Maddie seemed keen to get back to work. Cal drank his tea, but he decided that even though she was clearly keen to get on, he should thank her for her intervention with Hefton the other day.

When he tried to do so, however, she waved him away.

“Don’t mention it,” she said. “I could see that your lad Max was in trouble, and it was just lucky that I had decided to pop over right at that moment.”

“If you hadn’t, it could have been disastrous,” Cal said. “Max could have handled Hefton alone, but with the butler too, well, it would have been a different outcome. And it just so happened that I was in the middle of a very delicate piece of enchanting. If Hefton had got in and disturbed me, the consequences don’t bear thinking about.”

“Really?” Maddie said, surprised. Her impatience seemed to fade at the mention of Cal’s magic and she settled back into her armchair again. “I had no idea enchanting was so dangerous. Max told me that you were in the middle of some complicated work and couldn’t be disturbed, but I didn’t realize quite what was at stake. What would have happened?”

“I don’t actually know,” Cal admitted. “It might have broken a part of my enchanting table - in fact it almost certainly would have done so - and that would have been bad enough. But I was working with some pretty powerful energies, and there might have been an explosion, or a stray spell that would have got out of hand and enchanted Lord Hefton himself.”

Maddie snorted with laughter. “What kind of enchantment would it have been?”

“Vision,” Cal said.

“That doesn’t sound too bad. Lord Hefton is a notorious bully and that butler of his is a thug. And don’t get me started on his wife.”

“What, you know them?”

“Oh, gods, yes,” Maddie said with a sour face. “She’s barred from my shop, I don’t care who she is or how much money she has, I won’t have people like her near me or my niece. I can’t help feeling that a Vision spell - if it’s anything like it sounds - would have been just the thing for him. Anyway, he got a bruise from my stick, and a fright from my mouth, and that was enough for him.”

“You’re not afraid of the consequences?” Cal asked. “I’d feel awful if you got any trouble from them because you helped me out.”

“I’m not afraid of Hefton and his likes,” Maddie said. “They know me as well as I know them. They may be bullies, but they know when to stop pushing.”

Her voice had taken on a strange new note. Cal thought he had heard it once before, in her voice as he’d heard her ultimatum to Hefton outside the shop that day. “If your butler comes one step nearer,” she’d said, “I’ll kill him, understand? No second chances.”

Her voice had been like the flexible whipping steel of a thin blade; hard, uncompromising, and ruthless. Cal lifted his gaze from his mug and looked at her face. For a moment, he saw an expression as cold as granite in her eyes, then suddenly, she softened.

“Sorry,” she said, smiling. “I didn’t mean to let that through just now.”

Cal tilted his head to one side. “Let what through?” he asked quietly.

“The voice of a person I used to be,” she said, her voice quiet.

“You were a soldier, weren’t you?” Cal asked. From what Max had said, Maddie had taken on a loose and practiced fighting stance, and the butler and the large lord had both stepped back and fled in the face of her threat.

“A soldier?” she said, then shook her head. “No. Well, of sorts. Cal, I… Do you really want to know?”

“Not if you don’t want to tell me.”

She looked at him for a long moment, then smiled slowly.

“How old do you think I am?” she asked.

Cal was taken aback by the unexpected question. “Why, I don’t know,” he said honestly.

“I know you don’t know,” she said, a little sharply. “But you must have made an assessment. How old do you think I am?”

Cal looked at her. She was wrinkled, her skin weathered, her hair iron gray and tied up severely tight in a knot at the back of her head, but her eyes were bright and her voice was strong, and though she moved with the caution of an older person sometimes, at other time she seemed sprightly and swift in her actions. She might have been sixty-five, she might have been seventy-five. Cal opted for politeness.

“I’m not good at estimating people’s ages,” he said. “Sixty?”

She laughed. “You’re not good at lying either. Come on, tell me how old you think I look. I’ll not be offended.”

Cal smiled. “Okay,” he said. “I think you look between 65 and 75. How close am I?”

“About five decades out and then a little more,” she said, watching his face.

Cal’s mouth dropped open and he shut it again. “You’re… you’re over a hundred?”

“I’ve been alive for 132 years and counting, Cal Markwyrth. I’m a human, just like you, but I’ve been granted an unusually long lifespan due to some… interesting events in my youth. I’m into my fourteenth decade, Cal, and in that time I’ve seen many changes in the world, and many strange things.”

Something struck Cal suddenly. “A hundred and thirty two…” he said. “But that means that you were alive when… before…”

“Before the magical enlightenment changed the way of the world from war to peace,” Maddie said quietly. “That’s right. It must seem like ancient history to a young lad like you, but I spent my first 40 years in a world where magic was a force for combat, a weapon that was wielded battles to the advantage of commanders, kings, and warlords. The advent of new magic on a large scale changed all that - well, you know your history as well as any, I’m sure - but yes, for most of my life I was a fighter. I was a soldier at times, but other times I was a… a solo practitioner. And after the war ended and peace was established, there were many of us who didn’t know what to do with ourselves. War had become a way of life. Fighting was a skillset, a practice, an identity. To tell the truth, many of us didn’t want the war to end.”

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“Actually, I don’t know my history very well,” Cal said. “I know that about a hundred years ago, there were a lot of new discoveries made in magical science that changed things very fast, and I know that the discoveries made the warring powers seek a lasting peace, but beyond the basic facts and a few of the names, I don’t know much else.”

Maddie rolled her eyes. “What do they teach you in the schools these days?” she snapped.

Cal felt a flicker of resentment at her tone. “I didn’t have much time for school when I was young,” he said. “We were poor, my father was sick, and I spent a lot of my time looking after him while my mother was out working, trying to make ends meet. My uncle helped us out for a bit, and after my parents’ deaths he helped me through Level 1 of the enchanting course at the guild academy, but that’s it. Since then, I’ve focused on learning about how to enchant, not on studying history. So I don’t really know what they teach in the schools. Whatever they teach, I never learned it.”

Maddie was looking at him sadly. “I’m sorry, Cal,” she said. “I didn’t mean to snap. That sounds like a difficult childhood. I didn’t know.”

She sighed. “To tell the truth,” she continued, “it’s all so long ago that I almost don’t remember myself now, and what I do remember… Well, I’m not sure if I should trust my recollections. I was a very different woman then, and my life is very different now, but I kept some of my skills, as Lord Hefton knows. I’m unusual as a human to have lived so long and still be in health, but there are plenty of others with much longer lifespans than we humans. The elves live long, long lives, as do the dwarves and some of the orc and goblin races. There are wraiths, too, and others who don’t die in the traditional sense. You’ll find that there are more than a few citizens of Jutlyn who remember those days, and several who, like me, actively participated. Of course, things were different then, and most of the elves and dwarves who were heavily involved in the fighting and politics of that era left after the peace was agreed, going back to their own lands, but some stayed. I’ve never made any secret of my background. People who were in that war have a certain status among those who know who we are. That’s why Lord Hefton knows not to push me. He knows just enough about who I am… who I was, I should say… to know that I’m not someone to trifle with.”

Cal had been thrown a little by some of the painful memories of his childhood years that she’d stirred up with her off-hand comment. His childhood had not been a cruel one - his parents had been kind and his uncle had been a supportive presence and a good mentor - but the ever-present specter of grinding poverty and the constant struggle to eke out a living on the bottom of Jutlyn City society had not made for an easy upbringing. Intelligent and personable, kind, empathetic, quick to learn, Cal had done well, but he’d been lucky, too. His awareness of the harder side of life was one of the reasons he was so keen to make enchanting available to ordinary people, not just the rich. Now, he felt his spirits lift again.

“Thanks for telling me, Maddie,” he said. “I’m glad to get to know you better.”

She nodded, and said sincerely, “Me too, lad. Me too.”

* * *

Cal was quiet when he found himself back over in the Emporium. Max could tell that there was something on Cal’s mind, and let him alone. Cal told Max that Maddie had been pleased with the sample, but left the explanation there.

“I’m going to do some enchanting, okay?” Cal called through.

“I’ll just be here, then,” Max said from the front of the shop.

There was a steady flow of customers still, though not the same rush they’d had at the start of the day. It was getting dark outside now, but Max wanted to stay open a little longer at least, to catch the passing trade of people heading home from work.

It was a good idea. Though Cal left it to Max and didn’t pay too much attention, he was aware of the steady flow of people in and out, of the friendly conversations between Max and the customers, and of the clink of crowns into the strongbox under the counter.

Cal set to work with the enchanting of pendants again. They had sold a good few today, as well as at least one bowl, one hat, and a couple of mugs. The warmth-enchanted items seemed the most popular, but it was also true that they were the most available. If Cal was stocking mostly warmth items, then of course they would be the most popular. Cal didn’t want to acquire the reputation of having only one signature item available.

The thing to do, Cal decided, was to get a few different things out on the shelves and to put up some nicer signs explaining what different things were. He had a few other Level 1 cores to work with. There were the relic gasper cores, air cores that had Stamina and Calm as their Layer 1 and 2 effects. Then there were the gloomfist cores, thunder cores with Charisma and Strength (physical) at Layer 1 and 2. These cores also had the Voice Volume enchantment as a bonus, and those had been very popular before, partly just because they were new and unheard of before.

Cal decided that he’d make a few pendants from the gloomfist and relic gasper cores. He also had a good stack of bronze biter cores, but they were less easy to find a use for. They started with Durability at Layer 1 and then continued with Strength (Material) at Level 2. Both of these were useful to apply to objects, of course, but they were less attractive to the walk-in customer.

If an item could be enchanted with the properties of two different cores, then Cal might have used Durability on the warmth mugs and the bowls to make them harder to break, but the truth was that doubling up enchantments simply wasn’t done. Attempting to do so smashed an enchanted item to smithereens, and you just wasted your materials.

Cal stopped, midway through folding a Charisma boost into a pendant. An idea had struck him, but he forced himself to be calm and keep focus on the task at hand until it was complete. He worked carefully, folding the enchantment in, and cursed under his breath when he saw the duration come up as 250 days rather than 300. 250 days was still a good duration, of course, but he recognised that it was his abrupt hesitation in the middle of the folding process that had caused the degraded result.

Still, it had been a good idea that had made him hesitate. He’d remembered how he’d layered the blank core enchantment all over the existing Vision spell, working it through the fabric of the new eyeglass and augmenting the Vision spell in the process. What if that layering could be applied to other spells as well, not just the power from blank cores? That deep, layering trance had only come to him when he’d been working with the blank, and so he’d assumed it was unique to working with blank cores… but what if it wasn’t?

Cal glanced outside, wanting to talk this new idea through with Max, but Max was busy serving a tall, balding elf in a black uniform who appeared to be purchasing another of the warmth-enchanted hats. The elf was asking in-depth questions about the best way to care for his new purchase, seeming unwilling to accept that the enchantment in the hat didn’t need any particular looking after.

Max was politely explaining the same thing to the customer over and over again in different ways, and Cal withdrew into the back again. He looked at the cores on his table, scratching his head. What possibilities! If he could open the capacity to sustainably combine two enchantments within one item, he could open up a whole new range of products and discover yet more untapped potential in the art of enchanting.

He wondered if he had enough cores to get away with a bit of experimentation.