It happened when he was at the Quidditch World Cup with the Weasleys, and the spell he had to use for the first time in his life was not a spell he had ever wanted to use.
The day before the riot had been, with hindsight, almost perfect.
He had walked the World Cup grounds with Ron and Harry and Ginny and Hermione, and the twins tried selling them each of three different pieces of questionable merchandise, and Mr.
Weasley pointed out everything related to magical-Muggle interface and explained to them in his infectiously enthusiastic tone how it was either wonderful or terrible or both.
Cael, who had lived in Hogwarts for six months without highlighting the part of his head that contained *something else*, had found Mr.
Weasley fascinating.
Mr.
Weasley was — Cael had concluded while walking past a tent which looked like a saloon car from the outside and a four-room house from the inside — a person who had been trying all his life to understand the world from which Cael had come.
Mr.
Weasley did not know it.
But Cael was pretty sure that if Mr.
Weasley knew, he would have been driven mad by enthusiasm.
He had not considered telling Mr.
Weasley.
He would save it for the appropriate occasion.
*Muggle electricity uses a colour code: blue wires are neutral, brown wires carry current.* Mr.
Weasley deserved it.
The match itself was fast and spectacular, and Cael was not able to follow it.
He loved Quidditch in the same way he loved weather — he did not care enough to take sides.
The only thing he had cared about during the evening was observing the crowd.
The Weasleys around him had been too noisy.
Krum caught the Snitch, but Ireland won.
Mr.
Weasley took them back to the tent.
Hermione gave her usual sensible advice regarding sleep.
Ron gave his usual nonsense advice about staying awake.
The lights began to flicker out in the campsite, one after another.
Tents became less chaotic.
The screams broke out an hour later.
He was still undressing when Mr.
Weasley opened the tent flap and, with a voice Cael had never heard from him before, said *out, all of you, out, now, into the woods, do not stop*.
This was not Mr.
Weasley’s voice.
This was the voice of an ex-aide to a Minister who had dealt with many crises before.
They got out.
Hermione held his sleeve.
The ground was slippery with spilled beverages.
Smoke permeated the air.
He had lost everyone within three minutes.
No one was at fault.
This was typical of a campsite full of children racing at night, with screams, fire on the horizon, people running everywhere.
Hermione’s hand had been holding his sleeve, and then it was gone.
He called her name, but the crowd had picked it up and drowned it out.
He had moved towards the woods.
Sometime in between two tents, he had seen the masks.
Hooded people moving in formation, lifting their wands upwards.
People on the air, being forced to fly and make circles at a height of fifty feet above the ground.
Cael’s brain had processed the sight without any emotional response.
He kept moving.
In the end, he ended up at the edge of a row of tents with two children.
He did not know them.
They were not Weasleys.
It was a girl of about eight years old, wearing nightclothes, and a little boy, probably not more than five years old, dressed in pyjamas.
The girl was holding the boy’s hand.
She had been crying without making a sound.
The boy had not been crying yet.
He had the wide eyes and rigid expression of a child who had not yet determined whether this was the kind of fear that ended.
The hooded figure came out of nowhere, rounding the corner of the tent.
Cael had not had enough time to think, and, as he thought about it later, this was fortunate because it was his thinking brain that would have hesitated.
The hooded figure lifted the wand.
It was also looking at the boy.
And it said in a voice glee-filled and sing-song under the mask *Crucio.* The cast left the wand.
Cael cast.
He cast automatically.
He had not known until that second what he was going to cast.
He had not expected in any of his training that something like this could happen to him — an innocent bystander, not himself, someone he could not attack, a spell that had already been fired.
The reversed Protego would be wrong; the curse was already beyond the threshold.
The reversed Stupefy would be wrong; the caster was not the one who needed stopping.
What came out of his wand was not his decision.
It was — the *inverse* of what was coming at him.
In the air, between the figure and the boy, there was Crucio.
The spell Cael needed to cast was the one that *reversed* what was happening to the boy.
He thought Crucio while at the same time the meaning of Crucio was the inverse of Crucio, and his wand replied to him.
The reversed Crucio met the Crucio in the air.
The Crucio dissolved.
The boy inhaled sharply.
He did not scream.
Instead, the boy went — Cael saw it — momentarily completely still.
His pupils dilated.
His mouth parted, and out of it came a tiny involuntary sound that was not pain.
Cael knew the colour of his own cast — no pain, the *opposite* of pain, the sharp full-body sensation of pleasure.
The boy felt it.
The boy’s body froze under the effect, swaying slightly.
He sat down.
He sat down on the grass, slowly, with the stunned expression of a child who has just been hit by a wave of energy that cannot be categorized.
The masked figure had expected screams.
It got, instead, three seconds of silence, in which the cursed child sat down with a small, almost breathy noise, while his older sister stared at him in puzzlement, and the masked figure did the same.
The masked figure had a moment of — Cael saw it in the tiny set of the shoulders under the robe — *operational confusion*.
The cast had failed.
The cast was supposed to cause screams.
It caused silence.
The figure did not know what to do.
Cael acted in the second.
He did not engage.
He did not react, by instinct, to go on the offense.
He grabbed the older girl by the wrist and dragged her down behind the tent.
He scooped up the boy, who was small enough to lift easily, and put the tent line between himself and the masked figure.
He cast a reversed Protego in the direction of the figure at the lowest power level he could, the politely address setting, the one that had staggered Neville.
The masked figure reeled backwards two steps.
Cael did not wait for recovery.
He took the children.
He ran.
He found a Portkey point forty seconds later, with a long line of campers crying and one Ministry official desperately trying to maintain order.
He shoved the children into the line.
He told the older girl her brother had been hit with *something but not the worst*, and to make sure the Ministry medic looked him over before leaving the camp.
He did not give the girl his name.
She did not ask for it.
Her brother was alive.
He turned.
He walked out of the line.
He walked into the forest.
He met Hermione twenty minutes later, frantic, her wand in hand, scanning the faces coming towards her.
He had not, until she attacked him, realized the extent of her anger at him for being lost.
He let her be angry.
He let her swear at him for an extensive amount of time without offering any reply at all.
It took several minutes for her to calm down enough for the others to reach them.
Mr.
Weasley was missing a shoe.
Ron was clutching a stick with obvious intent to use.
Harry was dirty in a way suggesting at least one fall.
They went home in the morning.
In the notebook, two days later, in the quiet of his own dormitory, with the dawn just breaking outside and Ron snoring in the next bed, Cael wrote: *Reversed Crucio used in the field.
Target: an eight-year-old boy.
Result: redirected pain-curse effect to cause involuntary pleasure response.
Target physically uninjured.
Target had three seconds of acute pleasure and inability to act during that period.
Caster (me) was not targeted in retaliation by attacker due to operational confusion with results.* He stopped writing.
He looked back at the entry.
It did, effectively, what any good entry did — accurately record the cast and its effects.
The entry did not, however, address at all the other element — the aspect that was not going to leave him, which was that the eight-year-old boy had *sat down* on the grass and made the little, unconsenting noise in his throat, and that he had looked, for three seconds from the grass, the way a small drunk adult might look — confused, compliant, dazed.
This boy had not been harmed, would, in fact, according to any sane and reasonable assessment, walk away from this day with his physical integrity and sanity intact because of the cast.
This cast had, at fourteen, manipulated a child into a response he did not understand.
Cael wrote, in somewhat smaller print below the main entry: *Ethical issue unresolved.
Strategic issue is that the casting worked.
I need to discuss ethical implications with Hermione.
Snape will probably disagree, but his opinion will also be correct.
I have to live with the truth of both.* He underlined the word *worked* once.
He did not underline it twice.
For this particular cast, he did not feel the need for a ritual.
He closed the notebook.
He went down to breakfast.
The Great Hall was filled with the dull morning conversation of the institution’s inhabitants after the processing of a national event.
Hermione, at the table, looked up from the *Daily Prophet* with the tension in her jaw that said she was preparing to demand something of him.
He sat down.
He buttered toast.
“Cael.” “Yes.” “What did you do at the Cup.” “Define ‘did.'” “*Cael.*” “I’ll tell you.
Tonight.
Library.
After supper.
Bring something to write on.” She looked at him for a second.
Apparently, whatever she saw satisfied her.
She nodded crisply, and returned to her *Prophet*.
He buttered more toast.
The Hall was alive around him.
Outside the windows, the day was bright and bitter, and the sun hung in a low yellow sphere over the distant tree branches.
He was fourteen years old.
He had cast something he was going to carry.
He had decided he would carry it.
He kept eating his toast.
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