Harry saw one man fighting largely with enchanted objects. Sirius had never seen a style like it, and the fighter lost, but seemed happy for how far he'd gotten. It seemed what he'd tried was a work in progress.
That idea was amazing. Some were here for glory. Some were here to test their skills. Some were here to try out things they'd just imagined...
There were problems, too. One man in a later match looked more battered than even Sirius' friend with the blue wandering eye – or Headmaster Flamel wearing his true face. Harry wondered if the man had become mangled in battle or on another dueling stage some other time. This was entertainment, but it was also violence.
Harry had done more violence than he ever spoke about, but it wasn't something he liked or considered an achievement. He didn't get up on a stage and show off like this... Maybe that was why he'd had to spend a while getting comfortable with all of this. It was very different from what he was used to.
As the night wore on, Harry could see more and understand more of what he was seeing. The hall staff had to stop some of the matches and explain why. Others commented briefly, and informally, on what impressed them. Plus Sirius would note what he liked and answer Harry's questions.
Three people lost when their wands were destroyed, so that crabby wand-seller would get to vent on a few new customers tonight.
The first and second round matches continued until close to midnight. None of the contenders were cleared by a healer to continue at that point so it was settled by points.
By that time, Harry had seen more than a handful of formal duels and understood a lot more about how magic could be used outside of a classroom. He was still boggled by the speed. These people could fight.
It was inspiring and not a little overwhelming... Harry even said so.
"That was advertised as amateur, but these folks are all a few steps beyond that," Sirius said. "I hope you had fun."
"Yes," Harry said, after the last pit cleared. He was trying to figure out how they decided who got the purse. It seemed there was a scoring system in place. The purse-winner had won two matches, but so had two other people. There was something about him achieving a higher score than anyone else. Harry figured he'd do better to find a book on dueling styles than to ask Sirius about the points just now.
"Do you think I can get better, get like them?" a tired Harry asked. Not meaning dueling for sport, but fighting with the same kind of skill and energy for a cause, say defending his life against a lunatic.
Sirius smiled. "I do, absolutely."
They slipped out into the night with no one aware that Sirius Black or Harry Potter had attended at all. Harry began to see further possibilities for his own future. This struck him the same way Quidditch did: interesting, but not something he would likely love. He love the basic element, like flying or working spells, but there was something about performing in front of a crowd...
Harry breathed easier as he slipped into dreams. He didn't know it, but he was finally beginning to heal, and the hardest part. The broken bones were mended, his hand was uncursed, the stub of his missing pinky finger was healed. Now his mind was mending or reforming itself.
...
Harry had been promoted at the beginning of August from general dogsbody (strike off these runes, levitate those beams out of the way, get this area swept up, get me a big pot of strong tea and some clean cups, track down Stinky Ben and send him to the basement in the main house, hey don't forget to eat lunch before you collapse) to the kid who was forced to endure Old Spencer's stories and keep the senior senior senior cursebreaker from causing trouble on the site.
Today's story or rant was bemoaning that all the stone in the buildings on this property would have to be hauled out to sea and dumped before the land could be sold to muggles. (If that was true, why was a team draining the magic and why had Harry spent so many hours cleaving off the runes?)
"Old stones on old land pick up a family's magic, very useful," Old Spencer said, again. He shook his head, again, because the future purpose of this property was non-magical.
"Don't be a fool, boy. You have stone like this, you keep it. You keep your family land close, including the stone that was on it."
Harry agreed, of course, and planned to do just that, not that he'd told anything to Old Spencer, the nosy old codger.
But knowing the why behind this rant could be useful...
So, as Harry was supposed to keep Old Spencer well entertained, Harry asked, "Why?"
It was like pulling a critical stone out of a precarious dam, the words rushed and thundered and attempted to drown. Old Spencer was finally huffing a bit, short of breath. He was also calmer and distracted finally.
This seemed to be the reason he was assigned his own helper, so as to wear out the Great Spencer, as he referred to himself more than once, someone to ask questions of his stories or rants. Someone to trigger floods and explosions, someone to keep him reminiscing and not helping.
Spencer jabbed his fingers toward the tea pot and Harry made more. How the man wasn't all water and no tongue by now, it seemed impossible. The old cursebreaker swallowed down yet more tea and seemed to rediscover his purpose. "Don't dispose of old stone like that if its from your family – and don't trust stone if it's from another. Sounds superstitious, but probably not."
This odd fierceness was nothing new to Harry. He heard about three fervent lectures with only himself in attendance each day.
This guy wasn't short like Madam Spurl nor did he bear her level of wrinkles, but he had the same kind of flame inside his mind. When Harry had mentioned her name, he'd learned that Spencer had been her apprentice back when Victoria was about to end her reign. Maybe working with Madam Spurl induced a very specific kind of insanity?
Harry wondered if his working with Old Spencer was random chance (unlikely), something Madam Spurl had arranged (likely), or something Sirius had settled on (almost as likely).
Harry had figured out how to make the most of the time. He wrote down what he learned or what books Old Spencer mentioned. He did get some good information in between all his stumbling into very strange, but very sensitive topics.
Harry had found Old Spencer willing to explain many of the runestones they'd taken out of the old Black Mansion. Harry had gotten a better head for the positions needed to make runes work (normal rune versus upside down versus a left-to-right flip versus one shifted ninety degrees, plus a number of carving tricks that effected how the runes worked).
Taking runes as a class, then doing this for the summer, was like learning what a chicken was in class, with all the formal names for the different parts, then spending a few weeks being shown how to turn a good chicken into a very fine meal. Spencer for all his oddness was a master practitioner. A cursebreaker who had more than dabbled in laying runes into buildings like houses and perhaps larger structures.
Spencer's mind, and incipient rant, had doddered off into other uses for stone when a scream, then several screams, ended the lesson.
Harry checked for his wand then bounded from the room.
"No one told us the Orangerie was haunted. Vicious shits. Three people are bleeding and a few are trapped, something is blocking their apparition." That was Guillaume Castar screaming.