Lawrence threw himself into the interior. He stripped the ruined display cases down to their frames, rebuilt them with wood from a timber merchant on Horizont Alley who owed the Flamels a favour, and designed the new ones wider and deeper than the originals, with integrated lighting slots that would hold luminaires at angles calculated to show the products at their best. He worked with a focus that Rowan recognised from the weeks before the shop first opened, except now there was something harder underneath it. The cheerful ingenuity that had characterised their partnership at Hogwarts had acquired an edge.
Within three days, the shop was transformed. The front room was larger now, Perenelle's Expansion Charm applied with a sophistication that Rowan's earlier attempt couldn't match. The display area flowed naturally into a demonstration space where customers could see the luminaires working. The counter was new oak, heavier than the original, and Lawrence had built concealed compartments into it for wands, coin pouches, and anything else that might need reaching in a hurry. He'd reinforced the window frames too, and added iron brackets to the display cases that doubled as anchor points for defensive arrays. He hadn't said why. He didn't need to.
The upper floor was transformed entirely. Where there had been a cramped flat with two small rooms, there were now three proper bedrooms, a sitting room, and a kitchen that Perenelle had equipped with self-stirring pots and a cold-storage pantry enchanted to keep food fresh indefinitely. Nicholas had added warming charms to the floors and weatherproofing to the windows. The whole building felt different. Solid in a way the original hadn't been.
"This is too much," Clara said when they brought her from St Mungo's to see it. She was in a wheelchair, her hands steadier than they'd been but not steady. Lawrence pushed her through the rooms in silence, letting her take it in. "Rowan, this must have cost a fortune."
"The Flamels covered the materials. Lawrence did most of the work."
Clara looked at her son. Lawrence looked at the floor.
"We want you to stay," Rowan said. "The upstairs isn't two cramped rooms anymore. You and Lawrence have proper bedrooms now, and there's a third for staff. This is your home as much as it is mine."
Clara's hands, resting in her lap, went still for the first time since the attack.
"You're serious," she said. Her voice was careful.
"The arrangement stays as long as you want it to."
Clara looked at Lawrence again. Something passed between them that didn't require words. The two rooms they'd been sharing above the old shop had been adequate, barely. This was different.
"All right," Clara said. "We'll stay."
Lawrence exhaled.
The next morning, Rowan came downstairs early and found Clara in the kitchen. She was sitting at the table with her wand in both hands, trying to cast a Lumos. The tip flickered once and went dark. She tried again. Nothing. Her grip wasn't steady enough for the wand movement, and even when she braced it against her knee, the spell wouldn't hold.
She set the wand down when she saw him in the doorway. Neither of them said anything about it.
The goblin response arrived on the fifth day after the letter was sent. The owl was not a hired post bird. It was a Gringotts courier owl, larger and blacker than any Rowan had seen, with a sealed scroll case chained to its leg and an expression that suggested it had been bred specifically to intimidate the recipient.
The scroll was written in English, which surprised him. He'd expected Gobbledegook, or at least the formal hybrid script goblins used for inter-species correspondence.
To the Wizard Ashcroft,
Your proposal has been received by the Goblin Forging Guild and relayed to the Clan Council for consideration. The quantity and purity of gold described in your letter, if verified, would represent the largest single payment offered for goblin services by a wizard in living memory.
The Council has agreed to hear your case in person. You are invited to present yourself at the Council Chamber beneath Gringotts Bank at the tenth hour on the twentieth of August. You may bring no more than two companions. You will carry no wands in the Council Chamber. This is not negotiable.
Vorzak, Master Craftsman
Rowan could smell the greed through the parchment. One hundred pounds of Stone-forged gold was obscene by any standard. The goblins knew it. He knew it. The invitation to appear in person wasn't courtesy. It was the Clan Council wanting to see the gold verified before they committed to anything.
"They want the gold verified in four days," he told Nicholas. "Will it be ready?"
Nicholas's expression shifted into the particular intensity he reserved for alchemical challenges. "It will take two days of continuous work with the Stone. Perenelle and I will manage it."
"I need you there. Both of you. The letter says I can bring two companions."
"We'll be there." Perenelle's voice carried the calm of someone who had dealt with goblin politics for centuries and found it only moderately more irritating than human politics. "Nicholas speaks Gobbledegook. It tends to make an impression."
"We were mediators during the Hogsmeade uprising," Nicholas said, answering the question before Rowan could ask it. "The Ministry needed translators for the negotiations in 1612. We kept the skill current afterward. It seemed prudent, given how often goblin-wizard relations deteriorate."
On the morning of the twentieth, Rowan dressed in his best robes, put the letters of offer in his pocket, and met the Flamels at the Leaky Cauldron. Nicholas carried a leather satchel that clinked faintly when he moved. The gold.
The atmosphere inside Gringotts was different from Rowan's previous visits. More sentries at the inner doors. Tellers who watched the human customers with expressions that sat somewhere between professional courtesy and open suspicion.
Nicholas approached the head teller and spoke in Gobbledegook. The effect was immediate. Every goblin within earshot turned to look. The head teller's eyes widened before professional control reasserted itself. He responded in the same language, and a rapid exchange followed that Rowan couldn't follow.
"We have an appointment with the Clan Council," Nicholas said, switching back to English. "Rowan Ashcroft, Nicholas Flamel, Perenelle Flamel."
The teller studied the three of them. His gaze lingered on Nicholas, weighing him the way goblins weighed gold.
"You will surrender your wands at the door to the Council Chamber. They will be returned when you leave. This way."
They were led through doors Rowan had never seen, behind the teller desks and past the vault carts, into a part of Gringotts that no customer was meant to enter. The main banking hall fell away behind them. The corridors here were narrower, the ceilings lower, scaled for goblins rather than wizards. Nicholas had to duck at one point. The stone underfoot was older than anything in the hall above, rough-cut and dark, and the slope was steep enough that Rowan felt the pressure change in his ears. They were going deep beneath London.
The torches on the walls burned with a blue-white flame that cast no shadows. Rowan passed doorways that opened onto rooms he could only glimpse: a forge, dark and cold, with an anvil the size of a dining table; a long chamber lined with what looked like weapons behind glass; a corridor that branched and branched again into darkness. The whole place had been carved from the living rock over centuries, each generation adding depth.
A goblin sentry at a stone archway held out a brass bowl without a word. Rowan surrendered his wand. Nicholas and Perenelle did the same. The sentry examined all three with instruments Rowan didn't recognise, then stepped aside.
The Council Chamber was carved from the bedrock itself, a circular room with a domed ceiling and seven stone seats arranged in an arc at the far end. Six of the seats were occupied. The seventh, at the centre and slightly elevated, held a goblin Rowan recognised immediately. Brakthir. The account manager who had processed his vault, run his ancestry search, and said May your gold multiply and your enemies fall before you on the day they met. He looked different here. The teller's desk had made him seem like a functionary. The stone seat made him look like what he apparently was: Gringotts' representative on the Clan Council. His expression made clear that he found this entire proceeding distasteful.
Vorzak sat at the left end of the arc. He was smaller than Rowan had expected, given Nicholas's descriptions. Sharp-featured even by goblin standards, with hands that bore the calluses and burn scars of someone who had spent decades working metal at a forge. His eyes found Rowan immediately and stayed there.
A goblin Rowan didn't know stood at a podium to the side. A clerk, or secretary. He read from a scroll in Gobbledegook, and Nicholas translated quietly.
"He's stating the terms of the hearing. Your offer has been formally registered. The Council will vote after hearing from you and examining the gold. It takes a simple majority to approve or reject."
"Can I speak English?"
"They'll understand you."
Rowan stepped forward when the clerk finished. He'd prepared remarks, but looking at the six pairs of dark goblin eyes watching him, most hostile, a few hungry, he abandoned them.
"My name is Rowan Ashcroft. Five days ago, dark wizards attacked my shop and tortured my employee with an Unforgivable Curse. The British Ministry of Magic has declined to investigate. I am here because goblin wards are the strongest protections that exist, and because I am willing to pay what they're worth."
He paused. The Council members' expressions hadn't changed. Nicholas stepped forward and opened the satchel.
The gold caught the blue-white torchlight and threw it back. One hundred pounds of it, flawless, every ingot identical to the ones Nargok had tested at the teller desk months ago.
Two of the Council members leaned forward involuntarily. A third's hand twitched toward the podium as though wanting to touch it. Vorzak's expression didn't change, but his eyes acquired a shine that had nothing to do with the torchlight.
Brakthir looked at Vorzak. "Verify the purity."
Vorzak descended from his seat and approached the satchel. He produced a set of instruments Rowan had never seen, thin glass rods and a stone tablet etched with symbols, and tested three ingots in rapid succession. The process took less than a minute.
When he spoke, it was in English, directed at Rowan.
"This is Stone-forged gold. The highest purity I have ever tested." He looked at the Council. What followed was in Gobbledegook, but the tone was unmistakable. He was telling them that the gold was real.
The debate lasted nearly an hour. Rowan stood in silence while the Council members argued. Nicholas translated fragments: objections about setting precedent, concerns about Ranrok's faction viewing the arrangement as collaboration with wizardkind, counterarguments about the gold's value and the guild's right to accept commissions as it saw fit.
The vote came without warning. The clerk called for it, and seven hands rose or stayed down in quick succession.
Four against. Three in favour. Rejected.
Brakthir sat back. Rowan knew that expression from the teller desk — the same controlled displeasure he'd shown when explaining that Gringotts didn't invest in Muggle enterprises. A pragmatist watching his colleagues make a decision he considered foolish. Vorzak's face was carefully blank, but his hands, folded in his lap, were white-knuckled.
"The same faction that voted to dismiss the wizard staff," Nicholas murmured.
Rowan's mind raced. He'd prepared for this possibility, spent hours in the hospital bed thinking about what the goblins might actually want more than gold. Gold could be earned and spent. What the goblins wanted, what they'd wanted for centuries, was what had been taken from them.
"May I address the Council again?"