"Get your head in the game, Potter!"

Harry startled at the sound of Cedric calling his name. Right, he was supposed to be helping him raise a fog to obscure their preparations, while Enyo enacted palings around the clearing to stop anyone trying to scry out what they were doing. He'd just gotten slightly distracted, watching the ground team from above and thinking, when the hell did Maïa get so scary? Well, he meant, Maïa had always been kind of scary (see: that one time she'd set Snape on fire), but that was serious magic she was throwing around down there.

Runic casting wasn't hard like the Patronus, where you needed to channel a lot of magic to be able to do it, it was hard like focusing on every single detail of a transfiguration at once. (Sirius had recently informed Harry that Professor McGonagall had been teaching them lazy transfiguration for the past three years, and that just wouldn't cut it for the animagus transformation.) 'Proper' transfiguration — free transfiguration, without a specific spell to turn a mouse into a snuff box or whatever — required more focus than Harry had ever had to use to cast any spell ever and left him completely mentally exhausted after about three attempts, and that was just making simple shite, like the matchstick-needle exercise he'd done in his very first week of Transfiguration lessons. (Sirius promised that it got easier with practice.)

But unlike a transfiguration, which only took a few seconds of really intense concentration, runic casting could take minutes. And if you screwed it up it could blow up in your face, like Lyra had blown herself and Hermione up when she'd first tried it last year. And some of the forces involved could be huge, especially when they got earth-magic involved, too. When he'd asked Lyra what was the worst that could happen if Hermione's spell to build a bloody hillfort went wrong, she'd made him promise not to tell Hermione before admitting that she could probably destroy half the arena if she lost control of the magic. And the cool war-shield thing she and Mal had stolen from Grindelwald would take out the other half, no problem.

It was really fucking impressive to watch, though — he thought, hovering about twenty metres above the girls, calling clouds out of the little stream that ran beside their choosen ground — dirt just sinking and rising like clay on a potter's wheel, but without the spinning.

The spot they'd chosen was just inside the entrance to the arena, at the middle of its southern edge. It was the lowest ground in the entire eighth of a cubic kilometer that had been marked out for the task, and the smallest of three little relatively clear areas (small also being a relative term, it was a vaguely round space about a hundred metres in diameter), but that was mostly a coincidence, or maybe a consequence of some geomantic thing no one had bothered to explain to Harry. It was convenient though, because it meant they wouldn't have to fight with one of the other schools over the spot — they were both headed to the higher areas on the north side of the arena.

There were two kind of decent-sized hills over there, in opposite corners. One was a little taller and rockier than the other, but easier to get close to. Neville thought it'd actually been a tower or something, a long time ago, that had crumbled and fallen and been overtaken by the Forest. That was in the northeast corner, the direction the Durmstrangers had headed. Beauxbatons had gone straight for the northwest corner, which was more of a little plateau of sorts, with a much steeper incline to get there if you were coming directly from the entrance point (or Fort Hogwarts) — it was kind of just a long, low incline if you were coming at it from over by Durmstrang — but there was much more room to stand and such at the top, almost flat, while the Durmstrang hill was noticeably more...pointed. Peak-like? There was a distinct edge where the hill started, anyway, a sharp break in the natural contour of the land that Harry couldn't un-see, now that Neville had pointed it out.

They'd all come out over the past couple of days to familiarise themselves with the area, and Mallory had drawn a couple of different maps with the topography and magical currents before they'd decided that they were definitely going to do the hillfort thing. They'd considered the area Beauxbatons had claimed, there was actually more flat-ish ground over there, but the magical currents were apparently stronger here by the stream, and there were more plants around for Neville to play with. They being Maïa, Mallory, Lyra, and Neville, who was apparently learning a bit of the magical earth-energy detection along with his plant-magic — Harry still couldn't believe he thought he'd had nothing to offer their team, he'd been dead useful so far.

Much more useful than Harry, really. His biggest contribution to the whole planning a defence thing was basically asking whether there was a one-way shield they could use to cover the top of the fort, because he could easily imagine just flying over it and dropping spells or conjured shite or dive-bombing them from five-hundred feet, getting inside the defences before anyone even realised he was there. Mallory's eyes had gone all wide and she'd run off to Ravenclaw Tower and come back with a tatty old soft-cover paper book — basically a cheap pamphlet, compared to most magical books — that she said was a field manual for some of the standard spells and enchantments Grindelwald's actual bloody army had used and one of them was exactly what Harry had just suggested, and she and Hermione were off, babbling about how they could modify this thing or the other, and maybe that would work, but Hermione wouldn't have the power to pull it off solo, but they could do this other blood-magic power-sharing thing...

Mallory Prince, Harry thought, was eerily similar to a slightly older Hermione who gave slightly fewer fucks what people thought of her interest in the sort of magics that could blow up half the bloody arena if they went wrong. Mallory, though, was mostly interested in them theoretically. She was planning on going into construction enchanting when she left school, making buildings and their wards a part of the magical landscape, and stuff like that. (Which was cool, Harry had learned kind of a lot about magical career options in the past few days, hanging out with the NEWT students on their team.) Hermione was definitely interested in using them, and Harry was becoming ever more convinced that if she and Lyra didn't violently implode (and they did seem to spend more time arguing or being confused about one another than not, so that wasn't out of the question), that Hermione was going to become a Dark Lady or something — no matter how ridiculous Hermione herself found that idea. She wouldn't be able to help it, she'd see something that was wrong with society and Lyra would point out that there was no reason they couldn't do something about that if it bothered her so much, and before anyone knew it Maïa would have overthrown the entire government in her effort to establish citizenship rights for vampires and the People or something, Harry could just see it...

Or maybe more likely, Lyra would overthrow the government for her and call it a birthday present, and Hermione would be kind of appalled but also kind of flattered, and in any case stuck with it, because you can't exactly return a violent revolution for store-credit, Maïa. (Or something equally absurd that Harry just didn't have the imagination to predict.)

Anyway, Mallory and Hermione got on like a house on fire (literally). Even better than Hermione and Lyra did most of the time, which Lyra was apparently fine with — she tended to just sit back and listen to their conversations (which was weird, Lyra normally never shut up), dropping in the occasional question or comment and spurring them on to even more wild and terrifying ideas. And Neville was surprisingly good at this stuff, once he got past his initial I suck at everything, don't pick me, I'll only hold you back attitude. The Weasley twins were, well, exactly the same as he remembered from the last time he'd spent any significant time with them, at the Burrow the summer before second year — outrageous bordering on obnoxious, but in a slightly less malicious way than Lyra, and mad geniuses when it came to pranks and traps and shite.

Harry had hardly talked to Nick or Violet or Ash Ryan at all, just enough to have a vaguely positive opinion of Nick and Violet, and a slightly less vague negative one about the violinist. The only person on the team who actually seemed to like him was Lyra, and Harry suspected that at least part of that was appreciation of how much he annoyed the rest of them just by existing. The rest of it was probably just that she didn't realise how abrupt and abrasive he tended to be, because she was very much the same in that way, especially with people whose opinions she didn't much care about. (Which was pretty much everyone except Maïa...and sometimes her, too.)

He was warming up, down there at the centre of the rising hillfort. Harry could feel the notes echoing in his blood, even though he couldn't actually hear them — random nonsense not-sounds, almost like Lyra speaking thunderbird, making his heartbeat quicken in anticipation, a tight, tense, almost anxious feeling rising up in him...but not necessarily a bad tension. More like the energy that had surrounded Lyra all day, so very ready to go and do something that holding itself back was almost painful.

He'd talked to Thane Rowle even less than he'd talked to Ryan, but he really didn't need to to form an even worse opinion about him. Even if Lyra apparently had no problem with him having helped kidnap and torture her, and he wasn't entirely convinced of that — Blaise didn't think she'd be overconfident enough to curse him herself, in front of the entire world, but Harry was positive she had some ulterior motive in asking him to join the team — Harry wasn't going to just let that go. He might not have any plans to get revenge on her behalf — if he started doing shite like that for her, she'd probably take it as permission to start killing Dursleys — but he definitely wasn't going to be civil to the fucking arse, let alone laughing and joking and trading good-natured insults with him like he'd caught Lyra doing on the way back up to the school from their planning-session-slash-strategy-meeting out in the woods yesterday. (Good-natured on Lyra's side, he was sure Rowle legitimately meant his insults.)

Harry had called her out on it on their way back up to Gryffindor Tower, actually, because it was fucking weird, okay. She'd just blinked at him all confused, as though she didn't understand why it was not normal to act normal with someone you knew wanted to fucking torture you — nicer than normal, actually, Lyra didn't tend to act friendly with people, generally speaking — almost exactly the same expression as when he'd pointed out that it wasn't normal or okay to still be on speaking terms with the members of your family who were actual war criminals. And then she'd said something like, don't worry, I'm not going to fuck up the Task just to even the score with Rowle, Harry, which hadn't really been his concern at all, but trying to explain that just hadn't seemed worth it.

He could tell Rowle thought it was weird and awkward that she was being so...chummy with him too, acting like they were just comrades, and sure they might be annoying and/or insulting to each other on a fairly regular basis, but that was no reason not to work together to kick Durmstrang and/or Beauxbatons arse, right? But he was just kind of going along with it, because what else could he do, honestly? Admit that it was freaking him out that she was obviously comfortable with him having her back in the field, in spite of the fact that he'd tried to melt her face off and watched someone use the Cruciatus on her at the end of last term?

Harry had no idea whether Katie knew anything about what Rowle and company had done to Lyra, or if she was just uncomfortable around him because he was a complete arse and just untrustworthy in general, but she very clearly was uncomfortable with him. It was subtle, but she kept shooting wary glances at him when she thought no one was looking and never let him get behind her, like she thought he might curse her in the back. Even now, with both of them jogging into the trees after Lyra (who had darted off after Arte before anyone else on the Hogwarts Team had gotten into place, shadow-walking to catch up), she was hanging back a few paces, a few metres off his left side so it wasn't completely obvious, or probably wouldn't be from the ground, but.

There was no actual path for them to follow — most of the Beauxbatons Team were veela or lilin, and most of them had just fire-walked away as soon as they got inside the arena or taken to the air, presumably to ensure they'd reach their chosen hill before Durmstrang (not that Durmstrang seemed to have any interest in claiming it, anyway), so they hadn't even really left a trail behind them, crashing through the underbrush en masse — so it wasn't all that weird they weren't right together, but from up here, it was obvious that Katie had made a point of getting far enough away the trees between them put her out of spell-range when Rowle slowed down to walk with some of the Durmstrangers and she started getting ahead of him.

Two of the Beauxbatonnais, one veela and one lilin, Harry thought — though he couldn't exactly say why he thought that, he couldn't even really feel their magic from this far away — had stayed with Arte, coming to a halt at the centre of the largest clearing (there had been loads of small trees and bushes and shite around when Harry was out here two days ago, but they'd been cleared out since), about halfway between Fort Hogwarts and the hill Beauxbatons was claiming. There were a handful of Durmstrangers making their way there as well — Harry wasn't sure whether they'd planned that for strategy reasons (it was apparently pretty common for the other two schools to work together to take out the host school first in events like this, since they usually had a home-pitch advantage), or whether they just figured it made sense to have the big ground battle (or at least the beginning of it) in the largest area of (relatively) open ground. Lyra had said something about it generally being a good idea to have the offensive teams in the same area to start, especially in a large field with poor sight-lines like this one. If they weren't, they might completely miss each other, heading for the others' forts from their own.

Speaking of which...

Nope, she was gone already.

The person he probably liked best, out of all the new people he'd met over the past three days getting ready for this thing, was Astoria. He'd never really talked to her before, which was a bit weird in hindsight, because it wasn't as though she wasn't around — she was Daphne's little sister, and therefore Blaise's little sister. She didn't really hang out with them, though. She had her own friends, and apparently spent quite a lot of time out here on the edges of the Forest, trying to convince a unicorn to let her ride him, because Don't be silly, Harry, when Professor Cassie talks about shagging your mum she just says they were shagging. 'Riding unicorns' means actually riding unicorns. (Harry was still pretty sure it was a euphemism.) And a lot of the time when she actually was around, she was just sort of...there, in the background. A lot like Harry had been most of the time before this year. Well, like he still was a lot of the time, like when everyone else was going on about how to make their fort bloody impenetrable and he didn't have anything to add to the conversation.

He couldn't really get a read on her. She did occlumency strangely, sort of deflecting his attention around her the same as her notice-me-not trick, and when she didn't, or when he focused on her specifically rather than just generally being aware of the people around him, she almost felt like Sirius — like there wasn't much resistance at all to his intrusion, but no matter how far he tried to get in their thoughts and memories and motivations, he would only ever find more superficial, fluffy nonsense unless they wanted him to know something. Well, he didn't know for sure that that was what would happen if he tried to get deeper into Astoria's mind, but that was how Sirius did it, and they were so similar on the surface it was almost impossible for him to believe that it wasn't the same technique.

He was positive that there was more to Astoria than the superficial fluff partly because she could be surprisingly serious when they were actually planning shite, but also because he'd seen her hanging around with her friends, and the way she acted around them went perfectly with the fluff — only interested in unimportant shite, and only briefly at that, silly and easily distracted — but someone who avoided attention the way she did, it seemed like it would be really bloody weird if she acted the way she felt all the time, if that made sense. (He thought it did.) He kind of got the feeling that she was putting on a show for people a lot of the time, and that kind of felt familiar, because until he'd come to Hogwarts — until last year, really, and a lot of the time now, even — he had always been on the edges of things, too.

And even now, having more friends and being more social sort of...seemed like it wasn't really him. He was beginning to realise that he was comfortable only having a small handful of close friends. Even if Ron hadn't been such a possessive jerk when other people tried to hang out with them, Harry kind of thought he still might not have had many friends...and he was fine with that? He really, honestly was. But he thought he might make a point of hanging out with Astoria more, even after this Task was over. She was good company, in a quiet, patient, lurking on the edges of things making the occasional witty observation or sarcastic comment sort of way. Like Theo, kind of, but where Theo was kind of tense and watchful, Astoria was just...really chill, as Sirius would say.

She did have a sense of humour, though. (Which didn't at all match the fluffy nonsense part of her personality.) She was going to replace the Beauxbatons and Durmstrang flags with transfigured copies, so they wouldn't realise she'd stolen them for at least a little while. Just cut a piece off of her cloak and use that as the foundation of the spell, it would be much easier than conjuring a copy, and she was only a second-year. But after she'd decided that, she'd gone and painted a symbol that Harry recognised as Old High Elvish on what would be the new flags, hidden on the inside of her cloak at the moment.

Elvish runes were pretty easy to recognise, all blocky with lots of forty-five degree angles and little hooked bits that reminded him faintly of a clawmark or something, and tiny little diamond-shaped 'dots', they were just bloody impossible to read. Astoria didn't actually know how to pronounce this one, but she said it meant 'shadow'.

Which was the name of a particularly notorious vampire thief.

Well, obviously not their actual name, but the name the papers had given them over the past few decades. The vampire Shadow didn't actually leave calling-cards or some shite like that, just ghosted in and out of wherever, completely undetected with the help of their partner, a cursebreaker called Night, but when her transfigurations reverted (which they probably would relatively quickly, she wasn't really that good at transfiguration) anyone who could read High Elvish would recognise that the Hogwarts Flag Thief was making an homage to the notorious vampire, in about the most obscure way possible. There were probably only a few dozen people at Hogwarts at the moment, even with all the metamorphs and extra people here for the Tournament, who would be able to get the joke — Sirius said it was mostly used for summoning demons and writing about other dimensions and shite — but for some reason Harry actually thought that made it funnier.

He had already entirely lost track of the younger girl, down in the trees. He'd seen her slip away from the group, but then he'd gotten distracted by Maïa being bloody terrifying (which he meant in the most complimentary way possible) and the fog-summoning and watching the offensive squad take their positions, and she'd disappeared.

With the fog and anti-scrying charms in place, the three fliers separated a bit, taking different levels and angles to keep an eye out for any attempts to spy by more physical methods, like having a veela fly over or something.

No one actually tried that, but Cedric dropped down into the trees for a couple of minutes, chasing... Was that a raven? Harry knew that the organisers had eventually decided to include familiars as 'secondary foci', along with dueling knives and brooms and certain enchanted objects like communication mirrors (which were technically scrying devices that were enchanted to make it stupidly easy to focus on a single other specific thing, whatever was around the other mirror in the pair).

They weren't allowed to use offensive spells until the preparation period ended, which was one reason it was important to stake out whatever ground you wanted for your fort as quickly as possible — no one else could drive you off. (Though they could just start building their own defences there as well, in a sort of chicken situation — who's going to break first, admit that they can't make their strategy work with the enemy literally in their back garden?)

They could use environmental spells and shields and stuff like that, though, so it wasn't altogether surprising when Cedric rose up out of the trees after a brief, impossible to follow chase — about a third of the trees had lost their leaves for winter, but the rest were pines, their branches obscuring enough that Harry had hardly been able to see Ced, let alone the bird — with a furious raven beating its wings against what looked for all the world like a large, pink hamster ball, hovering beside him at wandpoint.

"Oi! Harry! Know any good tracking charms?"

"What for?"

"I thought I'd return this little birdy. I just need to know who it belongs to."

Harry snorted. Of course he was going to just give it back. Hufflepuff. (Though to be fair, it wasn't like they could stun it at the moment, or whatever.) "Ah...sure?" He actually knew a spell specifically to help someone find their familiar. He'd done it for Maïa when Crookshanks decided that he was going to just live with Sirius now and she couldn't find him. Granted, it hadn't actually worked, because Maïa hadn't had a familiar bond with Crookshanks — he'd tried it with Hedwig too, just to prove he hadn't done it wrong — but obviously if someone was using their familiar to spy they would have to. "I think you're going to have to drop the shield, though."

"Nah, it's physical only. Go ahead."

Harry shrugged and cast the spell, making a point of focusing on the way the magic felt as he cast it, rather than the actual incantation. One of the things Sirius had apparently told Gin in their dueling lessons (and no one other than Gin had ever bothered telling Harry) was that yes, casting a spell seven thousand times would make it so automatic she wouldn't have to think about it, let alone say the incantation, but if you focused on the magic rather than the words and the wand movements, you'd get it down a lot faster. Of course, it was still easier if you used the incantation, sort of to help you remember it, like? but you'd get to a point where you didn't need to after maybe a thousand repetitions, rather than seven thousand. And in the meanwhile, you could kind of mumble or fudge the incantation a little if you forgot the bloody Latin or Greek or whatever. And if you got good enough at recognising and remembering how it felt to cast a new spell, and just doing that again to cast it the next time, you might only have to use the incantation and even the proper wand movements a handful of times. (That was part of how adult mages were so quick to master new spells, compared to kids.)

Or, if you were Sirius, you might only need to see it or have it used on you once or twice to pick it up, even if you didn't know the incantation or wand movement — kind of like learning to play a song by ear, rather than having the sheet music in front of you. Gin wasn't sure whether he was having her on about that, she didn't know any spells that he didn't know so she couldn't test him, but she said it seemed plausible. Mage-sight was apparently almost as much of a cheat as legilimency, and though Sirius would say he wasn't really a top-tier battlemage, all the people he claimed were better than him were people like Cassie or Bellatrix or Professor Flitwick or Dumbledore. He might be a little rusty from sitting in Azkaban for years, but he was still amazingly good. (According to Gin. The way she talked about Sirius, sometimes, Harry couldn't help thinking she might have a little bit of a crush on him. He didn't ask though, because knowing that Gin fancied his godfather would be almost as weird and discomfiting as if Lyra confirmed that she fancied Mira.)

Lyra said it was possible, she wouldn't be surprised if Sirius could do it. And Bellatrix and Not-Professor Riddle. Flitwick for sure. Probably Dumbledore. Maybe Snape, he apparently had some experience with curse-crafting. She couldn't (yet), but apparently her mother (not Bellatrix, her real mother, Druella) used to make up spells, and variations on existing spells, that didn't have incantations. Like, at all. Specifically so that they'd be harder for Bella (Lyra) to break. And then she went off on some ramble about modeling what the spell actually did with arithmancy and using that to figure out the counter-jinxes, but Harry kind of stopped listening after she said that yes, that was a thing that people could do, because he didn't really care. He was too distracted by the idea of learning how to do it himself.

Which theoretically started with focusing on what it felt like to actually cast a spell, rather than worrying about the incantations. This one kind of felt like a little twisty, flippy burst of energy, coiling itself up and then springing away like an arrow, pulling more magic into itself as it went, spinning out a connection between the two halves of a whole which were the familiar and its master.

A bright blue thread immediately shot off toward the northeast hill, angled toward the ground rather than the handful of fliers hovering above them.

"Did you just...?" Cedric muttered, staring at him as though he'd grown a second bloody head or something.

"What?"

"Nothing, never mind. Cheers. Back in a jiff."

Of course, he didn't make it very far before the Durmstrang fliers intercepted him. They were way too far away for Harry to make out what they were saying, but he got the impression that they didn't believe Cedric was just returning the bird as a gesture of Hufflepuffish good-sportsmanship.

"Think we should go help him?" Enyo called, floating down to Harry from her position about twenty metres above him.

He still didn't really know what to think of the Slytherin stunt flier. She was sitting sideways on her broom, like they were just chilling over the lake or something, so casually it was almost annoying. All morning, everyone else had been getting progressively more tense, anxious and excited, and she just...wasn't. At all. She wasn't faking it, either. She was pretty good at occlumency, enough that the veela wouldn't be able to distract her, but she'd let him read her when she'd felt him trying to feel out if she was actually as relaxed as she seemed. (He hadn't really been intruding, just...poking around a little at the very edges of her mind-space, because that was bloody weird. She thought it was funny that he thought so.) Which she was. Apparently. And yes, he got that pulling off the sort of flying she did — Suicide Dives were kind of terrifying — she had to have nerves of steel, or bloody ice water in her veins, but it was still kind of unsettling.

Even Lyra wasn't unaffected at the prospect of the Task. Increasingly frustrated and anxious to go, obviously not nervous or afraid but not calm and unbothered, either. Harry was a little surprised she'd been holding herself back as well as she had all morning. He'd honestly expected her to blast Andi Tonks across the Great Hall when she'd grabbed her by the arm and literally dragged her into a corner to shout at her (under privacy charms, obviously) about projecting some song Sirius had chosen (Harry assumed, he could rarely make out the words in songs by the bands Lyra liked best) as background music for the riot which hadn't actually followed someone chucking an explosive curse at the Irish delegation (though it had felt like a near-miss). But either she respected Madam Tonks a lot more than Lady Malfoy or there was some other factor in play he didn't know about, because she'd just stood there and taken it — pouting and furious, but still. That had been much more surprising than that she had chased Arte over to that clearing, and was now...probably taunting the fighters from the other schools?

They weren't exactly obviously on the same side, Beauxbatons and Durmstrang, but the way they were standing kind of gave the impression that they were both more against Hogwarts than concerned about each other. (Harry really hoped Lyra knew what she was doing...)

Harry snorted, wrenching his attention back to Enyo and the argument obviously developing between Cedric and Krum. (And his teammates, but Krum was the one doing the talking — his English wasn't great, but most of the Durmstrangers were worse.) "Might as well. We've still got a few minutes, right?"

Enyo shrugged, annoyingly unconcerned. "I think so."

The Beauxbatons fliers — two veela and three humans on brooms — were watching them too. When Harry and Enyo headed over to see if Cedric needed help or whatever, all five of them came to join the party. They were closer than Harry and Enyo, actually, so technically they got there first, the veela circling the group at a slow glide since they couldn't actually hover in place. When Harry finally came within earshot, Cedric was explaining, very patiently (in French that wasn't much better than Harry's), that "I found this bird. It is not mine. I want to return it to...its Durmstrang human," with the most obnoxiously pleasant, deliberately obtuse, friendly Hufflepuff façade Harry had ever seen.

"Please, I beg of you," one of the boys from Beauxbatons said, wincing, "stop violating our beautiful language!" His English was very heavily accented, but not nearly as stilted as Cedric's French.

"Oh! I didn't realise you spoke English! Okay, well. Would you please be so kind as to explain to our friends from Durmstrang that I found this bird acting very peculiarly over near our base-camp, and Harry here did this charm, see—" He pointed at the blue thread. "—that shows us that it's actually a familiar and belongs to someone down in their camp, and I just thought I'd return it before we really get started. Obviously I can't let it go, if— Well, I don't really believe they were attempting to spy on us, but you can understand how someone else might think that, or that maybe it's an animagus or something and stun it, and that would just be terribly unpleasant, so—"

One of the Durmstrangers said something ostensibly to the Beauxbatonnais, her French too quick for Harry to really make out the words, but he got the impression the meaning was something like, we think this one's a bit soft in the head, which was fairly clearly conveyed by the slack-jawed idiot face she pulled at Cedric.

Enyo, shoulders shaking with silent laughter, managed to pull herself together enough to say...not as soft in the head as you lot (assuming that was what that phrase had meant) if you thought you could spy on us with your little bird. (Probably. He thought.)

"Why are you even here, little dancer?" another Durmstrang girl asked her, all dismissive and condescending. "You know this is a competition for serious fliers, yes? You should go home before you hurt yourself."

Enyo shifted around to sort of lie on her broom, one knee folded in front of her, balanced on the shaft, the other stretching back to hook around one of the leg braces, arms folded in front of her, resting relaxed on the handle, tilting it up a bit so she could still look the Durmstranger in the eye while pretending to be lying on a bloody bed or something, so casual she had to be having them on just as much as Ced with his helpful, friendly Hufflepuff routine. "What makes you think I'm not a serious flier? One too many bludgers to the head, perhaps? Or perhaps you're just naturally stupid."

"This isn't a—" Probably fucking, or bloody or something like that (Harry didn't really know many swear words yet). "—air ballet," the Beauxbatons girl said, darting forward a few metres as though she was planning on knocking Enyo out of the air — Enyo didn't even flinch, just smirked at the other girl from a few inches away ("Careful, kitten, the game hasn't started yet.") — as the Durmstrang girl with the condescending tone said, "Not as stupid as a Hogwarts student, if you think it's a good idea to send a delicate little—" Harry didn't know that word, either, but he assumed it wasn't flattering. "—out to play with the—" somethings. "Who designed your strategy? A small child?"

"What's she going to do with that shitty little—" ...tool? maybe? another Durmstranger offered (though his French wasn't as good as the girl's). He added something in the language all the Durmstrangers spoke (Swedish but not called Swedish? Harry didn't know), to uproarious laughter, so whatever it was probably wasn't flattering either.

"Oi! That was uncalled for!" Cedric objected, though Harry was pretty sure he didn't understand what had actually been said any more than Harry. "Are you going to let me return this bird, or not?" he asked, the raven still beating its wings helplessly against its hamster ball prison. Everyone ignored him.

"Are you offering to teach me how to ride your—" whatever the Durmstrang boy had called Enyo's broom. "Because—" size? "—is not so important, and I'm not sure you really know how to use it," she said, with a flirty edge to her voice. All the girls on both teams giggled as the Durmstranger went red.

"Of course I know how to use it!"

"Ladies, can any of you confirm his claim?" Most of the girls laughed again.

One of the veela trilled something. "My friend says that's big talk for a naïve little girl," one of the boys from Beauxbatons translated.

"Naïve?"

"She says you taste like a virgin."

"Oh! It was a sex joke!" Cedric explained, grinning all pleased with himself for having figured it out.

This time, everyone turned to look at him. "Yes, of course, you idiot," said the girl who had first called Enyo an un-serious flier. "Haven't you heard? Female fliers — quidditch players or racers or voltigeuses—" Harry presumed that was another word for air-dancer (danseuse à air) which was what they had been calling Enyo. "—all just want something long and hard between their legs."

Cedric put on an absolutely scandalised expression. Harry snorted — he was absolutely certain the Hufflepuff Quidditch Captain had heard that joke before. He'd heard it, Angelina had smacked the Weasley twins for suggesting last year that they could help her out with that if it was true.

"What about the boys?" he asked. He was fairly certain he'd said that right...

Apparently it was close enough, because Enyo sniggered. "They're—" compensent? compensating? "—for something. Or they like it up the arse," she added, winking at him. (Everyone knew that he and Blaise were a thing now — he'd mentioned it in that bloody interview, not realising at the time that he was basically volunteering information about his sex life to the entire bloody country...)

One of the veela warbled something else as some of the boys on the other teams objected. Harry just felt himself going a bit warm in the face, because, well.

"We'll see who's laughing when I curse you out of the sky!" the Durmstranger who'd made the first sex joke said, awfully red himself.

"Good luck with that, lover," Enyo snapped back, with an overconfident smirk that wouldn't have looked out of place on Lyra. Harry thought she kind of deserved it, though, because he and Cedric hadn't been able to land a single hex on her in practice. She was just too quick, and never where they expected her to be. Stunt-flying wasn't all terrifyingly dangerous dives. That was actually the easy end of broom tricks, just required good timing and nerves of steel. Most of it kind of reminded him of a gymnast on those bar things — Uncle Vernon had really liked watching the gymnasts on telly last time they'd had the Olympics...or, well, the time before that, Harry had been at the Burrow last time, whatever — or maybe a ballerina or something. It was like trying to fight Blaise, but in three dimensions. "Perhaps I will curse you out of the sky."

"Oh, yes, I'm so afraid of the little dancer on her little dancing broom — see how I tremble!"

The tension in the air between the three teams began to increase, three or four people shouting insults and provocations at each other — and Cedric inquiring yet again what he was supposed to do with this bird if they wouldn't let him give it back. Harry, for his part, addressed Enyo's lover-boy. "You should be. Ask Krum if he'd want to fight Tricia Mullet in the air."

Krum glowered at him. Harry had a brief moment to regret that — he'd spoken to the world-famous seeker a little bit last week, after Lyra just grabbed him and skipped over and introduced him at the stupid press thing, and once they'd gotten over the initial awkwardness of Lyra's exasperated introduction ("Victor Krum, this is Harry Potter. Harry, this is Victor Krum. You're both seekers, and Champions, and famous, and I'm sure you can find something to talk about, even if it's just complaining about me introducing you, so, discuss," and then flouncing away before either of them could say anything.) and trying to find a topic that wouldn't make Krum instantly dismiss Harry as a ridiculous fanboy (which had ended up being Krum very politely and resignedly saying, so you are also a seeker? and Harry going on a rant about how Hogwarts had cancelled the inter-house quidditch tournament this year), he'd thought they'd gotten on fairly well. If he was really offended, that would probably mean they weren't actually going to ever make it out to the pitch to run drills, like they'd half-seriously agreed they ought to at some point after this Task was over. (Krum, apparently having decided that Harry was a serious quidditch player more than a fan — which was bloody brilliant — had actually offered to show him a few things, in response to his bitching about no one on his team wanting to practise in the absence of actual matches this year.)

But then one of the Beauxbatons boys scoffed something that ended with "she is not Tricia Mullet!" (Harry didn't catch the beginning of it) and the tension seemed to reach almost a fever pitch, and before he could figure out how to say that he knew that but the Beauxbatons bloke was an idiot if he didn't think a stunt-flier wasn't going to fly circles around their quidditch-trained arses, the air shattered around them with a sound like a gong.

The signal to start!

For the space of a heartbeat, no one moved. Harry, for one, was paralysed by the realisation that they were way too close to everyone from the other teams — there were only three of them, they'd never been planning on actually fighting them, not in a group at least! Enyo was supposed to go make it look like she was attacking the Durmstrang base so everyone would think they were really going after their flag first, while Astoria actually went to steal the Beauxbatons flag first, and Harry and Cedric were supposed to help protect the Fort.

But the music surged in his blood, the rush of a crescendo pulling them forward — no turning back now, the game is on! GO!—

And then Enyo was rolling and diving, throwing a stunner at the bloody bird mid-twist and shooting off toward Durmstrang, three of their people following her to defend their base, and Harry and Cedric were surrounded by seven other people—

EVASIVE MANEUVERS! YOU GO UP! he 'shouted' at Cedric, pushing extra-hard to make sure the thought would get to him through his occlumency.

He had no idea if it worked, but Cedric flicked the hamster ball (and unconscious bird) at one of the Beauxbatonnais and cast a wide-angle elemental wind spell at the two Durmstrangers hovering above him and to his right in a single motion, clearing the way for both of them, and Harry dived, shooting down toward the trees, spellfire missing him by inches—

Shite, shite, shite, shite, shite!

I don't know if it's ever come up, but Old High Elvish is basically Ithkuil, so google that if you want some idea of what it looks like.

(Since I didn't know it was Ithkuil, no it hasn't been mentioned. Neat! —Lysandra)

Someone recently commented about Gin having a crush on Cassie. She doesn't. She's actually straight (what is this? us writing a straight character?!). Cassie's just her hero / role model / who she wants to be when she grows up. Sirius, though, she definitely fancies. (Sirius: *preens*)

Stunt-flying notes! Voltigeuses = acrobats/aerialists; "air-dancing" would be a slightly insulting way to refer to stunt-flying, implying that it's much less athletic and dangerous than it really is. Air-ballet would be a specific type of stunt-flying, telling a story a la cirque de soleil; air-ballerina would acknowledge the athleticism and training that goes into that sort of flying. That is actually what Enyo wants to do when she's done with school, hoping talent scouts will see the Task and ask her to audition, and definitely something Narcissa is going to comment on down in the stands.

—Leigha