The Great Hall was full in a way it had never quite been in the three years he had been eating in it. The four house tables had compressed toward the center to make room, and along the sides and at the far end, the Beauxbatons students occupied additional seating in a configuration that managed to suggest, without being explicit about it, that they were accustomed to more space. The Durmstrang students, by contrast, had settled into the available room with the ease of people for whom any available room was adequate.
He watched Viktor Krum arrive with the same patient attention he gave everything.
Krum was — not what he had expected, which was not a failure of expectation but an acknowledgement that a person in person was always more specific than a person known only at a distance. He was eighteen, dark, with the posture of someone who had been famous for long enough that he had stopped doing anything about it in either direction — not performing the fame, not managing it away. He sat at the Durmstrang table and looked at the Hall with the assessing attention of someone who was used to being looked at and had decided to look back.
He looked, at one point, in Ron's direction.
Ron looked back with the specific quality of someone who had nothing to perform. Krum's attention moved on.
The Beauxbatons display came first. Madame Maxime nodded to her students, and twelve of them rose together — a coordinated movement that had the quality of something rehearsed into genuineness — and cast simultaneously. What followed was an exhibition of Charm work at a level that silenced the Hall not with volume but with precision: silver butterflies that moved with the specific quality of living things rather than imitations of them, filling the air above the tables, each one individually articulated, responding to the air currents and to each other in the way that only very careful magic could produce. The Hall received this in the specific awed silence of people watching something they had not known was possible.
Applause. Genuine, without performance.
The Durmstrang display was entirely different in idiom and entirely equal in quality. Krum rose with four others, and what they produced was fire — not the uncontrolled kind, not the dangerous kind, but fire as a controlled magical instrument, shaped with the precision of a discipline that had clearly spent centuries thinking about what controlled fire could do. It moved through the air above the Durmstrang table in patterns that were partly geometric and partly organic, and at the end it gathered itself into a shape above Krum's outstretched hand — a dark bird, burning, that spread its wings once and dissolved.
The silence before the applause was slightly longer this time.
He understood both displays. They were introductions, but they were also statements — here is what we do, here is how we do it, here is the tradition we come from. Both were excellent. Both were also, in the specific way of introductions, incomplete pictures of the institutions they represented.
He watched Dumbledore.
The Headmaster had been watching the displays with the quality he brought to watching things he found genuinely interesting. Now, as the applause settled, he let his gaze move across the Hall with the specific casual thoroughness of someone taking a measurement — and it found Ron.
One beat.
Ron nodded his head fractionally.
Dumbledore's expression did not change. But something in it settled, the way things settled when a question had been answered. He rose to his feet.
'Beauxbatons,' Dumbledore said, 'has shown us the extraordinary precision of a tradition that has spent eight centuries refining Charm work into something approaching its own language. Durmstrang has shown us fire shaped by a discipline that understands — better than most — what magic looks like when it is taken entirely seriously.' He paused. The Hall was very quiet. 'It falls to Hogwarts to return the welcome. I think we can manage something appropriate.'
He sat down and said, very quietly, in the direction of no one in particular: 'Now.'