Clara came through with her wand up. She had stayed behind because her job was to Apparate the children out if the ward dropped, but the ward hadn't dropped, none of the attackers had reached the workshop, and the sounds from the shop had been getting worse. Her face was white and the hand holding the wand shook, but her casting was clean. Her Stunner caught the Body-Bound wizard as he reached for his fallen wand, breaking through his weakened defences and driving him sideways. Her Impedimenta followed before he could recover, locking his legs beneath him.
Rowan dragged a silent Incarcerous from reserves he didn't think he still had. The spell left his wand thin and barely formed, but the ropes caught the wizard from neck to ankle. He thrashed, snarling, already loosening them.
Behind them, the first attacker had broken free. He was on his feet, wand recovered, face white with fury.
It was two on one now, Clara beside him against a freed dark wizard, with two others bound or unconscious and a third straining against failing ropes.
Clara fired Stunners and Shield-Breakers, textbook duelling sequences delivered with solid technique and nowhere near enough power. The freed wizard batted them aside without looking, his real attention locked on Rowan, reading Clara's casting the way Hecat had once read Rowan's in those first humiliating sessions on the duelling platform.
Rowan hit him with a Legilimency lance. The shields held, but the distraction let Clara's Stunner clip his shoulder. He spun toward her, and the contempt on his face curdled into something deliberate and cruel.
"Crucio!"
Clara's scream tore through the shop. Through the smoke and the broken glass and the bodies on the floor and into a place inside Rowan that the Occlumency, even at maximum, couldn't wall off. Her back arched, her wand fell from spasming fingers, and she went down convulsing among the shattered luminaires. The sound she made was the sound of a person being unmade.
Iris and Lawrence came through the workshop door before Clara's scream had finished echoing. Iris had her wand up and a Stunner already leaving her lips. It was a second-year's Stunner, underpowered and slightly off-centre, and the wizard holding the Cruciatus didn't even glance at it. But Lawrence was already moving. He seized a length of iron pipe from the wrecked display rail and swung it two-handed at the wizard's wand arm. The pipe connected with a crack that carried through the room. The wizard's concentration broke. The Cruciatus dropped. Clara went limp, gasping, alive.
The silence after the screaming was worse than the screaming.
Rowan picked up a shard of broken glass with his dead left hand, fingers that couldn't feel closing around it by sheer force of will, and threw it. The glass caught the wizard across the throat, shallow, and the surprise of the pain staggered him backward. Rowan poured the last dregs of his magic into a silent Confringo aimed at his feet. Barely a spell at all, scraped from somewhere below empty. The detonation threw the man into the wall, and Rowan followed with an Incarcerous that wrapped him before he hit the ground.
The wizard who'd been straining against his ropes was free. He was standing with his wand in hand, and Rowan had nothing left.
"Flipendo!" Iris fired again. The Knockback caught the wizard in the ribs and sent him stumbling, but he recovered in a stride and his counter sent her scrambling behind the overturned counter.
The freed wizard from the wall pulled himself upright. Blood ran from the shallow cut across his throat. He looked at the devastation. His companions across the floor, bound or blinded or unconscious. The two in the square where the runic trap had thrown them. Two children with their wands up, a woman on the floor, and a boy on his knees with no magic left and blood soaking his sleeve. Five sent for this, and still they hadn't finished it.
He spoke a single word. Low, guttural, something older and harsher than any incantation Rowan had heard. The anti-Apparation ward shuddered overhead, the suffocating weight of it peeling away.
The ward dropped.
Every body in the room moved at once. The bound wizard, the blinded one, the unconscious man by the doorframe, the two in the square. All lurched and vanished in the same instant. No crack of Apparation. No flash of Portkey. The standing wizard held Rowan's gaze for one long second, his eyes visible beneath the hood for the first time, pale and memorising, and then he vanished too. All five pulled away by whatever old magic the word had invoked, leaving nothing behind but the ruin they'd made.
The silence that followed was absolute.
Broken glass and splintered wood and blood covered the floor. The luminaires that hadn't shattered still glowed where they'd fallen, steady white points scattered through the wreckage. Athena lay at the base of the counter with her wings folded wrong and her eyes open and empty.
Rowan's knees gave out. He caught the worktable edge and slid to the floor beside her and his hand found her feathers, still warm, still soft.
The Occlumency held. It held because he was making it hold, because the alternative was falling apart while his friends bled, and the cold machine he'd made of himself didn't fall apart. It catalogued warm feathers, open eyes, the absence of breath. It filed these observations the way it filed everything, neatly and without feeling, and the boy underneath the machine screamed against the glass and couldn't be heard.
His vision was going dark. The cold from the curse in his shoulder had spread across his chest and his sleeve was soaked to the elbow and he knew he was losing too much blood, could feel his own pulse growing thready and distant like a drumbeat heard through water.
Iris was beside him. He didn't know when she'd crossed the room. Her hands pressed against the wound on his forearm with a pressure that was hard and deliberate, and the pain of it reached him as though from a great distance.
"Lawrence, help me with your mother. She's the only one who can Apparate us out."
Lawrence was already kneeling beside Clara. He lifted her by the shoulders, and her head lolled and her hands wouldn't stop trembling, the Cruciatus still firing through her nervous system in random spasms. But her eyes found her son's face and something behind them sharpened.
"Ward's down," Clara managed. Her voice was barely a whisper, cracked and wet. "I can get us out. All of us."
Iris pulled Rowan upright. He couldn't stand on his own, and she braced his weight against her shoulder and locked her arm around his waist and bore him toward Clara with a strength that shouldn't have been possible but was, because it had to be.
Lawrence had Clara on her feet. She was leaning into him, her legs trembling, but her right hand found her wand on the floor and closed around it. The fingers shook against the wood.
"Together," Clara said. "Don't let go."
Lawrence gripped her arm. Iris held Rowan and reached for Clara's shoulder with her free hand. Four people standing in the wreckage, connected by nothing but the points where their bodies met.
Rowan tried to speak. His vision had narrowed to a single bright point that held their faces, and at the very bottom of his sight a small still shape of brown-and-white feathers that he would never stop seeing.
Then the compression of Apparation crushed the air from his lungs and the world went away.