21st January 1995, Hogsmeade, the High Street, 11:42 AM
January had brought, with the precise small unhurried inevitability of a Highland winter, a deeper snow than December had managed. The High Street of Hogsmeade was banked along both sides with clean piled snow of three weeks of intermittent accumulation, and the cobbles beneath had been swept by the efficient daytime charm-work of the village's small group of shopkeepers, leaving a clean dark path through the white. The sky above was a pale silver-grey of late morning at sixty degrees north, holding the promise of more snow before evening.
Harry, in his winter cloak with the small Gryffindor-red scarf his Mrs Weasley had sent him in November, walked along the High Street with Hermione, Ron, and Draco beside him.
They had been, for the last forty minutes of the morning so far, searching for Hagrid.
Hagrid had not, by Hermione's careful count, been seen in public since the morning of the twenty-sixth of December—the morning of Skeeter's article. Professor Grubbly-Plank had taught five consecutive Care of Magical Creatures lessons. The small Hagrid-cabin at the edge of the Forbidden Forest had its curtains drawn, its chimney smoking in a minimum way of an occupant who was inside but not, by any practical signal, receiving callers. Hermione had knocked on the door three separate times in the last three weeks. The third knock had received a distant muffled response of Not today, Hermione, thank yeh, and nothing more.
"He has to come out eventually," Ron said, with the precise small loyalty-warmth of a boy who had been worrying about Hagrid for three weeks. "He has to. There's still the Tournament and the Second Task is in five weeks. He's part of the security perimeter for it."
"He will come out when he is ready, Ron," Hermione said quietly.
"Mm."
"But the Three Broomsticks," she continued, with a composed scholarly determination of a girl who had taken on the project of finding Hagrid as her personal small project, "is the most likely place. Madam Rosmerta has been keeping him supplied, I am told. We may catch him."
Draco, on Harry's other side, was scanning the small lit windows of the shops with the alert attention of a boy who had been registering, throughout the last three weeks, that the wizarding-press response to Skeeter's article had been worse than anyone had hoped.
Three further pieces had run in the Prophet. Two of them had been straightforward malicious follow-ups. The third—Draco had pointed out at breakfast that morning—had been an opinion column, written by an anonymous concerned parent of three Hogwarts students, arguing that the Hogwarts Board of Governors ought to re-examine the Gamekeeper's continued tenure on the grounds of the safety of the student body.
Hermione had read the opinion column and had, with the composed quiet fury of a girl whose moral attention had been engaged, declared at breakfast that she would find out how Rita Skeeter is doing this if it was the last thing she did at Hogwarts.
They had not, in three weeks, however, made any further progress.
They reached the small lit doorway of the Three Broomsticks. The familiar warm-amber light of Rosmerta's pub spilled out onto the snow-dusted cobbles of the pavement. The small handwritten chalkboard sign by the door announced today's special—beef-and-Stilton pie, two Sickles—and the whiff of butterbeer, the pub-smell of pipe-smoke and wood-fire drifted out into the cold.
They went in.
The pub was at its precise small busy-Saturday register. Approximately half the tables were occupied. Rosmerta, behind the bar, gave Harry an affectionate nod she had been giving him since he was thirteen. The four of them scanned, looking for one tall figure, the various corners of the room.
No Hagrid.
But—at the back table by the fire, in a small huddled conversation that had been clearly intended to be private and was clearly not enjoying the precise small unwelcome attention of the rest of the pub's occasional glance—Ludo Bagman was sitting with three goblins.
The three goblins were short, sharp-faced, expensively dressed in small dark business-robes of Gringotts senior staff. The largest of the three—Harry recognised him vaguely from one of his past visits to the bank with Ethan—was leaning across the table at Bagman with a focused attention of a goblin who was not having a pleasant conversation. Bagman, in his bright blue robes with the small Wasps pin at his lapel, was sweating slightly despite the cool air of the pub, and his usual round-cheeked cheerfulness had taken on a strained quality of a man whose conversation had not, by any reasonable measurement, been going his way for some considerable time.
Hermione, beside Harry, registered the configuration with the composed attention of a girl whose research-mind had just been handed an interesting puzzle.
"That," she murmured very quietly, "is interesting."
"Goblins," Ron muttered.
"Goblins," Draco confirmed.
"Why is Bagman meeting with goblins in a pub?" Harry raised the pivotal question.
They began finding a table on the other side of the pub for entirely innocent reasons, to walk in the direction of a small free table by the window. Their route would passed within six feet of Bagman's back-table.
Bagman, registering the approach of a familiar four out of the corner of his eye, rose, with a over-cheerful energy of a man performing excellent timing for an interruption gesture for the benefit of his goblin-interlocutors.
"Harry!" he announced, far too loudly. "Harry, my boy! What a small wonderful coincidence! Come, come, let us have a word, just a small private one—" he had Harry by the elbow before the boy could finished registering the unwelcome contact, "—if you will excuse me, gentlemen, just a small moment, a small Tournament-related word with our young Champion—"
The three goblins, registering the interruption with unfooled coal-dark eyes of senior Gringotts staff who had clearly been negotiating with Bagman for some considerable time, exchanged a small look between them and said nothing.
Bagman steered Harry, with the over-firm pressure of a man who very much wished to leave the goblin-table for a small precise interval, to a quiet corner by the staircase.
He released Harry's elbow.
He smiled an over-bright smile.
"Harry, my boy. How is the preparation going?"
Harry, with Ethan-business-smile, registered the artificial cheerfulness for what it was. "Quite well, Mr Bagman, thank you."
"Excellent. Excellent. Now—as you know, I am, in addition to my official Tournament duties, very much at your personal disposal for any advice you might require. The egg, for instance—if you have not yet quite worked out the egg, I might... be able to—"
"Thank you, Mr Bagman," Harry said firmly. "I do not require help."
"My dear boy, the others—"
"I do not require help, Mr Bagman. Truly. But I appreciate the offer."
A flash of something Harry could not entirely identify—was it frustration?—crossed Bagman's round face. He recovered quickly.
"Very well, very well. As you wish." Ludo paused. "Have you heard, by the way, about my colleague Crouch?"
"I had heard he was unwell, sir."
"Mm." Bagman's voice dropped to a small precise confidential register. "Worse than unwell, Harry. He has stopped coming to work entirely. The man been sending Percy his instructions by owl, if you can imagine. Owls, Harry. The Head of the Department of International Magical Cooperation is conducting the Tournament by owl. Most irregular."
Harry, who had been registering this with the composed quiet attention of a boy whose father's friends had been watching Crouch's absence for some weeks now, said nothing.
"Not to mention his subordinate, Bertha," Bagman continued, with the distracted weight of a man whose worries had been mounting. "Bertha Jorkins, I think you had heard her case by now. Still missing. The Ministry search in Albania has produced precisely nothing. Three months now. I am—" he paused, "—I am genuinely concerned."
"I am sorry, Mr Bagman."
"Mm."
It was then, a crash of pub-door bells at the entrance announced the arrival of two new figures.
Fred and George.
They had, by every observable signal, arrived specifically to find Bagman. Both of them carried small leather purses with grim expressions of two small-business proprietors who had been waiting for a particular private conversation with a Tournament official.
Bagman, registering them in approximately three-quarters of a second, did the visible-blanching of a man who had been hoping not to see them.
"Ah," he said, "Harry, my boy, I am afraid I must—"
"Mr Bagman!" Fred called brightly across the pub. "A word, sir, if we may!"
"Mr Bagman!" George echoed.
"Harry, please excuse me—" Bagman was already moving toward the back door of the pub, "—an urgent matter has just arisen—"
He was gone.
The three goblins, watching his departure with their unimpressed coal-dark eyes, rose simultaneously with composed dignity of a Gringotts delegation that had decided the meeting was concluded, and filed out through the front door.
Fred and George, with the composed grim expressions of two boys who had registered that their target had escaped yet again, sighed in unison.
They crossed to the small table where Harry, Hermione, Ron, and Draco had now settled.
"That," Ron said with a small precise wondering pleasure, "was the fastest I have ever seen a grown man flee."
"Yes, Ron," Fred agreed.
"He owes you money?"
"A considerable sum, Ronald," George said with dignity. "From a wager at the World Cup involving the final score and the method of capture, in which our prediction was extremely accurate. He has been avoiding us since September."
"And he has clever ways of doing it," Fred added. "Last month he even Apparated into a toilet stall to escape us."
"A toilet stall," Ron repeated.
"Specifically," George confirmed.
"That is the saddest thing I have heard this month."
The twins, with a affectionate exasperated dignity of two boys whose business model relied on the reliability of their counterparties, departed to corner Madam Rosmerta about terms of credit.
Hermione, watching them go, frowned.
"Why," she said quietly, "was Ludo Bagman, the Head of the Department of Games and Sports, meeting with three senior Gringotts goblins in a Hogsmeade pub on a Saturday morning. And why," she continued, with a steady scholarly intensity of a girl whose mind had now formally engaged the question, "was he trying, again, to help Harry with the Tournament. Why is he so determined?"
"He likes me?" Harry offered weakly.
"Harry. He has met you five times. He is the Head of his Department. He has no reason to be personally interested in helping a fourteen-year-old Champion. Unless—" her mouth tightened, "—unless he has something to gain from Harry winning."
"..."
"Money?" Draco suggested.
"A bet," Ron breathed.
"A bet," Hermione agreed, "placed somewhere, on Harry to win the Tournament. With—the goblins, possibly. Gringotts handles considerable private wagering. If Bagman has lost considerable money in his other dealings and has staked his recovery on Harry winning the Tournament—"
"That," Draco said grimly, "would explain a great deal."
Then, there was pub-door interruption.
Rita Skeeter, in her magenta winter robes with her acid-green Quick-Quotes Quill already hovering at her shoulder, entered the Three Broomsticks with the predatory attention of a journalist who had clearly been following Bagman and the goblins.
Her predatory attention swung onto Harry's table.
Hermione immediately fully focused on Rita Skeeter as she rose.
"Miss Skeeter."
"Miss Granger."
"A word, Miss Skeeter."
"My dear—"
"Your article on Hagrid," Hermione said as she had clearly been preparing for exactly this confrontation, "was a piece of vindictive, malicious, deliberately damaging journalism . I do not know how you obtained the content of that conversation. I will, in time, find out. When I do, I will see to it that the Ministry's Press Standards Board receives the full account."
"Miss Granger, you do realise that the First Amendment of the wizarding press—"
"The wizarding press," Hermione said quietly, with the fury of a girl whose moral attention was fully engaged, "does not have a First Amendment. Britain does not have a First Amendment. The wizarding press has the Wizarding Press Standards Charter of 1893, and I have read every clause of it twice this month. You are in violation of approximately four of them, including the explicit prohibition against publishing private personal information obtained through unauthorised means."
"..."
Rita Skeeter, whose predatory smile had begun to thin, recovered her composure with the p efficiency of a journalist who had been managing hostile sources for thirty years.
"Miss Granger. I obtained my information from a reliable witness. I am not, under the Charter, obliged to disclose its identity. The article is legally protected.*"
"Pfft! A witness?"
"A witness, Miss Granger."
"There were no witnesses, Miss Skeeter. I have verified this."
"Then you have not verified it carefully enough."
The two women stared at each other across approximately six feet of pub-floor for the precise count of four. Then Skeeter, with a composed smile of a journalist, turned and departed.
Hermione sat down. Her hands, very slightly, were shaking with the her fuming anger.
Ron, beside her, patted her shoulder.
"Hermione..."
"I will find out, Ron. I will. There is something about that woman, and I will work it out."
"We know you will."
21st January 1995, Hagrid's cabin, 2:14 PM
The cabin, when they arrived in the early-afternoon snow, had its curtains drawn and its chimney smoking in the three-week-pattern Harry had become familiar with. The familiar small figure of Fang, however, was lying on the snow-covered front step, thegreat hound's enormous head on his paws and his mournful brown eyes fixed on the door.
Fang looked up at their approach. He gave a precise small whuff of recognition.
Behind them, along the snow-banked path from the castle, came the unhurried figure of Albus Dumbledore.
The Headmaster was wearing his deep-blue winter cloak with embroidered stars at the hem and a woollen scarf in a colour Harry could not entirely classify. He gave Harry a bright morning-spectacle twinkle as he caught up to them at the cabin's path.
"Mr Potter. Miss Granger. Mr Weasley. Mr Malfoy. You arrive at an excellent time. I had been hoping for some quiet additional company on my own small precise call to Hagrid this afternoon."
"Sir," The four said.
Dumbledore raised his spectacled eyes to the drawn curtains of the cabin and, without further ceremony, knocked.
"..."
"Hagrid. It is Albus. With four of your... small frequent visitors. We have come to sit with you for a while."
"..."
The door opened. Hagrid, in the state of a half-giant who had not, by any practical signal, washed his hair in three weeks, peered out. His enormous beetle-black eyes were the red-rimmed of a man who had been crying recently.
"Headmaster—"
"Hagrid. May we come in."
"I—of course, Headmaster, of course but the cabin is a mess. I have not—"
"The cabin is fine, Hagrid."
They filed in.
The cabin's interior was not a mess. It was, in fact, precisely as Harry remembered it—a wooden table in the centre with its empty teapot, the fire in a hearth with its low burn, a kettle on its hook and the the Fang-mat in the corner where Fang had now returned. The evidence of three weeks of inhabitation was visible only in unwashed tea-cups stacked beside the basin and unopened posts stacked on the dresser.
Hagrid had not been neglecting the cabin. He had been barely existing in the cabin.
He gestured them to the chairs around the table and, with the mechanical hospitality of a man whose ingrained habit had survived his depression, began boiling the kettle.
Dumbledore sat as he folded his hands on the table.
"Hagrid."
"Headmaster."
"I would like you to come back to your teaching post."
Hagrid's enormous shoulders, at the kettle, did not turn.
"Headmaster, I—I can't. The article. The—the parents. The Board—"
"The Board of Governors has not, Hagrid, asked for your dismissal. They have asked a series of formal questions, all of which I have answered. The students have not, with the exception of approximately twelve of them, raised any complaints. The teaching post is still yours. Professor Grubbly-Plank is, with gratitude, currently filling in, but she has informed me she would be pleased to step aside the moment you are ready to return."
"..."
Hagrid's enormous back, very slightly, began to shake.
Hermione carefully rose from her chair and crossed to the kettle. She took the tea-pot from his enormous hands gently.
"Hagrid. Please sit down. I will make the tea."
"Hermione—"
"Sit, Hagrid."
He sat.
His enormous shoulders, at the table, shook.
Draco, on Harry's right, leaned forward with the careful composed attention of a boy who had been thinking about what to say.
"Hagrid," he said quietly. "I have spent my entire childhood being taught... what to think about half-giants. The teaching was wrong. I have, in the last two years, with considerable help from your kindness to me whenever I have stopped by this cabin to ask anything. The truth is that you are a kind man, Hagrid, and that label half-giant is not, by any reasonable measurement, a label that anybody who has met you would think mattered."
Hagrid's enormous eyes, registering the Malfoy who had been raised by Lucius and was now sitting at his table telling him this.
"Mr Malfoy—"
"Draco, Hagrid."
"Draco, lad—"
"I am only saying. The Skeeter article was a piece of malicious journalism. The opinion column was nothing more than a piece of cowardly anonymous spite. Neither of them has anything to do with you. Neither of them has anything to do with the fact that you are good at your job and that the students are very fond of you."
Hermione, returning to the table with a filled tea-pot, set it down. Her face was composed.
"Hagrid. Everyone has... things in their past that the public might use against them, if they chose to. My mother is Muggle. My father is Muggle. By the standards of a certain kind of wizard, I do not belong at Hogwarts at all. I have been told this, by the specific people who hold those views. I have long decided that those views are not my problem. They are the problem of the people who hold them. You are a half-giant on your mother's side. By the standards of those same people, that is a thing to be ashamed of but I am here to tell you that those standards do not get to determine whether you teach the lesson on Nifflers next Tuesday afternoon."
Hagrid had begun to cry openly now.
Dumbledore did the thing he did in his most particular moments—he placed his old hand gently over Hagrid's enormous trembling one and did not, by any word, interrupt.
Ron, beside Harry, with the unselfconscious Gryffindor warmth of his particular character, said simply: "Mum always says you're one of the best men she knows, Hagrid. She really meant it."
Hagrid, with a convulsive shake, set his enormous head down on his enormous folded arms on the table and wept.
The five of them sat with him while he did.
After some time, Hagrid raised his enormous head. He wiped his enormous face with his enormous handkerchief. He drew a long, precise, shuddering breath.
"My father," he said quietly, "used to say to me, when I was a lad and the village children would call my names—he used to say, Rubeus, lad, never be ashamed o' what yeh are. There'll always be them as'll use it against yeh. Don't yeh ever let 'em. Be what yeh are. Hold yer head up."
A small precise pause.
"I'd forgot," Hagrid said softly. "I'd forgot, all this last month. I'd forgot what me father said."
"You remember it now," Dumbledore said gently.
"Aye. I do."
"All right," Hagrid said. "All right. I'll come back Monday."
Then Hagrid turned his enormous eyes to Harry, said with the steady warmth Harry remembered from approximately the first day he had met the man: "Harry. Yeh're goin' to win that Tournament, lad. Aren't yeh."
"I—"
"Yeh're goin' to. An' when yeh do, I want yeh to remember what we just talked about. That yeh don't have to be ashamed o' what yeh are. None of us do. Not me. Not Hermione. Not Draco's re-thinkin' of his upbringin'. Not yeh, Harry, with all that the Daily Prophet an' the Potter Stinks lot have been sayin' about yeh since November. Yeh win that Tournament, lad. Yeh win it. An' yeh make 'em all eat their words. All of them."
Harry nodded.
"Yes, Hagrid."
"Good lad."
They hugged him before they left.
22nd January 1995, the seventh-floor corridor, 5:47 PM
The late-afternoon study session in the Room had finished at five-forty, and the four of them had emerged from the concealed door into the seventh-floor corridor with the quiet pleasure of friends whose Sunday-afternoon work had concluded productively. Hermione had her Black-Lake bathymetric chart rolled under her arm. Draco had a composed working theory about Mer-language phonology. Ron had several Honeydukes wrappers in his coat pockets. Harry had the sense of progress—a two-hour work on Mer-people had genuinely advanced their preparation.
Once, they reached the bend in the corridor, their paths diverged.
Viktor was standing at the junction, in his dark winter cloak, with a composed pleased patience of a young man who had clearly been waiting for the last fifteen minutes.
Hermione's face bright up seeing him.
"Viktor."
"Hermin-ee-nee. I am here to walk you to the lake."
"The lake at sunset?"
"The lake at sunset."
She turned to Harry. "Bye."
"Bye." Harry replied tersely.
She took Viktor's arm. They departed along the east corridor.
Ron, beside Harry, had been checking his wristwatch with the urgency of a boy who had been managing a Sunday-evening date with cheerful efficiency.
"Mate. I have to go. Lavender is meeting me at the Astronomy Tower stairs at quarter to. She wants me to teach her some basic chess moves. I have been preparing for this for a week."
"See you at the dorm, Ron."
He went.
Draco, last, gathered his neatly-rolled phonology notes and gave Harry a nod. "Healing rounds. Madam Pomfrey is expecting me at six."
"Mm."
He went.
Harry, alone now in the small precise corridor in the late-afternoon golden light through the high arched windows, drew his folded Marauder's Map from his trusty satchel.
He tapped it with his hand.
'I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.'
The map's small precise ink lines spread across the parchment. Harry scanned, habitually, for Luna. He found her quickly—the small dot labelled Luna Lovegood was in near the Ravenclaw Tower with the small dot labelled Astoria Greengrass, the precise small pair sitting in the hall way. Together. Studying. Usual.
He smiled tenderly.
He turned the map's attention to the main castle corridors. The small dots of students, professors, and staff moved in their Sunday-evening pattern. McGonagall in her office. Flitwick in his. Filch and Mrs Norris in the fourth-floor corridor.
And then—Harry's breath caught—a small dot he had not expected.
Bartemius Crouch.
In Snape's office.
Harry's interior alarm engaged.
Crouch had not been seen at Hogwarts since the Yule Ball, when his absence from the judges' table had been the first formal sign of his deeper illness. The Head of the Department of International Magical Cooperation, missing for a month from his ministerial duties, was now in the empty office of Severus Snape on a Sunday evening.
Harry, with the steady composed interior decision of a boy who had decided that this was something Ethan needed to know about, immediately, tucked the map into his inside pocket, drew his Invisibility Cloak from his bag, swung it around his shoulders, and began to run, soft-footed, toward the dungeon staircase.
He had taken four flights down to the fifth-floor landing in approximately two minutes when his foot caught on the trick stair at the fourth-from-bottom step.
Harry eye's widened in surprise but his reflex that Ethan had drilled into him for moments of balance-loss in motion.
He recovered swiftly.
But the golden egg, which he had been carrying in his other hand, did not.
It slipped.
It hit the stone landing with a clang.
'Ugh! Why did I forgot to put it in the satchel' Harry's face darkened at his own clumsiness.
The Egg rolled, with an unmistakable echoing metallic sound down two further stairs, came to rest against the stone wall of the next landing, and emitted an opening-screech that resolved into nothing but lasted approximately one and a half seconds in full audible volume, followed by distant shuffling cough.
"Who's that."
Filch.
Harry froze.
He had time, just, to draw the folds of the Invisibility Cloak fully around himself before the precise small lit lantern of Argus Filch came around the corner of the lower landing.
Filch's thin sallow face, in the precise small lantern-light, peered up the staircase. His mean eyes registered the object lying against the wall.
"An egg?"
He picked it up.
He held it up in his thin sallow hand.
"Oh," he muttered, with the pleased malice of a caretaker who had just found something he could not entirely identify but was certain belonged to a student who would, in the near future, be reported to McGonagall.
A sweep of black cloak at the lower landing.
Snape.
He had clearly been alerted by the clang. His black eyes, in the lantern-light, narrowed immediately.
"Filch. What is that."
"Professor Snape, sir, I found this on the stair—"
"Give it to me."
Filch handed over the egg. Snape's long fingers turned it once. His black eyes did the thing they did when he was registering a piece of evidence.
"Filch," he said quietly. "Someone broke into my office this evening. Approximately twenty minutes ago. I require your help in finding them."
"Broke into your office, sir?"
"Yes."
A thump of a wooden leg on the lower stair.
Mad-Eye Moody.
He had clearly also been alerted. His magical eye was rolling in its registration of the entire landing—including, Harry registered with the horror of a boy who had been informed by his father that a Mad-Eye magical eye saw through Invisibility Cloaks—the precise small still figure of Harry himself at the precise small upper landing.
Moody's precise small good eye, however, fixed on Snape.
"Severus."
"Alastor."
"Something missing?"
"Something disturbed," Snape said quietly. "Not yet, I think, missing."
"Wouldn't be the first time someone took an interest in your office, would it," Moody said, with the dry weight of an Auror who was deliberately needling. "I myself examined it the first week of term, as you may recall."
Snape's black eyes went very still.
"You searched my office in September, Alastor. Without my permission."
"With the Tournament security clearance the Headmaster authorised, Severus. As you know."
"Without my permission."
"The security clearance does not require your permission, Severus."
"And yet," Snape said softly, with a steel composure of a man whose territorial registration had been engaged, "it is interesting, isn't it, Alastor, that on a Sunday evening of my office being disturbed, the ex-Auror who searched it without my permission in September is the first person on the scene."
"Severus."
"Alastor."
The two men, in the lantern-lit landing, stared at each other across approximately five feet of stone floor.
It was then Harry decided to moved.
He glided, on the soft soles of his shoes, in the absolute silence the Cloak granted him, down three stairs to where Filch was now standing slightly behind Snape's shoulder. He extended his unseen hand. Lifted the golden egg, which Filch was now holding loosely behind his hip, directly out of the caretaker's grip.
Filch felt nothing.
Snape's black eyes, however—in instant the egg vanished—flicked.
Moody's precise small magical eye, in the simultaneous instant, also flicked.
Both men, Harry registered with interior horror, had registered the disappearance.
He did not, however, wait to see what they did with the registration.
He ran.
He took five remaining flights of staircases in the soft-soled silent run, and was out into the upper corridor and away before the voices of Snape and Moody behind him had even fully resumed their argument.
He did not hear the full continuation. But he did hear, faintly, the first sentence of Moody's resumed reply, in a tone Harry had not previously heard him use:
"Severus. We will, in due course, have a precise small fuller conversation about exactly what was in your office tonight."
22nd January 1995, Gryffindor fourth-year dormitory, 7:14 PM
The dormitory was quiet. The evening light through the high windows had turned the clean dark blue of an early winter evening. The fire in the hearth burned at its evening register.
Harry sat at his desk by the window, with his paper laid out before him.
He was non-verbally and wandlessly dictating his letter to his father.
The ink-quill, in its precise small small dish, moved on its own across the paper in the steady hand Ethan had trained Harry in. The words appeared as Harry thought them.
Suddenly, the door of the dormitory opened.
Ron, with a flushed pleased face of a boy whose Sunday-evening date had clearly gone very well, and his arms full of small wrapped parcels of Honeydukes confectionery, came in.
"Mate. Lavender has worked out the chess. She beat me. Three games in a row. She has been hiding this from me. I have been in love with this girl for two months and she has been hiding her chess from me, mate! I have just realised I am going to marry her."
Harry, with the bemused pleasure of a friend who had registered the slow inevitable trajectory of his best friend's developing love affair, looked up.
"Ron, something happen... Odd."
"Like what?."
"Sit down."
Ron, registering the change in Harry's voice, sat. He set the precise small parcels down.
Harry told him what happened earlier.
Ron listened without interrupting. His freckled face went, by Harry's account, the composed thoughtful register of a fourteen-year-old who had been processing serious information for fully two minutes.
"Crouch," Ron said quietly, "in Snape's office. Snape, who is famously a repository of considerable Dark-Arts knowledge. Crouch, who is a senior Ministry official with a reputation for being almost as ruthless about Dark wizards as he is about prosecuting them."
"Yes."
"Mate, the obvious reading is that Crouch is in Snape's office looking for evidence that Snape is a Dark wizard."
"Could be?"
"..."
Ron with his eye brows rose, looked at Harry.
"Mate. You should consider being an Auror."
Harry rolled his eyes.
"I am only saying." Ron raised his hands up.
Ron's face then composed itself into a steady thoughtful register.
"Mate. Could... Snape have put your name in the Goblet?"
Harry, who had been considering this question, for some weeks now, drew a long precise small breath.
"I don't think so."
"Why?"
"Because... because Snape has never liked me. From the very first day. He has been openly mean to me for four years. The meanness has been—" Harry paused, choosing his words, "— remain only the ordinary meanness of a man who has decided he dislikes a student. It has not been the calculated cruelty of a man who has decided to arrange for the student's death. There is a difference, Ron. The first is prejudice. The second is malice. Snape has the first toward me. I have not, in four years of his attention, felt the second."
Ron considered this.
"Mate. You are—" he paused, "—very thoughtful about this for someone he has bullied for four years."
"I guess so" Harry drew another long breath.
"Most people would not draw that distinction."
"Most people do not have my father."
Ron grinned.
"Fair enough, mate. So Snape is not the one who put your name in. So who is."
Harry shook his head, though his eyes shone with contemplation, thinking of all the shady things that had happened since the beginning of the Tournament.