Chapter 203: The Only One Who Saw Them

 

Dumbledore let a pause fall, and when he spoke again the whole tone of the morning changed.

"There is one further matter, and I want it settled here." His eyes went to Edward and then along the other eleven. "Edward Black came out of the water early because he was attacked by Inferi. I would like to ask each of you. In the hour you were down there, did any of you meet Inferi, or anything else that had no business in that lake?"

The question landed badly. Nobody had been expecting it.

"Inferi?" Harry said it as though checking he had heard. "No. Nothing like that."

The champions looked at one another and one after another they shook their heads.

"No, Professor." Krum was first and quite definite. "Grindylows. Merpeople. Ordinary things. Nothing dead was walking about down there. Twelve of us were in that water. Somebody would have seen it."

"Nor I." Fleur's brows had drawn together. "I saw the Durmstrang wall and I saw some very nervous Grindylows. Is it possible Mr. Black saw a Grindylow in bad light and took it for something else?"

Cedric and Adeline shook their heads too, and said that apart from being driven off the fragments they had met nothing worse than weed.

Bartemius Crouch stepped forward with his jaw set.

"The Black Lake is surveyed every year by the Ministry together with the school, and no such thing has ever been recorded in it. Inferi do not occur. They are raised, and raising them takes Dark Arts of a very high order. Inside these wards, nobody performs that quietly."

"Then he is lying." Karkaroff's arm came up and the finger at the end of it was aimed at Edward, and there was nothing careful left in his face. "It is not complicated. Mr. Black saw that this task was going badly, saw that Hogwarts was about to lose the lead, and invented a monster so that he could leave the water without leaving it in defeat. There were no Inferi. He cannot afford to lose."

Edward got himself up off the bench. Draco moved to take his weight and Edward put the hand aside, not unkindly, and stood on his own.

"I am not lying." He had no colour in him and it made no difference to the voice. "They came up out of the weed on the western rock. A dozen of them at the least, and they came for me and for nothing else in that lake. The poison on them reached my arm and the arm is still numb."

He turned back the sleeve on his left forearm.

There was a mark across the skin above the wrist, faint and black and spread like something under the surface rather than on it.

Everyone within twenty feet leaned in, and the murmuring came back louder. Professor McGonagall crossed the grass and took his wrist and turned it to the light, and what was in her face when she straightened up settled the question for a good number of the people watching.

"This is Dark Arts venom," she said. "And it is consistent with what is carried on the nails of an Inferius."

"A mark proves a mark." Karkaroff had not moved. "He may have put his hand on any poisonous thing in that lake. He may have arranged it himself for exactly this purpose."

"And yet." Dumbledore's voice was mild and it stopped the exchange dead. "That is the part I cannot account for either. If Inferi were in the lake, why was Edward the only champion who met them, out of twelve who were in the water at the same hour?"

Edward said nothing, because he had no answer that he could give in front of two hundred people. He knew what he had seen and he knew it had been aimed.

"Enough for now." Dumbledore turned to take in the whole bank. "The matter will be looked into properly, and the Ministry will send people to examine the lake. Edward, you have emptied yourself and Madam Pomfrey has an antidote and a great deal else waiting for you upstairs. Go. The rest of you are wet through and have earned dry robes. We will read the scores in the Great Hall in one hour."

There was nothing to be gained by standing there and Edward knew it. He inclined his head and turned to go, and looked back once from the top of the bank.

Karkaroff had his head close to Krum's and was saying something that pleased him.

Moody had not moved from where he had stood through all of it. The magical eye had come round and it was on Edward, and it did not slide away when Edward met it, and after a moment the corner of the ruined mouth pulled sideways.

By the time he reached the doors Edward had settled two things in his own mind. The Inferi had not wandered into that lake, and whoever had put them there had known exactly which of the twelve to point them at. And Moody knew something about it, and there was no longer any comfortable way to think about what.

An hour later the Great Hall held everybody. The house tables had been drawn back against the walls, and over the open floor a great pane of light hung in the air with the standings written across it.

Durmstrang stood first, sixty from the first task and ninety from the second, one hundred and fifty in all. Hogwarts had ninety and then thirty, and came second on one hundred and twenty. Beauxbatons had seventy.

Among the champions Krum had taken ninety points out of the lake by himself and stood on a hundred. Edward was second on fifty, Cedric third on forty, and Harry had the ten points he had carried out of the first task and nothing added to them.

Thirty points behind at the first task, and thirty in front at the second. Karkaroff sat at the staff table with his head turned toward Bartemius Crouch, talking and smiling as though the third task were a formality. The Durmstrang benches were on their feet.

Edward sat at the Slytherin table with a goblet of pumpkin juice going warm in front of him and did not touch it.

"We take it back in the third." Draco had leaned in and kept his voice for the two of them. "The rule is changed, so they cannot stand in a ring and call it strategy again. And you are second on your own account. Beating Krum from fifty is nothing you have not done before."

Crabbe and Goyle nodded on either side, and Goyle said, low and entirely serious, "We know you will."

Edward did not answer. He was looking past all of them, along the length of the staff table to the far end.

Moody was drinking, and the wooden goblet covered most of his face, and it covered nothing that mattered. The magical eye had rolled round away from the hall and away from the food and away from every other person in the room, and it was pointed directly at Edward, and no attempt whatever was being made to hide it.

Inferi in a lake that had never held any. Moody's hand on his shoulder an hour before they came. Karkaroff's certainty. A Durmstrang formation drilled far too well for four students who had supposedly thought of it that morning. Every piece of it sat separately and every piece of it wanted to be put next to the others.

Edward picked up the goblet and drank the whole of it down, and the cold went through him and did nothing at all to what was burning underneath.