Chapter 197: Below the Common Room

The fire had burned down twice over in the Slytherin common room, and the silver-green candlelight lay across a table given over entirely to open books, none of which had been closed in two days.

Edward and Draco had barely left the room since the owl came up from Wiltshire with Lucius Malfoy's copy of Ancient Underwater Magic and Potions, and Crabbe and Goyle had been carrying meals down from the Great Hall in a state of considerable self-importance.

Edward ran a fingertip down the yellowed page without much hope in his voice. "Gillyweed does what the book says and nothing else. Gills at the neck, webbing on the hands and feet, and an hour of breathing that magic cannot lengthen by a minute. Go past the hour and you drown, and until then it has solved one problem out of three, since it will not turn a spell aside and it will not steady your casting."

Draco flicked his wand and sent a string of pale blue bubbles drifting up toward the ceiling, watching them go with open dislike.

He pushed his hair back off his forehead before he answered. "The Bubble-Head Charm is worse. It gives you air and its defence against anything is close enough to nothing to make no difference, since a strong current will burst it and so will any spell with weight behind it. And it bends what you see, which is a fine quality in a charm for crossing a pond and a useless one where somebody may be trying to stop you."

He turned the page hard enough to tear it, and did not apologise to the book.

"Is there really nothing that keeps you breathing, keeps something between you and the water, and leaves your wandwork where it was?"

Edward did not answer straight away, because his hand had gone to his own wrist without his deciding it should, and his fingers had found the seam of the glove there. The four-element crest worked into the dragon skin in Mithril thread caught the candlelight and held it a moment.

The four-element crest caught the light as he turned his wrist over. "There may be. These do two things: they convert one element into another, and they carry a spell further than a bare wand. Turn the whole of that on water alone and push the affinity as far as it goes, and the lake stops being something to survive and becomes something to work with."

Draco came up out of his chair.

He was already gathering the books into a stack he had no intention of carrying. "That is it, and I have spent two days reading about seaweed. It is your own work, which puts it a long way above anything three centuries dead in that volume."

Edward drew the gloves on, and the familiar faint pull of magic came up under his fingers as the Mithril took him. It was the sensation of a tool that already knew his hand.

"It is worth trying, but not in a bath tub and not where anybody can walk in. It needs real depth, and it needs to be somewhere nobody will come looking."

Draco said it as though it settled everything, which in his world it did. "Then we use the Slytherin bath. Lower level, under this room. Four families paid for it between them a long time ago and it has been silenced and warded ever since. Nobody gets through that door who is not meant to."

The stone door on the lower level had serpents cut into it, winding over and around one another until it was difficult to say where any one of them began. Draco put his mouth close to the stone and said something Edward did not catch, and the door slid back without a sound.

The room beyond was larger than it had any business being. The pool took up most of it, and pearls set into the walls below the waterline threw a soft light up through water that sat dark blue and perfectly still. The air carried salt and lavender, the smell every warded bath had, which was supposed to settle the nerves and steady the flow of magic in a body.

"We prove the other two are useless first," Edward said, "and then we try the gloves, because I would rather know exactly what I am replacing."

He tipped the Gillyweed out of its vial and swallowed it, and within a breath there were shallow slits opening along either side of his neck and a thin translucent webbing stretching between his fingers. Draco raised his wand and put the bubble over his head, and Edward stepped down into the pool and let the cold close over him.

The breathing was faultless and nothing else was. The Lumos he raised came thin and grudging, the webbing dragged at his hands until every movement arrived a half-beat late, and when he put two fingers to the inside of the bubble he found that the small current his own turning had raised was enough to make the whole thing shudder and go soft at the edge.

Then he tried to put his own magic into the Gillyweed to hold it past its hour, and what came back was outright refusal. The two things would not sit together. Whatever the plant did to a body, it did on its own terms and would not be argued with.

"Well?" Draco was flat on the tiles at the edge of the water with his chin on his forearms.

Edward came up, let the bubble go, and pushed the water off his face.

"Exactly as written. The weed takes my hands away and cannot be extended, and the bubble would not survive a startled fish. Neither of them belongs anywhere near a competition."

"So the book is worthless." Draco was already sitting up. "Then get on with the gloves."

Edward went under again with the Mithril warm against his palms and let everything else go quiet, which was always the first part of it: the gloves would not answer a crowded mind, and the silver in them would only take up a rhythm that was steady before it arrived.

He put his whole attention on the water and moved his magic along the threads, following the conversion pattern he had spent the better part of a year deducing and correcting. The runes in the lining took it in order, and a faint blue began to move in the silver, answering the pearl-light off the floor of the pool.

For a while that was all, and he did not force it, because water was the slowest of the four and would not be hurried. He kept adjusting the rate at which he fed it until the thing found its own pace.

Then the blue came up all at once, ran the length of both arms like something poured, and closed over him.

What he had on his skin then was a film so thin he could not feel its weight, and it did not catch at a single movement he made, and the pool no longer touched him anywhere. Better than that, it was taking what a body needs out of the water and passing it inward steadily, without the pressure and the stifling closeness of a bubble. It felt less like equipment than like a change in himself.

He brought the wand up underwater and said Incendio against the film, and the flame came orange-red and entirely steady, burning in its own pocket with the pool held off it. It was weaker than it would have been in dry air by something like a third, and he did not much care about the third. He fed his own fire back in and the film took it without the smallest resistance, replacing what the test had spent. As long as he had anything left in him, it would hold.

He surfaced with the film still on him like a skin of glass, shedding the water so completely that it ran off him before he was fully upright.

"It works."

Draco had got to his knees on the wet tiles without noticing he had done it.

"That is better than either of them by a distance. It cannot be burst, you can top it up, and it does not even blunt your fire." He shook his head. "Old artefacts. Honestly."

Edward came up the steps and let the film go, and the blue drained out of the Mithril until the gloves were ordinary again.

He let Draco enjoy himself a moment longer. "It works, and there is a problem left in it. Cedric has no gloves and neither does Adeline."

Draco's face changed as he caught up.

"This is Hogwarts against two other schools," Edward went on, "and I am not going to stand on that shore knowing that two of our four are going down there with seaweed and a bubble because of what they happen to be wearing. I will make two more pairs. The House of Black has the materials."

"Winning matters more than anything else," Draco agreed, and then added, in the tone of a boy who had been raised on the second consideration as much as the first, "and it will not hurt at all for the two of them to see precisely what you can build."