Fleur Delacour went first
The Common Welsh Green was released into the enclosure with the specific professional efficiency of dragon handlers who had spent several years working with Charlie Weasley and had absorbed his approach — controlled, respectful, the management of something dangerous through understanding rather than force. The Welsh Green moved into the enclosure with the alert wariness of an animal that had been transported across several countries and was now in a new space it had not yet assessed.
Fleur's approach was confident. Transfiguration — she conjured a small flock of birds that drew the dragon's attention with the specific quality of prey, moving them across the enclosure with enough variation to maintain the dragon's focus. Clean spellwork. The birds were well-made, their movement convincing. The Welsh Green tracked them with the focused attention of something that had found something interesting.
Fleur moved to the nest.
She was perhaps eight feet from the egg when the dragon breathed.
Not at her — it breathed at the birds, which it had finally decided to resolve, and the fire came out in the direction of the conjured flock rather than the witch who had made them. But the edge of it caught Fleur's skirt, which caught briefly and was extinguished by the handler team at the enclosure's edge with the practiced speed of people who had been waiting for exactly this.
She retrieved the egg. She walked out of the enclosure with the skirt singed and her composure entirely intact, which was the correct response to the situation and which she executed with the quality of someone who had decided that composure was not a performance but a standard.
The stands applauded. The judges scored.
He noted the scores, noted the technique, and noted what had worked and what had nearly not worked, and filed all of it. The birds were good. The timing of the retrieval relative to the dragon's attention had been slightly late, which was what the fire had punished. Four seconds earlier and it would have been clean.
Hermione, beside him, had her notebook out. He did not say anything about this because there was nothing to say — of course she had her notebook.
Viktor Krum did something unexpected.
The Romanian Short-Snout was a faster dragon than the Welsh Green — quicker to move, quicker to react, the specific danger of something that had survived by being harder to predict than the things that hunted it. Krum stood at the entrance to the enclosure and looked at it for a long moment before entering.
Then he cast the Conjunctivitis Curse.
It was not an elegant solution. Ron had considered it in his preparation work and set it aside specifically because of what happened next: the Short-Snout, temporarily blinded and in pain, thrashed. Its tail swept the enclosure floor with the specific violence of a large animal in distress, and it came within four feet of the nest, cracking two of the real eggs before the handlers intervened to control the movement.
Krum retrieved the golden egg. He had been faster than Fleur. His scores reflected this.
What his scores did not reflect, and what Ron noted with the careful attention of someone assembling a picture of a person, was the moment after Krum retrieved the egg — when he saw what the thrashing had done to the nest, saw the cracked shells, and stood for a moment with an expression that was not guilt exactly but was the specific quality of someone who had done what the situation required and was not entirely at peace with the method.
He filed this alongside the observation from the arrival feast. Viktor Krum was, underneath the fame and the economy of expression and the specific manner of someone who had been public property since he was fifteen, a person who had opinions about what things should cost.
Worth knowing.