Chapter 213: One Hour in Somebody Else's Face

The doors of the Great Hall went back hard enough to hit the walls.

Professor McGonagall came through them first with Snape a stride behind her and Flitwick almost running to keep up, and Madame Maxime filling most of the doorway after them. What they walked into was spell-light still hanging in the air, forty students on the floor in pairs, wands and books and torn parchment across the flags, and a cage of fire standing in the middle of it with four champions inside.

"STOP THIS. EVERY ONE OF YOU."

Her wand came round and a wave of silver went out across the hall, and it took hold of every student in the room and put a yard of empty floor around each of them. The flame cage came apart under it and folded down into nothing, and the four inside it stood there breathing hard with the malice still on their faces and no longer any way to use it.

Professor Binns drifted out from underneath his own podium, where he had been since the second minute, and looked around the room with an expression of profound and helpless resignation.

"Look at it." McGonagall's voice was shaking and it was not with nerves. "Three schools in one room for a single afternoon, and this is what you have made of it. Every student who raised a hand in here is in detention tonight, and I will be taking the names myself."

Snape moved through the wreckage with his eyes going over the participants, and stopped, and produced a sound of profound distaste.

"Fifty points from Gryffindor. The rest of you may consider yourselves fortunate that I am not in a generous mood."

The room emptied under supervision, and six students were left standing on the floor of it.

McGonagall looked at the six of them for a while before she said anything.

She let the silence do some of it first. "You are the champions of this tournament. The third task is three weeks away, the Ministry has its eyes on this school, and the six of you decided that this afternoon was the moment for a brawl in front of four hundred people."

Krum's colour was high and he was not giving an inch of it. "It was not us. Hogwarts began it, as Hogwarts began the last one."

"You put a jinx on the floor under my feet before anybody had drawn a wand at you." Harry was past being careful about his tone. "You and then Langlock, and neither of those is an accident."

McGonagall turned aside and spoke with Snape and Madame Maxime for the better part of a minute in a voice that did not carry, and came back with her decision.

"Given what stands three weeks from now, you are excused detention and will take a formal warning instead. Understand it plainly: if this happens again, whoever is involved is removed from the tournament. Not fined. Removed."

Karkaroff arrived before she had finished, coming up the hall at a pace that suggested somebody had run to fetch him.

He took one look at the state of his four and did not trouble with a greeting. "Is this the Hogwarts standard? No discipline of any kind, and open provocation of guests under your own roof. I shall raise it with Headmaster Dumbledore tonight."

"The fault this afternoon lies on both sides, Headmaster, and your students were casting offensive magic within ten seconds of the first shove." McGonagall neither raised her voice nor gave any ground with it. "We shall deal with ours. I would be obliged if you dealt with yours."

Snape looked at Karkaroff for perhaps two seconds and then turned and walked away without having said anything whatsoever, which from Snape was a considered statement.

Draco caught Edward's sleeve on his way out to serve the detention that had been handed down before the champions were excused theirs.

"Those four were not right." He kept his voice low and there was none of the usual performance in it. "It was a shoving match and they turned it into a battle, and they moved as though they had practised it for a month. And the way Krum was looking at you and at Potter was not the way a person looks at somebody he has quarrelled with."

"I noticed." Edward's fingers found the small twist of brown hair in his pocket. "We have what we came for. Go and be punished gracefully."

Draco's whole face changed.

"You have it? Then this was the best detention I shall ever serve."

The castle took a long time to go quiet. Past midnight Edward went down through the passages, round two sets of prefects and one patrolling professor, and out to the Shrieking Shack with the hair folded into a paper twist inside his robes.

Sirius and Lupin had the cauldron on the stone table and the base already worked up, and the surface of it was a slow thick green that turned over on itself and smelled of pond and something worse underneath.

Sirius was across the boards before the door had shut. "Tell me you have it."

"Fourth-year. Antonov." Edward put the twist of paper into Lupin's hand. "The lesson went badly wrong around us while we were getting it, but nobody was watching the floor."

Lupin unfolded the paper carefully and let the hairs down into the cauldron one at a time, and the smell went out of the room as though a window had opened. "The proportions are unforgiving and the hair is the whole of it. If it is clean, three hours of work comes good in about four minutes."

The green went out of the surface and left it a clear pale blue, and then a thread of silver came up through the middle of it and turned. Lupin filled three cups.

"An hour to change and an hour to hold. Do not push either of those."

Edward put his back and drank it down. It was bitter in a way that stayed in the teeth, and then the heat started somewhere under the breastbone and spread, and his bones made a series of small unpleasant noises as he lost four inches of height. When it stopped, the hands in front of him were somebody else's, and the face he could feel around his own was the face of a boy nobody in that camp had ever bothered to look at.

"There." Sirius was delighted, and drank his own without waiting.

It went wrong at once. His shoulders jerked, and the skin of his face ran from Antonov's shape to his own and back twice while he made a noise through his teeth, and then it stopped trying and left him as himself with sweat down his temples.

Lupin got perhaps half of his down before he began coughing, and a dull red came up under his skin from the collarbone to the hairline, and he had to put both hands on the table.

"The hair." He got it out between coughs. "It has been off him for hours and it is thin as it is, and Sirius and I are too far from him. Too old, too much magic of our own in the way. It will not take on either of us."

Sirius brought his fist down on the table hard enough to move the cauldron.

"So it is one of us and it is the one who is fifteen."

Edward looked at the unfamiliar hands and flexed them. "It is the one who looks exactly like a boy nobody in that camp has ever spoken to, which is why we chose him. If I am not back inside the hour you will know something has gone wrong and you will still be here to do something about it, which is worth more than three of us walking in together."

Neither of them liked it and neither of them had an argument.

He put on the spare Durmstrang uniform Lupin had prepared a week earlier, and Lupin walked round him twice checking the fall of it and the way the collar sat, and moved the fastening at his throat a half-inch. Then Edward went out of the Shrieking Shack into the cold, in another boy's body and another school's colours, and took the long way round toward the tents.