The lake in late February had the specific quality of a large body of cold water that had no interest in making the morning easier for anyone standing beside it. The spectators' platform was full — students, staff, the Beauxbatons and Durmstrang contingents arranged along the bank with the specific layering of coats and scarves of people who had accepted that the weather was what it was. The water was flat and dark and said nothing about what was in it.
He and Hermione had positioned themselves at the bank rather than the main stands. Not officially — there was no official bank position for non-champions — but the marshalling of the event had the necessary gaps that any large organized occasion had, and he had identified them in advance. They were twenty feet from the water's edge, at an angle that gave him a clear line across the lake.
He held the tracking charm's bearing in the back of his awareness the way he held Occlumency — present, available, not in the foreground. Ginny was roughly forty yards out and forty feet down. This was imprecise in the way he had told her it would be imprecise. It was sufficient.
The cannon sounded.
The three champions entered the water. They went in with the specific quality of their individual approaches — Krum's economy of movement, Fleur's ease, Harry's purposefulness — and within sixty seconds the lake had taken all three of them and the surface had closed.
The crowd settled into the specific patience of an audience that had no information and a long wait.
He stood at the bank and watched the water and held the bearing and thought about nothing that wasn't immediately relevant. This was a skill he had been developing since the Chamber — the ability to keep the mind at the task rather than at the weight of the task — and it was better now than it had been then, though not perfect, and he suspected it would never be perfect and had decided that imperfect was sufficient.
Hermione stood beside him. Close enough that their arms were touching. She was watching the water with the quality she brought to things she could not affect and had decided to witness properly anyway.
She had not said anything about Ginny since breakfast. She did not need to. The arm-contact was its own communication.
Harry broke the surface at forty-one minutes.
He came up near the bank, which was the approach they had planned — exit toward the shortest available distance once the hostage was retrieved, don't surface in the middle of the lake and require a long swim back to the judging area. He had Ginny with him. She broke the surface a second after he did, gasping, the lake water running from her hair, and she turned immediately to look at Harry with the expression that produced in Ron the specific satisfaction of a thing that had been prepared for and had gone correctly.
Harry looked at Ginny.
He had the expression of someone who had been forty feet underwater for forty-one minutes knowing that the person he was going to find there was this specific person, who he had looked at across the kitchen table all summer, and who was now here, and alive, and looking back at him.
Ron turned away and gave them thirty seconds.
Hermione was already there — at the bank's edge, reaching down, Ginny's hand in hers, pulling. She had a towel from somewhere that Ron had not known she was carrying, which was Hermione and her bag and the specific practice of someone who had decided to think about what was needed before it was needed.
Ginny came up onto the bank and stood dripping and looked at Ron.
'Full account,' she said, through chattering teeth. 'Later.'
'Later,' he confirmed.
Madam Pomfrey was there within thirty seconds with the specific efficiency of someone who had prepared for this exact scenario and was implementing the preparation. She shepherded Ginny and Harry toward the medical area with the manner of someone who had no interest in the emotional texture of the reunion and every interest in their core temperatures, which was the correct priority.
He turned back to the lake.
Fleur and Krum had not surfaced yet.
He waited.
This was the hard part — not the magic, not the decision, but the waiting, which required holding the boundary between acting and not acting with the specific patience of someone who had decided where the boundary was and intended to maintain it.
The task was not over. Fleur was still in the water. Krum was still in the water. Interfering before the task concluded was not something he was prepared to do — it would compromise the integrity of the result, which affected Harry's score, and beyond the immediate pragmatic concern there was the question of what the task was for. The task was for the champions. If he intervened while the task was live he was making it about himself, which was not what the task was for and not what he had prepared for and not what he was willing to do.
He held the bearing. Gabrielle was at a slightly different position than Ginny had been from Harry's account — the anchor points had not been identical. Roughly a kilometer out, fifteen meters down. The imprecision was the same as it had been for Ginny. Sufficient.
Fleur broke the surface at fifty-three minutes.
She came up without Gabrielle.
The specific quality of this was visible from twenty feet away — not just the absence of the small girl, but the way Fleur surfaced: not the clean exit of a completed task but the broken emergence of someone who had been in a fight and had not won it. Her left arm had the specific held quality of something that had been hurt. Her expression had the quality of someone who was not going to perform anything right now because there was nothing left to perform with.
Grindylows, Ron thought. They got to her before she reached the hostages.
Fleur was out of the water and on the bank before he reached her. She was sitting, which she had clearly not chosen to do but had ended up doing in the way of someone whose legs had made a unilateral decision. A marshal was with her. She was looking at the lake with the expression of someone for whom a specific terrible thing had happened and who was currently in the first seconds of understanding that it was not going to be undone.
He crouched in front of her.
'Gabrielle,' he said. 'Did you reach her?'
Fleur looked at him. Her eyes were doing what eyes did when the thing behind them was too large for the available composure. 'Non,' she said. 'The Grindylows, I could not ' she stopped.
'Have you given up on the task,' he said. Not unkindly. Directly, because the situation required directness and not kindness.
Fleur's expression changed. She had heard the question land — not as an accusation, not as permission, but as the specific thing it was: a door.
'Oui,' she said. 'I cannot — I cannot go back in.'
'Alright,' Ron said, and stood up.
He did not act immediately.
He had said he would wait for Krum, and he waited for Krum, because the task was still live and because the integrity of that mattered more than the three minutes it cost.
Krum surfaced at fifty-eight minutes with his hostage — a girl Ron recognised from the Durmstrang delegation, the one Krum had brought to the Yule Ball, who came up spluttering and disoriented and alive. Krum had her arm and was guiding her toward the bank with the economy of movement that was simply how he did everything, and his expression had the quality it had when he had done what he came to do and was finished.
He caught Ron's eye as he came out of the water.
Something in Krum's expression registered — the specific thing it did when he saw Ron doing something that was not what spectators did. His eyes moved to the lake, to Fleur at the bank, to the absence of the small girl, and back to Ron.
He said nothing. He moved his hostage toward Madam Pomfrey and stepped back from the water's edge, which was its own form of communication: the space is yours.
Ron turned to the lake.
He checked the bearing one more time. A kilometer from the shore, fifteen meters down, northeast of his current position. The imprecision was a radius of perhaps two meters. He accounted for it.
He raised his wand.