Chapter 193: Four from Durmstrang

The spires of the castle stood out of the failing light across the water, and the windows had begun to come on in rows, answering the first of the stars where they lay on the surface of the lake.

Edward sat by himself on a black rock at the edge of it. Years of water had left the stone cold and rough, which was most of why he had chosen it, since the heat in his palms had not settled in four days. Four days since the Shrieking Shack, and in four days he had turned the school over from the top down.

Students crossing the courtyards, professors bent over the greenhouse trays, staff walking the line of the Forbidden Forest at dusk, the small ones loitering on the kitchen stairs. Every calf that came out from under a hem, he had looked at.

The mark would not be hard to recognise. An ordinary burn is dull, and this was not: it kept a clarity to it, as though something molten had been worked into the flesh and left to set, and it held its own faint light.

Ordinary healing closed skin and did nothing to what lay beneath it. The rite that would actually lift the mark was written up in The Origin of Ancient Magic, of which even the library at Grimmauld Place held nothing better than fragments.

Nobody in the castle had it. As far as four days of looking could tell him, the man who had carried the Stilling Bell out through that window had walked off the edge of the world.

"Edward?"

The voice came across the grass on the evening wind, and he looked up to find Cedric, Harry and Adeline coming down toward the water with the last of the light stretching their shadows out ahead of them.

Cedric had his golden egg held against his chest with both arms, and the patterns across the shell threw back the sunset without warming to it. Harry had his tucked carelessly under one elbow, and there was grey under his eyes. Cedric came and sat on the rock, settling the egg carefully across his knees before he let go of it.

"Has that thing beaten you as well? It is going to drive me out of my mind. Alohomora, Finite Incantatem, an Undetectable Extension Charm because I had run out of sensible ideas. It screams, and that is the whole of its conversation."

Harry dropped down on the other side and put his egg in the grass at his feet without much affection.

"Hermione has been in the Restricted Section for three days. The Encyclopaedia of Magical Artefacts, Puzzles of the Ancient Wizards, everything with a promising spine. There is not one line about it anywhere."

"Madame Maxime said the answer was in following the nature of the thing," Adeline said. "So I have had it in full sun and buried to the seam. Both made the screaming worse."

Edward understood then that they had read his face and drawn the obvious conclusion. What had been sitting on him for four days had nothing to do with the egg, and there was no version of it he could hand across to them here.

"It is a difficult one," he said, which was true of something.

They sat in a rough circle as the light went. Harry maintained the screaming went straight through earmuffs, and Cedric said it had cost him two cauldrons already, and neither was really talking about the egg by then. Edward answered when answering was required, and his eyes kept going out across the water.

The Durmstrang camp stood in the trees on the far shore, and Karkaroff had worn the Dark Mark once, whatever the Ministry decided afterwards. If a man came off that lawn with a burned leg and needed somewhere to be, it was four hundred yards across the water. The thought had barely arrived before the heat in his palm turned over. Then footsteps came up the path, evenly spaced, putting a weight into the ground that was meant to be heard. Four figures came along the shore from the direction of the far camp. Viktor Krum walked in front, upright and unhurried, wearing the same closed expression he wore everywhere.

Behind him came Volodya Petrov, whose eyes were calm and missed very little, then Igor Vasiliev, built like a door and carrying himself accordingly, and last Nikolai Sokolov, turning his wand over in his fingers without appearing to know it. They came four abreast and made no attempt to be less noticeable.

"So the Hogwarts champions are no further forward than anybody else."

Krum's English came out heavy and deliberate, and every word of it had been sharpened first. His eyes went across the egg lying in the grass and his mouth moved into something that was not quite a smile.

"I had been told you were remarkable."

Igor came forward until he was standing rather too close to Cedric, and did not trouble to hide what he thought.

"Diggory. The luck you had in the first task does not follow a man about forever. You went around that dragon because you were fortunate, and if you cannot open an egg you may as well go home early and save yourself the walk."

Cedric was on his feet with his wand in his hand before the sentence finished, and his knuckles had gone white around it.

"I went around that dragon on Transfiguration I had drilled for a month. Say the other thing again."

"Drilled." Volodya spoke for the first time, quite pleasantly, and raised his wand with a perfectly steady hand. "Then let us see it."

The word he used was not English and none of them knew it. What came off the wand was thick and brown and low, and Cedric threw himself sideways so that it passed his trouser leg and struck the rock, spreading into a slick of tar that stank of the road.

"Expelliarmus!"

Harry's red went out across the shingle straight at Volodya's wand hand, and Nikolai's wand came up almost lazily.

"Impedimenta!"

The barrier came into being a foot in front of Volodya, and the red went into it and made a soft sound and stopped being anything.

"Your aim is nowhere near what it needs to be, Potter."

Krum had not looked at any of it. His eyes had fixed on Edward and stayed there, and behind them was what had been eating at him since the scores went up.

"Black. A duel, if you have the nerve for one. Whoever loses hands over his egg and says out loud that Durmstrang was the better school."

He did not wait for an answer before his wand came up.

"Locomotor Wibbly!"

The lavender came across whistling, and Edward moved out of its path so easily that he might have been stepping off a kerb, and his own wand went up as he went.

"Langlock!"

The pale blue took Krum across the throat. His face went red, and his mouth opened and produced nothing but a muffled sound behind the teeth, and what was in his eyes was mostly outrage. Igor saw his champion silenced and turned on the easier target with his teeth showing.

"Rictusempra!"

Harry had been waiting for it. "Finite Incantatem!" The white met the pink halfway between them and took it apart.

Cedric put an Impedimenta on Nikolai, and the barrier that rose out of it caught the Bubble-Head Charm he had been in the middle of casting, so that the whole of it broke and went nowhere.

"Ventus!"

Adeline's gust was not violent but it was well aimed, and it drove the whole loose cloud of bubbles back the way it had come, arriving around Igor before he understood what was happening. He vanished inside a sphere the height of a man, and along the bank several students laughed out loud.

After that it stopped being orderly. Volodya put Impedimenta after Impedimenta at Cedric, and Nikolai worked at Harry with disarming charms thrown accurately enough that Harry spent the next half minute doing nothing but moving. A Hair-Growing Charm came out of the bubble at nothing in particular, thrown by a man who could not see, and passed close enough to Edward that he felt it go.

He turned his wand over and put out a thread of fire no thicker than a hair, orange at the heart and almost invisible in the dusk, and laid it across the trail the charm had left behind in the air.

There was a small sound like fat in a pan. The dry grass along that stretch of bank came up at twice the height of a man in two seconds, thickened, and locked into a wall, and Igor, who had rolled clear of the bubbles and was coming around to arrive behind Cedric, walked into it and stayed.

Nobody saw where it had come from, which was the point. The Shrieking Shack had taught him that what people watch you do, they plan for afterwards.

"Stop this. All of you, at once."

The voice came from the direction of the camp, and Karkaroff came out of the trees at speed with the hem of his black robes dragging through the wet grass, his brows down and his face arranged into fury. Edward looked at him, and looked past the fury. Underneath it, well back where a man keeps what he does not intend to show, there was something else. When it came round and settled on Edward, it was not anger.