"Happy birthday!" Iris said, and the smile on her face was wide enough that arguing would have been absurd.

  He'd forgotten. Completely, thoroughly forgotten. Production schedules and transmutation cycles and the daily rhythm of keeping the shop alive had buried the date beneath layers of brass filings and alchemical notation, and he genuinely had not remembered until she said it.

  "I wrote to Clara last week," Iris explained, while he was still standing on the staircase trying to reconcile the scene before him with the morning he'd expected. "She said I was welcome any time, so I spent three days wearing my parents down. My father thinks Diagon Alley is no place for a thirteen-year-old girl unsupervised, which is probably fair if you haven't spent a year at Hogwarts dodging hexes in the corridors. My mother talked him around by pointing out that my friend had been written up in the Prophet as a respectable businessman. Apparently that carries weight in the Caldwell household."

  She was taller than he remembered from the end of term. Her auburn hair was longer, pulled back the way she wore it when she was concentrating, and there was a confidence in how she held herself that had been building all through second year and had set firm over the summer. The freckles across her nose had multiplied in the Devon sun.

  "Now feed him that cake before Lawrence eats it all," she said.

  "I've been very restrained," Lawrence said, in the voice of someone who had not been restrained at all and had only been prevented from eating by Clara's physical intervention.

  "Because it's his birthday cake, Lawrence."

  "I know that. I was just saying."

  Clara cut the first slice and handed it to Rowan. Ginger cake, dense and dark with treacle, the kind that stuck to the roof of your mouth in a way that made you immediately want more. He said so and Clara's expression softened into something pleased and private, the look of a woman who had not baked for anyone in a long time and had forgotten how good it felt.

  "It's my mother's recipe. I haven't made one in years. Couldn't find a treacle in Hogsmeade that was worth using, and then once we moved here I kept putting it off. But Iris's letter gave me an excuse."

  "It's brilliant," Lawrence said, already through half his slice. "You never made this at home."

  "You were always out. And your father didn't care for ginger."

  A small silence followed that. The kind that Clara's marriage left behind sometimes, brief and complicated, and then Lawrence took another bite and the moment passed.

  They ate around the makeshift table and the morning had a warmth to it that Rowan kept trying to classify and couldn't. His mind reached for the usual categories, efficiency, strategy, mutual advantage, and none of them fit. It was simply people who were glad to be in the same room, and the gladness required nothing from him except his presence.

  Iris told them about her summer. The cousins in Devon, and the week she'd spent trying to explain to a seven-year-old Muggle boy why she couldn't come to his school in September without mentioning Hogwarts.

  "I told him I was going to a very old boarding school in Scotland, which is technically true, and he asked if they had football. I said no and he lost all interest."

  "What did your parents tell his parents?" Lawrence asked.

  "Oh, the usual. Scholarship to a prestigious academy. My aunt thinks it's somewhere near Edinburgh. She keeps asking my mother for the prospectus and my mother keeps changing the subject." Iris reached for a second slice. "The worst part is, I can't even tell them what I'm actually learning. Can you imagine? 'Yes, Aunt Margaret, this term I'll be studying the properties of bezoars and how to turn a hedgehog into a pincushion.' She'd have us committed."

  Clara was laughing. Rowan realised he was too. The sound surprised him, as it always did, as though his body kept forgetting it knew how to do this and then remembered all at once.

  "What about you?" Iris asked, turning to him with the directness she'd always had, the quality that cut through his defences before he could decide whether to raise them. "I mean, not the shop. I've read the Prophet article and Clara's been writing to me about the sales. What have you actually been doing when you're not working?"

  Rowan opened his mouth and then closed it again, because the honest answer was that he hadn't been doing anything when he wasn't working. He'd been working all the time. Every hour, every evening, the transmutation batches and the rune arrays and the protection wards and the accounts, and in the gaps between those things the low-level strategic planning that never stopped, the calculations running beneath everything else like water under ice.

  "That's what I thought," Iris said, reading his silence as fluently as she read everything else about him. "You're hopeless."

  "He fell asleep in the workshop three times last week," Lawrence offered helpfully. "Once he was still holding his wand. Clara found him at five in the morning."

  "He'd been adjusting the protection runes on the back windows," Clara said. "I came down to start the kettle and there he was, slumped over the workbench with a half-finished Eihwaz rune in front of him."

  "I finished it the next morning."

  "That's not the point, Rowan."

  Iris shook her head and stole another piece of bacon from the plate. "Right. Today you're not working. It's your birthday and I came all the way from Sussex, so you're going to show me this workshop and then we're going to do something that doesn't involve silver or runes. Agreed?"

  Rowan looked at Clara, who raised an eyebrow that clearly said don't look at me, she's right. He looked at Lawrence, who was suddenly very interested in his cake.

  "Agreed," he said.

  Iris held him to it, mostly. She did want to see the workshop, and he couldn't show her the workshop without explaining what everything did, and once Lawrence started demonstrating the press on a copper scrap she got absorbed in watching the diamond tip trace its precise line through the metal. She leaned close with Lawrence's loupe and studied the finished rune, then looked up with genuine surprise on her face.

  "The lines are perfectly even. It's actually beautiful."

  Lawrence went slightly pink. "The Raido runes control the arm's arc. I just set the parameters."

  "Don't do that. Take the compliment."

  But after the workshop she made good on her promise. They walked the length of Diagon Alley together, the four of them, and Rowan realised as they stepped out into the summer street that he hadn't done this since the day they'd moved in. Weeks of living above a shop in the heart of wizarding London and he'd barely seen any of it. The realisation should have been troubling. Instead it felt like waking up.

  Iris wanted to see everything. She pressed her face against the window of Eeylops Owl Emporium and cooed at a tiny Scops owl that was trying to look dignified. She dragged them into a confectioner's near the Leaky Cauldron and bought four iced creams, waving away Rowan's attempt to pay on the grounds that it was his birthday and you didn't pay for your own birthday treat.

  They sat on the bench outside Gringotts eating and watching the Alley go past. It was a warm day and the street was busy, witches and wizards of every description going about their shopping, and for a while nobody said anything because there wasn't anything that needed saying.

  "I missed you lot," Iris said eventually, licking pistachio ice cream off her thumb. "Letters aren't the same."

  "Three more weeks and we'll be back at school," Lawrence said.

  "I know. I just wish the summer had been longer." She looked at Rowan. "Or that you'd taken a single day off before I showed up and forced you."

  "I'll take more days off."

  "No you won't. But it's nice of you to say."

  They drifted back to the shop around three. Clara opened up again and Iris watched her with the first few customers, then asked if she could try. She turned out to have a feel for it, talking to people with an easy warmth that was nothing like Clara's measured professionalism but worked just as well. She asked questions. She listened to the answers. She remembered names and details from five minutes earlier and wove them back into the conversation as though she'd known these people for years. By closing time she'd sold three luminaires to people who'd walked in uncertain and walked out converted.

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  Clara told her she was a natural, and Iris glowed brighter than the luminaires.

  Supper was shepherd's pie, and over it Iris told them about the books she'd been reading. A Muggle novel called Middlemarch that she'd picked up at a second-hand shop in Brighton and a history of werewolves she was reading for Professor Binns's class but had turned out to be genuinely interesting once you got past the first chapter.

  "George Eliot understands something most wizarding authors don't," Iris said, gesturing with her fork. "That the most interesting thing about people is the gap between what they want and what they'll settle for. Dorothea wants to change the world and she marries a man who's already given up on it. That tension drives the whole book."

  "You just described half the pure-blood marriages in the Wizengamot," Clara said, and Iris laughed so hard she nearly choked on her pie.

  The evening settled around them. Lawrence had his journal out on the table and was sketching something, some modification to the press he'd been mulling over. Iris sat cross-legged by the hearth writing a letter to her parents, occasionally chewing the end of her quill while she thought about what to say. Clara washed up slowly, in no rush, humming something Rowan didn't recognise.

  He sat at the worktable and watched them for a moment. These people. This room. The luminaires glowing softly in the display cases and the smell of ginger cake still hanging in the air and the sound of a quill scratching and Clara humming and Lawrence's pencil moving across the page. He didn't know what to call what he was feeling, because the Foundling Hospital hadn't given him a vocabulary for it. The boy who'd written Change requires power on the inside cover of his journal had never imagined that power might look like this. Might feel like a warm room with cake crumbs on the table and someone humming while she dried the dishes.

  But he thought it might be the thing that other people meant when they talked about home.

  Outside, the summer twilight had faded into full dark. The lamplighters were making their rounds somewhere in Muggle London, but in Carkitt Market the only light came from the shop window and the distant glow of Diagon Alley proper.

  Rowan excused himself to check the overnight batch. The transmutation was at the fermentation stage, the most delicate part, and the temperature needed to hold exactly. He was in the workshop adjusting the athanor's rune settings, the hum of it steady under his fingertips, when Athena launched off her perch.

  She hit the window shutter with enough force to rattle the frame, scrabbling at the wood with her talons, and then she screamed. A sustained, high-pitched shriek that was older than language and meant only one thing. Every instinct in her ancient raptor brain was telling her to fly, and she could not understand why she hadn't already.

  The sound raised every hair on the back of Rowan's neck.

  He was through the workshop door before the scream died. Clara had gone rigid at the sink, a dish still in her hand. Lawrence was on his feet with his journal sliding off the table. Iris's quill had fallen from her fingers and ink was spreading across the half-finished letter on the hearth.

  Nobody spoke. The shop was very quiet. Even the luminaires seemed to hold their breath, their steady glow suddenly too bright, too exposed.

  Then the wave hit.

  It came from above, rolling over the building like a change in pressure before a thunderstorm, heavy and suffocating and fundamentally wrong. Something imposed, like a hand pressed flat over a mouth. The protection runes in the doorframe flared white, bright enough to throw sharp-edged shadows across the floor. Every luminaire in the display cases flickered at the same instant, a synchronised pulse that should have been impossible given that each one drew independently from ambient magic.

  Clara set the dish down with exaggerated care. "That was an anti-Apparation ward." Her voice was barely above a whisper and rigidly controlled. "Someone just sealed this block."

  A second wave followed before anyone could respond, stronger than the first. The windows rattled in their frames. The Thurisaz runes in the sills pulsed as they absorbed energy they had never been tested against, and Rowan felt the excess charge building in the cores, the overloaded arrays straining toward the threshold he'd designed into them. Something was probing the building's defences. Feeling for the weakest point. The way a predator tests a fence before committing to the leap.

  He crossed to the front window and looked out. Carkitt Market was dark. The foot traffic that should have been there even at this hour had vanished entirely, the square emptied as though someone had cleared it before the ward went up. The fountain was a shadow. The shopfronts on the far side were shuttered and black. The only light in the whole of the square came from the luminaires in his own window, shining out across the empty cobblestones.

  A beacon. Announcing exactly where they were.

  "Get away from the windows. All of you, back room, now!"

  Lawrence grabbed Iris by the arm and pulled her toward the workshop. She went white but she moved, and Rowan saw her hand close around her wand as she went. Clara didn't move.

  "Clara."

  "I'm not leaving you out here alone."

  "There are two children in that room who need someone with them, and if the anti-Apparation ward drops for even a second, you're the only adult here who can Side-Along them out. That's what matters right now. Not me."

  She stared at him. He could see her fighting every instinct she had, the part of her that needed to stay, to shield, to be the grown-up in the room. She'd read what the Prophet wrote about him after the tournament. She knew, in the abstract, what he was capable of with a wand. But reading about it and standing in a room where the air tasted like burning was a different thing entirely.

  "If the ward drops, I take them and go."

  "Yes."

  "And I come back for you."

  "If there's time."

  She held his eyes for one more moment. Then she turned and walked into the workshop. The door closed. The lock engaged.

  Rowan stood alone in the shop. White light from his own luminaires pooled on the floorboards and spilled through the window into the dark square where nothing moved and nothing made a sound except the low hum of the protection runes in the doorframe, charged and waiting.

  He breathed. Let it out. Let the Occlumency take everything that wasn't useful, the fear and the fury and Iris's white face and Clara's stubborn grip on the dishcloth, and folded it all away until what remained was the cold clear awareness that had carried him through every duel he'd ever won. His weight settled. His wand came level.

  There was movement at the far end of the square. Where the passage opened onto Diagon Alley, a figure stepped into view, robed in dark fabric with its face hidden beneath a hood and its wand held low at its side. A second figure emerged behind it. Then a third.

  They fanned out as they crossed the cobblestones, spacing themselves wide enough that no single spell could catch more than one, moving with the unhurried patience of people who had sealed every exit and had nowhere to be. Two more appeared from the side passage to the south, closing the other approach. Five in total, converging from two directions.

  They moved like people who had done something like this before. Weight centred, wand arms loose, each step placed with the kind of deliberation that you couldn't teach and could only learn from repetition. No rushing. No hesitation. The quiet confidence of a group that expected this to be over quickly.

  Rowan catalogued them the way Hecat had taught him. Five targets. Two approach vectors. The three from the north were slightly ahead of the two from the south, which meant the formation would arrive in staggered waves rather than all at once. The spacing was professional, but it also meant they couldn't shield each other easily. The anti-Apparation ward overhead sealed his exits, but it also sealed theirs.

  And they were walking toward a doorway they didn't know was loaded.

  The two lead figures from the north reached the front of the shop first, wands rising. The first one cast without warning, a bolt of violet light that crossed the square and struck the front door. The Thurisaz runes in the frame blazed white and the barrier absorbed the curse, holding, but Rowan felt the impact shudder through the array like a fist driven into his sternum. Whoever this was could hit hard.

  The second attacker cast a fraction later. A Blasting Hex that struck the stone beside the doorframe and blew chips of masonry across the threshold. The runes held. The barrier shimmered into visibility under the strain, heat-haze ripples across the doorway, and the Isa regulation runes began cycling faster than they'd ever had to cycle before, trying to bleed off energy that was building faster than they could manage.

  The two attackers looked at each other. Rowan could see the hesitation behind the hoods. They'd expected the first volley to break through. The fact that it hadn't made them cautious for exactly one second, and then they raised their wands together.

  Twin curses hit the barrier simultaneously and Rowan felt the array reach its limit. The Eihwaz binding runes screamed against the stonework, hairline cracks racing through the mortar around the inscription points. The barrier flexed inward, bowing like a sail in a gale, and for a frozen instant everything held at the breaking point, the entire array singing with a tension that vibrated in Rowan's teeth.

  Then the Isa regulation runes burned out. The Eihwaz binding lost its anchor, exactly the sequence he'd anticipated those evenings ago when he'd reworked every array in the building. And all the excess energy he'd layered into the Thurisaz cores followed the only path the geometry allowed.

  Outward.

  The blast blew the door off its hinges and turned the doorframe into a cannon mouth. Raw magical force, everything the barrier had absorbed plus everything Rowan had stored in the cores, discharged in a single concussive wave that lit the square white. The closer attacker took the full force three feet from the threshold. It lifted him off the ground and hurled him backward across the cobblestones like a doll thrown by a child, his robes trailing smoke, his wand spinning away into the dark. He hit the base of the fountain with a sound that was too heavy to be anything but bone on stone, and he didn't move. The second caught the edge of the blast and staggered sideways, tried to bring his wand up, and collapsed against the fountain basin. His hood fell back as he went down and Rowan glimpsed an unfamiliar face, middle-aged, eyes wide and shocked, before the man's head struck the rim and he went still.

  Two down. The square smelled like ozone and hot metal and something that might have been burnt hair.

  The remaining three had been far enough back to avoid the worst of it. They stopped. One of them looked at the two unconscious bodies by the fountain, then back at the ruined doorframe where the runes had burned themselves dark and dead, and Rowan could see the recalculation happening in real time. The slight shift of weight. The adjustment of grip on the wand. Whatever they'd expected from a twelve-year-old shopkeeper, it wasn't this.

  The pause lasted two heartbeats. Then they spread wider and came on, wands up, moving faster now. The doorway gaped open and unprotected, the barrier spent, and all three of them knew it.

  "Velocitas." The world slowed. Smoke drifted through the ruined doorway in lazy spirals and the three figures beyond it moved as though wading through deep water. "Mens Acuta." His thoughts sharpened into crystalline focus, the same surgical clarity that had held Hecat at bay for two and a half minutes on the duelling platform.

  Three adult dark wizards who had just watched two of their own go down and kept coming anyway. Behind him, the workshop door where Clara and Iris and Lawrence were depending on him to hold.

  The lead attacker cleared the threshold.

  And Rowan cast first.