I am Happy to Publish Another Chapter of The Apprentice of The Red Witch
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- Willowmere Hollow -
The kitchen at four in the morning had a different shape than the kitchen at any other hour. The copper pans hung dull instead of bright. The window over the sink showed nothing but Harry's own reflection layered against the dark, and behind him, Natasha at the stove pouring coffee into a thermos with the unhurried focus of someone who'd done this exact thing in this exact light more times than Harry could count.
"Drink this," she said, sliding a small glass of something amber across the table. "All of it. One swallow."
Harry sniffed it. It smelled like fire pretending to be a plum. "Is this alcohol?"
"It's a warming draught with a brandy base. You'll thank me in twenty minutes when we're standing in a forest at two degrees."
"You said Romania was cold but you didn't say brandy cold."
"I said Carpathian. You should have inferred." She tapped the rim of the glass. "Down."
He drank it. It went down like swallowing a small, polite bonfire, and by the time it reached his stomach his ears were warm and his fingertips had stopped feeling like they belonged to someone else. Natasha watched him, satisfied, and turned back to the counter where a small leather pouch sat next to her wand and a folded square of grey wool he hadn't noticed before.
"Apparition's out," she said, without him asking. "Too far for a single jump, and three jumps with a child piggy-backing isn't a thing I'm willing to do to your insides. International Floo exists, but it needs Ministry approval and a paper trail with your name on it, and I'd rather light my own hair on fire than tell the British Ministry I'm taking the Boy Who Lived to Romania for the holidays."
"So Portkey."
"So Portkey." She opened the leather pouch and tipped its contents onto her palm. A coin. Heavy, dull, the metal so worn that Harry had to lean in to make out the embossed hammer and sickle, the cyrillic letters around the rim, a year, 1962. It looked like something a man had once paid for cigarettes with and then died holding.
"That's Soviet."
"Very good."
"Where did you get a Soviet Portkey?"
"From a contact." She closed her fingers over the coin. "Who is not on any list, who doesn't know my real name, and whom you will never meet. The coin is unsanctioned, untraceable, and activates in," she glanced at the kitchen clock, "four minutes. We need to be standing, both of us touching it, not speaking, when it goes."
"Why not speaking?"
"Because the last person who used this one was speaking, and he arrived with most of his tongue still in England."
Harry stared at her.
"I'm joking," she said. "Mostly. Stand up. Coat on. The pack by the door is yours."
He pulled on the wool coat she'd bought him in November, scarf wrapped twice, gloves, the small canvas pack with whatever she'd packed in it that he hadn't been allowed to inspect. She shouldered her own bag, black, soft-sided, a bag that looked empty even when it wasn't, and held out the coin between her thumb and forefinger.
"Two fingers," she said. "Pinch it. Don't grip. If you grip it and it activates while you're tense, your wrist will hate you for a week."
He pinched it. The metal was colder than the room.
"Eyes on me."
He looked up. Her green eyes in the dim kitchen, steady, the same steadiness from the first day on Privet Drive, when she'd stepped out of a blue sedan and looked at him like a person.
"Three," she said softly. "Two. One."
The hook caught him behind the navel and the world folded.
It wasn't like Apparition. Apparition was a tube and a squeeze and a pop. The Portkey was a hand reaching into his middle and yanking, and the kitchen was gone and there was a long howling stretch of nothing and then the ground came up to meet him with no warning at all.
He landed badly. His left knee took it, then his shoulder, then a faceful of pine needles and frozen earth, and for a second he just lay there with his cheek against the dirt while his stomach decided whether it was going to keep the draught.
"Up," Natasha said. She was already standing, of course she was. "Up, Harry, on your feet. The cold will help the nausea. Breathe through your nose."
He pushed himself to his knees. The air went into his lungs and came out as a visible cloud. Everything smelled wrong. Pine, yes, but a different pine, sharper, and woodsmoke from somewhere far off, and underneath it something fermented and old that he couldn't place, some smell that lived in the soil here and not in England. Above him through the trees the sky was the deep blue that came before sunrise, and the trees were enormous, taller than any he'd seen at Willowmere, and old in a way English forests weren't old.
"Where," his voice came out hoarse, "where are we?"
"Carpathian foothills. About thirty kilometres east of Brașov." She crouched in front of him, scanning his face. "Pupils even. Good. How's your stomach?"
"Considering its options."
"Your stomach has no options. Stand up."
He stood. His knee complained but held. Natasha studied him for another second and then reached into her coat and drew her wand, ebony, twelve and three-quarter inches, unyielding, the wand of someone who did not bend, and held it loosely at her side.
"One thing before we walk," she said. "Hold still."
"What."
"Hold still, Harry. Look at me."
He looked at her. The wand came up. Her free hand cupped the side of his face, thumb resting at his temple, and her eyes flicked up to his forehead where the lightning bolt sat under his fringe.
"Aunt Natasha?"
"I'm going to remove the scar. Temporarily. It'll be back by tomorrow morning, maybe sooner if you sweat enough, but for tonight you don't get to wear it." Her thumb stroked once, lightly, against his temple. "Where we're going, that scar means Boy Who Lived in nine languages. I don't want anyone in that room knowing your name. I don't want anyone guessing your name. Understood?"
"Yes."
"This won't hurt. It'll feel cold for a moment."
She murmured something, three syllables, quiet, a charm he didn't recognize, and the tip of her wand traced the shape of the scar through his fringe. A coldness spread across his forehead like a drop of water expanding outward, and then it was gone, and Natasha lowered her wand and looked at her work.
"There," she said. Her voice was quieter than it had been. "Hm."
"Hm what?"
"Nothing."
"Aunt Natasha."
She was quiet a moment longer. Then: "You look like your father. Without the scar. I hadn't, I didn't know how much, until just now."
Harry reached up and touched his forehead through the fringe. Smooth skin. No ridge, no faint catch of the old wound under his fingertip. Just skin. The thing that had been on his face every day of his life since he was fifteen months old was simply not there, and for a second he didn't know what to do with his hand. It hovered at his hairline like it had forgotten its job.
He made himself lower it.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay." Natasha straightened and tucked her wand back into her coat. "Walk behind me, three paces. If I stop, you stop. If I raise my left hand, you go silent. If I raise my right hand, you draw your wand. Do not draw it before I do unless something is about to bite you. Understood?"
"Understood."
"Good. Move."
She set off through the trees at something between a walk and a run. She knew the route and did not intend to be on it longer than necessary. Harry kept his three paces. His breath fogged. The cold burned the inside of his nose in a clean way that, oddly, he liked.
After about ten minutes the trees thinned and a road appeared, not a road exactly, a track of frozen mud with two wheel ruts running through it, and Natasha turned down it without breaking stride. Another five minutes and the track emptied into the back of a small village. Slate roofs. Smoke rising from one chimney in three. A dog barking somewhere. Not a single light on.
"This is Bran?" Harry whispered.
"Smaller. Bran has tourists. This place doesn't have a name on most maps." She turned down a narrow alley between a butcher's and what looked like a cobbler's, both shuttered, and stopped at a wooden door set into the alley wall. She knocked twice, paused, knocked once more.
The door opened. The woman behind it was perhaps fifty, wrapped in a heavy black shawl, with the kind of face that had been beautiful once and was now something better than beautiful, carved. She looked at Natasha and her mouth pulled into something that wasn't quite a smile.
"Volkova," she said.
"Sanda."
"Tu eşti nebună să vii înapoi."
"Probabil."
The two of them exchanged five or six more sentences in a low quick Romanian that Harry caught not a word of, and the woman, Sanda, looked past Natasha at Harry exactly once, for less than a second, and then ignored him completely. She stepped out into the alley, pulled the door shut behind her, and walked. Natasha fell into step beside her. Harry kept his three paces.
Volkova, he thought. Wolf-woman. That's not even a Romanian name. That's Russian.
His aunt had a working name. Of course she had a working name.
Sanda walked them three blocks, turned them down a side street, and stopped at a coach, a black, low-bodied carriage with smoked glass windows. She said something to Natasha that ended with what sounded like a question, and Natasha answered with a single word that Sanda accepted with a small nod. Then Sanda turned and walked back the way she'd come without looking at either of them again.
The coach driver was a hooded shape on the box. He didn't speak. Natasha opened the door and gestured Harry in.
The inside of the coach was warmer than the air outside but not by much, and it smelled of old leather and pipe tobacco. Natasha pulled the door shut and the coach moved off without any signal Harry could see.
"Listen," she said. The teaching voice. The voice from the floor of the main room at Willowmere, two weeks of breathing exercises ago. "I'm only saying this once and you're going to remember every word."
"Okay."
"Your name tonight is Andrei. You're my nephew. You're from a small magical family in the north of England, no surname given, no school named. If anyone presses, you say your aunt doesn't like you talking to strangers and you change the subject to anything else. Weather. Food. The girl across the room. Anything."
"Andrei."
"Andrei. Don't speak unless spoken to, and even then keep it short. Your accent gives you away as British the second you open your mouth, so the less you open it the better. If you have to speak to a Romanian, nod a lot and look young. You are young. Use it."
"What about the people from England?"
"There will be one or two. They won't approach me, and they won't approach you, because the people who come to this circuit from England are the kind of people who specifically do not want to be seen by anyone from England. Mutual silence. It's the only honest currency this room has."
"Got it."
"Names." She held up a finger. "You do not say Hogwarts. You do not say Dumbledore. You do not say McGonagall, Snape, Potter, Lily, James, or any version of any of those words. If a topic moves toward any of those names, you go silent, you look at me, and I'll take over. Understood?"
"Understood."
"And, Harry." Her voice softened, just a degree. "You do not say my name either. Tonight I'm Volkova. If you have to speak to me in front of others, you say aunt. Not Natasha. Not Aunt Natasha. Just aunt, in English, and as little of even that as possible."
"Volkova," he repeated. "Wolf."
"Mm."
"How many names do you have?"
She looked at him in the dim coach. Her face was as unreadable as it had been on the day he'd first met her, when she'd walked into the Dursleys' kitchen and Vernon had sat down without being told.
"Enough," she said.
The coach ran for perhaps forty minutes. Harry watched the countryside through the smoked glass, fields, stone walls, the dark shapes of villages without electric lights, once a wolf or a dog crossing the road in the headlamps of nothing, and somewhere along the way the sky behind them began to grey, not with sunrise yet, but with the idea of sunrise.
The coach stopped at a tree line.
Natasha opened the door. Harry climbed out. The driver did not turn his head.
Standing at the edge of the trees was an old man with a long grey beard plaited into two ropes that hung over the front of his coat. He was holding a wand, gnarled, pale wood, the grip wrapped in leather, and he was waiting. When Natasha approached him he tipped his head a quarter inch, the way old wizards greeted each other in places that did not have Ministries.
"Volkova."
"Bunicu."
"Acesta este băiatul." Not a question.
"Da."
The old man, Bunicu, grandfather, Harry thought, looked at Harry. His eyes were so pale they were almost colourless, and they rested on Harry's face for what felt like a long time, and then he said something to Natasha in a low voice that Harry didn't catch.
Natasha shook her head. Once. Sharply.
The old man didn't push. He gave a small, satisfied grunt and turned toward the trees, and as he raised his wand the air ahead of them shifted. Harry knew the feeling from the ward line at Willowmere, a soft pressure against his sinuses, and a path that hadn't been there a moment ago opened into the trees, dim and downward-sloping.
"Stay close," Natasha murmured.
They followed the old man down. The path wound between pines, and then the pines thinned, and they came out onto the side of a mountain Harry hadn't realised they'd been climbing. Below them, set into the rock face like something the mountain had grown around and forgotten about, was a citadel.
It was old. Old like the Hogwarts towers were old, but smaller, meaner, more honest about what it had been built for. Saxon stone, dark with eight centuries of weather. Square towers. Arrow slits. A single iron-bound gate set into the curtain wall, with no torches lit beside it, no flag flying from any rampart. To anyone walking the Muggle hills, Harry knew without being told, it would look like nothing, a shape in the dark, a ruin, a place where the goats sometimes wandered.
"Is that," he started.
"Yes."
"How many people are in there right now?"
Natasha looked down at the citadel. Her face was the face she wore in the duelling drills, the one that showed nothing.
"Tonight?" she said. "About four hundred."
The old man led them down the last of the path. The gate, as they approached it, opened by itself, pulled inward by hands Harry couldn't see, and a wash of warm air came out, carrying with it the smell of woodsmoke, sweat, spilled wine, and underneath all of it something burnt and electric that Harry's body recognised before his mind did.
The smell of spells. A lot of them. Recently.
Natasha's hand found the back of his neck for one brief second, a steadying touch, not affectionate, the touch of a handler at the gate of a thing she had built, and then she let go.
"Walk in like you belong," she said quietly. "Because tonight, Andrei, you do."
Harry took a breath. He thought of the breathing pattern. Four in. Four hold. Four out. Four hold.
He walked through the gate.
- The Saxon Citadel, Transylvania
The inside of the citadel did not match the outside. From the path it had been a square of dark stone bleeding into a darker mountain, but inside the gate the air went warm and gold and loud, and Harry stopped for half a second on the threshold because his eyes needed the time.
The banquet hall was enormous. Stone floor scrubbed and rescrubbed in places where the scrubbing had not been enough. Ribbed vaulting overhead, blackened by centuries of fires that had nothing to do with the witchfire burning now in iron baskets along the walls. Two long galleries ran above the floor on either side, packed with watchers leaning on the railings, drinking, talking, money already moving from hand to hand. Down on the floor itself the crowd stood three and four deep around a circular pit cut into the stone, low-walled, scorched, ringed with a runic line Harry's eye couldn't quite finish reading before Natasha's hand at his elbow steered him past it.
She walked him through the press without looking at anyone and without anyone looking at her, which Harry registered as its own kind of trick. People moved out of her way before they seemed to know she was there. She stopped them at a column near the pit, sightline to the pit, sightline to the gate, sightline to a side stair that went up to the gallery and another that went down to somewhere Harry couldn't see.
"Stand here," she said, low. "Don't lean on the column. Don't put your hands in your pockets. Watch the duels, not the crowd. You learn nothing from watching the crowd that you don't already know."
"Which is what?"
"That they came to see blood. Stop fishing."
He almost smiled. He kept his face still.
A man in dark red robes stepped into the pit and the room dropped its volume by half, not to silence, just down to the sound of four hundred people breathing and waiting. The man's voice carried without him seeming to raise it, some old amplification charm that wasn't Sonorus, something older. He spoke first in Romanian, then in Russian, then in English that was good but not his.
"First match. Open bracket. Magyar against Bessarab. To submission, to unconsciousness, to forfeit. No killing curses. No permanent disfigurement of the face." A pause. "Of the face."
Harry caught the qualifier. He glanced at Natasha. She was watching the pit.
The two duellists came in from opposite sides. The first was huge, bearded, swaggering, the kind of man who had clearly won enough small fights to expect to win this one. The second was thin, grey at the temples, expression of a man already bored.
The bell rang, a flat dull note from a stone the announcer struck with his wand.
The thin man raised his wand and said one word and the bearded man's wand left his hand, sailed in a clean arc, and slapped into the thin man's open palm. The bearded man stared at his empty hand. The thin man looked at the announcer. The announcer raised his wand.
"Bessarab."
The crowd booed, the bearded man swore in a language Harry didn't know, and the whole thing was over in less than four seconds.
"That's it?" Harry said.
"That's it. He paid to enter, he wanted a name, he didn't have one. The thin man has been here twelve times and he doesn't lose openings." Natasha's eyes hadn't left the pit. "First duels are usually like that. The good ones don't show up until the crowd's warm. Watch."
The bearded man was escorted out a side door by two men who did not look like healers. The pit stood empty for perhaps a minute. The announcer drank from a flask. Money in the gallery moved again, faster now, and the noise in the hall climbed back to where it had been.
The second match was different from the moment the duellists walked in.
The first was Romanian, Harry guessed, by the cut of his coat and the way the floor crowd shifted toward him. Tall, lean, brown hair tied back at the nape. He moved like someone who had been doing this for years and intended to do it for years more. He smiled at the crowd. They cheered. He bowed.
The second was harder to place. Shorter, broader, dark coat buttoned high to the throat, a face that did not move. He did not look at the crowd. He did not bow. He walked to his mark, set his feet, and waited.
"That one," Natasha murmured. Just two words, and Harry understood her to mean watch that one, and so he did.
The bell rang.
The Romanian opened with a flourish, three spells in quick succession, a stunner, a banishing charm, a cutting curse that sang in the air. The shorter man stepped sideways for the first, conjured a low stone wall for the second that the banishing charm splintered without effect, and let the cutting curse pass an inch from his shoulder because he had already begun the motion that brought his own counter down the line. A whip of red light. The Romanian rolled under it and came up casting.
For perhaps thirty seconds the duel was beautiful. Harry had never seen anything like it. They moved through each other's spells in a kind of conversation, exchange and answer, exchange and answer, the Romanian's wandwork wide and flashy, the shorter man's small and economical and a full half-beat faster on every counter. The crowd was loud now. Somewhere in the gallery a woman was screaming a name.
The Romanian landed first. A bone-breaker, Harry thought, by the way the shorter man's left arm dropped at the elbow and stayed dropped. The crowd surged. The Romanian smiled, finally, the same smile he'd worn at his entrance, and pressed his advantage.
He hit the shorter man twice more. A burning hex that caught his coat and had to be slapped out one-handed. A slicing charm that opened his cheek from jaw to ear. Blood on the stone. The shorter man's wand wavered. He took a step back. He took another step back. The crowd in the gallery began to chant something that Harry guessed was the Romanian's name.
The shorter man stopped retreating. He did not raise his wand higher. He lowered it. He spoke a word Harry did not catch and would not have understood if he had, because the word was not in any language Harry had ever heard, and the spell that came out of his wand was not light.
It was grey. It was ropy. It moved through the air like smoke underwater, slow and wrong, and it did not fly so much as reach. It reached across the pit. It found the Romanian's face. It did not strike. It attached.
The Romanian's smile died with his hand half-raised. He made a sound Harry would later try not to remember and could not stop remembering anyway. He clawed at his own face with his free hand and his fingers went through the grey ropes as if they were not there, and the grey ropes pulled, and the Romanian's features came with them.
The Romanian's face did not come off like a mask. It came off like a wet thing off a wall. Eyes, brows, nose, mouth, the architecture of him, lifted and stretched and drew across the air between them in a single greasy ribbon. The shorter man's wand was the anchor. The shorter man's face was the destination. Harry watched the ribbon meet the shorter man's skin and he watched the skin take it, swallow it, fold it down into itself, and when the spell ended the shorter man was standing in the pit with the Romanian's face pressed under his own like a second portrait painted onto the first. Two sets of features. Two mouths. Two pairs of eyes, one open, one closed, both visible at once, layered.
The Romanian fell.
His face was bone. Not bloody bone. Clean bone, dry, as if the skin and meat had simply been taken, and what remained was the dome of a skull with a lower jaw still hinged to it and nothing else.
The crowd was silent for the space of one full breath, and then it roared, and Harry understood with a sick clean clarity that the roar was approval.
The announcer stepped into the pit. He raised his wand.
"Vlaicu."
The shorter man, Vlaicu, walked out without acknowledging the noise. The two faces on his head moved together when he moved. Harry kept his eyes on the man's back until he was through the side door and gone.
"He'll wear it for a day," Natasha said quietly, beside him. "Maybe two. Then it sloughs. Eight or nine more like that and he can't carry his own face anymore. Everyone who casts that spell pays, eventually."
"Why does anyone cast it?"
"Because for a day or two they get to wear what they took. Some men want that more than they want to live a long life."
Harry breathed. He thought about the troll, briefly, the cratered chest and the hour afterward when he had not been able to feel anything at all, and he understood that he had been wrong, that night in the corridor, to think he had seen what magic could do.
He had not. He had just seen what he could do. There was a difference.
The Romanian's body was carried out by men who did not hurry. Someone scrubbed the stone where his face had been. The runic line at the edge of the pit flickered and steadied. The announcer drank from his flask.
There were three more duels after Vlaicu. Harry watched them and could not have told anyone afterward what spells were used. Somewhere in the second of the three he became aware that he had not blinked in a long time, and he made himself blink, and he made himself look at Natasha, who was watching him without looking like she was watching him.
"You all right?"
"I'm all right."
"Tell me the truth."
"I'm all right."
She studied his face. Whatever she found there satisfied her, because she nodded once, and then she did something she had not done all evening. She turned, fully, and faced him, and put her left hand on his right shoulder, and squeezed.
"Now it's your time."
Harry looked at her. He did not say what. He had known since they walked in.
"The junior bracket starts on the next bell," she said. Her voice was the same voice it had been in the kitchen at four in the morning, calm and exact. "You're in it. I entered you when we arrived. Your opponent is a girl, fourteen, second time on this circuit. She won her first bracket clean. Her guardian trained her the way I trained you. You will know it when she moves. She will know it when you move."
"What's her name?"
"You don't need it. After. If you want it after, I'll tell you."
"Aunt Natasha."
"Andrei, last warning with that name." Her green eyes did not move. "Listen to me. This is not the troll. Nothing in this pit will eat you. The wards on the floor will not let killing curses through, and you and she are both eleven and twelve and the men in the gallery will pull anyone off who forgets that the junior bracket is not the open bracket. You will not die tonight. You will be hurt. You may be hurt badly. You will not die, and you will not lose, because losing tonight teaches you the wrong thing and you have not done a year and a half of work to learn the wrong thing."
"What does winning teach me?"
"That every hour of it was real."
The bell rang.
Natasha squeezed his shoulder one more time and let go.
Harry walked.
The crowd did not part for him. He had to move through it, and he did, and people looked at him with the mild interest that men in gallery seats give a small thing about to be hit. He stepped over the runic line into the pit and the air on the inside of the line was different, denser, charged, the way the air at Willowmere went when Natasha set the practice wards before a drill.
The girl was already there.
She was tall for fourteen and lean, in a coat cut down from someone larger. Dark hair cropped short against the skull. Pale face. Dark eyes that found his face and read it as Harry had been taught to read faces, top to bottom and back up to the eyes, a single sweep that took less than a second and missed nothing. She did not smile. She did not bow. She set her feet.
He set his.
For one breath their eyes met across the pit and he saw what Natasha had told him he would see. You too. He gave her the smallest nod he could and she returned it, smaller still, and the bell struck again and she was already moving.
Her opening was fast. Three spells, low arc, no flourish. He did not recognise the first, blocked the second with a shield he was not sure he had time to cast and which held only because she was not casting at full power yet, and stepped wrong on the third. It clipped his right side under the ribs. Heat. Bruising hex. He grunted.
He had not fought a person before. This was the thing his body was telling him in the half-second after the hex landed. The troll had been a target. Drills with Natasha had been choreography. This was a person, and she was watching him, and she was learning him faster than he was learning her, and the bruise under his ribs was the price of that gap.
Centre.
He found the breathing without trying. Four in. The pain along his ribs went from a flare to a fact. Four hold. The pit narrowed to the girl and the line of her wand. Four out. He felt the warmth of his core, deep, steady, the pulse that Natasha had spent thirty minutes the first time helping him find. Four hold.
He stopped reacting and started fighting.
His first counter was a banishing charm aimed not at her but at the stone behind her, low, kicking up dust and chips, and while she flinched he was already moving left, and his second spell, a tripping jinx, caught her ankle as she shifted weight. She went down on one knee. She came up casting.
For perhaps ninety seconds they traded. He could not have told anyone afterward how many spells he threw or how many she did. The pit was very small and the air in it tasted of stone and ozone and the back of his own throat. She was faster than him. He was steadier than her. He had been trained to hold a coloured sphere through clapping and dropped books and scraping chairs, and the noise of four hundred people in a banquet hall did not break the sphere, and the girl, he understood somewhere around the sixtieth second, had not been trained for that. She had been trained for combat. Her concentration had a different shape. He could push it.
He pushed it.
He cast in pairs. A noise charm at the floor by her foot to make her flinch, and on the half-beat after the flinch a cutting charm at her wand hand. She blocked the cutter but the noise had moved her shield two inches off true, and the next cutter, low, took her across the thigh of her coat. Not deep. Enough.
She made a sound in her throat that was not a cry. It was a recalibration. She had taken him for sloppy and now she did not, and her next exchange was the real exchange, full power, no warm-up, and Harry took her at her word and gave it back.
The hit came in the eighth or ninth pass. He misread her wand by half a degree. The spell, some kind of crushing hex, he did not have the vocabulary for it, caught his left hand at the knuckles and folded it. He heard the bones go. It was a clean wet sound that did not belong in his hand. The pain arrived a half-second after the sound, white, total, and his vision went briefly to a ring of grey at the edges before he breathed it back open.
He did not drop his wand. His wand was in his right hand. His left hand was a thing that hung at his side now, and that was a problem for after.
The girl saw the hand drop and pressed. Two spells fast. He ate the first on a shield and let the second go past his shoulder because he was already inside it. He stepped in.
He cast at point-blank. Not Confringo. Never Confringo. A disarming charm with everything in him behind it, his core open, the pain in his hand pouring down into the spell instead of into his head, and the Expelliarmus hit her wrist and her chest at once and threw her backwards across the pit. Her wand clattered against the runic line. She landed on her shoulder and slid and stopped.
The pit was silent.
The announcer raised his wand.
"Andrei."
The crowd made a sound that Harry could not interpret and did not need to. He lowered his wand. He did not look up at the gallery. He looked at the girl on the stone. She rolled onto her back, slowly, breathing. She turned her head toward him and her dark eyes found his, and after a second she lifted her chin in the smallest possible nod.
He nodded back.
He turned. His left hand swung at his side and the swing of it sent another flare up his arm and into his teeth, and he made his face still and walked across the pit and over the runic line.
Natasha was already moving toward him. Her face, when he found it through the crowd, was lit from inside. He had never seen it like this, not on Privet Drive, not in the kitchen at Willowmere on his birthday, not in any of the moments he had been collecting in the small private place in his head. Pride. Whole and unhidden and aimed at him.
He took one step toward her. He took another. He felt his knees decide something his head had not been told.
The grey at the edges of his vision came back and this time it did not breathe out. It breathed in. The hall narrowed to her face and the lift in it, and to the warmth of her hand catching his good shoulder.
The last thing he saw was her smiling.
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