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The second event of the Triwizard Tournament opened by the Black Lake amid a biting, bone-cutting wind.
Dumbledore stood on a temporary elevated platform, his voice amplified by magic and carrying clearly to every corner of the grounds.
"Welcome, everyone, to the second event of the Triwizard Tournament! This time, our champions will face a challenge beneath the water."
He gave a brief overview of the task, then turned toward the composed figure standing beside him.
"The specific rules will now be explained by this event's safety supervisor — Miss Hermione Granger."
Hermione stepped forward. Her calm gaze swept over the four champions below, then across the crowd of students craning their necks to watch.
"The second event," she said, her voice cool and even, "requires each champion to retrieve someone from the depths of the Black Lake within the allotted time. Someone... very important to them."
Harry's expression shifted the moment the words landed.
He scanned the crowd urgently, searching for a familiar head of platinum blonde hair.
Krum's gaze moved through the Hogwarts students and settled on Hermione. His expression was complicated, unreadable.
His dance partner, perfectly fine and lively just yesterday, was nowhere to be seen.
"That's right." Hermione spoke as though she'd read all their minds, her tone completely flat. "The people you're looking for are currently at the bottom of the lake. You have one hour. When time is up, you return — whether you've succeeded or not. Champions, prepare yourselves."
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a strangely shaped flare gun, raising it high.
"Ready—"
The four champions moved to the end of the dock.
BANG!
The sharp crack split the air and the competition was officially underway.
Almost in the same instant, four figures dropped without hesitation into the icy water of the Black Lake, throwing up four massive plumes of white spray.
Hermione lowered the flare gun and walked to the water's edge, watching the surface in silence.
A faint blue light flickered through her eyes. Everything beneath the water became visible to her, clear as glass.
She watched the four champions fumble around in the depths, each scrambling to find their bearings by whatever means they had, and shook her head.
The Triwizard Tournament.
It was, in her view, more or less a school sports day with slightly higher injury potential. Compared to genuine life-or-death stakes, it was practically a children's game.
If she were the one organizing it, she'd have dragged a full cartload of the most dangerous dark wizards out of Azkaban, told them they'd earn a full pardon for killing these four "champions," thrown everyone into an enormous sealed magical barrier, then used Fiendfyre or some other wide-range lethal spell to steadily shrink the space until only one person was left standing. That would be a champion worth the name.
Too bad it wasn't her tournament to run.
Beneath the surface.
Harry gritted his teeth against the cold driving through every inch of him, yanked a potion bottle from his robes, and knocked it back in one go.
Almost immediately, both sides of his neck began to itch and prickle. Gills pushed out behind his ears. Webbing stretched between his fingers and toes.
Professor Snape had tracked him down last night and pressed the bottle into his hands with no warning, a modified Gillyweed potion, supposedly with improved effects and fewer side effects.
On top of that, Snape had spent the entire night, unprecedentedly, impossibly, drilling him through the Impervius Charm until Harry had it down cold, all to make sure he wouldn't fail the second task.
Harry had barely trusted his own ears.
Snape. Helping him. On purpose.
Faced with Harry's deeply skeptical stare, Snape had simply issued a cold snort and explained in that perfectly characteristic drawl:
"Potter, don't flatter yourself. I still find that face of yours, so boringly identical to your father's, thoroughly insufferable. However, you currently represent Hogwarts, and I will not allow you to make an idiot of yourself in front of the entire European wizarding community."
It almost made a certain kind of sense, when he put it that way.
Harry had accepted the help with cautious, reluctant half-belief.
Still, something nagged at him. It felt too simple an explanation.
Could it really be because of what Hermione had done, made him wear, pah, pah, pah!
Harry shook his head violently, physically dislodging the thought. The more he chased it, the worse it would get. He had a strong feeling that if he kept going down that road, something extremely unpleasant was waiting at the end of it.
He shelved the thought entirely.
With the potion working through him, he swam like an actual fish, fast, easy, cutting straight down toward the deep.
He found them quickly.
Beside a crumbling stone ruin at the lake floor, four figures hung suspended in the water, wrists and ankles bound with thick coils of aquatic weeds. A group of merpeople ringed them in a loose perimeter, tridents in hand, faces twisted with expressions that didn't need translation.
Harry's eyes locked onto one figure immediately.
Draco.
Eyes shut. Face pale. That platinum blonde hair drifting loose around her in the current, slow and weightless, all the life gone from it.
Hermione had promised, repeatedly, firmly, that the hostages were completely safe. Just a Sleeping Charm, nothing more. But seeing Draco like that, motionless and limp, Harry's chest went tight anyway. Worry flooded through him before he could stop it.
The other three champions arrived within moments.
Krum took one look at the hostages and the merpeople guards and didn't bother with words. His body snapped into a sharp hunch. His head warped, rapidly, grotesquely, and where a man's face had been, a shark's head now sat on his shoulders.
He let out a deep, rumbling snarl and hurled himself straight at the nearest merperson, claws slashing in a savage attack.
CRASH!
It was like hitting a beehive with a stick. Every merperson in the vicinity that had been holding position went off at once, shrieking in jagged, ear-splitting bursts as they swarmed forward with their tridents leveled at all four champions.
Krum didn't stay to absorb the attention he'd just created. His massive body twisted with startling agility, using the shark's momentum and bulk to muscle through the edge of the chaos, and made straight for the bound hostages.
"Damn it!"
Harry, Fleur, and Cedric swore in almost perfect unison.
The move was transparent the instant they saw it. Krum had started the brawl deliberately, handed all three of them a merpeople problem to deal with, and now he was going to use their distraction to walk off with his hostage while they were buried.
Despicable didn't quite cover it.
Furious or not, they had no real choice. The three of them threw themselves into the melee, firing spells in every direction to hold the merpeople back, inching toward the hostages a few strokes at a time.
They finally managed to drive back the heaviest wave of attackers, three of them working together, barely, and had just drawn a breath when they saw it.
Krum had already reached the hostages. He'd grabbed one and was rising fast, pulling hard for the surface.
Fleur went rigid with rage.
The Beauxbatons champion was not, it turned out, the kind of person who let things go. Her wand slashed out in one sharp motion, and a beam of red light shot through the water with perfect accuracy and hit Krum square in the back.
"Petrificus Totalus!"
Krum locked up mid-stroke. Every muscle seized at once, rigid as stone, all his momentum gone. He sank straight down, stiff as a plank, back toward the dark of the deeper lake.
➤ Next: The Maze
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