Meeting Of Swords and Wands

Chapter 14: Summon Forth the Contestants!

The appearance of the sign in the entrance hall had a marked effect upon the inhabitants of the castle. During the following week, there seemed to be only one topic of conversation, no matter where any of us went: the Triwizard Tournament. Rumors were flying from student to student like highly contagious germs: who was going to try for Hogwarts champion, what the tournament would involve, how the students from Beauxbatons and Durmstrang differed from themselves.

I also noticed that the castle seemed to be undergoing an extra-thorough cleaning. Several grimy portraits had been scrubbed, much to the displeasure of their subjects, who sat huddled in their frames muttering darkly and wincing as they felt their
raw pink faces. The suits of armour were suddenly gleaming and moving without squeaking, and Argus Filch, the caretaker, was behaving so ferociously to any students who forgot to wipe their shoes that he terrified a pair of first-year girls into hysterics, not that I could blame him. My mom has that same fury when I mess up her clean floors.

Other members of the staff seemed oddly tense too.

“Longbottom, kindly do not reveal that you can’t even perform a simple Switching Spell in front of anyone from Durmstrang!” Professor McGonagall barked at the end of one particularly difficult lesson, during which Neville had accidentally transplanted his own ears onto a cactus, much to Nico's enjoyment.

When Harry, Neeks, Ron, Hermione and I went down to breakfast on the day of our guests' arrival, we found that the Great Hall had been decorated overnight. Enormous silk banners hung from the walls, each
of them representing a Hogwarts House: red with a gold lion for
Gryffindor, blue with a bronze eagle for Ravenclaw, yellow with a black badger for Hufflepuff, and green with a silver serpent for Slytherin. Behind the teachers’ table, the largest banner of all bore the Hogwarts coat of arms: lion, eagle, badger, and snake united
around a large letter H. The 5 of us sat in a semi circle beside Fred and George at the Gryffindor table. Once again, and most unusually, they were sitting apart from everyone else and conversing in low voices. Ron led the way over to them.

“It’s a bummer, all right,” George was saying gloomily to Fred.

“But if he won’t talk to us in person, we’ll have to send him the letter after all. Or we’ll stuff it into his hand. He can’t avoid us forever.”

“Who’s avoiding you?” said Ron, sitting down next to them.

“Wish you would,” said Fred, looking irritated at the interruption.

“What’s a bummer?” Ron asked George.

“Having a nosy git like you for a brother,” George replied, highly annoyed.

“You two got any ideas on the Triwizard Tournament yet?”
Harry asked, trying to defuse the situation the situation, “Thought any more about trying to enter?”

“I asked McGonagall how the champions are chosen but she wasn’t telling,” said George bitterly. “She just told me to shut up and get on with transfiguring my raccoon.”

“Wonder what the tasks are going to be?” said Ron thoughtfully, “You know, I bet we could do them, Harry. We’ve done dangerous stuff before.”

“Not in front of a panel of judges, you haven’t,” said Fred. “McGonagall says the champions get awarded points according to how well they’ve done the tasks.”

"Then it's a great thing Percy isn't competing. He has all the grace of a drunk troll." Nico joked.

"Ha." I deadpanned as the group laughed.

“Who are the judges?” Harry asked as he wiped a few tears.

“Well, the Heads of the participating schools are always on the panel,” said Hermione, and everyone looked around at her, rather surprised, “because all three of them were injured during the Tournament of 1792, when a cockatrice the champions were supposed
to be catching went on a rampage.”
She noticed all of us looking at her and said, with her usual air
of impatience that nobody else had read all the books she had, “It’s
all in Hogwarts, A History."