By the middle of May, Hermione had a new revision timetable.
She kept the big one pinned to the wall of the Room, next to the old one she'd finished just after Easter, and carried a copy around with her in case she needed to check something.
The new one was in a different set of colours, and it started again from the first topic of first year.
"You've already learned all of this," Ron said when he saw the copy over her shoulder in the common room.
"I've learned it once."
"That's what learning is!"
Hermione kept writing. She moved Transfiguration from Thursday to Wednesday with a flick of her wand, and the colours on the chart rearranged themselves to match.
This was like a New Game Plus run, where you started again from the very first level with every stat you'd already earned from playing the game to completion.
As long as it wasn't a Souls-like game, since they made the enemies scale with New Game Plus.
Champions were excused from end-of-year exams, so I didn't have a timetable at all, and Hermione had given up being annoyed about that weeks ago. These days she just pointed at the chart whenever I looked too relaxed.
"You could help me test myself," she said, and handed me A History of Magic.
"I could."
"Goblin rebellions. Seventeenth and eighteenth century. Go."
So I sat down next to her and asked questions out of it. I'd read it once before Christmas and still remembered it down to the page numbers.
She got every single one right. By the fortieth, she was finishing my questions before I'd got to the end of them.
"You don't need me for this," I told her.
"No," she agreed, and turned the page so I could keep going.
At the end of May, Professor McGonagall kept me back after Transfiguration.
"Mr Bagman would like to see the four champions on the Quidditch pitch at nine o'clock tonight," she said. "He wishes to explain the third task."
"Did he say what it is, Professor?"
"He did not, Potter," said McGonagall, "and I did not ask."
When I got down there at nine, the Quidditch pitch wasn't flat anymore. Somebody had planted long, low hedges all over it, crossing and turning back on themselves, and they were already about knee high.
Mostly, I felt sorry for the crowd. For the first task, they'd at least had dragons. For the second, the whole school had sat in the stands for an hour watching the top of a lake. Now they were going to spend an evening looking at twenty-foot hedges while everything interesting happened in the middle, where none of them could see it.
Whoever designed this tournament had clearly never had to sit through it.
Cedric was already standing at the edge of the hedges with his hands in his pockets. He looked round when he heard me coming.
"Harry. Have you seen the pitch?"
"Hard to miss."
"Oliver Wood would cry," Cedric said, and grinned. "I'd pay to watch."
Fleur and Krum arrived together a minute later, Fleur talking quickly in French and Krum nodding as though he understood one word in four.
As soon as she saw me, Fleur left him mid-sentence and came straight over.
"'Arry." She kissed me on both cheeks, which made Cedric look at his shoes. "Gabrielle writes to me every week, and in every letter, she asks about you. I am to tell you she is practising holding her breath in the bath, so next time she will not need rescuing."
"Tell her not to try it in the lake."
"I 'ave told her." Fleur sighed. "She does not listen to me. She listens to you. Perhaps you will write to her, and say it."
"I'll write," I said, and she patted my arm as if that settled it.
Then Ludo Bagman came bouncing across the grass in his old Wimbourne Wasps robes.
"Well, what d'you think?" He spread his arms at the hedges. "Growing nicely, aren't they? Another month and you won't be able to see over them. Don't worry," he added, catching the look on Krum's face. "You'll have your Quidditch pitch back once the task's over."
"So it is a maze," said Krum.
"It's a maze!" said Bagman. "Very simple, really. The Triwizard Cup goes in the middle, and whoever touches it first gets full marks."
"We only 'ave to walk through it?" said Fleur.
"Well, there'll be a few things in the way. Hagrid's kindly providing some creatures, and there'll be spells to get past, and so on. Whoever's ahead on points goes in first." He beamed at me. "That's you, Harry. Then Mr Diggory, then Mr Krum, then Miss Delacour. Plenty of chances to catch up, though, depending on how you all get on with the obstacles. Should be fun, eh?"
Nobody said whether it would be fun.
"Oh, and the cup will be checked before the task by Professor Moody and Professor Flitwick," Bagman added. "Personally. Professor Moody insisted."
In the books, the fake Moody had turned that cup into a Portkey to a graveyard and then cleared the whole maze so that I'd be the one to reach it. This year, the real Moody was checking it, and I'd watched him look under his own desk three times in one lesson. If anybody had so much as breathed a charm on that cup, he'd find it.
"Any questions?" Bagman asked. Nobody had any. "Right then, off you go. Mr Potter, a word?"
He walked me a little way along the hedges, away from the others.
"Harry," said Bagman. "Harry, Harry. How are you feeling? Confident?"
"Very," I said.
"That's the spirit!" He clapped me on the shoulder. His hand was damp. "You know, if you ever wanted any help, any advice at all, I'd be only too happy to..."
"You asked me that in January," I said. "In the Three Broomsticks. There were goblins watching you."
His smile stayed exactly where it was.
"Goblins," Bagman said. "Ah. Yes. A little business arrangement. Nothing to concern you."
"You bet them I'd win the tournament," I said. "Didn't you?"
That got rid of the smile.
"I don't know where you've..."
"So when I win," I went on, "you win. You'll be able to pay them everything you owe them. And after that, you'll be able to pay Fred and George Weasley the money you owe them from the World Cup. In real gold, this time. Not the kind that disappears."
He went a sort of mottled red, all the way down into his collar.
"Now look here, Harry, I don't know what those boys have been telling you..."
"I just know what leprechaun gold looks like the morning after."
Bagman opened and closed his hand at his side a couple of times.
"After the task," he said. "Every Knut. You have my word."
"Thanks, Mr Bagman."
I left him by the hedges. When I looked back from the edge of the pitch, he was mopping his face with a handkerchief.
Cedric had waited for me by the stands.
"What did he want?" he asked.
"To wish me luck."
"He's never wished me luck." Cedric fell into step beside me, and we started up the lawn towards the castle. "Not once, all year."
"You're not missing much."
The lights were still on in Hagrid's cabin, and something large was moving about in the pumpkin patch. Buckbeak, probably, looking for ferrets.
"I still owe you for the dragons," Cedric said when we got to the front steps.
"Beat me to the cup, and we're even."
"Deal." Cedric held out his hand, and I shook it.
Hermione was still up when I got back to the common room, sitting in her armchair by the fire with the new timetable and the old Defence textbook open on her lap. She'd saved me the other armchair by putting her feet up on it.
"Well?" she asked.
"It's a maze. On the Quidditch pitch, with Hagrid's creatures in it."
She took her feet down so I could sit. "Did he say which creatures?"
"No. I had a word with him about something else, though."
I told her about the goblins and the twins while the last of the fourth-years went up to bed. She listened all the way to the end without interrupting.
"Did anyone else hear you?" she asked when I'd finished.
"No."
"Good. He'll try to get out of it, you know. Men like that always do. He'll pay them half, or pay them late, and hope everyone's too embarrassed to say anything."
"Probably."
"Then if he does," said Hermione, "I'll write to the Department of Magical Games and Sports and ask, very politely, why their own Head is placing bets on a tournament he's supposed to be judging." She dipped her quill. "I've already looked up the address."
A year ago, she'd have told me off for even thinking about leaning on a Ministry official.
A year ago, she also hadn't robbed Gringotts.
Three days later, at breakfast, Fred and George were sitting opposite Hermione and me when an owl landed in front of Fred and dropped a letter in his porridge.
He fished it out, shook the porridge off and read it twice before he handed it to George. George read it with his eyebrows climbing slowly up his forehead.
"It's from Bagman," Fred said, to nobody in particular. "He's very sorry for the delay, and we'll have the full amount, with interest, by the end of June."
"We've written to him four times since the World Cup," said George. "He's never answered one." He turned the letter over. "There's a bit on the back. 'P.S. Do give my very best wishes to Harry, and please tell him there is no need to mention any of this to anyone.'"
He folded the letter into a small square and looked across the table at me.
I was eating my toast.
George nudged Fred. The two of them watched me finish that piece and butter another one without saying anything at all.
Hermione, next to me, turned a page of her Arithmancy notes.
"I'd have asked for more interest," she said.
***
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