The lead attacker cleared the threshold and Rowan's silent Stunner hit him before his forward foot touched the floor.

  The man's shield materialised without an incantation, scattering red sparks across the doorway, and his counter came in the same breath. It was something dark and wordless that split the air with a sound like cracking bone. Velocitas stretched the half-second between cast and impact just far enough for Rowan to sidestep. The curse passed close enough that the displaced air stung his cheek, and he fired back before the afterimage faded with two silent spells overlapping: a Disarmer aimed centre mass and a curved Knockback sweeping low. The attacker caught the first on a shield and jumped the second, landing in a crouch with the easy balance of someone who had been dodging spellfire since before Rowan was born.

  The second figure came through the window.

  Glass erupted inward and Rowan threw his spherical shield up. Two curses struck it from opposite angles simultaneously and the drain hit his reserves like a blow to the stomach. He held the shield for two seconds, felt it hollowing him out, and dropped it. He sent a silent Confringo at the floor between the two attackers, and the floorboards detonated upward in a spray of timber and nails. A six-inch iron nail spun past the first attacker's face and opened a line across his hood. The blast threw both men back a step. Rowan vaulted the overturned display counter, jabbed his wand down, hardened the wood to stone with a silent Duro, and crouched behind it as return fire turned the air above his head into a lattice of coloured light. Red and violet and something black that ate the plaster wherever it touched, dissolving the wall behind him in smoking circles the size of his fist.

  The third came through the doorway.

  They spread across the shop without speaking, one taking the centre, one the right flank, and one circling left toward the workshop door. The one circling left was heading for Iris, for Lawrence, for Clara.

  Rowan sent a Legilimency lance at him. The man's Occlumency shields were dense and layered, and the mental strike couldn't break through, but the impact made him flinch and his stride broke for half a step. Rowan followed with a silent chain, three spells in under a second, Velocitas pushing his casting arm until the tendons burned. The first two hit shields. The curved Knockback caught the wizard in the hip and spun him into the far wall, away from the workshop door. He hit hard enough to crack plaster and slid down it, already casting from the floor.

  The lead attacker made him pay for the distraction. A curse warped the air as it flew, twisting like a corkscrew, and it shattered Rowan's hastily raised shield. The follow-through grazed his left shoulder. Cold erupted through the muscle and locked the joint. His left arm went dead from shoulder to fingertips. The nerves simply stopped, as though the limb had been severed from the map of his body entirely.

  It was dark magic, the kind designed to kill.

  He rolled behind the stone counter as the second attacker fired through the space he'd occupied. The curse struck the wall and the plaster dissolved. A hole the size of a cauldron appeared, edges smoking, the brick corroding as though doused in acid.

  He came up casting, sending a silent Confringo at the ceiling above the lead attacker. Plaster and timber crashed down. The wizard shielded overhead, arms raised, front exposed, and Rowan's Stunner connected with his chest a fraction of a second later. The man staggered. Rowan followed with a Legilimency strike, throwing everything he had at the wavering Occlumency shields. They cracked. The wizard's eyes went wide, the involuntary flood of his own thoughts turning against him. His silent Incarcerous caught the wizard from shoulder to knee, and he hit the floor with his mouth still open on a curse that would never leave his lips.

  One of them was down inside the shop, but the shop was wrecked around him. The display cases had shattered and glass covered the floor. Luminaires rolled in the debris, still glowing, steady white points scattered among the wreckage, and the two remaining figures were closing from opposite sides.

  A line of green light crossed the shop.

  "Avada Kedavra!"

  The green bolt moved faster than anything else they'd thrown. Rowan threw himself flat. It passed over him close enough that he felt it in his teeth, a buzzing wrongness that swam through the bones of his skull. It struck the stone counter behind him. Where the curse touched, a perfect circular void appeared, as though that section of reality had simply been subtracted.

  Raw terror tore through the Occlumency walls that had held steady through every duel and crisis of both his lives. The green light had come close enough to disturb his hair. The stone it had touched had ceased to exist.

  For one crystallised instant he was a twelve-year-old child on the floor of a broken room with his arm dead and his blood on the floorboards.

  Then Mens Acuta caught the terror before it could spread, filed it into a compartment, and sealed the door. What remained was geometry: angles and distances and every piece of debris that could serve as cover or weapon.

  He rolled sideways as a second green bolt hit the floor where he'd been lying. The wood blackened and cracked apart. He came up behind a fallen display case and cast a silent Glacius Maximus. Ice spread in a sheet across the broken floorboards, slick and treacherous, four inches thick. The flanking wizard melted a circle at his feet with a wordless Incendio. The other kept firing, dark curses interspersed with flashes of green that Rowan tracked with Mens Acuta's fading clarity. He threw himself right, dropped behind the frozen display case, and felt a slashing hex open a gash across his left forearm. Blood ran hot and fast down to his wrist. His vision sharpened at the centre and darkened at the edges.

  He sent a Legilimency lance at both simultaneously. Neither shield broke, but both flinched, their casting rhythm stuttering for the span of a breath. He fired a silent Confringo at the ice sheet. The explosion sent frozen shrapnel across the room, jagged pieces spinning through the smoke. The flanking attacker shielded. The other caught a shard across his wand hand and his next curse went wide.

  Rowan pressed the opening with everything Velocitas could give him, throwing three spells in under two seconds. The Stunner hit a shield. The Disarmer struck the injured hand and the wizard's wand tore free from bloodied fingers. The Body-Bind caught him rigid before he could dive for it and he toppled sideways into the remnants of the counter.

  That was two down inside the shop.

  The Velocitas collapsed. The world snapped back to full speed and the remaining attacker moved with a quickness that Rowan's battered body could no longer match. His reserves were guttering. The cold from the shoulder curse had spread across his chest. The blood loss had made his reactions sluggish, a half-beat behind where they needed to be, and the gap between a half-beat and dead was the width of a wand-tip.

  The last wizard raised his wand. The green light left it with casual, practised ease.

  Rowan's muscles were too slow without the enhancement. The green light crossed the space between them and he could see it coming the way you see a wave approaching the shore, beautiful and inevitable and utterly beyond your power to stop.

  Something brown and white came through the shattered window and the wizard's aim jerked sideways.

  Athena. She had been watching through the glass since the first curse hit the doorframe, perched on the outside sill with her feathers pressed flat and her enormous eyes tracking every movement. She had been waiting, because she was a hunting owl, and hunting owls wait until the moment is exact.

  This was that moment.

  She raked the wizard across the face with the full hunting force of a bird whose ancestry stretched back through millennia of killing things in the dark.

  The wizard screamed, raw and animal, and his wand arm jerked upward. The Killing Curse discharged into the ceiling and blew a hole through the plaster and the roof beyond. Night sky showed through the gap, clear and black and full of stars that had no idea what was happening beneath them.

  This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

  She banked and dove again. The wizard flailed, blind and bleeding, casting wildly at something he couldn't see. One of those curses caught her mid-pass, a dark formless thing that folded her wings against her body and sent her tumbling. She fell the way owls never fall, without control, without grace, and slid to a stop against the baseboard.

  She lay there, a crumpled shape of brown-and-white feathers that didn't move.

  Rowan scraped the bottom of his reserves and found something there that wasn't magic so much as will. He poured it into a single silent Stunner that caught the blinded wizard square in the chest with enough force to lift him off his feet and slam him into the doorframe. He crumpled, unconscious before he landed.

  Her eyes were open. The fierce intelligence that had lived behind them since the day she'd chosen him at Eeylops was gone, along with the curiosity that had watched him work late by candlelight, tilting her head as though his calculations were a species of mouse she hadn't figured out how to catch. Gone were the imperious demands for breakfast, the way she'd settled on his shoulder on winter mornings, warm and solid, her feathers ruffed against his cheek.

  All of it was extinguished.

  Something inside Rowan's chest came apart, and the Occlumency cracked with it. A fissure ran through the architecture the way the metanoia's dark light had run through his palace walls, except this time it wasn't magic forcing the break. It was grief.

  His next spell misfired. The Incarcerous he aimed at the stirring Body-Bound wizard veered wide and caught a display case instead, wrapping shattered wood in ropes meant for a man's throat. His wand hand was shaking. His breathing had gone ragged and his vision was blurring at the edges and the cold analytical mind that had carried him through the fight was dissolving into something he couldn't use.

  The blinded wizard was unconscious by the doorframe. The bound one on the floor was straining against his ropes. The Body-Bound one by the counter was reaching for his wand. And somewhere in the wreckage the first attacker was working a wandless counter-charm against his bindings.

  He was going to die. They were all going to die. Clara and Iris and Lawrence behind that door, because he couldn't hold himself together long enough to finish this.

  The Occlumency slammed shut.

  He did it with everything he had, the way he'd done it in the orphanage when the older boys cornered him, the way he'd done it in the mill when the machines took fingers and he couldn't afford to flinch. He forced the walls up, locked the grief away, and sealed every door. The shaking stopped. The blurring cleared. What looked out through his eyes was the thing Iris had seen during the metanoia, the calculating boy who treated people as variables, the one he'd promised himself he wouldn't be anymore.

  That boy could function. That boy could fight. That boy was the only version of himself that was going to get anyone out of this room alive.

  The workshop door burst open.

  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.