The second week had a different quality than the first.
The first week had been about establishing — finding out what the work required, building the foundation, discovering the specific places where each person's technique had gaps and beginning to address them. The second week was about consolidation, which was less dramatic and more demanding in the specific way of work that required not effort but repetition: doing the thing correctly, and correctly again, and correctly again until correct became the default rather than the achievement.
It was, in Ron's experience, the week people found hardest.
The first week had the energy of beginning. The third week would have the energy of proximity — the task getting close, the work acquiring the specific urgency of something that was about to matter in a way that was not hypothetical. The second week had neither. It had only the work itself, stripped of novelty and not yet charged with imminence, and the question it asked was whether you were the kind of person who could do the work for its own sake.
They all were, it turned out.
He had not been certain of this about all of them. He had been certain about Hermione, who had spent her entire academic life doing exactly this. He had been fairly certain about Harry, whose capacity for sustained effort in service of something he cared about was one of his more consistent qualities. Ginny he had assessed correctly. Neville exceeded his expectation, which was a data point he filed alongside the theory he had been developing since third year.
Luna was the one he had been genuinely uncertain about. Not her ability — her ability was real and had been surprising in its specificity. Her consistency was the question, because Luna's relationship with consistency was not always the conventional one. But Luna turned up every evening at half past five with her wand and her complete attention and the specific quality she brought to everything she considered worth doing, and she did not miss a session, and by the end of the second week her stealth work was the cleanest in the group after Ron's own.
He mentioned this to her on the Thursday evening, when the others had gone ahead and they were walking back together through the seventh floor corridor.
'You're the best at this,' he said. 'The stealth work. After me.'
Luna considered this. 'I think it's because I'm used to not being noticed,' she said, without self-pity, in the tone of someone stating a fact they had decided was simply accurate. 'I know what it feels like to be invisible. The charm is just making it literal.'
He thought about this for a moment.
'That's a very good way to understand what the charm is doing,' he said.
'Most things make more sense if you've already felt them,' Luna said. She looked at the corridor ahead with the quality she brought to spaces she found interesting. 'Do you think the castle minds? Being enchanted to look like nothing is there when actually something is?'
'I think the castle has seen everything,' Ron said. 'I don't think it minds much anymore.'
Luna seemed to find this satisfactory. They walked the rest of the corridor in the comfortable quiet of people who had said something real and were letting it be real without adding to it.
The third week arrived with the specific quality of proximity.
The task was in four days. Then three. Then two. The castle knew — not in the way that the castle knew things it had been told, but in the way that a place absorbed the energy of the people in it, and the people in it had been generating a particular frequency of anticipation since Halloween that was now, in the final week of November, approaching something closer to urgency.
He ran the sessions harder in the third week. Not longer — they were already at the limit of what was sustainable without compromising the quality of the work, and compromising the quality was not something he was willing to do at this stage. Harder in the sense of more specific, more demanding, closer to what the actual conditions would require.
On the Monday he ran the full sequence for the first time — the complete approach as it would need to work on the day. Disillusionment first, scent masking and heat masking and footstep silencing cast simultaneously and held simultaneously, which was the technically demanding part: maintaining four separate charms under pressure while moving. Then movement toward a simulated target. Then the secondary illusion — a decoy performing the visible action while Harry approached the real objective from the direction the dragon was not looking.
Harry ran it three times.
The first attempt: the Disillusionment held but the heat masking dropped when he moved quickly, which was the residual version of the same problem from week one — the intention narrowing under pressure.
The second attempt: all four charms held but the secondary illusion was slightly late, which meant there was a window of approximately four seconds where neither the real Harry nor the decoy was in the dragon's field of attention nor the dragon would reorient.
The third attempt was clean.
All four charms held throughout the approach. The secondary illusion launched at the correct moment, drawing the simulated dragon's attention to the east while Harry came in from the west, and the retrieval — a practice golden egg they had been using for two weeks — was completed without the target registering the approach at all.
The Room was very quiet for a moment.
'Again,' Harry said.
Ron looked at him. 'That was correct.'
'I know,' Harry said. 'I want to do it again.'
He understood this. The difference between doing something correctly once and knowing you could do it correctly. 'Again,' he said.
Harry ran it a fourth time. Clean again.
Hermione, from the side of the Room where the group was watching, let out a breath she had been holding in a way that was not obvious until she released it.
Ginny said: 'That's it. That's the one.'
'Yes,' Ron said.