The pace held through the week, limited less by demand than by supply. Word travelled through the Alley the way it always did, by conversation over shop counters and pub tables. Someone had read the article. Someone else had walked past the window. A third person had heard from their neighbour about a boy on Carkitt Market selling something strange.
That evening, after the ledger was closed and Lawrence and Clara had gone upstairs, Rowan sat at the worktable and wrote a letter he'd been putting off.
Dear Nicholas and Perenelle,
The shop is open and the luminaires are selling. I owe you both more than I can express in a letter, but I'll try properly when there's time.
I'm writing because I need your advice on something outside my knowledge. I've placed runic protection arrays on the doors and windows of the building, Thurisaz barriers with Isa regulation and Eihwaz binding, but they're stopgaps. They'll absorb a few hexes and buy time to react, and that's all.
What I need are proper wards. I've searched Flourish and Blotts and found almost nothing on the subject. Everything I've read suggests ward magic is passed down privately within families and never put into print. I know a Fidelius protects your home, but is there anything else you know about wards?
Rowan
The reply came three days later, carried by the Flamels' eagle owl. Nicholas's handwriting, with a postscript in Perenelle's.
Rowan,
Your protections sound sensible for what they are. You're right that they won't hold against anything determined, but having them is better than not, and the fact that you thought to build them tells me Perenelle and I haven't been wasting our time with you.
Yo are also right that the Fidelius is no help here. It is old magic, common among ancient families who have passed it down for generations alongside other protective charms you will not find in any shop. It serves us well because no one needs to find our house. Your problem is the opposite.
Beyond the Fidelius, our knowledge of protective magic is limited to what any competent witch or wizard could manage, and I suspect you've already exceeded that with your runic arrays. The real discipline of ward-crafting belongs to the goblins. The wards around Gringotts are goblin-made, forged into the structure of the building itself rather than cast as spells layered over it. The wards that protect Hogwarts were built the same way, taught to the Founders by goblin craftsmen in an arrangement that the goblins have apparently regretted ever since, as it is one of the very few times in recorded history that they have shared the craft with wizardkind.
I have written to Vorzak, whose crucibles you are currently putting to excellent use, to ask whether it might be possible to commission goblin wards for the Crucible. I should tell you that I am not hopeful. The goblins have always guarded their ward-crafting more zealously than their gold, and I am not aware of any case in which they have agreed to ward a wizard's property since the Founders' time.
Under ordinary circumstances, Vorzak would at least hear me out. He is as reasonable as goblins get, which is to say he will listen before he says no. But circumstances are not ordinary. Perenelle and I have read what the Prophet has reported about Gringotts dismissing its wizard staff, and what we are hearing privately from old contacts is worse. Relations between wizardkind and the goblin nation have not been this strained since the rebellions of the last century. Asking a goblin to share his people's most closely guarded craft with a wizard is a difficult request in the best of times. Asking it now may be impossible.
I will let you know what he says. In the meantime, keep your barriers active and your wand close.
Nicholas
P.S. He has been fretting about this since your letter arrived and refuses to admit he's worried. You should know that the only other time I've seen him this agitated about a student's safety was in 1406, and that situation involved a basilisk. Please do be careful. — P.
Nicholas's letter confirmed what Rowan had already suspected. Proper wards were beyond his reach for now, and might be for a long time. Which brought him back to what he had.
The barriers would fail against a serious attack. He'd known that when he built them. But failure didn't have to mean useless. If someone forced an array past its breaking point, the stored energy in the Thurisaz cores had to go somewhere. Normally it would dissipate, wasted.
Unless he gave it somewhere to go.
He spent an evening reworking the front door array, layering more power into the Thurisaz cores than the barrier strictly needed. The excess sat like a drawn bow, held in check as long as the array held. If someone broke through, all of it would follow the only path the Thurisaz geometry allowed. Outward. Into whoever was standing on the other side.
It was a one-use trap disguised as a defensive measure. Once it fired, the doorway would be completely unprotected. But anyone close enough to break the barrier would be close enough to regret it.
He did the same to every window array on the ground floor. It took three more evenings and left him exhausted, but when he finished, the building's defences had a second purpose that no one looking at the rune work from outside would suspect.
By the end of the first full week, they'd sold all nine of their opening stock plus the first three from the new cycle that came off the press during the week. Twelve luminaires. Thirty-six Galleons in revenue, roughly fourteen in materials, and after Clara's salary and operating costs the ledger showed a clear profit of fifteen Galleons.
More importantly, they had a waiting list. Clara kept it in a separate notebook, names and addresses of customers who'd come in to find the display cases empty and left deposits for the next available unit. There were eight names on it by Saturday, and Rowan calculated that at his current production rate he could fill those orders in about twelve days if nothing went wrong with the transmutation batches.
On the morning of the fifteenth of August, Rowan woke to the smell of bacon and something sugary and warm that had no business being in a workshop kitchen at seven in the morning.
He dressed and came downstairs to find the shop floor rearranged. Clara had pushed the display counter against the wall and laid a cloth over the worktable, set with four places and a small cake with a single candle. Lawrence sat on a stool looking enormously pleased with himself.
And standing by the window, practically vibrating with the effort of staying quiet until Rowan reached the bottom of the stairs, was Iris.