Diagon Alley on the twenty-eighth.
He went with Hermione, which had been the plan since the feast. Harry came as far as Gringotts and then went to find Fred and George on their own business.
He had a list.
The Four Emblems first, because he had promised. She had not been, and she walked in with the expression of someone who had been correctly described a place and was now encountering the reality of it and finding it exceeds the description in the particular way that only good places do. She stood in the doorway for a moment, looking at the shelves.
'Sirius did this?' she said.
'He had good advice,' Ron said.
He collected the custom order from the back desk — the volume he'd been looking for in March, found at last through the Four Emblems' sourcing network — and handed it to Hermione without ceremony.
She looked at the cover. Then at him. 'This is out of print.'
'I know,' he said. 'I ordered it in August.'
She held it for a moment. 'Thank you,' she said, in the tone she used for things that were too much and exactly right.
They spent an hour in the shop. He had coffee at the mezzanine café and read two chapters of the spatial compression volume. She was still in the Arithmancy section when he came back down.
The memories, he found in two places.
The first was Slug & Jiggers, where a request through the back counter produced a set of six memories from a recently retired Potions master — a Welshman named Ewan Pugh who had taught at a minor wizarding school for thirty years and whose memory of the intuitive potion-reading that Okafor had described as his development need had been recommended by a brief notation in the research he'd done before leaving Uganda.
The second was Knockturn Alley, which he entered with the Aging Potion's eight added years and the specific quality of someone who knew where they were going.
He found what he was looking for in the third shop. The proprietor was a woman who appeared to have decided that the best approach to running a shop in Knockturn Alley was to behave as if she were running a perfectly ordinary archive. The memory vials were organized by subject and date with the precision of a Muggle filing system applied to wizarding material.
He bought three: dueling memories of Alastor Moody, 1978–1982; a set of championship dueling finals from the European Dueling Association's archive, 1970–1985; and one at the back of the case in a plain vial labelled only 'Combat, unnamed, 1944.' He bought the last one because the quality of someone in combat in 1944 who had survived what 1944 had brought to the wizarding world was a quality he wanted to understand.
The fourth purchase was deliberate and had been planned since July. From a specialist instrument-maker two streets back toward Diagon Alley — a small shop with no sign, known by word of mouth, the kind of place that made one thing and made it exceptionally — he collected a perceptual focus instrument: a small brass device, precise and heavy, used in advanced Occlumency and ritual work to sharpen the practitioner's attention during extended sessions. He had been on the waiting list since spring. It was ready.
He brought them out of Knockturn Alley in a velvet-lined case and put them in the pouch.
He found Hermione in Flourish and Blotts, which was where she always was if left unaccompanied in Diagon Alley for more than fifteen minutes.
She was in the Charms section with a stack she had clearly been building for some time, each book assessed and either added or returned with the particular efficiency she brought to acquisition. She looked up when he appeared.
'How long?' she said.
'Forty minutes,' he said.
'I've been here twenty,' she said, as if this were relevant context.
He looked at the stack. Seven books. 'Do you want more time?'
'I've already been through the Arithmancy section,' she said. 'And the Ancient Runes. I was going to do the Transfiguration section next.'
He pulled a chair over from the reading area and sat down and opened the transfiguration treatise he'd bought at The Four Emblems. She went back to the Charms section.
This was, he reflected, an accurate representation of the relationship.
He bought her the Charms books when she wasn't looking — paid at the counter and had them bagged, presented the bag to her as they left with the question of whether she wanted to carry them or him. She stopped in the middle of the pavement and looked at him with the expression she used for things that were too much and exactly right.
'I had money,' she said.
'I know,' he said.
She took the bag.
'I'm going to get your school books,' she said, in the tone of someone announcing a fact.
'You don't have to... '
'Ron,' she said.
'Alright,' he said.