- Good luck with that! - told him to catch up with the Blaze.
- Hopefully, we'll get to the same department," he winked.
Anthony went to the Cogthewranes, and Gregory Goyle, who followed him, heard his verdict ("Slytherin!"But on the girl's head, whose name Blaze didn't remember, because he was distracted by her long and slightly bent hair, the hat sat for a long time, as if she was arguing with her in her mind, but the shaggy girl was extremely determined and seemed to insist on it, having achieved the cry "Gryffindor!" from the hat. After her, Professor McGonagall called Daphne Gringrass; Blaise thought it was a funny name, "Gringrass," and he decided to come up with a joke to kick the girl later, but she jumped off the stool with such a happy squeak and ran to the sluzzerinskoy table so quickly that he was confused.
- I wonder if there was much left. - A boy who stood slightly to the left of Blaise sadly held out. It was Neville Longbottom, whom Blaze had learned of on the way here to Hogwarts Express, or rather not so much about him as about his toad, which was running away from its grief master all the time.
- I think there were fifty people," said Neville, a redheaded boy in the front row, a representative of the Weasley family. When Blaze was buying textbooks and uniforms in Kosomi lane, several times he encountered this big family of wizards in one or the other shop.
Fifty people," he thought. - And by the end of the assignment, I will be standing here with a couple of students at best, if not all alone. That's the happiness of being in the center of attention! Eh, we should have asked Harry Potter to let everybody go, and he should have stayed for dessert, so to speak - most of the people present stare at him anyway, so let him carry the burden of glory to the end.
Looking for the eyes of the back of Potter's head among the other young necks in the slowly reducing crowd, Blaze automatically began to count the remaining freshmen, and then it hit him: because if you watch carefully how many people get into which department, you can easily predict where he will get himself - because the hat probably distributes students among the faculties approximately equally.
- Malfoy, Draco!
The blonde-haired boy with his hair licked back to Slytherin, followed by other junior representatives of the magical society of Theodore Nottte and Pansy Parkinson's families, then two Indian twins of the hat, strange as it may seem, scattered across different faculties, and so...
- Potter, Harry!
This time in the hall there was an extraordinary silence, and Blaze realized that the moment came important, although he did not share this importance with the others. To be honest, he was much more concerned that Potter was sitting on a stool longer than all the guys who had been assigned, even longer than Longbottom, thereby postponing the end of the ceremony, it seems, until the second coming. Waiting for the Hat's decision, Blaise had time to recount all the distributed ones and mentally calculate the likelihood that he would go to Puffendai and upset his home elf, who wanted to go anywhere but the wrong way. But here's the hat, finally, loudly announced:
- Gryffindor!
The silence hanging in the air was replaced by rapturous screams and a rumble of applause; Blaze shaken his head bewildered, wondering at such a violent reaction of the hall. But fortunately, after the Boy Who-Lived the case went faster, as if the hat slept on his scattered hair and felt a surge of strength. Dean Thomas, Lisa Turpin and Ron Weasley took their seats at the tables, and Blaze estimated that he was left with an unenviable set of Slytherin or Puffendooi, all or nothing, as his grandfather would have said, accustomed to solving any task radically.
- Zabini, Blaze!
Needless to say, there was of course no one left in the middle of the room, and now everyone was distracted from Potter and staring at the only undistributed student. Wishing to get it over with and think of ways to change the alphabet so that the letter "Z" wouldn't be the last one, Blaze came up to Professor McGonagall, flopped on the stool and immediately felt the soft tissue sinking into his eyes.
- Patience, I see, isn't enough for you, young man," Blaise said as if he were in Blaise's head, and he realized that it was the Hat he was saying. - Vaughn, I barely waited until it was your turn.
- I'd look at you if you were in my shoes," he answered.
- Ahege! So Puffendoui's off the table, he's for the patient toilers.
- Glory to Merlin!
- Why is that? - Hat was surprised.
- Well... That's not how you explain it," Blaze swung away, and he could barely sit still. - Look, send me to Slytherin, and I won't talk to you here until nightfall.
- If you need to, you will," Hat squeaked. - You'll sit longer than Potter! What makes you think I'm even considering Slytherin for you?
- I figured out that I had to get to Puffenduy, if not there.
- How did you figure that out?
- Based on the number of freshmen and where you sent each of them.
The hat made a sound like a cross between a cough and a skeleton.
- Smart, huh? Then go to Cogtevran.
- Really? - Blaze was happy because he didn't expect to be in the same department as Godstein, but he wasn't:
- But you can't fool me either. Slytherin!