Chapter 185: After the Arena

The cheering rolled across the stands and broke against the stone walls, and rather than dying away it came back doubled from every direction, until the noise seemed to belong to the castle rather than to the people making it.

Edward stepped down from the arena floor with the fire patterns still fading at his fingers, the gold-red lines thinning to nothing against his skin, though the warmth of them outlasted the light by several seconds. Underneath that warmth there was very little left, and he had known it would be so before he walked out there.

Harry reached him first, cutting through the crowd like a gust of wind with his face wide open and his glasses askew.

"Edward, that was incredible," he said, his eyes brighter than the torches burning along the barrier. "You put the Horntail down without leaving a mark on it, and that fire - I have never seen anything like it in my life, not from anyone."

Ron arrived a step behind him and clapped Edward on the shoulder hard enough to rock him where he stood.

He was grinning like a man who had just won money on a long shot. "Merlin's beard, that was worth ten Quidditch finals and a Cup on top. And Krum coming at you from behind the way he did was absolutely rotten of him. It's lucky you were quick enough to feel it coming."

Hermione came up more carefully than either of them, and her eyes went over Edward instead of the arena, moving across him the way they moved across a difficult page when she suspected it of hiding something.

"Your control was frighteningly precise," she said. "Wandless and silent for that long should not be possible, and I would like to know how you are still standing. Holding Elementalization has a cost, and you paid it four or five times out there. Will you take a restorative draught?"

Cedric followed a moment later with his own golden egg tucked against his ribs, and where the sun caught the shell it threw a hard white line across his sleeve that moved when he moved.

He set the egg down on the barrier before he spoke. "Congratulations. There is nothing about it I would have you change. The shape you gave the flame sword, and the way you finished with the Horntail instead of against it, taught me more than the whole of last term did."

There was no sourness anywhere in his voice, and none in his face. He had lost, and he had decided to be honest with himself about the reason, and so far as he was concerned that was the end of the matter.

Adeline Shacklebolt came last and unhurried, her blonde hair loose with the afternoon light moving through it. Her composure had a crack running across it today, and what showed through the crack was plain admiration.

"You convinced everyone in that arena, and not all of them wanted to be convinced," she said. "What impressed me was not the power, since we had all guessed at the power. It was that you had that much of it in your hands and still left the creature whole. Very few wizards can hold a line like that once the blood is up."

The Slytherin knot had already formed a few yards off, and Draco stood at the front of it with his chin lifted, wearing Edward's victory as though he had bled for it personally.

Draco spoke before anybody else in his group could. "I never doubted it for a second, not one. Krum and Fleur were not in the same room as you, and everybody watching knows it. As for that ambush, well, that is exactly the sort of thing you get from Durmstrang and always have."

Theodore and Zabini nodded along behind him with their eyes fixed on Edward, and there was something in the way they looked at him that had gone past liking and arrived somewhere nearer to reverence. Slytherin had never seen any reason to be shy about admiring strength when it was standing in front of them.

Edward returned a small nod to each of them in turn, and when he spoke his voice was level enough, though there was a thread of exhaustion running underneath it that he could not entirely pull loose.

"Thank you, all of you. Continuous Elementalization at that duration takes rather more than people imagine it does, and I have very little left. I need the common room and a few hours in it."

Then a voice went through the noise like a needle through cloth, sweetened deliberately and entirely without shame.

"Mr. Black, a moment please. Rita Skeeter, The Daily Prophet. Might I trouble you for a few minutes of your time? An exclusive, naturally."

She came through the crowd in robes of a pink that belonged to no season on the calendar, her notebook already open and her quill already hovering above it, and her eyes carried the particular brightness of a woman who has struck a vein and fully intends to work it dry.

Edward remembered their last encounter perfectly well, and he had no illusions whatever about what she wanted from a story that had just shaken the entire school.

The temperature around him dropped. He stepped sideways out of the path of the microphone she was pushing toward his mouth, and when he answered, his voice had gone flat and very far away.

"No, Ms. Skeeter. I have nothing to say to you."

Her smile stiffened for half a second before she got it back under control, and then she layered flattery over the top of it and followed him without a trace of embarrassment.

"Oh, come now, don't be cold with me. The whole castle is celebrating you this afternoon, and every one of them wants to know where a boy your age learns to handle fire like that." She let a small pause fall in exactly the right place. "And as heir to the House of Black, what are your expectations for the tasks that are still to come?"

She leaned on the name on purpose, the way a person leans on a loose floorboard in order to hear it creak.

Edward stopped walking and turned to face her, and his eyes had taken on the look of something tempered in cold water.

"My magic is not your business, and it will not become your business. As for the tournament, I intend to answer that with results rather than with quotations." He paused. "As for The Daily Prophet, you have always been considerably better at inventing a story than at finding one, and I have not forgotten how you handled the last."

He did not stay to watch her face darken. He turned away from her and held the golden egg out to Harry, who was still standing at his shoulder.

"Keep this with yours for the moment, and tell me if anything comes of it."

Harry took it in both hands, and the shell was colder and a good deal heavier than it looked, its patterns catching the low sun and shifting as they caught it, the way water shifts underneath ice.

"Go and rest," he said, nodding hard enough to shake his fringe. "We will have something for you soon, I promise we will."

Edward gave Cedric and Adeline a slight nod and started for the dungeons, and Draco and the others fell in behind him at once. On the way past, Draco found the time to turn a filthy look on Rita and mutter something about flies that would not take a hint.

Behind them Rita stayed exactly where she had been left standing. Her fists closed slowly at her sides, and then her quill went to work across the notebook, moving fast and pressing hard enough that the sound of it carried.