You'd think — here it is, the first week of May, tomorrow already Saturday, a match against the Slytherins coming up — other teams usually spend every last minute on the pitch training before a match. What are we doing? Nothing, that's what — drinking tea, reading books, discussing the latest news and suchlike, right there at the house table. During breakfast. Why do my thoughts trace such illogical pirouettes, taking such peculiar shapes in my head? Because there are days in Hogwarts like this — when something's in the air, or the weather's grim, or the cards simply fell that way — when everyone's in a foul mood, and whatever you happen to be doing in the Great Hall, even something as innocent as eating breakfast at the proper time, feels somehow out of place.
And right now, that easy, relaxed atmosphere at our table felt somehow wrong — even though nothing of any particular gravity was happening at the other house tables either. The same light cheerfulness, the same casual conversation, adjusted for the character of each house.
The shift in the morning mood was delivered by owls — right on time, as always, for post. Given the number of them, a new issue of the Prophet must have come out. Or every parent had simultaneously decided to bury their precious children in correspondence. Though, to be fair, the volume of family letters had increased considerably these past months — that was undeniable.
I received a letter too — delivered, naturally, by our little scops owl, Crumple. Having briskly deposited his cargo with me, he ruffled his feathers, squeaked something in the scops owl tongue, and made his way with considerable purposefulness towards the plate of fried bacon. It really was wonderfully convenient that magical owls were completely omnivorous and could be fed absolutely anything. Some of them, if the books and student gossip were to be believed, preferred freshly caught food more suited to their particular species — Crumple, for instance, adored catching insects, though he wouldn't say no to a mouse or a small bird either, while Malfoy's eagle owl preferred to hunt. That said, it would eat whatever it was given without any complaint whatsoever — you could feed it bread and it wouldn't mind. Some owls even preferred owl treats — but those were true victims of domestication.
Unfolding the letter from my parents first, I read through it quickly. They were simply sharing details of everyday life and the fact that everything was fine. They hoped I'd sit my fifth-year exams brilliantly, as in previous years. The usual exchange, in other words — we kept up a correspondence roughly once a month to six weeks. Recalling the details of Crumple's flight, I realised he'd dropped off a letter for Hermione first — that had slipped past my conscious attention, but not past my memory.
While the little scops owl squeaked happily and demolished a rasher of fried bacon shamelessly pilfered from the communal plate — to the adoring looks of a few nearby students — I turned to the second letter, which had arrived with a familiar owl. It was from Delacour. He would be most grateful if I could find out at my earliest convenience whether the Doctor would be able to meet with a "very important" client tomorrow evening — Saturday — to discuss a certain job, the details of which Delacour himself was not privy to. I'd write back at lunch, I decided, to say he could. The proposed meeting time was quite late; by then I'd have finished everything imaginable and unimaginable, and could spare a little time for a conversation with this "very important" client.
"Hector," Susan drew me out of my thoughts, passing a letter across the table.
"Right, thanks," I took it and immediately began reading.
It was from Susan's aunt — Amelia Bones. Written to the Weasley twins, in her capacity as an official of the law to the... official representatives of "Weasleys' Wizarding Wheezes" — that was the name they'd gone with, and they'd even registered it at the Ministry, apparently some time before Christmas, which they'd naturally not mentioned to anyone, as it hadn't seemed relevant. In any case, the Head of the MLE — which was precisely how Madam Bones ought to be read in the context of this letter — was writing to inform them that the artefacts had been received, tests had been conducted, results were highly satisfactory, and they were prepared to purchase stock in whatever volumes "WWW" was able to supply for sale at the price of fifty Galleons per item.
Some might have thought the price too low — but this was something the twins and I had discussed. Given that the purpose of this venture was less about earning enormous sums and more about equipping the MLE and the British Auror Office with genuinely useful tools, we'd extended what amounted to a royal discount. Madam Bones had specified the optimal volume for the first order: three hundred and twenty-four rings and the same number of bracelets — six hundred and forty-eight units at fifty Galleons apiece. A laughably small figure for a government department, let alone its entire budget. Though in the current climate, if the price had been higher or even commensurate with the artefacts' actual capabilities, the Ministry might well have tightened its purse strings. I was fairly sure they'd put a rather different figure through the accounts and skim a little off the budget — but that was none of my concern.
According to Madam Bones, three hundred and twenty-four was the minimum number of sets. Precisely the current count of high-ranking operatives across the MLE and the Auror Office — the ones permanently on the front line, so to speak, always "at the sharp end." The ideal number of sets would be roughly five times that — enough to equip the full staff of both departments.
"Excellent," I said, smiling and nodding my thanks to Susan for such pleasant news.
"Any time."
"So," Hannah grasped the essentials immediately and even lowered her copy of the Prophet, "Madam Bones agreed to the purchase?"
"Looks that way," Susan confirmed.
This news — and the letter along with it — needed to reach the twins promptly, so they could begin sorting out all the relevant procedures with the full measure of responsibility they were actually capable of when the need arose. The first batch, I decided, ought to be started as soon as I had a free moment — tonight, in fact. Worth setting aside a few items from Friday's schedule for it.
After breakfast, I caught the twins and shared the good news. They immediately ran through the total revenue, the profit, their percentage as set out in our agreement — and were, there was no other word for it, gobsmacked.
"Brother Fred..."
"Yes, Brother George?"
"Don't you think we may have stumbled into something a bit outside our usual line?"
"Doubts are arising..."
"Easy, lads," I smiled. "Don't let the glint of gold get to you. Your joke shop is the purpose of your lives, and in some sense a reflection of who you are. All of this—"
I gave Madam Bones' letter a shake.
"—is just a pleasant bonus from a mutually beneficial arrangement. Nothing more. Right now there's income from artefacts; later there won't be. The point is, I'm not making some throwaway trinkets that'll burn out in a couple of years — these are extremely long-lasting artefacts. The buyer won't come back for a new one because the old one died. Maybe for a significantly improved version — but nothing more than that. Once the magical world is saturated with the product, there'll be no one left to sell to. Then what? Whereas your pranks, by all appearances, are an eternal business. Like any consumer-driven enterprise."
"Even so, the profit margin is just... enormous," Fred said, shaking his head. "Tell me, how quickly could you fill the full order?"
"Hm?" I was mildly surprised by the question.
"Judging by how fast we used to get the warming amulets — a week at most, if you focus purely on artefacts."
"Well, faster if I really wanted," I didn't bother denying the obvious.
"So there it is — one week, fifteen thousand Galleons. That's just... wow."
The last word was delivered by both twins in perfect unison.
"All right, I hear you," I smiled. "Wow, and all the rest of it. But you could produce a mountain of your own stock in a week too. And don't forget — this," I shook the letter again, "is an agreed one-time delivery. A government order. That's not the same thing as retail — shifting that volume through a shop could take an indefinite amount of time."
"That's a fair point," Fred said, nodding thoughtfully, glancing at his brother.
"It is," George agreed. "It's just that we never factored in selling our goods wholesale in a single batch. I simply cannot imagine a wizard who'd need anything from our range in those quantities. But then... when you add it all up... like this... and then that..."
George was clearly running calculations in his head.
"Hm, that's actually not bad at all," he brightened. "Right, brother Fred. No point in being jealous — time to work."
"Exactly. So, since we're going to be dealing with the client side of things... Hector, how long do you need to produce the minimum requested volume?"
"Tomorrow morning, before the match, you'll have three hundred and twenty-four of each."
"Oh, brilliant," the twins grinned.
"And we'll sort out the delivery while everyone's at the match. Shame you won't get to see the look on the Slytherins when they crash into you as Keeper, mind."
"Hm — they won't be crashing into me as Keeper," my lips curved into a smirk of their own accord. "I'm playing Beater in this match."
"Oh!" The boys looked as though they'd just been reunited with a much-loved relative they'd long given up for lost — they were Beaters themselves, after all.
"Anyway," Fred said, putting on a conspiratorial smile and leaning in as though about to impart a terrible secret. "They've got those two big lads with the vacant expressions."
"Crabbe and Goyle," I supplied.
"Exactly. Don't let their slowness in daily life fool you. They're sharp and aggressive on the pitch, even if they're completely predictable. They like to hit the Bludgers with everything they've got — wherever they're looking, that's where the Bludger goes. And they play rough, generally."
"Noted," I said. "We'll see what can be done about that."
With that, the conversation concluded and we went our separate ways — a normal school day at Hogwarts began. Lessons, practice, talking with the others between classes, and occasionally during them, though the latter was a liberty you couldn't take in Defence or Transfiguration — neither professor had any patience for it.
And in the evening, right after dinner, I headed to the dormitory, retreated to my corner, drew the curtain, and set to work. The process was straightforward and had long since been refined to something close to automatic. I prepared a large stock of ring and bracelet blanks in advance, checked that nothing had cracked or worn on the heads or the hammer, and settled into the sequential, monotonous work — charging the tool with magic, forging one artefact after another.
On the subject of checking the hammer and heads — yes, they had never broken down or failed me, but there was always a first time for everything, and better to catch that moment in advance than wonder what had gone wrong.
Swing, charge with magic, strike the ring, quick sense-check, set aside. Pick up a new blank, swing, charge, strike, check, set aside. And so on — quickly, without fuss, but without dawdling either — forging ring after ring until the blanks simply ran out. There were slightly more than the order called for. Some of the extras I'd hand out to people I cared about — Daphne, Hermione, my housemates, for instance. The rest could make arrangements with the twins. Though Fred and George had more or less decided not to advertise the existence of this product in their inventory for the time being — at least until the first clash between the Dark Lord's forces and those of the MLE and the Auror Office. After that, items like these would cease to be any kind of secret, and they could start handing them out to reasonably trusted people.
I forged until nearly midnight, and at some point Justin looked in, knocking on the doorframe first.
"You all right in there?" he said, drawing the curtain slightly aside — breaking the soundproofing barrier, but not actually looking in.
"Perfectly fine. Just working on something in private. Why?"
"It's just odd, not having you with us on a Friday when we do homework in the common room. Thought I'd check. Unusual event, as it were."
"That's about the size of it."
"Right, well, if everything's good, I'll leave you to it. And I'll tell the others you're fine, just busy."
"Good. Sorry for not saying something beforehand."
"Don't worry about it."
Justin left, and I went back to work, wanting to get everything finished before turning in.
Before long, with the clock pushing towards midnight, I moved on to the second stage — transfiguring the outer layer onto each of the rings and bracelets. This went even faster, since it required only placing each ring or bracelet on the anvil, casting a single spell, and setting the finished piece into a different pile.
I finished around two in the morning. I made a box for the rings — they fitted vertically, twenty to a row, four rows, three layers. A little space to spare, but that was neither here nor there. The bracelets were trickier — simply because they were larger. Not that the work was harder, just that the number of boxes required was considerably greater than one. Once everything was packed, with a dozen and a half complete sets earmarked as gifts tucked into my bag, I went to sleep with a clear conscience. Tomorrow I'd hand them to the twins, then the match, then another session in the library — the Restricted Section — and in the evening a party regardless of how the match went. I wondered: if the game ended quickly, given that Draco played Seeker almost as well as Potter, would they let us go to Hogsmeade instead of Sunday? Probably better that they didn't, actually — there was still the matter of the "very important" client to see to...
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