He turned to Sirius and Amelia before he moved anywhere else.
'Moody,' he said. Not quietly — direct, at the volume the situation required. 'The man in the staff section. He's not Moody. He has been wearing Alastor Moody's face on Polyjuice Potion for the entire academic year. The real Moody is alive — he's in a trunk in that man's office. He has been steering this Tournament from inside the staff section since September and he is about to leave the grounds.'
Sirius looked at him with the quality of someone who had been told to take something seriously and was taking it seriously. 'Who is he?'
'Bartemius Crouch Junior,' Ron said. 'Presumed dead. Not dead. Currently walking toward the grounds' east boundary.'
Amelia had already stood. She had the quality of someone for whom professional function was the fastest available response to urgency — not because it suppressed the urgency, but because it channeled it. 'You're certain.'
'I have been certain since September,' Ron said. 'I have been watching him for nine months. The flask tell — he's been checking it with the wrong hand since the first week of term. Moody's right arm has reduced fine motor function from a case in 1979. This man checks the flask with his right. Consistently under pressure.' He held her gaze. 'That is one of eleven specific tells I have documented. I can give you all eleven. Later. Right now he is moving.'
She did not ask for the other ten. She looked at Sirius once, briefly, with the quality of two people who had developed the shorthand of trust over months and were using it now. Then she looked at Ron.
'Can you take him down from here?'
'Yes,' Ron said. 'But I need him alive and coherent. The reversal of a sustained Polyjuice glamour at forced speed requires him to be intact.'
'Then go,' she said. 'I'll follow. Sirius — '
'I'll stay,' Sirius said, which was the hardest thing he would say tonight and he said it simply, because he understood what was being asked and why.
Ron went.
He crossed the grounds at a run, which was not how he usually moved through situations but was the correct choice here — the distance required speed, not stealth, because the man ahead of him was already at the east boundary and the east boundary was where the Hogwarts wards thinned at the maintenance point.
He had known about the maintenance point since third year.
He reached the boundary thirty seconds after Crouch Junior did, which was sufficient. Crouch Junior had his wand out — not the attack posture, the preparation posture, the specific configuration of someone about to Disapparate — and was at the exact point in the ward perimeter where the density was lowest.
Ron raised his wand.
Three spells in sequence, non-verbal, the targeting work from January applied at the specific speed January had trained it to: the Body-Bind first to stop the Disapparition; the Full Incarceration second, the complete version rather than the partial, because the situation required certainty; and third, the forced glamour reversal, which was the ward-breaking principle applied to a sustained personal enchantment — the identification of the keystone, the structural dismantling from that point, the controlled collapse of what had been maintained for nine months on daily Polyjuice doses.
The reversal was not instantaneous.
It took perhaps four seconds, which was four seconds of visible change — the false Moody's features shifting, the magical eye losing its orientation as the socket changed shape, the height and mass redistributing as Bartemius Crouch Junior's actual body asserted itself through the glamour. He hit the ground as the Incarceration locked and lay there in the June grass in his own face, which was younger than the face he had been wearing, with the specific quality of someone who had been running a sustained performance for nine months and had just been stopped.
He was breathing. He was intact. He was exactly as restrained as he needed to be.
Amelia was there within forty seconds, which was faster than Ron had expected and which confirmed that she had been moving the moment he left the stands. She looked at the man on the ground with the professional assessment of someone confirming an identification she had already made from the description.
'Bartemius Crouch Junior,' she said. The words had a quality in them — not surprise, not quite, but the specific weight of an impossibility becoming a fact.
'Yes,' Ron said.
'He's been in this school since September.'
'Teaching Defence Against the Dark Arts,' Ron said. 'And doing it well, which I found the most consistently disturbing thing about the situation.'
She looked at him. The specific look she had given him in the stands when he had given her the flask tell and the nine months of documentation — the look of someone recalibrating the scale of what they were dealing with.
'The real Moody,' she said.
'Sable,' Ron said.
He had not turned around. He had known Sable was there from the moment he had left the stands — the specific quality of a house elf who had been waiting for the call and had been ready for it.
'The real Alastor Moody is in a trunk in that man's office,' he said. 'The seventh floor, the DADA classroom, the office through the door on the left. The trunk has seven locks and the seventh compartment is the one. Get him to Madam Pomfrey. Take whoever you need.'
Sable said nothing. She was simply gone, with the specific efficiency of a house elf who had been given a task that mattered and intended to complete it.
He turned back to the field.
The crowd noise had changed again.