It was already too late.

The dragon was charging toward him, and although Harry could see the dragon handlers chasing behind it, there wasn't enough time for them to do anything.

Running into the tent wouldn't do anything but endanger the staff inside. If he could get to the stands there were protections that were designed to keep the audience safe. No one wanted a repeat of the disaster from the last Tournament.

However, the same protections that would keep the dragon away from him would also keep him from getting into the stands without leaving the stadium and coming in from behind. That would run the risk of the dragon escaping and attacking any stragglers who weren't actually in the stadium.

No matter what happened, he had to gain some mobility. If he didn't the dragon would push him into a corner and then either burn him to death or eat him.

Hoping that it would distract the dragon, Harry threw the golden egg. This didn't stop the dragon at all; if anything it only seemed to enrage it more.

"ACCIO BROOM!" Harry shouted.

It didn't matter whose broom or where it came from as long as it reached him.

Unfortunately, it would take time for the broom to reach him; time he didn't have. Harry stared up at the dragon as it approached him, and then he waved his wand.

"ACENDIO!"

The spell sent him hurtling straight up into the air even as the dragon pounced on the place where he had been. Harry pointed his wand downward and yelled, "ARRESTO MOMENTUM!"

He began floating instead of falling, although as he was floating down toward the jaws of an angry dragon that was leaping up to eat him, it wasn't much of a comfort.

"BOMBARDA!" he screamed, pointing his wand down at the gaped open mouth of the dragon below.

It had a sudden strange expression on its face as the beam of light went down its throat. A moment later there was a muffled explosion.

The dragon fell back, coughing convulsively as Harry continued to float downward.

He finally saw the broom. Just as the dragon was recovering, Harry caught onto the broom flying toward him.

The dragon had recovered faster than Harry found comfortable, and it was already spreading its wings ready to come for him.

Harry cast a Conjunctivitis spell, hitting one of its eyes, but that only angered it more. It flew toward him, and as he tried to hit its other eye it kept moving its head, making it harder to hit.

Forcing his broom down as a gout of fire flew over him, Harry found himself wishing he'd spent more time practicing flying. It was all he could do now to avoid the dragon and even as he cast the flame freezing charm on himself and his broomstick.

Just in time; fire washed over him and he felt his skin tingle. The fire tickled and he felt an uncharacteristic urge to laugh.

Seeing that the fire was having no effect on him, the dragon redoubled its efforts, flying faster now. Although Harry was more agile, the dragon was faster than the old school broom and he knew he didn't have much time.

Below, he could see Dumbledore struggling to get out of the crowd, which had inexplicably begun to panic. He was being crushed in the crowd, which probably made undoing the anti-apparation wards more difficult than it should have been.

It was getting closer, and the wizards below were struggling to maintain order. Harry didn't have any choice.

He pulled out a small amount of peanut butter that he'd stolen from breakfast and slipped into a candy tin that Neville had lent him. Pulling it out, he cast the flame freezing spell on it before he threw it behind him, flicking his wand at the same time.

It would have been terrifying, riding his wand without using either hand, but the specter of death rapidly coming behind him with an open maw made it a trivial consideration.

The peanut butter flew straight and true, led by Harry's spell. It landed in the dragon's gullet. The dragon didn't look as though it had even noticed.

"GEMINIO!" he screamed.

The geminio curse was a spell designed to cause objects to multiply exponentially. It was used in the vaults of some wizards to cause thieves to be crushed under the replicated weight of the very things they were trying to steal.

As long as whatever it was continued to be touched by a living thing it continued to replicate, within the limits of the caster's power.

The thick peanut butter, stuck to the dragon's mouth began to replicate, doubling in size and then doubling again.

Harry dodged the dragon, dropping straight down toward the ground in a dive. He'd be able to pull up more easily than the dragon would.

It was diving after him, apparently banking on its own ability to catch up to him and pull up before it smashed into the ground. Dragons were decent fliers and this one was better than most.

Harry grimaced as it snapped at him, it's fangs only three feet from the back of his broom. It was already dead but just didn't know it, but even a dead snake could still kill.

He dodged to the right, but it didn't make much of a difference. The dragon had his measure now, and as they approached the ground Harry knew he had to pull up.

"BOMBARDA!" he screamed, pointing the wand in the dragon's face.

The explosion didn't seem to do much damage, but the smoke it created was enough for Harry to slip under it and behind.

The dragon had to come around for another pass, buying Harry some breathing room. The dragon's demise was taking longer than Harry had thought it would, and his only option was to continue to buy time until it was over with.

A few moment's breathing room was all he would have.

"FUMOS!" Harry cast, and an explosion of smoke emerged from his wand.

"FUMOS, FUMOS, FUMOS!"

A massive cloud of smoke suddenly surrounded him, obscuring his view of the ground below. It was a dangerous spell to use, because while it made it more difficult for the dragon to see him, it would be harder for him to see it.

He took a moment to cast the supersensory charm on himself. He could hear the sound of the dragon wings from below him and the sounds of its breathing, which was beginning to sound a little labored. The dragon was making a hacking, phegmatic sound deep in its throat.

It wouldn't be long, but Harry had to survive until then.

He dove to the very back edge of the cloud, and as the dragon flew up into it he dropped out of the crowd, diving for the ground.

The screams of the crowd made him gasp and want to hold his head. Instead he dismissed the charm. But it was too late. The dragon had heard the crowd and it was coming for him.

It dove, but as suddenly as it did it began hacking harder. It's entire body began to be engulfed by spasms, and it slammed into the ground rather than pulling up in time.

Hitting the ground shouldn't have been enough to do more than stun it slightly; dragons really were heavily armored.

However, it didn't get up.

It was struggling to breathe as the peanut butter in its mouth continued to double in size over and over again. The peanut butter was filling it's air passages, and Harry could see some coming from its nose.

Harry continued to float above it on his broom as the creature asphyxiated.

It took longer to die than he'd thought it would.

By the time Dumbledore and the dragon tamers reached the dragon, it was dead. Harry allowed his broom to drop to the ground.

"What did you do, my boy?" Dumbledore asked.

The crowd had finally stopped and people were standing in the stands. They were staring at the scene in stunned silence.

Harry decided that he would always have an exit from crowds; after the last time he knew they were a good way to get killed.

"I kept feeding it until it choked," Harry said. "I didn't have a choice."

There wasn't much to say after that, other than wait on the judges to confer. Killing the dragon had explicitly not been part of the challenge. However, Harry had accomplished the task as asked.

Harry could hear Karkarov arguing that the task hadn't officially been over until Harry had left the field. Once the dragon attacked him in the air, the task had continued.

The judges were arguing, and it suddenly occurred to Harry that it was unfair for the headmasters to be judging their own students.

Finally the deliberations were done. Madam Maxine raised her wand, and the number six emerged floating through the air.

Karkarov gave him a two, which probably meant he was not in Voldemort's camp currently, although Harry still couldn't be sure.

Bagman gave him an eight.

All in all, Harry had come in second, which was a decent showing given the disaster that had happened.

Part of him felt a little resentful that they had blamed him for killing the dragon. It was their responsibility for not having good enough chains.

He would have argued if he'd really cared about winning. It simply irritated him to be punished for something he couldn't help.

Sirius ran up to him; Harry hadn't seen him in the stands although he'd known he would be there. He was pale and there was blood running down his face. Apparently he'd tried to get out of the crowd to help Harry and had a hard time of it.

"I've never wished my animagus form was a bird instead of a dog until today," he said. "Are you all right?"

Harry grinned weakly. "Looks like I came out of it better than you did."

"There's got to be some way to get you out of this," Sirius said. "If this was the first task, what will the second one be like?"

Harry shuddered.

He wasn't sure whether the broken chain was due to sabotage or incompetence, but he hoped someone got sacked. Considering that he saw Rita Skeeter in the audience looking like she'd won the lottery, he suspected that it would be sooner rather than later.

After all, a well run Tournament was in the interest of the Ministry while a fiasco was not. Harry had a fleeting thought, wondering whether Voldemort's plan was to make the Ministry look incompetent as a way of swaying the vote on the new candidates.

Bagman called out to all the champions to gather around.

"That was a little more excitement than we all expected," he said, chuckling uneasily.

The other two champions were pale; apparently they'd gotten to watch his contest after finishing their own. Fleur was looking at him differently as well; she had always looked down on him as a child and she'd been open about it. Now both she and Krum were looking at him with more respect.

"The next task won't be until February 24th. We won't leave you as clueless as we did this time, but we won't make it easy either. If you'll look at the eggs we've given you you'll see that they have a hinge on them. Open them and interpret the message inside and it'll give you a clue to the next task."

He had three months before he had to bother with the second task. He felt a sense of relief. He'd have time to prepare, to get faster and better. The body of the dragon behind him proved that he was getting stronger and better, but Voldmort was more dangerous than any dragon.


Figuring out the screaming egg was harder than he would have thought. Harry had tried every spell he could think of, and other spells suggested by the other Slytherins. Nothing had seemed to work.

He wasn't allowed to get help from professors, not that this would have stopped him, but no one seemed interested in helping him.

Sirius had suggested that some animals sensed things differently from humans. Things that seemed high pitched to a human sounded low pitched to some animals. This was why Harry was sitting with a modified version of the supersensory goggles while the Weasleys, Hermione and Neville were sitting with the earmuffs used in Herbology to handle the mandrake roots.

These were adjustable; the twins were hoping to market them as ways to experience what it was like to be an animagus without having to go through all the trouble. See life as a dog! Experience the senses of an earthworm! They hoped to get actual animagi to calibrate the senses for their respective animal types.

So far they had only concentrated on modifying the sense of hearing. They'd added four knobs on the side of the visor and it had taken them more than a week of work to do so.

Harry grimaced at the wailing shriek of the egg. They were on the astronomy tower with permission, but he knew the sound was reaching everywhere.

"No...no...no...wait," Harry said. "It's getting a little closer. Closer...that's it!"

Instead of hearing things more intensely he'd had to actually muffle and deepen it, finally he heard the message.

He repeated the poem, which had been recited in mermaid's voices. He knew those voices intimately because he'd seen them outside the windows of the Slytherin dungeons. He'd heard their voices sometimes.

"It's a challenge under the lake," Harry said. "Probably has something to do with the mermen."

The possibilities for cheating were enormous. The first thing he needed to do was scout out the lake and its dangers. There was no guarantee that they wouldn't add more later, but the chances were that knowing his way around under the lake would only help him.

Besides, as he'd seen from recent events he really needed to work on his cardio. The next time he had to run from a dragon, there might not be a convenient broom around.

"Anybody up for a swim?" he asked.

The others looked alarmed.

"It sounds a little risky," Hermione said.

"If you can find a map of the lake I'll let you off, but I'm going to need to see what I'm getting into. It would be better to go as a group because then we'll be better protected."

The last thing he wanted to do was jump into a lake without knowing the possible risks.

"Didn't you already look up the creatures that are in the lake?"

"I didn't look up where they are," Harry said. He hesitated. "If you really don't want to go, that's fine. I don't want to endanger anybody for something that's really my problem anyway."

The Weasley twins were grinning. "Miss out on an undersea exploration mission? We've always wanted to have something to hold over our brother who likes to brag about exploring tombs and fighting strange mummies."

Harry grinned.


Harry's body ached.

He hadn't realized how out of shape he was until he'd begun exploring the lake. Fighting Grindylows hadn't been particularly hard, and finding the exact location of the Mermish village had been a matter of time and effort.

The swimming had been the most difficult part. Hermione had found a spell to keep them warm, saying they'd catch their death of cold jumping into a lake in Scotland in the middle of winter.

Harry wondered if he should see if the Room of Requirement could summon up a swimming pool. That would be a safer way to get the exercise he needed without having to be seen going out into the lake and risk being followed.

Their being there had upset the Mermish anyway.

"The Yule ball is approaching," McGonegall was saying. "A traditional part of the Triwizard tournament. It is an opportunity for us to socialize with the other schools."

"The ball will be from eight o'clock to Midnight on Christmas day," she continued. "It is only open to those of fourth year and above, although they may invite younger partners."

The Slytherins were all looking at each other.

"Unlike my own House, I have no reason to suspect that you will become too...spirited. I expect that everyone will represent this school to the best of their ability."

She dismissed the class, then said, "Mr. Potter, a word."

Harry stopped and waited for the other members of the class to file out of the room. Despite the fact that Slytherins were more composed and reserved than their counterparts in the other houses, he could sense excitement in the air. The girls were whispering together in ways he usually only saw in Gryffindors.

"Traditionally the Champions and their partners open the ball," McGonagall said.

Harry looked at her blankly. "Partners?"

Was there some part to the contest that he hadn't understood? He thought the entire point was for them to go it alone.

"Dance partners," McGonagall said.

If this was a joke, he didn't appreciate it. Putting him up in front of the entire school to be humiliated sounded like something from his first year, not now.

"I don't dance," Harry said flatly.

"I've seen you duel," she said primly. "And I'd beg to disagree."

It was a compliment from her; from what Harry knew about her she was a formidable opponent on the battlefield and a master of transfiguration.

"I don't know how to dance with girls," Harry corrected himself.

"There will be a chance to learn," McGonagall said. "But first you have to find a partner."

"What...ask someone out?" Harry asked blankly.

"Indubitably...and it needs to be soon."

Harry wondered why he was suddenly dreading this as much as he was. He had faced down death many times, fighting Death Eaters and Basilisks and dragons. None of those however had produced exactly the same kind of anxiety as being forced to ask a teenage girl out to dance.