The lunch crowd had thickened the street considerably. Rowan let himself drift with it, studying the flow of foot traffic. Every commercial district had a pulse if you knew how to read it. The busiest stretch ran from Gringotts to just past Flourish and Blotts, thinning as the Alley curved toward the quieter shops at the far end. The side streets drew steadier traffic, repeat customers who knew what they wanted.
He made his way to Gringotts. The queue was short. Rowan approached a teller and placed a small ingot from the Flamels' pouch on the counter.
"I'd like to exchange this for Galleons, please."
The goblin picked it up. His fingers slowed. He turned the ingot over with a care that hadn't been present a moment earlier, then produced a small glass instrument from a drawer and examined the surface through it.
"Where did you acquire this?" the goblin asked. His voice was neutral, but his eyes had sharpened.
"It was a gift."
"From whom?"
"That's my business."
The goblin looked at him for a long moment. Alchemical gold carried none of the trace impurities found in mined gold, no flecks of silver or copper, no crystalline irregularities. A goblin who worked with precious metals daily would recognise the difference immediately.
"This ingot converts to thirty-one Galleons at standard rates. However, given the exceptional purity, Gringotts would be prepared to offer a ten per cent premium. Thirty-four Galleons." He paused. "We would also be interested in acquiring additional quantities, should they become available."
"Thirty-four at the standard rate is fine. And I'd like to exchange three more ingots at the same terms."
The goblin's eyes widened fractionally before the professional mask reasserted itself. He weighed each ingot with deliberate care. Four ingots, a hundred and thirty-six Galleons total. Enough to cover the gap in the shop purchase and leave working capital for materials, wages, and the initial supply run.
The goblin counted out the Galleons in neat stacks. "Should you wish to conduct further exchanges, ask for me by name. Nargok."
"I'll keep that in mind."
The Flamels' warning echoed as he left. Do not flood the market. Do not convert large sums at once. Four ingots in a single visit was already more than he'd have liked, but the purchase demanded it. He would space future exchanges carefully.
He had an hour before meeting Clara. Rather than walk back to Carkitt Market, he turned toward Flourish and Blotts.
The shop was cool and quiet in the midday lull. Rowan found an assistant, a young witch with ink-stained fingers who looked like she'd been sorting stock all morning.
"I'm looking for books on protective enchantments. Wards, specifically. Anything on how to construct and maintain them."
She led him to a section labelled HOUSEHOLD CHARMS AND DOMESTIC MAGIC, which occupied half a shelf between GARDEN ENCHANTMENTS and PEST REMOVAL. Four books. Two were introductory guides to locking charms and burglar alarms, the kind of thing you'd buy after your first break-in. A third covered anti-Muggle repelling wards in such basic terms that Rowan already knew everything in the first chapter. The fourth was a treatise on Ministry-grade protective enchantments, priced at fifteen Galleons, and based on the chapter headings it assumed access to trained Aurors and months of preparation time.
Rowan opened the Ministry treatise to the index and scanned for anything on principles of ward construction. The closest entry was a chapter on "Established Ward Systems of Magical Britain," which turned out to be a historical survey rather than a practical guide. It mentioned Hogwarts in passing without describing anything useful, glossed over family estate protections as "proprietary knowledge beyond the scope of this text," and devoted a brief section to the goblin-made wards around Gringotts, noting only that the goblins' approach differed fundamentally from wizard magic and that the techniques remained exclusively in goblin hands.
Rowan filed it away and put the book back on the shelf.
"Is there anything else? Anything more practical?"
The assistant shook her head. "Ward magic isn't really a publishing category, I'm afraid. Most families who use serious protections learn it at home. It's passed down privately. We get asked now and again, but there's just not much in print."
Closely held knowledge. The kind that pure-blood families kept within their walls precisely because it was valuable and precisely because sharing it would reduce their advantage over people like Rowan.
He thanked her, bought nothing from that section, and found himself drifting toward the back of the shop with nothing better to do until half one.
Fiction.
The section was small, tucked between Divination and Muggle Studies as though the shop were slightly embarrassed by it. Two shelves of novels, a rack of serialised story pamphlets, and a rotating display of what appeared to be the wizarding world's bestsellers.
Rowan picked up the nearest novel. The Warlock's Heart by Gertrude Grimmshaw. The cover showed a muscular wizard clutching a fainting witch against a backdrop of exploding cauldrons.
"Drusilla," Vargus whispered, his wand trembling with the force of his passion. "I have fought Dark wizards, slain basilisks, and dueled the Minister himself. But nothing has prepared me for the devastating spell of your beauty."
He closed it and picked up another. Twelve Enchanted Evenings. A collection of short stories.
The moonlight caught Celestina's tears as they fell upon the enchanted rose, each drop turning to silver as it struck the petals. "He will never know," she murmured to the empty garden. "He will never know the depths of my magical heart."
He put it down. The third book, Night of the Living Inferi by Dorian Dashwood, at least had a promising title.
The Inferi lunged. Stubbleworth raised his wand and shouted the incantation his grandmother had taught him as a boy, back when the world was simpler and dark magic was just something other people worried about. The spell struck the creature in the chest and it exploded in a shower of sparks and bone fragments. "That's for Uncle Barnaby," he said grimly, already turning toward the next one.
Rowan replaced it on the shelf and stood there for a moment.
The writing was terrible. All of it. Melodramatic prose, flat characters, plots that relied on coincidence and spectacle rather than logic. The adventure stories were worse. Cardboard heroes defeating cardboard villains with spells the authors had clearly invented on the spot.
And people bought them. The bestseller display had price tags, and the numbers suggested healthy sales. The reading public was hungry for stories and had almost nothing worth reading to choose from.
Rowan had two lifetimes of literary knowledge in his head. He'd read Tolkien, Le Guin, Pratchett, Austen, Dostoevsky, and hundreds of others whose craft made anything on this shelf look like a student's first essay. More than that, he'd been a working writer. The Times had published his political commentary for years without knowing that their anonymous contributor was a child. He understood structure, voice, and the discipline of making words do actual work on a page.
The gap between what he could produce and what this market was offering was enormous.
He could write something better. He was certain of it. A published book would generate attention, build the kind of recognition that translated into customers walking through his shop door. His name on a cover would reach people who'd never heard of the duelling tournament or the Prophet profile.
But he filed it away. One venture at a time. The shop came first.
He bought a wizard detective novel that someone had enchanted with moving illustrations, three Sickles, and left.