Breakfast was the first priority. A brisk wash in cold water had left Cal ravenously hungry, and he was looking forward to bacon, fresh bread, and good coffee from Alyn’s. Would the baker have any of those sweet pastries today? Cal hoped so.

His mouth watering in anticipation, Cal headed round to the bakery.

Alyn was up and about early, as usual, and his mood was the best it had been in days. He was pleased to see Cal, coming out from behind the counter to slap him companionably on the back, grinning the whole time.

“No problems today, Cal,” he said heartily. “No problems at all.”

“Oh, really?” Cal asked. “I’m so glad to hear it!”

“Aye,” Alyn agreed. “Me too. I decided I would sit in with the bread while it was rising this time, just to be doubly sure. But nothing out of the ordinary happened, nothing tried to come in, nothing tried to eat my bread or lay its eggs or whatever that was. Some kind of parasite, you said?” he shuddered. “Ugh, how horrible! But I’m glad your idea of plugging up the gap in the ceiling worked. You’ll want coffee and bacon? I’ve got some good sausages there too, and some sweet pastries done with apricots that came all the way from southern Tarsh. A bit of everything? Very good.”

Cal smiled as the baker bustled off to see to the orders. It was great to see Alyn so much happier than he’d been recently. Cal was glad that keeping the spiders off his bread had contributed to that.

Of course, Cal knew that there was more to the solution than plugging the gap in the ceiling. If all he had done was to block up the spiders’ ingress into the bakery, Cal didn’t doubt that the spiders would have found another way in overnight. The spiders had been laying their eggs in Alyn’s rising loaves, injecting the bread with a thick knot of webbing to act as a protective structure for the eggs and the hatchlings.

The warm rising loaves had seemed like an attractive spot for them. Of course, the spiders had no way of knowing that these conveniently placed, warm, soft, egg laying opportunities would shortly be baked in an oven. Alyn’s bread was really no good as a spider hatchery, and having thick, dense clumps of spider web in his baked goods was also no good at all for Alyn. Several customers had found the horrible knots of baked spiderweb within their loaves, looking like nasty hairballs with the consistency of steel wire and the color of wet slate. Even a baker with as good a reputation for quality as Alyn could not survive long with the customers finding such unexpected and unpleasant things in their bread.

What had really saved Alyn’s bread was Loruk the ork’s advice to give the spiders somewhere better and closer to home to do their egg-laying. Of course, Cal couldn’t explain that to Alyn. To do so would be to let out the whole secret of the spiders to Alyn, and that was out of the question. Cal would need to be content with the baker thinking that they’d come up with a very simple solution to a simple, non-magical problem.

Alyn came back through, loaded with food and coffee.

“Here you go, Cal,” Alyn said, passing the breakfast over the counter. “Your Max was up and out early this morning, by the way. He came in here and grabbed a quick coffee but didn’t take any food. Said it was too early for him to eat. Is he back yet? No? I thought not. Well, I’ve put enough food in the bag so there’ll be some left over for him when he comes back. Seems like you’ve got a good assistant in that young fellow. Energetic! Almost makes me wish I could get an assistant like him myself. Anyway, here you go, enjoy your breakfast. I mustn’t hang around chatting, I have a busy day ahead! Got some catching up to do. See you later!”

Cal thanked Alyn and headed back next door. He hadn’t managed to get a word in edgeways during their conversation, but he didn’t mind. Alyn had been quiet recently, troubled, so it seemed to Cal, by whatever was going on in his business or his life. It couldn’t have just been the spiders, since that was a recent problem, but whatever else was going on seemed to have been resolved as well. Cal liked the old baker a lot. Whatever the reason had been for his gloom, it was good to see him in such good form again.

Back in the workshop, Cal made quick work of half the food and put the rest aside for Max. When he was done and his hunger was sated, he took his coffee through into the front shop and unlocked the main door, turning the sign around to Open so that the passing public would know that the Enchanter’s Emporium was ready for business. He opened the big ledger on the counter, prepared his pen and ink to note down the sales, and checked what money he had in the cashbox.

When all this was ready, he got his blank notepad out and sat behind the counter, resolving to spend his spare time between customers in creating an inventory of his existing stock and working out what he should make next. He took a drink of his coffee, gazed out of the front window… and then nearly overset his coffee as he jumped out of his chair in surprise!

“By all the gods!” he exclaimed. “How did I not notice that before?”

He put his coffee down again - thankfully he’d only spilled a little – and walked over to the front door to look more closely at the plant pots, flanking either side of the door on their little tables. The last time he’d looked at them, the seeds that he’d started in the enchanted pots had just sprouted. The fact that they had started so quickly and so well at this time of year had been impressive enough, but even so, they had been little more than a mass of tiny green shoots no more than half an inch tall at most, and with only two small starter leaves each.

Now, the pots were overflowing with young plants in a flush of growth. The plants had shot up to a height of around eight inches and were now busily putting out tendrils as if looking for something to grip to. Cal hadn’t known what kind of plants these were when he had planted the seeds - the seed packet had just said Flowers: Mixed (Early) - but now he could see that they were climbers. At the rate they were growing, they would need something to climb up before much more time had passed, otherwise they would fall over under their own weight.

Cal went back into the workshop and looked around for something he could use as a plant support, but there was nothing here that jumped him as useful for that purpose. He opened the back door and stepped out into the back court. Since the snow had melted, there was a wealth of strange junk now revealed out here. It didn’t take Cal long to find what he was looking for - a bundle of straight sticks, all between one and three feet in height, tied together with some fairly rotten old twine.

He carried the sticks back in, glanced into the front shop once more to make sure there were no customers, and then cut the string with his knife and selected a few of the shorter sticks. They were not the most handsome plant supports in the world, but they would do just fine for the moment. He carefully but firmly pressed them down into the earth in the pots then stepped back to survey his work.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

Yes, he thought, that’ll work.

After ducking into the bathroom to wash his hands quickly, he came back out and looked at the plants again. He did a double take and went closer. Yes, there was no doubt about it. In the few minutes he’d been out of the room, the fresh green tendrils of the plants had twisted themselves firmly around the new supports in a rush of growth that would’ve normally have taken even the most vigorous of climbing plants at least two days to achieve.

Shaking his head in amazement, he took his seat back at the counter. He would definitely make a few more of these growth boost enchanted plant pots. They were very impressive, and he was delighted with the results. In fact, of all the enchantments he’d done so far, he almost felt that he could say he was most pleased with these. It was not new magic exactly, but it was a new application of an old spell. Normally, growth boost enchantments were the exclusive domain of those who grew plants for a living – the farmers in the south of Roon. As far as Cal knew, no one had ever thought to put such spells into plant pots for use by regular people who just grew flowers at home for pleasure. It might not be new magic, but it was certainly a new product, and what was more it was magic made with a Level 1 enchantment that didn’t bend any rules. Unlike his eyeglass or the monster ore products, could happily sell enchanted plant pots without worrying about getting any unwanted attention from the Pedantus Guild.

He scratched a few notes in his pad, recording the date that he had planted the seeds and at what points since then he had seen progress. New thoughts occurred to him as he marked the dates down and he became absorbed in his writing, noting the kind of core that he’d used, the name of the supplier where Max had bought the seeds, and the type and size of the pots. He listed a few questions; would the magic work as well on different kinds of plants? How well did it work? Under what circumstances? Could plants be persuaded to grow in full darkness under the influence of the enchantment? Probably not, but how far could the magic be pushed? What other factors might influence the boosted growth? Could the material the pot was made from change the result? What about the type of plant? What vectors might be used for the magic aside from the pot itself?

All was quiet in the shop as Cal drank his coffee and explored this rapidly expanding new area. The only sound was the scraping of his quill pen across the paper as he worked on ideas for developing this line of products. Then he looked up toward the door again and laughed aloud. The climbing plants had put on a good four inches while he’d not been looking at them, and they were covered in a riot of tiny white flowers. A sweet perfume, noticeable but not overpowering, drifted from the flowers into the shop.

Cal wondered whether the plants would just continue growing or whether they would reach a certain size and then stop. He would have to keep an eye on them, though so far, they had seemed to do their growing when he wasn’t looking. When he looked at them, they seemed just like ordinary plants with nothing unusual at all about them except the fact that they were alive and healthy this early in the year. It was only after he’d looked away for a while that he found they had put on more growth.

He frowned, attracted by a new idea. Was the magic directly affected by being observed? Could he design an experiment to test that theory? How did the magic behave when it was used by professional growers in the southern farmlands? Could he find out?

He returned to the counter and his notebook, writing quickly as new ideas fired at him from every side, and glancing up at the plants every now and again to see if they had grown further. They hadn’t. Even after an hour, it seemed that they were not going to do anything more today.

“Fascinating,” Cal said as he sat back, turning the page of his notebook over. He felt like he’d written everything he could on the subject for now. He wanted to talk it over with Max, and in time he would be pleased to look further into the properties of growth boost magic, but for the moment he was pleased to just observe his new enchanted flowers.

“Well, I’d better do this inventory,” he said after he’d sat quietly for a minute or two, admiring the blooms. He stood and moved over to the set of shelves on the left of the shop, carrying his notebook and a scrap of pencil. Glancing from shelf to book and back, he began writing down the number of enchanted items on the shelves, their types, their enchantments, their colors, and the supplier of the vector. At intervals, he returned to the counter and redrafted his scribbled pencil notes into a neater, cleaner form using the quill and ink.

Cal took his time with this work, enjoying the process. He was about halfway through his stock take when the door opened and his first customer of the day came into the shop.

The newcomer was a thin, academic-looking human of about forty, immaculately dressed in a dark green suit, a bright green shirt and bow-tie, and gleaming black leather shoes. He wore small eyeglasses on the bridge of his button nose, and over these he peered at Cal with eyes of the same bright emerald green as his shirt and bow-tie. His hair, too, was green. Green hair was a very odd characteristic for a human, and one that made Cal glance surreptitiously at the man’s ears to check for the tell-tale upward sweep and point that would have marked him as an elf. There was no such upward sweep, however. As far as Cal could tell, the customer was indeed a human.

“Good morning,” Cal said politely to this interesting new arrival.

“Hello, hello,” the man said briskly. “I saw your shop as I was passing and thought I’d pop in to have a look. I’ve not seen this place before. Last time I was in Jutlyn this shop was all closed up, and the time before that it was open, but it didn’t seem very welcoming, and I didn’t want to go in. It’s very different now, much nicer!”

“Yes,” Cal said. “I’m fairly new here. I was lucky enough to be able to buy this shop after the previous owner sold up and left.”

“Ah, good,” the man said. “Still an enchanter’s shop, though, I see?”

“Still an enchanter’s shop,” Cal confirmed. “But one that’s trying to do things a little bit differently from the previous owner, and from the other kinds of enchanter in the city.”

“Very good, very good,” the customer exclaimed, his eyes twinkling even more brightly than usual over his little eyeglasses. “I thoroughly approve of that! Where I live, there are not many enchanters, so I like to visit the enchanter’s shops when I come to the city. But I have to say that even if they are better than the man who used to own this place, those enchanters are still not particularly welcoming.”

“I know it,” Cal said with a smile. He liked this fellow, though there certainly was something odd about him, and it was not just his green hair. He had an accent Cal couldn’t identify, and he spoke in a very clipped, brisk fashion that was unlike the usual style of the Jutlyn native.

“So, you’re not a resident of the city?” Cal asked. “Where are you visiting from?”

“Oh, I’m a timber merchant,” the man explained. “Name’s Kerolemipheramilion. Jorymilipos Kerolemipheramilion.”

Cal’s eyes bugged out of his head at the man’s ridiculous name. Jorymilipos had introduced himself and spoken his name at such speed that Cal had little hope he would’ve been able to remember it, never mind repeat it.

The man with the unpronounceable name stuck out his hand to shake and grinned. “Don’t worry,” he continued, to Cal’s immense relief, “you don’t need to remember the whole thing. Most people just call me Jory. Jory Kero if you need to be formal.”

“Right,” Cal said, grinning in return and very pleased that Jory was aware of how difficult his name would be for anybody else. “Nice to meet you, Jory. I’m Cal. Cal Markwyrth, owner of the Enchanter’s Emporium.”

“Pleased to meet you, pleased to meet you,” Jory said. “And now, what kind of things do you have in stock? As I said, I don’t get into the city very often and when I do, I like to treat myself to something from an enchanter’s shop. Show me your wares, young Cal Markwyrth, show me your wares! When I go back west to the timber lands, I have a feeling I’ll be taking something of yours back with me.”