Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire hp-4 Read online

  She stormed away; great multicolored swarms of fairies rose into the air as she passed, angrily pushing aside bushes. Hagrid was still sitting on the bench, staring after her. It was much too dark to make out his expression. Then, after about a minute, he stood up and strode away, not back to the castle, but off out into the dark grounds in the direction of his cabin.

  “C’mon,” Harry said, very quietly to Ron. “Let’s go…”

  But Ron didn’t move.

  “What’s up?” said Harry, looking at him.

  Ron looked around at Harry, his expression very serious indeed.

  “Did you know?” he whispered. “About Hagrid being half giant?”

  “No,” Harry said, shrugging. “So what?”

  He knew immediately, from the look Ron was giving him, that he was once again revealing his ignorance of the wizarding world. Brought up by the Dursleys, there were many things that wizards took for granted that were revelations to Harry, but these surprises had become fewer with each successive year. Now, however, he could tell that most wizards would not have said “So what?” upon finding out that one of their friends had a giantess for a mother.

  “I’ll explain inside,” said Ron quietly, “c’mon…”

  Fleur and Roger Davies had disappeared, probably into a more private clump of bushes. Harry and Ron returned to the Great Hall. Parvati and Padma were now sitting at a distant table with a whole crowd of Beauxbatons boys, and Hermione was once more dancing with Krum. Harry and Ron sat down at a table far removed from the dance floor.

  “So?” Harry prompted Ron. “What’s the problem with giants?”

  “Well, they’re… they’re…” Ron struggled for words. “…not very nice,” he finished lamely.

  “Who cares?” Harry said. “There’s nothing wrong with Hagrid!”

  “I know there isn’t, but… blimey, no wonder he keeps it quiet,” Ron said, shaking his head. “I always thought he’d got in the way of a bad Engorgement Charm when he was a kid or something. Didn’t like to mention it…”

  “But what’s it matter if his mother was a giantess?” said Harry.

  “Well… no one who knows him will care, ’cos they’ll know he’s not dangerous,” said Ron slowly. “But… Harry, they’re just vicious, giants. It’s like Hagrid said, it’s in their natures, they’re like trolls… they just like killing, everyone knows that. There aren’t any left in Britain now, though.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “Well, they were dying out anyway, and then loads got themselves killed by Aurors. There’re supposed to be giants abroad, though… They hide out in mountains mostly…”

  “I don’t know who Maxime thinks she’s kidding,” Harry said, watching Madame Maxime sitting alone at the judges’ table, looking very somber. “If Hagrid’s half giant, she definitely is. Big bones… the only thing that’s got bigger bones than her is a dinosaur.”

  Harry and Ron spent the rest of the ball discussing giants in their corner, neither of them having any inclination to dance. Harry tried not to watch Cho and Cedric too much; it gave him a strong desire to kick something.

  When the Weird Sisters finished playing at midnight, everyone gave them a last, loud round of applause and started to wend their way into the entrance hall. Many people were expressing the wish that the ball could have gone on longer, but Harry was perfectly happy to be going to bed; as far as he was concerned, the evening hadn’t been much fun.

  Out in the entrance hall, Harry and Ron saw Hermione saying good night to Krum before he went back to the Durmstrang ship. She gave Ron a very cold look and swept past him up the marble staircase without speaking. Harry and Ron followed her, but halfway up the staircase Harry heard someone calling him.

  “Hey—Harry!”

  It was Cedric Diggory. Harry could see Cho waiting for him in the entrance hall below.

  “Yeah?” said Harry coldly as Cedric ran up the stairs toward him.

  Cedric looked as though he didn’t want to say whatever it was in front of Ron, who shrugged, looking bad tempered, and continued to climb the stairs.

  “Listen…” Cedric lowered his voice as Ron disappeared. “I owe you one for telling me about the dragons. You know that golden egg? Does yours wail when you open it?”

  “Yeah,” said Harry.

  “Well… take a bath, okay?”

  “What?”

  “Take a bath, and—er—take the egg with you, and—er—just mull things over in the hot water. It’ll help you think… Trust me.”

  Harry stared at him.

  “Tell you what,” Cedric said, “use the prefects’ bathroom. Fourth door to the left of that statue of Boris the Bewildered on the fifth floor. Password’s ‘pine fresh.’ Gotta go… want to say good night—”

  He grinned at Harry again and hurried back down the stairs to Cho.

  Harry walked back to Gryffindor Tower alone. That had been extremely strange advice. Why would a bath help him to work out what the wailing egg meant? Was Cedric pulling his leg? Was he trying to make Harry look like a fool, so Cho would like him even more by comparison?

  The Fat Lady and her friend Vi were snoozing in the picture over the portrait hole. Harry had to yell “Fairy lights!” before he woke them up, and when he did, they were extremely irritated. He climbed into the common room and found Ron and Hermione having a blazing row. Standing ten feet apart, they were bellowing at each other, each scarlet in the face.

  “Well, if you don’t like it, you know what the solution is, don’t you?” yelled Hermione; her hair was coming down out of its elegant bun now, and her face was screwed up in anger.

  “Oh yeah?” Ron yelled back. “What’s that?”

  “Next time there’s a ball, ask me before someone else does, and not as a last resort!”

  Ron mouthed soundlessly like a goldfish out of water as Hermione turned on her heel and stormed up the girls’ staircase to bed. Ron turned to look at Harry.

  “Well,” he sputtered, looking thunderstruck, “well—that just proves—completely missed the point—”

  Harry didn’t say anything. He liked being back on speaking terms with Ron too much to speak his mind right now—but he somehow thought that Hermione had gotten the point much better than Ron had.

  24. RITA SKEETER’S SCOOP

  Everybody got up late on Boxing Day. The Gryffindor common room was much quieter than it had been lately, many yawns punctuating the lazy conversations. Hermione’s hair was bushy again; she confessed to Harry that she had used liberal amounts of Sleekeazy’s Hair Potion on it for the ball, “but it’s way too much bother to do every day,” she said matter of factly, scratching a purring Crookshanks behind the ears.

  Ron and Hermione seemed to have reached an unspoken agreement not to discuss their argument. They were being quite friendly to each other, though oddly formal. Ron and Harry wasted no time in telling Hermione about the conversation they had overheard between Madame Maxime and Hagrid, but Hermione didn’t seem to find the news that Hagrid was a half giant nearly as shocking as Ron did.

  “Well, I thought he must be,” she said, shrugging. “I knew he couldn’t be pure giant because they’re about twenty feet tall. But honestly, all this hysteria about giants. They can’t all be horrible… It’s the same sort of prejudice that people have toward werewolves… It’s just bigotry, isn’t it?”

  Ron looked as though he would have liked to reply scathingly, but perhaps he didn’t want another row, because he contented himself with shaking his head disbelievingly while Hermione wasn’t looking.

  It was time now to think of the homework they had neglected during the first week of the holidays. Everybody seemed to be feeling rather flat now that Christmas was over—everybody except Harry, that is, who was starting (once again) to feel slightly nervous.

  The trouble was that February the twenty fourth looked a lot closer from this side of Christmas, and he still hadn’t done anything about working out the clue inside the golden egg. He therefor
e started taking the egg out of his trunk every time he went up to the dormitory, opening it, and listening intently, hoping that this time it would make some sense. He strained to think what the sound reminded him of, apart from thirty musical saws, but he had never heard anything else like it. He closed the egg, shook it vigorously, and opened it again to see if the sound had changed, but it hadn’t. He tried asking the egg questions, shouting over all the wailing, but nothing happened. He even threw the egg across the room—though he hadn’t really expected that to help.

  Harry had not forgotten the hint that Cedric had given him, but his less than friendly feelings toward Cedric just now meant that he was keen not to take his help if he could avoid it. In any case, it seemed to him that if Cedric had really wanted to give Harry a hand, he would have been a lot more explicit. He, Harry, had told Cedric exactly what was coming in the first task—and Cedric’s idea of a fair exchange had been to tell Harry to take a bath. Well, he didn’t need that sort of rubbishy help—not from someone who kept walking down corridors hand in hand with Cho, anyway. And so the first day of the new term arrived, and Harry set off to lessons, weighed down with books, parchment, and quills as usual, but also with the lurking worry of the egg heavy in his stomach, as though he were carrying that around with him too.

  Snow was still thick upon the grounds, and the greenhouse windows were covered in condensation so thick that they couldn’t see out of them in Herbology. Nobody was looking forward to Care of Magical Creatures much in this weather, though as Ron said, the skrewts would probably warm them up nicely, either by chasing them, or blasting off so forcefully that Hagrid’s cabin would catch fire.

  When they arrived at Hagrid’s cabin, however, they found an elderly witch with closely cropped gray hair and a very prominent chin standing before his front door.

  “Hurry up, now, the bell rang five minutes ago,” she barked at them as they struggled toward her through the snow.

  “Who’re you?” said Ron, staring at her. “Where’s Hagrid?”

  “My name is Professor Grubbly-Plank,” she said briskly. “I am your temporary Care of Magical Creatures teacher.”

  “Where’s Hagrid?” Harry repeated loudly.

  “He is indisposed,” said Professor Grubbly-Plank shortly.

  Soft and unpleasant laughter reached Harry’s ears. He turned; Draco Malfoy and the rest of the Slytherins were joining the class. All of them looked gleeful, and none of them looked surprised to see Professor Grubbly-Plank.

  “This way, please,” said Professor Grubbly-Plank, and she strode off around the paddock where the Beauxbatons horses were shivering. Harry, Ron, and Hermione followed her, looking back over their shoulders at Hagrid’s cabin. All the curtains were closed. Was Hagrid in there, alone and ill?

  “What’s wrong with Hagrid?” Harry said, hurrying to catch up with Professor Grubbly-Plank.

  “Never you mind,” she said as though she thought he was being nosy.

  “I do mind, though,” said Harry hotly. “What’s up with him?”

  Professor Grubbly-Plank acted as though she couldn’t hear him. She led them past the paddock where the huge Beauxbatons horses were standing, huddled against the cold, and toward a tree on the edge of the forest, where a large and beautiful unicorn was tethered.

  Many of the girls “ooooohed!” at the sight of the unicorn.

  “Oh it’s so beautiful!” whispered Lavender Brown. “How did she get it? They’re supposed to be really hard to catch!”

  The unicorn was so brightly white it made the snow all around look gray. It was pawing the ground nervously with its golden hooves and throwing back its horned head.

  “Boys keep back!” barked Professor Grubbly-Plank, throwing out an arm and catching Harry hard in the chest. “They prefer the woman’s touch, unicorns. Girls to the front, and approach with care, come on, easy does it…”

  She and the girls walked slowly forward toward the unicorn, leaving the boys standing near the paddock fence, watching. The moment Professor Grubbly-Plank was out of earshot, Harry turned to Ron.

  “What d’you reckons wrong with him? You don’t think a skrewt—?”

  “Oh he hasn’t been attacked, Potter, if that’s what you’re thinking,” said Malfoy softly. “No, he’s just too ashamed to show his big, ugly face.”

  “What d’you mean?” said Harry sharply.

  Malfoy put his hand inside the pocket of his robes and pulled out a folded page of newsprint.

  “There you go,” he said. “Hate to break it to you, Potter…”

  He smirked as Harry snatched the page, unfolded it, and read it, with Ron, Seamus, Dean, and Neville looking over his shoulder. It was an article topped with a picture of Hagrid looking extremely shifty.

  DUMBLEDORE’S GIANT MISTAKE

  Albus Dumbledore, eccentric Headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, has never been afraid to make controversial staff appointments, writes Rita Skeeter, Special Correspondent. In September of this year, he hired Alastor “Mad-Eye” Moody, the notoriously jinx happy ex Auror, to teach Defense Against the Dark Arts, a decision that caused many raised eyebrows at the Ministry of Magic, given Moody’s well known habit of attacking anybody who makes a sudden movement in his presence. Mad-Eye Moody, however, looks responsible and kindly when set beside the part human Dumbledore employs to teach Care of Magical Creatures.

  Rubeus Hagrid, who admits to being expelled from Hogwarts in his third year, has enjoyed the position of gamekeeper at the school ever since, a job secured for him by Dumbledore. Last year, however, Hagrid used his mysterious influence over the headmaster to secure the additional post of Care of Magical Creatures teacher, over the heads of many better qualified candidates.

  An alarmingly large and ferocious looking man, Hagrid has been using his newfound authority to terrify the students in his care with a succession of horrific creatures. While Dumbledore turns a blind eye, Hagrid has maimed several pupils during a series of lessons that many admit to being “very frightening.”

  “I was attacked by a hippogriff, and my friend Vincent Crabbe got a bad bite off a flobberworm,” says Draco Malfoy, a fourth year student. “We all hate Hagrid, but we’re just too scared to say anything.”

  Hagrid has no intention of ceasing his campaign of intimidation, however. In conversation with a Daily Prophet reporter last month, he admitted breeding creatures he has dubbed “Blast-Ended Skrewts,” highly dangerous crosses between manticores and fire crabs. The creation of new breeds of magical creature is, of course, an activity usually closely observed by the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures. Hagrid, however, considers himself to be above such petty restrictions.

  “I was just having some fun,” he says, before hastily changing the subject.

  As if this were not enough, the Daily Prophet has now unearthed evidence that Hagrid is not—as he has always pretended—a pure blood wizard. He is not, in fact, even pure human. His mother, we can exclusively reveal, is none other than the giantess Fridwulfa, whose whereabouts are currently unknown.

  Bloodthirsty and brutal, the giants brought themselves to the point of extinction by warring amongst themselves during the last century. The handful that remained joined the ranks of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, and were responsible for some of the worst mass Muggle killings of his reign of terror.

  While many of the giants who served He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named were killed by Aurors working against the Dark Side, Fridwulfa was not among them. It is possible she escaped to one of the giant communities still existing in foreign mountain ranges. If his antics during Care of Magical Creatures lessons are any guide, however, Fridwulfa’s son appears to have inherited her brutal nature.

  In a bizarre twist, Hagrid is reputed to have developed a close friendship with the boy who brought around You-Know-Who’s fall from power—thereby driving Hagrid’s own mother, like the rest of You-Know-Who’s supporters, into hiding. Perhaps Harry Potter is unaware of the unpleasant truth ab
out his large friend—but Albus Dumbledore surely has a duty to ensure that Harry Potter, along with his fellow students, is warned about the dangers of associating with part giants.

  Harry finished reading and looked up at Ron, whose mouth was hanging open.

  “How did she find out?” he whispered.

  But that wasn’t what was bothering Harry.

  “What d’you mean, ‘we all hate Hagrid’?” Harry spat at Malfoy. “What’s this rubbish about him”—he pointed at Crabbe—“getting a bad bite off a flobberworm? They haven’t even got teeth!”

  Crabbe was sniggering, apparently very pleased with himself.

  “Well, I think this should put an end to the oaf’s teaching career,” said Malfoy, his eyes glinting. “Half giant… and there was me thinking he’d just swallowed a bottle of Skele Gro when he was young… None of the mummies and daddies are going to like this at all… They’ll be worried he’ll eat their kids, ha, ha…”

  “You—”

  “Are you paying attention over there?”

  Professor Grubbly-Plank’s voice carried over to the boys; the girls were all clustered around the unicorn now, stroking it. Harry was so angry that the Daily Prophet article shook in his hands as he turned to stare unseeingly at the unicorn, whose many magical properties Professor Grubbly-Plank was now enumerating in a loud voice, so that the boys could hear too.

  “I hope she stays, that woman!” said Parvati Patil when the lesson had ended and they were all heading back to the castle for lunch. “That’s more what I thought Care of Magical Creatures would be like… proper creatures like unicorns, not monsters…”

  “What about Hagrid?” Harry said angrily as they went up the steps.

  “What about him?” said Parvati in a hard voice. “He can still be gamekeeper, can’t he?”

  Parvati had been very cool toward Harry since the ball. He supposed that he ought to have paid her a bit more attention, but she seemed to have had a good time all the same. She was certainly telling anybody who would listen that she had made arrangements to meet the boy from Beauxbatons in Hogsmeade on the next weekend trip.