The announcement came at the start-of-term feast and Cael felt, sitting next to Hermione, the very sensation of a wave passing through a hall that had not been expecting one.
Dumbledore stood up after the puddings.
He held a goblet, briefly, and tapped it.
He waited for the noise to fall.
He told them, with the calm of a man who had had three months over the summer to think about how to announce it, that there would be no inter-House Quidditch Cup that year because Hogwarts was hosting the Triwizard Tournament.
The tournament would feature champions from three schools.
Cael, who knew the words *Triwizard Tournament* without being able to immediately call to mind why he knew them, caught the word *Tournament* and then the word *champions* and then the careful way Dumbledore *no student under the age of seventeen will be permitted to enter*, and felt — alongside the rest of the Hall — the small mass-sigh of teenage disappointment, layered with relief.
Beside him Hermione made a approving noise.
*Reasonable.
Three deaths last time it was held.* “Three deaths.” “Look it up, Cael, it’s all in *A Concise History of Magical Tournaments*.
They stopped holding it in 1792.” “And they’re holding it again now.” “With strong safeguards, the Headmaster says.” “The strong safeguards are why, last time, only three people died.” “Yes.” “Mm.” He filed the tournament in the back of his head as a thing that would be happening on the periphery of his work, and he turned his attention back to the puddings.
Across the table, Harry was doing the same.
Cael caught his eye briefly.
Harry shrugged.
Hermione, between them, said something brisk about *if either of you tries to put your name in, I will personally hex you*, and Harry *I have absolutely no intention of putting my name in, Hermione*, and Cael *I am fourteen and look it, the cup will laugh me out of the building*.
He had not yet, that night, had any reason to think any harder about the tournament than that.
The reasons came in pieces over the next few weeks.
The first was Mad-Eye Moody.
Moody had arrived as the new Defence Against the Dark Arts professor — Lupin having departed at the end of the previous year, gracefully, in the way Lupin did things, with a single handshake to Cael at the platform and a quiet *write*.
Cael had written.
Lupin had written back.
The correspondence was a small ongoing pleasure and a real one, and Cael did not want the new DADA professor on principle, simply because the new one wasn’t Lupin.
He had, in his bed the first night back, told himself to be fair.
*Give the man a term*, he had said to himself.
*He might be excellent.* The man was not excellent.
The man was — Cael’s pattern attention, by now, was sharper than he had any right to expect at fourteen — *wrong*.
The wrongness was not gross.
It was not, at any single moment, anything Cael could have pointed at and *that*.
It was also small.
And it was Moody casting a basic Lumos in the first lesson of term, and Cael, sitting in the third row, watching the wand-feel as not-quite-Moody.
It was also Moody casting a basic Stunner in the second lesson, in a demonstration on a dummy, and the wand-feel that time being *exactly* Moody — solid, steady, the cast a long-career Auror would produce in his sleep.
And it was, in the third lesson, a moment when Moody was demonstrating the Imperius Curse — *which he should not be demonstrating to fourth-years*, Hermione hissed to Cael, *Cael, this is on the* unforgivable *list* — and the wand-feel had wavered, mid-cast, between Moody and not-Moody, like a radio drifting between two stations.
The cast had landed; the spider on the desk had danced; Moody had turned away and made a joke.
Cael had recognised the wavering and filed it and said nothing.
He filed it for two weeks.
He did not, in those two weeks, develop a theory.
He wrote, in the back of the notebook, on the page he had been using for things-I-don’t-yet-have-a-theory-for, the entry *Moody — wand signature inconsistent.
Mechanism unidentified.
Possibilities: 1) Moody using two wands, 2) Polyjuice, 3) impostor, 4) something else.* He had drawn a question mark next to *2)*.
He had not crossed any of them out.
The second reason came in October.
The Goblet of Fire, in the middle of the Great Hall on its dais, ate Harry’s name one Friday evening at dinner.
It ate the names of the three actual champions first — a tall boy from Durmstrang named Krum, a tall girl from Beauxbatons named Delacour, a Hufflepuff named Diggory — and the Hall had begun to settle into the post-announcement noise when the Goblet did the thing it was not supposed to do.
It belched.
It produced a fourth piece of parchment.
The parchment landed, gentle as a leaf, in Dumbledore’s hand.
Dumbledore read it.
The Hall went silent in pieces.
Dumbledore looked up.
“Harry Potter.” It was the not-Moody Cael was watching, when it happened.
He was not watching Harry.
He was, on instinct, watching the high table, and specifically watching Moody, and what he saw on Moody’s face for a half-second was not surprise at all.
It was the clean satisfaction of a man who had set a clock on the mantel that morning and had just heard it strike.
Then Moody’s face was Moody’s face again.
Cael filed it.
He filed it deeply.
He did not, at the time, have what to do with it.
He could not, at fourteen, without proof that he could explain to anyone, walk up to McGonagall and say *the new DADA professor has just shown me a face*.
It would not, he knew, be heard.
He could perhaps, eventually, tell Snape.
He had been telling Snape a great many things lately.
He decided he would tell Snape after the First Task, when he had — possibly — more.
Harry walked up to the dais in the silence of the Hall like a boy walking up to his own funeral.
The third reason came after, when Cael had walked Harry back to the common room and watched him sit on the rug in front of the fire with his head in his hands, and watched Hermione fuss around him with hot chocolate that Harry was not drinking, and Ron, in the corner, sitting very stiffly and not looking at Harry, in the early shape of an argument he was about to have with himself for several days.
Cael had sat next to Harry on the rug.
He had told her nothing for a while.
He had let Hermione fuss.
After Hermione had drifted to the next chair to glare at Ron, he had, softly, “Harry.” “Yeah.” “You didn’t put your name in.” “I didn’t put my name in.” “Right.” “You believe me.” “Yes.” “Without me having to argue.” “Yes.” “Why.” Cael had thought about this for a moment.
He had been about to say *I just do*, which would have been true but inadequate.
He had landed on something else.
“Because somebody else did.
And the somebody else has been around Hogwarts long enough to have the access to do it, and is being deliberate enough that they aren’t being caught yet.
I don’t know who.
I have ideas.
I’m going to wait a bit before I share them.
But I’ve been watching things that are wrong, and one of them is you-having-a-fourth-piece-of-parchment-out-of-the-Goblet, and I don’t think you put yourself in there.
So no, I don’t think you did.
I think you got framed.” Harry had stared at him in the firelight.
“What ideas.” “I’ll tell you when I’ve got them properly.
I’m not going to throw a name at you when I don’t have evidence.
I will tell you, though.
Soon.
Probably this term.
Are you going to be all right.” “No.
But I’ll handle it.” “You’ll handle it.” “I’ll handle it.” That had been the conversation.
Cael had stayed on the rug another twenty minutes.
Ron had eventually gone up to bed without speaking.
Hermione had gone up shortly after, with a precise nod at Cael that *I will deal with him in the morning*.
Harry and Cael had sat alone in front of the fire, not talking, until Harry finally stood up and *I’m going to bed*, and Cael had *I’ll be up*, and stayed downstairs another half-hour with the notebook on his knee, writing.
The entry that night was longer than usual.
It said, at the top: *The worst spell available to me is the most healing spell I have.
I need to know how to cast it reliably before I need to use it.* He underlined *reliably* twice.
It was the third double underline he had ever made.
He went to bed.
He lay awake.
He could feel the project shifting under him.
The Patronus and the Protego were operational, but the AK was not.
The AK had been a theoretical priority.
Tonight it had become a practical one.
He thought about what would be needed.
And he thought about the bird he would need — a dying bird, ideally, an animal far enough gone that consent was impossible and survival was the question.
He also thought about location: the Forest, deep in, somewhere centaurs did not patrol.
And he thought about timing: before the First Task, if he could manage it.
He had until November.
The First Task was in November.
He had four weeks.
He could find a bird in four weeks.
He could also find a bird in a fortnight if he had to.
He turned over.
The dormitory was full of breathing.
Above him, somebody — Ron, probably — said something inarticulate in his sleep, the sort of half-syllable a person made when a dream had asked him a difficult question.
Cael let the breathing move around him and slept, eventually, with the project softly resorting itself in his head.
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