The Girl Who Hid | ✓

|49| the Second Task

Obedient to Sirius's wish of hearing about anything odd at Hogwarts, Harry and I sent him a letter by brown owl that night, explaining all about Mr. Crouch breaking into Snape's office, and Moody and Snape's conversation. Then we turned our attention in earnest to the most urgent problem facing us: How to survive underwater for an hour on the twenty-fourth of February.

Ron quite liked the idea of using the Summoning Charm again — Harry had explained about Aqua-Lungs, and Ron couldn't see why Harry and I shouldn't Summon one from the nearest Muggle town. Hermione and I squashed this plan by pointing out that, in the unlikely event that we managed to learn how to operate an Aqua-Lung within the set limit of an hour, we were sure to be disqualified for breaking the International Code of Wizarding Secrecy — it was too much to hope that no Muggles would spot an Aqua-Lung zooming across the countryside to Hogwarts.

"Of course, the ideal solution would be for you to Transfigure yourself into a submarine or something," Hermione said. "If only we'd done human Transfiguration—"

"I don't fancy walking around with a periscope sticking out of my head," I winced.

"I s'pose I could always attack someone in front of Moody; he might do it for me," Harry laughed.

"I don't think he'd let you choose what you wanted to be turned into, though," said Hermione seriously. "No, I think your best chance is some sort of charm."

With two days left, the anxiety of dying left me with little to no apetite. The only good thing about breakfast on Monday was the return of the brown owl Harry had sent to Sirius. He pulled off the parchment, unrolled it, and showed the shortest letter Sirius had ever written.

Send date of next Hogsmeade weekend by return owl.

"Weekend after next," I whispered. "Here— take Hermione's quill and send this owl back straight away."

Harry scribbled the dates down on the back of Sirius's letter, tied it onto the brown owl's leg, and watched it take flight again.

"What's he want to know about the next Hogsmeade weekend for?" said Ron.

"Dunno," said Harry dully. "Come on... Care of Magical Creatures."

Hagrid wasn't too worried about us; infact he was pretty confident in our abilities after we got out of the dragons' path. But the evening before the second task, I felt as though I was trapped in a nightmare.

I sat with Harry, Hermione, and Ron in the library as the sun set outside, tearing feverishly through page after page of spells, hidden from one another by the massive piles of books on the desk in front of each of us.

"What if I do the Bubble Head Charm?" I looked up at Hermione from the book I had been reading.

"Do you know how to do it?" Harry piped up.

"No," I grumbled as Hermione shook her head.

"I haven't a clue how to do it," Hermione sighed. "There must be something... They'd never have set a task that was undoable."

"They have," said Ron. "Harry, just go down to the lake tomorrow, right, stick your head in, yell at the merpeople to give back whatever they've nicked, and see if they chuck it out. Best you can do, mate."

"Don't be stupid, Ronald," I narrowed my eyes at him as he bit his tongue from laughing.

"There's a way of doing it!" Hermione said crossly. "There just has to be!"

She seemed to be taking the library's lack of useful information on the subject as a personal insult; it had never failed her before.

"I know what I should have done," said Harry, resting, facedown, on Saucy Tricks for Tricky Sorts. "I should've learned to be an Animagus like Sirius."