Chapter 62
"Well… welcome to our illustrious company, if I can put it that way," I said, looking with genuine interest at the pair of quite pleasant-looking Indian sisters who had, at last, been royally admitted by Daphne to our private training sessions. "I'm hoping for a productive collaboration."
"Hmph, and why does that sound like I've just accepted a job I'm also prepared to pay for?" Parvati Patil said with a slightly nervous, slightly ingratiating smile. She was the more lighthearted and open of the two — and the one who had crossed paths with our group the least, simply because she was in Gryffindor, which didn't share many classes with us.
"Because you really will have to work for it… At least if you want to get used to our training pace in any reasonable amount of time," I said with an easy smile, deciding not to drag out the start of the session. "All right. Today's agenda is large-scale transfiguration and the application of magical runes within it."
I had grown quite accustomed to my role as teacher and mentor to this varied collection of witches. Giving these informal lectures — often tied directly to whatever topics we were covering in class — had become entirely natural to me over the past year. My accumulated knowledge and general understanding of magic helped me hold my own well enough not to embarrass myself alongside the likes of Professor McGonagall's lessons.
Not that anything particularly extraordinary was expected of me. My friends were all quite solid on theory already, which meant I mostly concentrated on clarifying narrower points and left further theoretical preparation to them. They handled that perfectly well on their own.
Where they genuinely needed help was in practice — and there I did outpace them, often by a significant margin, with the ability to share my own experience and skills in ways that sometimes made real differences in their work with more demanding magic.
The steadily accumulating experience and my unusual degree of magical sensitivity — increasingly supplemented by my ability to pick up on others' moods and even surface thoughts, sometimes entirely involuntarily — made me a reasonably effective tutor, whatever my other flaws.
At the very least, the Patil twins had come away from our first joint sessions thoroughly satisfied, if a little rattled. Apparently they hadn't expected that in trying to help them grasp new dimensions of transfiguration, I would spend literal hours using transfiguration itself as a visual aid — demonstrating exactly what was actually being asked of them.
McGonagall didn't typically indulge her students with demonstrations like that, even though she never failed to remind them that visualization was one of the most fundamental elements of transfiguration. Which meant that sometimes walking through, step by step, how a chair ought to become an owl was considerably more effective than loading students down with abstruse theory and the mathematical underpinnings of every transformation.
Not that complex magical formulas and their combinations could be dispensed with entirely — not in transfiguration. Even Dumbledore couldn't work from pure will and imagination alone, recognized master of transfiguration three times over though he was. But my approach to teaching yielded decent results all the same.
I won't bother mentioning that this method turned every session into an exhausting workout for me personally as well. I had long since learned to make the most effective use of whatever time and resources were available, and the habit of using magic at every available opportunity had become deeply ingrained.
"You know, I genuinely understand now how Ginny managed to become a straight-O student since last year," Parvati said at some point, and the twins had clearly approved of my approach — they had begun looking at the younger members of our group with something rather close to envy. Astoria Greengrass was barely managing not to lift her chin to the ceiling, so full was she of quiet self-satisfaction.
"To be fair, I don't help anyone with Potions, Herbology, or purely theoretical subjects — I'm lucky to get anything above expected in those myself," I deflected part of the praise, knowing perfectly well that Ginny had always taken her studies seriously even without my involvement, having quietly set aside her burning desire to play Quidditch in favor of academics.
Though she was always happy to go for a casual fly on her broom. Partly, I suspected, because Daphne and Luna had no interest in that particular pastime, which meant we usually only flew together, just the two of us. Though this year things had been more complicated on that front — I'd been too absorbed in studying magic, and the weather outside wasn't doing anyone any favors.
"Hmph, the twins have been helping me with Potions — they gave me all their old notes ages ago. The rest isn't so difficult," the youngest Weasley said, modestly dropping her eyes in a way that conveyed anything but modesty, clearly delighted by my unspoken praise. "By the way, are you ready for the first tournament task? They're saying the champions are going to face real dragons."
"The whole castle's been talking about it," Astoria Greengrass said, waving a small hand with light mockery, not bothering to hide her blazing interest in the upcoming event. "The tournament organizers practically let the dragon handlers pitch their camp right at the edge of the Forbidden Forest, so that every champion would know exactly what they were facing."
"And rightly so," I said, shaking my head. I had no doubt the organizers had made that particular slip entirely on purpose. "Going up against a dragon with no preparation at all would be too much, even for an experienced, trained wizard — let alone ordinary students."
"But you'd find a way to handle a dragon yourself, wouldn't you?" Ginny said with a provocative smile. She knew perfectly well that I had spent a fair amount of time last year reading about fire-breathing reptiles and methods of dealing with them.
"Just like that, out of nowhere, with no warning about what I was facing? Extremely unlikely," I said, declining to agree with the ginger menace in this particular instance. It wouldn't do to let slip that I had mastered certain specific and exceedingly difficult spells used by dragonologists back in my third year.
Not that it would mean much, given everything I had already revealed about my abilities — but I had grown so accustomed to concealing particular skills that abandoning the habit wasn't something I was prepared to do lightly. So — no. I wasn't going to advertise my capabilities. I wasn't some boastful teenager who felt compelled to announce his strength at every available opportunity.
Quite the opposite, if anything. The instinct to keep myself concealed — especially where skills were concerned — had long since become second nature. It even led me to make deliberate mistakes in class sometimes. Nothing too consequential, and rarely affecting my marks, but noticeable enough to prevent anyone from suspecting how far I had actually advanced in certain areas of charmwork or transfiguration.
Intellectually, I understood there wasn't much point in the secrecy anymore. Any adult wizard would still refuse to take a student seriously — not completely seriously, I mean — no matter how brilliant or accomplished. But the habit had stuck with me since my first years, and it had its uses. Deliberately making a calculated mistake on a genuinely demanding topic was decent mental exercise, a check on magical control, and a mildly interesting problem to solve.
But returning to the subject at hand — watching the dragons, and watching our champions try to steal imitation eggs from them, was something I desperately wanted to see. The film was one thing, and the details and scenes I'd already half-forgotten. A real confrontation between the most talented young wizards of their generation and actual living dragons was something else entirely.
I wanted to see it. And thinking through how I myself might handle such a situation, with a real dragon directly in front of me — that was genuinely exciting.
And the British Ministry had really outdone themselves with the tournament's organization. Nothing remotely like the nonsense from the films.
Even if I no longer remembered many of the details, I was fairly certain the films hadn't mentioned or shown anything like the magical screens that broadcast everything from the arena — not just from every possible camera angle, but from the perspective of whichever champion was actively casting at the time.
That last part was especially captivating. Even if it was slightly disappointing that spectators weren't allowed anywhere near the actual arenas — there were three of them, each located at a considerable distance from the others — because the organizers feared provoking the dragons prematurely and were understandably concerned about casualties among the students and guests attending such a monumental event.
But otherwise — absolutely brilliant. Even the drawing of lots, showing each champion randomly selecting their future dragon opponent, had been put on before the competition began, sending the blood of every spectator in the stands rushing before a single spell had been cast. Most of those spectators, incidentally, were gathered on the Quidditch pitch, which at some point had come to resemble a five-dimensional cinema.
When a dragon exhaled a fresh jet of magical fire, actual, fully real — if completely harmless — heat rolled out at the audience from the main screen. Several quite sophisticated artifacts and two dozen wizards had been brought in specifically to produce effects like that.
Which was also why everyone preferred watching from the main stands. The competition was also being broadcast on one of the walls of the Great Hall, and you could follow everything from there perfectly well. But it simply wasn't the same, and wasn't nearly as thrilling — though most of the younger students had to make do with that version, since the administration had declined to let them out of the castle at a moment when the school grounds had been flooded with strangers and foreigners.
*And this competition, like the Quidditch World Cup, is almost certainly being broadcast live in any number of public gathering places,* I thought with private amusement, knowing perfectly well that the organizers' words about "eternal glory" for the champions weren't as empty as they might sound. Wizards would not be forgetting this event anytime soon.
And yes — while wizards had no television, and cinemas were still an entirely foreign concept — for events like this, methods of broadcasting live sound and image materialized with remarkable speed. For anyone who didn't catch it in real time, tomorrow's papers would overflow with full recordings of everything that had happened, along with frame-by-frame highlights and mandatory expert commentary from every imaginable perspective.
Newspapers in the wizarding world functioned as a kind of substitute for television, in that sense. No films or serials or reality programs had taken root among wizards yet, but Quidditch matches were broadcast in the papers — including certain publications dedicated entirely to the sport — with admirable regularity.
From what I'd heard, the British Quidditch Gazette ran recordings of even the inter-house matches at Hogwarts with some frequency. Which was partly why so many students fought so desperately for a spot on their house teams — for some of them it genuinely represented a chance to get noticed, and potentially break into serious professional sport.
And for the three champions of the Triwizard Tournament, this kind of public exposure would prove far from worthless in the future. The sight of Cedric Diggory quite literally restructuring a dragon's face with transfiguration was almost certainly going to matter when it came time for a prospective employer to make a choice — assuming Cedric decided to look for work anywhere in the next few years, while the memory of it was still fresh and vivid.
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