shrieking and dumping a flagon of pumpkin juice over Madame Maxime, Ron's own jaw hitting the floor at the surfacing of the bronze box.
When the credits showed, the Gryffindor table erupted — and Colin and Dennis Creevey were seized and hurled bodily into the air, beaming, to a chant of their own names. Harry caught Colin's eye across the Hall and gave him a grinning thumbs-up. The boy looked as though his entire life had been justified in a single instant.
Then came the awards.
Flitwick and McGonagall conducted it between them — the tiny Charms master practically vibrating with delight, the Deputy Headmistress upright and precise and, beneath it, quietly proud. Each Champion was called in turn, to receive their trophy and their prize and the warm words of all five heads, and as each was honoured the emblem of their school flared bright and high above the tables — the Horned Serpent for Robert, the ram for Adaeze, the twin wands for Fleur, the eagle for Viktor, and the Hogwarts crest, blazing twice over, for Cedric and for Harry.
Harry stood beside Cedric to take it, the Hall thundering, and thought — not for the first time — that of everything the Cup had cost, this, at least, was a good thing to have come out the other side of: standing here, alive, beside a boy who was also alive.
The feast ran late, and the next morning the castle emptied.
The grounds before the great doors were a chaos of trunks and owl-cages and farewells, the carriages drawing up in a long line to carry them to the Hogwarts Express.
Fleur came to say goodbye — to Harry, Hermione, Ron, Draco, and Luna, kissing each of them on both cheeks in the Beauxbatons way that left Ron scarlet for a full minute before being pinched and brought back to reality by Lavender. Adaeze followed, clasping hands all round, and pausing longest with Neville — "You will write to me, Neville Longbottom. I shall be most cross if you do not." Neville, going pink, swore that he would.
Robert came last of the three, with Selene Goshawk on his arm, and made straight for Harry and Luna.
"The campaign back home," Harry asked him quietly. "How's it going?"
Robert's grin was answer enough. "Better than we hoped. Honestly, mate — next time you're stateside, you might not recognise the place. Things are changing." He clapped Harry on the shoulder. "Bring the whole lot of them over. All of you. You'd be welcome."
Luna tilted her head. "Where is Howard?"
Robert sighed the particular sigh of a long-suffering student. "Left already. With Mr Weasley." His eyes slid pointedly to Ron, who shrugged with elaborate innocence. "Something about a — a project."
Harry and Draco exchanged a look of genuine alarm. 'Please,' Harry thought, with feeling, 'let them not have built a second Ford Anglia.'
Robert pressed a slip of paper into Harry's hand — an address — said "Call any time, truly," and went off to find his carriage with Selene.
A little apart, by the lake-path, Viktor and Hermione were saying their own goodbye.
Ron leaned in to Luna, Draco, and Harry and whispered, with the relish of a man narrating a match: "Oh, here we go. The trials of distance."
Three side-eyes turned on him at once. Then, with one accord, the four of them drifted a discreet distance off — and strained their ears shamelessly.
It began well enough. Summer plans. The fact that Viktor, with his schooling nearly finished, had decisions to make about what came next — and had not, he admitted, made them.
"But surely," Hermione said, "you'll play. Professionally. The national side, the foundation, the — you'd be famous, Viktor, more than you already are, the fans, the — the girls—"
And to her great astonishment, the broad, stern, formidable Viktor Krum's eyes filled with tears.
"Vhat girls," he said thickly, with the wounded dignity of a man cut to the quick. "Vhat fame. I do not vant fame. I vant—" his voice cracked entirely, "—I vant you to write to me. Every day. And to stay far avay from all ozzer boys. And I vill make my English perfect, Hermin-ee-nee, perfect, by ven ve next meet — and I vill come to visit you, I svear it—"
Hermione, halfway between laughing and crying herself, could only stare at him.
Then Viktor swept her into his arms and held her close, and said, half-muffled and entirely heartbroken, "If you look at me like zis, how am I to leave at all?"
A few feet away, Ginny watched with an expression caught precisely between this is the most heartwarming thing I have ever seen and oh, for goodness' sake.
The carriages were drawing up. There was no more time.
The two of them parted at last — reluctantly, and not without a final flurry of air-kisses that made Ron mime gagging and Luna applaud — and Hermione climbed into the carriage with her cheeks wet and her face shining, and looked back, and back, until the lake-path curved and Viktor was gone from sight.
The Hogwarts Express waited at the foot of the hill, scarlet and steaming in the bright summer morning, and the year — for all that it had brought, and all that it had begun — was over.