The World Cup was on the eighteenth of August.
They Portkeyed from the appointed spot — Ron's family, the Grangers, Harry, Luna — arriving at the Dartmoor staging point in the late afternoon with the tens of thousands of other wizards who had been arriving since morning and had already created a small temporary city of magical tents across the moor.
The staging point alone was worth the journey. Tents as far as the treeline in every direction, a city assembled in hours, the flags of a dozen nations bright in the afternoon light. The Grangers had come through the Portkey with the slightly compressed quality of people who had just experienced something that had no Muggle equivalent and were deciding how to organise it. Emma Granger straightened, looked around, and said nothing for a moment. Daniel Granger blinked twice and then looked at his own hands.
'You're alright,' Ron said.
'Yes,' Daniel said, with the tone of a man verifying a clinical assessment. 'Just recalibrating.'
The Ministry campsite worker who met them at the registration point was a harassed-looking young man who had clearly been on shift since dawn. He handed over the site allocation with the efficiency of someone who had done it nine hundred times that day and did not wish to make it nine hundred and one.
'One question,' Ron said. 'The Muggle site manager. Mr Roberts. Why not simply have a Ministry employee collect the money and hand it to him at the end of the event? It would save him the confusion.'
The campsite worker looked at him. 'Because he's the licensed caretaker. Money has to change hands at the site. Legal obligation.'
'So put the memory charm after the exchange rather than before.'
The campsite worker opened his mouth, closed it, and looked at Ron with the expression of someone who had been doing this job for four years and had not considered the question before. 'I just manage the registrations,' he said finally.
'Fair enough,' Ron said, and moved on.
Their allocated site was in the middle of a section that was organised chaos — tents in every style, the smell of food from a dozen countries, conversation in languages he counted without trying. He and his father set up the large tent in fifteen minutes, the interior expanding as the structure settled, the sitting area and kitchen resolving themselves while the Grangers watched from what they had gauged as a safe observational distance.
Emma Granger had said very little since they arrived. Now she stood at the entrance of the expanded tent and looked at the interior — the full kitchen, the six rooms, the sitting area with its conjured light — and said, very quietly: 'It's quite beautiful, actually.'
'Most magic is,' Ron said. 'If it's been done by someone who cares about the outcome.'
He took a photograph of her face. The genuine wonder on it, in the late afternoon light.
They roamed the campsite in the hour before they met Sirius. Ginny and Luna moved ahead of the main group with the ease of people who were interested in everything and had complementary reasons. Luna stopped at a Bulgarian stall selling enchanted instruments that made music when the wind changed direction. Ginny stopped at a stand selling Irish team merchandise and engaged the vendor in what became a ten-minute technical discussion about the Chaser formation that had beaten the Scottish side in the quarterfinals, conducted in fluent Irish. The vendor, a large red-faced man who had not expected this from a fourteen-year-old girl, looked at her with first surprise and then genuine respect.
'How many of them does she have?' Harry asked Ron, in a low voice.
'Languages? Six, now. She's added two this summer.'
Harry watched Ginny switch back to English to bring the man's attention to a point of Irish defensive statistics he appeared to have got wrong. 'Right,' he said, with the expression of someone receiving new information and filing it carefully.
They ran into a group of students from Uagadou near the souvenir stands, identifiable by their school colours and the wandless small-light they had floating companionably between them as the afternoon dimmed. One of them — a girl of perhaps fifteen, with the specific attention of someone from Baraka's class — looked at Ron and said, in Luganda, 'You're the one who photographed the Nundu.'
'Yes,' he said, in Luganda.
She looked at him with the assessing quality her school seemed to produce as standard. 'Baraka showed us the print. He said you held the camera steady.'
'I noticed the impulse to look away and decided not to follow it.'
She considered this. 'He's here,' she said. 'Baraka. With the staff.'
Ron found Baraka twenty minutes later, near the Ugandan national camp. He was with three other young teachers from the school, easy in the way he always was, with the quality of someone who found the world continuously interesting. He saw Ron across the distance and raised a hand.
'The photographer,' he said. 'Luna said you'd be here.'
'Luna says a lot of things,' Ron said.
'She's usually right,' Baraka said, which was accurate.
They spoke for a quarter of an hour — about the Nundu prints, which Baraka had shown to the school's creature archive; about the match, about which Baraka had an opinion grounded in Seeker theory that Harry stood and listened to with the focused attention of a student who had found a compelling source. Ron took a photograph: Baraka in the Dartmoor evening light, the Ugandan flags above the camp behind him, talking Quidditch with Harry. He would send Baraka a copy.
He found an extraordinary moment near the exit of the grounds: Professor McGonagall, in a Hogwarts tartan scarf he had never seen her wear, standing at the barrier of the Irish supporters' section with her hands clasped and an expression that bore no resemblance whatsoever to Transfiguration class. She was watching the stadium preparations having been an Irish supporter since before most of the people around her were born and not remotely embarrassed about it.
He took the photograph before she noticed him. The scarf. The expression. The uprightness that was precisely her and the joy underneath it that was only here, like this, on this kind of afternoon.
She did notice him, eventually, and looked at the camera with the expression he knew from corridors.
'Mr Weasley,' she said.
'Professor,' he said. 'You look well.'
A pause in which she decided, visibly, what to do with that.
'I expect that photograph to be discreet,' she said.
'I'll send you a copy,' he said. 'If you'd like one.'
Something in her expression shifted, briefly. 'Thank you,' she said, with the quality of something that was not performed. 'I would.'
Sirius met them at the designated point with Amelia and Susan.
Amelia Bones had the quality of someone who understood authority at a level beyond the institutional — not the authority of the position but the authority of a person who had seen a great deal and had organised their response to it. She received introductions with the professional warmth of someone who had done this many times and made each instance specific. She had been with Sirius since before Easter and there was, between them, the particular ease of two people who had decided each other was worth the work and were getting on with it.
Susan Bones was fifteen and had her aunt's eyes and a steadiness that Ron recognised as the kind that came from being close to power without being impressed by it. She greeted Harry with the ease of someone who saw him as a person rather than a situation. She greeted Hermione with the warmth of two people who had been politely aware of each other for three years without having had the right conditions to become more.
He introduced himself to Susan directly, which she received with slight surprise and then the expression of someone recalibrating.
'You're not quite what I expected,' she said.
'What did you expect?'
'The Weasley family's version of Ron Weasley,' she said. 'Which I think is different from the actual version.'
He found he liked her immediately.
He introduced Hermione's parents to Amelia, who shifted register with the ease of someone who spoke Muggle-professional as a second language. Within five minutes Daniel Granger was in a conversation about Ministry magical licensing regulations that he had no framework for but was attending to with the close focus of a man who did not believe in decorative listening.
He filed both in the sequence.