Chapter 194: What the Water Showed

The four from Durmstrang stopped where they stood. Krum put his wand to his own throat, took the Langlock off, worked his jaw, and looked at nobody.

"Champions of this tournament, brawling on a shoreline like farm boys." Karkaroff's voice carried well and his eyes went from one side to the other as though weighing both equally.

He walked down between them as he said it, and let his pace fall off as he came level with Edward. His body turned, putting most of him into shadow, and his wand had come down inside the wide cuff of his sleeve. Something was gathering at the end of it. He had waited days for a moment when a lesson could be administered without anybody being able to say afterwards that it had.

Edward had spent four nights learning what the Dark Arts felt like at close range, and he felt it now, small and cold and moving. He went sideways off the rock before it was cast and brought his wand round behind him without turning.

"Protego!"

The shield came up gold and thin as beaten leaf and took the jinx square. The lavender light turned through most of a right angle and went back along the line it had come from, into a man who had made no preparation for it.

Karkaroff's legs went out from under him. He got one arm up and then the other, and neither of them found anything, and he went off the shingle backwards into the Black Lake with a great flat slap of water.

It was not deep there and it was more than deep enough. He came up streaming, hair flat over his face, robes hanging off him with the weight of the lake in them, and fought the shore for every step back out, each one landing like a wet cloth dropped on stone.

He was on the bank before the anger caught up with the fear. One hand went down and closed over his own right calf, and he did not appear to notice himself doing it.

"You - you would turn a shield on me? Do you know what I am?"

Edward was not listening to any of that. He was looking at the hand and at what was underneath it.

The soaked robe had gone transparent against the skin and clung to every line of the leg, and there was a scar the length of that calf, three inches of it, deep enough to have reached something it should not have. Around its edges the skin held a faint gold-red light, the colour of a coal seen through ash. There was one thing in the world that left that mark and it belonged to him. No draught covered it and no glamour held once water reached it, because it was not a wound. It was a brand set into the blood.

Four nights ago a man had gone out through a broken window with Edward's fire through his right calf. He had come back onto this lawn in a headmaster's robes, shouting at children about dignity.

The heat came up through Edward's hands fast enough that it nearly got past him, and holding it where it was cost him more than anything he had done in the forest.

He could not do it here. Karkaroff was Headmaster of Durmstrang and sat with the International Confederation of Wizards, and Edward had a scar on a leg and a memory of a night that officially never happened.

Say it aloud now and Karkaroff would turn it inside out in a day. A boy who had already put him in the lake would become a boy who attacked a visiting headmaster and invented a story to cover it, and everything after that would be Edward explaining himself. He needed the other half of it, the part that could not be talked around.

"Headmaster. I defended myself."

His voice came out entirely level, and there was nothing behind it but cold.

"You raised your wand at me from a yard away without a word of warning. I was not going to stand and take it. There are thirty people here who watched you do it."

Heads began to nod along the bank. Karkaroff had been careful and not careful enough for that many pairs of eyes, and a good number had seen the arm move inside the sleeve. The murmuring that started was not about Edward.

Karkaroff's colour went from red to something worse. He stared at Edward with everything he had, and did not move a muscle toward him, and then turned the whole of it on his own students instead.

"Well? Are you waiting for an audience? Get back to the camp."

None of them argued it. Krum gave Edward a look that promised the argument would continue somewhere more convenient, and Igor tore out of the last of the grass wall and left a threat behind him about the second task and how little Hogwarts was going to enjoy it. Volodya said nothing and watched Edward on the way past, which was considerably more informative.

Harry and Cedric were still trying to work out how a grown wizard had contrived to fall into a lake standing still. Adeline was frowning at the treeline.

"That was strange. Not the falling. Afterwards. He behaved as though the worst thing that could happen was one of us getting a proper look at his leg."

Edward did not explain. He watched Karkaroff gather the hem of his robes down over the calf and hold it there, and go up the shore at very nearly a run, and lose himself in the trees, leaving a dark line of water behind him the whole way.

"My egg."

Cedric was up off the rock and staring at the lake.

It had gone off his knees somewhere in the middle of everything, rolled down the face of the rock and over the edge, and it was out on the water now, riding low and turning slowly with the ripple. And it had stopped screaming.

What came off it instead rose through the water rather than over it, low and winding and clear enough that all of them heard it. It had an old shape, the sort of tune sung the same way for a very long time by people uninterested in whether anybody on the shore approves. Words surfaced and went under before they could be held, though between them the four caught enough - an hour, something taken, and a place beneath the water where it was being kept.

"It opens in water." Adeline had both hands over her mouth. "That is it. That is the whole of it."

Cedric went down the shingle and fished the egg out with both arms, and stood there dripping while the last of the singing came off the shell and faded, and there was nothing harsh anywhere in it.

"Weeks." He was laughing at himself. "Weeks of that noise, and it wanted a bath."

Harry already had his own egg and was three steps into the shallows with it, and the screech cut off the instant the shell went under and came back as the same slow winding song. He shut his eyes for a second.

"I could kiss whoever dropped that."

The three of them ended up crouched over both eggs with their heads nearly touching, arguing happily about how a person breathes underwater for an hour and what merpeople do about uninvited visitors, and the whole evening changed temperature.

Edward stood a little apart and looked at the egg turning on the surface with the song still coming off it, and his eyes had nothing in them of the mood behind him.

Karkaroff had been gone into the trees for some minutes, and the scar was still in front of Edward as clearly as if the man were standing there holding the robe up. Two things had come out of the water tonight. The task had given up its answer, and so had the man who ran. A Death Eater wearing a headmastership like a coat, one of the hands behind the Shrieking Shack, and now a fixed point rather than a rumour.

Edward let the fire at his fingers go out, and the heat that had been in his palms for four days finally began to cool. Behind him the others were still going, cheerful and loud, entirely certain that the worst thing waiting for them was an hour underwater in February.

He would need evidence, and then he would need a place to put it where the man could not step around it. He had a whole tournament in which to arrange both.