Three weeks before the third task, Hermione asked the Room of Requirement for a maze.
It gave us a small one, three rows of hedges only a little taller than me, with a patch of open floor at one end for practising spells.
Hermione walked round the whole thing twice with a roll of parchment under her arm, and then came back and told me we were going to practise.
"I could find the middle of the real one with my eyes shut," I said.
"I know you could." She unrolled the parchment on the floor. "You're going to do it like a normal champion anyway. With a wand, and ordinary spells."
"I'm not a normal champion."
"Nobody in the stands knows that," said Hermione. "And I'd like it to stay that way."
The parchment was a list. At the top, in her neatest handwriting, it said POSSIBLE OBSTACLES (THIRD TASK), and underneath were forty-one magical creatures Hagrid might reasonably have got hold of, in alphabetical order, each with a short note about how to deal with it.
"You've missed one," I said, reading down it.
Hermione leaned over the parchment. "I haven't. I checked it against Fantastic Beasts twice."
"Blast-Ended Skrewts."
"They're not in Fantastic Beasts. Hagrid made them up."
"He's spent all year raising them, and nobody's seen them do a single useful thing yet," I said. "Where else is he going to show them off?"
Hermione sighed and wrote SKREWTS at the bottom in capital letters.
After that, she made me start with the Four-Point Spell.
"Point Me," I said, with my wand lying flat on my palm. It spun round once and pointed at the far hedge.
"Again," said Hermione, writing.
I did it again, and again after that. This was my training montage, apparently.
The Room hadn't thought to add any music.
On the tenth, she looked up from her notes.
"You're bored."
"I've found north ten times. It hasn't moved."
"Good." She pointed her wand at the pile of cushions the Room had left by the wall, and six of them rose into the air. "Impediment Jinx. Don't use anything I can't see."
The first cushion dived at me.
"Impedimenta."
It froze in mid-air and dropped. I did the next four the same way, out loud, because Hermione was listening for it.
As I stopped the sixth, Hermione sent a jinx in right behind it. "Petrificus Totalus!"
"Protego," I said, and her jinx hit a plain, ordinary Shield Charm a foot in front of my nose and bounced off into the hedge, which shivered.
"Better," she said, and made a note.
Next she asked the Room for a straw dummy at the end of the hedges, and asked me for the Reductor Curse.
"Reducto."
The dummy blew apart into a cloud of straw.
"Smaller," said Hermione, without looking up.
The Room put up another one. The second Reductor left a neat hole the size of a fist in its chest.
By the end of the first evening, she had three pages of notes, ruled into columns.
One of the columns was headed THINGS TO WORK ON. She'd drawn a line under the heading with a ruler and left it blank.
On the third day, Fleur Delacour caught up with us outside the library and pointed at the list sticking out of Hermione's bag.
"You are practising for the maze?"
"Hermione's making me," I said.
"I am helping him," said Hermione.
"The girls from Beauxbatons I practise with are very sweet," Fleur said. "They are so frightened of hurting me that they do not try. I would like to practise with somebody who is not frightened."
"You're supposed to be trying to beat me," I said.
"I am going to beat you," said Fleur. "But I would like to be good at it."
Hermione put her mouth next to my ear. "She's going back to France in a month. And she isn't going to tell anyone."
"I can 'ear you," said Fleur.
"I know," said Hermione. "I wanted you to hear the second part."
The Room was the one place in the castle I'd rather have kept to ourselves. But Fleur had watched me bring her sister up from the bottom of the lake in fourteen minutes, and she'd never once asked how I'd done it. I decided the Room could cope with one more visitor.
That evening, Fleur walked through a door on the seventh floor that hadn't been there a minute earlier, and stopped dead in front of the hedges.
"There was a wall," she said. "I watched you walk past it three times, and then there was a door."
"That's how it works," I said, and shut it behind her.
Fleur took her place at the far end of the open floor and bowed, and she didn't wait for me to finish bowing back.
"Stupefy!"
The red light came straight at my chest. I had my wand up before she'd finished the word.
"Protego."
The Stunner hit the shield with a loud crack. The shield shuddered and held, and red sparks sprayed off it across the floor.
Fleur was already moving. "Tarantallegra!"
That one came in low, under the bottom edge of the shield, at my legs. I tipped my wand down, and the shield swung down with it.
The jinx caught the lower edge and hissed off into the nearest hedge, and the hedge gave a sudden twitch, as if it had very nearly started to dance.
I felt the next one before I saw it. Her magic bunched up at the end of her wand, hot and tight, and she snapped out a word in French I didn't know.
A thin violet streak shot out of her wand and went wide of my shield. Halfway across the floor, it bent round the edge of the shield in mid-air and came at my shoulder from the side.
I swung my wand across, and the shield came round in time to meet it. The spell glanced off and smacked into the hedge behind me, and a whole patch of leaves turned bright purple.
Fleur went left along the hedges, watching my shield for a gap. Her hair was coming loose.
I turned on the spot to keep her in front of me. I still hadn't taken a single step.
She lowered her wand. She was breathing hard.
"You are not trying," she said.
"If I tried properly, you'd spend the third task in the hospital wing."
Fleur's chin went up. "Then I will risk the 'ospital wing." She pushed her hair out of her face. "Again. And this time, attack me."
So I did.
"Stupefy."
The first Stunner left my wand before her shield was all the way up. She got it there, and the red light burst against it and pushed her half a step back.
"Stupefy."
I sent the second while the first was still breaking. It came in at her hip, from a different angle, and hit the very edge of her shield.
The shield took it, flared white and broke. Fleur slid back two steps, her shoes squeaking on the floor.
She caught her balance and laughed. With her shield gone, she dropped low and sideways, out of line with my wand, and cast from one knee.
"Expelliarmus!"
It was a good one. It came in under my wand arm while I was still pointing at the place she'd been standing.
"Protego."
"Expelliarmus."
She got a shield up, and my spell went straight through it. Her wand jumped out of her hand, spun through the air, and landed in my palm.
Fleur sat back on her heels and blew a strand of hair out of her mouth.
She held out her hand. "Tomorrow," she said, "I will do that to you."
"You can try," I said, and tossed her wand back. She caught it without looking.
After that, it was Hermione's turn.
She walked to the end of the open floor and rolled up her sleeves. She bowed properly, all the way down, and waited for Fleur to bow back.
"Stupefy!" said Fleur.
"Protego!"
Hermione's shield went up silver-blue, and the Stunner burst against it.
"Stupefy!" Fleur said again, straight after.
That one broke on the shield as well, in a shower of red sparks. Hermione kept the shield up and stayed exactly where she was, with her eyes on Fleur's feet.
Then she aimed her wand at the floor. "Locomotor Mortis!"
The curse hit the flagstones a yard in front of her and skidded across them, low and fast, under Fleur's guard.
Fleur saw it too late. It caught her round the ankles, her legs snapped together, and she pitched forward and only stayed up by grabbing a handful of hedge.
"Bien," said Fleur, through her teeth. She flicked her wand at Hermione's feet and said something quick in French.
Hermione's shoelaces sat up. They'd turned into tiny green snakes, and before Hermione could get her wand down, they'd wound themselves together into a knot between her shoes.
She took one step and fell flat on the floor.
She said it was cheating. Then she asked Fleur to teach it to her.
They were still arguing about the wand movement when I left them to it.
Fleur came every evening after that.
She brought her own list, which was shorter than Hermione's and in French, and the two of them compared notes on the floor for half an hour while I sat with my back against a hedge and waited to be needed.
They agreed about the sphinx. They argued for ten minutes about grindylows, which were what had stopped Fleur in the lake.
She got quite heated, until Hermione said that a dozen of them at once would have stopped anybody. Fleur stopped mid-sentence and wrote that down.
By Thursday, Hermione could do the snake jinx. By Friday, Fleur had borrowed two of Hermione's books.
"She is very clever, your girlfriend," Fleur told me, while Hermione was across the Room looking for a quill.
"I know," I said.
"Beauxbatons would not 'ave known what to do with her." She watched Hermione check under a cushion for the quill. "Or with you. You are the best I've ever duelled, and you've not even tried yet."
"I tried a bit that first night," I said.
Fleur laughed and patted my arm. "I am not stupid, 'Arry."
At the start of the second week, Fleur had a meeting with Madame Maxime and didn't come.
Hermione asked the Room to take the hedges away, and sat on the arm of the sofa it gave us, with her legs swinging.
The Room had lit a fire as well, and without the hedges the place smelled of woodsmoke instead of wet leaves.
"I don't want to practise anything for the maze tonight," she said.
"All right."
"I want you to teach me something." She was looking at her hands. "Something that isn't for the maze. Something I can't already do."
I thought about it. Most of what she couldn't do yet, I didn't want her trying a week before her exams, because it could go wrong in ways that ended with Madam Pomfrey.
A Patronus was different. The worst it could do was not work.
Somewhere in my old life, a website had told me mine would be a chinchilla. I couldn't remember my own address, but I remembered that. I'd never forgiven it.
"Have you ever tried a Patronus?" I asked.
She looked up. "It's NEWT level."
"So's half the stuff you read for fun."
In the books, she hadn't managed it until fifth year, in this same Room, full of people, with me walking round correcting everyone's wand arms.
This time it was just the two of us, and her wand arm was fine. The hard part was the memory.
"It has to be happy," I said. "Properly happy. Not I got full marks in Arithmancy happy."
"I know that," said Hermione, and shut her eyes before I could say anything else.
She kept them shut for a while. When she opened them, she raised her wand and said, "Expecto Patronum."
Silver mist came out of the end of her wand. It hung in the air for a second, thin and shapeless, and then went out.
"Again," I said. "Hold on to it longer."
On the next try, the mist was thicker, and the one after that lasted almost five seconds before it faded. That was as far as she got that night.
She came back to it every evening after Fleur had gone, with a different memory each night, and none of them got her past the mist.
After each try, she wrote something on a scrap of parchment and crossed it out, and whenever I looked at it, she turned it face down.
On the last evening before exams, she kept her eyes shut for nearly a minute before she lifted her wand.
"Expecto Patronum."
A silver otter shot out of the end of Hermione's wand, turned a full circle in the air above us, and swam twice round my head before it came to rest in front of her, looking up at her with its whiskers twitching.
Hermione stared at it with her mouth open. She laughed out loud, and the otter rolled over in the air.
It stayed until she'd stopped laughing, and then it faded.
"What did you use?" I asked. "For the memory."
Hermione bent down to the bag by her feet and did up the buckle, which was already done up.
"I'm not telling you," she said.
"That's not fair," I said.
"Yes, it is." She picked up her bag. "You can work it out. You work everything else out."
She got as far as the door before she turned round, came back across the Room, put her hand on my chest, and kissed me.
Her bag slid off her shoulder and landed on the floor between our feet, and she left it there.
When she stepped back, she took two goes at picking it up.
"Goodnight, Harry," she said.
She went out into the corridor before I could answer.
She'd told me I could work it out. I was fairly sure I just had. Whatever memory she'd used, I was in it somewhere.
This year I'd faced a dragon and walked into a room with Voldemort in it, and I'd stayed calm both times.
Now I was standing on my own in the Room of Requirement, grinning at the bit of empty air where the otter had been, and it was ten minutes before I remembered I was allowed to go to bed.
The night before the third task, the common room was full of fourth-years revising for History of Magic.
Somebody had built the fire up as if it were January, and the room was hot and noisy with scratching quills.
Hermione was sitting with her feet tucked under her in the armchair next to mine, testing herself on the International Statute of Secrecy with her eyes shut.
At about eleven, she opened her eyes, took a small folded square of parchment out of her pocket, leaned across and tucked it inside my robes.
"What's that?" I asked.
"The list," she said. "The short version. Just the ones Hagrid's actually got."
"How do you know what he's got?"
"I asked him," said Hermione. "He didn't tell me. But he went a funny colour at six of them."
I took it back out and unfolded it. There were six creatures on it, in the careful letters she used for exam answers, with one note each. At the bottom, in smaller letters, it said Come out the same way you went in.
I read the last line twice. She knew I wasn't worried about the maze, so she'd written it small, at the very bottom, where it wouldn't look like a fuss.
I folded it up and put it back in my pocket, and left my hand over it.
When I looked across, her eyes were open. She shut them again and went back to the Statute of Secrecy.
***
A/N: Thanks for reading! Advanced chapters are up on [email protected]/Eternal97 if you want to read ahead.