"How hard it was to organize all this World Cup stuff makes my head spin," Sirius said, as they listened to some classical music on Radio Three.

Harry looked up, interested. "I didn't know you were involved."

"I wasn't," Sirius told him. "I just happen to know, because I was buying the tickets for us all to go."

Harry started to say thank you – not for the first time, but he was still grateful so it seemed polite – but Sirius waved him down. "I told you, I don't mind. Honestly, it'd be actually hard for me to spend all my money even if I was trying – I can't go and buy a Caribbean island or anything, but good tickets to a Quidditch match is nothing."

He chuckled. "It's because of what happened when I was buying them. The wizard looked tired, so I asked him how he was doing, and he told me how much trouble it's all been."

The music on the radio suddenly blared out a loud bassoon note that sounded really quite rude, catching them both by surprise, and after giving the radio a puzzled look Sirius continued.

It seemed that the big problem was simply the difficulty of staging a large sporting event – about the same size as a football World Cup Final, in terms of how many people wanted to come and see it, because Wizards didn't have television – without letting the Muggles know that anything of the sort was going on. Normally when one of those happened in the Muggle world they could just use public transport, but the very idea of large numbers of wizards using public transport made Harry unsure whether he wanted to wince or laugh.

Except for the Muggle-born, and a few exceptions like Sirius (who'd been making an effort to learn over the last couple of years), one wizard on the Tube was usually eye-catching even when they weren't like Hagrid. Imagining thousands of foreign wizards all over London was just asking for the whole Wizarding World to get exposed, and with a hundred thousand wizards coming to Britain the sheer number of odd things happening would be impossible to keep hidden.

(Harry did a bit of maths in his head, thinking about how many witches and wizards there were in the world, and decided that there was probably more than a tenth of the world Wizarding population attending the World Cup.)

So there was a complicated mixture of Portkeys and Apparating and that sort of thing, and people were arriving a few thousand at a time and camping around the stadium. Sirius had got them good tickets so they were only really staying for a day or so before the game, which was nice, and then afterwards they could just head straight back to Dogwarts (or home, for the others) if they wanted.

Assuming, of course, that they didn't need to go straight to Kings Cross.

"And that was Hayden's Symphony number 93," the Radio 3 announcer announced, as the music ended. "One of the symphonies with no nickname, probably because the only real option is a little too embarrassing. Next, we'll be listening to the Hebrides by Mendelssohn."

"I bet Trouble and Strife would like that one," Sirius chuckled. "Anyway, Harry… do you want to go straight from here to the World Cup stadium? I assume they probably have a fireplace linked to the Floo somewhere there – probably several, really. Or you could meet your friends and go with them."

Harry thought about that, and about what he knew of how his friends were planning on going to the Cup. Hermione and Dean were just going to meet up with Ron and go from the Burrow, but Neville's Aunt was going to Apparate him there Side-Along, so going with his friends really meant going to the Burrow.

"Do you know where the stadium is?" he asked.

"Somewhere in Devon, I think," Sirius replied, thinking about it. "I couldn't point to it on a map, though. It's Unplottable."

"How does the Marauder's Map work, then?" Harry asked. "If Hogwarts is Unplottable."

"That's a very good question," Sirius said. "Someone should really look into finding out the answer one of these days."

Harry blinked. "You don't know?"

"In case you haven't noticed, Harry, I was not exactly the most focused pupil," Sirius pointed out. "A bit like Trouble and Strife, really. James, Remus, , and I sort of went straight from the idea of the Map to starting to map things out, and because it worked we never thought about the Unplottability thing."

Harry was quite impressed by Sirius' ability to pronounce an empty space.

His Dogfather shrugged. "I mean, I assume Hogwarts actually is Unplottable instead of nobody having bothered to try to mark it on a map. But then again, look what we've found out about technology."

Harry had to agree, because there were several battery-operated gadgets at Grimmauld Place. Dogwarts only had the radio, because it was close enough to Hogwarts that whatever made televisions work made televisions not work, but there was no such problem at Grimmauld Place and they were both wondering in an idle sort of way whether they could get a power supply and a games console like one of Dudley's ones.

"I think I'd rather go to the Burrow," Harry decided. "It'd be nice to visit it again, it's somehow the most wizard-y place I've ever been – and that includes Hogwarts. And Dogwarts."

"I do like it," Sirius admitted. "Grimmauld Place is much more my style now we watch television there, but it's still a bit boring."

He stood, shifted to Padfoot, stretched doggishly and then shifted back to human again. "Want help writing the letter?"

"I'll be fine," Harry assured him. "Actually, because Ron's probably in his room but not gone to bed yet, I'll send him a Patronus asking if we can fire call to sort it out tomorrow."

"I should really learn how to do that," Sirius mused. "It's very useful."

"What about if I teach you?" Harry volunteered. "I thought Professor Dumbledore had already taught you, or I'd have offered earlier."

"...he probably would have, if I'd asked," Sirius snorted. "I really should have thought of that."

Mrs. Weasley was delighted to see Harry, when he Flooed over the day before they were all going to go to the World Cup.

Everyone else was happy to see Harry as well, and he was touched, but Mrs. Weasley was especially happy because of the way that there were so many people staying in the Burrow that they were more or less out of rooms. Harry duly set up his tent in Ron's room for the night, and then Charlie introduced him properly to the last of the Weasley siblings that Harry hadn't met yet.

Bill (or William, as nobody called him) turned out to be laid-back, easy-going, and fun to talk to. Harry sort of got the idea of him as the sort of Prefect that Sirius would actually respect, and that made him wonder just how much Bill was like Prongs had been.

He did his best not to wonder that during the conversation, though, because it wouldn't have been very fair to Bill. It wasn't as if it was hard to be focused on other things, either, because Bill was deeply interested in what Harry and Charlie had found out between them about Nora.

"At work there's a lot of focus on trying to actually train dragons properly," Bill confided. "Unfortunately the best methods they have at the moment aren't very good, or so I'm told, and this idea of being able to actually give dragons instructions is something that Snaphaunce and the others are all very interested in."

"I did hear about dragons at Gringotts," Harry agreed. "What are they like?"

"Good question!" Bill admitted. "I'm in the curse breaking section, so I'm mostly going abroad to break curses on Egyptian or Mayan tombs – that sort of thing. It's just what you hear from the others."

He shrugged. "But even then, a lot of it is secret. They all say having talking dragons would work better though."

"I got approval to do more tests," Charlie told Harry, taking up the thread of the conversation. "To see whether it's something about Hogwarts that makes it work, or how Hagrid and Kettleburn raised Nora – we'll be trying that one in Romania. If it's neither of those, it might just be something about Nora."

Harry had a very good idea what had caused it, but that didn't actually mean he knew what to say. Telling them would mean giving away the secret of Empress, and he wasn't sure that would be either a good idea or a polite thing to do.

"Professor Dumbledore and I wondered if it was a ghost teaching Nora overnight," he said, eventually. "We couldn't find the ghost that was doing it, but maybe if you try spending lots of time teaching one of the hatchling dragons Dragonish that would be a good test?"

Charlie frowned, reaching up to toy with a ring in his ear. "That might be a good idea too. We should test as many options as possible."

He brightened. "And if all else fails, we can just call it Hogwarts Weyr."

Harry beamed, and Bill just looked confused. "What?"

"It's a book Harry copied for me. I'll show you," Charlie promised.

Bright and early the next morning, in fact so early that it didn't really qualify as 'bright', they all got up to go up Stoatshead Hill near the Burrow to catch a Portkey.

Harry had managed to get enough sleep that he was only yawning a little bit at breakfast, but he seemed to be just about the only one. Hermione's eyes looked a bit red, and she was doing a lot better than Dean or Ron (who were almost nodding off over toast) or even Ginny, who spent about half the time yawning.

"How do you even do that?" Ron muttered, staring blearily at Harry. "Get up so early."

"It's so I can read more at night," Harry explained. "I sort of learned how when I was younger, and I'm doing my best to keep it up."

It made sense to him, but Ron just groaned.

"Look, can I get a lift?" he asked. "If I have to walk I'm going to fall over and break my ankle or something."

"Really, Ronald," Mrs. Weasley said, tutting. "How do you think Harry will feel?"

"I won't mind," Harry replied. "Nutkin only weighs about a pound."

"I beg your pardon?" she asked.

"It's me as a squirrel, mum, remember?" Ron asked, then finished off his toast.

A new slice appeared almost immediately, and he shook his head. "No, that's fine, Dobby."

The House-Elf beamed, taking the buttered toast for himself, and spread jam on it before taking the plate to wash it.

"Well, if Harry doesn't mind, I suppose that's fine," Mrs. Weasley decided.

"It's not going to be very Muggle-friendly, is it?" Mr. Weasley asked, worried.

"I can change back once we get to the Portkey," Ron pointed out. "And Muggles don't really pay much attention to squirrels."

"Or crows," Dean suggested.

Hermione snorted. "It's a pity I don't have that excuse."

Somehow it ended up that Harry was carrying four of their group up the hill – including both Weasley Twins – but it was all right, because all put together they weighed less than one backpack full of library books. It wasn't the sort of thing most people thought of when they thought of the good sides of being an Animagus, but it was still a good side.

More than once, Harry saw Hermione looking longingly down at her legs as they climbed the steep hill – probably wishing she could risk shifting to her other shape – but it turned out that they arrived in good time and happened to meet Cedric and his dad up there as well. Fred and George shifted back to human to offer Cedric a toffee, but (no fool he) the Hufflepuff just told them to try one themselves.

"I'm not going to be eating anything from them for the rest of the summer," Ron muttered.

"At this point I think you should just ignore anything they've helped make," Dean replied, yawning again. "Thanks, Harry, I needed that extra hour or so…"

Then everyone reached out to put a finger or a hand on the Portkey – which had been made out of an old boot – and Mr. Weasley started counting down with all his attention on his watch.

A moment later, Harry was alone on the hill.

"Oh," he said.

Harry had sort of wondered whether it was like Apparating or not, and there was his answer.

Rummaging in his bag, Harry dug out one of his two-way mirrors and called Sirius to let him know. Sirius promised to let everyone else know what had happened and to send him Hedwig just in case, and then Harry got out his compass and checked which way north was.

At least he had plenty of time to get there, and he took off with only one mild grumble.

As it turned out, when all the information you actually had on where something was amounted to "a moor somewhere in Devon", it wasn't all that easy to find it even from the air.

The first problem was what actually qualified as a moor. Harry had had the vague idea that to get to a moor you usually went north, but after flying north for about twenty minutes Harry reached the sea and realized he'd have to rethink this.

Fortunately the local library was open, and Harry quickly checked a map and found that he'd ended up in Somerset instead. There was a moor to the west of him, which was Exmoor, but all the other moors were much more towards south Devon or even Cornwall.

Armed with a photocopy of the map in question, Harry contacted Sirius again to discover exactly which moor the Quidditch Stadium was on.

"Hold on, I'll go and check," Sirius said.

The mirror viewpoint moved, showing Harry a momentary glimpse of a gigantic golden stadium, and Harry heard Sirius' voice made a bit fainter by distance. "Does anyone actually know where we are?"

"The Quidditch World Cup Final, Mr. Black," someone replied.

"I know that much," Sirius countered. "I mean where in Britain. What moor."

"What more what?" the other person said, confused. "You must realize I'm busy, I can't answer questions that aren't clearly stated."

Harry tried to stifle his giggles.

"If I walked ten miles… that way, where would I be?" Sirius demanded.

"Lost," the ministry official said succinctly.

"Oh, for goodness' sake," Sirius groaned. "Hold on, Harry, I'll try someone else."

Fortunately, the next person Sirius asked was a member of the Falmouth Falcons and actually knew the answer, which was that they were somewhere northeast of Plymouth and thus on Dartmoor.

His question answered, Harry carefully plotted out which direction to fly in and then set off. It was quite a long way, another forty miles or so, and as he flew Dartmoor gradually grew on the horizon and then bulked up into a kind of mass of grass-strewn granite.

Hedwig arrived while he was en route, flying up and around to take a position off his wing, and Harry smiled before focusing more on trying to find where the stadium was going to be. Some things were easier to spot from the air, but other things were harder, and a stadium that was meant to not stand out too much might be hard to spot.

As it turned out, however, a stadium able to seat a hundred thousand people covered all over with gold was quite easily seen from overhead. So that was all right then.

"There you are, Harry," Mr. Weasley said, as Sirius brought Harry over to their tent plot. "It gave us all quite a fright when you didn't show up – still, not your fault, was it?"

Harry shrugged, and replied that after something that had happened a while ago he had a lot of ways to find where he was meant to go.

Looking around the campsite, Harry was struck by how oddly some of the witches and wizards were dressed. It wasn't that they were dressed as wizards, which could certainly be quite odd, but that they were dressed like wizards trying to be dressed like Muggles. (Or possibly like Muggles trying to be dressed like Muggles who didn't know how Muggles dressed.)

Admittedly Harry wasn't much of an expert on clothes, but he was fairly sure you weren't supposed to wear a raincoat and poncho on a fine sunny morning in August – or a pair of trousers under a petticoat with the ensemble topped off by a kilt.

"Mr. Weasley said we're trying to seem like Muggles," Dean said, noticing how Harry was looking around. "I think this is what happens when most of them have never done Muggle Studies and the rest of them did it back in the nineteen twenties or something."

"Hey, we're doing all right," Fred protested. "Aren't we?"

George nodded. "Of course. After all, if we were wrong we'd know."

"That's not how… um… knowledge works," Hermione said, after a pause of three or four seconds to make sure she knew just how she was going to phrase it.

"It is," Ron countered. "In History of Magic there's lots of questions where I think 'I don't know that'. You can know you don't know something."

"I know, but you can also not know you don't know something," Hermione replied. "If you have the wrong idea about something, you can be really sure of it and still be wrong – like Muggles are about magic, because they don't know."

"That is a good point," Ron admitted, after thinking about it a bit. "Oh, so maybe Fred and George aren't dressed right for Muggles."

Harry thought they didn't look all that bad, really, for wizards dressed as Muggles. If he'd seen them on the streets of London he would have just thought they were teenagers, and teenagers could wear almost anything – if you didn't recognize it, according to the books he'd read, that just meant they were rebelling against something.

"When in doubt, wear a football shirt," Dean advised. "That's what I'd say."

As they kept talking, Harry spotted someone familiar and waved. Neville waved back, and came jogging over to join them.

"Everyone all right?" he asked. "Great-Uncle Algie Apparated here with me about ten minutes ago."

"I got left behind by the Portkey," Harry replied. "But it wasn't all that far to fly so I just came the long way."

"Couldn't we have done Side-Along Apparition, Dad?" Ron asked.

"Not with this many people to bring," Mr. Weasley replied. "Percy, Bill, Charlie and me, that's four Apparaters, and then there's Hermione, Ginny, you, Fred, George and Dean to bring. And we all thought the Portkey would work on Harry."

He looked suddenly uncertain. "We did, didn't we?"

Harry shrugged, having worked through all his mild annoyance on the flight.

"It's almost a pity we're not on Bodmin Moor," Neville said, frowning suddenly. "We're not supposed to do anything that might give us away as being magical, but there's supposed to be a big wild cat on Bodmin Moor."

"Hah," Dean sniggered. "You've only been here ten minutes. Most of the people who are trying to follow the rules aren't very good at them, and a lot of them aren't even bothering."

"I wasn't very impressed with Mr. Malfoy's tent," Hermione added, frowning. "He must know live peacocks aren't normally found on a camp site."

"Well, it's how we get when we're together," Mr. Weasley admitted. "We do like to show off."

For most of the day, Harry and the others ended up doing people watching – or wizard watching, which Harry thought was the more interesting version because there seemed to be a lot of variety.

That did also mean that a lot of wizards from other countries were seeing Harry in person for the first time, and Harry was glad that his friends were with him because that meant they could take turns answering all the questions that got asked – if, that was, they were in English.

Or basic French for Hermione, which turned out to be helpful for a surprising number of African witches and wizards.

They did meet Percy's new boss, Mr. Crouch, who seemed a bit odd as far as Harry was concerned. He was very well turned out indeed, the sort of wizard who Uncle Vernon would approve of simply because he'd never notice that Mr. Crouch was a wizard at all, but at the same time Harry sort of remembered that Quibbler article about all the Invisibility cloaks.

"Is this a business day or a day off, Mr. Crouch?" Percy asked, looking attentive. "I don't want to bother you if it's not a business day."

"It's certainly not a day off, Weatherby," Mr. Crouch replied, and that made Harry blink in surprise.

He looked at Mr. Weasley, who was the head of an office in the Ministry, and then at Percy Weasley, who looked really very similar all things considered. Not the same, of course, but it should have been an easy enough clue.

"In that case, Mr. Crouch," Percy went on, "I've got the cauldron regulations drafted, for your approval."

Mr. Crouch nodded slightly. "Very good."

Percy took a thick sheaf of papers out of his robes, and began shuffling through them. "And there's the legislation for the entry into the country of dangerous animals, which has been approved by all origin countries for all the animals in question."

"Yes, Weatherby, very efficient," Mr. Crouch said, and Percy separated out a third distinct document.

"There's also this matter of special cross-language classes for below-age foreign visitors to Hogwarts," he explained. "I've got all the details sorted out, but it requires the signature of a departmental head."

Mr. Crouch took it from Percy's hands, flicked through it, and raised an eyebrow. "Romanian origin as well? I didn't realize… well."

"Romania and Bulgaria are very close together," Percy said.

Harry's head was going back and forth like there was a tennis match going on, and every time Mr. Crouch said 'Weatherby' all of Percy's brothers tried not to snigger.

"All seems in order," Mr. Crouch said, and signed at the bottom of the document. "Keep this up and you may end up going places, Weatherby."

"Thank you, sir," Percy replied, taking the documents back. "I do apologize for bothering you on a busy day."

Harry felt like something had happened which he didn't fully understand, but once Mr. Crouch had left again Percy handed the third document to Charlie.

"All approved through the proper channels," he said.

Charlie's eyes bugged out. "You what?"

"Language lessons for below-age foreign visitors," Percy reiterated, with a very slight smile.

"Blimey, Percy, what happened to you over the last few years?" Charlie asked. "You're scary now."

Percy bowed slightly.

Harry still wasn't sure what had happened, but by the sounds of things he'd find out sooner or later.

It was at Hogwarts, after all.

In the late afternoon they all set off to the pitch. It was quite crowded, with a hundred thousand people needing to get in and get to their seats, and by then everyone was gradually getting more and more excited and Harry didn't get more than a few surprised comments.

Really, though, everyone had sort of stopped bothering to even try and hide the magic by that point, and Harry was fairly sure Hermione could have attended the match as a dinosaur and the only question someone would ask was what team she supported. (For his part Harry was sort of vaguely supporting Ireland because Ireland was covered by the British Ministry for Magic, the whole Irish Independence thing apparently not having mattered much to wizards.)

They had to do a lot of climbing to reach their seats, Sirius leading the way, and when they finally arrived they were only two rows down from the Top Box right up at the pinnacle of the stadium itself. In a Muggle football game they would have been so high that you'd start to wonder if the view was still any good, or if you'd just see the players as little moving dots, but because it was a Quidditch game it was much better to be high up in the air like this instead.

This was the first magical sports stadium Harry had ever seen the inside of, or at least the first one which wasn't just the equivalent of a school sports field, and it was interesting to see how all the things he was used to from a Muggle stadium showed up or didn't. There were no floodlights but instead everything was just sort of well lit by magic, which was much more convenient, and there were three giant chalkboards around the stands which were the magical version of a big screen showing things like the score or adverts or things like that.

It didn't look like there were adverts around the field itself, though, which made sense because there wasn't really any need to go down to the pitch and so nobody would bother looking. And Harry had seen football supporters arranging themselves to spell something out, but there was no sign of anything that coordinated here.

Once he was sitting down, only a little awkwardly – Dean offered to switch to his Animagus form to clear a seat for Harry to lie across, and Harry refused but thanked him – Harry started looking around the stands as people slowly filtered in. Sometimes he spotted a fellow Hogwarts student or someone else he knew in the crowd, like when Professor McGonagall sat just above one of the magic chalkboards, and he was tempted to wave before remembering that his eyesight was much better than normal and so there was no point.

Then a loud voice sounded from just above them, welcoming them to the final of the four hundred and twenty-second Quidditch World Cup. Harry wasn't quite sure how the maths worked out for there having been four hundred and twenty two world cups if the game hadn't been invented until the eleventh century, but then he decided not to bother wondering about that and pay attention.

The first part of the World Cup wasn't the actual game itself, but instead a sort of show-off display by the mascots of the two opposing countries.

Bulgaria went first, and their mascots were Veela. Harry had encountered them in one of the magical fiction books he'd read, which meant he knew they were supposed to be extremely beautiful and able to throw fire.

It was sort of an open question in Harry's mind which of the two was going to be more important for their mascot display, because he was fairly sure that the "looking beautiful" thing would only appeal to about half of the crowd, and when they started to dance he felt a little odd but then blinked a few times and it went away.

Sirius just sort of smiled down at the Veela, but Ron, Neville and Dean all looked seriously impressed. Then Dean switched forms, looked distinctly puzzled, and switched back.

"That was weird," he said. "I was really into them until I changed..."

His gaze was drawn back to the dancing Veela, and Harry blinked a few more times in case that oddly fuzzy feeling started to come back again.

"It's how Veela work," Hermione told them, as the dance ended. "They have a kind of magic that makes them very attractive to men – well, most men and some women, apparently. I'm not really sure it's fair to have them as the mascots for Bulgaria, they've just bewitched half the crowd..."

Harry had to admit that that was a bit strange, but then the Irish mascots took the field as well and they turned out to be leprechauns dropping gold everywhere.

So really neither of them was doing the sort of thing that would be considered all right for Muggle mascots, Harry decided, and picked up one of the gold coins to give it a nibble.

It dissolved when he bit into it, which was sort of a shame but did remind him and everyone else that leprechauns didn't create real gold.

When the actual game started, Harry was really impressed by the speed and coordination of the teams. It was easy to see how they were the finalists at the World Cup, because the Irish Chasers were bouncing the Quaffle one to another to another with a kind of instinctive grace that could only come from really long practice, and the Bulgarians were pressing them hard – hard enough that any of the teams he'd been or seen at Hogwarts would have just come apart, though the Irish team were managing to handle it.

The first goal came in less than a minute, and the second a few minutes later. Part of Harry's attention was on the Snitch, though, which was zooming around at high speed and dodging from place to place with such agility that he kept losing it for a moment.

That had never happened before with a Snitch, and Harry had the distinct feeling that they were using a faster one for this kind of game. Or maybe they used a slower one at school, it could be either way around.

"Hey, Harry, watch it," Ron complained, and Harry lowered his wings sheepishly – realizing he'd been thinking about taking off and catching it himself!

It would probably be best not to do that.

Then the Bulgarian Seeker – Viktor Krum – feinted towards the ground, decoying his Irish counterpart into following him and crashing into it. There were lots of groans, but apparently it wasn't serious (which was what Harry had expected at first, because he'd hit the ground harder than that while learning to fly, but not everyone was a dragon) and the Irish seeker was back in the air after a few minutes.

"I wouldn't want to be the Bulgarian Keeper right now," Neville said, about half an hour into the game.

"Nor would I, mate," Ron agreed. "I think I could have saved that last one, but I'd have let through the one before that so it's kind of balancing out."

Ireland was already in the lead by a hundred and twenty points and had been scoring nearly one goal every two minutes, despite the quality of the opposition, and it was easy to see that fairly soon the game would become effectively unwinnable for the Bulgarian side.

"What about you, Harry?" Neville added.

"I'd be sort of nervous flying in front of this many people," Harry replied.

"Oh, yeah, good point," Ron agreed. "And I bet if you did play like you usually do you'd get a hundred thousand witches and wizards really angry at you after they spent all that money and camped in a field for days to watch five minutes of Quaffle play and two goals."

Harry's ears flattened slightly, embarrassed. "I'm not really sure, this Snitch is really quick."

"Blimey, you can see it," Ron realized. "What about-"

There was a loud booing, and Ireland got a penalty because the Bulgarian Keeper had elbowed one of the Irish Chasers in the side.

That seemed to set everything off, and over the next ten minutes or so the game got dirtier and dirtier as more and more fouls took place.

Harry knew this wasn't as bad as Quidditch got – it couldn't be, unless someone had been attacked with a sword or attacked by bloodsucking bats or any of five hundred or so utterly crazy things that had all happened at the same World Cup final – but it was bad enough, even worse than the most foul-laden Hogwarts game, as the veela and the leprechauns got in a brawl on the pitch level and one of the Irish players nearly got knocked off her broom.

"Is this what professional Quidditch is normally like?" Harry asked, nudging Ron.

"Shouldn't be," Ron replied, distracted, most of his attention glued to the game. "Most games don't have this many fouls, usually there's just a couple of cases of Blatching and some Stooging and that's about it."

Krum suddenly rolled into a dive towards the ground, aimed directly for the Snitch, and got smacked in the side by a Bludger a moment later. He shook it off, though, and kept diving as the Irish Seeker caught up to him.

For a long moment the two of them were neck and neck as they dropped towards the mascot brawl, and Harry couldn't tell who was going to get the Snitch. Then the Irish Seeker pulled up, and Krum didn't, and hit the ground just as hard as his foe had done earlier in the game.

The whumph was audible even up near the top of the stands.

"Ouch," Neville said faintly. "Do you think he's okay?"

Harry leaned forwards to look closer, and saw Krum raise a hand – a hand holding a glittering Snitch.

His other arm looked broken, perhaps from the landing or from the Bludger, but he'd got the Snitch anyway.

The score, when Harry looked up at the board, was a hundred and seventy to Bulgaria – and a hundred and eighty to Ireland, with the last goal having been scored while the Seekers were actually in their dive.

"That was better than I thought it was going to be," Dean declared.

"What?" Neville asked, sounding confused. "You thought it wasn't going to be very good?"

"The fouls made it much more entertaining," Dean replied.

They shuffled slowly another step down the long route towards ground level, and Harry thought about that.

"I'm just saying, when you're not really invested in either team, an eventful game is a good game," Dean went on. "A Gryffindor match? Or a Hammers match? I'll get really annoyed when it's a dirty game. But when it's like that it can be more exciting than just a game where everyone follows the rules."

Sirius let out a shout of laughter. "That's what I always used to think! Never wanted to say it, though."

"Football must be really violent," Neville decided.

"It can be," Dean said. "But the really violent game is rugby."

A little further down the steps, Ron turned to Hermione. "Did you see him shrugging off that Bludger? That was really cool!"

Hermione sounded slightly shocked. "You mean the Bludger that broke his arm?"

"Yeah, that one," Ron agreed.

Harry couldn't see, because there was a Percy in the way, but he had the feeling that the pause wasn't because Hermione had just accepted that answer.

"What?" Ron went on. "You're looking at me like I'm the crazy one here. Don't Muggles carry around boxes of acid and lightning in their pockets? That's crazy."

"Pardon?" Hermione asked. "And – that Bludger broke his arm, Ron. That's not just a scrape or something."

"Don't see why," Ron said. "Oops – sorry… anyway, don't see why when the mediwizard can just fix it with a single spell. It's not like what happened to Oliver last game, that was painful."

"It's still a broken arm!" Hermione insisted. "Why are you-"

Then she stopped and interrupted herself. "Do you mean batteries?"

"Yes!" Ron agreed. "Batteries! The things you stick in a Game Boy or a CD player to give them electricity."

"Is that what they do?" Mr. Weasley asked, sounding fascinated. "How do they work?"

"I think it's something about how the acid dissolves something, but slowly," Ron said. "I'm not really sure how they know to only do it when you've put it in something, though."

"How well do you think that went, Harry?" Percy asked.

Harry refocused, thought about it, and nodded. "It was a lot of fun," he said. "And there was something amazing about being in a crowd with so many wizards."

"I do hope that Mr. Crouch is properly respected for the work he's done," Percy mused. "This is one of the largest gatherings of wizards there's ever been, and I personally think it's gone rather well."

It took perhaps ten to twenty minutes just to get to the stadium gates again, and as they were leaving Harry looked back at the stadium and wondered what they were going to do with it.

Just making it vanish again seemed like a bit of a waste, but he supposed there wasn't much else they could do with it. In a Muggle country it would stick around as an extra sports stadium, but there was almost nothing that could even happen in Wizarding Britain that would need even a tenth as many seats and leaving it up would mean a big chunk of Dartmoor that was just off limits to nearly every single Muggle.

He thought about asking Percy, then actually did ask Percy, but apparently that was Department of Magical Games and Sports business more than his own.

"There's some cross-departmental work, of course," Percy added. "Quite a lot of Ministry wizards had to be seconded to the DMGS to help with construction. But I'm not privy to the plans."

"Maybe they'll get started while some of the visitors are still here," Sirius suggested. "On that front, anyone think we should stay around for the night? It's earlier than I expected, we could pack up and Apparate home."

"What about how not all of us can Apparate?" Ron asked. "Aren't there too many of us to be Apparated?"

"I can fly home," Harry said. "I can take anyone with a small Animagus form who wants to come, as well."

"We may as well stay the night, though," Hermione mused. "We did go to the effort of setting up the tents."

"Why are we talking about going home?" Ginny asked. "Then we'd all be home and there wouldn't be everyone to talk with."

"She makes a good point," Fred admitted.

There was a whoosh somewhere off in the distance, and a cloud of green sparks rose into the air to form the shape of a shamrock. It was followed by a cloud of golden sparks that shaped into a harp, and Harry shook his head slightly.

"Do the Irish remember that we're supposed to be trying to hide?" he asked.

"Probably not," Percy said disapprovingly. "This is going to make things much harder for whoever hosts the next World Cup, if this kind of behaviour happens at this one."

"It happens," Sirius told him. "I remember – well, after Moldy Voldy bit the dust there was all sorts going on."

"Oh, yes, I'd tried to forget," Arthur agreed. "Shooting stars in the daytime, owls everywhere… it was terribly hard to keep things under control."

That started another discussion, and Sirius quickly squeezed Harry's wing shoulder.

"Sorry about bringing it up," he said.

"It's okay," Harry replied. "It's – something I sort of got over before I even knew what had happened."

Then he thought of something, and looked up at Sirius. "And I'm proud of you, you know."

"You are?" Sirius replied, confused.

"That wasn't a good day for you, either," Harry said. "But you're getting over it as well."

Sirius nodded, looking like he wasn't sure whether or not to speak, and gave Harry a quick hug. It was a bit awkward, and Harry had to help, but he didn't care.

"So here's my question," Dean said. "How come the Irish team is that good but they don't play in the British Quidditch league?

"They do," Ron answered him. "They're split between two clubs though. Ballycastle and Kenmare have some really good players, we're lucky Kenmare has such terrible Beaters or they'd win every game with eight hundred more points than anyone else…"

AN:

Magical transportation for this Harry is a bit less varied than for the human sort.