Vinda stepped forward first and let the silence settle properly before speaking.
"The first task measured individual competence under pressure," she said. "The second will measure whether this competence can shine through leadership."
That line was enough to focus the room.
Karkaroff stepped to the first covered board and cleared the thick fog with a wave of his wand. A charcoal diagram of a maze appeared beneath it, layered in moving lines and marked intersections.
"The opening phase is retrieval," he said. "Your team enters a warded fog maze. Three rune discs are hidden within it. The discs are keyed to differing magical signatures, which means no champion will complete the phase alone, no matter how ...capable they might be."
Several students glanced at Altair when he said that. Altair did not return the favour.
Karkaroff made some intricate motions, and a glowing map of the maze appeared for all to see. He pointed to the map once with his wand. Several corridors shifted on the board.
"The partitions move. Some paths are false. Some are traps. You may separate or regroup. If your team loses cohesion entirely, that is your failure, not the maze's success."
Madame Maxime took the second board for herself and uncovered a drawing of a lantern surrounded by pressure plates, narrow bridges, and broken stone.
"The middle phase is transport," she said in her calm French cadence. "Your team will be given a ward lantern containing an unstable magical flame. You will carry it across a disrupted field. The footing is unreliable. The plates react to magical force. If you cast like butchers near the lantern, it will answer in kind."
"Dropping it will scatter enough magical backlash to ruin your score and your dignity at the same time. Kindly avoid both."
A few Beauxbatons students laughed first. Then remembered their team and competition.
Vinda moved to the third board and stripped the fog. This one showed a square chamber, three inner barriers, a marked standard at the centre, and a cluster of moving constructs drawn around it.
"The final phase is extraction," she said. "A bound school standard will be placed inside a warded chamber behind obstacles, hostile constructs, and a final lock sequence designed to punish impatience. Your task is to retrieve the standard and leave the chamber with all team members active. You are not being assessed as lone duelists. If your volunteers are left stunned against the walls while you reach the end looking proud of yourself, I assure you that your final score will reflect the fault of that choice."
That one landed hardest on the Hogwarts and Beauxbatons volunteers. Durmstrang merely looked as though the instruction had been insultingly obvious.
Maxime folded her hands behind her back. "Time matters, of course."
"But not enough to excuse foolishness," Vinda added.
Karkaroff took over again. "Your marks will be judged on six elements. Your use of time, leadership, command clarity, spell discipline, adaptation under stress and most important of all, protection of teammates." His gaze shifted across the room.
-
Durmstrang adapted first and most naturally. That was no surprise. Their education was more militaristic than the others, and the task suited habits already forced into them by years of training. Krum, Petrov, and Ilieva fell into role with almost insulting ease. Petrov handled forward pressure and physical obstruction. Ilieva read traps, structure, and battlefield geometry. Krum stood at the centre of it, setting pace, assigning correction, and adjusting both without wasting breath.
Even their arguments looked drilled.
Petrov pushed too fast into a false corridor, swore in Bulgarian, and hit a dead end hard enough to make the fog ripple. Ilieva did not slow. She struck the back of his shoulder with two fingers, pointed right, and barked the corridor count before Krum even turned his head. Petrov corrected instantly, took the proper branch, and found the rune disc eight seconds later.
They simply moved on.
Flitwick watched from the side with his arms folded into his sleeves. "Durmstrang educates children as if all of them will someday need to take a fortress with six friends and no sleep."
Vinda, standing beside him, watched Krum redirect Petrov without raising his voice. "That is because Durmstrang assumes life may one day ask exactly that."
Altair's team looked different, not softer, but sharper in another way.
Céleste and Castor already understood one another through the half-formed shorthand common to Nestborns. They had trained under the same regime of pressure, enhancement, and educational cruelty. Altair used that to his advantage. He pointed out priorities once and expected compliance. Céleste excelled in reading the course logic. Castor moved with the eager competence of a boy trying very hard not to look eager at all.
During the task, Altair halted them at the mouth of a false corridor, glanced once at the torch brackets, then sent Castor left and Céleste low with no further detail. Castor triggered a decoy plate deliberately. Céleste folded a wall segment out of phase with a transfiguration. Altair walked through the actual path before the fog had finished rearranging itself. It was not warm leadership. It was an effective and cruel example of the Nestborns.
Fleur's team took the longest to settle, which was not the same as saying they were weak, but more individual.
Élodie understood instructions quickly and obeyed them exactly. Lucien had the irritating habit of improvising before the plan had fully matured, which rendered Fleur's first two runs less effective than she had wanted. The problem was not incompetence. The problem was that both of her teammates were used to winning elegance prizes, not battlefield timing.
She corrected that in her own way.
On the third phase, Lucien drifted off line in the maze, certain he had identified a shorter route. Fleur waited until the false wall turned and nearly trapped him between two shifting partitions before pulling him out with a sharp twist of her wand and an even sharper look.
"You are entitled," she told him with icy clarity once he rejoined them, "and therefore used to get spared from the consequences of your idiocy far too often. If you leave formation again without command, I shall let the maze keep you."
Élodie covered her mouth with one hand and looked away before her smile became obvious. Lucien, to his credit, straightened at once and behaved properly for the next full hour.
By the end of the task, Fleur's team finished in third position. Durmstrang won and Hogwarts lost by seconds.
-
The second Quidditch match took place under low winter clouds and a colder wind than the first.
This time, Hogwarts faced Beauxbatons.
The French team wore pale blue trimmed in silver. Captain Delphine Morel led them with a poise almost insulting in its neatness. Her Chasers, Colette Marchand and Isabelle Renard, moved with a preference for formations that looked airy until one realised they were designed to force a defence into the wrong altitude. Their Beaters, Marc Boucher and Thierry Lemaire, were lighter than Durmstrang's but technically cleaner. Keeper Julien Sorel had the irritating habit of smiling after blocks. Their Seeker, Étienne Vallois, flew like a man who thought elegance itself counted as speed.
Hogwarts had learned from its loss.
Octavia Fawley adjusted the opening pattern at once. Instead of matching Beauxbatons in shape, she dragged the tempo lower and made the pitch itself do the work. Lucas Merrythought scored first after Imogen Vane baited Renard too wide on the western drift. Beauxbatons equalised through Morel with almost insolent smoothness. Then Fred and George began doing what they did best, which was making other people's clean plans look like carelessly stacked furniture.
They were not as brutal as they were with Durmstrang and more irritating in every useful way. George spoiled one pass by turning a Bludger just enough that Boucher had to duck at the wrong second. Fred drove the other across Sorel's sightline, forcing the Keeper to blink while Fawley put the Quaffle through the left hoop. Later, when Marchand tried to build a patient approach through the centre, both twins attacked the shape rather than the players, nudging the Bludgers into the passing lanes so often that Beauxbatons had to abandon elegance and improvise.
That suited Hogwarts.
By the time the Snitch appeared, the score had already shifted in their favour. Adrian Bowen saw it first and, unlike against Krum, met an opponent he could actually hunt instead of merely study. Étienne Vallois was quick and technically lovely in the air. Bowen was uglier in his pursuit and therefore more effective. He cut lower, sacrificed line for pressure, and forced Vallois into a correction that cost him the catch.
Bowen took the Snitch near the northern hoop.
Hogwarts won.
The roar from the stands had less awe in it than the one that had greeted Krum's catch, but it had more joy.
-
The potioneering tournament unfolded indoors under tighter control and sharper nerves.
Three-person teams worked from sealed task cards, which were revealed only when the cauldrons were already lit. The rules were simple enough on paper and vicious in practice. One potion to be brewed from a list of permitted ingredients, one corrective subtest where the team had to identify contamination in a nearly finished brew, and one preservation stage to prove the result would remain stable after bottling. Half the marks came from function, the rest from purity, timing, and the absence of magical residue that should not have been present.
Hogwarts won that tournament because Ravenclaw and Slytherin, when forced into academic cooperation under public scrutiny, became intolerable in a productive way. Geneviève Rosier, Morag MacDougal, and Draconis Primus produced a restorative draught so clean that even the judges' corrective sample failed to throw them off for long. Beauxbatons came close to refinement. Durmstrang came close on discipline. Hogwarts had the better finish.
-
The duelling tournament ended differently.
Its rules had been announced with all the sobriety Vinda could force on a room full of students who immediately heard only the word duel. Formal warded platform. Victory by clean disarm, ring out, magical incapacitation below the danger threshold, or triple point technical superiority recorded by the judges. Dark Arts were permitted while Unforgivables were not. Any spell intended to maim permanently, blind, destroy a magical core, or leave irreversible bodily damage ended the duel and the duellist's place in the tournament. Binding, cutting, blasting, and controlled transfiguration were all legal if they could be reversed cleanly. It was a proper duel by modern standards, which meant it was both dangerous enough to matter and controlled enough to be safe.
Durmstrang took it.
Not through brilliance alone, though they had enough of that, but through consistency. Their duelists made fewer mistakes. A Rosier from Hogwarts reached the semi-final. A Black reached the quarter-final. Beauxbatons displayed beautiful spell work and several fatal habits involving overconfidence in elegance. In the final, Katya Ziegler of Durmstrang defeated Septimus Selwyn of Hogwarts by forcing him into a sequence of defensive corrections until his footing failed him near the platform edge. It was not dramatic. It was better than dramatic.
The second leg of the matches was scheduled to be on the day of the third task, and every participant started to sharpen their skills.