Chapter 196: An Hour Underwater

He was out of the common room before the castle had stirred. The corridors held nothing at that hour but the small metallic shifting of armour on its stands.

The bronze griffin took his password without any comment on the hour.

"Sherbet Lemon."

The office smelled of boiled sweets and old paper, and Dumbledore was behind the desk with a quill going steadily down a margin.

He looked up over the top of his spectacles. "Edward. Good morning to you. Nobody comes to this door at this hour with something that could have waited, so let us have it."

"Professor, some weeks ago Sirius and I were attacked in the Shrieking Shack." Edward stopped a pace from the desk. "I should have brought it to you then."

The quill did not move again. Something crossed Dumbledore's face and was gone almost before it had arrived.

He folded his hands and gave Edward the whole of his attention. "Then tell me now, and all of it."

Edward gave him the shape of it rather than the detail. Four of them, hooded, through the door without a word spoken, and a Stilling Bell, and what it had done to him while it rang. He had put fire through one man's right calf as he went out of the window, and that burn did not come off.

Then he came to the lake and slowed over it. "Karkaroff came to break up the trouble with the Durmstrang champions and put a jinx at me on the way past, with his wand still inside his sleeve. I turned it and he went into the water, and when he climbed out his robes were wet through and the scar on his right calf was mine."

Dumbledore's fingers came down against the desk, once and then twice, and stopped, and for a long moment he said nothing whatsoever.

"Igor," he said eventually. "I ought to have kept a closer eye on him than I did. The Ministry took him as a Death Eater and he purchased his freedom by naming more than a dozen others, and a man who does that once will do it again whenever the price is right. He has no loyalties, only whoever happens to be strongest at the time."

Edward waited until the tapping stopped before he added the rest. "Sirius went into Borgin and Burkes and put it to the old man directly. The bell was never theirs, not in the shop and not in the collection, which means Karkaroff was given it. And the one we took alive was under the Imperius Curse, so the others likely were too."

"Not the Burkes." Dumbledore repeated it slowly, as if setting it somewhere he would be able to find it again. "That is a considerable thing to know. And as to who put it in his hands, set it beside what you brought me before, about Barty Crouch's son, and the field becomes rather narrow."

He turned his chair slightly toward the window.

"We have established how he came out. His mother went in under Polyjuice, took his place and died in that cell as him, and his father allowed it. He was held down very hard by that man from childhood, and what grew underneath was exactly what Voldemort knew how to use. A man like that does not come out of prison and rest. He comes out and rebuilds, and an ambush of that kind is very much his hand: reckless, elaborate, and willing to spend other people."

Edward had been waiting for somewhere to put the question. "Then do we take him now?"

"No." Dumbledore shook his head, and there was something tired in it. "We have a scar and an account of a night with no witnesses outside the two of you. Arrest a foreign headmaster on that and the Confederation will be in uproar inside a day, and there is every chance the tournament stops where it stands. That serves nobody but the man we actually want."

He let the mildness go out of his eyes without the warmth going with it. "So we wait. The day this tournament closes I go to the Ministry myself and have him taken for the attempted murder of a student of this school, and then we may ask him at leisure who handed him that bell. Until then he stays where we can see him, which is worth more than a cell."

"And you will take care." That was not a suggestion. "He knows you saw the leg, and a man who believes he is already caught does things a careful man would not. If you want protection, or help with your magic, or somewhere to put a thought at two in the morning, you know where this office is."

"Thank you, Professor."

Edward meant it, and it changed nothing, because walking back down the moving stair he found that the name sitting heaviest on him was not Karkaroff's.

By the ground floor the corridors had filled, and a voice cut across the traffic before he had gone twenty yards.

"Edward!"

Harry was at the corner with Ron and Hermione, all three with the brightness of people who have been awake half the night and consider it a bargain.

"We have it," Harry said, arriving. "The egg. The song says an hour under the water and it says they take the person you would least like to lose. Hermione went through it about nine times. So the task has to be an hour down there, find whoever they have taken, and bring them back up."

The brightness came off him a little as he got to the rest of it. "Which leaves the small matter of how anybody breathes for an hour. I know one charm for keeping water off my face and it will not last ten minutes, and everything is slower down there. Spells lose half their weight in water."

Then he looked at Edward properly, and something apologetic came into it.

"And your fire. Underwater it is going to be halved at best and gone at worst. Of all of us this task is worst for you, and it is not close."

Edward looked at the three worried faces and decided that whatever was moving out there could wait, since the second task was three weeks off and would not reschedule itself around him.

He put Karkaroff away at the back for the time being. "I will manage. There is always a way through something."

"We are going up to the library after breakfast," Hermione said. "There has to be better underwater breathing than the Bubble-Head Charm somewhere, and there may be something on carrying spellwork properly through water. Come with us. Four sets of eyes."

He very nearly said yes, and what stopped him was knowing there was a faster road than that one, and that it did not run through the library.

He let the tiredness into his voice, since it was true enough to be borrowed. "Not today. I was awake most of the night and I am no use to anybody like this. Tell me what you find."

"Get some sleep, then." Harry took it at face value. "We will come and find you the moment we have anything."

He met Draco halfway back to the dungeons with Crabbe and Goyle in tow, all three of them in the middle of an argument that stopped the moment he appeared.

"Black." Draco came over at once, openly curious. "What did Potter want with you? Is it the second task?"

Edward gave it to him without ceremony. "The egg is solved and it is the Black Lake. An hour underwater, and they take somebody from each of us to be found and brought back."

Draco's face lit and then fell again within about two seconds. "Underwater. Your fire is no use whatever down there. What are you meant to do, drown politely?"

Edward stopped walking, which was the whole reason he had come this way. "That is what I wanted you for. Your family keeps old books. Is there anything in them on moving properly underwater, or on getting fire to hold in water?"

Draco went quiet in the particular way he did when he was actually thinking rather than performing, and then his chin came up.

"There is a book in my father's study called Ancient Underwater Magic and Potions, and it has a version of the Bubble-Head Charm that somebody improved a few centuries ago. It does not only give you air, it clears your sight down there as well, and the duration is an hour." He was enjoying himself now. "And there is a Flame Solidification Charm that holds fire in its shape underwater so it does not simply go out. Weaker than dry fire, obviously, but still fire."

Edward looked at him for a moment. "You are certain of that."

"I have read it, which is more than Potter can say about anything in that library." Draco was already reaching for parchment he did not have on him. "I will write to my father this morning and have it sent up."

He paused.

He added the rest with the air of a man laying down a good hand. "And there is a potion in our recipes for putting weight back into spellwork below the surface. It may not do much for fire specifically, but it will do something. I will ask Professor Snape to brew it, since he owes my family a favour and will not enjoy being reminded of it, which is half the pleasure."

Whatever was being assembled out there in the dark, here at least was a problem with a shape and an answer to it.

The weight on Edward's chest shifted very slightly. "Then I am in your debt."

"You are in no such thing." Draco waved it off, though he was plainly delighted. "The Slytherin champion is not going to be pulled out of that lake by a merman in front of the entire school. Besides, I want to watch you set fire to something at the bottom of a lake. I expect it will be worth seeing."

Crabbe and Goyle nodded along on either side of him, entirely convinced of every word of it.

Edward inclined his head and said nothing further. The weeks ahead would be crowded: a task to be ready for, a headmaster to be watched without appearing to watch him, and behind the whole of it a man nobody had yet found.