Dear Rowan,
Matilda tells me you've found your place. I can't say I'm not a little sorry to see the lot of you go. The Broomsticks is quieter without someone commandeering my back room for business meetings, and I'll miss having your common sense around to keep the regulars honest.
I expect great things from you, though I suspect you'd manage them whether I expected them or not. You've a good head and a good heart, and those are rarer together than most people think.
Now that Athena's recovered and can find you herself, I'll ask for my owl back when you get a chance. She's been well-behaved but she's eating me out of house and home.
Come visit when the shop's open. I'll be your first customer.
All my best,
Sirona
Rowan stroked Athena's head. She leaned into his hand, then spotted the workbench full of unfamiliar equipment and began investigating the crucibles with the cautious curiosity of an owl who had learned from experience that not everything in Rowan's workspace was safe to stand on.
"Don't touch the athanor," he told her. She ignored him, as was her custom.
Lawrence appeared in the workshop doorway and leaned against the frame, watching Rowan arrange the last of the reagent bottles on their shelf. He'd been lingering for a while now, restless.
"So are you going to let me see it, or do I have to stand here and guess what everything does?"
Rowan stepped back and let him in. Lawrence circled the athanor the way he'd circled the luminaire schematics back at Hogwarts. He ran his fingers along the etched runes on the brass casing and Rowan could see him reading the geometry, working out what the feedback loops did before being told.
The self-regulating temperature sequences were elegant work, Flamel's personal design, capable of holding within a degree for days. At Hogwarts the Room of Requirement had given them an iron box that drifted three degrees in an hour. This was a different class of equipment entirely.
Lawrence moved to the transmutation station next and picked up one of the goblin crucibles, turning it to catch the light on the polished interior. He held it for a long moment, feeling the enchantment humming in the alloy. "Where did the Flamels even get goblin-forged equipment?"
"Well, apparently Nicholas was owed a favour by a goblin named Vorzak. Perenelle's letter says the crucibles are on indefinite loan."
Lawrence considered this. "I suppose when you've been alive for five centuries, you accumulate some useful contacts."
He spotted the leather-bound notebook and opened it without asking, which Rowan let him do because Lawrence reading was Lawrence learning, and Lawrence learning was the whole point. He stood at the workbench and read in silence for a long time, turning pages with slow deliberation. When he looked up, his expression had changed. The restlessness was gone.
"This is everything. Every stage of the Saturn-to-Moon process, exact temperatures, timing for the planetary transitions, what the solution is supposed to look like at every step so you know whether you've gone wrong." He shook his head slowly. "Mr. Flamel doesn't teach alchemy the way textbooks teach it, does he? This reads like someone standing right next to you at the furnace, telling you what to watch for and what it should look like when you've done it right. I've never seen anything like it."
"That's how he taught me too. It took only one summer to understand what I was doing."
"The luminaire refinements are in here too, with the filament diameters for different housing sizes, and the optimal inscription depths on silver," Lawrence tapped the page. "This alone would save us weeks of trial and error."
"Which is time we don't have. The press is still the bottleneck. I can transmute the silver. You can inscribe the runes. What neither of us can do yet is inscribe them fast enough to build an inventory before opening day."
Lawrence closed the notebook and pulled his own journal from the shelf where he'd stacked his things the night before. The pages they'd filled together in the Room of Requirement, covered in overlapping sketches and annotations in both their handwriting. He spread them on the workbench beside the Flamels' notebook, and the two documents sat there like a conversation between past and present, the designs they'd imagined at school laid out beside the professional equipment that could make them real.
"We built the design around a stone base with Isa dampening, a Raido-governed arm, Sowilo at the carving tip, Jera-Ingwaz stored charge for power, and a goblin-steel pivot for the angular adjustment." He traced the pivot mechanism on the page. "The pivot is the only part I'm worried about. Goblin steel has the tensile strength to handle the continuous magical load without developing micro-fractures. Regular tempered steel will work for a while, but it'll fatigue."
"Gringotts sacked their entire wizard staff months ago. They're not selling goblin-forged anything to wizards right now, and I don't see that changing soon. We'll use tempered steel, accept that it'll drift after two hundred cycles or so, and find a better solution before it fails."
"Two hundred cycles is enough for the first production run. I can recalibrate the arm occasionally to compensate for early drift." Lawrence cracked his knuckles, the unconscious gesture that meant his mind had engaged with a problem and wouldn't be letting go any time soon. "What else do we need that we don't have?"
"Materials. Moonstone powder for the catalyst, lead sheeting for the batches, replenishment acids, inscription needles, and glass housings for every finished luminaire."
"Where are we sourcing all of that?"
Clara had the answer to that. She'd spent two years working in Diagon Alley, and she knew which shops would serve them and which ones would rather watch them fail.
"Mulpepper's Apothecary carries moonstone," she said the next morning, as they gathered in the shop to plan the supply run. "He's further up the Alley near the Owl Emporium. His prices run about fifteen per cent above what Slug & Jiggers charges, but he's fair and he doesn't ask questions about who you are or who you work for. The Diagon Dispensary has acids and reagents. Potage's Cauldron Shop carries metals and inscription tools. And for the glass housings And for the glass housings, I'd write to Dervish and Banges in Hogsmeade. They do custom glasswork for magical instruments."
"What happened to Slug & Jiggers?" Lawrence asked. "They'd have everything in one place."
The silence that followed had an edge to it. Clara looked at Rowan. Rowan looked at the floor.
"Borley happened," Clara said. "I walked in to buy the powder, same as any customer. He recognised me, and the first thing out of his mouth was that he didn't serve traitors. His assistant was worse. She asked me if I was proud of myself, going to work for another Mudblood."
The word sat in the air between them. Lawrence's jaw tightened.
"Clara told them both where they could put their opinions," Rowan said. "And then we left. There's no point spending gold where it's not wanted when there are other options."
Lawrence didn't ask again.
They split the list. Clara to Mulpepper's for the moonstone, Rowan and Lawrence to the Dispensary and Potage's for everything else. They'd meet back at the shop by noon.
The Dispensary occupied a narrow frontage between a tea room and a stationer's. The air smelled of eucalyptus and something antiseptic. Lawrence hung back near the door while Rowan approached the counter. The witch behind it was perhaps fifty, with steel-grey hair and spectacles on a chain.
"I need vitriolic acid, dilute concentration, about eight ounces. Same amount of aqua fortis, and four ounces of spirit of salt."
She studied him over her spectacles. "That's not a potions list, is it?"
"No, it's alchemy. I'll be placing regular orders once we're up and running, if you can keep the quality consistent."
Something about the confidence of that, or perhaps the fact that a boy his age could rattle off the names and concentrations without consulting a list, seemed to satisfy her. She measured the acids into thick glass bottles sealed with wax stoppers.
"That'll be two Galleons and four Sickles for the lot. I'm Edith Hartwell, by the way. If your alchemical work ever runs to anything unusual, come back and ask. I keep a specialist catalogue that isn't on the shelves."
"I appreciate that, Miss Hartwell. I expect I'll be making use of it before long."
"You've got that look about you. My late husband had the same one. Usually meant he was about to spend more money than we had on something everyone told him was impractical." She wrapped the bottles in paper and slid them across the counter. "He was usually right, mind you."
Potage's smelled of hot metal and solder. The wizard behind the counter had scarred forearms and the patience of someone accustomed to explaining the difference between pewter and iron to people who didn't care.
"I'm looking for lead sheeting, about three millimetres thick. Enough for twenty palm-sized disks. And four bars of tempered steel if you've got them, half-inch diameter."
He disappeared into the back room and returned with the materials. "Steel's cauldron-grade tempered. Not rated for sustained magical load. For that you'd want goblin-forged, and I haven't been able to source any in months."
"Tempered will do for now."
"Three Galleons, one Sickle."
Lawrence, meanwhile, had found the inscription tools without help and was examining a set of fine steel needles under his loupe, testing the point of each one against his thumbnail before selecting the set he wanted.
Back at the shop, they laid out the day's purchases on the workbench and took stock. Clara's trip to Mulpepper's had produced four ounces of powdered moonstone for two galleons.
The moonstone was commercial grade, the kind sold in any apothecary for standard potions and crafting work. Adequate for alchemy but nothing close to the ritual-grade specimens Rowan had read about in the Room of Requirement, which were vanishingly rare, carried years-long waiting lists, and cost as much as basilisk venom. This would serve perfectly well for what they needed.
Rowan tallied everything in his ledger. Just under nine Galleons for the day, plus whatever the glass housings would cost. He wrote to Dervish and Banges that evening requesting six sample pieces, and enclosed two Galleons as a deposit. That left roughly a hundred Galleons in operating funds before Clara's first month's salary came due.
Tight. But enough, if the product was right.