Seeing that Iain's eyes would not leave the wizard kissing a toad-crab,
Dumbledore could only sigh inwardly.
"An eagerness to learn is a good thing, but that is not something you ought to be studying."
He promptly guided Iain away from that particularly free-spirited corner of the street.
Even Dumbledore had no wish to comment on a wizard's private tastes.
The street was crowded.
Men and women in robes moved between the shops, some carrying owl cages, others clutching great stacks of books under one arm.
One wizard was even haggling with a flying squid.
A short man in a tall hat passed by Iain, and there was a burning feather stuck into the brim of his hat, though the man himself appeared not to notice.
To Iain, every bit of it was astonishingly fresh.
"Wow. I love magic."
Iain finally dragged his eyes away from the shop windows and looked back toward the entrance to the street, or what he assumed ought to be the entrance.
He kept turning around every few steps.
And there was nothing there.
No wall.
No door.
No bricks.
No Leaky Cauldron, the shabby little pub from the films that looked as though it ought to have been condemned years ago.
"My route into Diagon Alley feels wrong. I haven't even seen butterbeer brewed beneath a crane yet."
Once again, the strange fragments of knowledge in Iain's head began tormenting him.
He was curious, but he did not dare ask Dumbledore why they had not first gone through the pub.
"I absolutely cannot pretend to be a prophet. That would be unethical."
Iain rigidly held himself to the rule that, in front of Dumbledore, he should display only the knowledge and reactions of a newly awakened young wizard.
As for his clumsy acting, Dumbledore seemed not to notice.
The old man did not look at him. Instead, his gaze was fixed somewhere farther down the street, on the white marble peak of the Gringotts building.
"I will first take you to claim your family inheritance. At the same time, I have a few things of my own to deposit in Gringotts."
Dumbledore led the young wizard steadily closer to the bank.
"Family inheritance? Professor, my parents really were wizards, then?"
Iain's attention finally left the shop windows and shifted to the white building gleaming in the sunlight.
Gringotts.
The goblin bank.
The best place for any wizard to keep money.
"Yes. I have only told you this now, and I hope you can forgive me."
Dumbledore's pace did not change, but his voice was somewhat softer than usual.
There was a trace of apology in it.
"At first, I worried that if you were too emotionally fragile, the circumstances of your family might place too much pressure on you."
Dumbledore was plainly overthinking things.
Though with him, it was always difficult to know how much of a sentence was sincere and how much carefully selected.
Iain's steps faltered for a moment, then resumed.
"The circumstances of my family?"
He realized his parents might have been far from ordinary.
Though still...
"Your parents truly did die in a car accident. Wizards are fragile too. Otherwise, so many of them would not have perished during the witch hunts of the Middle Ages."
Before Iain could voice the question, Dumbledore answered it first.
That was not Legilimency at work.
It was simply the instinctive understanding that came from a lifetime of reading people.
"I see..."
Iain fell quiet for a while.
The shop windows on either side still flashed with all manner of strange lights. A flying teapot zipped over their heads, its spout venting multicolored steam.
In truth, Dumbledore's explanation was not the answer Iain had wanted.
If there was no Voldemort to blame, then the accident might still have had more to do with his own mysterious talent for attracting fatal lorries.
Dumbledore did not reply.
They passed several shops.
They passed a vendor selling books that tried to bite customers.
They passed a group of girls in Hogwarts school robes.
Their laughter hit the street with the force of hammer blows.
"Your mother was a witch, born to one of the Sacred Twenty-Eight. But your father, your father's line, had not produced a wizard in a very long time."
Dumbledore spoke again, more slowly this time.
He paused.
"Your father's family was once among the most illustrious houses in this land."
Dumbledore himself did not know whether telling a young wizard something like that would burden him unbearably.
These days, he had grown cautious about placing heavy expectations on others.
The Boy Who Lived, however, remained an exception.
At those words, Iain's brows rose.
"Oh? How illustrious?"
His tone carried genuine curiosity and surprise.
Dumbledore was silent for a beat.
"The kind born to power."
He was just about to continue when he stopped walking.
The two of them had reached the great doors of Gringotts.
The building stood at the far end of Diagon Alley, its white marble walls almost painfully bright in the sunlight, as though covered by some invisible sheen.
The goblin at the entrance spotted them from quite a distance away and hurried over.
Its head was large, its facial proportions distinctly unlike a human's. Its eyes were black, with vertical pupils like a cat's, or rather like the sort of alien eyes popular in Muggle stories these days.
Had the eyes been a little larger, Iain might have concluded that many so-called Muggle alien sightings were merely goblins. Or perhaps house-elves.
"Dumbledore. Ah, the great Albus Dumbledore. You are quite the rare visitor."
The goblin's tone carried a strong undercurrent of I am not at all pleased to see you, but custom requires that I greet you anyway.
At that, Dumbledore gave a small nod and answered in a tone as flat as though speaking to a neighbor he saw every day.
"I need to deposit a few things."
He paused, then shifted slightly so that the goblin's gaze would fall upon Iain.
"And I also need to help this young wizard retrieve the fortune that rightfully belongs to him."
The goblin looked at Iain.
Its eyes swept him from head to toe, as though appraising an item brought in for valuation.
Then, suddenly, its pupils contracted sharply.
"How is that possible?"
The goblin's voice dropped at once, almost to a mutter.
"That family, that family... how could it possibly have produced another wizard?"
Its voice trembled, its expression full of shock and disbelief.
And more than that, some inexplicable resentment.
The goblin bit at its lip, its nostrils flaring, its fingers curling into fists.
But the instant its eyes turned toward Dumbledore, all those darker emotions retreated.
"I first need to deposit something in Vault Seven Hundred and Thirteen."
Dumbledore did not look at the goblin. His gaze rested somewhere deeper within Gringotts, his expression calm as a windless lake.
"Then you will take us to the deepest vault. Vault Zero."
His voice was not loud, but each word landed like a nail driven into wood.
Not to be questioned.
The goblin stood there, lips moving once or twice as though chewing on something unpleasant.
In the end, it stepped aside and made a gesture of invitation.
The motion was impeccable.
And as stiff as a rusted machine.
Iain followed Dumbledore into Gringotts.
Enter, stranger, but take heed, for those who take without earning must pay most dearly in their turn...
The words engraved in silver upon the doors earned nothing from Iain but silent contempt.
What sort of respectable person resorted to robbery?
He certainly would not lower himself to that.
A robber without a brain remained a robber forever. But a young wizard as brilliantly, though not excessively, intelligent as Iain naturally aimed for something greater.
Why else study properly?
It was because he studied, studied well, and studied often that Iain already knew the Ministry had never explicitly outlawed certain things.
Dumbledore, in his younger days, must have entertained similar ideas.
Otherwise, who kept law books at home?