Well, borrow one of the school owls, then, anyone can use them," said Hermione.
They went up to the Owlery. Hermione gave Harry a piece of parchment, a quill,
and a bottle of ink, then strolled around the long lines of perches, looking at all the
different owls, while Harry sat down against a wall and wrote his letter.
Dear Sirius,
You told me to keep you posted on what's happening at Hogwarts, so here goes - I
don't know if you've heard, but the Triwizard Tournament's happening this year
and on Saturday night I got picked as a fourth champion. I don't who put my name
in the Goblet of Fire, because I didn't. The other Hogwarts champion is Cedric
Diggory, from Hufflepuff
He paused at this point, thinking. He had an urge to say something about the large
weight of anxiety that seemed to have settled inside his chest since last night, but
he couldn't think how to translate this into words, so he simply dipped his quill
back into the ink bottle and wrote,
Hope you're okay, and Buckbeak - Harry
"Finished," he told Hermione, getting to his feet and brushing straw off his robes.
At this, Hedwig fluttered down onto his shoulder and held out her leg.
"I can't use you," Harry told her, looking around for the school owls. "I've got to
use one of these."
Hedwig gave a very loud hoot and took off so suddenly that her talons cut into his
shoulder. She kept her back to Harry all the time he was tying his letter to the leg
of a large barn owl. When the barn owl had flown off, Harry reached out to stroke
Hedwig, but she clicked her beak furiously and soared up into the rafters out of
reach.
"First Ron, then you," Harry said angrily. "This isn't my fault."
If Harry had thought that matters would improve once everyone got used to the
idea of him being champion, the following day showed him how mistaken he was.
He could no longer avoid the rest of the school once he was back at lessons - and it
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was clear that the rest of the school, just like the Gryffindors, thought Harry had
entered himself for the tournament. Unlike the Gryffindors, however, they did not
seem impressed.
The Hufflepuffs, who were usually on excellent terms with the Gryffindors, had
turned remarkably cold toward the whole lot of them. One Herbology lesson was
enough to demonstrate this. It was plain that the Hufflepuffs felt that Harry had
stolen their champion's glory; a feeling exacerbated, perhaps, by the fact that
Hufflepuff House very rarely got any glory, and that Cedric was one of the few
who had ever given them any, having beaten Gryffindor once at Quidditch. Ernie
Macmillan and Justin FinchFletchley, with whom Harry normally got on very
well, did not talk to him even though they were repotting Bouncing Bulbs at the
same tray - though they did laugh rather unpleasantly when one of the Bouncing
Bulbs wriggled free from Harry's grip and smacked him hard in the face. Ron
wasn't talking to Harry either. Hermione sat between them, making very forced
conversation, but though both answered her normally, they avoided making eye
contact with each other. Harry thought even Professor Sprout seemed distant with
him - but then, she was Head of Hufflepuff House.
He would have been looking forward to seeing Hagrid under normal
circumstances, but Care of Magical Creatures meant seeing the Slytherins too - the
first time he would come face-to-face with them since becoming champion.
Predictably, Malfoy arrived at Hagrid's cabin with his familiar sneer firmly in
place.
"Ah, look, boys, it's the champion," he said to Crabbe and Goyle the moment he
got within earshot of Harry. "Got your autograph books? Better get a signature
now, because I doubt he's going to be around much longer. . . . Half the Triwizard
champions have died.. . how long d'you reckon you're going to last, Potter? Ten
minutes into the first task's my bet."
Crabbe and Goyle guffawed sycophantically, but Malfoy had to stop there,
because Hagrid emerged from the back of his cabin balancing a teetering tower of
crates, each containing a very large Blast-Ended Skrewt. To the class's horror,
Hagrid proceeded to explain that the reason the skrewts had been killing one
another was an excess of pent-up energy, and that the solution would be for each
student to fix a leash on a skrewt and take it for a short walk. The only good thing
about this plan was that it distracted Malfoy completely.
"Take this thing for a walk?" he repeated in disgust, staring into one of the boxes.
"And where exactly are we supposed to fix the leash? Around the sting, the
blasting end, or the sucker?"
"Roun' the middle," said Hagrid, demonstrating. "Er - yeh might want ter put on
yer dragon-hide gloves, jus' as an extra precaution, like. Harry - you come here an'
help me with this big one....
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Hagrid's real intention, however, was totalk to Harry away from the rest of the
class. He waited until everyone else had set off with their skrewts, then turned to
Harry and said, very seriously, "So - yer competin', Harry. In the tournament.
School champion."
"One of the champions," Harry corrected him.
Hagrid's beetle-black eyes looked very anxious under his wild eyebrows.
"No idea who put yeh in fer it, Harry?"
"You believe I didn't do it, then?" said Harry, concealing with difficulty the rush
of gratitude he felt at Hagrid's words.
"Course I do," Hagrid grunted. "Yeh say it wasn' you, an' I believe yeh - an'
Dumbledore believes yer, an' all."
"Wish I knew who did do it," said Harry bitterly.
The pair of them looked out over the lawn; the class was widely scattered now,
and all in great difficulty. The skrewts were now over three feet long, and
extremely powerful. No longer shell-less and colorless, they had developed a kind
of thick, grayish, shiny armor. They looked like a cross between giant scorpions
and elongated crabs - but still without recognizable heads or eyes. They had
become immensely strong and very hard to control.
"Look like they're havin' fun, don' they?" Hagrid said happily. Harry assumed he
was talking about the skrewts, because his classmates certainly weren't; every now
and then, with an alarming bang, one of the skrewts' ends would explode, causing
it to shoot forward several yards, and more than one person was being dragged
along on their stomach, trying desperately to get back on their feet.
"Ah, I don' know, Harry," Hagrid sighed suddenly, looking back down at him with
a worried expression on his face. "School champion. . . everythin' seems ter
happen ter you, doesn' it?"
Harry didn't answer. Yes, everything did seem to happen to him. . . that was more
or less what Hermione had said as they had walked around the lake, and that was
the reason, according to her, that Ron was no longer talking to him.
The next few days were some of Harry's worst at Hogwarts. The closest he had
ever come to feeling like this had been during those months, in his second year,
when a large part of the school had suspected him of attacking his fellow students.
But Ron had been on his side then. He thought he could have coped with the rest
of the school's behavior if he could just have had Ron back as a friend, but he
wasn't going to try and persuade Ron to talk to him if Ron didn't want to.
Nevertheless, it was lonely with dislike pouring in on him from all sides.
He could understand the Hufflepuffs' attitude, even if he didn't like it; they had
their own champion to support. He expected nothing less than vicious insults from
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the Slytherins - he was highly unpopular there and always had been, because he
had helped Gryffindor beat them so often, both at Quidditch and in the Inter-
House Championship. But he had hoped the Ravenclaws might have found it in
their hearts to support him as much as Cedric. He was wrong, however. Most
Ravenclaws seemed to think that he had been desperate to earn himself a bit more
fame by tricking the goblet into accepting his name.
Then there was the fact that Cedric looked the part of a champion so much more
than he did. Exceptionally handsome, with his straight nose, dark hair, and gray
eyes, it was hard to say who was receiving more admiration these days, Cedric or
Viktor Krum. Harry actually saw the same sixth-year girls who had been so keen
to get Krum's autograph begging Cedric to sign their school bags one lunchtime.
Meanwhile there was no reply from Sirius, Hedwig was refusing to come
anywhere near him, Professor Trelawney was predicting his death with even more
certainty than usual, and he did so badly at Summoning Charms in Professor
Flitwick's class that he was given extra homework - the only person to get any,
apart from Neville.
"It's really not that difficult, Harry," Hermione tried to reassure him as they left
Flitwick's class - she had been making objects zoom across the room to her all
lesson, as though she were some sort of weird magnet for board dusters,
wastepaper baskets, and lunascopes. "You just weren't concentrating properly -"
"Wonder why that was," said Harry darkly as Cedric Diggory walked past,
surrounded by a large group of simpering girls, all of whom looked at Harry as
though he were a particularly large Blast-Ended Skrewt. "Still - never mind, eh?
Double Potions to look forward to this afternoon. . ."
Double Potions was always a horrible experience, but these days it was nothing
short of torture. Being shut in a dungeon for an hour and a half with Snape and the
Slytherins, all of whom seemed determined to punish Harry as much as possible
for daring to become school champion, was about the most unpleasant thing Harry
could imagine. He had already struggled through one Friday's worth, with
Hermione sitting next to him intoning "ignore them, ignore them, ignore them"
under her breath, and he couldn't see why today should be any better.
When he and Hermione arrived at Snape's dungeon after lunch, they found the
Slytherins waiting outside, each and