After spending three Christmasses at Hogwarts already, Harry found it odd to have so few people coming back to the castle for the beginning of classes in nineteen ninety-five – simply because so many people had stayed over for the Yule Ball.
That said, the lessons themselves were that pleasant Hogwarts mix of expected and not expected. Harry had expected that they'd be doing History of Magic, for example, and that it might be a bit dry, but what he hadn't expected was a shift from discussing the intricate details of Goblin Rebellions to talking about the Wizardly version of the American Revolution.
Honestly, it was a bit of a strange story. In the first place the Magical government of America (which was called the Magical Congress of the United States of America or MACUSA, a name that made Harry scratch his head and wonder when the idea of a USA came about in the first place, as he hadn't thought anyone had thought of a USA yet then for there to be a MAC of) had been set up a long time before America had been independent from Britain, but it had been set up such a long time ago that Britain wasn't the only place it was set up to be independent from.
The problem was lots of unpleasant witches and wizards who came over from Wizarding Europe to cause… well, problems, and so MACUSA was set up to try and stop them, but it sounded hard enough to Harry to try and find someone who was hiding even without them having most of a continent to hide in.
The other thing that was really surprising was hearing that the American witches and wizards had tried their very best to stay completely un-involved in anything American Muggles were doing. Harry had expected that the magical version of the American Revolution would involve some actual magical involvement in the American Revolution, or perhaps some separate revolutionary things, but instead MACUSA just did their best to stay out of the way and nobody magical in Europe tried to do much of anything.
Professor Binns then started talking about the differences between that and Goblin Rebellions, but it seemed to Harry like there were so many differences that you couldn't really say there were any similarities. It was nice that there hadn't been a magical war about it or something though.
Dean said that History of Magic was vaguely boring when things all worked out, and Harry wasn't sure if he agreed or not, but he did think that it was at least a nice surprise.
In Charms class, meanwhile, Professor Flitwick flourished his wand in the second lesson of the new year.
"Now!" he said. "We have already covered the Summoning Charm, and I hope you were all paying attention to that quite excellent demonstration of the Summoning Charm by our very own School Champion during the First Task?"
There were some nods, and Neville put his hand up.
"Professor?" he said. "Why didn't all of the Champions just summon their eggs? I know we covered how you can summon something by name."
Professor Flitwick was about to reply, but Dean put his hand up as well, and the little Charms teacher smiled brightly before calling on Dean.
"It's because you can enchant things so you can't Summon them," Dean explained.
"Quite right, Mr. Thomas!" Professor Flitwick announced. "Yes, and it's a kind of enchantment which means you have to be good at the original spell – it's a little bit like immunization – though of course you can't always enchant something to be immune to a spell, and someone who's better at casting the spell than you are may be able to better than you. But that's something we'll be covering in later years. Now, the reason I bring that up is to give you some idea about the Banishing Charm."
He waved his wand at a nearby book. "Depulso."
Harry watched, impressed, as the book flew across the room and landed on top of a neat pile.
Professor Flitwick went on to explain – or to call on students so they would explain – that the Summoning and Banishing Charms were nearly but not quite opposite. That meant that there were a lot of things about the spells that were very similar, and other things that were as different as possible.
"For example, since you can – if you are good enough – summon something from almost anywhere, you can also banish it to almost anywhere!" Flitwick told them, practically bouncing with excitement. "Though of course you can only summon something to yourself, and you can only banish it from yourself. Can anyone see any other possible limitations of the charm?"
Su Li's hand went up, and she said that maybe it only worked on objects and not people.
"Ah!" Flitwick smiled. "Actually that is not the case, although I can certainly see why you would think that!"
His animated chalk wrote busily on the board as he explained. "The Summoning Charm is much harder to use on people than the Banishing Charm, which is one of the main reasons why they are not quite opposite spells. But another limitation of the Banishing Charm is that if you attempt a Summoning Charm and do not quite get it right, it is most likely the case that you will summon everything very slightly – so nothing moves. But if you attempt a Banishing Charm and do not get it quite right, you may well end up banishing everything near you by quite a lot!"
That did sound like it would be a bit of a problem, but then Harry frowned and put up his paw.
"Mr. Potter?" Professor Flitwick asked.
"Could you sort of Summon and Banish something at the same time?" Harry asked. "To do something a bit like a levitation charm?"
"I suppose you could, yes!" the teacher agreed. "It would be a little bit of a waste, perhaps, but if you wanted something to come towards you and then stop in mid-air without dropping it then you could perhaps Summon it and then Banish it at the same time. Very good thought, Mr. Potter, and two points to Gryffindor for inventiveness."
Harry felt quite pleased with himself for that.
"Now, the incantation is Depulso," Professor Flitwick went on. "And if you would begin practicing the wording without wands – I have some cushions to practice on, but I think it would be best if you did not send all your things flying..."
Harry turned out to be quite good with the Banishing Charm, both in making sure he could cast it on the thing it needed to be cast on and in making sure he could get it going to the place it was meant to go.
He'd been quite good at the Summoning Charm as well, but trying to mix them together didn't really work very well. It was sort of a pity, because Harry thought it would have been a nice way to make sure that someone without hands would be able to pick things up and move them around (without the slightly slow and clumsy Wingardium Leviosa) but he supposed you couldn't have everything.
Maybe there was a Fifth-Year Charm that was closer to what Harry was thinking of, though by then people like June and the Barlos girls would be more than halfway through their Hogwarts career and so it would be less help anyway.
Their Charms homework over the weekend was to practice the Banishing Charm some more and to write up the ways it compared to the Summoning Charm, which was nice (because it was thoughtful but didn't take up very much time) and Harry was done with both that and the Potions homework by the evening.
It was a nice freeing feeling. Or perhaps that was the bit of Dragonflight that Harry had reached.
"I see," Empress said, as Harry finished the chapter. "So she is full of confusion, because there are three of her and because she has realized that she has caused all those problems for herself."
"It's sort of odd, because we see later that you can't really change how it goes," Harry told her. "But you still have to make sure that you do the right thing. One of my favourite characters in any book has that as his job, later on."
He looked at the clock, then back at his dragon painting. "It's nearly time to stop, but I think we can do the next chapter. It's just a couple of pages."
"You are the expert on books," Empress told him.
Harry smiled, then looked across the page to one of the little poems that were called epigrams. "A fleck of red in a cold night sky; a drop of blood to guide them by; Turn again, Turn again, Turn, be gone; a Red Star beckons the travellers on..."
The weekend was a Hogsmeade Weekend, and Harry went to visit Sirius in Dogwarts on Saturday. He asked over lunch what year you learned the Bubble-Head Charm, and one thing led to another, and twenty minutes later Harry was back on the shore of the Black Lake in a patch of the shore he'd cleared of ice with his fire breath.
Which was where they stayed for the next four hours.
Harry was used to spending a lot of time trying to get a spell right, but it did sometimes get slightly tedious.
"Well, you're getting the wand movement right," Sirius said, leaning back on a deckchair he'd Transfigured for himself after the first hour. "Two full circles as close to identical as possible, and yours are more identical than mine."
"Right," Harry agreed, doing the wand movement again just to be sure.
"And you're pronouncing the incantation right," Sirius went on. "Let's hear that again?"
"Orbis Ebulio," Harry complied, making sure to form the words right because he knew how much a mispronunciation could mess things up.
"So with both of those out of the way, it looks like the problem is just that you're, well, magic resistant," Sirius summarized. "Hey, try it on me?"
"Orbis Ebulio," Harry complied, pointing his wand at Sirius this time. A shimmering bubble of magic formed around Sirius' head, one which gave him a sort of distorted look like he was looking through a goldfish bowl, and Sirius gave him a thumbs-up before dispelling it with his own wand.
"That was really good, by the way, Harry," his godfather added. "I know you did a lot of practice, but that was your first time actually casting the spell and it worked fine."
Harry nodded at that, pleased that he'd at least be able to help next time Ron tried going into the upper atmosphere, then snapped his claws as a thought came to him.
"The problem is that the spell doesn't want to attach to me, right?" he asked, and Sirius nodded. "So what if I actually breathe out the spell? It's already on my head, then."
"Worth a try," Sirius decided, and Harry started bobbing his head around a bit.
He wanted to make sure he was making just the right movements before he tried to cast, because he'd got the movements down to a T with his wand (for whatever reason that you had to get something down to a T, instead of an R or a Y or something) but his head was something else completely.
"Did you ever have to go swimming in the lake?" he asked, curious.
"Well, we only had to once," Sirius replied, thinking back. "I don't actually remember the reason, but it was very important indeed for us to get to the other side of the lake without running into someone on the shore. So someone comes up with the idea, and James decides it's a good one, and we're all plunging into the water and Remus is the only one who remembered to actually do something so all our homework and books didn't get ruined."
He shrugged. "Though I got awful marks for all those essays, so maybe he should have let mine get wrecked."
Harry chuckled, then decided he should give it a try.
The first attempt didn't quite work, and Harry had the unusual experience of being in the middle of a ball-shaped cloud of smoke for a few seconds, and the second was even stranger because it went floating off and formed a collection of bubble rings.
Fortunately, the third time was the Charm (which was a saying Harry thought was more relevant to wizards). The breath out sort of became a bubble instead of a flame, rippling like a soap film did when it was pulled through the air, then snapped back to form a clear bubble all around Harry's head.
He stuck his head under the water experimentally, to see if it would last, and discovered that it was quite durable enough to survive being there.
"Well done, Harry!" Sirius said, as Harry pulled his head back out of the cold water. "Just don't give me a hug or anything, I'd freeze."
"You've got a Warming Charm on," Harry pointed out.
"Oh, that's why I've not turned blue," Sirius said, in tones of great surprise. "I did wonder."
He clapped his hands. "Speaking of being warm, Ted Tonks got me a film that he thinks you might like to watch. We'll have to go to Grimmauld Place, because the telly doesn't work in Dogwarts, but it's apparently set in China or Arabia or somewhere."
Harry had to admit that it sounded like a nice idea to curl up in a chair with a mug of hot Klah and watch some telly.
"What are you humming, mate?" Ron asked, back in Gryffindor Common Room after dinner.
"I actually think I recognize that," Hermione frowned. "Is that from Aladdin?"
"Sirius showed me," Harry answered, nodding, and hummed another few bars of Never Had a Friend Like Me. "The song's kind of catchy, but I'm not sure you can do those things with magic."
"Well, it's a Muggle idea of what magic can do," Hermione replied. "But I think most of those things are things you can do, except for conjuring all the people."
She frowned. "And making someone into a powerful sorcerer. And the thing with… okay, maybe not."
"Who can really say what magic can and can't do, though?" Dean asked. "You know Lumos was only discovered in the nineteenth century? And they didn't build a broom that could cross the Atlantic until 1923."
"1935," Hermione corrected him.
"And I think it's Hermione who can say what magic can and can't do," Neville said with a chuckle.
Harry nodded, and so did all the other boys.
Hermione looked a bit embarrassed, but pleased as well.
The Second Task was getting closer, and everyone was talking about it, but nobody seemed to have any idea what it could be.
"We've all been trying to find a way to help Cedric," Justin explained to Harry. "He says he's on top of it, but – well, Hufflepuffs stick together."
Harry nodded, and looked carefully at the plant they'd been assigned.
It had long, swaying tentacles, so it looked a lot like Devil's Snare, but then again they'd just been studying Flitterblooms where the whole point was that they looked a lot like Devil's Snare but weren't.
"What do you think?" he asked.
"I think that horrible screeching might be an endurance test," Justin replied.
Harry must have looked quizzical, because Justin explained. "When Cedric opened his prize egg after the First Task, it screamed at him. Terrible noise, I dropped my cocoa."
"Oh, right," Harry realized. "I didn't know they did that."
"Nobody in Hufflepuff is going to forget any time soon," Justin said, shaking his head.
Harry nodded sympathetically.
"Do you think it's Flitterbloom or Devil's Snare?" he asked, nodding towards their plant pot.
"Well… hmm," Justin mused, and flipped through his copy of One Thousand Magical Herbs And Fungi. "It doesn't seem to be moving aggressively."
There was a whoosh from a few rows down.
"Mr. Thomas!" Professor Sprout said sharply. "Please do not entirely incinerate your plant, even if it does turn out to be Devil's Snare! They are small enough that they are merely mildly dangerous!"
"Oh, wait," Justin realized, pointing his wand. "Lumos."
The plant refused to react to the light.
"Probably Flitterbloom, then," he said.
That seemed logical to Harry.
Just to be sure, he went to grab it, and because it didn't immediately try to throttle him Harry decided they were probably correct.
That or it was extremely well-behaved Devil's Snare.
Runes that week had them all writing out possible rune schemes for their OWL projects, and then swapping them over to try and find problems in one someone else had made.
It was an interesting sort of exercise, even if it did mean Harry was trying to work out problems with something he hadn't designed so he didn't know what all the bits did. That was probably the point, though.
"Okay, so..." he said, frowning. "That's Fehu, which is a rune with a meaning of wealth, and it's a fire rune… and the next one is Wunjo, an earth rune. Which is happiness. And they're a rotational pair, so… in this case it's meaning that the wealth moves into happiness."
He wrote that down with a pencil on some scrap parchment, then looked at the third rune.
It was Gebo, an air rune, and while that was supposed to mean generosity the way it followed an earth rune didn't seem like it was going to work well.
"Maybe you should use Pertho in between?" he asked Ernie. "Because that's Water, and it's got a meaning about luck."
"Oh, yeah, maybe," the Hufflepuff agreed, looking up from where he'd been writing about Harry's own runes. "I don't want it to turn into a way to cheat at card games or something, though."
"I think if you can get an elementally inverted Dagaz in that might help," Harry suggested. "Maybe if you put it between the Wunjo and the Pertho? Or would that mean it got inverted twice, because it's a mixed rune?"
He tapped his claw on the table, then realized he was making a dent and stopped with a wince. "Um… or maybe an inverted Thurisaz?"
"I don't want bad luck, either," Ernie protested. "Otherwise all this stuff about generosity and wealth might mean… I don't know, my grandad dies or something."
It was a good point, but it made Harry wonder about something.
"Maybe you need to decide what effect you're after," he suggested. "Are you going to want it to find treasure or something? That could be good, and it's got some 'good luck' in it."
"Good point," Ernie agreed, scribbling on his own parchment. "Speaking of which, what's your one going for?"
"Nauthiz is meant to be doing amazing things, and then the next one is friendship," Harry replied. "I was actually trying to spell out a name to go on a sword… I think I missed some interactions as well, though."
"Yeah, going from Ehaz to Wunjo is an elemental inversion," Ernie pointed out. "And you're missing out on Hagalaz, which is a good one for a sword."
He sketched something out. "What about if you go fire-earth-ice?"
"Maybe," Harry agreed, turning over the reference book to where it had all the runes and their elements, and wrote out N-E-H-V-I-L-EL. "Or… fire-earth… ice-earth-ice-water-air? No inversions there."
"You have that ice-to-water change," Ernie pointed out. "Going from Isa to Laguz… we might need to ask about that one."
He shrugged. "I mean, I'm not sure how the friendship bit of Ehwaz works with a sword, either, but at least you've mostly got something pronounceable."
"Sometimes I think that's points off, for runes," Harry said ruefully.
In the middle of February they had a Care of Magical Creatures lesson which involved the dragonets again. They were still growing, but slower now, and it seemed like every time Harry saw them their language skills had improved.
By now not only were all three of them saying words, but the words were more and more relevant to what was actually going on – and they could understand at least some other words that were being said. It wasn't quite where they were up to where Nora was when Harry had first heard her speak, but it actually seemed like they were learning faster than she had – unless they suddenly slowed down, they'd match up to September-the-first-1992-Nora with a few weeks to spare.
Professor Kettleburn, Hagrid, Nora, Charlie and Hermione were all pleased as punch about it, and Harry was quite pleased about it as well. He did hope they started behaving better soon, but then again maybe it was just that they were able to play rough with one another. Or it was a sibling sort of thing.
(Harry had made sure to write down when Gary had quite clearly called Sally "Smelly", and she'd retaliated by breathing smoke in his face.)
The date for the Second Task grew closer and closer, and – just like the First Task, and the arrival of the other schools, and for that matter the Yule Ball – became more and more the focus of conversations around the school.
Nobody really had much idea what the Second Task was – Harry had more idea than most and the most he knew was that it would be a good idea to learn to swim – and, because nobody who actually knew was telling (probably because it would make things easier for someone who wasn't their school's Champion) that meant all sorts of strange rumours abounded.
One person said that maybe the Champions had to duel one another, though someone else pointed out that that would make more sense for the third task if anything, and anyway as there were three of them it would just be decided by whoever happened to not be attacked at first. Then there was another who suggested that they'd have to go into the Forbidden Forest and bring back an unharmed unicorn, though that just sounded difficult to Harry because unicorns were so tremendously hard to find.
The oddest was the idea that the second task was that there was no second task, but Harry had nary a clue how to reconcile that with screeching noises.
Finally, at about eight in the evening the night before the Task, Harry got a letter from Professor Dumbledore asking him to please show up at the side of the Black Lake at twenty minutes to nine the next morning.
The letter went on to explain how he had several of these letters to write, and was attempting to keep them all as similar as possible, so he did not wish to say specifically what time the recipient should go to bed – but that he felt it was always good to get plenty of sleep, so the recipient of the letter could decide from that what they wanted.
Harry felt that was reasonable enough, and after finishing his Transfiguration homework and making his excuses to Empress – they were on Dragonquest by this point – he turned in early.
At breakfast, there was an odd rumour going around that it seemed half the school had been turned upside down looking for whoever it was that had been Viktor Krum's date to the ball.
Either that had been after Harry had gone to bed, or – just as likely – the half of the school that had been turned upside down hadn't included the top half. If anyone had asked him he'd have been able to tell them it was Anna Smith, though he wasn't entirely sure how the kitsune had pulled it off.
He'd asked, but that hadn't helped.
Harry had a quick breakfast, went back upstairs to get his towel and pair of swimming trunks (both of which went in a drawstring bag which said NIKE on it, largely because that had been the first one he'd seen in the sports shop) and was outside and ready beside the Lake at twenty-five minutes to nine.
"Ah, Harry," Percy said, pausing in doing something intricate with his wand. "Professor Dumbledore said you were one of the ones he'd asked to help. He's just in that tent there."
Harry nodded his thanks, but watched for a moment longer to see what Percy was doing.
With a flourish, the older wizard unshrank a giant bank of golden seats – enough to seat at least four hundred people – so they were facing the lake, and also facing a set of half a dozen large poles sticking out of the shallows of the lake which Harry was fairly sure hadn't been there last night.
"I'm sorting out the seating," he told Harry. "Supposed to be someone from the Ministry doing it, but apparently there's a bit of a mess in Kent they're having to clean up."
That made sense to Harry, and so he duly went into the tent.
"Ah, Harry!" Dumbledore greeted him, as soon as he was through the flap. "And I see you have your swimming things. Marvellous."
Dumbledore was the first person Harry actually saw, but he wasn't the only one in there. He also spotted Cormac, Tiobald, a girl who Harry didn't quite remember the name of (but he thought she was a Seventh-Year), Ken Towler who was in the same year as Fred and George, and Luna who was wearing a pair of earrings.
"We are just waiting for the last person who is expected to arrive," Dumbledore informed them all, consulting a rather fine looking watch with elegant numerals on the dial. "Then, once all is in place, we will be able to explain the role we would like you all to play today."
"Seems a shame to wait," Cormac said, shrugging.
"Alas, I am old, and I do not wish to strain my voice," Dumbledore smiled. "Thus I must take advantage of whatever loopholes there may be to speak as little as possible. I am sure you understand, of course."
The final person to arrive was another one Harry recognized, James from his dungeons and dragons club, and once they were all sitting down Dumbledore clapped his hands together once.
"It is wonderful to see you all," he said. "And I will now be able to tell you all what the Second Task is, a little ahead of when everybody else is so lucky as to get the same information. You have doubtless noticed that we are by the side of the lake."
"Bit hard to miss, honestly," Ken chuckled.
"I find it quite easy to miss even the most obvious of things, so I must extend the same courtesy to others," Dumbledore told them all. "But all three of our Champions will be shortly plunging into the lake, so as to retrieve someone of great value to them."
The Headmaster smiled. "Of course, we have taken every precaution to ensure that none of those people of great value are in any true danger. Mr. MacUalraig's family has been most helpful in ensuring that the so-called hostages shall be safe, for example, and they have been placed under a magical sleep that will only wear off when they are brought safely back to the surface."
"So… what are we doing, then?" James asked. "If it's okay to ask, I mean."
"It is, of course," Dumbledore agreed. "Much to my consternation, it was pointed out to me some months ago that this task – while undoubtedly most exciting for all involved – would not actually be very entertaining to watch. Fortunately it was the selfsame person who pointed that out who was able to supply a fine solution."
Dumbledore picked up some strange contraptions from a nearby table, each of consisted of an array of straps and a single silvery mirror.
"For those of you who are not aware of two-way mirrors, they are mirrors that are magically connected together. Mr. Towler, Mr. McLaggen, Miss Crofts, you will each be following – respectively – Mr. Diggory, Mr. Krum and Miss Delacour. Some rather larger mirrors will shortly be in place outside, and we will be able to use them to see what each of you is seeing."
Dumbledore went on to explain where everyone else would be – Harry's job was that he'd be with James and Tiobald, both mirror-filming the area at the selkie village at the bottom of the lake and providing help in case someone got in trouble nearby or if at the end of the time they needed to bring a hostage back up.
There was a slimy stuff called Gillyweed available for any of the camera-wizards who might need it – Harry wasn't at all sure it would work on him, which was why it was fortunate that he'd managed to get the Bubble-Head Charm correct – and then Dumbledore gave them all some time to get changed into their swimwear before opening the other tent flap to reveal the lake itself.
In the time they'd been in there most of the crowd had arrived, and Harry realized it was only about ten minutes before the official deadline to start the task itself. Unless they wanted to let all the Champions just follow them straight to the village, they'd better get going straight away.
"What's Luna's job?" he asked, suddenly curious.
"I'm the translator," Luna said. "I'm also one of the reporters. It's very convenient."
Then James ate his Gillyweed, dropping into the water a moment later, and Dumbledore tapped his fine looking watch.
"Mr. Lively, I will be sure to send you a message in fifty-two minutes," he said. "It will take the form of a rather fetching phoenix, which will of course be a little incongruous in a lake; if nobody has yet reached the village, please return to the surface at that time as your Gillyweed will shortly be wearing off."
James nodded to show he understood, taking a deep breath under the water instead of above.
"And that means that if someone does reach," he began, then took another water breath, "the village, I come up first?"
"Precisely," Dumbledore confirmed pleasantly. "Off you go!"
Harry took just a moment to properly cast his Bubble-Head Charm, then he dropped into the water – his filming mirror strapped nicely in place – and followed James and Tiobald into the depths of the lake.
Really, if you were going to be going deep into a lake, it was helpful to have someone who already lived there to show you around. Harry thought that was advice everyone should pay close attention to.
AN:
Even though Harry is a long way away from doing the Tasks as a Champion, so far he's ended up involved.
The Runes stuff is not something I've fully worked out, but I've got enough to be going on with to spot the basic problems. It's sort of fun to come up with a magic system like that.
Though I might have to base the rune scheme for the finished work on Lap Cat instead of Neville, because a sword with NEHVILEL on it might be a bit… evil.
Also, it's four days more than a year since I started writing this fic. I think it's a reasonable amount of work for about a year's writing.