# Chapter 63
The first task of the Triwizard Tournament ended well enough for all the champions. At least no one died, and no one was seriously injured — which, naturally, gave certain individuals who hungered for blood and spectacle plenty of reason to complain. Personally, I couldn't have cared less about those degenerates.
I did note, almost as an afterthought, that a great many girls genuinely disliked Fleur Delacour. Disliked her intensely enough that certain witches — if one could call them that — were fuming with indignation that the dragon hadn't incinerated the proud Beauxbatons champion. Or at the very least hadn't bitten off a particularly choice piece of her.
*Oh, the wonders of female jealousy…*
I found myself somewhat taken aback by the attitudes that occasionally cropped up even among witches I knew — not nearly as well as the girls in my own, ahem, somewhat expanded circle, but still. The Ravenclaw prefect, for instance, was being exceptionally harsh in her opinions of the French Veela.
That became all the more apparent once the school administration announced the upcoming Yule Ball — or Christmas Ball, if one preferred. Though in truth, most students had already known it was coming. After all, the summer letter listing our required purchases had specifically mentioned the need for dress robes in our wardrobes.
So most students had known, or at least suspected, that something of the sort was absolutely bound to happen this year. But after the tournament's first task, everyone seemed to lose their minds all the same, plunging headlong into the depths of nervous anxiety and the usual adolescent turmoil.
"I trust I may count on your company at the upcoming ball, O soul of my soul?" I asked, inviting my fiancée in a manner that was half-joking, half-rambling, but entirely decisive and unambiguous.
"It could be no other way, O light of my eyes," she replied in kind, with a generous measure of amusement and contented satisfaction, not for a single moment doubting that this was exactly how things between us were meant to be.
"Tch. You managed that even faster than I could react." Ginny Weasley scrunched her face in irritation — she'd been right there to witness my invitation. "I wouldn't be surprised if you're already the very first couple to have sorted out your attendance at the Yule Ball. Now Luna and I have absolutely no reason to go…"
"Says the witch who almost certainly doesn't even know how to dance," Heiress Greengrass replied, rolling her eyes with a languid, utterly unbothered ease — she had long since made her peace with the red-haired Gryffindor's interest in my humble self. "Besides, you're relaxing too soon. I'm nearly certain someone will invite you and Luna. And once that happens, I might even let you have my partner for a dance or two."
"Mm, I don't want to go to the ball with strangers. And I don't know how to dance either… although that could actually be interesting." Luna Lovegood shook her head, airily waving away any future advances on that front before they even materialized.
"Same problem here." Ginny's expression drooped. "Dancing with Harry would be… terribly exciting and thrilling, but going to the ball with someone from Ron's crowd of friends holds absolutely no appeal for me." She was being the tiniest bit dishonest — she very much wanted to go regardless — but she still looked at Daphne and me with a drop of undisguised envy.
"Well… we could just arrange our own dances among ourselves," I offered, trying to cheer my friends up a little. I understood perfectly well where this was all heading, but I still saw no real reason to refuse the younger witches such a small thing.
Besides — I genuinely could not dance. Not even close. A graduation waltz in a past life didn't count for much. So I was going to need practice regardless. And I didn't see a particular problem with that. I'd simply swap my sessions at the Muggle sports club for dancing with girls I'd known for ages.
It was hardly a bad trade. Whatever I lacked in purely physical training — something I'd been getting quietly fond of lately — I could easily make up on my own. I'd long since transfigured a pull-up bar above the doorframe of my room, reinforcing it with charms and runes to make absolutely certain it wouldn't tear itself off the castle wall. It had no conventional bolts or anchors, after all. You couldn't drill into the walls of this castle so easily, not even with magic.
"Well, if I'm the only one here who actually knows how to dance, there's really no point in protesting the plan." Daphne didn't look entirely thrilled about Ginny's rather excessive enthusiasm, but she ultimately found the idea of dancing together not so repellent after all. "We'll just need to get a music box."
"I can handle the music myself. I've seen the right enchantments somewhere before. And your mother drilled the basic sound charms into my head over the summer — more than enough to play whatever music we need," I said. The purely technical aspects of this little venture I could take on easily enough. It would also be another project for my already quite active magical practice.
In magic, after all, everything is interconnected — the better you get at one set of charms or enchantments, the more readily the rest of it comes to you. And stepping away from my constant drilling of combat spells wouldn't hurt, either. My head was ringing and buzzing by the end of every day lately. Damned physical-enhancement charms.
"No sound charms," my fiancée said, shaking her head. She had been working through those same sound charms alongside me — they were part of the illusion magic her mother excelled at. "Too much fuss. Better to just enchant the box itself. Or honestly, let's just order one. Why fill our heads with nonsense like that?"
"Easy to say when not everyone here has spare Galleons to spend on what is, let's be honest, a rather pricey trinket." Ginny pursed her lips in displeasure, dropping a pointed hint that if we were organizing this little amusement for everyone, contributions from all sides would only be proper — and her and Luna's pocket money wasn't exactly overflowing.
"I'd actually like to be involved in enchanting something that complex," Luna added, supporting her friend. "There must be runes involved, surely. Some music boxes are genuine artifacts, even if not the most complicated or expensive ones." She, like Ginny, had clearly caught the implication that Daphne and I were more than willing to simply cover the cost ourselves — but neither of them wanted that.
Being kept in that way wasn't something either Ginny or Luna could stomach. Even though the Weasley girl, all things considered, would probably be perfectly content if I decided to take her under my full financial wing someday. I had a distinct feeling that the role of someone kept and provided for, in relation to me, appealed to her more than a little. But in a situation like this — letting her friends foot the bill for shared entertainment — she simply refused.
Personally, I found that to be quite the double standard. But I accepted this particular quirk of the red-haired Gryffindor with relative ease. After all, it wasn't she who was counted as my fiancée — that was Daphna, who would hardly ever want for money even without my inheritance.
In any case, this sort of thinking wasn't unusual for local witches — the notion that providing for the family falls wholly and entirely upon the husband was, around here, practically the natural order of things. Wizarding society was more than a little archaic and patriarchal. Magic itself did quite a lot to put men and women on equal footing in terms of rights and capability, yet local society still assumed, in one form or another, that the man would be the breadwinner.
*And strangely enough, I'm actually fine with that… I have no desire to squander my ancestral inheritance carelessly, but I think — in the future — money won't be a problem for me.*
I noted this, one of the more important reasons I'd made peace with the way most witches thought. Setting aside, of course, the fact that I might not even make it to graduation from Hogwarts.
Though I'd already largely conquered that particular fixation, at least for the time being. Not because I'd suddenly become certain about tomorrow, or because I'd infected my mind with some other foolishness. More that I was simply tired of being afraid. And yes — I felt just a little more confident in my own abilities.
When nearly everyone around you thinks of you as some kind of magical monster, and you've still managed to keep your most extraordinary and out-of-the-ordinary capabilities hidden… well. It's difficult, in that kind of atmosphere, to think of yourself as a completely hopeless wizard.
And my regular weekend meetings with Sirius only reinforced that still fragile but nonetheless growing confidence in myself. No, I still hadn't mastered hellfire — not yet. What I had managed was to knock my godfather into the dirt fairly regularly during our ongoing sparring duels.
And one couldn't even say anymore that Sirius was some weakened wreck who'd only just crawled out of Azkaban. Black had been free for nearly two years. He'd fully reclaimed his form. He was even developing actively, unwilling to accept being periodically beaten by an actual schoolboy.
So yes — as a purely combat wizard, I was beginning to amount to something. Setting aside the fact that I had zero real combat experience, and no immediate way to get any — but that didn't diminish my overall skill level. In an emergency, if I managed not to panic entirely, I would at least stand some chance of holding my own.
Though with hellfire specifically, I really ought to push harder. Or rather — I ought to push Sirius a little harder to finally let me practice the spell itself. My godfather was dragging his feet on that particular point something fierce. Either a responsible adult had finally awakened somewhere inside him — not entirely out of the question, since the bastard had dug through his entire family library before beginning my training, searching not just for instruction on mastering such magic but for every scrap of information about the spell itself —
— or that very information about hellfire had caused my godfather to abruptly pump the brakes on teaching me something so dangerous. Sirius genuinely cared for me, practically as if I were his own son. There were no other relatives left for Black — even ones as loosely formal as me. So he looked after me, and perhaps in his protectiveness was beginning to hold back my development just a little.
Out of the best intentions, and for reasons I understood completely — even approved of. I myself, in Sirius Black's position, would not have been in any rush to teach my ward a spell known first and foremost for its danger to the very wizard casting it.
But I simply didn't have a choice.
The locket of Slytherin, at least, wasn't something I needed to worry too much about. That particular nastiness Sirius and I had found long ago, dropped it into a specially shielded box, locked it in an equally shielded room, and strictly forbidden the old cantankerous Black family house-elf from going anywhere near any of it.
Sirius and I weren't in any hurry to go poking at the collection of dark artifacts ourselves either, even shielded as they were. We had no particular reason to, and there was no rush — especially since even Sirius himself had no idea that a Horcrux of the Dark Lord was sitting right there in his house. When going through all the old junk he'd inherited, he simply hadn't recognized such a dangerous object for what it was.
Part of the reason was that I wasn't yet ready to destroy the one Horcrux that was relatively harmless and accessible to me. Who knew how it might prove useful in the future? The diadem, on the other hand — it would be better to be rid of that one. Having two Horcruxes on hand was almost certainly unnecessary, and destroying that particular piece of filth before Voldemort's resurrection was something I very much wanted to accomplish.
Hmm. Before Christmas, then, I needed not only to learn to dance and have my dress robes adjusted to match my fiancée's gown — I also needed to finally sort out the matter of hellfire. All the prerequisite spells of a similar type — ones requiring precise control from the caster, the kind that built toward a first encounter with hellfire itself — had already been mastered to a sufficiently high standard.
All that remained was to work through the fire that *devoured even souls* itself, without dying in the process.
After that, at least, I might be able to breathe just a little easier.
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