Chapter 212: The Joint Lesson

The joint History of Magic was set for the afternoon, and the Great Hall had been turned into a classroom for it, with the four house tables pushed back against the walls to leave the middle of the floor clear.

The three schools arranged themselves by camp without being asked, which told you most of what you needed to know. Sunlight came down through the coloured glass of the roof and did nothing whatever for the temperature of the room.

Since the Black Lake and everything that had come out afterwards, Durmstrang and Hogwarts had reached the point where even standing in the same room was a decision.

Edward took his place in the Slytherin line and watched, out of the corner of his eye, Draco give Crabbe and Goyle a look that meant nothing to anybody who had not spent the previous evening being briefed on it.

They had gone over it twice. Crabbe would walk into the boy and go down noisily, Goyle would ensure everybody within thirty feet watched the argument rather than the floor, and Draco would take the hair with a wordless Accio. Edward had the four champions, because the only thing that could ruin this was one of them looking the wrong way at the wrong moment.

The target was standing at the tail of the Durmstrang line with a copy of A History of Magic held against his chest. Vasily Antonov was a fourth-year with a habit of standing slightly behind whoever was nearest to him, and in a fortnight of watching, Draco had never once seen anybody address a word to him.

Professor Binns drifted up through the front of the podium rather than around it, and his thin voice went out over the hall with that quality of being faint and impossible to ignore. "Settle down. This afternoon we consider the medieval legislation separating the wizarding and Muggle worlds. Students may exchange views freely, and any student who exchanges anything else will find me less tolerant than my reputation suggests."

Crabbe chose that moment to lose his footing.

He went into Antonov shoulder first with the whole of his considerable weight behind it, and the boy staggered sideways into the row while his books went out of his arms and the pages went across the flags in every direction.

"Are you blind, or is it that you simply do not care?" Antonov shoved him back with both hands, and half a dozen Durmstrang students turned round at once and closed the distance without hurrying.

Goyle pitched his voice to carry the length of the hall, which was the only part of the plan he had been given and which he executed perfectly. "He was standing in the middle of the floor. You put yourself in his road and now you want an apology?"

"Is every one of you brought up in a stable, or is it only the ones they let out?"

Both sides were shouting inside ten seconds, and Professor Binns's account of the medieval statutes went under it and did not surface again.

Nobody was looking anywhere but at the argument, which was the point of the argument, and so nobody saw Draco's wand come up along his side with silver at the tip, or the few brown hairs on the flags where the boy had been shoved, or the moment they stopped being there.

"Enough. All of you."

Viktor Krum came through his own students with his eyes already fixed on somebody. He had spent a fortnight watching a tournament he was winning turn into a set of newspaper columns about a Phoenix, and it had been working on him the whole time, and his gaze went past the shoving and settled on Edward and on Harry standing a little way beyond him.

"It is you two again. Is this all Hogwarts is capable of?"

"It was an accident and everybody here knows it." Harry had his hands open and his wand still at his side. "Nobody has to make it into anything."

"An accident." Krum's wand came up, and the word he used was not English and not one any of them had heard before.

The spell came out thick and low and brown and struck the flags at Harry's feet, and the stone went slick beneath him so that his boot went out from under him and he had to fight the floor to stay upright.

"Fire Shield."

Edward had already moved across in front of him, and the gold-red came up out of the Mithril in a curtain that caught the Langlock arriving behind the first spell and turned it into nothing. The heat of it took the slick off the flags in a wash of steam, and Harry got his footing back.

"Behind somebody else. Naturally." Krum's wand swung to Edward. "Stupefy!"

The red came across the hall like something thrown from a bow, and it did not come alone. Volodya, Vasiliev and Sokolov moved in from three sides in the same breath, and they did not look like students who had lost their tempers. They looked like a formation.

Volodya's Impedimenta went up as a wall, and it was not aimed at anybody; it was placed between the Hogwarts students and the four of them, cutting off everyone who might have come to help. Vasiliev sent a Rictusempra out wide across the room and half a dozen third-years folded up helpless with laughter in the middle of it. Sokolov put a whistling line of silver chain at Draco.

"You appalling people!" Draco went under the chain and came up casting. "Langlock!"

The pale blue drove Sokolov sideways, and after that the room went.

Slytherin came up behind Draco and Gryffindor behind Harry, facing the same direction for the first time in living memory. Ron pointed his wand at Vasiliev, produced a fair approximation of the word Krum had used, and put him flat in his own tar, which drew a noise from the Hufflepuff side that Binns would have deducted points for.

Within a minute it had stopped being a duel and become a brawl. Spell-light crossed the hall in every direction and burst against the walls, and where students found their casting blocked at close quarters they threw the wands down and used their hands instead.

Beauxbatons went backwards and then came forward again. Fleur got a wind charm under two boys grappling on the floor and blew them apart, and Cedric put an Impedimenta up crossways between the two sides and held it there.

The four champions were the worst of it, and the worst of that was how well they worked. Volodya shrank the space the Hogwarts students had to move in, Vasiliev reinforced whatever Volodya built, Sokolov worked the flanks, and Krum did nothing whatever except aim at Edward and at Harry, with no attention to spare for the people trying to get between them.

Harry was carrying too much of it. He was dodging Krum's line and Sokolov's at the same time and his casting had begun to fray, and a chain caught his shoulder and went round the arm and pulled it against his side.

Edward stopped being careful.

"Flame Blades."

Dozens of them came off his wand at once, thin as knives and no longer than a hand, and they went into Volodya's barrier together and opened four gaps in it in the space of a breath.

"Harry. Get out of it."

He put himself in front and let the Fire Shield go wide until it covered everyone behind him, and the four of them answered by escalating rather than stopping. Volodya threw up barriers in layers, one inside another. Vasiliev put Glacius into the Fire Shield to smother it. Krum's Stupefys came in a stream and none of them were aimed anywhere survivable.

Something in Edward went cold.

He had been holding back all afternoon, because these were students and this was a classroom. But no ordinary quarrel escalated like this, and no four boys who had merely lost their tempers moved with that kind of understanding between them. That was not anger. That was drill.

He raised his wand high and let the gold-red gather and split into four lines.

"Flame Cage."

The four chains went out and crossed one another in the air and closed, and the four Durmstrang champions were standing in a ring of turning fire that came up past their heads and shut over the top. It did not spread an inch beyond where he set it. It only stood there, and when Krum threw Expelliarmus into the wall of it the spell went in and did not come out again.

They attacked it together, all four, and the fire took everything they had and returned ripples.

And through the moving light Edward looked at their faces, and what he saw there stayed with him a great deal longer than the fight did. It was not fury. Fury burns out. What was in those four faces was fixed, and flat, and had nothing behind it whatever, and it was pointed at him and at Harry as though the two of them were the only objects in the world.