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Dawn came up grey and dripping over Exmoor, and out of the hillside rose a stadium.
It came in sections with vast golden ribs unfolding out of the wet earth, towers telescoping upwards through the drizzle, a hundred thousand seats blooming along the stands in long green rows, and all around it, dotted across the mud like ants at a picnic, four hundred wizards heaved, shouted, pointed their wands, and swore frequently when a section went up crooked.
Ron Weasley stood at the crest of the hill with his hands on his hips and rain in his hair, watching it rise, wearing the expression of a man on Christmas morning.
"Look at it," he said. "Harry. Look at it."
"I'm looking at it."
"The final happens there. Right there. Biggest crowd-charm ever cast in Britain. And do you know why it's going to be the greatest night in the history of English sport?"
"Because it's coming home?" said Harry, who had now heard the speech seven times.
"Because it's coming home." Ron said the words the way Percy said Ministry regulations, reverently. "Home, People forget what the word means. Queerditch Marsh is in England. The game was invented on an English bog a thousand years ago, some lunatics with a leather ball and a bad idea, first recorded match, first Snitch, the lot. We gave Quidditch to the entire world, and the entire world has spent ever since not letting us win our own game back. Five hundred years of hurt, Harry, and now it's time. Six stadiums, five weeks, home soil."
"Five hundred and thirty-three years of hurt, technically," said Harry. "Hermione worked it out. England have literally never won it. Not once. She checked twice, because she didn't believe it either."
"It doesn’t scan, does it, five hundred and thirty-three," said Ron, nettled. "You can't sing that in any chants. This is why neither of you is allowed near the opening ceremony."
As it turned out, nobody was going to be allowed near the opening ceremony, the closing ceremony, the commemorative Portkeys, or anything else that cost money without getting past the meeting that was due to start in Portable Ministry Office Four at nine o'clock. The Wizengamot had fought over the tournament budget for three full sessions; the argument had been so bad that two elderly warlocks had to be separated by security trolls; and the peace terms, when they finally came, included a clause that made Ron go pale when he read it. The Ministry's finance office was embedding a comptroller. One witch or wizard, with authority over every Knut spent at all six venues, and the power to refuse anything.
"They've sent someone senior," Harry told him, as they trudged down the hill. "That's all I could get out of Susan. Someone senior, and apparently the Portkey Office clerks call her 'The Duchess' behind her back.
"The Duchess?" Ron stopped squelching. "Blimey, what's a witch from finance have to do to get a title like that?"
"That's what worries me. Susan wouldn't say. She just went quiet and wished me luck."
"How bad can it be?" said Ron, rallying. "It's finance. They count things. I once watched a bloke from finance get overexcited about a counting quill."
The comptroller was already there when they arrived, seated at the far end of the conference table, and Harry's first thought was that she was, quite simply, lovely.
She looked about their age, and was very blonde and very composed, with eyes of a pale, bright blue that were moving down a column of figures faster than Harry could have read the headings; and in front of her, stacked at perfect right angles, sat six fat ledgers, one per venue, each bound in a different colour, a copy of the 1994 Inquiry bristling with red flags, and a heavy brass stamp.
Harry looked at the stamp. It said DENIED, backwards, on its face, and even upside down it managed to look eager.
The comptroller glanced up, and caught him looking at her, and Harry became abruptly and deeply interested in the teapot.
"Good Morning," she said. "You're early. Sit down — no, not that one, Mr Weasley, that chair's got a cursed wobble, I've complained twice." She flicked her wand at the teapot, which poured three cups. "Daphne Greengrass, Ministry finance. I'm your comptroller. Short version: from today, nothing gets bought, built, hired, or set on fire at any of the six venues without my signature. Long version's in your welcome packets, which neither of you will read."
"Greengrass," said Harry slowly. The name had snagged on something. "Hogwarts?"
"Slytherin. Your year."
"Were we—"
"Most of the same classes for six years. I sat two rows behind you in Potions." She sipped her tea, watching him over the rim with something that was not quite a smile. "And that, Mr Potter, just now, became the longest conversation we've ever had."
"That can't be true."
"It's quite all right. There was a lot going on at your end, what with all the murder attempts. I mostly kept my head down." The corner of her mouth tucked in very briefly. "Right. Portkey line-items at half nine, so if either of you has anything expensive to confess, now's the moment."
Ron, who had been laying out his portfolio across a third of the table with the quiet ceremony of a wandmaker opening shop, cleared his throat.
"Before the Portkeys," he said, "the centrepiece. Greengrass, picture the final. Hundred thousand people. Night match. And above the pitch, moving with the play—" he unrolled a schematic with a snap of his wrist— "the box."
Daphne looked at the schematic. Harry had seen the schematic. The schematic had fountains on it.
"A levitating VIP pavilion," said Ron. "Fully warded. Self-orbiting. It follows the Quaffle at a tasteful altitude, so the Minister and every foreign bigwig we're trying to impress gets a perfect view of every phase of play. It rotates, Greengrass. Think of the sightlines."
There was a pause. Daphne turned the schematic ninety degrees, studied it, and turned it back.
"How much?" she said.
"A hundred and forty thousand," said Ron. "Ish."
"Mm," said Daphne. She picked up the brass stamp, touched her wand to it — it gave a small, hungry click, and its face flared briefly scarlet — and brought it down on the schematic with a bang that made the teacups jump. DENIED, said the schematic, in letters that smoked faintly at the edges.
"You had that made specially," said Ron, staring at it. "Didn't you? You had a stamp made."
"Self-inking, self-drying, and charmed so the word can't be Vanished off afterwards," said Daphne. "The last big project I did, a wizard in Magical Transport un-denied himself three times before anyone noticed. Never again." She slid the smoking schematic back across the table. "For the record, Mr Weasley, wizards have watched Quidditch from seats nailed to the ground since 1473, and they will continue to do so. Next."
"The opening ceremonies," said Ron, rallying with the courage of a man who had once followed spiders into a forest. "Six venues, six ceremonies, and I've had a quote from the Welsh reserve—"
"If the next word is dragons, don't say it."
"—for dragons, and before you reach for the stamp, hear the vision—"
"Fire," said Daphne, "at a Quidditch stadium, in front of the world's press, at the first British World Cup since the last British World Cup ended in flames. That's the vision. I've read the '94 Inquiry cover to cover, Mr Weasley, the insurance appendix twice, and our premiums are already the biggest single line in this budget. Denied." Bang.
It went on like that for two hours, and it was, Harry thought, a genuine sporting contest. Ron proposed like a man conducting an orchestra, Daphne denied like a woman swatting flies, and neither of them gave an inch. The commemorative trophy-shaped Portkeys went down ("they'll melt them for the gold, Mr Weasley; I would"). The enchanted halftime show involving the Holyhead Harpies and a tame weather charm went down ("you haven't spoken to the Harpies' agent; she'll bleed you dry"). And then Ron, digging deep, produced the climate seats.
"Charmed climate seating in the top price band. Hear me out. Harry took me to a Muggle football match last year — back me up, Harry — Arsenal, December, posh seats, his treat, and there was a button, Greengrass, a little button on the armrest, you pressed it, and the seat got warm. Under your actual bum. I've thought about that button ever since. Now — it's July, granted, so we improve on it. Cooling for the afternoon matches, warming for when the evening ones run long, because they will run long, it's Quidditch. Muggles queue for hours in the freezing rain to watch a sport with one ball and no flying, and even they've worked out the button, and we're supposed to be the ones with magic—"
"You are the ones with magic," said Daphne. "They're called Warming and Cooling Charms. Third-year work. Both free."
"It's not the same if you have to do it yourself," said Ron, with tremendous dignity. "That's like saying you don't need the trolley witch because you could've packed sandwiches. It's about the occasion—"
"It's about fourteen thousand Galleons of climate runes in a stadium full of people who own wands. Quidditch has survived centuries without a button." Bang. "Next."
She reached for the red-bound ledger, turned to Harry, and her voice changed — not warmer, but heavier, the way a wand changes in the hand between practice and a real duel.
"Mr Potter, security. You've asked for a forty per cent uplift on warding across all six venues, a hundred extra Aurors on rotation, and plainclothes in every campsite from the group stage. It's the most expensive security plan in the history of the tournament. Justify it."
"Nineteen ninety-four," said Harry.
The office went quiet. Somewhere outside, a wizard shouted at a tower, and the tower ignored him.
"I was there," Harry went on. "I was fourteen. I watched a campsite with ten thousand people in it get put to flight by fewer than forty men in masks because every contingency in that year's plan had been accounted as unlikely. The wards were built to budget and the budget assumed goodwill." He nodded at her paperwork. "You've read the appendix everyone flags, the money one. I wrote my plan out of the other one. So that's the justification: every line in my submission is something that already went wrong once on English soil at a World Cup. I'd love to be wrong, though."
Daphne looked at him for a moment and then, instead of the stamp, she picked up her quill. It was a very smart quill, black eagle-feather with a silver band, and it wrote in a fast and immaculate script.
"The uplift stands," she said briskly. "The Aurors stand. The plainclothes rotation stands in principle, but you're paying senior field rates for wizards to drink tea through the group stage, so you'll re-cost the early weeks against lower-cost hit-wizards, and you'll rank the whole thing by venue, because you've asked for everything everywhere, and a man who ranks nothing has thought about nothing. And before you look at me like that, that's not a denial but rather a negotiation."
"That's it?" said Ron, staring between them. "He asks for half the Auror Office and a small mountain of gold to pay for it, and you get out the nice quill— I asked for one modest orbiting pavilion—"
"His is expensive and justified," said Daphne, restacking her ledgers into their right angles. "And after two hours of you, Mr Weasley, it feels like fiscal restraint. It's a low bar and he limboed under it." She stood, gathering the stamp and paperwork and headed towards the door. "Same time Thursday. And Mr Weasley, genuinely, the orbiting box was the best-drawn doomed proposal I've seen in my years at the Ministry. If it helps, I'll be denying it again in my memoirs."
The door clicked shut behind her.
Ron looked down at the word DENIED smoking gently on his fountains, and then at Harry, and said, with the deep respect of one professional for another:
"Blimey. Where's she been all my career?"
"Two rows behind us in Potions, apparently," said Harry, and found he was still looking at the door.
Spring wore on, and so did the arguments.
The venues came up one after another. Devon first, then the Welsh borders, then Bodmin, then the two group-stage grounds in Yorkshire, which the locals had immediately christened "t'Cauldron" and "t'other one" and refused to call anything else, including in official correspondence. Every venue brought inspections, every inspection brought meetings, and every meeting settled into the same shape. Ron proposed. Daphne denied. Harry, somewhere in the middle, rescued what could be rescued.
He turned out to be good at the rescuing, and the reason was awkward to admit: he thought they were both right. Ron's ideas were mad, but they were mad in the service of something true — Ron understood, right down in his bones, that this Cup had to feel enormous, had to hand Wizarding Britain five weeks of joy so big there'd be no room left in anyone's head for the memory of the last time the world came to visit. And Daphne's refusals were brutal, but they were brutal in the service of something equally true, which was that the whole glorious project stood one scandal, one overrun, one burning tent away from being '94 all over again on every front page.
The dragons stayed dead, but a phoenix made of cold fire — a twentieth of the price, none of the actual burning — made it into the opening ceremony after Harry pointed out it could double as a test of the emergency beacons. He got good at finding the security argument hidden inside Ron's showmanship. And though he'd never admit it aloud, he had also got good at predicting which arguments would make the corner of her mouth do the thing.
The thing was this: when a point genuinely landed, when somebody said something Daphne Greengrass had not already thought of first, which by Harry's count probably happened about at most twice a week across the whole Ministry, the left corner of her mouth tucked in just for a second, like a smile being put somewhere safe for later. Then it was gone, the tea was sipped, and the meeting went on. Harry had no idea when he'd started keeping track.
There was plenty of cover for not thinking about it, because the tournament produced disasters the way a Niffler produced holes. The Muggle-repelling ward at Bodmin came in so fierce it repelled two Squibs, one contractor's entire non-magical family, and a member of the Wizengamot whose grandmother turned out to have been rather less of a witch than the family had always claimed. The campsite committee put the Bulgarian and Irish supporters in adjacent fields again and only Harry, who had personally watched that particular experiment in 1994, caught it before the maps were printed. A delegation of hags lodged a complaint about the catering tender; Daphne handled it herself; the complaint was withdrawn inside a day with a statement praising the Ministry's "constructive engagement," and the head of the catering committee, when asked what had happened in the room, only shivered and asked to talk about something else.
Week by week, without meaning to, he was building up a picture of her, the way he built a picture of anything: out of evidence.
She was first on site at every inspection and last to leave, and she walked construction mud in good boots like a woman who owned the place.
It was the end of a brutal twelve-hour inspection at Devon, everyone else gone, the light going soft and gold over the half-built stands, and two apprentice charm-wrights were racing each other round the goal hoops, whooping, on brooms they were absolutely not cleared to be on. Daphne was standing at the edge of the pitch with her ledgers under her arm, watching them. She hadn't reported them. She wasn't going to. She was watching the way you watch something you once wanted and told yourself you'd stopped wanting, and Harry had the sense to leave without being seen, and thought about the look on her face all the way back to the tents, and a good deal after that.
She noticed things back. It was Daphne who mentioned that the night-shift rotation had Harry down for six consecutive perimeter walks and that "even righteous overtime gets billed somewhere, Potter — usually to your face, and end up looking like a Grindylow's breakfast." And it was Daphne who, when the sandwiches came round at the long Thursday sessions, took to putting one on the ledger nearest him without comment or eye contact, as if it had simply always been part of the filing system.
The revised security plan went in on the Friday, ranked by venue as instructed, and came back Monday covered from margin to margin in fast black eagle-feather script — sharp, fluent, occasionally ruthless, and twice, which annoyed and delighted him in equal measure, better than what he'd written. She had spotted a shift-change gap at the Welsh venue that lined up with the Portkey arrival window; she'd costed the fix before he had even flagged the hole. At the bottom of the last page, small and neat, she had written: Approved in full. That's what ranked thinking looks like. — DG
He read it three times, then he put the page in his desk drawer instead of the case file, and looked at the drawer for a moment in a way that would have interested Susan Bones very much indeed; and as spring turned into summer, the drawer quietly filled up.
England beat Norway by two hundred and ten points on the opening Saturday of July, under a phoenix of cold fire five hundred feet high, and something happened to Ron Weasley.
It had been building for weeks, if anyone had cared to track it. It started in April, when the squad list came out and Ron read the Chaser line aloud at the Burrow twice and then said "Huh" — a small noise, but Harry knew it of old: it was the sound of hope. Through May, his official pronouncements about the tournament, always delivered in his scrupulously neutral Operations Director voice, developed a lean, like a table with one short leg. And at 6:47 in the evening on the opening Saturday, when England's Seeker took the Snitch out of a sixty-foot dive in front of ninety thousand people, Ron Weasley — Tournament Operations Director, sworn custodian of strict institutional neutrality — rose from his seat in the operations box and bellowed "IT'S COMING HOME!" with such ferocity, directly into a recording orb that was live to the Wizarding Wireless Network.
The Department made him issue a clarification. The clarification, drafted by Ron personally and released before anyone could stop him, read, in full: The Tournament Operations Director wishes to clarify that it is coming home.
"You have to understand," Hermione told Daphne a fortnight later, in the operations tent at t'Cauldron — where she had come, as Head of the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, to sign off the Bulgarian mascots' veela permits, and stayed, as Hermione, to talk — in the gentle voice of a Healer briefing a colleague on a chronic case, "England have never won it. Not once. Not ever. There was 1809, when they reached the final and the forest attacked—"
"The forest what?"
"Attacked. It's in Quidditch Through the Ages, nobody knows why, it was a very bad year for forests. Then there was the Norwegian fog. And then 1966" — Hermione paused, respectfully, the way one pauses at a graveside — "when Britain hosted, and England reached the final, at home, and Australia won it. Which is somehow worse than all the others put together, because it's the only thing anyone's talked about since. Arthur goes quiet if you say 'sixty-six' at dinner. Molly's banned the number."
"And yet," said Daphne, looking through the tent flap to where Ron, across the compound, was teaching the words of a chant to a visibly delighted delegation of Japanese officials, "he believes."
"He believes," said Harry, "the way Hermione believes in library fines."
"It's five hundred years of hurt, Harry," said Ron, arriving exactly on cue, as he always did when his faith was questioned, as though it rang a small bell somewhere on his person. "And this squad, this is the best English side since—"
"Since the last one that lost," said Harry and Hermione together, in the flat chorus of two people who had supported this man through eight consecutive Chudley Cannons relegation battles, every one of which had begun with the words this is their year.
They grinned at each other over his head and Ron drew himself up and informed them that neither of them understood sport, that faith was a muscle, and that when England lifted the Cup on home soil he would expect a full written apology from each of them, in duplicate, through proper channels.
"I'll draft it now," said Hermione, "and date it never" — and then, because she had not actually come to the operations tent to discuss Quidditch, she squared her shoulders, turned to face Daphne, and produced from her bag a folder with a livid purple cover.
Harry and Ron exchanged a single glance. It was the glance of men checking where the exits were.
"Since I've got you," said Hermione, in the voice, "I want a word about funding."
"Hermione," said Harry, "she's mid-reconciliation—"
"It will take one moment, Harry." Hermione set the folder down on top of the open ledger — squarely, deliberately, an act of provocation so brazen that a junior finance clerk at the next desk made a small sound and left the tent. "Miss Greengrass, this spring the Ministry found nine hundred Galleons for commemorative programmes. It found four hundred Galleons — I have the figures — for the trophy plinth. A plinth. A stand, for putting a cup on. And in the very same quarter, the central grant committee rejected, for the third time, my own department's founding bid for V.O.I.C.E."
There was a pause.
"Voice?" said Daphne.
"V.O.I.C.E.," said Hermione. "Vampires Ought to have Integrated Civil-rights Equally."
"It's the sequel to S.P.E.W.," Ron put in helpfully, from a safe distance. "Which was elves. There's going to be one for werewolves as well. She does the acronym first and the campaign after — it's like watching someone name the baby before the wedding—"
"Thank you, Ronald." Hermione was going pink, which was the two-minute warning. "People laughed at S.P.E.W. too, and S.P.E.W. is now the Office for Elf Welfare with a permanent budget line, so I'll thank everyone to hold the smirk. Because the situation is a disgrace. A vampire in this country cannot open a Gringotts vault. He can't sign a standard tenancy. Seventy per cent of registered vampires have no legal employment — not because they can't work; most of them are desperate to work; there is a vampire in Whitby with two Charms masteries who is stacking crates by owl-order at night because no employer can get insurance on him — because the Ministry's own registration rules make hiring one impossible, and then the same Ministry spends a fortune policing the mess it made, and then tells me there's no money left for fixing it. While buying plinths. My pilot programme costs six hundred Galleons a year. That is one and a half plinths, Miss Granger. I've done it in plinths so the committee can follow it."
She stopped, slightly breathless, and braced. Harry watched her brace. The whole tent braced. The stamp sat on the desk, gleaming, and seemed to lean forward slightly.
Daphne pulled the folder towards her and read it. Actually read it — eyes flicking fast down the figures, one nail tapping twice against a number near the bottom of the actuarial page — while outside, faintly, Fred and George's merchandise stall failed another decibel inspection.
"She's right," said Daphne.
Ron made a noise like a man swallowing his own whistle.
"Your enforcement figure's too low, if anything," Daphne went on, turning a page. "You've used the Auror Office day rate, but vampire callouts skew to night rates plus hazard pay — the true number's a third higher, which makes your case a third stronger, and you should say so. Unbankable, uninsurable, unemployable — that's not just a rights problem, it's terrible bookkeeping. The Ministry has regulated an entire population into being a permanent cost and then congratulated itself for containing it. It's the worst-run liability on the domestic books apart from werewolf policy, which—" she flipped to the back of the folder— "yes. There's the second acronym. W.A.G.E.S. Hmm. That one's actually rather good."
Harry realised his mouth was open, and shut it. Hermione's was also open, which was a far rarer event, and stayed that way.
"I can't fund you from this budget — it's ring-fenced, and if I could move gold from plinths to people, believe me, plinths would be having a terrible year. But the committee that keeps turning you down reports to the same directorate I do, its chairwoman owes me a favour, and — more use to you than the favour — your application keeps failing because you've written a moral case for people who only read cost cases. It is a cost case. A good one. Send it to me after the Cup and I'll walk it in myself, and we'll re-hang your figures so the committee trips over them. Committees never fund what they find on their own." She closed the folder, squared it, and slid it back. "Anything else? The group stage won't reconcile itself."
What followed was one of the great silences of the tournament.
Then Hermione — who had arrived armed for a pitched battle and been ambushed by an ally instead, a maneuver for which fifteen years of winning arguments had left her wholly unprepared — said, "I — well. No. Thank you," in the small, stunned voice of a woman re-evaluating a person in real time, gathered her folder, got all the way to the tent flap, and spun round, producing from apparently thin air a second, much thicker folder. "The werewolf one is forty pages—"
"After the Cup, Miss Granger."
"After the Cup," Hermione agreed, glowing like a Lumos, and then, "and please, call me Hermione."
"As long as you call me Daphne."
Hermione's smile never vanished as she left.
Ron revolved slowly in his chair.
"You agreed with her," he said. "Nobody agrees with the acronyms. There's a procedure. You nod, you say 'how interesting,' you promise nothing, and you leave before she gets the second folder out. Harry's mastered it. Kingsley's mastered it. Dumbledore's portrait pretends to be asleep—"
"She was right," said Daphne, already back in the reconciliation. "Agreeing with people who are right saves the most extraordinary amount of time, Mr Weasley. You should try it about the climate seats."
But Harry, who was watching her the way he now hopelessly, habitually watched her, saw the corner of her mouth tuck in and hold for a full second, and felt something in his chest lift off without clearance while refusing all instructions to land.
England beat Brazil in the quarter-final on a filthy wet Wednesday in Wales, by two hundred points, and the roar could be heard in Bristol. Ron cried during the anthem — before the match had started — and "it's coming home" broke loose of all containment: it was on Fred and George's rosettes, which sang it in three-part harmony and could not be silenced by any known counter-charm; it was chalked on the Bodmin ward-stones until somebody's apprentice was made to scrub it off; and it appeared once, gloriously, as the entirety of Ron's recorded contribution to a vendor arbitration, entered into the official minutes by a straight-faced clerk whom Ron promoted the following month.
And on the Thursday after the quarter-final, going through the master budget as he did every week, Harry found a new line. It sat quietly between medical reserve and post-tournament ward decommissioning, and it read: Contingency: home-victory civil celebration — crowd charms, street wardens, Portkey surge capacity, misc. It was costed to the last Knut. It was initialled DG.
He carried the ledger three tents down and laid it on her desk, open, without a word.
Daphne looked at the line. Then at him. A faint pink came up along her cheekbones and was sternly dismissed.
"A comptroller provisions for all material outcomes," she said, with immense dignity. "However remote."
"You've costed the miracle."
"I've costed a contingency, Potter, and if you tell Weasley, I will audit your biscuit expenses, which I promise you will not survive daylight—"
Harry told Ron that same evening, obviously; and Ron's joy was so vast, so operatic, so loud— "SHE BELIEVES! THE DUCHESS BELIEVES! IT'S ON THE BOOKS, HARRY! IT'S LITERALLY COMING HOME IN WRITING!" — that it carried clean across the compound to the finance tent, from which there came, a moment later, the unmistakable sound of a brass stamp being brought down on a desk three times, hard, like a gavel; though Susan Bones, passing the tent flap at the time, reported that the comptroller had been smiling while she did it, and Susan Bones was not known to be wrong about things.
It was somewhere in those weeks that Harry noticed what had quietly happened to the names. "Mr Weasley" had not survived June — it was plain "Weasley" now, delivered with the exasperated familiarity of a sister; Ron, who had called her "Greengrass" from the first morning with the cheerful democracy he applied to everyone up to and including the Minister, had never once been corrected, which from Daphne was practically an embrace. And one evening in the finance tent, taking a revised rotation from his hands, she said, "You look dreadful, Harry — go to bed," and heard the name only after it was out — because he'd been calling her Daphne for a fortnight by then, quietly, in the after-hours, and neither of them had signed anything to authorise it — and the colour came up along her cheekbones while she became extremely busy with a reconciliation that was already reconciled. After that it was "Daphne" and "Harry" in the quiet hours; and "Potter," he came to understand, was not retired but reassigned — reserved for meetings, emergencies, and any moment when she needed somewhere to hide.
England beat Bulgaria in the semi-final at Bodmin, under a full moon, on a Snitch catch so late and so narrow that three separate sections of the crowd needed treatment for joy; the United States beat Argentina in the other semi the following night, comprehensively, in Yorkshire.
The final was set: England versus the United States, Saturday in Exmoor. The Prophet began printing a commemorative edition daily, apparently on the theory that everything was now commemorative. Diagon Alley ran out of red and white bunting by Tuesday and started charming other colours. Fred and George's singing rosettes reached such saturation that a Wednesday session of the Wizengamot had to be suspended when one went off inside a member's robes; the member, a ninety-year-old warlock of previously unblemished dignity, was observed to let it finish, and to nod along.
And Harry Potter — who had finished planning security for the biggest final tournament history without breaking sweat — spent Thursday morning walking in circles around the security tent, rehearsing a sentence.
It was not a long sentence. That was the humiliating part. He had talked down cursed vault doors. He had given evidence to the full Wizengamot, twice, and enjoyed it once. But every time he got the sentence out in front of the shaving mirror, it collapsed in a different place, and the wreckage always sounded either like a man booking a meeting or like a man proposing marriage, with nothing survivable in between. The last time he had done this properly — actually walked up to a girl and asked her to a thing, out loud, with his own mouth — he had been fourteen, and the word ball had come out fused to three other words, and Cho Chang had had to ask him to say it again.
He was twenty-six now, he told the mirror. He was a Senior Auror and Head of Security for the largest event in British wizarding history. He had a plan, the plan was good, and the plan was this: the Weasleys had a box at Exmoor — a players' family box, no less, which Ginny had claimed for the whole clan the day she made the squad, on the grounds that England's first-choice Chaser was owed something for six brothers' worth of garden Quidditch. Family, friends, noise, food. An invitation to a box was not a Declaration; it committed nobody to anything; she could even bring a friend, he'd say that bit, bring a friend, which made it casual; and if she said no, the no would be small, and survivable, and he could go and stand at the bottom of a lake until the feeling passed.
He collected a requisition form on the way to her tent, so that his hands would have a reason to exist.
She was mid-ledger when he knocked on the tent post, quill going, the late sun through the canvas doing something to her hair that Harry noted and then had to consciously set down in order to proceed.
"If this is Weasley's fireworks appeal—"
"It's the perimeter requisition." He put the form on her desk. She glanced at it.
"You signed this yesterday."
"Yep," said Harry. "So. It's countersigned. Which is. Good." A silence opened up, and he walked into it. "Look — Saturday. The final. Ginny's got the family a players' box, the whole lot of us'll be there, Hermione, everyone, and I — d'you—" the sentence reached the collapsing place and, live, in real time, chose its direction— "d'youwanttocome? To the box. You could bring someone — a friend, I mean — anyone — there's loads of room, and loads of food. So. If you wanted. That's — yeah."
Daphne looked up at him.
And Harry watched — with the specific helplessness of a man who has thrown the Quaffle and can now only follow its arc — as the invitation crossed the desk, and arrived, and was received by the most rigorous administrative mind in the Ministry of Magic, and was understood, swiftly, competently, and completely wrongly.
"Oh," she said. And then — worse than anything — she smiled: a real one, small and warm and touched, a smile with no idea in it whatsoever. "That's kind of you, Harry. Honestly. But you don't have to look after me — finance has its own allocation; we've had departmental seats since March. West stand, halfway line, very respectable. And after the fortnight you've had, the last thing you need on Saturday is your comptroller in the family box making everyone nervous about the drinks bill." The smile went slightly wry. "It was a lovely thought. Thank you."
There was a pause of a length that instruments could have measured.
"Right," said Harry. "No. Yeah. Departmental seats. Halfway line's — that's good seats." He picked the requisition form back up for something to do with his hands, realised he had now un-delivered his own pretext, and put it down again. "Well. Enjoy the— Right."
He got out of the tent with most of his dignity, in the sense that he did not actually walk into the tent pole, and Daphne Greengrass sat looking at the flap swinging behind him with her quill stopped dead over the ledger.
Because she had seen it. She saw everything; seeing things was the entire profession. Somewhere between departmental seats and lovely thought, the light had gone out of Potter's face — dropped, all at once, like a figure vanishing off a balance sheet — and she had now run the conversation back three times, and audited every line of it, and could not find the error. He had made a kind offer; she had declined it kindly; the books balanced. The books did not balance. She sat in her tent for a long time with the group-stage reconciliation going cold in front of her, disliking, intensely, the sensation of a discrepancy she could not trace; and the discrepancy had green eyes, and it would not leave the page.
Which was how it came out — offhand, mid-drink, the way real accidents happen — that evening, in a corner booth off Diagon Alley, to Tracey Davis.
Tracey had been Daphne's best friend since they were eleven, which made her the only living soul with full archive access, and she had spent the fifteen years since attempting, with the patience of a missionary among cannibals, to get Daphne to live a little— a campaign whose battle honours included the Yule Ball ("one hour, Daph, you stayed one hour, and you spent it critiquing the catering"), the entire summer of 1999, and a standing monthly offer to set her up with somebody, anybody: the Cursebreaker, the Healer from the Christmas party, that French delegate who had sent actual flowers. She was halfway down her second glass and a scandalous story about her boss when Daphne — frowning into her wine as though it had misplaced a decimal — said:
"Odd thing today. Potter asked me to watch the final from his box. The Weasley box — family, all his friends. Come along, bring someone, loads of room. I said the department has seats and I wouldn't impose, and he went—" the frown deepened— "strange. His face did a thing."
Tracey put her glass down with the care of a woman who has just been handed something ticking.
"Say the first part again."
"He went strange—"
"Not that part. Harry Potter. Asked you. Personally. Face to face, to sit with his family and his closest friends in the world, at the biggest match of the century."
"It's an enormous box, Tracey, it was a courtesy—" But Tracey had put her whole hand over her own face, and was breathing slowly through her fingers, in the manner of a woman counting to ten in several languages.
"Daphne," she said, from behind the hand. "My love. My oldest friend. The finest mind of our House. He was asking you out, you catastrophic genius."
"He was not."
"'Bring a friend'" — Tracey dropped the hand — "is what a terrified man says instead of 'you,' so that when you say no, he can pretend he never asked anything. Which you then did. To Harry Potter. Who then went strange in the face. Walk me through the face. Exactly. This is for the record."
And Daphne — who could recall any page she had ever read — replayed it: the requisition form he had brought for no reason and picked up again afterwards; the sentence that had come out fused into one word in the middle, d'youwanttocome, like something said underwater; the light going out. And, oh — the whole column came down at once, the way a sum does when you finally see the figure you copied wrong at the top — there was the discrepancy, and it had been sitting in plain sight since four o'clock in the afternoon.
"Oh," said Daphne.
"There she is."
"Oh no."
"There she is." Tracey topped up both glasses, glowing. "Fifteen years I've waited for this face. Do it again."
"But it doesn't make sense." Daphne had gone pink — properly pink, hairline to collar, an event Tracey had personally witnessed perhaps two times since 1991 and was openly savouring. "Why on earth would Harry Potter — Tracey, he's Harry Potter. He could have any witch in Britain. There are witches in multiple countries with his picture on their—"
"And yet," said Tracey, "he walked across a field to stammer at the one who stamps his budgets." She leaned forward on her elbows. "He wants you, you dummy. This isn't hard sums, and you're meant to be the numbers one. Also — point of order, as keeper of the records — you are a certified, weapons-grade babe, which you'd know if you ever once looked in a mirror for longer than it takes to check your collar, and you have turned down — I've counted — six dates since this tournament began. Six. The Cursebreaker. The Healer. The bloke from Portkeys with the shoulders. The Frenchman sent flowers to your office, Daphne—"
"He wanted his catering variance approved—"
"He wanted to marry you; the variance was a love language. Six dates, turned down flat, because you were 'busy' — which we both know means bored in advance." Tracey sat back and delivered the rest with the lazy, deadly precision of fifteen years' practice. "So look, don't spiral about it. Potter's just another bloke who fancies you. Chuck him on the pile with the other six and let's order the—"
"Harry is not just another guy," said Daphne.
It was out before her brain had seen the paperwork — flat, instant, certain, in the voice she used for figures that were not up for discussion — and it landed in the middle of the table and sat there, unrecallable, while across the booth Tracey Davis's face performed the slow, radiant, terrible dawn of the grin Daphne had feared since they were twelve years old.
"...Harry, is it," said Tracey.
"Tracey—"
"Not 'Potter.' Not 'the Senior Auror.' Harry." The grin reached its final, feral form. She raised her glass, clinked it against Daphne's unresisting one, and settled back with the boundless contentment of a woman who now had a project and a deadline. "Right. These departmental seats of yours. West stand, was it? Halfway line?" She sipped. "Shame. Because I have a feeling, my darling — call it professional instinct — that by Saturday afternoon, they'll have been reallocated."
Saturday came up gold.
It was the sort of English summer evening the country managed perhaps twice in a decade and then went on about for the rest of it: warm and still, the sky over Exmoor deepening from blue towards a colour nobody had paid for, swifts hunting high over the moor; and beneath it all, invisible to every Muggle in the West Country, a hundred thousand magical beings came pouring up the hillside in a river of red and white. The wards held. The gangways flowed. Harry walked the full perimeter twice before four o'clock, found nothing wrong with any of it, handed command to Susan Bones for the duration on the principle that a Head of Security who couldn't delegate the final had planned it badly — and climbed, at last, to the box.
The box was bedlam of the best and Arthur held the back row like a small monarchy; Bill and Fleur had brought Victoire, who was conducting the crowd noise with both fists; Charlie had come over from Romania with a dragon-burn on one arm and an England scarf on the other; Percy was explaining the tournament's regulatory framework to a foreign guest who had stopped listening somewhere in the group stage; George was field-testing rosettes; Fred was running a book on the toss; and Neville and Luna had the corner, Luna wearing an enormous hat crowned with three roaring lions — the original Gryffindor lion, Harry was fairly sure, flanked by two new recruits, "because England is three lions, Harry, everyone knows that; one would be under-dressed."
And at the end of the front row, applauding the warm-up with grave, conflicted courtesy, sat Viktor Krum.
"Bulgaria vos better in the semi-final than the score suggests," he said, shaking Harry's hand with the solemnity of a man laying a wreath. "Write that down. But tonight — tonight I support the Chaser. Number six. You know her, I think."
"We've met," said Harry, grinning; and it occurred to him, watching Krum's eyes follow the red-and-white figure looping the pitch below, that at Bill and Fleur's wedding, eight years ago, the International Quidditch star had once grumbled to Harry there was no point in his fame, because all the good-looking girls were taken. It had taken Viktor Krum the better part of a decade and a lost semi-final to run the problem down: by Ginny's own delighted account, he had appeared at the mouth of the players' tunnel at Bodmin twenty minutes after her side had knocked his out of the World Cup, still in his match robes, bowed from the waist, and asked her to dinner on the grounds that "a man who has just lost everything else has nothing left to be afraid of" — which Ginny had declared the single best line any wizard had ever said to her, and accepted on the spot. That had been several days ago. He had worn his England rosette to the box without being asked.
Ron himself stood at the front rail, gripping a team sheet he did not need, since he had known the squad by heart for a month, reading it anyway.
"Chaser," he said, to nobody, in a voice that wasn't quite steady. "Weasley. Number 6. There, look. In print."
"You've shown me the print, Ron," said Harry.
"I'm showing you again. My little sister. In the actual — I taught her that reverse pass, you know. Well. She taught herself. In secret. By burgling the broom shed for six years. But whose broom shed was it, Harry? That's the question historians will ask."
"It was Dad's shed," said George, passing with rosettes.
"Who cleaned it, though?" said Ron, thickly.
Harry took his seat next to Ron and Hermione — who had brought a book as a joke and not opened it — and settled in to the serious work of not looking at the west stand, halfway line. He had been not looking at it all afternoon, through two full perimeter walks; he was becoming expert; he had just achieved nearly four consecutive minutes of not looking at it when a steward leaned in at his shoulder.
"Mr Potter? Sorry to disturb — young lady at the gate, says she's a guest of yours."
Harry's heart did something that would have failed a St Mungo's physical on the spot.
He took the stairs at a pace that fooled nobody he passed, came out at the rope — and there she was.
Daphne Greengrass stood at the gate in England colours: a red and white scarf worn with the precision of a woman who had researched scarves, a small enamelled lion at her collar, her hair down for the first time in five months of meetings; and the evening sun was doing the thing to it, the thing Harry had privately been aware of since roughly April, only now there was rather more of it, and no ledger to hide behind on either side. She looked amazing. She looked, in fact, like the specific thing he had been not-thinking about with total dedication since Thursday; and slightly behind her right shoulder, wearing the grin of a Kneazle in a room full of unattended cream, stood a brown-haired witch he had never met.
"Harry," said Daphne. There was colour high on her cheeks, and her chin was up, in the manner of a witch who had rehearsed a statement on the walk over and would be delivering it as drafted. "It turns out the departmental seats were — reallocated."
"Tragic mix-up," said the brown-haired witch, deadpan. "Nobody knows how it happened."
"So." Daphne's chin came up another degree. "I'd like to watch it with you. If the offer still stands."
"It stands," said Harry — instantly, before the sentence had anywhere to collapse. "It — yeah. Never stopped standing." And the corner of her mouth tucked in — and this time, for the first time on record, it stayed there.
"Tracey Davis," said the brown-haired witch, sticking her hand out as Harry lifted the rope. "Best friend, keeper of the records, architect of the reallocation. She's told me absolutely nothing about you, which — between us — is how I knew."
"Tracey," said Daphne, to the evening air, "is not stopping long."
"Tracey has brought an overnight bag," said Tracey, and swept past them both up the stairs.
The box absorbed them the way the Weasleys absorbed everyone: immediately, loudly, and with food. Molly had Daphne's hand in both of hers inside fifteen seconds ("so you're the one who's kept our Ron under budget — sit down, dear, you must be worn to a thread"); Arthur wanted to know, with real hunger in his eyes, whether it was true the finance office had a machine for adding, and had to be gently told it was simply a charmed abacus; Fred and George introduced themselves in the wrong order and were corrected — "you're George; the rosette charm vendor application was written right-handed, and Fred isn't" — after which they attempted, for a full minute, to recruit her. Krum bowed over Daphne's hand with Durmstrang formality; and Charlie, shaking it next, asked with genuine professional interest whether it was true she'd settled the hag catering complaint in a single meeting, and looked deeply satisfied with the answer.
And Luna drifted over from the corner, lion hat and all, took both of Daphne's hands in hers as though resuming a conversation from earlier that day, and said, serenely: "Oh, good, you came. I'm glad. Your auras have been tangled up together since at least the quarter-finals — like earmuffs left in a drawer, you know, where you can't tell anymore which loop belongs to which — and it's been making Harry very restless. He walked the perimeter twice today and it only needs walking once." She patted Daphne's hands and released them. "I shouldn't worry about the Wrackspurts, by the way. They always swarm a bit, around new couples. They'll settle."
There was a short, ringing pause.
"Thank you," said Daphne faintly, who in eight years at the Ministry had never once been without a procedural response, and had now been without one twice in a week.
"That's Luna," Harry said, steering her to the front rail. "She's usually right, is the frightening thing."
"About the auras?"
"About the perimeter only needing walking once."
Then the anthems started, Ron began to cry, and the final began.
It was one of the great ones; everybody said so afterwards, even the Americans. The United States were magnificent and terrifying — a Chaser line that moved like one animal with six arms, and a pair of Beaters known professionally, and with good reason, as the Eviction Notice — and for the first hour England hung on by fingernails, nerve, and Ginny Weasley. She scored twice in the opening twenty minutes, the second off a reverse pass that drew a noise from the crowd like a wave hitting a cliff, and the box became briefly dangerous: Ron came off the floor bellowing "THAT'S MY SISTER!" with both fists in the air, and behind him a solid bank of Weasley brothers — Bill, Charlie, Percy, Fred, George, every one of them on their feet — roared her name in a wall of sound that made Victoire burst into delighted tears, while Viktor Krum applauded with the stately anguish of a man whose heart had defected.
Daphne, it turned out, watched Quidditch the way she read ledgers: silently, completely, leaning further and further forward over the rail; and when England's Keeper made a triple save in the seventieth minute she came up out of her seat with the whole box, fists clenched, shouting— scarf askew, frost nowhere in evidence, and Harry missed the entire next passage of play, and considered it well spent.
Then the second hour turned cruel. The American Seeker stopped searching and started shadowing; the Chaser machine found its range; and the score began to walk away — sixty, ninety, a hundred and twenty — with only one thing holding the door: every time the gap crawled towards the fatal one hundred and fifty, where even the Snitch would not save them, the ball found number six. Ginny scored from an angle that shouldn't have existed. Ginny scored off the back of a broken play, flat on her broom, one-handed. Ginny took a Bludger to the shoulder from the Eviction Notice, stayed on, and scored anyway, and Ron by now had no words left at all — he simply rose and fell with his five brothers around him, hoarse, conducting the chant of her name with both arms, while Krum said, "she is better at twenty-five than I vos. Do not print that," to nobody in particular, in the voice of a man deciding to propose. But it was one Chaser against a machine, and the machine kept scoring too; and at a hundred and forty points down, the arithmetic arrived in the box like a change in the weather. One more American goal and the catch would only draw it. Two, and England could lose even with the Snitch in their hand. The crowd's roar developed a ragged edge, the sound of a hundred thousand people doing the same sum. Hermione had Ron's hand. Somewhere behind them Fred said, "Come on, then, lads," quietly, with no joke in it at all.
Daphne's hand found Harry's forearm on the rail, and gripped, and did not let go; and Harry stopped breathing for reasons that were only partly due to Quidditch.
And the English Seeker — nineteen years old, from Tutshill, playing the biggest match any Englishman had faced since 1966 — chose that moment to fall out of the sky.
The dive came from an altitude that pulled the stomach out of the whole stadium at once — steeper than sense, faster than the American shadow could hold, down and down through the towering golden evening towards a glint that most of the crowd couldn't even see — and the roar rose and rose until it stopped being sound and became a place they were all standing in; and the American pulled out of it, and the boy from Tutshill did not; and at a height the Prophet would print as four feet and Ron would swear to his dying day was two, his hand closed.
He came out of the dive along the grass with his fist in the air and the Snitch in his fist, and England had won the World Cup.
The box came apart entirely. Molly and Arthur were clinging to each other; Percy was weeping freely into the foreign dignitary's shoulder while shouting something with the word "regulatory" in it; Victoire conducted the apocalypse; Neville hugged a total stranger from the next box; Luna's hat achieved independent flight and was not pursued. Fred and George had seized each other and were simply screaming; and Ron —
Ron was in tears, arms flung wide, hauling Harry in with one and Hermione with the other, his face a shining ruin of joy, bellowing into the space between their heads, over and over, at a volume that would enter Weasley family legend:
"IT'S COMING HOME — IT CAME HOME — IT'S COME HOME — WE'RE HOME—"
"You said it and you were RIGHT!" Hermione was shouting back, laughing and crying at once, every ounce of Department Head gone. "FIVE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-THREE YEARS and you were RIGHT—"
"FAITH, HERMIONE! IT'S A MUSCLE!" roared Ron — "AND THAT'S MY SISTER! THAT'S MY ACTUAL SISTER!" — for far below, small and brilliant on the floodlit grass, number six was mobbing the Seeker with her team, and the wall of Weasley brothers was howling her name over the rail as one animal, Bill and Charlie with their arms round each other, Percy's dignity gone to wherever Luna's hat had gone; and then Fred and George landed on Ron from behind, chanting his own words back at him, while somewhere in the crush Tracey was high-fiving everyone within reach, strangers included, shouting "I don't even follow Quidditch and this is the greatest night of my LIFE—"; and Viktor Krum stood applauding through all of it while he watched Ginny being hoisted onto her team-mates' shoulders. "I vill vin the next one. This is certain. I haff decided it tonight. But today—" he pressed a fist briefly to his chest— "today is hers."
And Harry, extracting himself from Ron's headlock, turned round in the middle of it all, and there was Daphne.
She was lit up like the stadium — scarf gone sideways, hair everywhere, laughing, properly laughing, her eyes brilliant with the noise and the gold evening and the sheer impossible fact of it — and she turned at the same instant he did, and both of them moved, arms already rising, into what was clearly, certifiably, in any court in the land, going to be a hug; the kind everyone in the box was having; the kind the whole of England was having—
And Harry Potter — who had planned every contingency at six venues, who had asked her sideways with an escape route built in because the direct way had frightened him more than anything — was, when it came right down to it, a Gryffindor; and the moment was enormous; and she was right there.
He kissed her.
For one heartbeat Daphne Greengrass went perfectly still — the stillness of an entire filing system meeting something with no form for it — and Harry had just enough time to begin the first syllable of panic.
Then her hand came up, took a fistful of the front of his jumper with the decisiveness of a woman closing a deal, and she kissed him back.
The box noticed all at once. The whoop went up from every direction — Fred's unmistakable "OI OI!"; George's wolf-whistle; Tracey with both fists in the air bellowing "THAT'S MY GIRL"; Molly's overjoyed "oh, lovely"; Krum inclining his head to Daphne with grave approval; Luna saying "there, you see, the Wrackspurts have settled," to no one in particular; and Ron, breaking off mid-chant, arms still round Hermione, roaring "IT'S ALL COMING HOME!" to fresh howls of laughter — while overhead the fireworks went up, gold and red and white above Exmoor, entirely unlicensed, unmistakably Fred and George's, spelling words across the sky that the referees' union would be writing letters about on Monday.
Harry and Daphne broke apart an inch. Below them, somewhere, the Cup was coming up the podium steps into five hundred and thirty-three years of waiting, and the whole hillside was singing.
"For the record," said Daphne, breathless, her hand still holding its fistful of jumper, "I accounted for every material outcome of this tournament. Every single one. That was not on the books."
"Then let me fix the books," said Harry. "Dinner. Tomorrow. Just us, no ledgers"
"Approved," said Daphne, and kissed him again, while behind them Ron Weasley stood at the rail with his arms spread wide to the roaring golden evening, tears streaming down his face, singing to the sky that it had come home, it had come home, it had finally, finally come home.