Chapter 198: Four Champions

It took them three days, and at the end of them two new pairs of Heart-Flame Crest gloves lay on the workbench, built to the same pattern as Edward's and Harry's, with the Mithril laid to the same depth in the dragon skin and only the cut altered for a different pair of hands. Under the candlelight the crests held a quiet blue that came and went as the flame moved.

They went down to the lake early on the appointed morning and did not have long to wait. Harry came along the shore with Cedric and Adeline, and none of the three of them looked as though the last fortnight had gone well.

Cedric had tried Gillyweed and spent the days since worrying about the hour mark, Adeline had read everything written on the Bubble-Head Charm and reached exactly Draco's conclusion, and Harry had been working at ordinary waterproofing charms and getting nowhere.

"Edward, tell me you have found something," Cedric said, and there was more urgency under the courtesy than he probably intended.

Edward did not make a speech about it. He took the two pairs out of his bag and put one into Cedric's hands and the other into Adeline's.

He did not make a speech about it. "Heart-Flame Crest gloves. They convert one element into another, and what I want here is water. Worn properly they put a film over the whole of you that breathes for you, holds off anything short of a serious spell, and leaves your casting where it was."

Adeline turned hers over slowly, and her fingertips went along the Mithril where it ran through the crest.

"I have read about elemental conversion of this kind in old books," she said, and there was something careful in the way she said it. "I have never seen it made small enough to wear, or made to work this cleanly. This is not in the books."

Rather than argue, Edward put his own gloves on and let the magic run through them where all of them could watch, and the pale blue came up until he stood in the sunlight wearing a second, thinner skin. He walked down into the shallows until the lake was over his calves, and not a drop of it got past the film anywhere.

"It takes what you need out of the water and keeps giving it to you, and you can feed it from your own magic whenever it thins, so there is no hour and no limit except how much you have in you." He brought his wand round while he was still standing in the lake. "Incendio."

The flame came up off the wand in the middle of all that water and stood there burning, and the shallows went gold around his knees.

"A third weaker than it would be dry. Still enough for whatever the day throws."

None of the three said anything for a moment. Then Harry got his own gloves on and had the film up within about a minute, because his pair had come off the same bench as Edward's and his hands already knew the trick of it, and he went splashing four steps out into the lake like somebody half his age.

"It is nothing like the bubble. I can breathe properly and I can move properly and I can see where I am going."

Cedric and Adeline took longer, though not much. Both of them had the ability; what they needed was the one instruction Edward gave them, which was to stop trying and let their minds go quiet first, and to feed the magic in at an even rate rather than shoving it. Within a quarter of an hour both were standing in the shallows inside a film of their own.

Cedric put a hand out and watched the water part around his knuckles, and when he looked up he had dropped the champion's manner entirely.

"Thank you. I am not going to pretend otherwise: without this I would have gone down there hoping, and hoping is not a plan for an hour underwater with something living in it."

"We are all Hogwarts champions," Edward said. "It would be a strange sort of school where I let two of you go down worse equipped than the other two."

Adeline drew her gloves off and stood turning them, her thumb moving over the cool blue in the crest, and when she looked up there was something in her face that had not been there while she was in the water.

Her thumb stopped moving on the crest. "You have taken a great deal from those materials, then. The logic behind this is not modern, and I can see the shape of very old elemental magic in it if I look."

Edward felt it go through him and did not let any of it reach his face.

She was talking about the notebook, and she was not really talking about the notebook. It was the same careful step she had taken in the library, and she was giving him the same open door she had given him then, and he was no more able to walk through it now than he had been.

"The notes are worth studying," he said evenly. "The elemental conversion in them is only theory, and a good deal of it is unfinished. I have altered most of the detail to get anything practical out of it. What you are looking at is largely my own working."

All of that was true, which was what made it possible to say.

"Whatever it is, thank you." Adeline let it go, and her voice was warmer for having let it go. "If the underwater casting gives you trouble, come and find me. I have spent a month on it and some of it may be worth having."

Edward inclined his head, and it cost him something not to say more than that.

"Practise," he said instead, to all three of them. "Not the film itself, which any of you can raise now. Practise the feeding of it. You each carry a different amount and you each spend it at a different rate, so what you want is to find the rhythm at which you can top it up without thinking, because the one thing that must not happen down there is a gap."

"I will have it cold," Harry said, with rather more confidence than his fortnight of waterproofing charms entitled him to. "I am not going to be the reason Hogwarts loses anything."

Cedric and Adeline gave their word more quietly and meant it just as much, and the three of them went back up toward the castle with their heads together, already dividing the practice between them.

Draco watched them go with the expression of a man reviewing a satisfactory ledger.

"All four of ours can handle an hour underwater now, and neither of the other schools has the first idea. Whatever Durmstrang has been doing in that camp, it is not this."

Edward did not answer him. He was looking out at the middle of the lake, where the light was breaking up on the water, and from somewhere a long way down the merpeople were singing, faint and cold and entirely uninterested in any of it.

The task was solved. That was one thing off the board, and it did not touch the other, because Karkaroff was still walking about this school in a headmaster's robes with a burn on his leg, and behind Karkaroff there was a man whose name Dumbledore had said out loud and whom nobody had been able to find.

For the next fortnight he would set that aside and give the lake his whole attention, since the task would not be won by a champion thinking about something else. But he would go into that water knowing the tournament was the one place where a great deal of confusion could be arranged cheaply, and that a man already exposed had every reason to use it.

Back in the common room the fire went on burning quietly over the abandoned books, and the Mithril in the crests came and went in the low light, blue and then nothing and then blue again.