Sirius had caught two more horcruxes so that was probably most of them, leaving Voldemort weaker than ever. And, for better or worse, Voldemort's loud crimes were making it difficult for people to not consider he might be returning. Both of his adoptive parents, in their quest to be as overbearing and paranoid as possible, had even started getting along again. Well, they continued to ignore the other entirely, but they could both be in his presence at the same time without argument.
To top it off, Harry was very prepared and only reasonably anxious for the upcoming task, which was tomorrow afternoon.
Even Ron was fine and eating breakfast, albeit a small one. He would be dueling again today. Harry was very glad the blood stains had come out of Ron's nice formal robes, he'd felt a bit guilty about that.
"You don't look nervous," he commented to his friend.
"You know, I've got that weird feeling I usually get when we have one of those death-defying adventures, my heart is racing but my mind is calm. Like I've accepted my imminent death," Ron said as he buttered his toast.
"Er, good?"
"It can't go any worse than dancing," Ron said with wisdom and gravitas. "Now hurry up and eat so we can watch some Quidditch!"
It was nice to sit in the stands instead of playing for once (not that he would have been cleared to play anyhow) and Harry enjoyed the match between the Hufflepuff team versus one of the Durmstrang teams. There was still an edge of heavy discontent from the adults, which was obvious by the quiet murmurs as none of them really paid attention and Ludo Bagman's much more monotone commentary than usual. It was probably due to the majority of the French students being sent home, which had led to a last-minute change of who was playing and a mad scramble to reorganize parts of the tournament. There were maybe five or so of them left, all of them in their last years of schooling and legal adults who had the right to stay as they'd wished. The singular exception was Fleur's younger sister, Gabriella who was here alongside Fleur's family. Fleur had asked if they could sit with him, his friends, and Viktor during the game.
Fleur was a bit annoying and kept insisting that Harry was a little boy, but she looked shaken and lonely. She'd sat alone at the edge of the Ravenclaw table at breakfast and Harry knew he would be faring a lot worse if all his friends had up and left him right before the task, so he tried to be courteous to his fellow champion. Luckily, the Weasleys were as friendly as always and she was chatting rapidly in French to Bill Weasley, who was looking a bit flustered.
Ron was also flustered, grumbling at both Fleur and Viktor. The latter of which was sandwiched between Hermione and Luna and was doing remarkably well under both girls' fast-paced random commentary ranging from the history of broomsticks to the shapes of the clouds.
Harry elbowed him to quit being an ass. Harry reckoned Ron needed to have a good think about things. It was ridiculous how his friend got so weird around attractive, older students. Ron ignored him, mumbling something about muscles.
"Neville!" Harry turned the boy. "You aren't involved in any weird love drama, are you? I'll talk to you today."
"Sure thing," Neville agreed. "What are we talking about?"
"Er. I dunno. Did you ever check out my hidden book stash with Luna?"
Neville perked up and began one of his excited lectures. "Actually, yes I found an interesting passage in one of them and I was talking to Professor Adams about it and did you know mistletoe can be used to ward off dementors? Apparently back in the days of the druids they had this ritual -" And Neville was off. Harry thought it was funny how the boy lost any hint of shyness when plants were involved. Of course, he would be interested in the herbology side of necromancy. He could get Hermione-ish in his reading too, and the boy pulled out some notes from somewhere to further his explanation. "- so yeah, I figured if you used specific groves in this pattern it should act as a power source such that you wouldn't need to account for the moon phase for rituals." He looked at Harry, clearly ready to cry if Harry wasn't impressed. Which was silly, because Harry was very impressed.
"You figured out how to theoretically brute force rituals without requiring additional power sources." He said, a touch flabbergasted. "That's really cool. You had to use arithmetic equations for this sort of thing," He looked at the little diagram of trees arranged just so in a massive ritual circle. "I didn't know you were taking that class."
"Er, yeah. Professor Trelawny kept predicting my death so Hermione convinced me to switch to Arithmancy. It's pretty interesting. You can use it to calculate the best times to pot and harvest and for larger stuff like garden layouts. The magical effects of the trees in this hypothetical grove would be about thirty times stronger than if you just planted them, however. And that's not accounting for what would happen if you enriched the soil with sacrifices. Yews and oaks have been shown to produce higher quality wand wood when watered with magical blood."
"Well damn. Are you going to try to make one? Where would you put it?"