Chapter 204: Savior or New Threat

The quiet did not survive the post.

The Owlery went up first, a noise of wings that carried the length of the castle, and then several hundred owls came down through the Great Hall in a grey wave with the smell of ink and feathers arriving underneath them.

The Daily Prophet came down across all four tables like leaves off a tree, and the headline had been set in scarlet and could be read from the far end of the room. Phoenix Animagus Revealed: Saviour or New Threat?

Below it ran a photograph, and whoever had taken it had been very lucky indeed. It held the instant the lake broke open: the water going up in a column, the gold-red line coming out of the dark underneath it, and then the wings opening wide enough to put light on the whole of that grey sky, over and over, every few seconds, for as long as anybody cared to watch.

The byline was Rita Skeeter's, as everybody had known it would be.

Her argument was built carefully and it was built to do damage. No wizard in any surviving record had ever taken a Phoenix as an Animagus form. That creature stood in every text for light, for rebirth, for what could be redeemed. And it had chosen to appear, of all the wizards alive, in a son of the House of Black, a pure-blood line that had furnished the last war with Death Eaters by the handful and had been on speaking terms with the Dark Arts for three centuries. Could a family like that produce an incarnation of light, she asked, and left the question sitting there.

After that she selected. She set out how comprehensively Edward had beaten his own age group in the tournament so far. She quoted officials at the Ministry whom she declined to name on the danger of an unrecorded Animagus walking about unregistered. And she wondered, without ever saying it, whether Dumbledore had been growing himself an heir, and what the old man intended to do with him.

The whole of it went out on the owls that morning and began working through the country by lunchtime.

There were people who read it and came down entirely the other way. In the Leaky Cauldron that evening glasses went up to the Phoenix as the natural enemy of everything Voldemort had left behind, and there was a good deal of talk about a first light after a long night.

There were others who went into the archives instead and came back with the list of Blacks who had died in Azkaban, and passed it round by Floo, and said that a third Dark Lord would of course arrive dressed as the opposite.

The letters page of the Prophet became a battlefield inside two days, and the argument put Edward at the centre of the wizarding world whether he had any use for the position or not.

The thing that bound him, though, was not the newspaper.

A snowy owl came in over the Slytherin table and dropped an envelope beside his plate with the Ministry's seal pressed into the wax, and the whispering started before he had touched it.

"That is from Magical Law Enforcement." Draco had his neck out and no shame about it whatsoever. "You are required to present yourself at the Ministry in London, in person, before the final task. Compulsory Animagus registration." He got further down the page and his voice changed. "Merlin. And you are to perform the transformation there, in front of them, for representatives of the Department of Mysteries and the Wizengamot."

Edward folded it along its crease and let his thumb move across the gold-stamped crest without any expression arriving on his face.

He could feel the room on him from every side. Curiosity and admiration and envy and outright suspicion, all of it arriving at once, all of it landing like fine needles.

In the corridors the younger years stopped talking when he came round a corner and started again the moment he had passed, and seventh-year prefects who had never given way to anybody found reasons to be against the wall.

There was one school where none of that translated into goodwill.

Durmstrang had won the second task and stood thirty points clear, and Krum had taken ninety fragments' worth of points out of that lake by himself and led every champion in the tournament. By every measure that appeared on parchment, the morning belonged to them. Then a gold-red light had come up through the Black Lake and taken every conversation in Britain with it.

It broke first in the second-floor corridor, where three Durmstrang boys in heavy furs put themselves across the passage.

"And here he is. Our glorious little Phoenix." The one in front had freckles and enjoyed himself thoroughly. "You fly beautifully. It is a pity about your score. Some people cannot win, so they arrange to be looked at instead."

"I heard there were never any Inferi down there," said the one behind him. "I heard a gentleman found he was losing and needed a way out of the water that did not look like losing."

Edward's voice did not change, and something behind his eyes did. "Move."

"Or what?" The freckled boy came forward half a step, which was the entire purpose of the exercise. "Will you turn into a little bird and peck at me?"

The wand had already come down into Edward's palm. It was not the wand that answered.

"You three."

Snape had come out of the shadow at the end of the corridor without anybody hearing him do it, and his robes settled around him as he stopped.

"I am curious. Are you disputing the professional finding of a Hogwarts professor, or are you disputing the magical detection carried out by the Ministry of Magic? Take your time."

The three of them lost most of their colour, produced something between them that was not quite a sentence, and were gone round the corner inside ten seconds.

The seed was in the ground by then. Over the following days it came up in the courtyard and outside the library and on every staircase where two schools had to pass one another. Durmstrang students discovered a need to discuss, at carrying volume, how a real champion wins on strength rather than on spectacle. Beauxbatons disliked what Durmstrang had done in the lake and disliked Hogwarts getting the whole of the attention afterwards, and settled for watching. Madame Maxime said nothing whatever, from a considerable height.

Karkaroff was less subtle about it.

He raised it three times in the staff room in a week, always as though it had only that moment occurred to him.

"The registration system has stood for centuries, and now we are told a form appears that no book has ever recorded. One does wonder. Albus, would the school not be wise to take rather more care over this particular student?"

Dumbledore looked at him over the half-moon spectacles, and the mildness stayed exactly where it was while something behind it did not.

"What I find myself wondering, Igor, is how Inferi came to be in the Black Lake, given that raising them takes Dark Arts of an order very few living wizards possess. And having wondered that, I go on to wonder why, out of twelve champions in that water, they went for one."

Karkaroff's face stopped moving. The smile stayed on it the way a picture stays on a wall, and he did not find anything to say.