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.