Chapter 205: The Report

Hogwarts itself was slower to take a side than might have been expected, and the reason was not complicated. The boy at the centre of it was in Slytherin, and three houses had spent seven years learning not to put themselves out for Slytherin.

That lasted until Draco Malfoy took half his year to the doors of the Great Hall and raised his voice on purpose.

"Krum's score. Yes. Quite remarkable." He had pitched it to reach the staff table and it reached the staff table. "Remarkable enough that it took three of his housemates holding the lake shut so that nobody else could get near a fragment. And having won that way, they have the nerve to stand about telling anyone who will listen that the champion who met the Dark Arts alone down there was showing off. I have heard a great many stupid things in this hall. That is the best of them."

Somebody at the Gryffindor table failed to smother a laugh, and Ron leaned across to Harry.

"He's insufferable and he's right. I hate it."

Hermione was already on her feet trying to bring the temperature down, and nobody heard a word of it, because the Durmstrang benches were standing up and wands were coming out along the whole length of them.

Slytherin came up as one and matched them.

Two spells went over the tables and met somewhere above the middle of the hall with a crack that put sparks across four hundred heads, and a tapestry that had hung there since the fifteenth century began to smoke along one edge.

"THAT WILL DO."

Flitwick was on his chair with his wand up, and what came off it hit the ceiling and burst there in a silver flare that made everybody flinch.

"The next student who casts an offensive spell in this hall serves detention until the end of term and takes every point his house has earned down with him. Try me."

It stopped. It did not settle, and for the rest of that week the castle had a feel to it like weather coming.

What ended it came on Thursday afternoon.

The Transfiguration classroom had been enlarged four or five times over to take three schools at once, the walls pushed back and the seats running away in rows, and by two o'clock there was not a space left in it.

Dumbledore stood at the front with Professor McGonagall on one side of him and Madam Pomfrey on the other, and neither woman looked remotely as though this were a routine assembly.

"You have all read the Prophet, and most of you have heard a good deal that was not in it." Dumbledore's voice went to the back of that room without being lifted. "This afternoon the school and the Ministry will put the facts in front of you, and then there will be no further need for anybody's theory."

McGonagall came forward with a roll of parchment carrying two seals, and her fingers were not entirely steady on it. Anybody who knew her understood that this had nothing to do with nerves.

"This is a joint finding of the Hogwarts Hospital Wing and the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes." Her voice could have been used to cut glass. "When Edward Black came out of the Black Lake he had lacerations to the left forearm and foreign matter in the wound. We have spent seven days analysing what was in it."

She turned her wand over and the writing came off the parchment and hung in the air above the room in cold blue light for everybody to read.

Analysis of Dark Arts venom residue. Sample taken from magical laceration, left forearm. Result: Cadaveris Venenum, confirmed. This substance is carried on the claws of Inferi and on nothing else; no living magical creature is known to produce it. The shape of the magic in the sample matches, without divergence, the three archived Inferi attacks held in Ministry records.

The room drew breath together, and then the noise started.

"Further." McGonagall moved her wand again and a survey map of the lake unrolled itself in the air beside the report. "We found heavy Dark Arts residue in the rocky ground on the western side of the trial area. Reconstructing the traces gives us this. During the task, in that spot, somebody cast a directed summoning. It drew the Inferi to that ground, and it set them on one person."

She turned her head, and her eyes went along the rows where Durmstrang were sitting, and stayed there.

"That person was Edward Black. Accordingly, every suggestion that this student invented an attack in order to leave the water is contrary to the established facts, and it is a second injury done to somebody who was already the victim of the first. This school reserves every disciplinary and legal remedy available to it against anybody who continues to make it."

Nobody in that room said anything. It was possible to hear the torches.

"The presence of Inferi within the grounds of this school," Dumbledore said, and he spoke more quietly than he had all afternoon, "is the gravest failure of security Hogwarts has suffered in a hundred years. The school and the Ministry have formed a body to find out who is responsible, and it will not stop until it has. As to the student concerned: attacked by name, with his magic almost spent, in deep water and alone, he brought himself out under his own power. I would be glad if a great many of you took that as your example, and I would be gladder still if none of you ever needed to."

He paused, and looked along the four houses, and finished it plainly.

"The truth is now in front of you. Prejudice which continues past this point is no longer ignorance."

The Durmstrang rows went out of that classroom almost at a run, heads down. Volodya and Vasiliev had gone the colour of the parchment and neither would meet anybody's eye. Karkaroff had discovered he was unwell and left the moment the first report went up into the air, which had been noticed by four hundred people, and every remark he had made in a week was now a joke he was not present to hear. Beauxbatons stopped glaring, and what replaced it in the way they looked at Edward was closer to caution, and had respect somewhere underneath.

Inside Hogwarts, the walls between the houses simply came down.

Slytherin went up so loudly that the candles moved. Draco got both feet onto the bench and was taken off it again by a single look from Snape, and none of that dented him in the slightest. From that afternoon the house had a centre it had not had in living memory: Black blood and Malfoy blood, more raw power than any student had a right to, an Animagus form out of legend, and now proof that somebody had tried to kill him and had failed.

Gryffindor was the surprise. Harry stood up and began to clap before anyone else in the room had moved. Hermione went up beside him. Ron looked as though it physically hurt and then joined in anyway, and within twenty seconds the whole table was on its feet and the applause was loud enough to be felt through the floor. A number of the people clapping had spent two years crossing corridors to avoid him, and had the decency to look uncomfortable about it.

Ravenclaw surrounded him on the way out and wanted to know about the Phoenix, all of it, immediately, and in academic detail.

Hufflepuff arrived with honey biscuits and pumpkin pasties that somebody had plainly been baking all morning, and Cedric came through them and put his hand out.

He said it so that the people around him could hear it. "I have been wanting to say this since the lake. What you did down there settles more than any score on that board ever could."