Chapter 199: Twelve into the Water

Morning came down on the Black Lake in broken gold, and a light wind kept turning the surface over so that the whole of it moved.

The shore was already full. Students and staff from three schools stood along the bank in a press that reached back to the treeline, and under the noise of them, coming up out of the water itself, ran the thin distant singing of the merpeople.

A pale blue barrier stood over most of the lake, its edge shimmering faintly where the sun caught it, and everything inside that curve now belonged to the tournament and to nobody watching.

The four judges stood together on the platform, and the arrangement of them said a good deal.

Dumbledore was in purple robes worked with stars, and behind the half-moon spectacles his eyes went over the crowd with the usual mildness. Anybody paying proper attention would have noticed that they rested on the Hogwarts champions a beat longer than on anyone else, and that what sat behind them was not entirely calm. A lead from the first task was a comfortable thing on parchment and nothing whatever underwater.

Bartemius Crouch stood very straight with his hands behind his back and his face closed.

Karkaroff was wrapped in Durmstrang's heavy furs despite the sun. The first task had left his school a full thirty points behind Hogwarts, and everything he wanted from this tournament now had to come up out of that lake. His eyes went to Edward, stayed a moment too long, and then he found something requiring adjustment at his collar.

Madame Maxime's height made her impossible to overlook. She spoke quietly with Dumbledore, glancing now and then at her own champions, and there was expectation rather than anxiety in it. Beauxbatons stood third and not badly third. She put a hand on Fleur Delacour's shoulder and said a few words in French, and Fleur nodded and set her chin.

"There he is."

"He looks well today, look at him -"

The Durmstrang benches went up in a wave when Krum raised a hand to them. He was behind on points and it had done nothing whatever to his bearing, and his dark blue eyes had the flat certainty of a man who intends to correct an error.

The four Hogwarts champions stood at the head of the line.

Edward drew a slow breath and felt the film settle. It was already on him, so thin that the sunlight went through it without bending, and the circulation that held it there had become as automatic as breathing after a fortnight of nothing else.

Harry kept pushing his glasses up and tapping his fingers along his wand, plainly still running through everything that could be waiting under the surface. Cedric had his wand out and was going over the shaft with his thumb, tracing the protective runes his father had cut into it by hand. Adeline stood with her eyes shut and her lips moving on a steadying charm, which was her mother's habit before her: an Auror who had raised her daughter on the principle that the worse a situation became the quieter one had to be inside it.

All four wore the same look. Leading after the first task made them the thing everybody had come to watch, and also the thing two other schools had spent a month planning to overtake.

"Champions. Your attention, please."

Dumbledore's voice came through the amplifier without being raised, and the shore went so quiet that the wind in the leaves became the loudest thing on the bank.

"The rules of the second task are these. The crest of each of the three schools has been divided by magic into four pieces, twelve in all, and the twelve have been hidden across the floor of the Black Lake."

He turned his wand over, and three crests rose into the air above the water in transparent light: the lion, eagle, snake and badger of Hogwarts, the double-headed eagle of Durmstrang, and the silver iris of Beauxbatons. Each of them broke into quarters while the whole shore watched, and the pieces turned once and went out.

"Ten points for every piece recovered. Should any champion bring up all four pieces of a single school's crest, that champion takes sixty."

He let it sit, and his eyes went along the whole line of them before he went on, and his voice changed as he did.

"You have one hour. Any champion still in the water when the hour ends is out of the task. A school's score is the sum of what its four champions carry ashore, and the individual standing is decided by the same count. And I would ask all twelve of you to hold on to one thing above the rest of it. Whatever you have or have not found, you come back up."

The shore broke into murmuring, because everybody could do the arithmetic. Sixty points in a single morning would put whoever took them beyond reach.

Durmstrang were talking among themselves with some energy. Hogwarts were quieter about it. The Beauxbatons girls exchanged a look that had a plan somewhere inside it.

"Champions, if you will -"

"Hold on."

The voice came out of the side of the platform like something dragged over gravel, and Alastor Moody came up onto the boards with his wooden leg striking each one, which in that silence carried the whole length of the shore. His magical eye was going round and round in the socket, taking in the crowd, and then it stopped and fixed on the Hogwarts four.

"Beg pardon, Albus. Two words with these children before you send them down."

He was already moving, and the smell arrived with him, old leather and something brewed. His hand came down on Harry's shoulder hard enough to rock him where he stood.

"Potter." The single eye held him and the pupil went to a slit. "Down there is not up here. Grindylows, merpeople, and a good deal you have never been told about, all of it sitting in the dark waiting to see what you do. Gryffindor nerve is a fine thing right up until it turns into stupidity. Points are not worth as much as coming back out."

Harry swallowed and got his chin up. "Understood, Professor."

He could feel the callus on the palm and the weight behind it, the hand of a man who had spent forty years holding a wand, and something in it that was not quite reassurance.

Moody turned to Cedric, and the magical eye came half round to look at him while the other stayed where it was.

"Diggory. You are a steady one." His voice came down a little. "It will be dark and it will be cluttered. Be patient and look properly. What you want will not be lying in the open. Try the cracks in the rock and underneath the weed."

"Thank you, Professor. I will."

Cedric said it respectfully, and noticed while he said it that the magical eye was not on his face. It had gone over his wand and along his pockets, unhurried, the way a man checks a bag he expects to find something in.

Adeline was next, and Moody looked at her for several seconds before he said anything.

"Shacklebolt's girl. Your mother was one of the best Aurors I ever worked a case beside." There was something almost like memory in it, which was rare enough to be worth noticing. "You have her eye for a thing. You have her obstinacy as well, and I would not waste either. But do not put too much faith in what you see down there. Light in deep water lies to you, and a good deal of what looks solid is put there to look solid."

Adeline's lips pressed together and her fingers closed on her wand.

"Yes, Professor."

She had grown up on stories about her mother and had never once heard that Moody was in any of them, and what came up in her then was admiration with something less comfortable tangled through it.

Then Moody stopped in front of Edward, and everything seemed to take longer.

He did not speak. He looked, with the ordinary eye and with the other one going round hard, up and down and back again, and the sensation of the magical eye was not like being looked at. It was like being opened and gone through, and Edward felt every muscle across his shoulders draw tight against it.

The hand came down and stayed longer than it had on the others, and pressed harder, and Moody leaned in until his mouth was almost at Edward's ear.

"Black's boy. They tell me you are clever with fire." The voice had gone down to sandpaper. "Here is a piece of advice for nothing. Fire is no use to you under the water."

He paused, and his gaze went across Edward's cuffs and away again, and there was no possible way to decide whether he had meant it to.

"And clever equipment is not worth what people think when the moment comes. If you intend to come back up, you come back up on what you actually are."

Edward looked into the ordinary eye, and what was in it went past him too fast to name. Warning, or threat, or something with no word attached. He had begun to frame a question when Moody's mouth moved into a shape that did not suit his face at all, and the hand came off his shoulder.

"The second task - begins."

The whistle cut the morning open, and twelve figures went off the bank together and struck the water in twelve white bursts, and the shore and everything on it was gone.