Magic? || Years 1-5

Beauxbatons Students: Year 4

They reached the entrance hall at the end of their Care of Magical Creatures class, unable to move due to the massive crowd crowded around a sign that had been posted at the foot of the marble staircase.

Ron, the tallest of them all, even had to stand on tiptoe to read the sign aloud to them.

Triwizard Tournament

The delegations from Beauxbatons and Durmstrang will be arriving at 6 o'clock on Friday the 30th of October. Lessons will end half an hour early --

"Brilliant! It's Potions last thing on Friday! Snape won't have time to poison us all!" Harry beamed ecstatically.

Students will return their bags and books to their dormitories and assemble in front of the castle to greet our guests before the Welcoming Feast.

"Only a week away! I wonder if Cedric knows?" Ernie's eyes were glowing as he escaped the crowd. "Think I'll go and tell him..."

"Cedric?" Ron repeated, watching as Ernie hurried away.

"Diggory. He must be entering the tournament," Harry explained, answering his unasked question.

"That idiot, Hogwarts champion?" Ron's face twisted up in disgust as they climbed up the crowded staircase.

"He's not an idiot. You just don't like him because he beat Gryffindor at Quidditch. I've heard he's a really good student -- and he's a prefect," Hermione replied sharply.

Amisty grinned faintly, tucking a stray hair behind her ear sheepishly as she added, "He's really polite, too."

Ron looked betrayed, but he recovered quickly, "You only like him because he's handsome."

"Excuse me, I don't like people just because they're handsome!" Hermione argued, in tandem with Amisty's, "I just said that he was polite!"

Ron's responding cough sounded very much like "Lockhart!"

Amisty raised her eyebrows at him.

He knew just as well as she did that she regarded Lockhart with the same level of respect she did a Blast-Ended Skrewt.

He didn't meet her gaze.

-=+=-

As the arrival of the other schools drew closer and closer, the castle's conversations had very quickly shifted to that of the Tournament.

Who was going to be the champion, what the tasks would be, how the different students from Beauxbatons and Durmstrang would be from themselves.

That wasn't all that was happening, however. The castle was slowly getting cleaner and cleaner, each day resulting in another hallway gleaming.

Grimy portraits had been scrubbed to the annoyance of those painted, all of them rubbing their freshly cleaned faces.

The suits of armor no longer squeaked and shined as if they were brand new, and Filch was scarier than ever, scaring a group of first-year girls into tears after they forgot to wipe their shoes before walking inside.

He wasn't the only one.

"Longbottom, kindly do not reveal that you can't even perform a simple Switching Spell in front of anyone from Durmstrang!" Professor McGonagall had snapped after a difficult lesson where Neville had messed up and transfigured his ear into a cactus.

The morning of October thirtieth was especially tense, even with the added decorations in the Great Hall.

Four silk banners hung from the walls, Gryffindor's red with its gold lion, Ravenclaw's blue with its bronze eagle, Hufflepuff's yellow with its black badger, and finally Slytherin's green with its silver serpent.