Chapter 3

It is evening when we arrive in Milan. The floo connects us to a resort called Albergo Per La Magia. It is orange on the inside and overhangs the Naviglio Grande. We have booked a room here for the three of us: we're always looking to save money, so we intend to bunk together. The drowsy bellhop, a boy of twelve, leads us to an ochre door on the second floor— this is our room for the next fortnight. It is midsized. Stale air wafts in through its shuttered windows. There are antlers above the entrance and glass candles nailed to the walls. A cloying scent of perfume permeates the double bed. Towels, ginger newts, rose water and a bottle of frangipani litter the teapoy, and beside them is an ashtray holding a stubbed-out cigarette. Mouldering away on the solitary sofa is a shirt speckled with lipstick stains. The bellhop hurriedly claims this and tucks it into his jacket.

"Galleon a week for room," he announces. His english is clipped and heavily accented. "Three meals during stay for extra galleon."

Daph looks mutinous. The handbag between her fingers crumples under the death grip she's subjecting it to: she's shrunk and stashed her clothes and toiletries in there.

"You cannot be serious!" She explodes. Her rage is directed at me, not the bellhop, who nonetheless shies away from her in alarm. "This pigsty is not fit for habitation!"

Trace walks around the room.

"Bigger than most places I've slept in," she says, eyeing it critically. "Cleaner too."

She runs a finger along the walls. Drifts past a weather beaten cupboard and comes to rest in front of the copper bin adjoining the mirror stand.

"Oh goody, is that a used condom?" She asks, peering in. She stares at the contents with detached interest, then pulls out her wand and vanishes them.

"We'll take it," I say to the lad, pressing three galleons into his palm. He side-eyes Daph, who is starting to purple, and scurries away.

"Business, not leisure, Daph," I console. It is futile— there's smoke pouring out from her ears.

"Have you no standards?" She snarls. "Despite your best efforts to deny it, the blood that runs in your veins is noble! How could you be fine with sleeping in this chicken coop? When you said it would be a modest room, I expected a Hogwarts four poster, not this—this—"

"Hovel straight out of a muggle porno?" Trace offers.

"How do you even know about that?" I demand, vaguely disturbed.

"Borrowed a few cassettes from a dodgy cornershop. Mum's got a second hand VCR. Sorta snuck into the sitting room after she went to sleep and watched some."

"Had fun?"

"Oh yes."

"Was it informative?"

"Very." Tracey's grin is shameless.

"Don't ignore me!" Daph howls. She does not understand us or she'd be a blushing wreck. As it stands, she's only determined to be the first casualty in her war against squalor. "I demand that we go back to Hogwarts this instant! We can travel back and forth for the tournament if we have to."

"And what happens when Snape 'forgets' to leave his floo open?" I ask. "This is a room, Daph, it has an attached bathroom— we can stay in the arena all day, if you want, then return here to sleep. But at least we have somewhere to return to. If we try staying at Hogwarts, and if Snape pulls off the buggery I expect from him, we'll have to sleep in a muggle park and shit in the woods."

"You could apparate us to Hogsmeade, y'know," Trace points out. "Not that I mind this place, it's lovely. Proper cozy, even has a fireplace if we need it. There's enough space on the bed— conjure us a blanket and we can snuggle together. But if Daph's insistent . . ."

"Neither Three Broomsticks nor Hog's Head has better rooms," I say. "But it's a pointless hypothetical anyway. Daph blew a gasket the last time we stayed at Three Broomsticks, remember? And even if she hadn't, I'm not side long apparating you back and forth from England to Italy four times a day. I don't have a license— I'm underage, they won't give me one— and while the rules for such stuff are lenient within national borders, I'd be in serious trouble for international crossovers. The ICW tracks that shit diligently. More diligently, I dare say, than the Ministry of Magic does."

"Oh, they're useless, the Ministry of Magic, we're all agreed on that," Daph says scathingly. "The only organisation in the world, in fact, that's more useless than the two of you are."

She slams her handbag on the bed and marches off to the bathroom. Wrenches the door open then slams it shut so hard that the portraits on the wall flee their frames.

"Gee, Daph, tell us how you really feel," I say to the air.

"What did I do?" Trace complains. "Why am I being clumped in with you?"

I shrug in nonchalance.

Then I whip my wand out and start transfiguring things. First the bed, which I turn king-size and crenulate with pearl; then the teapoy, which I transfigure into a lavish wardrobe; then the floor, which goes from cement to marble; then the ceiling, which I layer with frosted foliations; finally the walls, to which I add writhing emerald serpents and intricate auroral patterns.

I take a deep breath, close my eyes, twirl my wand. I murmur under my breath as I make semi circles and figure eights in alternating clock and counterclockwise motions— this is the hard part, this uses charms. Much to my delight, however, I get the expansion charm for the entire room right and am able to localise it within the limits of the four walls, so that there's no external expansion, and so that the rest of the resort remains untouched. After all, it would be awkward if my attempts brought the ceiling down on us or caused the walls to explode.

By the time I'm done the room is unrecognisable. What was once a respectable looking lower middle class bedroom now looks palatial. The enchantments are temporary—I'll need to renew them every few hours—but it is well worth the effort.

Tracey's jaw has hit the floor.

Her eyebrow twitches.

"If you knew you could do all that, you prat, why didn't you just say so?"

"Ah Trace," I smirk. "It would be cruel to deny me the amusement of watching Daph go apeshit. Besides, it's not my fault she forgot we could do magic. She's the pureblood here, not me."

The bathroom door bursts open. Daph thunders out. Or tries to, anyway. She takes one step into the room and freezes. She too goes bug-eyed and slack jawed.

"Must've been something in the water," she says to herself faintly, before doing an about turn, going back into the bathroom, and locking the door.

"Best prank ever," I say to Trace.

Am I really friends with people if I don't cause them mental breakdowns on a weekly basis? My answer to that is an emphatic no.

Sadly, I cannot emulate the same trick with edibles. Come morning, we partake in the mouldy rat droppings this resort tries passing off as pasta. There is a soggy squelchy mess on one side of the plate that the waiter swears is salami. I mentally mourn the loss of my galleon, but needs must and all. We push the food away and promptly resolve to never eat here again. There should be eateries adjoining the arena— even if there aren't, I can dip into the nice little nest-egg of muggle money my gramps left me. It isn't enough to set me up for life, but with some careful investing I can get a few years of mileage out of it if I want. Of course, I don't really count this as money and only use it for sundry expenses whenever I go muggle: the coloured bills would not qualify as toilet paper in the magical world, nor can they be traded in for galleons, sickles or knuts. The only exception to this is for Hogwarts students from muggle backgrounds, and even then, only up to fifty galleons a year. A galleon costs a hundred pounds— I'd know, it's how I got my school supplies the first two years— and throughout the exchange the goblins stare at you as if they wish to harvest your internal organs. They don't take too kindly to being forced by ministerial decree to part with goblin crafted gold, even if it's just fifty galleons' worth.

In fact, there was a goblin rebellion in the mid nineteenth century that started over this very matter. The Ministry of Magic at the time tried normalising an exchange between galleons and pounds. It's one of the few rebellions the goblins won, because not only did the resultant three week war lead to the current status quo, but the ministry legislation also proved so deeply unpopular amongst the wizarding community that the sitting Prime Minister was deposed, tried for financial fraud, incarcerated and burnt alive in Diagon Alley, evidently to much cheering and applause.

So no, I've never met a goblin I've not despised. They're conniving little buggers that would gladly knife you in the back for a knut. Hell, they'd do it for shits and giggles, because there's a searing resentment against all wizarding-kind that simmers just beneath the surface of their hideous grins.

To be honest, I do not see our relationship with them as symbiotic. I think it is inevitable that either they exterminate us or we exterminate them. They were put in charge of the banking system four centuries ago, halfway through the systematic witch hunts undertaken by muggles; they were given the banks because the wizards of the time could ill afford a goblin rebellion— fighting on two fronts would've led to extinction. In retrospect, this is perhaps the biggest mistake in all of Wizarding history. In the centuries that have followed, every goblin rebellion has ended in a peace treaty, not due to the largesse of the wizards or the reconciliatory tendencies of the goblins, but due to the implied threat of the metaphoric nuclear option: bringing the financial machinery to a grinding halt. The Goblins could bunker down, defend each bank for years, and cut off all access to wealth, whilst in the meantime the wizarding community starves, riots and turns on itself, or else breaches the statute of secrecy in desperation and attempts to take on the muggles for their resources. It's lose-lose. The risk of mutual destruction has kept the peace despite all ill will and animosity. But someday someone on either side will go a step too far, and that will be that.

Of course, my viewpoint is niche, even amongst blood purists, who've never had to think about money for a day in their lives. On the other hand, money's all I think about at the moment, because money represents freedom. I can get my friends out of their horrid circumstances; I could duel because I want to, not because I have to. But now I have to, there's no other choice. I lied to Daph— I don't know how we're making five thousand galleons in a year and a half. Well, four thousand five hundred— the three of us have saved up five hundred over the last four years. But that's still a tragically absurd figure. I'd need to win every tournament I go to, and that's bloody unlikely. But I'll try. I'll leave my heart and soul out there, I'll embrace suffering, I'll pawn my well being. If there's breath left in my body I'll keep going— I'll leave that arena in a coffin or I'll leave with the money. For Daph, for Tori, for the five thousand fucking galleons we need. Money— money. Its pursuit is all there is in my life.

So the thought of some filthy fucking goblin getting its stinky little paws on my money and keeping it away from me renders me willing to genocide the entire species. But Gringotts historically offers a two percent interest rate, inflation's about the same, so I can hardly tuck my money into my trunk and forget all about it, can I? I'd invest it, but there are no businesses willing to take twenty galleon loans from retail investors, go figure. They all go to Gringotts instead— Gringotts, it turns out, also has a monopoly over lending.

This is all to say, the blood purists hate goblins for what they are— I hate them for what they control.

But then again, I doubt someone like, say, Granger would see the distinction. She's righteous, from what I've gathered: she had that elves' welfare thing going on last year. I only know about it because Parvati told Padma who told Tracey who asked Longbottom for a badge, only to be promptly talked out of it by him. Even her closest friends were apparently treating it as some sort of joke.

Me? I think Granger's methods were crude, but her heart is in the right place. There's a conversation to be had about the utter servility of elves. It's disturbing— it's unnatural. I've had Daph look it up, and the prevalent theory seems to be that they're sentient homunculi that feed on the ambient magic surrounding a wizard and die without it. But there's no proof for this— it's a theory that was promoted by a notorious breeder and slaver and marketer of elves in the early eighteenth century. It's been parroted ad-nauseam ever since.

But enough about Granger, enough about goblins, enough about elves. The girl next to me is turning green.

"Relax, Trace, it'll be ok," I say.

We're ambling down the sidewalk— Daph's stuck notice me not charms on the three of us. She's changed into her lime green healer's robes: they contrast well with her blue eyes and add some definition around her modest bust. The emergent sun turns her windswept hair into a cascade of honey and gold.

Trace and I, on the other hand, are decked in our duelling robes. For a pair of Slytherins we have a fantastic sense of humour: we've gone with deep, form fitting crimson, cinched by a black sash with silver highlights. Our cloaks are dragonhide, as are our gloves, but the robes themselves only have dragon hide padding around the chest, shoulders and knees. This is cheaper, but it is also practical: Daph has woven a gamut of protective enchantments into our robes; Dragonhide, being spell resistant, would act as an impediment.

I bump shoulders with Trace. Her eyes are glued to her feet. She's clenching and unclenching her hands. There's a thin film of sweat gathering around her forehead, but this is neither due to exertion nor the sun. With a soft sigh she tightens her cloak around herself and shivers. This, too, is not due to the wind. She did not touch her breakfast, and that was not due to its quality either— Tracey Davis will eat anything, given the right incentive.

"Yeah, I know." It is a muted response, offered without an iota of conviction in it.

I bump shoulders with her again. It is uncharacteristic of her to be this nervous.

"Do you want some water?" Daph asks kindly. She's trailing behind the two of us. I look over my shoulder—our eyes meet. She inclines her head towards Tracey, urging me to fix this somehow.

"Nah," Trace says, chewing on her bottom lip with a glum expression. She kicks a stone down the sidewalk. It skitters across the road and a vehicle runs over it. Her head sinks down another inch.

"Stop provoking those beasts!" Panic tints Daph's tone.

She's a convincing actress when she wants to be. She lives in London, she's seen hundreds of vehicles before, she knows what they are.

"They're cars, you moron." I play along.

Trace huffs out a weak snort. Her heart's not in it.

"Muggle transport," she mumbles.

Daph and I exchange another glance, this one more worried than the last. Trace laughs at the lamest of jokes— she cannot stay agitated or nervous for long. She's never failed to find Daph's ignorance of muggle culture hilarious. So for her to be in this mood…

"If you wish to talk, there's time," I say.

Trace says nothing for a while.

"Have you thought about what we'll do if we lose this?" she asks eventually.

"Lose, how?" Daph says from behind.

"Get knocked out in the group stages," Trace says, hollow voiced. "Or before the quarters. Or even in the quarters. It says on the pamphlet you get a hundred galleons for making it that far, but even a hundred does nothing for us, does it?"

"For me, you mean," Daph murmurs, a wan smile flickering across her face. "For Tori. Really, Tracey, if that happens it's not your fault. It's not Harry's either. It's my responsibility to find the money, not yours. The two of you are just kind enough to offer me charity. And I promise you this: if we're able to void that betrothal then I'll pay you back every knut with interest, even if it takes me a lifetime to do so."

She takes a deep breath and stares into the distance. Clears her throat. Knots her fingers together and holds them against her chest.

"But if you're not able to help . . . then thank you for trying. Thank you for everything. You're the only friends I have, the only people in the world I can turn to, the two people closest to my heart after my sister. And it'll remain that way, no matter what. So win — but win for yourselves, not for me. Win, because it's the coward's way to lose, and my friends are the bravest people I know."

She shrugs and spreads her arms.

"But if you don't, I'll still be there for you, because you were kind enough to give an unpleasant bitch like me a chance. You trusted me, you accepted me. I can hardly offer anything less in return."

We're rooted to the spot. Allow me to stress that Daphne Greengrass is not the sentimental type. She does not do motivational talks; she's the sort of person to tell you through deeds, not through words, that she cares for you.

It must've crushed her on the inside to admit all that out loud.

I ruffle her hair and affectionately nuzzle my cheek against hers, because I am a creep and have no sense of personal space. She lets out an indignant squawk but does not try breaking away.

"You've gone soft, Daffy," I complain. "I liked it better when we were lugging around a solid block of ice."

Her cheeks go pink.

"I opened my heart to you—" she sputters.

"And the subzero temperatures did not kill me, it's a miracle."

Trace whacks me on the back of my head. I pout and let go of Daph, who immediately conjures a mirror to adjust her hair.

"Oh stop it, you," Trace says to me. But there's a smile on her face, a pep in her step. Her chin's no longer buried in her chest and her eyes have regained their warmth. She's still nervous, but she no longer seems to be seconds away from offing herself.

Daph catches my eye. We trade nods. She's come through for me and Trace, even if it's at great personal cost to herself. After all, as we both know, I'm never going to let her live this down.

Duelling arenas tend to be located underground. This, of course, makes the most sense: it is next to impossible to ward enough ground level space in the muggle world without some overzealous administrator raising hue and cry about it. There are eternal fears about breaching the statute of secrecy. Even Ministries tend to be buried underground, with only the entryways accessible through a telephone booth or a subway station or the like. In fact, if we weren't called wizards, I suspect we'd be called mole people: schools and marketplaces aside, the vast majority of our basic amenities are underground.

To get to this one we have to first locate an antique shop. The shop is only one of several entry points into the set of arenas— it is a world championship, and crowds can reach up to five thousand per match, especially for the semi finals and beyond, so they have dozens of locations around the city that can be used to avail the tourney grounds. This is the entrance we've been designated.

The shop shimmers between two skyscrapers, and people pass it by without giving it a second glance. The silver bells attached to a sprig of mistletoe tintinnabulate when I push the door open. The shelves are bursting with trinkets from the ages. At the counter there's a hunched over crone. She takes one look at our robes and gets a clipboard out.

"The championship?" She asks.

I blink. Her accent is American, not Italian.

"Er, yeah."

"To watch or to duel?"

"The latter."

She peers at me through the brittle grey strands shadowing her eyes.

"Invite," she demands.

The world championship is by invite only. There are sixty-four participants—thirty spots go to the top thirty duelists in the world, and the other thirty-four are winners of various national tournaments. Each of us has been mailed a hexagonal pendant. Inscribed on it are the duelist's name, rank and the details of their team.

I reach into my robes, pull it out and toss it to her. She slips it into a cubical device which glows amber.

"Harry Potter," she hums. "World rank, fourteenth. Second, Tracey Davis; Healer, Daphne Greengrass?"

"That's correct," I say.

The crone riffles through the underside of her desk and whips out a tray.

"Wands, please," she orders. I pass her mine, then look around. Daph's holding hers out to me, handle first. Trace is still rummaging about in her robes for hers.

Sometimes I despair over the state of this girl.

The crone puts my wand in her tray. The tray makes a bleeping sound and shoots out a slip of paper.

"Potter. Ash and dragon heartstring, twelve and a half inches?"

I nod.

I give her Daph's wand, even as the crone returns me mine. Trace has finally found hers, which she passes on to the crone.

"Greengrass," she says, after the summary series of clicks and blips. "Ten inches, aspen and unicorn hair?"

"That's right," Daph says, taking her wand back.

"Davis. Blackwood and . . . griffin claw? Ten and three quarters? That's got to be a collector's item."

"Mr. Olivander said it went unsold for three centuries," Tracey beams.

"And if you could differentiate the handle from the tip, you'd be the best of us," I mutter.

Trace sticks out her tongue at me, then accepts her wand back.

The woman sighs.

"Mr. Potter, you know the rules," she says. "The association bears no liability in the event of disability or death, especially for you. Please note that your second is underage and your healer unlicensed. This qualifies as gross negligence. Therefore it is my duty, as a representative of the ICW, to recommend that you find yourself a better second and a better healer."

The girls stiffen.

I laugh.

"I'll risk it," I say.

"Very well." Her lips are drawn together in a disapproving line. She reminds me of McGonagall. "Seventh floor, arena number twelve. Here are your passes. Step this way, please."

She tosses us three cards, then draws back a curtain. We step into a narrow passageway that inexplicably arches upwards. We undertake an arduous climb, the walls on either side narrowing, palpitating, resplendent with runes . . .

We come to a halt in an odd room with every appearance of an attic. There's a grinding sound after the three of us enter, and a door shimmers shut at the end of the passageway we've just vacated.

"Hang tight," a disconnected voice intones.

We're not given any time to question this pronouncement. Daph shrieks in terror as the walls whirl three sixty degrees; the floor gyrates like a Rubik's cube. I'm quick to whip my wand out and anchor us, even as everything around us turns into a hurricane of activity. The room is a torrent— it rattles downwards with a sickening lurch, and for a moment we're in free fall. Shadowy shapes ghost past the shuddering oval window corkscrewed at one end. There's a retching sound behind me, then a weak moan: that'll be Daph, she's claustrophobic and mortally afraid of twisters and other animate overlarge superstructures that hurtle into oblivion. The first time she and I travelled a floo together, she emptied the contents of her stomach all over my shoes. I can only pray that her vomit this time is a self-contained trickle and not a projectile.

With a discordant boom the room comes to a halt. The door blocking our escape melts away. We're on the seventh floor. I look behind me, and Daph is very green and very nearly in tears: she's hunched over, and there's a spatter of sick staining the hem of her robes. I vanish it then scourgify the hem, even as Trace, uncaring for her own safety, sidles over and rubs Daph in the back whilst cooing out consolations. Daph herself hastily rummages through her handbag and pulls out a bottle of water. She glugs it down like a tourist stuck in a desert.

"We're never doing that again," she chokes out between gulps.

"We're stuck here for a fortnight," I point out. "We'll be doing that at least ten more times, Daph, depending on how far we go in the tournament."

She moans and rights herself on trembling legs. I link an arm with hers and step into the passageway. It slopes downwards this time, then blooms out into an inflorescence of lights. The air carries the scent of camphor, the walls are wreathed in ancient curlicues and arabesques. On the nearside there's a cafeteria, on the far-side a couple of security personnel stand guard over a black door; right in front of us, sealed off with a chain, is a waiting area for the international press. A few early stragglers have taken their seats already. With a jolt of surprise I recognize the yawing figure seated at the very front: robes of mauve, locks of faded blonde, a dash of cherry drawn across puffed out lips in a vain attempt at seductiveness. Rita Skeeter meets my eyes, springs to her feet in surprise and beckons me.

My first instinct is to ignore her. She and I have a frosty relationship— I was first introduced to her by Gilderoy Lockhart, who milked every iota of publicity and goodwill he could out of taking on 'a penniless castaway whose mother is a vegetative torture victim'. Rita talked about my overcast emerald orbs, my tender good looks, my ruined lineage, my general scruffiness, my prodigious talent and my desire to learn from a national hero. Of course, after I accidentally killed a man, she was the first to stick the knife in. She's been on my shitlist ever since.

But I hesitate. While the press are vultures, and while Rita in particular is the worst of them, I have a vague notion that I could use her to find myself gainful employment. There are always rotten purebloods shopping around to provide an education in 'the fine art of duelling' to their equally rotten progeny, and whilst I'd usually never stoop so low as to serve the type, I find myself in desperate need of money. Purebloods pay their tutors well. If Rita were to exaggerate my accomplishments, and if I were to get to the quarters or the semis, then I'd be in with a good shot of making five hundred galleons out of a single summer of instruction.

It is too good an opportunity to pass up.

With a resigned sigh, ignoring the twin looks of disbelief Trace and Daph shoot me, I correct my course and walk towards Skeeter.

"Rita, darlin'!" I greet, plastering on a cheerful smile and extending my arms for a hug. The girls behind me are rooted to the spot; they think I've gone insane.

"Harry Potter." Her leer is predatory but she accepts the hug. Much to my gratitude, the bronze chain that cordons off the press still separates us, and she can't lean in too close. I inhale her cloying perfume; I thump her spine. We break apart.

"You did a hatchet job on me with that piece last summer," I say, still grinning. My jaws are starting to ache; I suspect my grin is too wide and toothy to pass off as natural.

"It's just business, dear. You understand, don't you? Of course you do, Harry, you're smart, else you wouldn't be talking to me right now." She peers around me. Her leer widens. "And these fine girls? Your girlfriends, I presume?"

Her notepad snaps open and levitates next to her. Her quick quotes quill floats in the space next to it, eager and poised.

"My groupies," I confess, palms outspread. "Members of my rapidly growing harem. Here today, gone tomorrow. Gone with the wind, gone kicking and screaming, most likely, cuz' they can't get enough of me. But between you and me, Rita? I'll forget their faces by this time next week. The Harry Potter cult spans Britain after all, and I'm here at this tournament to make it a worldwide phenomenon. I'll be swimming in women before this is done, mark my words."

I've thrown her off. Her mouth's an O— she looks scandalised. Her quick quotes quill trembles, then strums out a desolate beat against the parchment.

"Aren't they . . . er, you know, your healer and—"

"Rita, Rita," I puff obnoxiously, "forget them, they're irrelevant. Me, though? I'm a winner. Crushed everyone in the competition to make it here, didn't I? Youngest person ever to participate in the world championship, aren't I? Sing hallelujahs to your Lacroixes, your Shacklebolts, your Grimsditches, your Grogroviches and what not, but I'm the best there is, I'll beat 'em all, hell I'll eat 'em all for breakfast." I thump my chest. "It's coming home, Rita, it's coming back to England. Tournament's mine, everyone else is cannon fodder. Quote me on that if you want."

And before she can respond, I wink at her and whirl away. I strut pompously, the girls trailing after me. I daren't look behind, because I suspect Daph will stab me to death with an icepick if I do. But I sneak a glance at Trace, and she's biting her knuckles, trying her hardest not to laugh.

"I'll be your groupie anytime you want, Harry," she says sweetly.

"Flattered, Trace, but there's only one vacancy, and Daph's the one I want."

"Not if you're the last man on Earth," Daph swears. "But what in Merlin's name was that clownery about?"

"Optics." I head towards the security personnel.

"Optics? What, by sounding like an insufferable, delusional, womanising twit?"

"By sounding like Lockhart, yes."

Daph goes silent.

"There's no such thing as negative press, Daph. You give the people what they want. If I'm meek, measured and principled, that doesn't even make the papers, let alone the front page. If I'm Lockhart, on the other hand, then that's a larger than life caricature the public can gladly loathe whilst secretly admiring. It sells. It puts my name out there. They all want to be me, they all want to learn from me. There's money in that. Doubly so if I can back it up."

"And if you can't, you're going to be mocked, disdained, vilified—"

"So, no different from what it's always been like, then?"

She falls silent again.

"Did Lockhart teach you all that?" Trace pulls out a stick of chewing gum from her sleeve and pops it into her mouth. She procures a second from the other sleeve and offers it to me.

"Watching him did," I say, taking it. "Trust me, there's nothing calculated about how he does it, he's just a shit human being. But people lap it up— even when Dumbledore fired him for sleeping with that seventh year it did not damage his reputation. Enhanced it, if anything."

"What was her name, again?" Daph scrunches up her face. "Nym-something, no?"

"Tonks, I think. I dunno, some generic chick with a fetish for older men. Not the first, probably not the last. All consensual, apparently. I don't doubt it— Lockhart's good looking, he can be persuasive. She was not underage either, which is why they didn't cart him off to Azkaban."

"Heard it ruined her chances of becoming an Auror," Daph hums.

"Wouldn't know, didn't keep track of such shit back in the day— was obsessed with duelling and that's the one thing the bellend could teach."

"He was good at DADA," Trace says, chewing. "Best we've had."

"Nah, Moody was better," I respond, "and 'egads, you know I hate that unhinged fossil."

"He hates you too," Daph snorts.

"Due to my dad. Now hush, Daffy, we're here."

We're at the door. A guard strides up to meet me. He has a writing pad of some sort in one hand.

"Name?" He asks. This one has a faint Italian accent.

"Harry Potter."

He ticks a box.

"Pass?"

I offer him the three passes the crone gave us. He scrutinises them, then gives them back.

"Your duel's in an hour," he announces. "You can go to the waiting room," he gestures with his thumb to the door he's guarding, "or you can sit in the cafeteria. I'll call you when there's ten minutes left."

I turn to Trace and Daph.

"You girls fancy a bite?"

They both shake their heads.

"Waiting room it is," I say to the guard.

He steps back. The other guard traces a set of patterns across the door with his wand. It flashes white, then creaks open. I take a deep breath, square my shoulders and walk right in.

There are sixteen groups of four each. The winner of each group goes through to the knockout rounds. Each round is five minutes, each fight has five rounds. The group winner is ascertained on the basis of total rounds won across three fights. In the event of a tie, it goes to head-to-head record. To facilitate all this, they've also provided us with sixteen separate arenas sprawled across various floors of the building. Each of us fights a duel a day, and at the end of the group stages there are two rest days.

Simple stuff, right?

It is generally good practice to study your opponents beforehand. Trace, Daph and I have dossiers on most of the candidates here, not to mention an assortment of pensieve memories that we have painstakingly procured and combed through. The pro duelling community is closely knit, so it is common practice to walk up to someone and offer to trade a spell for a spell or a memory for a memory. I have done this with impunity on several occasions— it's how I've built up my formidable dossier.

Now let me introduce you to my best friend. No, not that one— not the slender freckled good-looking brunette of goofy propensities and middling height— I mean the other one: my pocket pensieve.

It is a battered secondhand piece I bought off a desultory drug dealer in Knockturn. He was coked off his tits, so I only paid thirty galleons for it. There are about fifty pieces of this thing in the world, and when bought brand new it costs five hundred. For context, I could sell my kidneys for five galleons on the black market; I could sell Dumbledore's for five hundred, I suppose, but only because someone somewhere must've put a bounty on him.

Anyway, I paid thirty for this, and this pensieve alone has won me hundreds of galleons over the last year. It is through the prism of this artefact that I dissect the style of whomsoever I am about to face; it is through its visual aid that I identify their favourite branches of magic, their prominent spell chains, their tendencies to move or stay still, the quality of their wrist work, their tells and giveaways, variance of tactics across rounds, and so on. It is with this that I have diligently prepared for each of my group opponents, dedicating several days to picking apart quirks and potential weaknesses.

So imagine my surprise when the first thing the screen in the waiting room tells me is that all my prep is null and void, and that the order for the matches has been scrambled at the last second. I stare at it in stunned disbelief as it broadcasts to the world that my first group match is not against the champion of Hungary, which is whom I've prepared for. Instead, there's a question mark next to my opponent's name.

"If I turn that screen into a Toblerone and shove it up the ref's arse, do you think they'd notice?" I ask, eye twitching.

I sound calm, but really, I am fucking incandescent with rage.

Trace has lost the skip in her step — prior this she at least had our prep to fall back on; now she's nervous again, and all at sea.

"Maybe there's some mistake," Daph tells me.

"Maybe," I concede, not believing it. "Right, lemme go find the referee, then."

"No need," the pile of rags squatting on a bench to the side informs me. I squint as it straightens, and much to my distress I realise it's a ghoul. A talking ghoul. This suddenly takes on the absurdist tenor of a fever dream. Kafka must be rolling in his grave.

I pause. I gulp. I level my wand at its heart.

"Oh put that away, will you?" It growls. "There's no mistake, I'm the referee for your match."

"They've gone too far this time with creature inclusivity," I say to it, wand still raised.

"Go on then, talk yourself into a disqualification, racist," it goads.

"At least I'm supposed to talk. You're not— your kind is incapable of speech, abomination."

"And yours of thought, evidently. I'm a half ghoul, you nitwit. Now put that thing away, or I'll give your opponent a walkover."

Grumbling, I holster my wand. I very carefully refrain from asking whether it was its mum or its dad that was the creature loving degenerate with a fetish for ghouls.

"There's no mistake," it says again. "The group stages were dull and one-sided at the last five tournaments. We suspect this was due to the level of preparation rather than any difference in skill. So it's been shuffled around this time to make all preparation useless. You're not special, snowflake; everyone starts with the same disadvantage."

"You could've saved everyone a lot of time leaving the match ups undeclared instead of baiting us with bogus flowcharts of who fights whom," I fume. I am tempted to hex this thing into Kingdom Come, especially due to the twisted sneer it pins me with.

"And miss out on this reaction, wizard?" It taunts.

I seriously consider getting myself disqualified, just for the vicious joy of turning this crusty pile of rags into ash.

"Just tell us who we're fighting before I throttle you, ref," I growl.

Its eyes gleam. Its sneer grows more pronounced.

"For your first match, Kingsley Shacklebolt," it announces.

Silence. Dead silence. And then—

"Aw, bugger, we're going out in the group stage, aren't we?" Trace says faintly.

Indeed we are.

Endnotes:

Finished my re-read of OOTP. Despite its redundancy as a work (the prophecy adds nothing the reader doesn't already know, and its pursuit is pointless), despite its many, many plot holes, and despite my many, many, many complaints regarding canon Harry, I found it to be very charming and very well written. Plot oriented; the summer's slow, but it really picks up once you get to Hogwarts. Rowling creates a sense of mystery. She's got solid dialogue, and she also writes people well (I'm not getting into her political stances here— I prefer to separate the artist from the person). It's her greatest accomplishment.

If you're wondering why the hype around Kingsley, then having just read OOTP, I'm convinced he's the strongest Order member after Dumbledore (though Sirius has a case as well), so there's that.

My chapter lengths will range from three thousand words to twenty thousand words. A chapter's done when it feels right— felt right to stop here.

This arc should be 3-4 more chapters.

This update was only this prompt because I spent fourteen hours on Sunday writing for this fic. No, really. Fourteen fucking hours. I checked. And believe it or not, I still only got fifty percent of the chapter done that day.

Reviews. They help. Like, a lot. Please leave one.