I woke before the dormitory had truly begun to breathe.
For a while, I lay still beneath the canopy, in the darkness cut through by the greenish light of the lake. Someone on the other side of the room muttered something in his sleep. Someone else rolled onto his side, and the old bed groaned softly under his weight.
A normal morning.
Except not quite.
Today, Hogwarts was going to get what it had wanted most for three days: a new reason to shout.
The match.
I did not need to look at a calendar. I did not need to ask the older students or listen to excited whispers at breakfast. I knew this day. Not from my own life, not really, but well enough to feel a quiet, unpleasant anticipation under my skin from the very start of the morning.
Harry would fly.
The broom would stop obeying him.
The crowd would first think it was part of the match.
Then they would realize it was not.
On paper, it almost looked amusing. First match, a little chaos, Snape looking suspicious, Hermione setting his robes on fire, Harry catching the Snitch in a way that should have ended with a visit to Pomfrey.
A lot of things looked better on paper.
I got up quietly.
Not because I could not sleep. I could have. Probably. Had I insisted. But lying there and waiting was worse than movement, and at least my body still understood simple commands.
Push-ups. Squats. Stretching.
Breathing.
Movement had a beginning and an end. Muscles hurt in an honest way. If my hand trembled, I knew why. If my heart beat faster, I could count after how many repetitions.
It was pleasantly unmagical.
My left eye did not hurt. Not really. I only felt a faint tension beneath the eyelid, as if something there had woken before I had and was waiting for me to finally stop pretending the day would be ordinary.
The water in the shower was ice-cold.
Good.
Warmth made you sluggish. And I did not need sluggishness today.
When I left the dungeons, the castle was already alive with the match.
Not noise. Not yet. More what comes just before noise. The corridors held acceleration inside them. Students walked faster, talked too much, laughed a little louder than the joke required. Somewhere by the stairs, a small green light-comet flew beneath the ceiling, then crashed into a suit of armor and showered it with sparks.
The armor lifted its visor, as if it wanted to complain.
No one listened.
The Great Hall was worse.
Enchanted ribbons curled beneath the ceiling, green and red, far too bright for that hour. Badges flashed on Slytherin robes with the stubbornness of insects around a lamp. On the Gryffindor side, someone released a small lion made of red light; it ran across the table, gave a thin roar, and disappeared into a bowl of porridge.
Ron nearly choked laughing.
Hermione looked as if she were trying to will the entire sport out of existence.
Harry sat stiffly beside her, one hand wrapped around his cup. He was not eating. He stared at his plate with such concentration that it looked as though he was hoping the egg would tell him how not to fall off a broom.
I sat down in my usual place.
Malfoy waited maybe half a second.
- Potter looks like he is about to faint.
I did not even look up at once. I reached for my tea.
- Still better than looking like you already gave your victory speech before breakfast.
Blaise snorted into his cup.
Malfoy grimaced slightly, but quickly returned to the proper expression. The one that said the world was a stage, and he had unfortunately been forced to perform with amateurs.
- Today Potter is going to fall.
I looked toward Gryffindor.
Harry was just trying to answer Ron, but all he managed was a short nod. He looked less like the hero of a legend and more like a boy someone had reminded that morning that the whole castle would be watching to see whether he made a fool of himself.
- Touching - I said. - So much faith in someone else's flying career.
Crabbe laughed too loudly. Goyle joined in a moment later, safely delayed as always.
Malfoy adjusted the badge on his robes.
SLYTHERIN WILL CRUSH GRYFFINDOR
The words flashed before my eyes so obnoxiously that I had the urge to check whether a badge could feel shame too.
- Do not look at my badge like that - Malfoy said. - It will start being afraid.
- It should. Someone has to.
Blaise closed the book he had apparently been reading only to show everyone that he was above all this. He was not. No one was today.
- You do not like Quidditch? - he asked.
- I do not like a collective illness pretending to be tradition.
- So, Quidditch.
- Among other things.
The conversations around us grew, overlapped, and broke apart mid-sentence. Flint moved between the tables, broad-shouldered and confident in a way that should have required a teacher's permission. At the Gryffindor table, Fred and George shouted something until McGonagall looked their way.
They fell silent at once.
That was talent. Almost magic.
Only after a while did I raise my gaze to the teachers' table.
McGonagall was speaking with Hooch. Snape sat farther down, black and motionless, with the face of a man ordered to participate in school enthusiasm without the legal right to revenge.
And Quirrell...
I did not look at him by accident.
This time, I did it deliberately.
My left eye answered at once with a thin stab, like a needle pushed just under the eyelid.
Quirrell looked as he always did. Pale, slightly hunched, his hands held close together, as if he feared that without control they would start apologizing to people for his very existence. The turban sat too heavily on his head. Not physically. Differently.
The space around him did not lie evenly.
I had no better way to name it. With other teachers, magic had shape, weight, personality. With Dumbledore, it was too deep. With Snape, too layered. With McGonagall, too precise.
With Quirrell, it was false.
Like a note played correctly, but on an instrument tuned wrong.
I looked too long.
Quirrell moved his head.
Not much. Just a little, like someone who had felt a draft.
I looked away first.
The tea was too hot. It burned my tongue. Good.
Simple things still worked.
After breakfast, the castle moved toward the stadium.
We did not walk. The crowd flowed. Down stairs, through corridors, through doors, across the grounds. Scarves, banners, badges, enchanted ribbons that wrapped around arms and sometimes had to be removed by irritated prefects. All of Hogwarts had become one organism, too loud, too colorful, and convinced that shouting earlier gave an advantage.
Outside, the air was cold and damp.
The grounds shone with the morning chill. Grass by the path bent beneath hundreds of shoes. The stadium grew before us with every step, covered in old spells like stone covered in moss. I saw them better than I wanted to. Reinforcements on the stands, barriers along the pitch, organizing charms holding seats, passages, boundaries.
Usually, magic sat inside things.
Here, it waited for movement.
That was different.
The brooms carried by older students left thin, almost invisible trails. Stabilizing charms by the twigs trembled with every step. The wood no longer looked like wood. More like a promise of direction.
My left eye shifted beneath the eyelid, as if it wanted to focus by itself.
Not now.
I sat high in the stands.
Not because I cared about the view of the match. I wanted to see the whole pitch. The teachers. The Gryffindor section. Quirrell. Snape. Harry, when he appeared.
Malfoy sat several places away with Crabbe, Goyle, and Blaise. Of course not too close. Close enough to talk, but not so close that it looked like a need for company.
- Good spot - Blaise said, looking at the pitch.
- You can see Gryffindor's defeat from every angle from here - Malfoy added.
- That must be important, since you plan to watch it more carefully than your own lessons.
- Lessons do not scream when they end.
- Snape comes close sometimes.
Blaise smiled faintly. Malfoy did not have time to answer, because the crowd suddenly rose by an entire level of sound.
The teams were coming out.
Slytherin first. Green robes, straight backs, Flint at the front, looking like someone who was about to try to beat not only the opposing team but the very concept of rules.
Then Gryffindor.
Harry looked smaller than he should have.
From below, at the table, he had looked like a nervous first-year. Here, from the stands, against the pitch, the hoops, and the sky, he looked almost absurd. A child on a broom far too good for him, pushed in front of the entire castle, which had already decided it would turn him into either a legend or a joke.
And then I remembered too clearly that this was not a book.
This was not a scene between pages.
This was a boy who could fall.
Madam Hooch was saying something in the middle of the pitch. The players lined up opposite one another. The balls waited in the chest, restless even from this distance. The Bludgers thrashed like something stupid and aggressive, very eager to be given permission for violence.
Then the whistle.
The balls went up.
The brooms shot after them.
The stadium roared.
For the first few minutes, the match was simply a match.
Speed. Color. Turns sharper than they should have been. A Bludger cut through the air with such a whistle that several people in front of me instinctively ducked, even though it was flying far above the pitch. Flint nearly rammed one of the Gryffindors, then looked offended that someone had dared to have a body in the place he wanted to fly through.
The commentator spoke too quickly. The crowd answered even faster.
Harry circled high above, away from the chaos. On the Nimbus, he looked more natural than I wanted to admit. Not brilliant. Not yet. But light. Like someone doing something for the first time in a long while where his body did not have to ask his mind for permission.
For a moment, I almost watched the match.
Almost.
Because I knew where to look.
Quirrell sat among the teachers, small and unremarkable compared to the rest of the stand. He was doing nothing. That was the worst part. People who truly do nothing look different. They glance around. Blink at the wrong moments. React to noise.
He was too focused on being inconspicuous.
Snape sat nearby.
Nothing yet.
The match went on.
Gryffindor scored. Slytherin answered almost immediately. The crowd screamed. Someone behind me spilled pumpkin juice on someone else's shoes, and there was nearly a duel involving a sandwich. Malfoy muttered comments the whole time, half of which were insulting and the other half inaccurate.
And then Harry's Nimbus twitched.
Not violently.
Not dramatically.
That was exactly why it was worse.
It was a small, dirty movement. As if, for a fraction of a second, the broom had received two conflicting orders and tried to obey both at once.
Harry adjusted his grip. Leveled out his flight.
The crowd noticed nothing.
I did.
Not because I was sharper.
Because I was waiting.
I felt my heart strike harder. Not from fear. Not yet. More from that unpleasant feeling when a familiar scene suddenly begins to happen for real, and you realize memory does not prepare you for the weight of the air, the cold of the boards under your hand, or the distance between a boy and the ground.
The Nimbus jerked a second time.
Harder.
Harry flew sideways. Not like a beginner losing balance. Like someone whose floor had suddenly shifted beneath his feet.
Several people pointed upward.
Ron stood up.
Hermione too, but differently. Faster. As if something in her mind had already started arranging itself into suspicion before the rest of the stadium had even managed to call it a problem.
I looked at Quirrell.
And then I saw it.
Not a spell like the ones you saw in lessons. Not a bright line, not a clean movement, not an elegant pattern of magic responding to intent.
More like a hook.
A dark, thin, dirty hook driven into something that was already in motion.
The broom was trying to fly. Its own spells were working, correcting, holding direction, balance, height. And something foreign was biting into those corrections, not taking over the whole thing, only ruining it moment by moment. Small jerks. Wrong adjustments. Someone else's will slipped in where wood and magic had to agree with each other again and again.
My left eye burned so sharply that I tasted metal on my tongue.
Quirrell did not look dangerous.
It was almost offensive.
He sat hunched, pale, his hands arranged too calmly. From a distance, one might think the poor professor was simply afraid of heights, noise, crowds, life, and everything in between.
But his attention was pinned to Harry.
He was not looking.
He was holding.