25th August 1994, The Burrow, Ottery St Catchpole, Devon, 5:17 AM
The kitchen of the Burrow at dawn had a particular kind of hush about it—the hush of a house that had resigned itself, after decades of early risings for various improbable reasons, to being awake before the sun was. The range had been lit since four. A kettle that had apparently been designed by someone with firm opinions about boiling efficiency was maintaining its whistle at a determined low, and Molly Weasley was pressing parcels of breakfast into various hands with the systematic thoroughness of a quartermaster outfitting a regiment.
"Bacon sandwiches are in the brown paper. Tomato rolls are in the blue. Don't mix them up, Ronald, or Fred will eat both out of principle. Ginny, darling, your cardigan—"
"Mum, I've got it—"
"—and you'll thank me when you're sitting on a hillside in Devon at five in the morning. Harry, sweetheart, have you eaten? You haven't, I can see it in your face. Here—"
A tomato roll arrived in Harry's hand before he could frame a response. Molly's warmth had the same quality as her cooking: resisting it required more energy than accepting it, and was generally less pleasant.
"Thank you, Mrs Weasley."
"Molly, dear. I've told you. Molly."
She hugged him once, briskly, and then she was off to catch Fred by the sleeve before he could pocket something from the kitchen dresser that he had clearly decided he needed. Ethan stood by the back door in a travelling coat of charcoal grey, his silver-framed glasses reflecting the dim amber light of the kitchen, his silver pocket watch turned once in his palm with the easy habit of a man who had timed many journeys in his life. He caught Harry's eye and the corner of his mouth rose fractionally—a shared moment of appreciation for Molly's weather system of hospitality.
Bill, Charlie, and Percy had already left for the site—Apparition being, as Bill had pointed out with the particular ease of a curse-breaker who had Apparated across half of Egypt, considerably simpler once you had a license and somewhere to land that wasn't a field full of excitable tourists.
The rest of them would be taking the Portkey.
"Right," Arthur said, clapping his hands together with the slightly manic cheerfulness of a man who had been up since three and had drunk tea of questionable strength ever since. "Everyone accounted for? Satchels, tickets, boots?" He looked round. "Boots, Ron."
"I've got boots."
"On your feet, Ron."
"Oh."
Molly pressed a last kiss to Ginny's forehead and then to Hermione's, who had straightened slightly for it with the particular poise of someone receiving something she had not grown up expecting. "All of you. Be careful. Arthur—"
"I know, dear."
"—watch the children at the campsite, and Fred and George—"
"We'll be angels," Fred said.
"Literal angels," George confirmed.
"No." Molly said, with the particular directness of a woman who had stopped believing in that particular transformation when the twins were approximately four years old. "Just... behave yourselves. Arthur, Ethan, watch them."
"Watched," Ethan said mildly.
The morning air outside the Burrow was cold in the way August mornings before dawn could be—the damp chill that sat under a day that would later be warm, breath pluming softly, the overgrown garden silvered with dew, the gnomes mercifully still asleep in their hedge. The sky above the orchard had the deep blue of pre-dawn, a few stars still visible over the thatched roof.
"Stoatshead Hill," Arthur said, settling into tour-guide mode as they started along the lane. "Two hundred Portkeys placed across Britain, roughly... Ludo's people managing the lot. Thousands of wizards converging on Dartmoor for the next three days. A remarkable feat of logistics, really, even if they did give several of them to Arnold Peasegood, who once lost a whole box of them in a pub in Leicester. Not a Ministry story I'm particularly meant to tell—"
"You just told it," Hermione pointed out, whose eagerness had overridden any pre-dawn sluggishness within approximately six paces of leaving the kitchen.
"Did I? Best keep it between ourselves, then."
They walked along the narrow hedgerow-lined lane with the fields beginning to emerge out of darkness on either side—stubble catching the first grey of the sky, rooks calling from somewhere, the particular smell of damp Devon earth underfoot. Ethan walked at Arthur's shoulder, listening to Arthur explain, with animated hand gestures, the Ministry's Portkey classification system, which Ethan received with the patience of a man who already knew the system intimately but understood that Arthur explaining it was the real pleasure.
Harry walked in the middle of the group with Ron on one side and Hermione on the other. His satchel was slung across his chest; Jasper had declined the travel perch in favour of nestling against the side of his neck under the collar of his jumper, where the warmth of him was a small steady comfort. In Harry's right hand, at about waist height and moving along with him in the air as he walked, a folded sheet of parchment floated. In the air beside it, a self-inking quill wrote with the patient precision of an instrument responding to something other than a hand.
Dear Luna,
Thank you for your letter and the photograph. The one of you looking up through the birch leaves at the moon, I don't know how your father managed to catch both, but it's the finest picture I've seen in some time. The creatures you described watching under that particular moon, I won't name them, since you said they prefer to remain privately known. I'm glad you had the sight of them. I rather think that was the sort of moment the Crumple-Horned Snorkack is merely an excuse to find.
We're on our way to the Quidditch World Cup final. The whole lot of us. I'll be taking photographs with the Atid Stella camera, as many as the roll allows, and then as many more as the roll pretends to allow, since Dad charmed it and I'll save the best ones for you. You'll tell me what the Wrackspurts look like in the stadium crowd, which I expect will be quite a report.
"Harry," Ron said, with the tone of a man who had been watching something for nearly a minute and had finally worked out what he was watching. "Is that you doing that?"
"Mm," Harry said, not looking up.
Hermione, who had been half-attending to Arthur, turned her head and promptly stopped walking. Ron bumped gently into her and neither of them noticed.
"You're writing that," Hermione said, "without touching it."
"Mm."
"Without a wand."
"Mm."
"Harry."
The quill paused in the air, considered Hermione with what Harry was quite sure was the quill's own polite opinion, and then continued with and I'll tell you properly once I've actually seen it all. Write as soon as you're back—
"How are you doing it?" Hermione demanded. "What's the theory? Is it an extension of silent casting, or something closer to pure intent, because I read that true wandless non-verbal work is almost exclusively the province of exceptionally experienced wizards, and that the control required to manage fine motor work like writing—"
"It is an extension of silent casting," Harry said mildly, "but not exactly." He thought about how to describe it. The dawn was beginning to lift itself over the fields now, greying everything by degrees. "The incantation and the wand are... shortcuts, I suppose. Dad taught me that magic is really just... threads. There are threads of it in me, coiled up in my core, and threads of it running through everything else. When you cast a spell you're pulling one of the threads in yourself to meet one of the threads outside, and the incantation is what tells the whole arrangement what shape to take."
Hermione's eyes had gone bright in the way they went when she encountered a new framework of knowledge she had not previously considered.
"So when you're doing this," Harry continued, "you're skipping the shortcut. Which means you have to do the shaping yourself." He gestured vaguely at the quill, which was adding a postscript. "It's harder for big spells. For small, simple things, light, mending, cleaning, moving a quill along a page... you can get the feel of it. Dad had me start with Lumos when I was nine. Then Nox, then Reparo, then Scourgify. Then non-verbal with a wand. Then non-verbal without a wand. Now we're at—" he gestured at the floating parchment, "—this. Daily-life spells, mainly. I'd not try to Apparate this way. I don't think I'd survive it."
"No wonder, back at our first year... the lesson with professor Flitwick... Harry," Hermione said, in a different tone entirely, "you have to teach me!"
"I—"
"I'm serious. The theoretical framework alone... threads, Harry, that's not in any of the standard texts, that's not in Standard Book of Spells or Magical Theory, that's not even in—"
"Hermione."
"I'll bring notes. I'll bring questions. I'll be a model student—"
"Hermione," Harry said, laughing now, "I'll teach you what I can. It took me years. It's not—it's not something you do in a week."
"I have years," Hermione said, with the particular determination of someone who had spent her life discovering that she had many more years than most things required.
Ron, who had been watching this exchange with the fond resignation of someone who had long since accepted that his two best friends occasionally spoke an entirely different language at each other, was by this point stroking Jasper under the jaw with the easy practised ease of a boy who had been allowed to handle the Snidget since the previous summer. Jasper's eyes were half-closed in contentment.
Ron glanced at the letter still floating in the air. He tilted his head. He read.
"Oh, bless," Ron said, very seriously.
Harry twitched. The quill wobbled.
"What."
"The finest picture I've seen in some time. That's proper. That's Keats, that is. That's the stuff."
"Ron—"
"Tell me, honestly—" Ron leaned over, examining the letter with the absorbed attention of a scholar, "—how many letters a week are we doing? Two? Three? Four? Because I saw you last night with one from her, grinning at it like she'd just invented pumpkin pasties, and you were at it for half an hour—"
"Ron."
Hermione had begun to laugh. It was the quiet, bubbling kind that meant she was trying not to and was failing gracefully.
"And poor Draco," Ron continued, shaking his head with mock sorrow. "Just sitting there with his Healer's manuals. Neglected. Cast aside. A once-proud correspondent, now reduced to—"
"Ron, I write to Draco and Luna, and you know this—"
"Do you though—"
"—and anyway, we're meeting him today, which is more than we're doing with Luna, so if anyone is being neglected it's quite the opposite—"
"Tell her," Ron said, rolling his eyes, "tell Luna that Hermione and Ginny send their regards, for Merlin's sake, do the courtesy—"
Harry's face was a colour that he suspected was visible even in the pre-dawn greyness. The quill added, at his direction—and with the faint extra pressure of someone getting a thing over with before further commentary was possible—Ron says Ginny and Hermione send their regards. I'll write properly tomorrow. Harry.
He sealed the letter with a pinch of his fingers. Hedwig had been circling, patient as ever, and now descended to his wrist. He tied the letter to her leg. "Baker Street when you're done," he told her quietly. "Rest."
Hedwig extended her leg, then fixed him with the look she reserved for occasions when he had overcomplicated her instructions.
She was gone, white against the brightening sky.
Stoatshead Hill rose out of the Devon morning at a deceptively steep angle. By the time they reached the top, even Fred and George had gone quiet, not from exhaustion, precisely, which would have required a more significant climb, but from the particular curiosity of seeing upward of thirty witches and wizards gathered on the summit of an otherwise ordinary hill at twenty-past-five in the morning, all looking with varying degrees of attention at an old boot.
"Ah, Amos!" Arthur called, striding forward with his usual warmth.
A stocky wizard with a neat beard turned, and his face broke into the large open smile of a man who had been waiting comfortably for company. Beside him stood a tall boy of about seventeen, whose handsome, friendly face Harry recognised at once.
Cedric Diggory.
"Arthur! Glorious morning for it, eh? Glorious. And this must be—" Amos's eyes swept the group and landed, with the specific attention of a man who had read a Prophet article recently, on Harry. Harry felt the familiar tightening in his shoulders.
"You're Harry Potter," Amos said, beaming.
"Y-yes, sir."
"Of course. Of course. Read all about the duelling business last year—four fifth-years, was it? Extraordinary. Ced was just telling me—"
"Dad."
"—yes, yes, all right, all right. Let me introduce. This is my Cedric. Hogwarts sixth-year, captain of the Hufflepuff side this season, and—"
"—and," Cedric cut in, with the smoothness of a boy who knew his father well and loved him anyway, "that's quite enough of that. Hullo." He extended a hand, first to Arthur, then to Ethan, then, with a smile that was neither theatrical nor shy, the smile of someone who simply meant it—to Harry.
Fred and George had arranged themselves with the particular neutral expression of two people who had not quite forgiven someone for winning a Quidditch match.
"Cedric Diggory," Amos was saying to Ethan, "beat Gryffindor last year. The final. Snitch in under forty minutes. First time Hufflepuff's seen anything like it in a decade—"
"It was a fluke, Dad," Cedric said, flatly and without visible shame. "Ron had been attacked by Dementors. Oliver declined a rematch. It's hardly a fair claim."
"Fair or not, it's the scoreboard that—"
"Dad."
Amos, to his credit, took the hint from his son with the grace of a man who had been taking it for some years. He clapped Cedric on the shoulder and turned to pester Arthur about seating arrangements in the Top Box instead.
Cedric, mercifully, turned back to Harry.
"Nice to meet you," Harry said. The words came out quietly but clear, without the stammer, and he was pleased about it in a private way, the way one is pleased about having tied a knot correctly the first time.
"And you, properly. I've only seen you across a Great Hall." Cedric's smile widened with genuine interest. "And your friend here... Ron, isn't it? Gryffindor Seeker. I've watched you fly. You've got a Seeker's instinct that's frankly unfair."
"Oh," Ron said, pleased and trying not to show it. "Cheers. Mate."
"And you must be Hermione Granger... you were brilliant at the Duelling Club exhibition last year, incidentally. The footwork. You've clearly had training."
"Karate," Hermione said, and her smile was pleased in the way she was pleased when intelligent observation found her. "Yes. I'm a green belt now."
"Impressive."
Cedric turned back to Harry, and for a moment he seemed to brighten with the kind of unselfconscious enthusiasm that Harry, who had lived for the entirety of his time at Hogwarts in careful avoidance of a certain first-year with a camera, recognised instantly and with an interior wince. The energy was not the same as Colin's: it was calmer, warmer, seventeen-year-old rather than eleven-year-old. But it was close enough that Harry's shoulders tensed automatically.
Cedric, to his credit, saw it. His whole posture adjusted, minutely, the step he had been about to take not taken, the hand he had been about to offer again kept at his side. He softened the enthusiasm without dimming the warmth.
'Good man,' Ethan's expression said quietly from some feet away.
"That duel last year," Cedric said, pitching his voice lower and unhurried, "the one against the fifth-years from Ravenclaw, that was extraordinary. I wasn't at the match, I only heard the accounts, but... you did that for Luna Lovegood, I understand. Stood up when her housemates wouldn't. That was properly done. Properly knightly."
Harry's face went a colour that would have been visible at any hour of the day. "Th-thank you," he managed. "Th-that's kind."
Ron and Hermione, traitorously, had both developed interested expressions.
Cedric, still deploying that calmer warmth, seemed to consider that the admiration ought to be mutual. "A-and you... a-against Professor Sprout at the Club. Burning through her vines. That was a properly clever duel from you, you made her work for it."
"Ah—" Cedric's own colour lifted slightly, a young man's blush. "I lost, in the end."
"You lasted longer than most of us would have," Harry said, which was true.
"Well," said Cedric, and his grin came back. "That's generous."
Ethan had drifted closer. Cedric turned and inclined his head. "Mr Esther, sir. Good morning."
"you too, Mr Diggory."
For the briefest instant, too brief for Cedric to track or Amos to notice, but long enough that Cedric felt something he would later fail entirely to name, Ethan's dark amber eyes shone with a fine starlight, and looked at Cedric, and looked through him. The boy felt a small tug, as though someone had turned a page somewhere in his peripheral vision. Then Ethan's business smile smoothed the moment over.
"I shall be watching the match with considerable interest," Ethan said. "Enjoy your morning, Cedric."
Cedric blinked once. "I... yes. Thank you, sir."
He rejoined his father. Harry saw Ethan's expression shift, very minutely, into something contemplative. He did not ask. Some things Ethan would explain when he wished to. Some things he would not, and the not-explaining was also its own form of care.
"Come along!" Arthur called cheerfully. "Ten seconds to go, everyone round the Portkey, finger on the boot, mind how you go..."
The old boot lay in the grass at the centre of their circle, entirely unimpressive, catching the first proper light of the morning with no particular dignity. Hermione, crouching beside Harry, was practically vibrating.
"I've read about Portkey travel," she said, in the breathless way that meant she had also read about it sufficiently to be nervous, "but I've never actually—"
"Hermione," Harry said, "it's—"
"Three," Arthur called, "two—"
"not quite like what you've read—"
"one..."
"hold on tight—"
There was a jerk behind Harry's navel so precise and demanding that Hermione's small sound of surprise was lost in the sudden wind. The Burrow, the hill, the hedgerows of Devon, the fading stars—all of it spun away in a coloured rush. Harry had done this three times before, once across the Atlantic to Ilvermorny with Ethan and Luna. His stomach had learnt the protocol. He planted his feet in the direction he felt the spin.
They hit the ground with an oof of collective exhalation, variously upright and not, and Hermione, who had not quite landed, found herself on her hands and knees in the dewy grass, blinking.
"That," she said, with deep feeling, "is not at all like what I read."
"I did try," Harry said, offering her a hand.
"Next time tell me earlier."
Arthur, radiating cheerful dignity from where he had landed upright, was already walking ahead. "Follow on, follow on! Welcome to the Quidditch World Cup!"
The moor stretched before them.
Harry stopped. Hermione stopped beside him, and her hand came up to her mouth in a gesture that was half surprise and half delight.
Tents. A sea of them. Thousands upon thousands, stretching away across the Devon moor in all directions, arranged into streets and avenues and squares, their canvas flaps coloured in every conceivable shade and frequently shaped like things that no Muggle tent had ever thought to resemble. A castle-shaped tent stood next to a pavilion in the shape of a vast green shamrock that appeared to be actively growing. A cluster of small domes in scarlet and gold flew banners Harry didn't recognise. Smoke rose from a thousand campfires. The faint, distant sound of music came from somewhere, layered over the babble of a city-sized crowd waking into a festival morning. Far away, at the horizon, rising out of the mist like a silver crown set upon the moor, was the stadium itself—vast, gleaming, the morning sun catching the edges of it.
"Merlin," Hermione breathed.
Harry was grinning entirely without having decided to. His hand had come up to the strap of his satchel without thinking, checking for the camera.
Ethan had stopped a pace ahead, and turned back to look at the two of them with an expression of quiet amusement—the particular amusement of a man who had seen extraordinary things often enough that the real pleasure now was watching someone else see them for the first time.
"Yes," he said. "Rather. Come along, the two of you. We've a tent to find. And Samantheus will be growing impatient, which he hates to admit."
Ron appeared at Harry's elbow with a broad matching grin. "Bet you Draco's already criticised the campsite layout."
"Ten Knuts says he's already improved it," Harry said.
They went on, down into the hollow where their corner of the great gathering awaited—a morning that had only just begun, the air cool and sharp and full of the scent of a thousand breakfasts and a faint edge of something more.