JAMES POTTER AND THE VAULT OF DESTINIES

Clutchcudgel matches went from grueling dark and icy affairs to exhilarating romps through the mild evenings, lit by the rose-gold light of the later sunsets. Team Bigfoot continued its dogged refusal to be knocked out of the final tournament playoffs, winning a few matches, tying even more. Fortunately, since their standings had gradually improved over the course of the season, tie games often meant technical victories for the orange and blue team. No one expected the Foots to actually get into the final tournament, but at least no one expected them to get knocked out easily. James was quietly very proud of the team and his own unique involvement with it. Even if they still ended up dead last in the overall season standings, it would be a close thing. More importantly, the other teams respected Team Bigfoot now. Or, at the very least, didn't openly mock them.

       Oliver Wood still showed a stubborn reluctance to encourage the use of anything other than the most basic magic during his team's matches. He did, however, allow the continuation of the team's game magic meetings and James began showing his fellow players some of the Artis Decerto tricks he'd learned during his last year's Defense Against the Dark Arts classes with Professor Kendrick Debellows.

       'It isn't just about beating the other guy's magic with your own magic,' he attempted to explain. 'It's about beating his magic with your mind, by knowing what he's going to do even before he does it and being ready for it.'

      'Mind reading,' Gobbins frowned skeptically. 'I never understood that crazy voodoo stuff.'

       'It's voodoo,' Ralph said, shaking his head. 'It's just knowing how people usually act and guessing what they're going to do before they do it. It's easier than you think. People are a lot less unpredictable than you'd ever guess.'

       James nodded enthusiastically. 'Look at the Igors,' he said, standing up. 'Say it's the third quarter and they're down by ten. You see three of their Clippers lining up around the second turn. What are they up to?'

       Jazmine laughed and shook her head. 'They're stacking a pile-drive maneuver. Their lead Clipper has the Clutch and if he loses it somehow, he'll just toss it back to the guy behind him. That way, they've got two-man insurance that they'll make it to the goal.'

       'That's what I'm talking about,' James nodded, pointing at her. 'We don't have to wait to see what they're going to do in that situation. We already know that's their standard procedure, so we act first, sending some Bullies back to get in between them even before they line up. That's Artis Decerto!'

       'But that's not all it is,' Wentworth said, tilting his head. 'It's also those crazy acrobatics you do out there on the skrim. You look like one of those guys from Cirque de Blase.'

      'My mom took me to that last year,' Norrick interjected.

      Wentworth turned to him. 'Did you like it?'

       'Meh,' Norrick shrugged. 'When I think circus, I think guys walking tightropes and taming tigers and making pyramids out of dozens of elephants and stuff. I don't usually think of a bunch of dudes in tights swinging around on velvet ropes and doing yoga on flying carpets.'

      'Sounds pretty interesting to me,' Jazmine admitted.

      Norrick rolled his eyes. 'That's 'cause you're a girl.'

      'Thanks for noticing,' Jazmine replied sourly. 'At least when Ralph says it, it sounds like a good thing.' She smiled at Ralph across the room and his cheeks reddened. He coughed lightly and looked helplessly at James.

       'Yeah,' James nodded, struggling to stay on topic. 'Artis Decerto is also about acrobatic kinds of stuff too. It's just a matter of using your whole body sort of like a tool or a weapon or a torpedo, whatever best suits the situation. You put both ideas together, and not only will you know what the other guy is about to do, you'll already be getting yourself into position to defeat it.'

       'Like when you got between that Zombie Clipper and Bully last match!' Wentworth exclaimed, sitting forward. 'And you pretended to have a Clutch under your arm so the Bully would aim a gravity well at you, but then you spun around up over the other guy at just the right moment and the Bully shot his spell at his own Clipper and knocked him right out of the course and then ran into him because he was so surprised that he didn't even see the other guy behind you until you went all topsy-turvy and they both crashed into the ring like a couple of blind Rafewringers!' His eyes bulged excitedly at the memory and then he sighed deeply, leaning back again. 'That was beautiful.'

       'Zane sure didn't think it was funny,' Ralph muttered. 'Although he did admit that it was a pretty good move.'

'Yeah,' James agreed, nodding at Wentworth. 'Like that.'

       'But how do we practice stuff like that?' another player, Luca Fiorello, asked from the corner near the window.

       James nodded resolutely. 'Good question,' he admitted. 'And you won't like the answer, but… well… me, Ralph, Zane, and Professor Cloverhoof have set up something in the backyard. It's not anywhere near as good as the one back at Hogwarts and Zane and Professor Cloverhoof only helped us build it because we agreed to let Team Zombie use it as well, but trust us, it's the best way to learn Artis Decerto. Come on over and take a look.'

       James led the team out onto the third-floor landing, where they all crowded around the window that overlooked the mansion's walled back garden. There was a moment of tense, puzzled silence. Finally, Jazmine spoke up.

'What is it?' she asked, frowning.

       James sighed at the irony of it all. In the yard below was a haphazard clockwork monstrosity of wooden cogs, treadmills, pommels, swinging weights, and wand-studded barrels.

      'It's called the Gauntlet,' he admitted. 'And it's about to be your worst enemy.'

       Classes at Alma Aleron, which had at first seemed exotic and strange, had by now grown routine and even boring.

       James' favorite classes were Clockwork Mechanics, Advanced Elemental Transmutation (which was the American equivalent of Transfiguration), Theoretical Gravity (which was still being taught by Oliver Wood), and Magi-American History with Professor Paul Bunyan. Having lived the long and amazing life of a giant in the country's frontier days, the professor taught a lot of his classes by way of firsthand stories. Some of the stories, admittedly, were embroidered with obvious tall tales, such as the details surrounding the origin of the Rocky Mountains (allegedly piles of cast-off rocks cleaned out of the giant's boot treads with a redwood trunk) and the creation of the Great Lakes (claimed to have been dug out by the giant's footprints when he was wrestling Babe, the giant blue ox, for the last pancake of a particularly delicious breakfast). A Vampire boy had once deigned to challenge Professor Bunyan's tall tales, confronting him with the fact that while he was indeed quite large, he was nowhere near big enough to leave footprints the size of Lake Superior.

'Were you bigger back then, maybe?' the boy asked, a smile curling the corner of his mouth.

       Professor Bunyan merely scoffed and waved a hand. 'I was always the same size,' he said, his dark eyes twinkling. 'But the world was a lot smaller back in those days. It's a known fact. Just ask Professor Wimwrinkle.'

       James had a suspicion that Bunyan knew that no one would actually do any such thing, being generally terrified of the Mageography professor, thus his allegations were, nominally, safe.

       Mageography was, in fact, near the top of the list of James' least loved classes. Only marginally worse,