Chapter 222: What Cedric Carried Out

The wall of blades came apart perhaps four seconds after Edward and Harry stopped being in the maze, and what had been steel fell as a slow drift of light and went out before it reached the ground.

The staff came in through the hedges from three sides following the disturbance, and what they found at the middle of it was not what any of them had braced for.

Cedric Diggory was down on one knee in front of the dais with one hand flat on the earth holding him up, and the other closed round the Triwizard Cup. His robes had gone to mud and thorn-tears from the collar down, his hair was stuck to his forehead, and he was breathing as though he had run the whole eleven acres. What was in his face was not triumph. It was relief, of a fairly complete kind.

Nobody outside the maze had seen the last twenty minutes of his night. After the runes took the other two, Cedric had gone the rest of the way alone: the thorn closing on him in a passage that had been ten feet wide when he entered it, a boggart that had come at him as something with a great many legs, and two of the old traps that had been laid in the outer rings and forgotten about by whoever laid them. He had got through all of it by being unhurried and thorough and extremely difficult to panic, which had never once impressed anybody at this school until tonight.

"Hogwarts! The winning school is Hogwarts!" Ludo Bagman's voice went round the whole ground with his striped coat flapping at the elbows. "And the champion of the Triwizard Tournament - Cedric Diggory!"

The noise that came back was not a cheer so much as weather. Hufflepuff yellow came over the barriers in a wave and Cedric disappeared into the middle of it and then reappeared above it, being thrown into the air by people who had waited seven years to be allowed to do that to somebody. Silver-green and scarlet went up along the other stands together, which had not happened in the memory of anybody present. Draco kept his chin exactly where it usually was and clapped anyway. Harry was waving both arms over his head.

Edward stood at the edge of it and found that he was smiling.

He had not won and he discovered he did not mind, which was worth knowing about himself. Cedric had gone at a dragon in November with nothing but drilled Transfiguration and had not stepped back from a single thing since, and there was nobody on that field with a better claim to the cup than the boy currently being dropped and caught by his own house.

Harry came through the crowd and put a hand on his shoulder.

"He has earned every part of that. From the first task to tonight he has never once gone backwards."

Edward nodded, and let his eyes go past the celebration to the staff platform. Dumbledore was standing at the rail, and behind the half-moon spectacles his gaze was steady on Edward and had a good deal in it: worry, and something like approval, and the plain instruction that there was a conversation to be had and it could not wait long.

Then four people came through the crowd toward him, and the crowd got out of their way.

The Durmstrang champions were walking under their own control for the first time since Christmas, and it showed in how badly they were doing it. Krum was at the front with his eyes clear and something exhausted still sitting behind them. He stopped in front of Edward and Harry and inclined his upper body slightly, which from him was a considerable gesture.

"Black. Potter. I owe you both an apology and I would rather give it now than later."

His voice had gone rough. "I do not remember most of what I did. What I have is pieces. Attacking, and not being able to stop, and the two of you moving out of the way of things I was throwing. They have told me since that I was under a curse the whole term, and that I was a puppet with nobody in it, and I find I believe them."

Volodya came up beside him.

"For months we were shut inside our own bodies watching what was being done with them," he said flatly, and the flatness was the worst part. "You had every opportunity to hurt us in that maze and in the Great Hall, and you did not take one of them. We know exactly what that cost you, and we will not forget it." He turned his head. "And Diggory earned tonight. Congratulations to him and to your school."

Vasiliev pushed a hand through his hair and looked at his own boots.

"I used a Tickling Charm on you and then I tried to get my hands round your throat, and I can remember doing both and I can remember wanting neither." He grimaced. "I have never been so frightened of anything as I was of that."

"If there is ever a way for us to make it good," Sokolov said, "I would take it."

Edward looked at the four of them and let go of something he had been carrying since the joint lesson.

"None of it was yours," he said plainly, because they needed it plainly. "You were the first people he used and you were used badly. The apology is owed by the man who did it, and he is in a room downstairs where I would not want to be."

"It is all right." Harry was already waving both hands. "Honestly. We knew it was not you. It is finished."

Two mornings later the mist was still lying across the square in front of the castle when the two schools left.

The Durmstrang ship had her black sails up and the water round her hull had begun to turn. The Beauxbatons carriage stood harnessed with the winged horses stamping and blowing in the cold.

Krum came and found Edward one more time, and took something out of his robes: a flat metal plate about the size of a palm, with the double-headed eagle cut deep into the face of it.

"This is ours. Put your magic into it and it will reach the people we keep in Britain, and they will come." He closed Edward's fingers round it himself. "If that man has truly come back, and if it goes badly for you here, you will use it. I am in your debt and so is my school, and I do not intend to carry that."

The metal was cold and the lines of the engraving were fine and very deep. Edward closed his hand on it and meant what he said.

"Thank you. I will. Safe passage home."

Madame Maxime was taking her leave of Dumbledore at the foot of the carriage steps, in purple silk, at a height that made the farewell visible from most of the castle.

"There has been a great deal about this tournament that I did not care for, Dumbledore. There has been nothing about the conduct of your school that I could fault." She put out a hand the size of a dinner plate. "If Beauxbatons can be of use to you, you will ask."

"Madame Maxime." He bowed over it. "You have been generous throughout, and I suspect I shall."

Fleur came down the line to Harry with a bunch of dried lavender and put it into his hands without ceremony.

"Good luck to you, Potter. I think you will need a great deal of it." Then she turned. "Black. That fire of yours. I have been taught by good people for seven years and I have never seen anything of that kind, and I have thought about it every day since the lake." The gold eyes held his for a moment. "Do not let anybody tell you what it is for."

She went up the steps with the silver hem of her skirt turning after her.

The ship went out and down the water and was gone behind the trees. The carriage came off the ground with the horses labouring and then not labouring, went up over the forest, and shrank into the morning until there was nothing there.

The square emptied by degrees. Hogwarts stood over it in the low sun looking as solid as it had ever looked.

 

And underneath the whole of that morning, unmentioned by anybody on the steps, sat the fact that a man with a new body was somewhere south of them and had spent two days doing something nobody in Britain could see.