Chapter 211: One Hour, One Hair

 

The top of the North Tower was empty, and the wind coming across it carried the wet green smell of the Forbidden Forest.

Edward took the two-way mirror out from inside his robes and put his fingers across the glass, and Sirius came up in it looking as though he had not been indoors for a week.

He kept his voice down even in a place where nobody could possibly hear him. "There is something new, and I do not like the shape of it. Remus and I have had Karkaroff between us for two days, turn and turn about. He has not come out of that camp once."

Edward's brows came together.

"Not once? He was going out alone every other night, and now he does not open the door?"

Sirius's eyes had sharpened by several degrees. "Which is exactly why I am telling you. A man who has been meeting people that often does not simply stop. Either whatever he was arranging is arranged, and there is nothing left to go out for, or he has moved the rest of it inside those tents where nobody can watch him do it. Either way I want to know which."

Edward said it flatly, because it needed saying before anybody got enthusiastic. "We cannot go at it directly. Since the lake, Durmstrang will not so much as stand near a Hogwarts student. Anybody who goes over that ground in his own face will be seen doing it, and the moment that happens Karkaroff knows we are looking and stops doing whatever it is we wanted to see."

Sirius let a moment go by before he answered, which meant he had been waiting to. "No. We go in wearing somebody else's. Remus and I have the makings of Polyjuice. Get me the hair of a Durmstrang student and we walk in through the front of the camp as one of their own."

Edward turned it over and found it sound, because an hour inside another man's face made the whole problem of their vigilance stop applying at once: the thing they were watching for was a Hogwarts robe.

"Whose hair is it that you want, then?"

Sirius was entirely firm about that part. "Nobody who matters. Not Krum, and not one of the four. The dullest boy in that camp. Somebody nobody notices leaving a room, because that is exactly who nobody notices arriving in one either." He paused. "And be quick about it. Polyjuice takes a month and there is no month left, and what we have was brewed for something else entirely and holds enough for exactly one transformation. If you waste the hair we do not get another attempt before the third task."

"You will have it inside two days." Edward looked out across the grounds to where the black ship-shaped tents stood along the water with the last of the light on them. "You two take care going in. If he has stopped moving because everything is in place, then he has nothing left to do but watch his own doorway."

"Moony and I spent seven years getting into places we had no business being." Something that was nearly a grin arrived on the other side of the glass, and it had the family arrogance all through it. "This is the part I am good at. Keep the mirror close."

The light went out of the glass and the tower was cold and quiet again.

Edward stood at the parapet a while longer. Snape had closed one road and it had been the only road he had. But Karkaroff had stopped going out, and a man who stops moving has generally finished something, and there was a way through the wall of that camp after all.

The Slytherin common room was warm and low-lit when he came down, the fire putting silver-green across the stone. Three second-years in the corner were conducting a serious discussion about what one had to do to be considered for the Flame Serpent Alliance, and all three of them stopped and nodded to him as he passed, with a formality that would have been comic if they had not meant it entirely.

Draco was at the long table turning a wand over in his fingers, the one with the serpent worked into the grip that he only carried when he wanted it noticed. He came away from the table as soon as he saw Edward's face.

"You have been somewhere. Was it the Ministry again?" A little of the drawl came off it. "If those clerks are still at you, my father can have somebody's afternoon ruined by Thursday."

"The Ministry is finished with. It went through and Dumbledore handled the rest." Edward realised he had been misread and let it stand, because the truth involved an alley and two men with unfinished marks and there was no version of telling Draco that which did not end in owls. "It was tedious and it is over."

Draco said it as though reading from a ledger of arrangements already made. "Whatever they try next, the Alliance is behind you. Zabini and Theodore have the rumours. Crabbe and Goyle have Durmstrang, for whatever that is worth, because since the Inferi business came out none of them will cross a corridor without three others."

"That is actually the reason I came down at all, and not the Ministry."

Edward moved along the wall to the corner where the fire did not reach, and Draco followed him without being asked twice.

"Karkaroff has not left his camp in two days, and his students barely come out of it. That is the opposite of everything they have done all term. Something is being done behind that fence, and I would rather know what it is before the day of the third task than afterwards."

Draco stopped looking amused.

He said it as a statement and then argued with it in the same breath. "You want to go in. There will be wards all round that ground, and since the lake they have been unbearable enough to cancel their own flying practice. There is no way to get near the place, let alone into it."

"Polyjuice. One of theirs, an ordinary one, and I only need the hair," Edward said plainly. "The difficulty is exactly what you have just described. They never separate."

Draco's fingers started tapping the stone beside him, which was what they did when he was actually thinking rather than talking.

He frowned at the fire while he worked through it. "They do not separate, no. Tents, or in groups, always inside their own line, and they will be worse now, because they won the last task by standing together and it has confirmed everything they already believed about themselves. Whatever is in that camp, they are not letting it out of the fence."

"They monopolised half a lake without a moment's hesitation," Edward said. "I do not intend to find out what the larger version looks like on the day of the third task."

Draco went quiet. Then something turned over behind the grey eyes, and it was the expression that had been getting him out of trouble since he was seven.

He was enjoying himself before he had finished thinking it through. "There is one hour in the whole week when they have to come out. Joint History of Magic, tomorrow afternoon, all three schools together in the Great Hall. Binns on the Medieval Wizarding Convention. It is compulsory, which means Karkaroff cannot keep them behind his fence for it. They will be sitting in rows in a room we know better than they do."

"A joint lesson." Edward considered it. "It is the opening. It is also three hundred people. Binns will not see anything, he has not seen anything since the last century, but everybody else has eyes."

Draco was already laying it out with both hands. "Which is why it wants two of us. Crabbe walks into him coming out of the doors. Not hard, just enough that everybody looks at the collision and at Crabbe apologising badly, which he does very convincingly because he is not acting. I take the hair wordlessly while the whole row is looking the other way." He tipped his head. "And I know which one. There is a fourth-year of theirs, Vasily Antonov. Sits at the back, says nothing, and I have watched him for a fortnight and never once seen anybody speak to him. If he vanished for an hour I doubt his own house would raise it."

"Then we split it." Edward nodded slowly. "You take the hair. I will make sure that at the moment you do it, every eye in that hall is somewhere else. That part I can arrange without much effort at present."

"No, you cannot walk two feet without being stared at." Draco put his hand out. "Whatever they are hiding in those tents, we will have it out of them. The cup is going to Hogwarts."

Edward took the hand.

The fire cracked and settled behind them. Outside the deep window the grounds had gone entirely black, and from the direction of the forest came the thin unpleasant call of a thestral, once and then not again. Down at the water's edge the ship-shaped tents of Durmstrang sat in a row with dim light behind their windows, quiet as something large and asleep, and Edward stood looking at them for a while.

Three weeks to the third task. If Karkaroff had genuinely finished whatever he had been going out at night to arrange, then there was rather less time than that.