I wasn't into quidditch, so the most interesting thing to me was just how many people they managed to cram into the stadium they'd built. Arthur Weasley had kept saying that the number was a hundred thousand, and I could believe it. Taller and wider than any muggle sporting arena, the building was still visibly crammed full of people.
There were only maybe six million magical humans on Earth, so this crowd represented nearly two percent of the entire wizarding world population. It would be like getting the whole population of Britain and France to watch the soccer world cup live and in person, compared to the total world's population.
I at least enjoyed spending it with Oliver and his new team, Puddlemere United, and their associated friends and family who'd also gotten complimentary tickets for their private box seats. Oliver was still a reserve player, and had only known them all for a couple of months, but seemed to be slowly making connections. It had probably helped his case to see him having a good time with me and Mathilda, since I knew he could be scarily intense when he was playing. It might make it easier for him to fit in if they knew he was only a hardcase about quidditch.
Oliver also acquitted himself well when the Bulgarian team's veela cheerleading squad turned their allure up to max during the opening show. Maybe it was his deep devotion to quidditch, or maybe it was sharing a castle with Maeve for a year and a half (even though, as far as I knew, she only turned her full aura on to mess with me), but he stayed calm and focused. The two of us helped the witches in the box manage the rest of the guys, keeping a couple of members of the team from flinging themselves over the railing to try to get down to the field and the supernaturally attractive cheerleaders. Maybe veela allure was more potent than I'd given the ones I met earlier credit for.
I was pretty sure the boxes were warded to prevent falls, and we were pretty close to the ground anyway, so it wouldn't have been too bad regardless. Hopefully none of the Weasley boys had managed to escape their box, since they were in one of the top ones. I didn't actually notice any lovesick men falling to the ground, so I felt pretty good about my assumption there were wards.
The match itself was weirdly short, compared to how long I understood they could go. Bulgaria was getting the snot beaten out of them the whole, brief competition, only managing to score a single goal. And, wonder of wonders, that wasn't completely wiped out by the unfair number of points awarded for catching the snitch: Ireland's team managed to rack up enough goals that they still barely won, even with the Bulgarian seeker, Krum, being first to the tiny golden ball.
But the real benefit of the short match was more time for after-parties. The game had started pretty late, so it was fully dark by the time it finished, and the stadium emptied with surprising alacrity for so many people, all exiting by the light of lanterns and the occasional swooping leprechaun (the on-the-nose mascots/cheerleaders for the Irish team) shedding glowing faerie gold. There was basically no chance that we should have been able to find the Weasleys without going all the way back to the tents, but my magic messaging rings wound up being just the thing for coordinating meetups in the raucous party city.
After the first party, where we wound up congregating with everyone staying with the Weasleys, plus the Longbottoms and Finnegans, I remembered to switch the younger kids off of the connection I shared with the recent-adults. The kids seemed really excited to be included in the party at the Puddlemere tents, at least. Oliver was tickled to get to introduce most of his old team from school to his new teammates, and they made noises about maybe recruiting some of them once they'd graduated.
Arthur, however, was clearly exhausted after getting up so early, and started to lead the kids away before too long (forcefully, in the case of the twins). That left me with my core group of friends, as well as Percy's older brothers, to go on a tent-based pub crawl.
It was a ton of fun. Moody had been drilling me in CONSTANT VIGILANCE for two months, and as fun as the environment was, there were enemies about, so I managed to regulate my drinking. Mathilda had only recently turned 17, and was skinny besides, so I did my boyfriendly duties of making sure she had two glasses of water and a butterbeer for every real drink she had. Percy, Penny, and Alexis were used to being prefects, and Bill had been head boy, so they didn't overdo it.
Oliver, of course, got smashed, and dragged his old quidditch seeker Charlie right along with him into blackout town.
We were at the Chudley Cannons' garishly orange tent (Mathilda was excited and Ron was going to be inconsolable he'd missed it) when I overheard the thoroughly-sloshed newly-pro player slurring at Alexis, "I jus', I don' like how we left things, y'know. An' maybe… maybe I thought the groupies… well, it's jus'... none o'them're near as pretty as you, Lexi."
Alexis moved her beer to her off hand to push Oliver by the shoulder back to verticality, from where he'd been about to tip out of his chair trying to lean in to talk to her. Their breakup the previous year had been on account of magical proof that he didn't love her as much as she loved him, and they'd worked hard at getting back to being friends. I could tell that she was conflicted about him drunkenly setting her up to potentially be hurt again. She finally told him, "Oliver Wood. If you want to try again, you need to work up the courage to ask me when you're sober. And prove to me it's not just because you aren't getting the pretty quidditch groupies. Anyway, I can't even think about that until I'm done organizing the Triwizard Tournament."
"The what?" Mathilda asked, before I could.
Alexis looked shocked, obviously drunk enough she'd forgotten it was supposed to be a secret. "Forget I said anything! It's a surprise!"
"Not much of one!" Charlie Weasley chortled. "They've got my whole preserve standing by…"
Percy asked, "It was, what, 1792 when they held that last? Very dangerous. Why this year?"
Alexis shrugged. Charlie shrugged. Like half of the partygoers sitting around who had apparently known about it shrugged. "Fudge is up for reelection soon?" Mathilda guessed. That got a lot of nods. If it was political, when in doubt, blame the Minister.
It was maybe half an hour later and we were in… somebody's tent. I had vague memories of just walking by and being invited in. "Remus Lupin's friend!" a man's voice called, and I looked over and spotted a few of the werewolves from earlier, thoroughly drunk.
Oliver, without missing a beat, and with some cosmic sense of bad timing, yelled, "Me too! I helped him kill Fenrir Greyback!"
I froze. The werewolves froze. The sense of tension spread through the crowd. If the music had been from a record player, instead of a live violinist playing along to the wizarding wireless, there would have been a record scratch, rather than the slow screech of a bow across the strings.
The moment stretched and then broke as the lead werewolf smiled and yelled, "Greyback slayer! Good riddance to mad men!" The party started back up again, louder than before, and we were swept along with our new lunar-challenged pals, who hadn't liked the lupine tyrant either.
That was how we ended up winding down the night right back in the "undesirables" area of the camp. The wolves didn't have super-nice tents, but they had comfy camp chairs and a fully stocked bar they'd packed into a space-expanded suitcase. Patrick, the wolf who'd had trouble keeping his eyes off the veela, turned out to be an excellent bartender.
Speaking of keeping one's eyes off the veela, Bill seemed to be hitting it off with Fleur, who had come out to put up silencing charms since her little sister was trying to sleep, and wound up staying to hang out. I wasn't sure if she was specifically taken with Bill, or just using him as a buffer against the wolves, but it seemed to be working for them.
It had quieted down enough, at least at the fringes of the tent city, that I could make out a disturbance of people trying to be sneaky, coming out of the woods that the campgrounds butted up against. It sounded like a large group, and for a moment I thought it was just a bunch of drunks that had wandered off and gotten turned around. But they didn't sound like drunks. Maybe I was just reacting to the werewolves, who also heard the sound and didn't seem to think it was harmless.
"Old men sweating in metal and mothballed cloth," Patrick's girlfriend, Mary, suggested after catching a scent on the wind. Even the drunker members of the group started to notice something was up and their conversation petered out just as we saw the light of the nearly-full moon glimmer off of metal masks in hooded cloaks.
There had to be at least thirty of the figures, more than I'd estimated having signed on before Voldemort's recent death, and a voice I was really coming to hate—Cantankerous Nott's—yelled, "Kill the mudbloods and half-breeds!"
And then the squad of Death Eaters fell upon us.
"Protego!" I shouted as I half-staggered out of my camp chair, getting my largest shield up in between us and the attackers. I hoped they weren't actually prepared for this many skilled combatants to be there and conscious. A couple curses slid off of it, the faint glow of my magical dome of force drawing fire in the dim light.
Moving off to my left, Penny and Percy tried their combo of water-summoning and freezing, and it worked much better than it had in a dry Egyptian tomb. A curtain of ice froze out of the sweep of water, protecting that flank, but it immediately started to shatter under the weight of incoming curses. It soaked up a shouted "Crucio!" so it was already a good choice.
Mathilda was off to my right, flinging spells around my shield, while Alexis tried to awaken the neighbors and organize them, fast-paced French yelled at the Veela tents as Fleur dismissed her silencing charm. Bill seemed to be working some kind of complex conjuration. Charlie and Oliver were just trying to get their drunk brains to focus.
And the werewolves charged.
While they weren't nearly as deep in their curse as Greyback had been, this close to the moon, our new friends were pretty feral and partially spell-resistant. Wizards rarely seem to expect melee combat, and a dozen brawlers can play hell on a firing line. Several of the Death Eaters got tackled to the ground, and their allies were having a hard time targeting the werewolves in the grapple, with as much as they were rolling and it was dark out. Them dropping to the ground left room for us to fire on the remaining enemies.
Several of the veela were pouring out of their two tents, but that just made them a target and I tossed off a "Locomotor Murus!" to yank a section of my conjured wall in between them and the oncoming attacks. Unfortunately, one of the more dangerous-seeming combatants used my distraction to fire a sickening-looking orange curse my way, which got around my shield and managed to soak through the protections on my duster. I immediately felt my insides churning, and it became an intense chore to keep my shield raised.
"Bill!" Percy yelled. "Counter the Entrail-Expelling Curse on Harry!"
"Got it!" the oldest Weasley son yelled, finishing his conjuration and slipping behind me to work the counter before my internal organs managed to violently exit through my mouth. Where he'd been working his conjuration, a dozen faceless wooden humanoid figures began to troop toward the enemy. If I remembered correctly, they were called "ushabti" and were servitor constructs from Egypt. They probably did something more interesting than just charging in and soaking up spellfire.
As the veela joined in and more of the neighbors were pulling themselves together and joining the fight, the Death Eaters seemed to realize they had lost surprise and numbers. My poor conjured wall had been levitated by others to shield against Unforgivables, as had the various tents of the werewolves. I couldn't tell whether any wolves or bystanders had actually gone down in the chaos and darkness, but there were fewer Death Eater silhouettes than when we'd started and a lot more maneuvering on my side.
Probably less than thirty seconds after we'd joined the fight, they'd had enough, and someone on the enemy side yelled "Morsmordre!" With that incantation, he lifted his wand to the sky and summoned a giant illusion of green smoke and stars, a snake and skull, identical to the tattoos the Death Eaters wore on their arms.
"Death Eaters, escape!" Nott's voice called out, and then he concluded with, "Pyroincendio!"
The purplish flame began to form into an imago of a giant spider, and I had no idea how we were going to keep the fiendfyre from ripping through the entire tent city, and murdering thousands of people.