Cal reached into his pocket, and Maddie Turner realized what Cal was about to do a moment before he did it. Her eyes went wide. A moment ago, she’d been suspicious and wary, but now a spreading smile suddenly transformed her face.

“Oh, you didn’t,” she breathed. “How in the world…? How in the name of all the gods…?”

Cal’s smile matched hers as he took the brightly coloured squares of fabric from his pocket and held them up for her to see. Maddie opened and closed her mouth a couple of times but seemed incapable of speech. She raised her hands in the air helplessly, grinning like a maniac, then jumped up and down on the spot a couple of times before making a strangled noise in the back of her throat and dashing with unexpected speed away from them, across the hallway, into the living room, and out of sight.

Jason looked at Cal, and Cal looked at Jason. Cal had not been entirely sure what to expect, but whatever he might have expected, it was not this. Where had Maddie gone? Why did she run away? Should they follow?

“Perhaps she needs a minute to get over the excitement,” Cal said quietly.

“Don’t hang about, come through here where it’s light!” Maddie barked at them, her voice carrying from across the living room.

Of course, she was in the workshop. That was the only reason she had run away. She didn’t need a moment to get over the excitement; she wanted to go to a room where she could examine the samples in better light.

Cal grinned at his own mistake and rolled his eyes, gesturing for Jason to follow him.

Jason followed Cal through the darkened living room, across the beautiful carpet, past the gorgeous, comfortable sofa, then through into the workshop that Maddie had shown Cal earlier. The little space was lit from several different sources. Muted spirit lamps in colored shades threw soft light from their mountings on the walls, and a brighter one hung from the ceiling.

There were projects everywhere, in various stages of completion. Several of these were spider fabric being woven in different ways, and Cal saw that Maddie was creating samples which demonstrated the many ways the new thread could be utilized.

“I don’t know what you were waiting for,” she said grumpily. “Bring the samples over here. Don’t dawdle.”

Clearly, Maddie Turner had regained her composure. Cal guessed that she was probably a little embarrassed by her reaction to the initial news and was compensating for it by being extra grumpy now.

“On the table!” she said, slapping her palm on the surface of the workbench and nearly hopping up and down in her impatience. “Put the samples on the table!”

Cal did as she asked, laying the fabric swatches out in a row from left to right, in the order that Jason had colored them; blue, yellow, then red. Maddie pulled the flexible spot lamp down from the shelf above, activating it with a tap and angling the bright light to shine full on the little squares of colored fabric.

For a few minutes, the old woman bent over the workbench and gave her full attention to the samples, all her nervous impatience gone. She ran her fingers over the bright colors, seeming particularly interested in the yellow. She examined them closely with a series of magnifying lenses and then, one after another, she placed spots of clear liquid from a rack of small dropper bottles onto the edges of each one.

When she had done this, she produced a pocket watch from a fold of her clothes and glanced at it. She waited, staring at the spots of liquid on the fabric and glancing every now and again at her watch.

“Remarkable,” she muttered after a few minutes had passed. “Quite unheard of.”

Then, as if abruptly remembering that she was not alone, she snapped her pocket watch closed and put it away again. She wiped the liquid from the sample swatches with a rag, clicked the spirit light off, then turned, putting her fists on her hips and glaring at the two young men with a stern, matronly air that made them both grin.

Their grins seemed to make her frown deepen. “Wipe those silly smiles off your faces, the pair of you,” she scolded, “and get busy giving me a few straight answers.”

Cal was taken aback. He wasn’t used to being spoken to as if he were a recalcitrant child, and though he found the dynamic between them amusing to some extent, he was suddenly unsure about whether he was willing to be spoken to like this by a business partner. He decided to try not to respond with annoyance, however, instead giving her the chance to see for herself that she wasn’t quite treating them with the appropriate courtesy for their business relationship.

He raised an eyebrow and met Maddie’s piercing gaze with a steady look of his own. “How about brewing us up a couple of cups of straight coffee, then we can give you some straight answers?” he suggested, speaking slowly to put some weight behind his words. “We’ve had a busy evening to bring you these and we could do with a rest.”

Maddie continued to glare at him for a moment, then abruptly dropped her stern grandmother act. Her frown vanished and she dropped her fists from her hips and shrugged.

“Fair enough,” she said, and without any further delay she marched past them and off into the kitchen.

The kitchen was warm and cozy from the heat of the wood-fired cooking stove, and lit by a high-quality spirit light hanging from the ceiling. Jason and Cal sat at the table while Maddie brewed the coffee. It had been a long evening, and it wasn’t until Cal took his first sip of the strong, richly flavored brew that he realized just how tired he was.

Jason was as tired as Cal, if not more so. In many ways, it had been a weirder evening for him than for any of them. He’d never met Maddie before tonight and had only just heard of the spider fabric and all the convoluted adventures that had developed since he’d last visited Cal’s shop. Jason had headed out for an evening of auction-hunting and maybe a quiet drink. He’d planned to buy a new book, then spend tomorrow reading and having a restorative day off. Instead, he’d found himself dropping into the midst of an adventure. The coffee was very welcome.

“Oh, that’s good,” Jason said with deep sincerity as he took his first mouthful of coffee and laid his mug down on the table.

“Well, come on,” Maddie grinned at them both, sitting herself opposite them and wrapping her wrinkled hands around a tall, beautiful blue mug of steaming coffee. “How was it done? How did you manage to get coloring into the fabrics? I’ve tried everything I could think of and had given up, and now you show up here not only with colors, but colors that are richer and better than any I’ve ever seen!”

“Jason did it,” Cal said.

Jason took another mouthful of coffee and nodded. “I’m a color weaver,” he said. “Cal and I met by chance earlier this evening. We’d not seen each other for a while, so we went for a drink and a bite to eat. He told me all about the fabric and showed me the samples. As soon as I touched the fabric, I knew. I could feel it. My magic cried out to be used on them, it felt like the most natural thing in the world.”

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

“You didn’t do it in public, did you?” Maddie asked, horrified.

“Of course not,” Cal said, a little sharply. Perhaps it was just fatigue after a long day, but he was finding Maddie’s attitude toward him a little trying this evening. “We went over to Mullinor’s Park and found a quiet spot where we could work unobserved,” he added. “It was just as well we did so, too, because the magic ended up being quite colorful and bright.”

“How was the magic for you, Jason?” Maddie asked.

“To tell the truth, it was difficult. My main class is Stone Singing, and though I’ve usually been able to do a decent enough job with Color Weaving when I’ve tried, it’s definitely my subclass; I’m no specialist, and my interest is amateur at best.”

“Well, this time it started out easy,” he continued, “but when it came to the end of the magic, the whole spell started to go sideways. I really struggled to keep it under control. I’ve never felt anything like it before, but there was a sensation almost like pain. It was difficult on the first sample, the blue, but then on the second sample, the yellow, it was much easier. When we did the red sample, it got really bad, and I actually passed out after completing the spell.”

“We’d had a couple of drinks beforehand,” Cal put in. “That might have been a factor.”

He’d been expecting Maddie to make a show of disapproval, but she just sat there, listening, stroking her chin thoughtfully.

“It may have been a factor, and it may not,” she said after a moment. “In my experience, the dangers of mixing alcohol and magic are vastly overstated. Why, back in my day… Well, never mind what happened back in my day. How long did it take you to recover from the faint, Jason?”

“Oh, I was unconscious for less than a minute. I felt a bit unsteady and had a killer headache for maybe twenty minutes afterward, but after half an hour I was fine again.”

“Interesting,” Maddie mused. “Well, you won’t be able to know anything for sure until you’ve experimented a lot more. I’m assuming Cal’s told you just how much potential impact this new material could have?”

“He said it might upend the whole fabric industry,” Jason said.

“He did not exaggerate,” Maddie said quietly. “The fabric is revolutionary, that’s for sure, but your experiment makes it vastly more impactful. I tried every technique in the book to get the spider thread to take color, yet it wouldn’t. Of course, color weavers have tried in the past to use their magic for dying clothes, but in general it doesn’t work. You saw the droppers that I used before we left the workshop? I put some liquid on the samples?”

Cal and Jason both nodded.

“Those liquids are a selection of common caustic substances that mimic the action of long-term weathering on fabric. Common dyes fade over time with stress and weathering, but unfortunately, the dyes that come from color weaving generally don’t hold in fabrics very well at all. They last for a long time in things like wood, stone, metal, or even leather, as I’m sure you know, but try to put them into cotton or linen and they just run right out again.”

“Really?” Jason asked, surprised. “I didn’t know that. Like I said, Stone Singing is my main magic, and color weaving is a far second.”

“Something tells me you’re going to have the opportunity to explore your subclass in a bit more detail now,” Maddie said with a grin. “Anyway, I tested the fabrics you dyed with your magic as you saw, using the caustic weathering agents to see how the dye would hold up. In normal fabric, like cotton, for example, or wool, I’d expect those tests to fade the color to about half strength within two minutes, but on those swatches, nothing happened – the color didn’t deteriorate at all.”

“So, you think we can create fashionable garments using color weavers to dye the cloth?”

“I’m certain of it,” Maddie replied. “Intuitively, it makes sense that the fibers from the web of a magic enchanted spider would be able to hold magical color in a way that regular fabrics can’t. I’m delighted. I hadn’t thought of trying it myself, but I can’t say I’m actually that surprised, now that I’ve seen it. It does make sense.”

“So, we’ve made a new discovery, at least,” Cal said, “but what’s our next step? Do you still want to go ahead with your plan to approach the Clothmakers Guild as soon as possible, or do you want to experiment with coloring the fabric a bit more first?”

“I still think we should go to the guild as soon as possible,” Maddie replied without hesitation. “The fact that we can put color into the fabric is a massive added bonus, as is the ability to take full color samples to the guild when we go. But I have a feeling that we’re not going to be able to keep this under our hats for much longer. This is a very valuable secret, and the process - as well as the fact that we have it at all - needs to be safeguarded. Only the guild can do that. I’ve been working on a few more samples, weaving the fabric and a couple of different ways to show a few different things that can be done with it. If we can get color into a few more of those samples over the next day or two it will be worth waiting, but we can’t wait any longer than that. Once we can show the Clothmakers Guild a proof of concept, they can use their influence to safeguard us from interference while we refine the process. They’ll be able to support us, maybe even provide more secure space to work and some physical help with the experimentation process as well.”

“Is it really that huge?” Jason said.

“It really is,” Maddie said. “There’s the potential to make a lot of money here, and that always draws interest. We’re going to need to go carefully.”

“I think you’re right about it being a difficult secret to keep for much longer,” Cal said. “I forgot to mention this, but we were followed when we were in the city. There was a man - we thought he was probably a reporter - and he got a glimpse of the samples and tried to follow us, but we shook him off.”

Maddie’s eyes narrowed at this. “A journalist? What made you think he was a journalist?”

“He had a notebook and a pencil, and he was scribbling notes in his book in the cafe where we were sitting. He caught sight of the fabric, I think, and followed us. We shook him off and followed him, and afterward we watched him and saw him looking for us.”

“Hm,” Maddie said. “Yes, it does sound like he might have been a reporter. Well, there’s nothing that can be done about it now except to move as quickly as we can. I’m glad you shook him off. You’re sure you did shake him off?”

“Certain,” Cal said. “He went away in the other direction. We slipped off up a side street and came straight here.”

“Okay,” Maddie said. “That certainly makes it imperative that we should get the Clothmakers Guild on side as soon as possible. We need to get some more samples in place, but Jason, I don’t think that you should do any more fabric coloring until you’ve had a good night’s sleep at least. When might you be available to experiment further with this?”

“It just happens that I’ve got tomorrow free,” Jason said. “I moved some jobs around so that I could take the day off, but at this rate I think I’m going to need another holiday to recover from this one!”

They all agreed that the three of them should get together back at Maddie’s home the following afternoon, by which time Maddie would have finished her sample making and they would all have had some much-needed rest. Despite the strong coffee Maddie had served them, Cal was starting to feel the effects of his long day, and a huge yawn caught him off guard as they finalized their plans for the following day.

Soon afterward, Cal and Jason had said their goodbyes and headed out into the street. They walked warily, remembering not only the journalist who had followed them, but also the mysterious man in the horse-drawn cab. There was no sign of anyone in the street, however, and they walked to the nearby cab rank without incident and caught a wyvern cab that drove them back into the city center.

“I’ll jump out here, Jason,” Cal said as they rattled through High Hill Row, a large main road that went near the top of Sandweaver Street. “You keep the cab and ride home. See you tomorrow?”

Jason nodded. “I’ll come to the shop in the afternoon,” he said. “Good to see you, Cal.”

“Goodnight,” Cal said. He gave Jason a coin for the cab fare, and before Jason could protest, he hopped out onto the street and the cab rattled off into the flow of traffic.

It was dark now, and late - just how late, Cal wasn’t exactly sure. High Hill Row was a wide and busy road, and there was always traffic there throughout the night, but as soon as Cal got off the main road things dropped very quiet. He walked at a good pace through the deserted Market Square, then, yawning like a cavern, he turned across Queen’s Gardens and into Sandweaver Street.

There was a light on in the Enchanter’s Emporium, and Cal rubbed his hands together in anticipation of the warmth and comfort of home.