"The wands tell you," he answered with a small grin. It was not the first time he'd been asked how he went about selecting wands for customers to try out, but that was more or less the best answer he could come up with. It was a difficult thing to explain, and he thought he'd learned it more through years of working in the shop and watching his father and brother assist customers with their wands than anything else. Maybe it had something to do, too, with how much he knew about wand creation. Even for the wands in the shop that he'd had no personal hand in, he could get a feeling of sorts for what they'd been through, and a bit of their personality. For Gideon, telling whether or not a wand was suited for the witch or wizard who held it was as easy as telling whether two people engaged in conversation liked each other or not. The tells were different for every wand, just as they would be different for every person, but they were always there. Actually, come to think of it, he was probably a lot better at reading wands than he was at reading people.

He hadn't done much in the way of passing this skill along to Billie. She may have been working in the shop ostensibly to earn her room, but that was more of a facade than anything else; he'd only ever given her small tasks and errands to accomplish and not brought her in to the art or science of wandmaking. She still felt too young — neither he nor Gervaise had begun learning the craft until after their OWL exams. Besides, he wasn't sure if she even wanted to learn, when there was a whole other world of possibilities available to her. It might be fun, though, to bring her into the process a little bit for the moment, since they were choosing her wand.

"Come over here and I'll show you," he said, moving towards the section of the wall for ebony wands. Eying the wall, he selected four boxes and removed them from the shelf, setting them on a nearby surface and removing the lids. "You might think these are all the same, since they're all black," he explained. "But ebony is special, even among all the other magical woods. Ebony wands always know just who they are. Take a look, and see if they'll tell you."