Chapter 217: What Krum Got Out

They went for the sound together and took two corners at a run, and found Fleur Delacour standing in the middle of the passage with her wand out and nowhere to point it.

The thing across the path from her was the size of a small horse, golden-furred, with a woman's face and the patience of something that has done this many times. It sat squarely across the passage, looked at the two arrivals without much interest, and repeated what it had evidently been saying for some minutes.

"What begins in darkness, is born in light, is nourished by hope, and can destroy everything?"

"I have given it fourteen answers." Fleur did not turn round, and there was real temper under the composure. "It will not move and it will not let me pass, and it will say that until one of us dies of it."

Behind them, boots came down on the path in step.

Krum and Vasiliev came round the corner side by side with their wands already up and their eyes entirely empty, and neither of them looked at Fleur or at the sphinx. They had come a long way to arrive at this exact passage, and there was nothing accidental in it.

"They have been brought here." Harry had gone white. "Same as us. The runes brought all four of them and us."

"Then we split it." Edward stepped out into the middle of the path and let the gold-red come up round him until the hedge on both sides was lit. "Get the riddle. I will hold these two. And be quick, because I do not want any part of this happening in the centre where he wants it."

He read Krum before Krum had finished raising his arm. The web off the gloves went through him and came back wrong: the magic inside the boy moved in straight lines and did not adjust, arriving where it was sent and not a hair off it. That is not how a duellist casts. It is how an instruction executes.

"Stupefy."

The red came flat and true and without a curve anywhere in it, and Edward went off the line of it by two feet and answered.

"Flame Cage."

Chains of gold-red went round Krum's wand arm and closed. And then Krum's shoulder came back and simply tore through them, and the arm came up again for a second cast, and there was no possible way for a boy of seventeen to have done that.

"They have put something in him." Edward got the shield up in front of his own chest as the second spell came. "That is not his strength."

Vasiliev's Rictusempra came in from the side in a spreading pink wash meant to take his concentration apart. Edward had been expecting it since the joint lesson and touched his own temple with the wand.

"Finite Incantatem."

It went out like a lamp. He brought the wand round in the same movement and put an Expelliarmus straight through Vasiliev's guard, and the boy's wand went out of his hand and buried itself somewhere in the thorn.

Harry's shout came from behind him. "Ambition. It starts in the dark because nobody says it out loud, it is born in the light the first time you get a chance at something, hope is what feeds it, and there is no single thing that has destroyed more people."

Fleur repeated it to the sphinx in a voice that had gone slightly unsteady, and the sphinx inclined its head, rose without hurry, and moved aside.

Vasiliev came at Edward with his hands out, no wand in them and no expression on his face, the fingers curved and stiff, crossing the ground far faster than a boy should have. Edward stepped inside it, drew the fire into his fist and put it against the shoulder joint with almost nothing behind it. It did no damage and it stopped him for two seconds, which was what it was for.

Then Krum began to speak, and what came out of him was not a school spell. It had a weight to it that turned the whole passage greasy, and Edward recognised the shape of it from a doorway in the Shrieking Shack.

He stopped holding back.

"Flame Blades."

Half a dozen of them went out together, thin and white at the edge, and took the wand across the grip rather than the hand. It went out of Krum's fingers and end over end into the hedge, and the half-finished spell came apart with a sound like ice giving way.

Krum came on anyway, wandless, with both hands reaching for Edward's throat.

And Edward, instead of moving out of the way, went to meet him. He got a palm flat on the boy's shoulder and let his own fire go into him, not as a strike but as a question, running it against the current of whatever was moving in there and pushing it out of true.

Krum stopped as though he had walked into a wall.

Something came back into the dark blue eyes. It was there for less than three seconds and it was unmistakable while it lasted, and his lips shook and he got four fragments out through his teeth.

"The Cup. There is something in the Cup. He is - he is watching -"

Then it went out of him again like a candle, and his whole body took a step backwards without his agreeing to it, and he turned and ran heavily for the centre of the maze with the right leg going down flat at every stride.

Nobody said anything for a moment.

"He said the Cup." Harry's voice had gone thin. "Edward, he said there is something in the Cup and that somebody is watching. Watching from where? Is there somebody in the school?"

Edward did not answer, because the answer had been in front of him for a month and he had not wanted it. A man who could hold four champions since Christmas without leaving residue, who had known exactly what to say to him on the shore of the Black Lake four minutes before the Inferi came out of the weed, and whose eye had not left him all evening.

"The Cup is the point of all of it," he said slowly. "Every rune in this maze is pushing us toward a thing he has already prepared, and he has spent the whole year making certain that the people who could stop him would be somewhere else when it happened."

Fleur had finished straightening her sleeves and had her wand back in her hand.

"Then I am coming with you," she said before either of them had asked. "Beauxbatons does not walk away at the end, and I am not going to be found in a hedge afterwards wondering what happened at the middle."

They went on in a triangle, Edward at the point with the web running out ahead of him, and the maze narrowed as they went.

The pull of the runes stopped being subtle. Every branch that might have taken them outward had closed, and the dark green overhead had thickened until it lit the path better than the orbs did. Behind them came spellfire and a long tearing shriek from something with more than four legs, answered from the left and then from ahead. The whole maze was closing on one point.

"Stop."

Edward put an arm out and the other two stopped dead. The web had come back off the ground in front of them with a flat cold reading.

"Ice, from here to the corner. Put a solidifying charm on your soles or you will go across it on your back."

They did it, and crossed, and came out through a last gap in the thorn into open ground.

It was a circle perhaps forty yards across, and the whole floor of it had been cut with the same dark green runes that hung above the maze, laid out in a ring within a ring, turning very slowly.

Volodya and Sokolov stood in the middle of it, side by side, waiting. Their eyes were as empty as the others had been. Each of them was holding two wands, and neither of the spare ones was his.

"They knew we were coming." Harry had his wand up. "They have been standing there."

Edward pushed the web out across the circle and it came back carrying something underneath the runes: a deeper current running below the pattern, purer and older and considerably worse, and it was not coming from the two boys standing in the middle of it.

It was coming from the edge, somewhere behind them, from a place he could not see.

"Disarm them and nothing else." He set his feet and let the gold-red climb until the thorn walls all round the clearing stood out in the light of it. "Whatever those two do in the next minute, they are not doing it. The one we came for is standing at the side of this circle watching us decide what to do about them."

The runes on the ground turned faster and began to brighten, and Volodya and Sokolov raised their wands together.